Adyashanti - The Most Important Thing: Discovering Truth at the Heart of Life

Contents

Acknowledgments

A few years back I was sitting around the dinner table at my home with Tami Simon, founder of Sounds True, and Mitchell Clute, an editor and producer who has been intimately involved with every Sounds True project I have done in recent years. I shared with them my fantasy of someday having a little recording studio at my home, so I could pop in and record teachings whenever the spirit hit me. To my great surprise, Tami said, Lets make that happen, Adya. Where would you put it? After I recovered from my shock, I thought about it for a moment and said there was a little closet space under the stairway that might work. Tami then asked, So what do you want to do next with Sounds True?

After some time brainstorming, we came up with the idea to record a series of talks about how grace arises in the ordinary moments of everyday life. The program was titled Moments of Grace, and from the very start this project felt to be perfumed with grace. I cannot thank Tami enough for her friendship and generosity, as well as for her constant invitation and encouragement to produce whatever teachings I feel inspired to with Sounds True. You are a great grace in my life as well as a true dharma friend. And a great bow of appreciation as well to Mitchell Clute, who has faithfully guided not only this book but all of my Sounds True projects to fruition. Your dedication and wisdom inform everything I do with Sounds True, and I appreciate you from the bottom of my heart.

I want to extend a mountain of gratitude to Alice Peck, who had the Herculean task of editing and arranging my spontaneous ramblings into a comprehensible manuscript. Your task was great, and you performed it with tremendous care and dedication. My appreciation for you runs deep and wide.

I also want to offer a deep bow of thanks to Jennifer Miles for her wonderful cover design. I cannot comprehend how, out of nowhere, you pull from your creative spirit such fine artwork over and over again. May your wellspring of creativity continue to flow forevermore.

And, finally, I want to express my heartfelt appreciation to Aron Arnold, studio manager at Sounds True, for turning my little closet space under the stairwell into a wonderful recording studio. May many years of recordings flow forth as a result of your making my little fantasy into a reality.

Adyashanti

Los Gatos, California

2018

Introduction

OUR INNER LIVES ARE EVERY BIT AS ASTONISHING, BAFFLING, AND MYSTERIOUS AS THE INFINITE VASTNESS OF THE COSMOS.

As long as cognitively capable human beings have been living on this small blue planet among the stars, they have been telling stories. Storytelling began long ago with our ancestors sitting around the safety of an open fire on moonlit nights recalling the events of the day, or of the year, or of their distant relatives. And even though we have developed technology beyond anything our ancestors might have imagined, we still tell stories to one another every day and, in our own minds, perhaps nearly every minute. Each moment of our lives is a story in creation, a novel without end, where new chapters are being lived out daily. And if we are paying attention, well notice that some of those stories contain moments of grace when we are gifted with wisdom or love and understanding. Such stories can enlighten and transform our lives for the better.

In 2017, I began recording a weekly series for Sounds True called Moments of Grace, through which I hoped to convey some of those wisdom stories from my own life. As I recorded stories that had gifted me with a bit of insight or a better understanding of love, I began to notice a theme emerging. In one way or another, each of the stories I told showed me how vital it was to be oriented toward an awareness of what I call the most important thing. Time and again, each story that conveyed meaning in my life was an expression of the essential importance of being able to discern what truly mattered in life. Every story seemed to hone my ability to discern the most important thing about each situation I had experienced. In retelling these impactful stories from my life, I was also reliving and reexamining the paradoxical power of intention and grace.

As the weeks went by, I eventually found myself stretching my lifelong bad memory to its limits as I tried to recall stories from my past that had shaped my character and my life. If truth be told, I rarely live in the past, but by recording the Moments of Grace series I had the opportunity to experience again some of the significant stories from my life and reconsider their impact. It was a wonderful and clarifying experience, and as the project went on, I began to turn more toward elucidating the wisdom and love that I had gained through these stories and how one could find that same wellspring of wisdom and love within oneself.

For each of our lives provides all that we need to gain deeper wisdom and loveif only we can learn to not become captivated by the negative and confusing spin that the mind often creates, but instead derive useful and enlightening knowledge from our own direct experience. This requires a disciplined awareness of and keen attention to the moment-to-moment experience of being, as well as great honesty and sincerity of heart. Ive found that only by taking complete responsibility for my moment-to-moment experience of being do I retain both a sense of sovereignty and a feeling of connectedness with whomever I may be in relationship to. It seems that the experience of grace, when new vistas of insight and understanding spontaneously open within us, is intimately related to (though not directly caused by) the intentions and priorities that we live by. This paradox of intention and grace is embodied within the unfolding of each of our lives as well as in the stories and teachings of this book.

Our inner lives are every bit as astonishing, baffling, and mysterious as the infinite vastness of the cosmos. For we are each individual expressions of conscious being, and we contain the vastness of the cosmos within us, as much as we are contained within it. To look within and answer the ancient call to know thyself is perhaps the greatest and strangest adventure of all. It is the key to awakening to the truth of our being and living the most evolved lives that we can individually and collectively imagine. My hope is that this book will not only entertain and uplift you but will also give you the tools to dive deeply into the immediate experience of being, so that you will find your own experience of grace by attending to the most important thing.

What Is the Most Important Thing?

NO SPIRITUAL TEACHER, NO MATTER HOW WISE, AND NO TEACHING, NO MATTER HOW PROFOUND, CAN BE A SUBSTITUTE FOR DISCOVERING WHAT IS IMPORTANT TO YOU.

What is the most important thing to you? Not the top ten, not the top five, not the top three, not the top two, but the top. Is it awakening? Is it love? Is it peace? I could go on naming possibilities, but think about your spiritual life, the part of you that deep dives into the discovery of meaning. By meaning, I am not referring to the meaning of lifethat ends up being theoretical. I am talking about meaning as that which gives us a sense of vitality, aliveness, inspiration, calm, and joy.

I have done some research on the idea of the most important thing, and I have looked at it from different angles, talking to executives, athletes, musicians, writers, artists of all kinds, and anybody who excels at something. For as long as I can remember, I have been interested in people who do things well. These people tend to have an ability to define what is most important, to know it within their being, and to rally their resources toward it. If you think about it, anybody who achieves unusual excellenceyou could throw Warren Buffett, Miles Davis, Michelangelo, or the Buddha and Jesus and other spiritual figures in therehas a sense of direction and a genuine feeling for the most important thing in their life.