My spirituality journal

Life after awakening

The following text doesn't belong to me. It's a paragraph from "The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment." by Adyashanti Adyashanti

I hope you'll find it as useful as it is for me.

More and more people are waking up spiritually. And for many of them, the question becomes: Now what? "Information about life after awakening is usually not made public," explains Adya. "It's most often shared only between teachers and their students." The End of Your World is his response to a growing need for direction on the spiritual path. Consider this Adya's personal welcome to "a new world."

Here is the excerpt, entitled "Exploring Life After Awakening."

There's a phenomenon happening in the world today. More and more people are waking up-having real, authentic glimpses of reality. By this I mean that people seem to be having moments where they awaken out of their familiar senses of self, and out of their familiar senses of what the world is, into a much greater reality-into some- thing far beyond anything they knew existed.

These experiences of awakening differ from person to person. For some, the awakening is sustained over time, while for others the glimpse is momentary-it may last just a split second. But in that instant, the whole sense of "self " disap- pears. The way they perceive the world suddenly changes, and they find themselves without any sense of separation between themselves and the rest of the world. It can be likened to the experience of waking up from a dream-a dream you didn't even know you were in until you were jolted out of it.

In the beginning of my teaching work, most of the people who came to me were seeking these deeper realizations of spirituality. They were seeking to wake up from the limiting and isolated senses of self they had imagined themselves to be. It's this yearning that underpins all spiritual seeking: to discover for ourselves what we already intuit to be true- that there is more to life than we are currently perceiving.

But as time has passed, more and more people are coming to me who have already had glimpses of this greater reality. It is because of them that I am giving the teachings in this book.