An Interview with Adyashanti

The following interview took place after I attended my first five-day retreat with Adyashanti during which I was introduced to his radical approach to meditation.

Tami Simon: Adya, you were a Zen practitioner for fifteen years, and you compare the meditation practices that you did, sitting in zazen and meditating for long hours, to banging your head against a wall. But what if the Zen meditation that you did actually energetically prepared you for awakening and provided you with the insights that you now teach? Don't you think that's possible?

Adya: It's possible. Anything's possible. However, in my experience, what Zen practice really did for me was provide the avenue through which I eventually failed. It was my avenue for failure. The cushion was the place where I went to spiritual war with myself. I was trying to become enlightened and the cushion was where my own personal willfulness was playing itself out. In that sense, I can look back and say that it was necessary for me to engage in that battle with such intensity so that I could fail at it. I found out once and for all that I wasn't going to win the spiritual battle, and I finally let it go. So in that sense, those years of Zen practice were quite useful. But I think it would be very misleading to say that therefore everybody needs to go that route. I think we all go whatever route we go.

TS: Your Zen teacher was Arvis Justi. I've never heard of her.

Adya: Almost nobody has actually. She trained with quite a number of the early Zen masters who came from Japan to America in the last century, primarily Yasutani Roshi and Maezumi Roshi. And many really excellent teachers were part of this first wave of Zen masters who came to America because Zen in Japan had become very traditional, very institutionalized. People would go to their Zen temple in the way that some people-not all-go to church. You know, 'It's Sunday, let's go to the Zen temple and meditate.' So these early Zen teachers who came to America were looking for fresh blood; they were looking for some very sincere people. And, of course, when we're actually awakened and we're called to teach, that's what we want: to teach people who are really sincere.

At that time, there were almost no Zen temples in America. So something like forty people would pack my teacher's house in Northern California in order to practice. People would sleep on the lawn and all over the place. After a while, my teacher's teacher said to her, 'You don't need me to come up here, you teach this now.' And that was it. There wasn't any kind of traditional dharma ceremony. And my teacher was very clear. She didn't feel she was cut out to be a priest. She was an older woman by this time, she had raised five kids, and she realized that although Zen can take a traditional path, she'd seen that that wasn't necessary and she wasn't drawn to that.

She taught in her house, and she never advertised. In the beginning, she would set up cushions in her living room every Sunday morning and sit, and nobody showed up for a year and a half. And every week she'd put the cushions out and she'd have a talk ready. She would just sit down and nobody would show up. Of course, who's going to show up when you're not advertising? But she just kept at it with this absolute dedication. And after a year and a half, one person showed up. And so she sat with that one person every weekend for a year. And then another person showed up, and so it went. She never sought to be known and she never really even saw herself as a teacher. She was a very unassuming person.

At that time, Zen was starting to become known in America and people like me were attracted to the robes and the temples and the ceremonies and stuff. And here's this little old lady who welcomes you into her house through the back door and she's wearing normal clothes and you go in her living room and you sit down. And from the exterior, it wasn't impressive at all. In fact, I don't think I really understood what she was offering until she suggested that I go to a temple and do a long retreat, the first retreat I ever did. When I came back after that retreat, which was really quite rigorous, I was literally blown away. I thought, 'My God, what's there is here, and even more so. In this little lady's living room and kitchen on Sunday mornings there is as much dharma and maybe more dharma than when I was up at the retreat.' I can't really communicate it, but it was really quite shocking. She was so unassuming that I think the vast majority of people missed it. They missed her, they missed what she was, and they missed what she had to offer.

TS: Even though you teach in your own way based on your discoveries about True Meditation and your writing experiments, do you feel that you are part of a lineage? Do you feel that you are carrying her lineage?

Adya: I do very much, actually. She has such a deep place in my heart, and I feel very much like a part of her lineage.

She told a story about the first time she ever sat down to teach. Of course, nobody showed up. But she sat and continued to sit in her living room every Sunday morning. And somebody once told her, 'Boy, that must have been lonely, that must have been difficult.' And she said, 'It wasn't.' She said, 'Every time I'd sit there I could feel and almost see all the lineage holders before me. I could feel that.' And the first retreat that I ever taught as a teacher, I remember sitting down and having the exact same experience. I felt like I was the tip of the iceberg of this very, very long lineage of beings that had so compassionately done what they could to pass this on. So I do feel very much that I'm part of a lineage. I feel very intimately the transmission that I got from her, not simply the transmission of awakening, but the transmission of her incredible integrity as a human being. It almost feels like it got directly put into me in some energetic way. She just had so much integrity, and of course she had a lot of grace, too. There was no presentation; there was nothing phony about her in any way whatsoever. It took me a lot of years to see that it had slowly seeped into me, an appreciation for that integrity. I don't have a lot of grace like she had, but I can almost feel that there's a place in my body that feels like it's her integrity, that energetically feels like her. Probably more than anything, that's what she gave me.

TS: Do you have any concern that the path that actually took you to where you are is not the path that you're teaching?

Adya: No concern whatsoever. The path I am teaching is very much the path that brought me to where I am. When I lead a retreat, we always spend five or six periods a day in silent sitting. But I discovered that my spirituality really started to take off when I wasn't relying exclusively on meditation practice. Even though I kept meditating, there was a point where there was a fundamental shift and I was no longer relying entirely on the practice. I could see that meditation in and of itself wasn't working for me. I didn't totally reject it, but this other element started to come in, which was inquiry. I started to fundamentally question everything. I started to look at things very deeply, very intently.

And then of course, the awakening part is always spontaneous. There are no ABCs of how to wake up. But when I look back, I saw these two things: stillness and silence, and the ability to be ruthlessly honest with myself, to not fool myself, to not tell myself that I knew something that I didn't, to stay with my line of inquiry. After a while, these two approaches together became my spiritual path. And these two things combined are what I teach.

TS: In that sense, are you teaching a path?

Adya: Sure. A pathless path [laughs]. But yes, you could say it's a path. It's not a path like 'one plus two equals three,' and it's not a path like 'just keep walking and you end up at the top of the mountain.' It's not a path in that sense. It's not a path that particularly has the feeling of progression. It's a way of being with experience. It's a way of being with yourself that actually unhinges the personal self. Whether you know it or not, whether you're conscious of it or not, the path is actually deconstructing you. Silence deconstructs you, but for most people silence isn't enough. Just meditating isn't enough. There's also this more active part of deconstruction, which is direct questioning and inquiry.

TS: In your retreats, you often suggest that people inquire using the question 'What am I?' I've never heard that suggestion before. Most people who teach self-inquiry suggest that students work with the question 'Who am I?'

Adya: 'Who am I?' never worked for me. Even though for some people it works well, for me 'Who am I?' implies an entity. 'What am I?' feels to me like a more open-ended question.

TS: And you don't care if people come to your retreats and slouch during the silent sitting periods? I'm curious about that because it goes against a lot of the training that I've had.

Adya: It goes against a lot of the training that I've had, too.

TS: So why don't you care about that? Don't we want to sit in such a way that we are open and alert and the energetic pathways of the body can flow freely?

Adya: No, actually. [Laughs.] I say that because I've seen many people wake up while slouching. [Laughs.] And I always use what I observe, what my direct experience is. Do you have to be sitting in the lotus position, does your spine have to be straight in order for awakening to occur? No. Simply through observation, simply through watching what actually happens rather than listening to what any tradition has said, it's become clear to me that none of that has to happen for awakening. Is sitting with an erect posture useful for some things? Of course it's useful for some things. It can open up certain pathways, as you mentioned, and there are certain postures that are themselves more open postures. Of course that's true. But what I found through my Zen background was that a lot of people were so intense about correct posture that even though they sat in a very open posture-a lotus posture with the hands in the correct mudra-even though everything was externally right, their internal attitude was actually very tight and very closed. What I've seen is that it is the attitude that is important. If the attitude and the posture are one, then it's working. But so often, when posture is overemphasized, the posture may be right but the attitude is not open. And it is the internal attitude that has all the power. There's a teaching that if you have the right posture, the attitude will follow, and that's just not so. At least not for most people.

TS: Many meditation teachers work with beginning students by teaching some kind of concentration practice. Then, once people are familiar with basic concentration practices, they have the opportunity to loosen up a bit and explore. I believe many meditation teachers begin with concentration training because they are concerned that otherwise students will spend their whole time spinning in thought instead of meditating.

Adya: Probably so.

TS: But you're not afraid that people are sitting around at your retreats lost in thought without having had that training?

Adya: What I've found is that many times people show up at retreats and either they haven't meditated or they have been part of a meditative tradition. Either way, it can take them a while to catch on to what I'm teaching. And of course, when people stop manipulating, a lot of times their mind does go kind of crazy for a period of time. Oftentimes people at retreats will come to me looking for some means to control their thoughts. What I've found is that the more they stick with not manipulating, eventually-which usually doesn't mean years or months-eventually things start to quiet down in a natural way. And, of course, people ask me, 'Can I follow my mantra? Can I follow my breath?' And I say, sure, if you find that helpful go ahead. If that's working for you, go ahead and do it. Just move in the direction of less and less and less and less and less.

What I have found is that although in theory there's usually a concentration practice that you learn that you are later supposed to let go of, most people don't actually ever let go. If you train yourself in manipulating your experience for ten years, it's really a deep-seated groove in your consciousness. Letting go of that can really be quite difficult. In theory that's how it's supposed to work, but oftentimes that's not what actually happens.

I think sometimes people have a fear, and maybe even certain teachers have a fear-although I don't know this for sure-that if you really let people's minds go crazy for a while and if people really allow themselves not to manipulate their experience, that maybe their minds will never stop. Or maybe they'll get lost somewhere. But I've truly found over and over and over again that the natural state starts to come around. The Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi said that the best way to control a cow is to give it a very, very big field. Don't put the fences too close together. And in a sense, I think that's what I'm doing. Create a really big field and eventually the mind won't try to bust out. Again, it's a different process from what people are used to, but again and again, I find that people come to retreats and in a day or two or three or sometimes four, a sort of natural process of relaxation and stillness starts to happen.

TS: Aren't you concerned that instead of meditating, people might just be spinning and spacing out?

Adya: I'm not concerned. I guess I'm different from a lot of teachers in this way. I don't see myself in any way as anybody's schoolteacher or parent. I'm here to talk to people who are actually really sincere about awakening. If they don't have that sincerity already, then they are with the wrong guy. Because I'm not going to give sincerity to them, and I'm not going to invest much energy into trying to get them to pretend like they are sincere. I know that, in a lot of traditions, teachers try to make their students be sincere. And I'm not saying that's wrong in any way, but that just doesn't happen for me. My attitude is, if you are sincere, then your sincerity is going to be a really powerful force in your life. And if you're not sincere, all the posture and all the this and that are not really going to have much effect. So if you want to sit in a lawn chair and stare at the clouds all day long, that's your thing. You see what I mean? If that's what you want to do, then that's what you'll do. If you ask me, I won't pretend that it's sincere and I won't pretend that it's leading to awakening. But I'm not in the business of trying to change what people want. I'm here, and if you really want truth, then we have something to talk about. The sincerity is totally up to you. It's not up to me; it's up to you. You are going to sink or swim with this stuff from your own sincerity. If you have it, good. And if you don't have it, I'm not going to rescue you. In that sense, I'm really out of the babysitting business.

TS: What would you say to someone who partially feels sincere in their quest for truth but partially feels insincere?

Adya: I think most people actually do feel that way when they get right down to it. They have that sense of division. Usually what I suggest is that they look inside themselves, and make a really deep inquiry, an open-ended inquiry, into what they really, really want. I tell them to make no assumptions about what they want. And I often say, don't make it about what you think you should want. Or what a teaching said you should want. Really look at what you really, really, really want.

This type of inquiry can only happen if there are no shoulds, if there are no preconceived ideas about what you should want. This is what I mean by integrity: the willingness to really find out for yourself. And what I've discovered is that if someone really looks and sticks with this investigation, looking into what they really, really want, it can bring them much more to a unified place. It naturally brings them there. And to me, this is much better than trying to get to a unified place through discipline. Because people hear that kind of teaching-you must want awakening more than you want anything else-and it's true, but you can't pretend your way there, you can't fake your way there. Because you can't fool your own emotional radar. And I think that a lot of people are actually doing that-they hear the teachings and then they pretend that they are in a place that they're not.

I go about teaching in a totally different way. Because I know that if people can look deep inside themselves, they are going to find that they really do want the real truth. I know that if they look inside deeply enough, that's what they'll find. Because that's the ground of their being. It's also the core of their ego. Even the ego, in its deepest place, wants the truth.

TS: What do you mean by that-the core of the ego wants the truth? I thought my ego wanted things like fame, power, money, domination.

Adya: It does. It also wants all that, but all that is actually rather surface. Those are surface wants, surface desires. Of course, egos want all that stuff. Of course they want that, but if you go deep enough into the egoic self, deep into its core, you actually meet the truth, you meet the divine. The spark of it is right in the core of the ego.

That's why a lot of the time what I do is give the ego lots of room. People will say to me, 'I don't think I want the truth, I want to do this or have that.' And I say, 'Go for it, do it.' And it's amazing what happens as soon as you tell somebody, 'You can do what you want, you can want what you want, go ahead, I don't care, God doesn't care, nothing thinks you're wrong, nothing in all of the universe except a thought thinks you're wrong for wanting what you want. Now go ahead.' It's amazing how sometimes when you give someone total permission, how something deeper comes out. All of a sudden they drop into, 'Now that I actually feel that I can want anything I want, I guess I don't really want what I thought I wanted. Now that I have permission, now that it is okay with the universe and God and guru and the divine and everything, I'm not really sure that that's even what I truly want.' Because a lot of these surface egoic wants are very much held in place by a sense that these wants are not okay. It's very adolescent. Adolescents want to dye their hair orange as long as it freaks out mom and dad. But if mom and dad are totally okay with orange hair, they're not going to dye their hair orange anymore, are they? There's no mystique to it, there's no allure. But before they find out that it's okay, it's just about the most important thing in the world.

I understand that my approach is completely backward from the way spirituality is often taught. My approach is to help people really connect with their own integrity, because it's only when people are in touch with their own integrity that real spiritual discoveries can be made. People can't get there if they are stuck in shoulds or shouldn'ts.

TS: Sometimes when I hear people talk about how their true nature is awareness itself, it can sound to me like empty rhetoric that is really a type of spiritual bypassing. I can tell that this person is seething with rage or a nervous wreck and yet they know what inquiry is supposed to lead to and they mouth the words.

Adya: That's one of the reasons I have people meditate. I think of it as truth time. If you sit quietly for a period of time, sooner or later your denial starts to break down because it just gets too painful to sit there and lie to yourself about what's happening. During our retreats, sooner or later people will come up and start talking about this fear that they've always had or this unresolved issue they've never looked at or the fact that they are still in a rage about something that happened twenty years ago. Just sitting in silence is enough. It starts to break people down after a while. And that's one of the reasons I teach inquiry and meditation. If people think they've woken up to their true nature yet they can't sit still without going crazy, then they aren't half as awake as they think they are. Meditation is like an oven that forces the truth out.

I often tell people that I'm not having them meditate just so they can become good at meditation. When you meditate and you're not manipulating-which is of course new to a lot of meditators-then quite naturally there is this kind of unloading and the truth itself can spontaneously arise. And often what is unloaded is a lot of repressed material that people have been using their spirituality to suppress. When you just sit and you're not manipulating then you actually start to see the things you need to see and experience the things you need to experience. Old experiences may arise that have been waiting there for thirty years just to be experienced, not to be figured out necessarily, or analyzed, but just to be experienced without going unconscious. And what I've found over time is that as this natural unloading happens, people then have the energy they need to go deeper.

TS: I've heard you say that you don't believe that awakening-defined as a fundamental shift of identity out of the personality and into awareness itself-is actually that rare. And that in fact this belief that awakening is rare is actually an obstacle to awakening. You don't think that awakening is rare?

Adya: No.

TS: Why is this belief an obstacle?

Adya: Because almost all of us feel like we're not the chosen ones. Most of us feel pretty ordinary when you get right down to it. If you have this unconscious or conscious belief that awakening is only for very extraordinary people, that totally contradicts our sense of ourselves. This idea may be the most powerful impediment to awakening. Our examples of awakening feed this. We have images of the awake being, and they are halo-enshrouded, with long hair, flowing gowns, and if they're doing anything in life they are always teaching, they always have disciples, they always have people following at their feet. These images are out there, and yet it's simply not so. It's very hard for our minds to get that enlightenment can look like your grandmother or your grocer. It doesn't need to look in any way extraordinary. Some enlightened beings are very charismatic. But you know what? Some unenlightened beings are very charismatic. But these images really get in the way. Awakening isn't about becoming extraordinary. If anything, it's about becoming ordinary. It's about becoming who we really, really are.

TS: I think one of the reasons some people believe that awakening is rare is because they have been practicing meditation for twenty or thirty years and they haven't made the kind of breakthrough discoveries that you describe for yourself, and so there is a certain grumpiness or cynicism and a belief that enlightenment must be only for the rare few. Otherwise, they'd have to believe that there was something wrong with them or that they were a failure in some way.

Adya: That's one place their mind could go.

TS: Or that the path that they're following isn't working.

Adya: Ah! That's a much more threatening idea. Of course that's what I think contributed to my own awakening. I didn't blame it on the path but on my relationship with the path. That's why I encourage people to shake it up, shake it loose, let yourself question, open it up a bit. Don't be afraid to question. Look at yourself and see what hasn't worked. And have the courage to change, to move on if something's not working. Look with innocent eyes, very innocent, very open. That innocence is always there. It's a sense of wonder.