The One You Feed - Adyashanti on Living in the Service of Truth

Episode Date: June 19, 2019

Adyashanti is an American born spiritual teacher devoted to serving the awakening of all beings. His teachings are an open invitation to stop, inquire and recognize what is true and liberating at the core of all existence. Adyashanti also runs the Omega retreat which Eric has taken part in many times. In this episode, Eric and Adya talk about his latest book, The Most Important Thing: Discovering Truth at the Heart of Life.Need help with completing your goals in 2019? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Adyashanti and I Discuss…His book, The Most Important Thing: Discovering Truth at the Heart of LifeAttention and IntentionThe inquiry at any given time: Where are we giving our attention to?Considering the question: What is worthwhile orienting your life around?The limitations that come with aging How the definition of happiness changes as we ageWholeness of beingLife as it is rather than the image of lifeTwo interpretations of the fact that sometimes those who are the most unhappy tend to be seeking happiness the mostShooting for meaning rather than happinessHow meaning is an experience of beingThe inquiry: What am I in service to?That we don’t seem to do well as human beings when we live exclusively for ourselvesWhat does it mean to really serve what you realize (rather than trying to realize more and more)The mistaken thinking that an act of service must be grand in scale or scope or must be visible to really count or matterHow it’s easy to be noble when you are noticed but in most of our lives that’s not what’s taking placeThat giving time and attention when someone needs it can make for transformative momentsSeeing the importance of the things you do in your life now that are in serviceThat you can’t make yourself awaken but what you do DOES have an impact – it’s just indirectThe yearning itself comes from the very thing we’re yearning for (in terms of awakening)Adyshanti Links:adyashanti.orgTwitterFacebookInstagramDaily Harvest – they deliver absolutely delicious organic, carefully sourced, chef-created fruit and veggie smoothies, soups, overnight oats, bowls and more! To get 3 cups free in your first box, visit www.daily-harvest.com and enter promo code: FEEDFabFitFun is a seasonal subscription box delivered 4 times a year with full-sized beauty, fashion, home, fitness, and wellness products for just $49.99 a box – though the box is valued at more than $200. The summer box is valued at over $400! Eric’s girlfriend absolutely loved the box they sent and has already signed up to receive their fall box. Use the code FEED to get $10 off your first box at www.fabfitfun.comPhlur makes stunning, non-toxic perfumes, listing every ingredient and why it’s there. Visit www.phlur.com and enter promo code WOLF to get 20% off first custom sampler setIf you liked this episode, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Adyashanti (Part 1) 2018Adyashanti (Part 2) 2018See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everyone, you may have already heard about the One You Feed mass meetup that's going to happen on Saturday, June 29th. But if you have not registered yet, this would be a great time to do it. It's going to be completely free. It's going to happen on Saturday, June 29th all around the world. In order to be part of it, you don't have to make a commitment at this point, but if you register, we know where you are. And if enough people in any given place register, then we have enough people and we will schedule a meetup for you all. So the more people who register, the greater probability of a meetup taking place in your area. So you can go to oneufeed.net slash meetup to sign up for this gathering. You'll need to do it by June 22nd, end of day June 22nd. And again, go to oneufeed.net slash meetup to register your interest. I sincerely hope we have lots of people participating in this, giving you a chance to meet each other. So oneufeed.net

slash meetup. Thanks. Human beings, we don't seem to do well if we're living life exclusively for ourselves. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor,

what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to really know really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The really know really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Adi Ashanti. This is actually his third time on the podcast. So he's a member of an elite club there. He's an American-born spiritual teacher devoted to serving the awakening of all beings. And his teachings are an open invitation to stop, inquire, and recognize what is true and liberating at the core of all

existence. Adi Ashanti also runs the Omega Retreat, which Eric has taken part in frequently. Hi, Adi. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Eric. This is our third time to sit down. So I don't know, I think there's been one other guest who's been on three times. So you are an elite company. Is that right? Yes. Yes. So it's always fun to do. And we are in person, which always makes it even more fun for me. So many of them I do remote. So I love when I could do them in person. So thank you. Some of what we're going to talk about is your most recent book, The Most Important Thing, Discovering Truth at the Heart of Life. But before that, you're going to get a chance to respond for the third time to the wolf parable.

you're going to get a chance to respond for the third time to the wolf parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life there's two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf which represents things like kindness and bravery and love and the other is a bad wolf which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.

So I'd like to kind of ask you, like I said, for the third time, and I don't know what you said the first two times, so have at it. I don't know either, which is probably a good thing. It's an interesting question, you know, because it's like one of those parables that's, on the face of it, seems pretty simple and straightforward and i think anybody that's halfway conscious um knows exactly what you're referring to in that parable right um and yet it also seems to have this portal into something that's really quite deep and universal for us all. And the

thing that comes to mind when you were telling me that parable again, is that, you know, is that actually like it's the same wolf, right? The good wolf and the bad wolf is the same wolf, right? It's all part of our psyche. And I do think that mostly I think we feed with our sort of attention and intention. I think our undervalued things in human life, just our mere attention, like where are we giving our attention to, but also our intention. And I've focused a lot more on that in the last few years.

The way I like to try to approach it is when we all look at our, whatever our deeper, more meaningful experiences in life have been, you know, they could be revelatory moments or whatever. It could be the birth of a child or falling in love or a spiritual awakening or all sorts of different experiences. But I think that, and this kind of gets back into that sort of wolf parable or analogy, is when we touch upon our depth, I think we can sort of, we have a certain experience, sometimes certain insights come from that. But what the thing that we don't often do, which gets back to intention, is look and reassess and go from that perspective, from the perspective of whatever has been my more, some of my more meaningful or insightful experiences in my life, what becomes truly important?

And then important in the sense from the inside out rather than from the outside in. And I think that's a way of connecting with our truer nature, right? With the more benevolent way of being inside of us. But to see it not just as an experience or something that feels good or feels meaningful, but really it's sort of more, there's a more challenging way, I think, to look at it, which when we look from our depth goes, how does that experience prioritize our life? In other words, what becomes meaningful, what becomes worthwhile orienting my life around? That's kind of how I look at it now. And I think that's a way of orienting it around that benevolent and wise sort of light within

ourself. But like I said, I think it's also the same wolf, even though it has these two aspects, right? It's the same self, the same psyche that experiences both our light and our darkness. And yet I think, especially as I get older, you know, I'm 56 now, and I think one of the things as you get older, as you age more, certainly in my case, you just become more and more willing to experience the entirety of your being.

And I think part of it is you get encountered with things that we try not to encounter early, like limitation, like human flaw, human fallibility, you know, all those parts. And even from an aging level, you know, we're not in the upward curve of our strength and endurance and even our cognitive capacity, but we're in a different dimension of our life. And even though I don't associate that with like darkness or anything like that, I think there is an encounter with limitation that we don't usually see as sort of the light, bright, shiny, you know, wisdom part of us that, but there is a profound kind of wisdom that comes with a kind of confrontation with limitation, or even with sometimes some of the dark spaces inside.

Yeah, we did an interview with a guy named Jonathan Rauch. He works for the Brookings Institute. His book is called the, I think it's called The Happiness Curve, if I recall. And he basically says that if you look at, again, this is demographically, your individual experience might be different, that you see happiness start off as you're younger up here, and then it sort of plummets down and sort of bottoms out in what we might consider middle age, late 40s. And then it starts to actually go back up. You know, you actually start to get better. And I think it

flips that narrative on its head of, oh, your later lives are going to be unhappy. You do, to your point, you do have this recognition of limitation and you realize all the things that you might not accomplish in life that you thought you were going to do and yet looked at in a certain way, we can become happier, more contented, deeper people as we age if we allow that. Yeah, I think that the definitions of sort of what we even think of as happiness is changes. So like, for instance, now, kind of going back to what you're speaking about is, to me, when we're young, happiness is, well, it's the sort of a conventional idea of happiness. You know, it's associated with innocence and potentiality and like that upward curve of life and all of that.

And I think there's, as we mature, whether it's physically or spiritually, that happiness becomes more a outcome of wholeness, that we're actually becoming whole beings. And again, to kind of tie into that, the parable of the two wolves, I think that there's a different kind of happiness when we start to open to this sort of greater sense of wholeness of being. And I think that's, in one sense, that's why that arc of well-being, maybe that's even the better word, well-being or something like that, then conventional happiness comes online because I think we start to have a bigger capacity for our own wholeness. I remember my mom when she was trying to think of the age, she started to talk to me about this, but certainly in her 60s. And she says, well,

basically, my life didn't unfold as I thought it would. None of my kids ended up to be who I thought they would be. All the things that I thought I had figured out about life, I realized I didn't have figured out about life. And maybe that's part of that dip of middle life when you start to come into a recognition of life as it is rather than the image of life. But then there's the flip side of that where she said it's actually, it's better. Like my kids ended up to be better than I hoped. Like my life didn't end up to be the way that I saw it being, but it seems to be getting better and better and better. And I think there's that confrontation with just the reality of life that flips the equation.

I've seen as a spiritual teacher that generally, a lot of times, the people that are the most unhappy are the people that are seeking happiness the most. the most unhappy are the people that are seeking happiness the most. Well, in one sense, that's obvious. Like if you're unhappy, of course you want to be happy, right? But I think there's also a less conventional way of looking at that that's maybe just as true, which is, especially in our culture, where we tend to be focused so much on happiness. Everybody's trying to be bright and shiny and happy and successful and all these things. And I think that's sort of a misunderstanding about what real happiness is. And I think happiness isn't even a great goal to shoot for.

Like, we all want to be happy, sort of innates in our DNA. But I think the most contented people seem to be the people that have tapped into their life being an experience of something that's really meaningful to them. You know, I think if we shoot for meaning rather than just happiness we end up being a whole lot more happy yeah in the end and i don't necessarily mean like a meaning that you could philosophically write down in your notebook and show your friend but i mean you know we all know the experience you're a parent right so i imagine the the experience of seeing your child for the first time, probably a happy, joyous, mind-blowing moment. But I imagine that moment had a kind of depth of meaning that it's probably hard for you to even try to articulate to me.

Right. Right? Is that... Yeah. Oh, yeah. And that's kind of what I mean. I think there's happiness and well-being flow out of meaning, but a kind of meaning that's not always easy to articulate. Because I think meaning is fundamentally an experience of being. It's not something you can actually necessarily explain to somebody. Right.

That leads me into your book is called The Most Important Thing, Discovering Truth at the Heart of Life, your latest book. And you say the questions we ask are so incredibly important. And one of the questions that you ask is, what am I in service to? You say it's an awakener. It's an awareness practice and an honesty practice. Yeah. I think it kind of comes back to the idea of meaning and well-being. And I think meaning comes out of what we're in service to. Happiness, deeper happiness, comes out of what we're in service to. Human beings, we don't seem to do well if we're living life exclusively for ourselves. Right. It just doesn't seem to make us happy. And yet we seem to be inclined to try.

Absolutely. And at a certain point in our life, maybe that's just developmentally reasonable. Like, you know, when we're quite young. But as we get, as we get a little older, a little older would be by our late teens or early twenties. get a little older. A little older would be by our late teens or early 20s. I'm not talking like, you know, old age, but we start to have this turning and start to realize just the pursuit of happiness for ourself doesn't end up making us happy. Self-centeredness just isn't a very happy way to go through life. I remember years ago when I did a weekend intensive, it was really a learning experience for me. And as a subject

matter, I called the whole weekend Servants of Truth. And the idea was, what does it mean to actually serve what you yourself realize? Rather than trying to get more realization and how do I hold on to it and how do I have more experience and this sort of acquisition orientation towards spirituality and spiritual experience and instead look at whatever our more meaningful experience is of being and start to ask ourselves, like, how could I be in a deeper service to this? And it really showed me something because I got about half the people on that intensive that I normally get. Which is interesting, you know, as a teacher, like, you know, you learn a lot from your students.

And it really showed me, that weekend, which is going back probably 12 to 15 years ago now, that, what I took out of it is, Adya, you're not getting something across. If this is how the people are responding to this idea, this is an idea you've got to articulate better than you have. Because if the word servant to something just scares people off or makes them uninteresting, like that told me as a teacher, I've got to start to articulate this in a better way so people really start to realize, number one, what I'm talking about, and I think what the foundation of both human

and spiritual maturity really is. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com

and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You tell a story of your first teacher and this idea of service about how she started teaching and would show up each week, write a Dharma talk, show up to meditate, and oftentimes there was nobody there. Nobody came for an entire year. Yeah, tell me more about that. Not a single person.

And yet she went, and this, you know, she did this in her house, so she reorganized the whole living room, put out all the meditation cushions. It was no small thing. And then after a year, one person showed up, and they sat together for a year until a few more, and then a few more started to show up. But it was a real, I remember when she, her teaching, telling me about that story. And kind of as a dovetail to that, if I sort of fast forward many years after she asked me to teach, and not long after she asked me to teach, they found out she had a sort of... Well, number one, she just hadn't planned on it,

but intuitively she just knew it was time to stop teaching. And so she said, stop. She didn't even know why. Well, then six months of that, so this is about a year now after she had asked me to teach, they found she had a brain tumor, which fortunately was not cancer, but they had to operate, and all the complications of brain surgery unfolded.

And then when she started to recover from that, she used to come into the office. It wasn't this office that we have now, but not too far from here when we were much smaller. And she said, I want to come help you guys out. And I said, okay, come on in. We'll see what we have to do. And one day I walked in the door and there she was sitting at a desk. And it was back when there were like tapes before CDs and stuff. And she was putting, you know, the decal on the tape where you could write the name of it and stuff like that. And I remember walking in the door and I saw her doing that.

And for me, in one way, that was one of the most profound teaching moments that I had from her of just seeing that she'd always talked about serving the Dharma. And I was there. There she had been for over 30 years, like the teacher. And that was her way of serving the Dharma. And then when she could no longer do that, now it's putting labels on tapes in the office and seeing that as serving the Dharma. For her previous student for her previous student and the the the humility and the and the sense of service and that just touched me so much you know i just thought wow like that service beyond who you are or or how you can be seen or your position or whatever. That's just serving what's valuable to you in life.

And that taught me a lot. Yeah, and that story you go on after to sort of say something, and I've noticed this a lot also in working with people, is that we tend to have this idea that if we're going to be of service or we're going to do something good for the world, it's become so inflated with being seen, with being noticed, or even if it's not that, even if the motivation still is, you know, if we manage to sort of keep ego out of it, it still seems like if it's not on big scale, we feel like it's not important.

Yeah. And I feel like that's a place that a lot of people get lost and feel that life isn't, it's not as important as it could be because I'm doing this little thing, you know. And I think we sell ourselves short of the good work that we do do in life by not appreciating it because thinking it has to be grand for it to matter. Yeah. I think that's a really good point, Eric. I really do because, well, because the former, what you just mentioned, can kind of be a sort of concealed ego orientation, right? Unless it has huge impact or I'm seen or I'm noticed or something I don't have much motivation for it. or something I don't have much motivation for it. Where really, I think the service to whatever we hold is valuable is like each moment of life.

It's a life orientation that really doesn't have anything to do with how big the scale is, or how much it is known. That's what I got from seeing my teacher with those tapes. It was like, that's service. She's serving what's valuable to her. She's giving her life, her energy, her commitment is actually to serving the Dharma. And it doesn't make any difference how that's seen.

If it's on a big scale and a small scale whether it's noticed or not noticed it's just getting down like let's say i could go out and have interviews like this or give big talks or do retreats or whatever and then i'm like sitting in a line in a bank and somebody behind me is having a tough time but I don't want to be bothered. You know, like all of a sudden, you know, for me, if I didn't step up to that moment and acknowledge that person or just see what their need was at that moment, the whole rest of my life would just seem like a total

charade. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's kind of easy to be noble when you're up, when you're noticed, when people notice. But I think most of our lives, that's not where it takes place. Right. Right? So even when I'm like, I'll be going to a retreat, right, and I'll be teaching. But I'm actually teaching for maybe four hours during those days, which means there's 20 other hours. I think the 20 other hours are just as important and maybe even more important than the four. Yep. Those are all the little small moments, you know, where it makes a difference.

Because really, I mean, how much have you and I and all of us in our lives had those moments where somebody just gave us what I call our two most prized commodities, a little time and attention when we needed it. And it wasn't known, and it wasn't on a stage, and it wasn't for any other reason than somebody saw that we needed a little time and attention, and somebody gave it to us. I think most of us have all had those moments, and those can be very transformative moments. They're small, at least from the exterior. So I think that's a really, really important part because we can get hung up. Like, I don't want to do this unless I can change the world. Well, geez, how big an ego is that? You know what I mean? We were talking about kids earlier.

I often think about parents. I mean, there's so much service embedded in that. And yet, often, as parents, we don't even reflect on that that is a noble and a beautiful thing to do. Like, I often think, as a parent, you're like, all I'm doing is taking care of my kids all day long. And look, this guy's over there giving, you know, starting this clean water project. And we sell ourselves short about what we could feel positive about. If we looked and went, wait, my life is about service. I am serving. And can I reorient my expectation of myself?

Yeah. Through teaching, I have come to see how unimaginably, really unimaginably, and I don't say that as an overstatement. Maybe it's an understatement. How unimaginably important parenting is. Because I see the fallout of bad parenting. Or just parents that just, you know, most people don't go to a parenting class. Like they're doing the best they can, but it may not actually be that great. And I think personally, even though I don't have kids, but I think the

role of parenting is probably the most noble calling that anybody could have. Right? Because that, man, you want to have impact. Yeah. Parenting is your place where you may have more impact than anything else you do. Yeah. Because it's going to affect that person's life and their children, their children's children, and it's going to go on for generations. Yeah. It's true. Really? I just think it's huge, and most of it's done behind the scenes where there's no fanfare, and sometimes it's beautiful and lovely, and sometimes it's extraordinarily challenging, it seems to me.

Yeah. As my mother said to me many years ago, that the first five years I almost killed her, because I was such a difficult kid. Yeah. killed her because I was such a difficult kid. Not an ill-tempered kid, but she just couldn't turn her back on me. She'd never know the next dangerous thing I would be getting into. And anyway, so I just think things like that, parenting, it's not just parenting, but I think that's a really good example of profound service. Right.

And it's easy to imagine, I can only imagine as a parent, at any moment during the day when there's, you know, all sorts of challenges at any given day, that it's not easy to keep a living sense of how desperately important that is and how much you are in service to the whole world. Yeah. I think it's so easy to lose sight of. Yeah. And I think it's very easy. What I'll hear people I work with in my one-on-one work will be,

I'm not doing anything important in the world. I'm like, hang on, slow your roll, hold on. Actually, you're doing something tremendously important. And to feel that if we're not doing something that's big, we're not doing something important is a... We make ourselves feel bad about ourselves. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really.

Go to ReallyNoally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ...in a way that is truly unnecessary. I think so, too. that is truly unnecessary. I think so, too. And I think it was the consequence of something that was necessary

culturally and developmentally. I think it was necessary that, you know, because you can get sort of lost in parenting and sort of lose your inner life in a certain sense, you know, through just trying to do the right things

and be the right person and do all this kind of stuff. And of course, generations, thousands of years of women that couldn't felt like they couldn't fulfill their potential in other ways in life beyond parenting. And so all those, you know, for all those reasons, and many more, you know, this pressure came societally to start to change that, to let people realize they can develop lives beyond and outside of their parenting roles. And so, okay, that really needed to happen, right? Especially for women, that really needed to happen and that transformation needed to come. And I think what often happens is we can kind of throw out the baby with the bathwater in a certain sense in that, yeah, we want to be able to exercise our talents beyond the particular, let's say, parenting roles or family roles we play in life. And we want to be able to do that. But I think what we've lost in there is exactly what

you were just mentioning, that, yeah, we do want to be able to flourish in other ways, but, man, don't forget that that parenting role, the immensity of the importance of that is and what an incredible service that is. And a sacrifice, even though it seems to me that parents get so, so much from being a parent, but it's no walk in the park every day. So I think we've kind of lost a little bit of touch with valuing how important that actually is. Yeah. That's a good point, though, about how we got where we are. I think it's really true. Yeah. I mean, it almost always goes that way. To find balance, we go from one out of balance state to a little bit out of balance state before we find something that's

a little more wise. So I want to talk now about this idea that you talk about in the book, and you say there's no direct causal relationship between our spiritual pursuits and the arising of self-recognition or of spiritual awakening. So sort of saying you can't make yourself awaken. And yet, so there's no direct causal relationship, but you also say it's a mistake to assume that what we do doesn't have an impact. So talk to me about that dichotomy or that paradox. Yeah, well, it kind of goes into this sort of human way that we tend to think, which is in either or categories, right? And this is like a really great example of thinking in either my spiritual, say, practice, what I do to try to awaken or connect with the divine or something, that either that has a direct causal relationship to revelation or it doesn't. But if we kind of like back up from that and say, life doesn't usually go according to these black and white ways of unfolding, that, yeah, we can't, you know, have this recipe where I do this, this, and this, and this, and I can guarantee that it equals spiritual awakening. Right.

It just doesn't seem to work that way. Hell, if it did, we would have figured out a long time ago what the three steps or the 10 steps or the two steps, and yet it just doesn't sort of... But, so then people will conclude, well, then it has no... There is no causal relationship. I think the causal relationship is there, it's just not direct. It's indirect. causal relationship is there. It's just not direct. It's indirect. It's in the sense of, well, to go back to parenting, right? You can't cause your kids to be exactly what you think you want them to be or should be or guide them or, you know what I mean? You can do the same thing that another parent does and have a very, very different result. But there are hundreds of thousands of indirect causal relationships that are setting a stage. There are having an effect. It's just not like mathematics. It's not like two and two equals four. Sometimes two and two equals six or five or seven or... But it's also not chaotic. It's not simply chance. There's no mistake that most people that have, say, spiritual awakening,

not all, but I would say, in my experience, in excess of 95%, were doing something specific in their pursuit of that. And I think we'll explore this more in part two about how our spiritual practice, if we're not careful, becomes about a result. Right. We do it because we expect or we want this thing to happen. Yeah. And that very mentality often stands directly in the way of the thing we want. There's the paradox of spiritual practice itself, right? That it can open doors,

and it can also close doors. And often it does both of those things at the same time sometimes. Again, I think a lot of this goes back to the ways that we compartmentalize all this stuff the way I see it now is the very impetus that gets someone to do any kind of spiritual practice that gets them to open a spiritual book or go to a talk or look on the internet why are you doing that and your friends could care less where did that come from in your life? And what I would say is that the impulse, let's say, for enlightenment,

big word, but we'll just... And the impulse for enlightenment is you have the impulse because the impulse is the first arising of the enlightenment arising in your consciousness. That the interest itself is a sign that there's a spiritual maturity that's already arising into consciousness. That's a very different way of looking at all this, because usually we look at it as, I want to awaken, right, or I want enlightenment or something something because it's not here,

because I don't experience it. What I'm saying is that your very desire for it is actually only there because that impulse is already starting to flower in your life. Maybe not to the extent that you would like, right? It doesn't meant you just get to sit back and wait for it all to happen but the yearning itself is sort of coming from the thing we're yearning for that can be a more useful way to look at it because it keeps us out of this either-or way of relating to to our spirituality our our practice, whatever that might be. In Zen, I remember hearing about some of this stuff just years before I had any understanding of it. Like, your practice is an expression of enlightenment itself.

And I'd be sitting there meditating going, well, that sounds kind of profound, although confusing. But it certainly doesn't seem to be what I'm experiencing. Right. Like my practice doesn't feel like enlightenment at all, right, at that time. It feels like the circus is here. Yeah, yeah. It can seem like a chaotic circus, right? A bad circus is coming to town.

But in retrospect, which is often where we are all the most wise, right, in retrospect. You look back and now I can clearly see that even that sort of chaotic impulse for awakening was there because in essence, awakening was already in process. It hadn't bloomed to the sense that I was conscious of it. I was at that time still kind of confused and blindly groping in the dark. But even the impulse to do that is coming from the thing that we're seeking. We think it's coming from the lack of what we're seeking

rather than the presence of what we're seeking is already starting to arise into our consciousness and you know if we're if we're ready for it that can kind of put a little bit different twist you know that we can we can start to maybe just a little bit start to appreciate within the impulse to awaken itself is is a bit of the awakened mind. We only feel that because awakened mind is already starting to sort of break through just a bit into consciousness. And even if we take that on a conceptual level for a little bit, that perhaps it allows one to kind of relax, relax into their practice rather than, because spiritual practice so easily becomes a sort of institutionalized seeking.

Right. My practice is nothing but spiritual seeking, and that's when it becomes a barrier. And that's when it becomes a barrier, you know? That's when it starts to get in the way because it's an unconscious denial of true nature. We don't know it at the time, but that's kind of what it is. Right. And that is what we will explore in part two. All right.

So thank you so much for coming on for part one. Thank you. It's nice to be with you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.