What do you know?

Via To Live the Truth, A Weekend Inquiry with Adyashanti. Inspired me enough to transcribe it. Enjoy.

“As Ramana used to say, let what comes come, let what goes go, find out what remains. Awareness needs no contrast. Awareness is.

What have you been forever?

The best way to find out is to be still and let it discover itself. Just be still and let it discover itself. There is no trick. If I could hand out the trick of awakening, if I could get like the five step plan, that’d be great. I’d love to have one. I know a lot of people, most teachers have some sort of five step plan, ten step plan, two step plan. I don’t have a plan. I’ve never seen a plan that works, even very often. Right? There isn’t really a plan, because it just doesn’t work that way.

This is my invitation. To be still and let that which is awake within you remember itself. Allow it to remember itself. Don’t think you are wrong because you can’t do it with your will. That’s what’s right. You can’t do it with your will. It remembers itself by itself. The less you struggle, the easier it is for consciousness to reveal itself. Struggle makes it very difficult, because it ties up consciousness in this process called struggle.

Where does your heart lead you? What do you know? What do you know? Follow your heart. There is no prescription for this. We do it or we don’t. When you do you find there is a tremendous force to it. Following what you know to be true. See, I can’t tell someone, ok, go home, sit such and such hours of meditation a day and it’s going to work. Because I know it doesn’t work that way. The way it tends to work, follow what’s really, actually, authentic within you. And if you don’t know what’s authentic than find out. Right? Then sit down in a room and find out what’s authentic. If takes you two seconds, great. If it takes your two months, great. But find out that authentic place within you, and follow it with all of your heart. That is the most powerful thing within you, within any of us. That is our personal invitation. It guides you in the way no exterior force can guide you. And if it says sit six hours a day than sit six hours a day, and if it says don’t bother with it, don’t bother with it. And you’ll find that force, that still small direction, it’s not what this mind wants to do or doesn’t want to do is it? It’s very different. Do you see? There is nothing wrong with you. It’s all there isn’t it? It’s all there. Everything you need. The direction. Which way to go. What to do or not. It’s all there. That’s what I have great trust in, because I know everybody has this complete, built in road to their own being.

But let yourself know that this is important. As my teacher’s teacher used to say, Suzuki, ‘the most important thing is to find out what is the most important thing’. And that sounds like very cliche and very Zen, old guy wisdom. But when you realize that the most important thing is to find out what is the most important thing… and find out how important it actually is to you … that is what lights the fire. That is what gets through our lethargy, or in some people it’s resistance, in some people it’s anxiety, in some people they gotta move through fear, everybody’s gotta move through something. And it’s not a technique that’s going to get them to move through it. It’s really contacting, with what’s the most important thing. What is this life about? What is the one thing that is more important than all the other things that are important? You see what I mean? … We go through our whole lives, being moved, and we don’t really contact this force. Just touching into that has so much power…

And when you really tap into this, it’s not the power that makes you just feel extremely anxious, like, “I have got to wake up yesterday!” That’s the ego’s distortion of that beautiful power. That’s the ego sort of turning it into a goal oriented process. But when you really feel it, it’s something very powerful, very deep. More important than anything else in this moment. And really not about achieving your mind’s idea of something. It’s deeper than that. This is what has all the power in it. You contact with that, you don’t really need to know what to do anymore.”