The End of Your World
Adyashanti’s The End of Your World is an extraordinary book about the awakening experience. In my reading in Zen commentary, I have not encountered a book that speaks so frankly about what it is to wake up and the challenges waking up may pose for the awakened person.
In Adyashanti’s terms, in an awakening experience, both the sense of self and the sense of separateness disappear from consciousness. The experience is rightly termed “awakening,” since the opposite sense of things, that one’s self and separateness are real, is equivalent to a dream state. Adyashanti approaches the experience as momentary; in fact, however, the experience may last for thirty seconds or longer.[1]
Adyashanti considers awakening to be either non-abiding or abiding, which might be dependent on the duration of the experience. In any event, if a person’s awakening is non-abiding, he or she is prone to reverting to an ego-driven condition. In Adyashanti’s words, he is prone to succumbing to the “gravitational field of the dream state.”[2] In abiding wakening, falling back into the dream state is only a fleeting factor.
Adyashanti approaches waking up as a time-bound, momentary experience. However, it is common for a sense of non-self and non-separateness to grow gradually in zazen practitioners as they continue to practice. Therefore, The End of Your World is really quite useful for any zazen practitioner, who may already be encountering some of the challenges of awakening.
Footnotes
- See “Zazen and Ego” in this collection of essays.
- Adyashanti, The End of Your World, Boulder, 2008 and 2010, p. 40.