by Adyashanti

“At any moment when all of our senses come together and really start to work as a coherent whole, when they’re all intermingled, they actually create another sense.”

Our senses need to become refined, and the way our senses become refined is by starting to live through our senses again. It’s a great spiritual practice—a great human thing, but especially a great spiritual practice—to really be connected to your senses. You go outside and you actually feel the cold or the warmth on your skin. You don’t just take quick note of it and you’re off to the next abstract thought that flows through your brain, but you actually feel the cold or the warmth on your skin.

You really see what you’re looking at. You see it because you’re actually looking at it. We can have our eyes open but not really notice very much. You can look at something without having any of your senses online except vision. It’s almost like a computer looking around: “Okay, I’m taking it in—blue, white, ceiling, floor.” People live most of their life doing something like that. Or you can actually feel and sense what you see. Your sense of seeing and your sense of feeling are now operating in a kind of tandem.

It seems to me that either what evokes this noticing or what actually brings it into operation is the capacity of the heart to experience life in a tremendously deep and intimate way. Of course, it’s easier when you look at a tree or some flowers, something with some beauty to it. If you’re looking at them with any attention at all, you’ll realize it evokes a sense, a feeling. Your vision and the feel of something are operating in one moment. You’ve got at least two of your senses cooperating.

Actually, I think all of the senses are meant to work as a coherent whole. Their original way of operating is where you see and feel and hear and taste and touch things all at once, like the great composer who could not only hear music, but see music in his mind’s eye. How many people see music?

At any moment when all of our senses come together and really start to work as a coherent whole, when they’re all intermingled, they actually create another sense. That sense is what I’m calling the heart. All of a sudden, life is experienced in a very different way. As the great Zen Master Dogen said, “It is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.” It’s an interesting thing to be enlightened by the ten thousand things—meaning everything. It’s to be enlightened by what you see and hear and taste and touch and feel, to be enlightened by the world.

So this is the awakening of the heart. You can just do whatever you’re doing, look at whatever you’re looking at, and imagine that somehow there’s something in the heart that’s actually part of the process of what you see. You’re seeing from it. You’re looking from it. Immediately it will change your experience. It will become a more intimate experience of being. It really doesn’t matter what you’re doing if you start to do it from the heart.

From Adyashanti’s May 22, 2018 Tahoe Retreat Talk

4 Responses
  1. Tao Says:

    I agree, in fact I feel happy to read this. I havent read it any other place, but Adyashanti seems to say that this is a posibility already there from the beggining.

    For me it happened very late in the path, it's happening now, when also the "subject" is disappearing. Then, as you focus on your senses (there's no other place) the bliss at the heart is inmediate, strong and unavoidable...

    In my humble and probably wrong model of the path it's happgning at the Mahamudra one-taste (more or less).

    Just in case is useful for someone...

    Best wishes


  2. Anonymous Says:

    Hi, this is something Thusness said in 2009 :

    " U hv to gauge yr conditions,if u choose the direct path,u cannot downplay this "I " ,contrary,u must fully,completely experience the U as Existence."

    In vipassana ,one does not focus on the I.

    Does this two path 'contradict' one another? Like being in a crossroad,where one must choose 1 path and following it while forgetting the other?


  3. Soh Says:

    Better to focus on Self-Inquiry if you are doing that, for me I focused on Self-Inquiry and was able to get Self-Realization in less than 2 years of practice. If you are doing both practices then maybe it will take longer. But Vipassana was important at a later point. But for those purely practicing Vipassana, Luminosity only comes at a much later stage (e.g. Daniel Ingram's case).

    Sorry been busy lately and will take some time to reply all the messages.


  4. Soh Says:

    "For me it happened very late in the path, it's happening now, when also the "subject" is disappearing."

    Complete stability requires realization of both stanzas of anatta as a dharma seal (a dharma seal as being always already so and not merely a stage or peak experience)

    http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2009/03/on-anatta-emptiness-and-spontaneous.html

    Realizing and severing the subject/object duality through anatta insight is also the beginning of Medium One Taste based on Mahamudra's description.