Throwing Yourself Into The World As An Act of Love

BY HARV BISHOP

Adyashanti’s Jesus is not the Jesus you grew up with if you were raised in a traditional Christian denomination.
“No Divine entity will be upset if you look at the story with different eyes,” says the spiritual teacher and author affectionately known as “Adya,” who recently appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s “Super Soul Sunday.”

Adyashanti’s Jesus does not transcend the world and its sorrows, as Buddha does, but instead throws himself fully into life and his humanness, with all its joys and sorrows, as a “redemptive act of love,” he says. By redemption, Adyashanti means to make whole, recognizing the union of our humanity and divinity.

The “Jesus story,” as he calls it, reflects deep universal truths about the spiritual journey and living in the world that transcend any particular religious creed.

Adyashanti, who cut his spiritual teeth in the Zen tradition, believes that both Buddhism and mystic Christianity have important truths about our spiritual awakening but also believes that fully embracing our humanity offers “a much deeper freedom” than transcending the world.

“We have spent 2,000 years looking at our holy books as if they are history lessons and with the idea that God writes books,” Adyashanti tells Science of Mind magazine.“Both of those ideas are terrible ideas. God doesn’t write books; human beings write books. If we just readjusted those two basic principles we would move into the mythical world and the metaphorical world, which is actually much richer in meaning and much more powerful at evoking the lived experience of divinity.

“We’ve got to let go of the idea that says, ‘The way I am interpreting the Jesus story is the only one and true way to interpret it.’ As far as I see it, there is not a right way. There is just a way that is a current reflection of your own consciousness. Everyone’s interpretation of the story will only reflect their own current state of consciousness. It can’t be otherwise.”

To modern ears, says Adyashanti, a myth means untruth, whereas in ancient times myth and story were used to illustrate deep truths.

“We have lost almost entirely the attitude that people had two or three thousand years ago, which was that the deepest truths about the human experience cannot be just written down in logical formulations. They are just too big. They are too vast. You have to convey them in a story so that people kind of get the overall experience, almost like a poem. A poem is meant to elicit something, an experience within you.

“And even to use a word like poetry, most people’s minds will go, ‘That’s nice, but not real.’

“But we live our lives in a poetic realm. The things that areimportant to us — love, happiness, peace, well-being — none of these
are things that you can measure, none of these things have a color, a shape or a gender, and yet they are part of the poetic experience of our day-to-day lives. We are constantly living a poetic life,” he says with an easy laugh, “but we keep forgetting that.

“You can take a picture of a human being on a park bench, but that picture doesn’t convey who they love and the depth of their lives or the depth of their sorrow. It conveys almost nothing about the reality of their lives.

“But in the modern time we think if you take a picture, if you can tape-record it, if you do video, then you have captured history.”

A NEW LOOK AT THE JESUS STORY

What does Adyashanti see when he looks at the Jesus story through the new eyes of myth and poetry?

First, he sees a unique opportunity to realize the oneness of our human and Divine nature and second, a desire for social justice.

“In the Jesus story, the humanity was not edited out, which was the very thing that makes it powerful,” says Adyashanti. “Jesus does not come off like a Buddha figure in the lotus position where nothing can ever get to him, touch him or harm him. The image of Christ on the cross, this is somebody who life can very much get to. This harm caused him to go into despair. He finds a much deeper freedom by going through those human experiences. I think that is the whole point. He goes through these experiences rather than avoiding them.

“This leads to a complementary way of what enlightenment in life looks like. And the incredible requirements of it. It is one thing to say, ‘Just say yes to life.’ It’s a whole other thing when you’re sick or in chronic pain or dying or somebody is accusing you of something. These are very human experiences. I think that is where the Jesus story has something to offer people that is different from what we get out of the East.

“Our theology is usually some version of the fall that says I’m here as some sort of mistake or illusion. Maybe Adam and Eve are
to blame. Maybe it’s my rotten karma. Maybe it’s just something is wrong with human nature.

“Turn it upside down and just imagine if you were here as an act of love that you yourself consented to in order to redeem your life, because of course nobody else can redeem your life but you. Redeem means to make whole, to return to our natural condition. Imagine, if everyone on the planet walked around with a feeling like, ‘I know what I am doing here. I’m here as an act of love to redeem my life and to bring it back to wholeness.’ Just that would be revolutionary.”

And Adyashanti means revolutionary in terms of social change.

Like Jesus, he does not expect spiritually awakened people to passively sit back and observe injustice.
“It is redemptive love that gets you to be engaged in life. You are willing to be engaged because you love something, not because you hate something. Lots of activists hate a lot of things. They hate the way the environment is being treated. They hate people who abuse power. They really have a lot of anger about what is happening in the world. And that is understandable. But anger begets anger.

“The universe doesn’t seem to register why you were upset. It just registers that you were upset,” he says with a laugh. “I often say to people ‘If you love the Earth, focus on loving the Earth. Don’t focus on the people who are doing things to the Earth. Keep your eye on what you love and it will be 100 times more powerful than being upset with what you hate.’ Otherwise it’s just going to be the sameold cycle accomplishing the same old thing.

“For me, love isn’t just a nice feeling, it is not just a swelling of the heart chakra, and it is not just feeling a state of ecstasy as you sing or chant to God. It’s a very robust experience that is proved more by what we do than how we feel.”

Adyashanti traces the source of social problems to our inability to see past the boundaries that we create between ourselves and other human beings and ourselves and the Divine.

“One of the things that gets in the way is the way we language everything. It creates boundaries, right? So my name is Adya and
yours is Harvey, and we are these two people talking to each other, and conventionally that is true.

“But when we begin to examine even the most easily agreed-upon boundary like that, it all starts to fall apart. You could not exist without the sun overhead or the air to breathe or the water or the ground underfoot. Neither could I.

“We couldn’t survive without the whole world around us. We are the whole world around us. It’s not just a figure of speech. If we start to remove any part of the world around us, we actually die because we are literally removing a part of ourselves. And that is the first thing that we human beings seem to forget. We forget that we are each other.

“The way we talk about things creates boundaries that aren’t there. Spiritually speaking, the greatest boundary we create is by using the words ‘human beings’ and ‘God.’ God is a metaphor for what is Divine in every human. As soon as we forget that,
we put God out there.

“Then we create painful stories about that God. We frighten ourselves with how we are going to get in trouble with that God, how to please that God, how much we need to worship that God.

“These are all various sorts of insanity. If we contemplate it, that primal distinction between ourselves and God isn’t as real as we think it is. What is the price that we have been paying for acting as if we are two different things? We pay an immense price. Turn on the news. We are still killing ourselves over who we think has God’s good favor.

“I would hope every now and then someone reading ‘Resurrecting Jesus’ would say, ‘You know, I can look at these stories from a different eye,’ and then they may start to evoke a different experience of divinity than they had expected. If that happens within a blue moon, I think that’s just fantastic.”

Reprinted from the December 2014 issue of Science of Mind: Guide For Spiritual Living magazine, courtesy of Science of Mind magazine.