The One You Feed - Adyashanti on Spiritual Awakening

Episode Date: August 3, 2021

This is Adyashanti’s fourth time as a guest on the show! He’s an American spiritual teacher who offers talks, online study courses, and retreats in the U.S. and abroad. He’s also the co-founder of the Open Gate Sangha Meditation Center and is the author of many books, including the one he and Eric discuss in this episode, The Direct Way: Thirty Practices to Evoke Awakening.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 Spiritual Awakening and …His book, The Direct Way: Thirty Practices to Evoke AwakeningThe evolution of his innate competitive nature and its role in his spiritual growthThat we tend to go towards our strengths in any situation, regardless of whether or not it’s what the situation actually calls forHow he describes spiritualityHis teacher’s instruction to him: “Always and only teach from your own experience.”His answer to the question What do you trust?The Spiritual HeartThe difference he sees in awakening and enlightenmentThe damaging myths of awakeningAdyashanti Links:Adyashanti’s WebsiteTwitterInstagramFacebookBiOptimizers: Just 2 capsules of their Magnesium Breakthrough taken before bed gives you all 7 forms of magnesium so that you sleep better at night. Go to www.magbreakthrough.com/wolf and use the promo code WOLF10 at checkout to save 10%.If you enjoyed this conversation with Adyashanti, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Adyashanti on Living in the Service of Truth (Part 1)Adyashanti on Living in the Service of Truth (Part 2)Awakening in Life with Ryan OelkeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No 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, and it's actually his fourth time as a guest on The One You Feed. Pretty sure that's the record. He's an American spiritual teacher who offers talks, online study courses, and retreats in the U.S. and abroad. He's also the co-founder of Open Gate Sangha Meditation Center and the author of many books, including the one him and Eric discuss here, The Direct Way, 30 Practices to Evoke Awakening. Hi, Adya. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Eric. It's nice to be back with you. It's been at least a few years, so nice to chat together again. Yes, it's been two years. We had been sort of making an annual tradition out of

this. I would be out there in California, and we did that for about three years, but then we got COVID disrupted, and you're living somewhere slightly differently. So we're doing this one remote, but I appreciate you being here. We're going to talk a little bit about your latest book, which is called The Direct Way, 30 Practices to Evoke Awakening. But before we start, you're going to get to answer this question for the fourth time, I think, which is, we all have two wolves inside of us that are 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 he thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather. He says, well, grandfather, which wolf wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. One of the things I like about it is that it's sort of simple. It's to the point and it hits what I think of as like our intuitive, ethical buttons, right? We'd have this intuitive sense of what's good or not so good and right or not so right and all of that and so it's simple in the sense that it gives us a direction right what we feed is really really

important so where we put our mind where we put our attention is pivotal i think there's also it comes to mind this morning eric is a deeper aspect to it also what it means to sort of embrace our well what's typically been called our dark side i don't really like to use that, what it means to sort of embrace our, well, what's typically been called our dark side. I don't really like to use that word because it gives the implication of bad or wrong or can, but everybody has a dark side, right? Everything that exists is a play of opposites. So I think there's a paradox that comes up to me, Eric, with this kind of parable, which is on a relative sense, yeah, we want to be feeding the better, more evolved aspects of our nature. And yet I think we also want to embrace the other aspects, the darker aspects, you know, whether those are greed or hatred or there's something just sort of less dark, just the sort of the unknown aspects of ourself or

the source of nightmares, real or imagined. So, the paradox, I think, is that we do want to be very mindful of where we put our attention. I think that's the sort of the hallmark of any contemplative spirituality. It's all about where are we putting our attention. It's kind of a training of attention. And at the same time, I think that we don't want to make any kind of attempt to disassociate ourselves from these other darker aspects of our being. Because along with hate, ignorance, greed, and all the sort of negativity, also part of the darkness is this sort of very unknown aspect of our being, which is often the aspect of our creativity often comes from that place. And our inspirations often come from a place we don't know where. We don't know why. We don't know when they arise.

They arise almost out of nowhere. So I think I just wanted to sort of broaden the scope a little bit just this morning so that we all are reminded of the importance of where we put our attention. But also, you know, be careful of trying to cast out your own monsters because, as Nietzsche said, you might be casting out the best thing within you. Which doesn't mean we want to grow up to become monsters. within you, which doesn't mean we want to grow up to become monsters. But there's also, like I said, a creative side, an inspirational side, a numinous sort of aspect. The great unknown of our psyche is also at operation. And to say nothing that it's healthy for us to have an acknowledgement without indulging in it, but an acknowledgement of our own darkness. That's a healthy thing. So that's what comes up this morning. It's funny, you could ask that question every day and probably you get a different response. It's going to be sort of like the Adyashanti good wolf calendar.

It's just going to be each day I'm going to ask you the question and we're going to get a different response. That does bring up an interesting question, though. By and large, your teachings are about awakening from the things that aren't real. Maybe that would be the simplest way of saying it, waking up from things that aren't real. And a lot of these things that we would consider more the shadow sides of our personality, they're real and not real, right? Given that you had so many profound awakenings pretty young, and you've had a lot of years since. Curious how dealing with recognizing, embracing, learning from those darker aspects of your personality, if that's the word we want to use,

for lack of a better one, how has that looked for you? and has it been something you've consciously spent time on? Sure it is. The one that comes up most readily is, I think I was born coming out of the womb with a pretty strong competitive sort of aspect. If there was a race to get out of my mother's womb and I had a twin, I would have been racing. So it's not really something I learned. It was just something that was always a part of me. And of course, when I was young, you know, competitiveness, you know, great things can come out of it. Inspiring things can come out of it. And also, it can be sort of, you know, dark. And I used to joke, I've even said it in my teaching many times, I said, you know, when I was 22 years old and a competitive cyclist, I probably would have

ran over your grandmother to get to the finish line first. Now, that's not the most evolved impulse in the world, right? And yet, you know, whatever one might judge the competitive instinct, if you're kind of someone that's born with it, it's not like you can just jettison it out of your system. It's not quite that simple. So what I noticed, first I noticed where it was working for me and working against me. That was really, really important. So, which was very situational, like there's situations where the competitive instinct was called for, you know, at that time of my life, athletics. I even used it because I was also born dyslexic. And so I kind of used that same tool to kind of challenge myself like,

okay, I'm going to get out of any sort of remedial reading class by the time I'm in third grade. And I challenged myself and I used my competitive instinct. And so it really worked. Also, from an educational point of view, I did notice that as my spirituality evolved, the competitive instinct, it didn't necessarily go away, but it kind of naturally fell into a kind of rhythm. It was no longer this blanket thing where I was competitive about everything. It became like just very situational.

If I'm involved in something where the competitive instinct is useful, it seems to just kind of come to the fore now. And when I'm not, it's kind of in the background. It's no longer sort of dominating, you know, the whole internal atmosphere at all. But that's a really good example of something that can be both light and dark. It can cut for you and against you. You know, we can do some amazing things utilizing that instinct. And if we lose control of it and it takes over us, well, then it can be destructive to ourselves

and others. Yeah, I think that's such a great example. More and more, I've become aware of how almost any personality trait is that way. Like, take it too far becomes problematic. Too little of it, also problematic. What's the right amount of it, you know, given the right circumstance? Was that something you consciously worked on and looked at in your life? Yeah, I was consciously worked with. I didn't sort of take it as a project, like, okay, now I have to kind of eradicate this. But I just saw through my, especially my spiritual experience, my spiritual practice, which I started also in my early 20s, about 20, and I wasn't competing against anyone or anything, but I took this certain orientation that I had from my athletic background and thought, okay,

basically meditation's like training. And I became really good by out-training most of the people I know. And so, okay, I'm going to apply that to my meditation practice. You know, right now it seems kind of naive looking back, but at the time it seemed like, hey, this thing's worked for me. I might as well just use it here. And the nice thing about the spiritual practice was it just showed me quickly, not that I learned quickly, but it showed me quickly that to approach spiritual practice from that attitude is almost the opposite of what you want to be doing, you know, and so it just led to a lot of sort of frustration and, you know, trying to have breakthroughs in the same way that I was trying to win races. And it simply didn't

work. Probably at that point, after a couple of years of that, that's when I consciously started to reevaluate. Like, okay, this isn't working. This is an aspect of my personality I've had my whole life and I just sort of slipped into applying it here without even thinking about it much and it's clearly not serving me, so I have to start to make some different choices. You know, it was that moment that seems very like a small moment. But the moment that I realized it doesn't work here in this way and I can make a different choice. I think you referred to this a minute ago, Eric.

I call them like our swords, like those things in life, like your personality traits that cut for you, that they open vistas, they open avenues. Like for some people, it might just simply be their raw intelligence, right? They just apply that to everything. Or in my sense, it was this incredible work ethic, not just in general, because I can be extremely lazy too, but when I was inspired, I could imply this incredible worth ethic and sort of push through. So, that was a sword, right? Helped me in my education, helped me in lots of ways, but then I hit spirituality and all of a sudden that sword

that sort of was cutting new pathways open for me was actually cutting back against me. It was getting in my way and I've seen this as a teacher for a long time now that we all have those go-to traits in our personality that sort of work for us the best. And they'll usually be one or two. But those will also be the same traits that we tend to not have learned how to control. We just apply them to everything in the same way. And in some things they work, control. We just apply them to everything in the same way. In some things they work, and in other areas they don't work. So, I think a lot of it is, and spirituality really taught me this more specifically spiritual practice, was I had to realize what my innate strengths, when they were working for me, and when they were working against me. And I've seen as a teacher,

everybody's, we're all kind of the same in that sense. We tend to go towards our strengths just intuitively, whether they're what the situation needs or not. Yeah, I see that in working with coaching clients all the time. And the thing is that a lot of times that approach takes you to a certain point. And then it's just like, boom, you're stopped. It makes me think of that business book. I don't even know exactly what it was about, but the title was, What Got You Here Won't Get You There. And the basic idea was, you know, the things that got you to be like a upper level manager are not going to get you to be an executive. It's a different skill set to jump. And if you keep just hitting those same things, that's why you're sort of stuck there. And so I

see the same sort of thing in coaching clients all the time, which is we've got something that's worked really well for us until all of a sudden either we've played it out or we've come into a situation that it doesn't fit for. Yeah, that's a great, really, really good example because that trait did work for me for a while and then I had to develop new ones. It's exactly like what you're talking about. It'll take you a certain way, but we also have, I think, have to be mindful for when we feel like we're stalling out. That's usually an indication of, okay, maybe it's time to reassess our whole approach to practice, or sometimes it's an attitude sort of change. The way we feel about it, the way we think, the attitude with which we're approaching something is critical. I'm going to go back to something very foundational

that you have on your website that I want to use as an orienting point as to what we're talking about. And it's basically what you say is what spirituality is. You say spirituality is not something set apart from life. Rather, it is a plunge into the heart of existence. Say just a little bit more about that, because I think this term spiritual is used so many different ways. I mean, we've got a course called Spiritual Habits. I mean, it's used a thousand different ways, but I love that definition of it. Yeah, thank you. I think it's important. You know, there's part of a lot of people's spiritual instinct and maybe everybody to a certain extent. You know, we have that part of us that would

simply like to sort of transcend this confusing world and maybe just sort of hover above it if we can at all manage to or be in the bleachers, you know, watching it as it goes on. But somehow, in essence, to get ourselves off the playing field in some way, right? Not permanently, but so that it's much more smooth. And I can understand that, and spirituality can do that. And that's part of naturally what having certain insights gives us a little more of a transcendent witnessing perspective. But I do think in the long run that spirituality in its truest sense is really a way of plunging into the mystery of our existence, the mystery of who we are and what this life is and how we live this life. And that sense of sort of plunging into life rather than trying to get an

escape hatch from life, I think is a really pivotal orientation. And I found that it will, in the long run, it will dictate how far people even go spiritually. Do you know, if we're just using it as an escape hatch, it'll take us that far, but then we won't have it very integrated into our lives. So, I mean, good Lord, look at life, you know, Eric, like life itself. It's just this unimaginably vast mystery. I do think that life is that which is weirder than we can even possibly imagine. And, you know, the more we unpackage any aspect of it, whether it's spirituality or psychology or biology or chemistry or physics or, you know, the cutting edge discoveries of anything tend to show us this is more bizarre, more weird,

like nobody would have believed it if they wrote this in a novel. And I think that's what spirituality is kind of for, it's to plunge us into the heart of life, into the essence of life. Do you know? I think of spirituality almost like a safer form of mountaineering, right? It's mountaineering of the soul. It's adventuring of the soul. But if we don't have the adventuring kind of spirit, we will tend to stall out at some point, I think. So, taking that as the spirituality being a plunge into the heart of spirit, we will tend to stall out at some point, I think. So taking that as the spirituality being a plunge into the heart of existence, I'd like to go back to where you started your formal spiritual journey, which is with Zen. And I want to talk a little bit about that because since you and I last talked, I have

become a pretty avid Zen student. I've been doing koan work with a teacher. I recently passed my 100th koan. So I have an appreciation of the ways in which Zen shows up in your teachings that I did not have prior to that. I see it. So I wanted to ask you, your teacher asked you to teach, which is a classic sort of Zen thing, right? The teacher says, okay, I now give you authorization to teach, but you chose to then move sort of out of that lineage, or maybe that's not even the word you would use, but your teaching became broader than

that. And I'm just kind of curious, what was your reasoning or your feeling for doing that? Well, you know, I took one of her pieces of advice absolutely concretely, maybe more, I don't know. She seemed to be fine with it, but maybe even more concretely than she had in mind. But one of the pieces of advice she gave me when she asked me to teach was, she said, always, always and only teach from your own experience. And I took her at her word. And I know what she was saying. I don't think it's just a good spiritual teacher thing. What if we all did that? What if we really spoke from our experience? Or at least when we weren't, that we made that known, you know? We might be much more benign towards each other if that was the case. And I kind of see myself sort of within her lineage. Now, she was asked to teach by her

teacher, and yet the way she was asked to teach was sort of very unusual for Zen. It was kind of like the way I was asked to teach. Her teacher used to come up and do these week-long retreats at her house because there were no Zen centers at the time in the 60s. And at some point after years of doing this and studying, he said, you don't need me to do this anymore. Why don't you do it? And that was it. There was no transmission ceremony. What we think of as the big Zen passing of the baton. There was just like, here, why don't you do this? So, she taught out of her living room the rest of her life for a better part of 30 years. Strangely, she got to know

these other people over years that were kind of teaching often out of their houses in this sort of unassuming way that were asked to teach, but it wasn't some big sort of lineage holder deal. And they kind of, over years, got to hear about each other and connected in with each other. And most all of them were women, which I don't think was any mistake. I think us guys tend to like, you know, establishments and big, impressive looking things. But so, most of these were women and they called themselves the Zen Tea Lady Society.

They just sort of made up this name for Zen teachers that were teaching in these unassuming ways, right? They didn't have the monasteries, the temples. My teacher had long since before I met her had taken off her robes. Ironically, she was one of the very first people really early that got a robe from the monks in Japan when she visited it, tore it apart, and came up with the pattern that makes all the robes that we all wore in Zen now. So, the very person that did that was also the person that later decided to sort of take her robes off. And so, in one sense, I see myself even though, you know, my teaching became just exponentially bigger than either one of us ever imagined in our wildest imagination.

I mean, I thought I would be teaching in my living room like she did. So, that was a real surprise to us. But as far as like where she came from and her own sensibility about all this, I kind of feel like I was in this sort of unspoken lineage in a way. You know, it's not like the official thing where you have the right documents you can look at. Although, like she was, she was asked to teach by a very good Zen teacher as I was. But we just sort of went our own ways with it. You know, she went her way. It looked a little bit more like Zen than my way looked. But I kind of followed in her footsteps, I think. I just took the next logical progression and then

there just happened to be more people that came to see me like I said than either one of us ever dreamed of 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?

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and even in the intervening years since, has there been a role for you in your life of having a teacher or having a trusted elder? What role have you had in, you know, your teacher was a big part of your life for a number of years? I'm kind of curious, as you moved into teaching and onward, what that's looked like for you. Yeah, I didn't take on any other teachers after her, although I've learned from dozens and dozens and dozens of people over the years and books and, you know, all sorts of things. This is a little bit off your question, but I think it relates. One of the first things I did before I gave a single talk, I actually pulled two people that I trusted most in my life, which was my mother and my wife Mukti. I pulled them aside and I said, okay, I'm entrusting you

to watch out for me. And if you ever see me going off the beam, you know, doing anything that seems a little weird, I'm entrusting that you will tell me, that you will mention it to me. And if you ever see me going off the beam, you know, doing anything that seems a little weird, I'm entrusting that you will tell me, that you will mention it to me. I say that because I think it's healthy that we're not our own exclusive resource for always how we're doing. So, okay, you know, my mom's not a Zen teacher. My wife basically became one, but neither of them were at the time. But that's not what was needed. What was needed was just people that I trust that, you know, my mom changed my diapers. She raised me. If I'm going to go off the beam, man, she's going to tell me. So, in that respect, I had those sort

of guardrails. And I think those are very, very, very important. And then as far as teaching, I feel like that's something my teacher used to say to me. She said, you've got to be your own best student. You've got to be your own best student, which doesn't mean that I only listen to myself. It means basically you've got to remain a student, whether you teach or not. And maybe if you teach, it's even more important to remain a student, to always be opening, to be learning, to be questioning yourself, to not leave that sort of student orientation. And for me, because I love to learn, I'm kind of an adventurer. So I love exploring those vistas and those boundaries are really what have all the energy

for me. Excellent. I was talking with somebody I've worked with as a spiritual director. It's somebody I touch base with every couple months. And we just sort of talk about my spiritual life. And every single time I talk with this guy, I asked him today, I said, dude, all your conversations end on this point? Like, or is it just me?

Like, I just need to know, are you a one-trick pony? Or is this where we always end up? And where we always end up is around the question of trust. And I don't mean trust in like, I don't trust my partner or I don't trust my friend. We're talking trust in a foundational sense. And I'm curious what it is for you. If you were asked that question, what do you trust in? I'm just curious what it is for you. Yeah, that's a great question, by the way. And I'm not surprised that a lot of it comes down to trust. What we can trust,

what it means to trust it. I think that's like spirituality. Number one thing is start to orient towards that inside you which you can trust. So what I oriented around, I mean, not exclusively, of course, but I remember hearing a talk by Kenneth Roshi, who was a woman who was an abbess of a monastery I stayed at for a while. And she had given this talk and she had said when she was a monk that this idea that she had almost like a mantra which was, I could be wrong, I could be wrong, I could be wrong. And she said it took her so, so far, right, to just realize I could be wrong, to not get hung up on her own beliefs. But then at some point she realized she had to also entertain equally, I could be right. Which means I could be wrong actually,

I think, helped orient her, loosen her up so she wasn't so caught in her stuff towards what she could trust inside, right? I could be right is like saying there can be something inside me that I can trust, right? So what I found that I could trust was my sincerity. Because when I looked back over my life, I saw that it was my sincerity that even though I could go down, you know, a hundred different side paths that really didn't go anywhere, or I can make a hundred thousand different mistakes, there was this quality that had a sort of self-righting mechanism that would always sort of pull me back, you know, back in line. And I think that's the thing to contemplate, like what's that inside of each person that tends to pull them back

into alignment? Not that they never get out of alignment, but pulls them back. And what I recognized when I really contemplated it was that I was always very sincere, right? I was always very truthful. Now, that doesn't mean that you're always perfectly truthful, especially with yourself, right? Because you can think you're truthful, but then you realize maybe not as much as you thought. But just that intention, I had to realize that I could trust that. I didn't need to sort of have my superego just watching over my shoulder so incessantly that there is actually something deeper than my superego that was really trustworthy. And for me, it was just my sincerity. And I think each person has their own aspect that they can really trust in.

And yet, how many human beings have been really taught to find that in themselves that they can really trust in. And yet, how many human beings have been really taught to find that in themselves that they can trust? Because there's so much inside of ourselves that we can't trust, right? That's conditioned and prone to mistakes and all sorts of things. I think majority of human beings have a lot of emphasis on what they can't trust. A lot of people have told them what was wrong about them, but not so many of people have were really told like, hey, this is the thing, this is the good thing, this is the goodness inside of you, this is the thing you can trust and you should trust it. Maybe you should do more than trust it. Maybe you should really orient around whatever you're doing, whether it's spiritual practice or you're in business or like,

what are we going back to? What are we trusting inside? What's the thing that will right us eventually, even when we lose our balance? Yeah. It's interesting because as I've explored this topic, every time I talk to the guy, no matter what I'm talking about, we end up back on trust, which is why I asked him like, is this what happens with everybody? He's like, no, just you. And it's interesting because I do have a deep trust in myself in a deeper sense. I mean, I was a heroin addict for years and an alcoholic, so I know just how wrong my brain can lead me. I'm not deluded about that.

It's a deeper trust. But what I've started to realize is, what trust do I have in that I don't have to do it all? That's right. That's what I'm talking about. And I think that's the piece that's harder for me, is what can I rely on that may be inside me, but isn't me in the way I traditionally think of myself as me. Doesn't rely on my effort. Right. Doesn't belong to your ego. It's just, it's innate sort of. Yeah. That's what I was trying to get across. That thing that's innate. By the way, when you were talking about, you know, solving koans and stuff, like so much of solving a koan is just trust. You go in, you let it rip. Maybe it gets approval. Maybe it gets

disapproval. But if you don't let it rip, you're never going to get very far, right? Totally. It took me a while to learn that. I'd be like, I don't have a presentation. And I was eventually sort of told, like, just present. Just whatever you got at that moment, give it. Show it out. See what it is, you know? There you go. I was trying to go, well, do I feel like I have it figured out? And it was like, you're not the judge of that necessarily. Right. That's what you got the teacher there for. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a lot of what a good spiritual teacher is somebody that you can actually take those kinds of risks with. And if you trust them, they'll help orient you like,

almost like, yeah, okay, that's it. Or that's in the right direction or no, not quite. But sadly, often people see their spiritual teachers, they see them as such authority figures that they're afraid to let go and take some risks like that, which we should be the place where you can take risks, where you can experiment. We will help orient that energy, right? But yeah, you got to let go first. Yeah. In your latest book, you talk a lot about, it's not the first time you've talked about it, but either it was more prominent or I was more in a place to hear it than maybe I had been before. I never know which it is. But you're talking a lot in there, you've got a whole section on the spiritual heart. I'm wondering if you could say a little bit more about what the spiritual heart is. is? Sure. So we all know when we think of as our sort of emotive heart, right? So first of all, we're not talking about the physical beating thing in our chest. You know, conventionally, we'll talk about our heart as sort of an emotional center. So that's our emotional heart. We all kind

of have some connection with that. The spiritual heart, I think it's a lot of things, but in its truest sense, the spiritual heart is that which allows us to feel. Let's start there. Start with feel. Because even though it's not really an emotional thing, it's that which allows us to feel great connection all the way to the experience or the insight of unity. Because unity is an experience, right? We don't just go, oh, by God, that's unity there. I met one with the tree. Like, if that's what we're thinking,

we haven't got unity, right? Unity is this incredibly, profoundly intimate experience with existence. So, that's one part of what I'm calling the spiritual heart. And interestingly, I find it interesting anyway, that I found that different aspects of insight correlate with different areas of the body. So unity will always correlate with sort of an activation of the spiritual heart, which is basically this area in and around the chest. this area in and around the chest, right? It's bigger than the emotional heart. It's a different kind of seeing, right? We see with our eyes up here, but there's another kind of seeing with the emotional heart. It's also the nice thing for the spiritual heart is as it begins to become activated, and a lot of say like practices like meta meditation, compassion meditation, things like that are trying to elicit at least certain aspects of the spiritual heart but from a human point of view the nice thing about it as the spiritual heart become more activated in us it gives our sort of human

emotional heart a space to sort of safe space to open in, you know, because we're told all the time, if it'd be nice if you could be more, say, emotionally open or emotionally connected or emotionally available. And yet we all have experiences where we've been emotionally open and it's gotten trampled on by somebody that wasn't particularly nice or wasn't very wise or life circumstances happen and that little emotional heart sort of pulls back in. The nice thing about the spiritual heart is it's sort of a ground where the human heart also can open because a spiritual heart has a feeling tone of a kind of invulnerability. It's that that reminds us that even though we might have been

hurt a hundred thousand times emotionally, that the spiritual heart is invulnerable. It can contain all of that. And so it also becomes a place where the human heart can open. Last thing I'll say, Eric, is just to give another sense of this is when we have those kind of insights or awakenings where we feel ourselves to be this sort of like clear awake space you know something like that of course these are just words but something that's like a clear awake space that's what i would call awakening at the level of mind which is really awakening from the mind the conceptual mind But it's also a mode of the awakened view. It's very transcendent, very empty, very spacious. It's wonderful. It's beautiful. But often, it's also disconnected.

You can be like, oh, I feel totally free, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then your partner says, yeah, but you're not here. You're not available. You're not showing up. You're not paying attention to the kids. You know, you're forgetting the dog. You're, you know, you're being disconnected from me or work or whatever. So when that sort of drops down, literally almost drops into this other area of the body, then the heart gets activated. And all of a sudden, there's an intimate connection with existence. It's not just transcendent. We're discovering something about the world itself, the phenomenal world. I think of it as almost like a re-entry of awakened consciousness back into the phenomenal

world. And that, to a large extent, occurs at this level of the spiritual heart. you talk about awakening at the level of the head which was sort of this clear space of awareness awakening at the level of heart which is more unity awakening at the level of gut and i think oftentimes the assumption is that they may happen in that order but that's not necessarily true because i think for me, my first big awakening was definitely the spiritual heart. It was the unity experience. It was one of great peace, great love, great warmth, great intimacy with everything. I've had ongoing experiences of more of the head variety. And you're right, I think the best way I can describe it is it's very open and it's very quiet,

which is really lovely in a lot of ways compared to a noisy brain. But it does not have, to me, the same warmth to it. Right. There's no warmth to it. So traditional Zen, you know, unless you've got the spiritual heart online, they're not even going to usually often consider it a real awakening. If it's just this, like, I'm pure emptiness, I'm nothing, I'm transcendent of time and space, like, okay, good kid, now go sit back on the cushion. And whereas sort of what I'll say is like, no, there's a legitimate kind of awakening if there's a sort of a shift of your identity.

But let's remember, it's not complete. So yeah, and you're right. You know, the way I'll talk about these head, heart and gut, it's as if this is the way it always has to be. Probably more often than any other way, it is head, heart and gut. But you're an exception to that rule. I'm an exception to that because my first awakening was definitely a gut awakening in my 20s. You know, I did the whole thing backwards, as you would expect a dyslexic to do. And so that's kind of my own unfolding went that trajectory. So no, they can hop around.

Any real awakening is going to have elements of all of it. It's going to have elements, but usually there's one element that's sort of just much stronger, more prominent, and the other elements will maybe... 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

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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. I'm more online at a different time. I read you once say, and I wonder if this is the way you would describe it or not. You once said that this was a pretty old interview, which is why I caveat

that. That awakening was you have an awakening experience, that's awakening. Enlightenment is when you stay awake. The difference between awakening and enlightenment, you know, one being sort of temporary, the other being more or less permanent. I'm curious if that's still the way you would describe it. I'll ask that question first. Yeah, it's a good question. I think I see things the older I get, just see it on a spectrum. It's a spectrum of one thing. We can have glimpses that seem to go away, but there's always an element, if they're really real, that's still there, although it may not be quite as noticeable. There's something that is much more accessible right we may not be walking around in some

totally clear state but we can almost like access at will there's something of the view let's call it that the awakened view becomes more of the default condition but that doesn't mean even when it becomes a default condition that other elements of experience don't become more foreground at times. You know, it doesn't mean we're just swimming in this state of, you know, total enlightenment 24 hours a day without any undulation. Well, that's a nice fantasy, but that's not really the way it seems to work. I would see enlightenment in something that's also covers more of the spectrum, like we were just talking about. It's a word that I don't actually use that all that much nowadays, because it's useful in the sense of saying, hey, enlightenment is a word that reminds you that there are a completely different way to

experience yourself in the world than you might currently have. So, it gives us sort of a reference point. But all the rest, you know, like someone will say, well, are you fully enlightened? Well, what does that mean? Like, you know what I mean? It's almost like asking someone who's pregnant, are you fully pregnant? Well, I think if you're a day pregnant, you're pretty much fully pregnant. And if you're nine months pregnant, you're fully pregnant. But that doesn't mean that being one day pregnant and

eight months pregnant are the same. They're obviously different, but they're just on a spectrum. So I think a lot of the problem is in spirituality, how we tend to use these terms. There's something in the human psyche that really likes absolutes because it gives us something to hold on to. But I think, you know, the enlightened view, it's a way of seeing and experiencing life. And it can be from shallow or to something deep. I don't think we will ever exhaust its potential. So for someone to say, I'm fully awake,

I wouldn't even know what that means. That just means that you put a closure on your insight, which means nothing more is allowed, which doesn't really seem to make any sense to me. So yeah, I mean, I would stand by it to some extent, but I would want to qualify it a little bit. I've got more experience under my belt. And I do tend to carry some of these terms, I think, lighter, the older I get, it just doesn't seem to be relevant. Yeah, it's a term I actually haven't heard you use much because I think that this is always an interesting question to me around how active is the awakenings that I've had in my life? How much am I living from that place? That I believe I have a physiological condition. This is just a belief.

So I hold this belief loosely, a physiological condition called depression. And so it shows up sometimes regardless, it seems, right? And so what I've worked and tried to learn to do is to not let that necessarily mean to me that I've not made tremendous progress or had great awakenings. It feels a little bit to me like saying like, you wouldn't say, well, you haven't had any deep awakenings because you broke your leg. You'd be like, well, that doesn't make any sense. No, doesn't make any sense. And as you said, and I'm sure you know better than I do, Eric, that there are all sorts of reasons for us being depressed, right? And one of those reasons can just be a total physiological brain chemistry, you know, like welcome to your life when you're

born. This is going to be part of your experience. And then there's all sorts of other reasons to be depressed, you know, life experience and traumatic episodes and all that. Now, a lot of that more, we could put that, just for lack of a better term, I'm not saying this is an accurate term, but that kind of depression that's kind of caused by basically what's happened to you from the time you're born to the current time, we can call that psychological depression. That's no evaluation of it. That can be unbelievably debilitating, right? And a lot of that, a lot of that is different for different people. Certain elements of that can be dispelled with our practice, let's say, or our insight. But if we've had sort of this brain chemistry thing,

like from the time you're born, it may get better. I think what often gets better when we have these deep, deeper insights is how we relate to it, right? How we handle it, how much self we derive from it, you know, or lack of self we derive from it. But if it's like you had a foot that was just a little bit off, a little bit deformed. We all have part of our physiology that's not perfect. That's for damn sure everybody. If that's sort of the origin of most of, say, the depression, then awakening doesn't necessarily wave a wand over it and make it all go away. And that issue you brought up is a really really good issue because i do see people sometimes that

they they have these really legitimate awakening experiences and yet then they'll still have something that sort of pulls on them right sort of tugs on them and they'll sort of delegitimize their awakening in their own mind like well because i still have this i still let's say i still have days where i can hardly get out of bed because I'm depressed or whatever. That therefore, no, it's just that you have a hard time getting out of bed today and the awakening you have was actually real. And both of them can occupy the same space. The idea that awakening just removes all psychological difficulty is probably one of the more damaging myths that there are about awakening. I think that's why I've always been a little bit drawn towards Ken Wilber's talk about waking up, growing up, cleaning up.

Like if you're going to be a full human and everybody has different degrees of effort that are needed in each of those areas. Absolutely. Absolutely. Right. Awakening isn't going to necessarily make you great at relationships. Crummy at relationships going in, probably not so good coming out until you do some work, right, on that particular domain. So I agree that our human psyche is very, very complex. It's all interrelated, but these lines of development certainly aren't the same. And I do think that's an important part of spirituality is that we not get so exclusively focused on awakening that we forget

that being like a functional, decent person is a perfectly legitimate thing to orient our life towards with or without awakening. Yeah. And I think it gets even more blurred by the fact that the tradition that you come out of and that I'm in, a tradition like Buddhism is also a very, just by its nature of the things the Buddha taught, has a very psychological orientation to how you work with your thoughts and emotions. And so all of a sudden, it seems a little bit easier in, say, mystical Christianity to separate it. That's psychological. I think those are straw men to a certain degree. But when you wade into Buddhism, it's like they almost feel like they were married at the hip from the beginning.

Yeah, I think in many senses they were married from the beginning because the Buddha was like a very, he was like a very early enlightened psychologist in a way. I mean, because he seemed to have had an unusually astute understanding of the human psyche, right? Not just the awakened view, but the mechanics. It's really interesting to me about him because he seemed like more of a scientist sort of mindset that got involved in spirituality. And we all benefit from that, right? Because he was very empirical, I think, and certainly very rational about the way he analyzed the workings of the human mind and the workings of the human psyche and what's beneficial and what's not beneficial. And to say nothing to the fact that I think,

as a lot of traditional sort of religious structuring is breaking down all around us, that's been going on for the better part of 100, 150 years. Part of that's great, because spirituality is kind of breaking out of its religious confines. But another part of that is a little tricky, because a lot of spirituality nowadays is sort of unmoored from its moral and ethical foundations. Right. Right. And because those are kind of inconvenient, you know, I'm awake, man, I may be an asshole, but I'm awake, right? And traditionally, it'd be like, well, that's actually a pretty dangerous thing. right? And traditionally, it'd be like, well, that's actually a pretty dangerous thing.

So, it's not the same as what you were just mentioning with the more psychological aspects, but I do think that the ethical and moral foundation is a very psychological aspect of certainly the Buddhist teaching. And I think it was extremely wise to put as almost as a foundation those ethical principles. And I think it's no mistake that pretty much every religion in the world that I've ever bumped into does the same. Right. And they seem to be remarkably consistent with the heart of it is. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sometimes those principles can be communicated in ways that are more or less effective or, you know, more or less resonant or lead to more or less judgment. But the principles themselves, yeah, I would agree. They seem to be pretty,

pretty universal. This stuff was worked out a long, long, long time ago through our ancestors living their lives and seeing what works and what doesn't work. Well, Adya, we are out of time. I would love to do this longer. And you and I are going to do it longer in the post-show conversation. Listeners, if you'd like access to the post-show conversation and lots of other benefits of being a member of our community, go to oneufeed.net slash join. Thank you so much again, Adia. I think you are the first four-time guest. Wow. Thank you, Eric. I just like coming and talking to you. So to me, it's a win from the very beginning, but thanks for having me on again. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast.

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