Adyashanti – Experiencing No-Self – Study Course
“The falling away of self is the most significant, bewildering, and liberating spiritual event in one’s entire life, and perhaps the least understood.”
—Adyashanti
The no-self perspective opens the doorway to true freedom and liberation. In Experiencing No-Self study course, Adyashanti will guide you through the sometimes precarious territory of no-self as he sheds light on the falling away of self and the perspective that the no-self experience reveals. He uncovers the delusions and cul-de-sacs sometimes afflicting those experiencing the falling away of self and offers insight and guidance about:
- Understanding exactly what the experience of no-self is.
- How no-self fits in within the overall arc of awakening.
- Reorienting to this new and liberating perspective.
- Spiritual autonomy and the no-self perspective.
- Losing your inner world.
- Getting stuck in the no-self experience.
- Limitations of the no-self perspective.
- Living and relating from no-self.
What You’ll Learn In Experiencing No-Self
THEMES OF EXPLORATION:
SESSION 1
Topics: Philosophy vs. Direct Experience / Transcending Self vs. No-Self / Ego and No-Self / The Experience of No-Self / The Physical Component to the No-Self Experience / The Way God Speaks to You / Can No-Self Be Non-Abiding?
Quotes:
“Any moment of transcendence is a mortal blow to the ego. It begins the ego’s demise.”
“You see that what you thought defined you is not actually what you are, but is something that exists within you.”
“Life beyond ego becomes something that’s very simple. It matures into a kind of ordinariness because it’s simply the way things are.”
“Ego is essentially a kind of friction. Self is that which looks at ego. Self is the act of consciousness reflecting within”
“Wherever we are in our own unfolding is perfectly adequate. Our own intuition of what we’re called to is Reality speaking to us individually and perfectly. We have to listen to how the Infinite talks to us and leads us. Reality, life, the Infinite, God, has a way of leading us in just the perfect way, if we will only just listen to it.”
“What’s important is the capacity to listen, to be quiet, and to be patient so we can intuit the way that God or life wants to reveal itself to you.”
“You have to be really honest with yourself.”
SESSION 2
Topics: Concepts of Self and Ego / Shifting from Ego to Self / The Highest Form of Self / The Continuum of Self to No-Self / Loss of Will and Motivation / Life Living Itself / Letting Go Completely / Coming Back to Free Illusion / Trusting Your Inner Knowing / A Predictable Trajectory / Cultivating Unrestricted Truth
Quotes:
“When you’re in self, you’re experiencing life through the beautiful medium of self, or whatever is left of self. When self falls away, there’s nothing between. There’s just the Infinite experiencing itself from within itself. It’s no longer you experiencing God; it’s God experiencing God.”
“When we come into the most profound and liberating sense of self, we think that is the highest reality. We think we’re experiencing something transcendent of self. We don’t recognize that what we’re experiencing is actually self. . . . When self is fully expanded, it doesn’t feel isolated, separate, or different. This experience is commonly mistaken for the falling away of self.
“There’s a dying-out process from self-centered will to boundless loving will.”
“Do we want the truth for the sake of truth, or do we want the truth for a payoff? Do we want truth for its own sake, no matter what it is?”
“When we’re in any degree of self, we want that wonderful divine experience to some extent.”
“The holy states belong to the highest dimensions of self. The Infinite never conceives of anything separate from itself. Even the idea of no separation doesn’t occur.”
“The paradox is that no-self is the fundamental reality of what we are.”
SESSION 3
Topics: The Expression of Life Beyond Self / Becoming What We Eternally Are / Seeing Through the Heart of Grace / The Ground of Being Will Find Its Way / Relating with Divine Wisdom & Love / Relationship with Children / Opening of the Spiritual Heart / The Pain of Disconnection
Quotes: “In the relinquishing of self, you do not receive grace; all experiences of giving or receiving are based in ego or self. Instead we see from the eyes of grace, from the heart of grace.”
“In the being of this love, we can have no image of what it’s going to look like — not a saintly person or even a holy person. To go beyond self is to go beyond all that, as beautiful and noble as it may be.” • “The dimension beyond self moves from something prior to causes and reasons.”
“Life does move in the absence of motivation.”
“It helps when there’s a deep trust that that which is beyond all self will find its way through your human expression. There is something inside that you can trust, even though you can’t make it happen.”
“It’s not unusual in the state of no-self that there are still things that need to be seen through, so that divine love can embody itself through this humanity.”
“When it comes to human relating from the divine ground, one of the most important things to realize is that even when someone has a deep grounding in no-self, it does not mean that they know how to relate to other people very well.”
“When the self falls away, we become more and more simple. The more simple we become, the more wisdom we embody and the more love we live.”
“In the modern age, the concept of God as ‘other’ is breaking down. What we’ve lost with that is that sense of something beyond our self”
“Your letting go is not just a personal thing; it’s an act of love. It becomes a gift to the people and the world around you, because it increases your capacity to love truly selflessly and intimately.”
SESSION 4
Topics: Grounding the Teachings in Silence / Existential Aloneness / Dying Into the Great Silence / Transcendence vs. Falling Away / The Unconditioned Mind / Life from Life’s Point of View / Seeing Through the Eyes of Eternity / Love That is Not Based on Feeling / Absolute Intimacy / Abide in the Deepest Thing You Know / Unconditioned Mind: Be It
Quotes: “If we start thinking we’re higher or better than most people, we’re simply operating at an egoic level of delusion. It’s the falling away of seeing yourself as inferior or superior.”
“We must want the actual Truth more than we want the Truth that we imagine.”
“Love can start to undergo a transformation where the experience of it goes from being emotionally based to love that is not based in feeling and emotion. It’s not defined by experience at all.”
“When self falls away, freedom falls away with it. There’s no sense of freedom; freedom doesn’t make sense anymore.”
“With no-self, you’re going beyond the medium that experiences things through experience. It’s not defined by feeling states, but neither is it unfeeling.”
“If the self fundamentally drops away, ego drops away, too. But you can have ego fall away and still have self.”
“You really can’t suffer unless you pick up the conditioned mind.”
About Adyashanti
Adyashanti meaning “primordial peace” is an American spiritual teacher and author from the San Francisco Bay Area who offers talks, online study courses, and retreats in the United States and abroad. Adyashanti is the author of numerous books, CDs and DVDs and, together with his wife Mukti, is the founder of Open Gate Sangha, Inc., a nonprofit organization established in 1996 which supports and makes available his teachings.
In his 20s, Adyashanti studied Zen Buddhism under the guidance of Arvis Joen Justi for fourteen years. Justi was a student of Taizan Maezumi Roshi of the Zen Center of Los Angeles. Adyashanti also studied with Jakusho Kwong Roshi of the Sonoma Mountain Zen Center. At age 25, Adyashanti began experiencing a series of transformative spiritual awakenings. While sitting alone on his cushion, Adyashanti describes how he had a classic kensho, or awakening experience, in which he “penetrated to the emptiness of all things and realized that the Buddha I had been chasing was what I was.” Besides his meditations and prayer, he also studied books about Christian mystics and the Gospels.
For the next few years he continued his meditation practice, while also working at his father’s machine shop. In addition to sitting, he spent many hours in coffee shops writing answers to questions that spontaneously came to him. Finally, at 31, Adyashanti had an experience of awakening that put to rest all his questions and doubts. In 1996, began teaching with the approval of his teacher, Arvis Joen Justi. He first started giving talks to small gatherings, in a room above his aunt’s garage, which grew over years and he changed his name to “Adyashanti,” a Sanskrit term for “primordial peace.
” Adyashanti’s talks focus on awakening and embodying awakening. “The Truth I point to is not confined within any religious point of view, belief system, or doctrine, but is open to all and found within all.” He has authored the following books: “The Direct Way,” “Sacred Inquiry,” “The Most Important Thing,” “Resurrecting Jesus,” “Falling into Grace,” “The Impact of Awakening,” “The End of Your World,” “Emptiness Dancing,” “True Meditation,” “My Secret Is Silence,” and “The Way of Liberation.” Adyashanti’s foundational teachings can be found in the book “The Way of Liberation.”
In April 2014, Adyashanti appeared in an interview with Oprah Winfrey on a Super Soul Sunday episode.
Presently, Adyashanti lives in the Eastern Sierras, with his wife Mukti.
