Customer Reviews

The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

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Feeling kind of alone with my experiences on the awakening path, Adyashanti is a great understanding company for me and i only can recommend his Audio CD's, describing all traps i could fall into.
I read Tolle, Balsekar, Ramana, Nisargadatta etc., all helped and Adya definitely helped me further through his language.

In his usual intelligent and no nonsense manner, Adyashanti warns the spiritual seeker that they just might find what they are looking for! This is straight talk about the nature of enlightenment and outlines the pitfalls of the spiritual awakening process.

With penetrating insight, Adya navigates beyond the common traps which include the sense of meaningless, the ego's attempt to co-opt spiritual awakening for its own purposes, the sense of superiority that may accompany profound breakthroughs, and grasping the intoxicating bliss.

This is an honest investigation into the truth of who you really are and offers direction in how to live this truth once it has been discovered. In addition, the six cd set also offers teaching stories and an interview with Adyashanti.

He frankly shares that awakening does not offer a "new version of you," but rather no version at all. The wisdom of this collection points to the profound spiritual realization that lies beyond "you and your thoughts," "you and your emotion" and "you and your personal will."

Katie Davis, Author, "Awake Joy"

First, I want to acknowledge Tami Simon for the outstanding service she has provided spiritual seekers for over two decades through her amazing company, Sounds True. Tami had the wisdom-eye to spot Adyashanti's spiritual genius relatively early on in his teaching career and has made his teachings available to the general public through Sounds True.

This book (or cd), "The End of Your World," is once again a creation of Tami's wisdom/compassion. She saw the vital need for clear spiritual guidance not only into awakening, but through it and beyond. She asked Adya to respond to this need and the result is this essential book.

The great awakening traditions have their own ways of dealing with life after awakening. Unfortunately, their methods too often require the assumption of cultural affectations and reprogramming into a particular stance or relationship with reality. How is it that someone who claims to have awakened continues to identify with being a yogi, sufi, zen buddhist, taoist or christian- all human created over-lays of reality? Our spiritual/religious identity is part of what is awakened out of. Hence, the end of your world. You don't even get to keep your spiritual delusional system, as nice as it may be!

Adya points to total freedom from self and its multitude of identities, including the spiritual ones. No abidance anywhere.

This is an essential guide book for anyone experiencing true awakening. It isn't a program or even a map, just a gentle reminder that everything that happens is only an expression of absolute freedom. So relax. What's the worst that can happen? The end of your world.

Adyashanti helped me better understand why the life-changing effects of a spiritual awakening in my early 30s eroded over time. He calls it the I got it/ I lost it phenomenon. Had "The End of Your World" been available years earlier I may have avoided many of the pit-falls that un-enlightened me. The trap of meaninglessness, how the ego can "co-opt" realization for it own purposes, becoming drunk on "emptiness" and the illusion of superiority.
Because I've experienced increased energy and memory lapses it's reassuring to learn that physical and energetic phenomena often accompany awakening. Adyashanti says it's common to experience a new influx of energy as the egoic structure dissolves and to have memory lapses as our consciousness releases the mind. I, fortunately, did not experience the other symptoms of insomnia, heart palpitations and body movements. He says these normal transformational energies "re-wire" the mind and lead to a clearer and deeper perception of reality.
Adyashanti says real awakening happens when the seeker and the seeking has dissolved. When we're no longer fueled by "what do I want" and "what don't I want." The hallmark of a true awakening is the end of seeking. There's no longer a need to seek love, approval, success, money or even enlightenment. We realize the entire structure of a personal worldview and a personal self is nothing but a dream in universal mind. True enlightenment is the experience of Spirit completely unhindered, uncorrupted by illusion, conditioning or contradiction.
Adyashanti says, "Full awakening comes when you sincerely look at yourself, deeper than you've ever imagined, and question everything...Enlightenment has nothing to do with what you add unto yourself or whether you're more or less happy. Enlightenment is, in the best sense of things, a destructive process: it's the crumbling away of untruth." It's asking, "What do I know for certain?" and being open and sincere about what we find.
"The End of Your World" is an in-depth guide to spiritual awakening. With great clarity, wisdom and insight Adyashanti gives straight talk on the journey to Enlightenment.

This book is my first exposure to Adyashanti, reviewing it as a service to the Amazon.com Vine community. Having a deep knowledge of Zen, Dzogchen, and Advaita from teachers like Ramana Maharshi, Papaji, Sosan, and Norbu, I would have never picked up this book. This book is clearly written for a beginner spiritual audience who wants to talk a lot about enlightenment to judge if they can place the "enlightened" nametag on themselves.

In "The End of Your World" Adyashanti takes the reader on a journey of what happens to a person when they are "enlightened". He tells the audience what to look for and what to expect, relaying his own stories and personal experience. Clearly this type of approach is only reinforcing the identification of a person with events and isolated experiences, effectively moving the reader's consciousness away from any direct experience of Consciousness back into the analytical self-reflecting mind.

If a person were to compare this book with a book by a spiritual teacher such as Ramana Maharshi or Papaji, we would clearly see the difference. While Ramana Maharshi and Papaji take the reader back into the direct experience of Consciousness with every sentence, Adyashanti takes the reader in the opposite direction - further into the egoic mind.

So if you want to call yourself "enlightened" but aren't sure if this new nametag fits, you may want to read this book by Adyasanti. However if you only want deep abiding inner peace and stillness, I recommend reading a teacher like Ramana Maharshi.

To close my review, in the beginning of chapter 2, Adyasanti states that enlightenment does not have an experience of love or bliss. That divine ecstacy is only a salespitch.

Experiencing "enlightenment" without love is only a tiny glimmer of the enlightened state. This "loveless enlightenment" is commonly expressed by teachers when the ego remains and the Spiritual Heart is unawakened.

So when a teacher advertises himself as an Advaita teacher and teaches that bliss is not part of enlightenment, a red flag is raised. To quote the most well-known Advaita teacher of our time, Ramana Maharshi:

"If it is the real bliss of the Self that is experienced, that is, if the mind has really merged in the Self, such a doubt will not arise at all. The question itself shows real bliss was not reached. All doubts will cease only when the doubter and his source have been found. Bliss is a thing which is always there and is not something which comes and goes. That which comes and goes is a creation of the mind and you should not worry about it."

On a similar note, I studied the Zen Buddhist tradition for many years before I first heard a Zen teacher use the term "love" when describing the state of enlightenment. I was shocked when I first heard this word spoken in this context. Zen teachings always appeared dry and devoid of energy.

I was at a Zen retreat when I was honored to meet a 97-year old Zen roshi. Of the handful of reputed spiritual teachers that I have been able to sit with or speak to, this man had the most remarkable stillness. His energy field was completely still, yet radiant - not even a shutter of movement in his energy. To this day, I have never seen another person who was so still within.

As this 97-year old Zen roshi spoke to us, he described the state of enlightenment as the meeting point of Tathaga and Tathagata, that singular moment when perfect stillness is reached as the duality becomes One. He called this state "True Love". This description was shockingly new to me, a radical departure from the ancient words of Zen and Chan teachers. Yet my direct experience of this roshi - his stillness, depth, and radiance - confirmed that he had experienced this state deeper than anyone I had met before (or to this day).

There are a handful of other incomplete understandings that Adyasanti shares in this book. I will not go into these because by now I think any sincere reader can understand the essence of my review of this book.

I have always told others to read only the words spoken directly from the master teachers. Avoid re-interpretations and summaries. If you want enlightenment, find a teacher who will give you the way, not one who will talk about what to look for along it.

When a student gets to a point in his/her spiritual practice, the realization occurs where talking about enlightenment is useless and even ridiculous. Only the direct experience of inner stillness and lucid clarity is the way and the goal, both occuring in this immediate moment.

Words are for the mind. Silence is for the Heart.

Namaste.

I have listened to and read a great many spiritual teachers. A very few living teachers stand out as Great Vessels: Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, Ramesh Balsekar and Adyashanti are four who come to mind immediately.

This series, which I am listening to for the second time, is the best thing I've heard in five years. Without being coy with the wording, let me say that if you've had an awakening experience you owe it to yourself to listen to this series. It's so beautifully informative and helpful. I am blown away by the depth of Adyashanti's enlightenment, by his integrity and by his clarity as a teacher. He is a wonder and a gift.

Adya, I am deeply grateful. Thank you so much.


Peace to you,

Fred

"I do not present my teachings as statements of truth," writes Adyashanti in the first chapter of The End of Your World, "because trying to put the truth into words is a fool's game."

I wholly agree; the ineffable defies prosaic expression. Rather than play the fool's game of trying to put "the truth" into words, Adyashanti uses words as "pointers" in the sense of the Zen saying, "Don't mistake the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself."

His pointers are fresh, clear, and non-dogmatic, and I can understand why Jack Kornfield, who has been one of my favorite spiritual teachers for decades, lent his name to the book in an endorsement that appears on the back cover.

The End of Your World is written for those who have had "real, authentic glimpses of reality." I think it would be most helpful for those who have had just such a glimpse or what Adyashanti also refers to as "nonabiding awakening," which he contrasts with "abiding awakening," and who want pointers on "life after awakening."

Adyashanti discusses many "common delusions, traps, and points of fixation" that many who walk a spiritual path encounter; the "'I got it, I lost it' phenomenon"; "being stuck in emptiness," which is a form of "being stuck in the transcendent"; being "drunk on emptiness," which is having a sense of superiority or inflation after an awakening, a "sense of looking down our noses at anybody we think is not awake"; getting caught in a negative sense of meaninglessness; etc.

The final chapter of The End of Your World is an interview of Adyashanti by Tami Simon, founder and president of Sounds True, Inc., who published the book. Simon, who also edited and wrote the foreword for The End of Your World, is a good interviewer (I've read other interviews by her, e.g., of Ken Wilber). She's not shy about asking challenging questions and of putting interviewees on the spot. For example, she asks Adyashanti what he thinks will happen when we die, and insists, "don't say that you don't know!" He begins his response by saying, "And I can't say I don't know? Well now you've really tied my hands, Tami." I don't want to spoil anything by revealing more of Adyashanti's answer, but I'll say that I, who consider myself a critical thinker, appreciate his answer.

One of the qualities that some spiritual seekers sometimes lack is confidence in being, which is to say that they are plagued by a certain amount of self-doubt. You've had an awakening or many awakenings (what are referred to in Japanese Zen as kenshos), but you're nevertheless in a state of existential doubt. There's some confusion or sense of what Zen teacher and scholar David Loy calls lack. I think that someone in just that kind of situation could find Adyashanti's book a useful companion. It may be the right medicine for someone who is intimate with awakening to some degree but who also has a sense, however subtle, of being stuck or confused.

This book is a wonderful and clearly written path to enlightenment. It will be especially helpful to those of us you have been in pursuit of awakening for a while. It aims at readers who have had glimpses of awakening but have fallen back into the delusion of the mind. What the author calls nonabiding awakening contrasted with abiding awakening. Spiritual awakening is not a personal experience, it is awakening from the "me". The ability to observe your ego as a construction of the mind, a complete reality shift. "The ego does not awaken; the "me" does not awaken. We are not the ego; we are not the "me". We are that which is awake to the ego and the "me". We are the observer of the mental constructs. The author awakened at twenty five when he realized he was not his body, or his mind, or his personality. We are the pure observing consciousness behind all of these. "This isn't a journey about becoming something. This is about unbecoming who we are not, about undeceiving ourselves." It is about returning to our true nature."
"Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true--from ourselves to the world."
This is a must have on the path to enlightenment. It brought me to another level in seeing through the delusion of the divided mind. The authors writing is very similar to Eckhart Tolle. Readers will find that Adyashanti's path is the same as other enlightened teachers. We need only to learn from him and use his teachings to find our own way out of the suffering of the delusion of ego.

It's quite common for the followers of spiritual leaders to quickly endorse whatever new book their leader happens to publish. We would like to make it clear that we are not followers of Adyashanti, in fact we had not heard of him until we had received "The End of Your World" through the Amazon Vine program. We found the title intriguing, because the vast majority of spiritual teachers focus on improving the world we project, not ending it. Unfortunately, spirituality has become of fad supported by the ego. As a result, there are many "teachers" who have had a glimpse of Oneness, and have used it as a spring board to financial success. These teachers make awakening to Oneness an end in itself, and fail to see that this is merely the beginning of enlightenment. True masters are few and far between, and their mastery did not come to them at the moment of their awakening to Oneness. The details of these masters' spiritual growth are rarely told since followers prefer to see the master in his or her realized state. Unfortunately, most spiritual seekers will probably never come into contact with a living master or have the privilege of studying with one over the course of their awakening; most seekers have no idea what the spiritual path really looks like. If you are a seeker who is willing to end your world as you are now projecting it, you owe it to yourself to read "The End of Your World."

As Adyashanti so clearly points out, spiritual development can take many difficult years to come to fruition. During that time, many changes in the seeker's body and life may occur. When we consider the fact that our sense of individuality and specialness has been nurtured by society and a relentless cycle of egoic rebirths, it comes as no surprise that "unlearning" can be painful and slow in coming. We must also acknowledge that the ego does not take its death lightly, and it will continually attempt to reassert itself. Many seekers who listen to popular teachers feel like they are failing when their "enlightenment" does not quickly result in a rosy, problem free existence. But stripping away the ego layer by layer and finally letting go of self-will, is not something that can take place overnight. Adyashanti's candid stories relate the many bumps that were a part of his spiritual path, and will no doubt show up in the paths of his readers. This frank discussion of the ups and downs of spiritual awakening will be both a comfort and a guide to those who have felt lost and insecure as they tread their spiritual path. Lee & Steven Hager are the authors of The Beginning of Fearlessness: Qauntum Prodigal Son

I've read a lot of Zen books, and while this isn't necessarily just a Zen book, it certainly springs from that tradition. That said, I found it very interesting. I think this book delves deeply into topics that I haven't seen covered in others. Rather than treating enlightenment as a light bulb that suddenly turns on, the book treats it as an ongoing process with phases and new problems arising in each phase. It's always hard to use words in addressing a topic that by it's nature cannot be described, but this book does a good job of explaining through examples, analogy, and description. Well worth a read if your already on the path and wondering what might be around the bend.