Quote of the Day: The Most Important Thing by Adyashanti
Our inner lives are every bit as astonishing, baffling, and mysterious as the infinite vastness of the cosmos. For we are each individual expressions of conscious being, and we contain the vastness of the cosmos within us, as much as we are contained within it. To look within and answer the ancient call to know thyself is perhaps the greatest and strangest adventure of all. It is the key to awakening to the truth of our being and living the most evolved lives that we can individually and collectively imagine.
For as long as I can remember, I have been interested in people who do things well. These people tend to have an ability to define what is most important, to know it within their being, and to rally their resources toward it. If you think about it, anybody who achieves unusual excellence—you could throw Warren Buffett, Miles Davis, Michelangelo, or the Buddha and Jesus and other spiritual figures in there—has a sense of direction and a genuine feeling for the most important thing in their life.
That is fine, because to copy what somebody else did is one of the mistakes we make. We should not say, “If the Buddha left everything behind, I need to leave everything behind.” What is more important than the renunciation is the Buddha’s focus, the sense that he found his most important thing. His act of leaving everything to pursue his question is unimportant; it is his response to the question that matters. For Jesus, I would say it was to put God first in all things—that was his most important thing.
When I ask people, “What is your spiritual life all about?” you would be surprised by how few have taken the time or imposed the mental discipline to define it. They read book after book, work with teacher after teacher, and even do years of meditation or other spiritual practice, yet they are chasing something that somebody else defined for them, thinking, That sounds pretty good. I’ll go for that. But they are not discovering the unique orientation that belongs only to them and their life. Nobody can give this to them.
I am a big lover of asking profound and deep questions. I call this “inquiry.” Questioning is not safe; answers are safe. Accepting someone else’s answers is safe, an ideology is safe, and a theology is safe. We seek the “right” answers because we think they will make us comfortable, protect us, and insulate us from suffering. We grasp at the first thing that makes us feel better, but truth may or may not make you feel better—some truths are beautiful, and some are shocking. However, a great vitality comes with discovering any truth, because that which is real is charged with life-force, energy, and power.
The cost of not asking insightful questions is that we tend to live on automatic pilot and solely from our conditioning, most of which was imprinted in us by our culture and society, our family and friends, the education we have had, and the consensus reality that most everybody falls into without even knowing it.
Anybody who is involved in any kind of excellence or profound achievement tends to question consensus reality, especially spiritual people like the Buddha or Jesus or so many others. They do not settle for a comforting belief system, and they do not comply because the authorities have suggested that is the way the world works or that is what is true; they explore these issues within themselves.
The great mythologist Joseph Campbell paraphrased Carl Jung, saying that religion is here to protect us from the truly religious experience. How does it do ” “that? By telling us the way everything is within an ideology of theology or a belief system. We respond, “Okay, that sounds good to me, I’ll buy into it, that is the way things are,” but doing that disconnects us from true revelation, because the place where revelation occurs within us is in the unknown.
Dogma fills the unknown within us with the known; religion fills us all up, and we walk around with a new ideology, which precludes having meaningful religious or spiritual experiences. This does not mean that religious people do not have religious or spiritual experiences. They do, but they have them despite their beliefs, not because of them. Although they may have a belief system, they continue to reach beyond dogma and beyond mere ideas.
It does not matter what the belief is—theistic, nontheistic, dualistic, nondualistic. It is our answers that blind us, that we hide behind, and that we use to protect ourselves from the great insecurity of facing our confusion and our doubt and plunging into our consciousness in a profound way.
Even if we know not to accept the answers we are given, the questions we ask can also be conditioned. Sometimes the questions that are useful are the ones that are dangerous—the ones that feel like they threaten your consensus reality. The right kinds of questions will shake up your world view. When you ask those kinds of questions, you will begin to find that the ways you have defined yourself limited you and that they are not who and what you are. This kind of questioning is big questioning.”
For as long as I can remember, I have been interested in people who do things well. These people tend to have an ability to define what is most important, to know it within their being, and to rally their resources toward it. If you think about it, anybody who achieves unusual excellence—you could throw Warren Buffett, Miles Davis, Michelangelo, or the Buddha and Jesus and other spiritual figures in there—has a sense of direction and a genuine feeling for the most important thing in their life.
That is fine, because to copy what somebody else did is one of the mistakes we make. We should not say, “If the Buddha left everything behind, I need to leave everything behind.” What is more important than the renunciation is the Buddha’s focus, the sense that he found his most important thing. His act of leaving everything to pursue his question is unimportant; it is his response to the question that matters. For Jesus, I would say it was to put God first in all things—that was his most important thing.
When I ask people, “What is your spiritual life all about?” you would be surprised by how few have taken the time or imposed the mental discipline to define it. They read book after book, work with teacher after teacher, and even do years of meditation or other spiritual practice, yet they are chasing something that somebody else defined for them, thinking, That sounds pretty good. I’ll go for that. But they are not discovering the unique orientation that belongs only to them and their life. Nobody can give this to them.
I am a big lover of asking profound and deep questions. I call this “inquiry.” Questioning is not safe; answers are safe. Accepting someone else’s answers is safe, an ideology is safe, and a theology is safe. We seek the “right” answers because we think they will make us comfortable, protect us, and insulate us from suffering. We grasp at the first thing that makes us feel better, but truth may or may not make you feel better—some truths are beautiful, and some are shocking. However, a great vitality comes with discovering any truth, because that which is real is charged with life-force, energy, and power.
The cost of not asking insightful questions is that we tend to live on automatic pilot and solely from our conditioning, most of which was imprinted in us by our culture and society, our family and friends, the education we have had, and the consensus reality that most everybody falls into without even knowing it.
Anybody who is involved in any kind of excellence or profound achievement tends to question consensus reality, especially spiritual people like the Buddha or Jesus or so many others. They do not settle for a comforting belief system, and they do not comply because the authorities have suggested that is the way the world works or that is what is true; they explore these issues within themselves.
The great mythologist Joseph Campbell paraphrased Carl Jung, saying that religion is here to protect us from the truly religious experience. How does it do ” “that? By telling us the way everything is within an ideology of theology or a belief system. We respond, “Okay, that sounds good to me, I’ll buy into it, that is the way things are,” but doing that disconnects us from true revelation, because the place where revelation occurs within us is in the unknown.
Dogma fills the unknown within us with the known; religion fills us all up, and we walk around with a new ideology, which precludes having meaningful religious or spiritual experiences. This does not mean that religious people do not have religious or spiritual experiences. They do, but they have them despite their beliefs, not because of them. Although they may have a belief system, they continue to reach beyond dogma and beyond mere ideas.
It does not matter what the belief is—theistic, nontheistic, dualistic, nondualistic. It is our answers that blind us, that we hide behind, and that we use to protect ourselves from the great insecurity of facing our confusion and our doubt and plunging into our consciousness in a profound way.
Even if we know not to accept the answers we are given, the questions we ask can also be conditioned. Sometimes the questions that are useful are the ones that are dangerous—the ones that feel like they threaten your consensus reality. The right kinds of questions will shake up your world view. When you ask those kinds of questions, you will begin to find that the ways you have defined yourself limited you and that they are not who and what you are. This kind of questioning is big questioning.”
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