Awakening: Adyashanti Interviewed by Renate McNay

By Conscioustv

Adyashanti is author of several books including, 'Emptiness Dancing' 'Falling Into Grace' and 'The End Of Your World.' In this interview he talks in detail about his years as a Zen meditator; life as a top athlete; his two significant awakenings; the obstacles he discovered in the way, and the nature of illusion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Conscioustv
• Release date: Mar 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9781908664587

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Awakening

Adyashanti

A Conversation with Renate McNay

CONSCIOUS.TV

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All text copyright © Conscious TV Ltd.

First published January 2015

Renate: Hello and welcome to conscious.tv. My name is Renate McNay and my guest today is Adyashanti. Hello Adya.

Adyashanti: Hi.

Renate: Nice to have you here.

Adya: Thank you.

Renate: And we’re going to talk about Adya’s awakening experience, his teaching and his life and Adya has a whole pile of books, which I'm going to show you at the end of the interview. We’ll just start right away. So Adya, when you were seven or eight years old, you had already a very profound realisation and this realisation was that people are suffering because they believe their thoughts.

Adya: Yes.

Renate: How did that impact you at that time?

Adya: Well, it’s strange ‘cause I've told the story many times when I've taught, about being seven or eight and being very confused about the adult dimension – about adults and why they acted the way they did and it just seemed sort of odd and one day I just had the insight and the insight was I get it – they’re crazy, they’re crazy, they believe what they think. And somehow that just kind of came to me and the interesting thing is when I had that insight, I felt a great relief because I didn’t have to think about it anymore, I kind of understood something. It didn’t make me reject anything, or it didn’t cause me any anxiety or anything. I just thought Now I understand. I can let go.

Renate: So what did you understand?

Adya: That they believed their mind.

Renate: And this is…?

Adya: And this was why they were often acting – not just acting but what I saw more was just in human communication, ‘cause I was a real listener my whole life – real listener. There was nothing that went on in our household that I didn’t know, ‘cause I would listen to everything that I could and I would see, in communication, where someone would start to try to manipulate the conversation, or they would start to deflect something, or they would go into avoidance and I could see all this at a very young age. And when they would say something that wasn’t really real and because I could see all this, it’s confusing. You know when adults – these are people who’re supposed to know more and be more wise and more insightful and I could see them that sometimes they were but sometimes they weren’t. It’s confusing, what’s going on there, why did they do that? I was lucky because when I've told this story in public before, I find lots of people have had their own version of this insight very young in their lives and the interesting thing is for most of them that have shared it with me, what it produced in them was great anxiety because

Reviews for Awakening

[Kalyana Rao · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Adyashanti's narration of his experiences is almost unbelievable. Divine Coma , it truly is a great way to describe his experience.