Introduction
Adyashanti is a spiritual teacher who was born in America. His name means primordial peace. He offers online study courses and retreats not only in the United States but also abroad. He was born Stephen Gray in the year 1962 in Cupertino, California. At the ripe age of 19, he became interested in meditation and enlightenment. He took up the spiritual path to search for the ultimate truth. He has been teaching since then. He is also the author of eight books, and many CDs, DVDs. Together with his wife Mukti, he is also the founder of Open Gate Sangha Inc. It is a non-profit organization established in the year 1996. This organization supports and makes available his teachings to all who are interested in them.
Teachings of Adyashanti
Adyashanti holds weekend intensives and evening meetings. He also conducts live internet broadcasts, silent retreats, and online courses. He has taught in countries like the US, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, the UK, Denmark, and Australia.
“People believe that a spiritual teacher must provide answers to life’s bigger questions. Yet, the opposite is true. The main task of any good spiritual teacher is not to give answers to your questions. It is to question your answers. This is because of conscious and unconscious assumptions which are beliefs that tend to distort one’s perception. This leads one to separation and division where there is only unity and completion ” ~ Adyashanti
Adyashanti’s writings elaborate that true meditation has no particular direction or goal. It is pure surrender. It is a silent prayer. All methods that aim to achieve a particular state of mind are limited, impermanent, and also conditioned. He further says that fascination with the states leads to bondage and dependency. He elaborates that true meditation is abidance to primordial awareness.
Adyashanti talks about no longer finding self in identity. He says that many people ask him questions like: “Adya, I am experiencing great fear like I am at the door of some void, and it’s going to swallow me. Somehow I am compelled towards it and terrified of it. This is happening because I am feeling that it’s going to be the end of me.” Adhyashanti says that it is coming across such questions is very common in our search for doing deep work. In this way, he questions the beliefs such as that elaborated above.
Adyashanti says that that
“Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has got nothing to do with becoming better or happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the façade of pretense. It’s the complete elimination of everything we ever imagined to be true.”
Adyashanti is the author of The Way of Liberation, True Meditation, The End of Your World, and Falling into Grace. He is devoted to serving the awakening of all people. His teachings are an invitation for people to stop, inquire, and recognize, in that order, what is true and liberating at the core of all existence.
He was asked to teach by his Zen teacher at the ripe age of 14 years. He offered teachings that were free of any tradition or ideology. He said that “The Truth I point is not to be confined within any religious point of view, belief system, or doctrine, but it is open to be found within all.”
His teachings are directed only towards those who are called upon to awaken their true nature. People who want to embody their life-changing realization. Adyashanti holds the belief that “Everything that disappears when the thinking mind stops is garden variety illusion, not the ultimate truth. Once one gets this it will shock them if they’ve never seen it before-about how much untruth we take to be as true. This is being alone.”
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