Reflections on the Suffering of Characters
COMPLETE FAILURE
Q: I want what you wanted.
Adya: What did I want?
Q: You wanted to become enlightened.
Adya: I wanted to become enlightened. Ok. It didn’t work out.
Q: Did you at least become awake?
Adya: No. Awakeness became awake. Enlightenment becomes enlightened. The me, the little guy, little Steven Larry Gray, that meditated in his parent’s backyard for hours and hours a day, every single day, in the morning and the evening, and did nothing but do the good Buddhist thing, diligently, terribly, terribly disciplined, he didn’t get enlightened. He never made it. He never crossed the river of nirvana, it never happened to him.
What he did was, for whatever reason, maybe the seeking was necessary, is he got exhausted. It just completely exhausted itself. The little one that was trying to get awake and enlightened got so exhausted, so stricken by I can’t do this, I can’t, and I could no longer tell myself I can. That means the complete and utter destruction of denial. Because the denial is “I can.” And your experience keeps showing you “you can’t.”
And so I got so exhausted psychically, internally, emotionally, spiritually that I couldn’t keep it up anymore. And I had to see the truth. I was willing to see the truth only because I was exhausted. I can’t do it. And in that “I can’t do it,” and not as a spiritual strategy, emptiness woke up out of the seeker. The seeker didn’t wake up. Consciousness woke up from the seeker, from the personality, from the “me” that was trying so hard.
~Adyashanti
from “Big Sword Swinging”
THE VISE OF SUFFERING
After my hearing in 2006, I saw that I simply could not live under those conditions. What would be the point? Where was there any happiness to be found, or goodness to see and experience?
And then I saw that I could not not live under those conditions. Due to my love for Betsy, suicide was not an option. The only acceptable choice was to somehow allow the character to continue functioning as the living dead, a tragic story in want of an interested character. I, whatever “I” meant, was outathere.
Thus to my dismay, I could not surrender up the body on that day. But I certainly surrendered up the character who had heretofore been associated with it.
Knowing “I can’t, and yet I can’t not,” this is the Vise of Suffering. I’d had that very same experience prior to surrendering to addiction: abject failure. We succeed only by failing and accepting that we have failed.
The abandoned fred character now, more than ever before, desperately wanted to wake up to the Truth of God. The following day, the Truth of God mercifully woke up to the fiction of fred instead.
A reflection cannot view a mirror,
nor can moonlight shine upon the sun.
Shadows question the existence of Form,
without which there is no shadow.
~Fred Davis
