Hi Kami,
Yes, that is the interesting thing about Adyashanti, he meditates for years, goes through an intensive kundalini awakening, comes out the other end enlightened and then talks, for the most part, as if it didn't happen and has no relevance. Then occasionally someone asks him about it and he says "Oh yes, that...".
quote:
Your definition of unity being an evolution of ecstasy is not the same as Adya's (at least from my understanding of his teachings). I "get" his definition simply because it fits my own experience and evolution. I had not the slightest interest in him as a teacher until I heard a short talk and felt it was addressed specifically to me. It may not fit with yours or anyone else's since each of our journeys is unique.
To be clear, his teachings do not emphasize energy. His new book that is a distillation of his teachings - The Way of Liberation (which, in my opinion, is a gem) has absolutely nothing about cultivating energy, bliss or ecstasy.
I wasn't giving a definition of unity, but rather a pointer to it, to show how kundalini is involved in the journey. So it isn't like I think one thing and Adya thinks another. I have not read Adya's latest book that you mention, but I am familiar with his teachings.
Adya is completely right in saying that unity has nothing to do with energy or with bliss or with ecstasy. But it is also just as true to say that unity is the merging of ecstasy and bliss and the end of the process of kundalini. It is one of those divine paradoxes.
If you come at it from one angle, when you stop identifying with the movement of thought, you begin to realize that you are the witness of every thought that arises and ceases in the mind. You are also the witness of every emotion, every sensation, in fact, of everything that moves. You are the expansive silent awareness that exists behind everything and does not move. The experience of this is very beautiful and very peaceful but it is still only half the journey. The second half of the journey, the decent into unity, is a kind of non-doing. There is nothing you can do to make it happen. It is a kind of surrender, or a giving-up where you simply stop making the effort to hold onto the illusion of separation. The separate self- even as the witness- falls away, and there is no gap between what is seen and what is seeing. You could say that you realize yourself to be everything, but it is just as true to say you are nothing. The experience of this is love and ecstasy. It is love because everything is completely intimately connected to the point where there is nothing that is separate in any way, and it is ecstasy because everything is vibrating with the fullness of that love (or spirit as Adya would say).
Coming at the same thing from the other angle, as we cultivate bliss we come more and more into the witness and as we purify the body we come more and more into a state of ecstasy. As ecstasy and bliss merge in silence, the boundaries of the illusion of separateness fall away and we come into unity and the experience of divine love. Same thing, same process, just a different way of talking about it. Only from the pure advaitic perspective, it is necessary to let go of everything in order to make the transition from the witness to unity, which means also letting go of bliss, ecstasy and the value of any energetic experience. That doesn't mean those things are not experienced by the advaitic sage, of course they are, it just means they are given no importance so as to be able to give complete importance to the practice of letting go and simply being as the primary tool of awakening.
The point that both traditions agree on (the yogic and the pure advaitic) is that the transition into unity involves a shift into the heart so that the person functions fully from there. This is another divine paradox, because it feels as if there is no centre and at the same time it feels as if everything is centred in the heart and radiating with love from there.
All the best,
Christi
