Into The Mystery Podcast (Episode 1)

This podcast with teachers Adi Vajra and Rishika Anya explores the many facets of the journey to Self-Realization and wholeness. We will be speaking on many of the practical and subtle elements of spiritual unfolding, ranging from the mystical to the everyday. Our hope is to speak to those who wish to live 'in the world, but not of it', and to those seeking to live a truthful, rich, and precious life of Presence.

Transcript

Namaste, You're listening to the inaugural episode of Into the Mystery. I'm Rishika, Here with my co-host, Good friend, And fellow teacher Adi Vajra. Today we're going to talk a little bit about spiritual awakening, Or what some people refer to as enlightenment. So let's dive right in. So in my mind, When we have a conversation about awakening, It's quite a difficult conversation to have because I think there's a lot of different things meant by awakening by different people. And generally speaking, Awakening seems to be the emerging of your consciousness from one level or one program into another. And I think there can be many, Many different types of awakening that happen in an individual's life. The awakening that I mostly concern myself with, Or am interested in, Is the awakening, What I would kind of think of as a core kind of awakening, Or an essential kind of awakening. The same thing that's indicated by experiences of enlightenment, Where one becomes aware of a reality that is non-material, And experiences oneself as a consciousness. I think we should maybe break that down a little bit, Because I think there are a lot of definitions in many people's minds as to what constitutes awakening. For some people, It's this sort of moment in which all of a sudden you become enlightenment. I think a lot of people equate it with some huge non-dual experience. But to clarify for people who are listening, Maybe we should discuss the different kinds of awakenings that people might experience, Whether it's a simple, I say simple, Nothing is simple. Well, Ultimately it is, But you can have a spiritual opening that's not quite the same thing as a full-blown awakening, Am I right? I think so. I think you can have a spiritual opening. I think you can also have intimations of spiritual reality or spiritual nature that don't necessarily constitute awakening, Such as what one might experience in a moment of profound love or ecstasy or joy, What one might experience, Say, On psychedelics, Where one has an intimation of a greater reality, But their consciousness hasn't fully emerged within it. And so I think it's a good point of clarification to really understand. I think it's important to understand that awakening has many forms, Many levels, And there's a developmental process to it too. In the old schools of enlightenment, Especially in Buddhism, You sort of see enlightenment treated as either a gradual development or a sudden experience. And in my experience, We undergo a series of awakenings that introduce us to greater and greater dimensions of our being, More and more vast scales of existence. And in each, There's an awakening. But there's something, I think, Crucial to the awakening where an individual sees or awakens from the sleep of material reality, Where one becomes aware that there is indeed something more than just the material existence of his or her body and the society that one has lived in, The values that one has been taught. And one wakes up from that. And I think that's the essential awakening. It's a huge, Profound shift. I mean, I remember from my own experiences that one day I had one notion of what reality was and then suddenly have this experience and understood without being able to necessarily explain any of this in words that, Oh my God, Nothing is what I thought it was. Everything is. . . I mean, All of my paradigms were shattered. And then what follows, I think, For most people is this period of integration and coming to terms with those things, Because the ego is not super excited about awakening except to the extent that it thinks it can use it for some sort of egoic gain. Yeah, Right. I mean, I think you described that well, Is that what awakening is, Is it's a massive paradigm shift. And what you just described, I think, Constitutes the very essence of an essential awakening. I think it was the same in my own experience that awakening, It overturned my every notion of what was real. And that's, I think, One of the hallmarks of a true awakening is that it does, It upsets, It turns over all of our ideas about who we thought we were, What we thought was real. And the wake of that is not, Of course, That's not easy to deal with, That awakening, As much as we would love to think of awakening as this pleasant, You know, Joyful bursting of love and unity, Which it is, It also upsets every notion that our life has been founded on. Yeah. So, Hey, Can I get you to tell your story? Because I love your story about what happened to you back when you were, Was it 23 or so? Yeah, I was, How old was I? 23. Yeah. And, You know, At first, I can say that there was, There was a lot, I think, That led up to my awakening experience that I didn't necessarily realize. I mean, There were intimations in my life all the way from childhood through adolescence and, You know, Small glimpses, Small intimations of something bigger that I began to sense. But, You know, This was different. And when I was 23, I was out in the wilderness and we went out way too far, Much farther than we should have. And by the time that we decided to turn around from our hike and our little adventure, It had started to become dark and partway through our journey back to our car, The parking lot we had parked in at the trailhead, We lost the trail and we ended up lost. And for whatever reason, Even though the situation wasn't a dire survival situation, I became immensely scared, Scared for my life and scared that I wouldn't find my way out of that dark forest. And it was quite an irrational fear because one part of me knew that I was safe and that I would eventually find my way to my car. And, You know, Even if, Even if we had ended up there overnight, I don't think we would have been in any real survival danger. It wasn't cold enough to, You know, Kill a body, I don't think, Just for one night. But for whatever reason, The fear was just so profound and it, You know, The experience itself, It teased this survival fear to the surface of my awareness. And there was nothing I could do to alleviate it. It just kept increasing and deepening. And there was a point during this whole period where I realized I wasn't going to be able to get rid of the fear, Nothing, No mechanism that I was calling on to calm myself or soothe myself or tell myself it was going to be okay was working. And so the fear became something I couldn't, I couldn't overcome. And it was sort of right at that moment where the fear became so huge, It became only what I can think of as an annihilating force. And when it, When it came through, When that fear was felt in such intensity and depth, There was really no option but to surrender to it. I wouldn't even say I chose to surrender to it. It was just that there was no other option. And what followed that was so profound in that this fear broke. And what happened in my awareness was so profound, So exquisite. I mean, I'll never be able to put words to it. But it, There was a profound shift that felt like a dying. It was as though the thing in me that was afraid to die was dying. But it was clear and evident that what was dying was not really who I am. And a shift, It was as though suddenly there was that panicking survival anxiety present in my biology, My body, But I wasn't that anymore. And as that became evident in my consciousness, This massive joy, This massive freedom just exploded. And I remember in the episode just sort of smiling and dancing and crying and saying to myself, I'm not Paul. I'm not Paul. That's not who I am. I'm not Paul. And Paul was my name from birth. And it was just so absolutely evident and clear that what I was was something so much more expansive than a body or the story I had constructed about my life or any of the details that I thought were me. And that was really, Although I had intimations throughout my life up to that point, That was really the awakening point. That was the point where I saw with certainty that there is something more than this material reality. I think that's a key point, Too, That all of a sudden you disidentify from everything that you thought that you were. In my case, I ceased to be someone, Someone, I ceased to be a body. You know, I was sort of, I was lying there on my couch at the end of a long day of doing yoga and meditation and became simply a point of consciousness. And everything I was perceiving was not being perceived through my senses, My physical senses. And I suddenly saw this, God, It was almost like a menu of experiences and information and all of the wisdom and knowledge in the universe that was surrounding and suffusing everything in my sphere of awareness. And I was not a person anymore. So it was kind of the same thing. I didn't disidentify from my name so much, I kind of still knew who I was, But it was this understanding that what I was, Was not at all confined or defined by body, You know? Right. And then, You know, And then you just kind of, I don't know, Laugh, Dance, Cry. The body, Your emotions don't even know what to do with this new information because it's overwhelming. It's literally too much for the mind to be able to sort through and categorize. So it's almost like everything you've known as your boundaries and limitations has simply exploded. I love that. I love that. Yeah, So true. So true. The framework that we bring to understand life and reality is no longer suitable to experience the magnitude and intensity of what we experience in those moments. But, You know, We both hit on here in telling our stories a little bit, We both hit on a very common ingredient that this realization of being a point of consciousness and this recognition that our body or story doesn't define what we are. And I think that's a pretty good working definition of awakening. Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. And then, You know, At least for me, The period that followed that was pretty blissful. I remember, You know, The next few weeks or months, I felt, You know, The ego, Of course, Took over a little bit and went, Hey, You're special. You now know some things nobody else does. And of course, Being an Enneagram five, Any kind of specialized knowledge is really appealing to my ego. So, You know, I instantly wanted to package it and sell it because I thought I had this precious product that I, You know, That nobody else had, Which, Of course, Is not true. Now, You know, Years on into this process, I know much better than to sort of think that that's anything that's unavailable to other people. But I do believe that you have to be sort of ripe for an awakening. And just like you, Like I had a lot of intimations that there was something more earlier in my life that I wrote off as coincidence or just sort of a moment of expanded awareness that was probably just my mind playing tricks on me. But then it turns out all this stuff is real, Which is so astonishing. That's really a key word there, Isn't it? Real. This is real. That what we're describing is not a metaphysical belief system. It's not a philosophy that we've taken from another culture or a religion and suffused it with our, You know, Foundations of belief and try to make it real as an experience. This is a real experience that is had within our consciousness. And that's important because a lot of, I hear a lot of people describe their experience as awakening, But usually or often what they're describing are things like emotional releases or, You know, They let go of a pattern or a story that they've been holding on to. And that's very beautiful. It's very essential. But I don't know that it doesn't necessarily constitute an essential awakening. Yeah, Exactly. And what do you think about, You know, People who've had an ayahuasca experience, For example, Or one of the other drugs that can produce an experience similar to awakening, And maybe it is an awakening experience of some sort. Do you think those are valid? I do think they're valid. What these substances can do is they can give us a glimpse beyond the veil and they can introduce us to that reality in a way where, You see, When I think of ayahuasca or psilocybin or peyote, And I have some experiences with these things and not all of them, But some of them, And I don't look at them as substances that give you reality. I look at them more as substances that break down your veils and filters so that you might perceive reality as it really is. And I do think that's absolutely, I know, I can't say I think, I know that's valid because I've had those experiences. However, You know, One of the things I see in the culture around those substances and practices is a reliance on them. And, You know, I think that they're intended to be introductions to reality, Ways of tearing down the veil, But not necessarily our only access to it. Right. It's sort of a shortcut, Or maybe an off-ramp is a better word, If you get reliant on something like that to produce a certain state of consciousness. And of course, You know, We know that developing oneself to be capable of higher consciousness involves a whole bunch of other factors in order to support the awareness. The body changes, The chakras are activated. It's really a lot of work in some ways to get the physical body and the mental body to be in a condition to consistently maintain those states. That's an excellent point. And that, To me, Brings us to the other dimension of awakening, Which is not so much the initial awakening that one has, But the way in which that awakening becomes embodied. And that's what we call the gradual path of enlightenment, Or it's the hard work of integrating. It's the hard work of bringing that awakening into every dimension of our life. And that, To me, Is when I speak of awakening, When I think of awakening, That's really what I'm thinking of, Because really any bozo can have a glimpse of reality. I mean, It really, You know, Just a little bit of work, A little bit of openness or the use of a substance, And you can have a glimpse of reality. But to be able to call forward your will and live that with the fullness of your being, That takes work. And that takes intense dedication and devotion. And that, To me, Is what is the proper definition of an awakened being, One who's called forward all those properties. Yeah. And, I mean, For me, It's been an ongoing journey of reclaiming my energy from the places where it was supporting paradigms that were not conducive or not validating of the new reality that I now perceive. And in some cases, That meant family members, I hate to say it that way. But you begin to see the dysfunction that you had taken to be like a valid and real way of living, And you all of a sudden see it for what it is. And maybe we should talk about Maya here, Because when we talk about the awakening giving us a glimpse into reality, We're talking about seeing through that veil of apparent reality that most of us live in. All of a sudden that veil drops, And you can perceive the larger context within which this is happening. Would you agree with that? I would. But I would say that the reality that the construct, If you will, The consensus reality that most people live in is made up of different ingredients. In one sense, It's the reliance on material, Physical reality as that which is real. But it's also our societal programming, Our individual familial programming, It's our biological programming. There are many aspects of conditioning that, Like you stated, That need to be undone, Unlearned in order to fully inhabit that wakeful presence. Yeah, Yeah. So much yes to that. Because when you go back to the very beginning, You know, We come to this world as consciousness in this sort of wriggling body. And when you're in the mother's womb, Everything is still continuous, And it's warm, And you're fed, And you've got everything you need. And then all of a sudden, One day, Something changes. And you're ejected into this new environment where there's light and noise and cold and scratchy things. And then people give you a name, And then you learn that you have a gender, And you learn that you live in a society that practices certain laws or has certain beliefs. And all of these things get sort of layered on one after another until we reach adulthood. And a lot of us maybe hit middle age or so and look around and be like, How did I get here? You know, Just like the talking head song. Well, How did I become me? You know, What is this really? And when the questioning and the searching begins, And then I suppose we begin to ripen ourselves for something higher to come through into our awareness. But yeah, All of those things need to be questioned, And they need to be healed, If necessary, If there's a lot of trauma in our background. Some things need to be shifted, Some relationships will change, Some will end, And it's a lot. It's a lot for a psyche to handle. And because there's so much going on at once, I think for a lot of people, It's a fairly traumatic process at times. Although for me, It's been a cycling thing. So I'll go through periods of calm, And then that'll be followed by some kind of chaos, As you know, Since we work together on these things. But people, As you said earlier, People shouldn't underestimate just how much is involved. And it's not as simple as simply, You know, Dropping some ayahuasca or some acid or something and, Oh, I love everybody, You know, If only, If only it could be so simple. Yeah. Well, You know, That's why very few people see the whole thing through. Very few people have the guts and the heart and the will to traverse the treacherous territory of awakening to see it through to its fullest possibility. And it's no wonder, It is. It's incredibly hard and it's heartbreaking and, You know, We love the idea of being free of our illusions, But that means being disillusioned. That means having these, And I love the definition of that word, You know, To be disillusioned is to have a pleasurable but false notion destroyed, You know, And that means that these notions or constructs that we cling to are often the very pleasurable, Comfortable, Secure notions that tell us who we are. And so, Yeah, Absolutely. It's not easy work. It's not child's play. Yeah. There's so much security, We think. I mean, The ultimate security does not lie in our illusions, But because we're so used to them and we rely on them, It's just sort of like, Like my dog has a routine and if he doesn't get his dinner at five o'clock, Then he gets a little antsy and starts feeling like something's gone wrong. You know, I think we're the same in our mental habits. Oh, Absolutely. I was just talking about this earlier today. We were walking down the street and there was a detour that was taking people five or six miles out of their usual route, And the drivers that were passing by on our walk were driving very fast, Very aggressively, And we took note, What's going on here? And without knowing what the detour was about and, You know, My first comment was any time that we're forced to move outside of our dream landscape, We become frustrated. We don't want anything to disrupt our comfortable, Secure routine and habit and our automatic existence. And that's what awakening does. It comes in and it disrupts every pattern. It does. And it's funny, The other day I walked into my garage and one of my tires had gone flat. I picked up a nail and, You know, Five years ago I probably would have gone, Grumbled under my breath and dropped some F-bombs and then kind of moped about it all day because I'd not have to get a wheel fixed. And I just kind of looked at it and instead I went, Oh, You know, I just get to work changing the tire. And it was fine. I didn't cause myself a whole lot of suffering around that because now I know better. But boy, In the past, When I think about how stressed out I was about, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago, I don't know how I got through life, Honestly, Because everything was a crisis and things didn't go according to plan. You know, If the kids needed something and I wasn't in the space to provide that, Well, You know. So. Well, Let me ask you a question here. Yeah. So can you speak to those who are listening here about some of what you've discovered as to what it takes to see this journey through to say, Okay, So first let me say, Let's, We both can acknowledge that this journey is an endless one. It's a constantly unfolding dynamic. So let's not talk about it as if it's over in any way, But can you speak to your experience of what it has taken for you to see this, See to this journey, To see to this unfolding with heart, With guts, With, What's it taken for you? It's taken, Well, Commitment, Certainly. So I have to say, I've felt for a long time, Decades even, That I was on this path and I didn't really have much choice in the matter. I took a lot of detours away from it when other things seemed to be more attractive. I kind of forgot about it at times. You know, I went through some addiction issues that, Boy, That takes all your energy and you really don't have anything left over to try and develop some higher consciousness. But when all of that was behind me and I had had enough vision into the real reality, It was so compelling that all I could do was commit myself to it. I don't know if that's the case for everyone, But I, As I probably have told you, I meditated for 900 days in a row, Practiced yoga every day. I did all of the things, Chanted mantra, Just to see what would work, To see what would accelerate my progress. And the hardest thing was probably whenever, Well, As the emotional stuff is coming up to be processed and, You know, For listeners, Be forewarned that anything you've tried to hide from yourself, Any aspects of your personality that you don't like or that you deny that you have, You know, You will be called to acknowledge and to understand them differently. And so there were times when I thought I'd be losing my mind, I'd be, You know, Watching dishes and crying over the sink or just sometimes the insights were coming so fast and heavy, I didn't know what was real anymore. And so in those moments, You gave me some really good advice one time and you told me to just take an attitude of allowing. And so I developed this habit of clinging to the present moment, Literally clinging, Because I would be so upset sometimes, I didn't know if I was coming or going or if I was going to live through the night, Especially when the dark night of the soul came around, Which we can talk about in some other episode. But to remind myself repeatedly that all I had to do was be in the moment and allow whatever was happening to happen, Because I wasn't under any physical threat. The emotions were uncomfortable, You know, All the chaos in my head was uncomfortable. But to recommit to the process over and over again, I can say that now as though it was not that difficult. But I can tell you, At the time, It took every ounce of presence that I was able to muster. And especially because a lot of things are going on in your body that are uncomfortable as well, You stop sleeping sometimes, Or, You know, Your food sensitivities change. And so it's pretty much chaos for a good, I don't know, For me, It was several years, It seems to be settling down a little bit now, But I think other people, Maybe it's a little bit more of a gradual process or a gentle process. For me, Because I had so much trauma in my background, I think I just got sort of hit with a whole sack of bricks at once. But I don't know, What was the hardest part for you, Do you think? Or what did you find most essential to your path? Well, I think the one thing that's always fueled me through various stages of awakening and various challenges, Various dark nights, Is an unwavering commitment to truth. And you know, I heard one of my teachers once said that you're going to have to want truth more than you want to feel good. And I think that's pretty good advice, Because it's that tethering oneself to the truth, To intensely wanting to know, Wanting to live the truth that will eventually, Well, As the saying goes, The truth will set you free. And it does. But on the way, In the pursuit of truth, In the adherence to truth, There is the tearing away of every illusion and every scrap of untruth. And I think without that unwavering commitment to truth, There's a vulnerability in our practice, In our pathway that will continue to bring us back, As it would, Do you really want to know what's true? Do you really want the truth? Do you really want to live that? And you know, I also can recognize at least a decade, If not more, Of intensely fighting and resisting certain truths, Which led to certain dark nights. And I think that would be a great topic for us to speak on sometime, The dark nights of the soul. Yeah. And we don't realize when the resistance is sort of active, Because it's so, A lot of it is so unconscious. You sort of get the results of it at the level of awareness in the physical body. But that sounds really sort of spacey. But you know, I mean, We don't realize that what we're feeling, You know, I might be upset, And it feels like I'm reacting to a situation or something, But it's actually because I don't know who I am, Or, You know, My gender doesn't make sense to me anymore. Or I've just realized that everything I've committed my life to thus far was absolutely meaningless. And all of these reference points that the ego has taken as its creations, I should say. No, That's a good word. Yeah. You know, Of course, You reminded me as you were sharing that A Course in Miracles has a lesson which reads, I am never upset for the reason I think. And it speaks to what you're saying is that in this commitment to truth that we have, When we are going through these upsets, We have our ideas about what's happening. We have our stories and narratives about what's happening. But there's something deeper happening. And if we don't have that commitment to truth, We don't see that through. Right. Because you can't preserve your illusions about yourself and discover the truth at the same time. Well put. Well put. So what is our final word here on Awakening? Be careful what you wish for. That's a good one. Well, I think it's, You know, I talk about this with my students all the time, Too. And I had one person I worked with who, I was, From my observations and from the way she spoke, I was pretty sure she was in some stage of awakening, Like she'd already had that breakthrough where she'd seen into the reality beyond the veil. And yet she was convinced that she wasn't. And her reasoning was that she hadn't had a big enough, Transformative enough experience. And she was sort of still striving for that. And I couldn't convince her that that was, You know, Sort of a pointless cause. But yeah, I would say don't expect it to be, It might be a firework show. I mean, You might find yourself transported to other dimensions. And I always think of that scene in Doctor Strange where the Ancient One taps him on his third eye and all of a sudden he goes zooming through all these parallel realities. It might be that, But more likely it's going to be something a little bit more subtle and hopefully gentle. And the best thing you can do is just prepare your body by doing the physical practices and meditate. I think meditation is the number one way of inviting spiritual energy to work with you. It's sort of this gesture to the universe that says, Here I am. I'm willing. I'm willing for you to enter me and transform me. If that's what our meditation is, Absolutely. You know, I think that that's good. I'm glad you mentioned that because there's a lot of notions that people have about what meditation is. And from what I've seen, That's rarely what people treat meditation as. But if we treat meditation that way, In the way you're describing it, It's then something very beautiful. Very, Very beautiful. Yeah. Well, Ask and you shall receive. Well, You know, It's interesting that you mentioned experience because I think that inevitably when we talk about awakening, People will often look to that as some type of experience. And I think that's a worthy conversation to have, Is that awakening is not a single experience or even a set of experiences. Awakening is like any other phenomena in this world, Come and go. And so when we're looking for awakening as an experience, We end up missing the point. And to understand awakening in its bigger context, That yes, It does happen through these episodes of experience, These moments of awareness of our Christ nature, Our Buddha nature. Our awakening is something much bigger than that. It's much more inclusive, Much richer, Much fuller than just these phenomenal experiences that happen. Yeah. Do you think there's a mass awakening taking place on the planet right now? I don't know that I see a mass awakening. What I see is mass polarization, Which has the potential to lead to awakening. I think that people are, I do think that there is a movement in consciousness that is creating a ripe scenario for greater awakening to happen. I think that there's always been awakening. You know, In fact, In an indigenous culture, In a culture that does things right, Such as the cultures that were undisturbed by modern societal programming, Awakening was something that someone went through in their adolescence. And, You know, Now we're looking at awakening into, You know, Midlife crisis era, 40s, 50s, 60s. And I think awakening is intended to be something much more natural in our consciousness. And I don't know that I see people truly waking up yet, But I see the potential being created. I see the rift in the matrix, If you will, The construct is deconstructing around us. And I think that if we handle that wisely, There's a possibility that there will be greater and greater awakening on the planet. But so far, What I see is, What I see a lot of people talking about awakening, I wouldn't call awakening. Well, Yeah, There's woke culture, Quote unquote. What's that culture? I don't know that culture. Oh, The term woke, W-O-K-E, Gets bandied around a lot to describe somebody who's got a higher sort of like a meta perspective on current events and so forth. But it's not necessarily indicative of some kind of a spiritual orientation. I mean, You could have a woke perspective on politics, For example, Because, Yeah, And there's all kinds of variations on that. But well, That's that's what gets tricky here, Isn't it? Part of what our new age culture has introduced is variable definitions on what awakening is. And it seems that nowadays people can sort of construe their experience, Any type of variety experience, As an awakening experience. And it may be on some level, It might be a precursor to, I guess we could call it a true awakening that just hasn't quite arrived yet. Maybe it's something in the ripening process. But I don't know, All I can say is that you'll know one if you have one. That's for sure. I mean, The person I was talking about earlier didn't quite know, But as the evidence mounts, At some point you just go, Oh, Yeah, That's me. That's what's happening. And it's sort of terrifying and a relief at the same time. But I feel that at a worldwide level, It's hard to know how accurate this is, But I kind of feel it like a gathering wave, Except the energy is still in the ocean, Like when there's a tsunami, The energy travels through the water for hundreds of miles before it finally gets lifted up by some sort of an obstacle and becomes the wave that you can actually look at. Oh, Good. I like that. I like that. Yeah. It's like the obstacle is slowly mounting such that we might actually generate a wave here. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. Wouldn't that be spectacular? Indeed. Indeed. Adyashanti wrote, What do you really want? Let your brain whirl and spin itself into blessed, Exhausted silence. Let it rest like a baby in the open-palmed hands of the heart held now. What do you really want after all? That's a good one. Yum. Thanks for listening to this episode of Into the Mystery. We hope you gained something useful. If you'd like to learn more about our work, You can go to our websites, Adivajra. Org, Or visit Rishika's at interdimensionalyoga. Com. If you have questions or topics you'd like to hear about in future episodes, Be sure to drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.

Reviews

Very interesting talk… But I really do believe that every awakening is different… And whoever was shuffling the cards in the background I found it quite distracting

Really interesting! Thank you!