' Falling into Grace '...

And there was nothing I could do. Finally, I faced the last thing that I ever wanted to face—I think the last thing anybody ever wants to face—and that is absolute, utter, bone-crushing defeat. This is something quite different than feeling despair or despondence. When we feel despair and despondence, we haven't been completely defeated yet, which means we haven't entirely stopped. Something in us is still struggling against what is.

But in that moment where I realized there was literally nothing I could do, everything changed. All of a sudden, my view of everything shifted. Almost like flipping over a card or a coin, everything that I ever thought or felt, everything that I could remember, everything in that moment literally disappeared. I was finally alone. And in this aloneness, I had no idea what I was, or where I was, or what was happening. All I knew was that I had hit the end of some imaginary road. I'd come to some brick wall and found myself suddenly on the other side of it, where the brick wall actually disappeared. And then this great revela­tion occurred where I realized that I was both nothing and everything, simultaneously.

As soon as that realization came, I started to laugh. I thought, "My God! I've been searching for this for years, meditating for thousands of hours, writing dozens of notebooks—all this searching and all this struggle." It maysound like a short period of time—four years is a relatively short period of time—but when you're in your twenties, four years seems like forever. So in that moment I laughed, because I realized that what I was searching for was always right here, that the enlightenment for which I was seeking was literally the space that I existed in. All along I hadn't ever been far from the end of suffering. It had been an open door from the very beginning, from the first breath that I ever took.


Adyashanti from Falling into Grace
p.168-9