November Feature Stories
A lesson in Zen:A Conversation with Spiritual Teacher Adyashanti
by Jill DeDominicis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
When Adyashanti first read the word “enlightenment” in a book at the age of 19, something within him woke up. He didn't know it then, but he had felt a calling and would go on to study the ways of Zen from that moment on. He studied under Arvis Justi, a great Zen master who would in turn persuade Adyashanti to enter the role of teacher himself. Since 1996, Adyashanti has been teaching, offering satsangs, weekend intensives and silent retreats, and has authored books on Zen, including his latest, True Meditation. I had the pleasure of speaking with Adyashanti about this new book, as well as his teachings, which push spiritual seekers to question who and what they are at their very core, to see the ultimate Truth and oneness of all things. It may sound like quite a lofty goal, but Adyashanti will tell you that's just another one of our misconceptions about the path of Zen.
Vision Magazine: What do you think of our concepts of teacher?
Adyashanti: Well in spirituality [teaching is] something different. First of all, I hold the teacher as a role, not necessarily an identity, and in spirituality a teacher is something sort of fundamentally different than other teachers, because a spiritual teacher's role is not to communicate information like it is if you're a school teacher. A spiritual teacher really has a different role to play. For me, it's trying to remind people of essential knowledge they actually already posses but may have forgotten they posses–basically the knowledge about their true identity. You can't really tell somebody what that is [the way] you can tell them a mathematical formula. It's almost like everybody actually knows, it's just that in most people, what they really know about themselves is unconscious, it's hidden.
VM: In the article “Freedom and the Unknown” you discuss our conflicting desire for freedom and security. How can we reconcile attempts at freedom with our need for control?
Adya: Well in the short run it really comes down to what do we want more? Do we actually want freedom or do we want control? Because ultimately we can't have both at the same time. We really don't have control, number one. I think most human beings are in some state of reaction or frustration to the fact that they don't have as much control over life as they would like to, as much control of the people, the situations in their life. If they're into spirituality, they find they don't even have control over their own mind or thinking process, or what emotions are going to come into the system. So it's ironic that as human beings, we grow up with this sense that we have control and can be in control, when actually, most of our experience is a constant reminder that so much is beyond our control, which really fuels the sense of the desire for freedom. In one sense freedom is being free from this psychological, emotional demand for a control that we don't actually have.
VM: How does True Meditation differ from your other work?
Adya: It differs in the fact that none of my other books really focus on meditation. They mention it in passing, but this book is really all about meditation and how I see it, which is a little different than a lot of spiritual teachers. I see meditation as the relinquishing of effort and manipulation, whereas [for] a lot of people, their idea of meditation is associated with various ways to control their experience. As I see it, the art of meditation is learning to let go of controlling your experience and finding out what happens when we actually completely let go of manipulation.
VM: In True Meditation you mention the Way of Subtraction. Can you tell us about this?
Adya: The Way of Subtraction is a methodology you might say. It's a spiritual technique used to really come to your true nature, and really in one sense the only way we come to our true identity is by seeing what we are not. We have to see that we're not the image we hold in our minds of ourselves, or the thoughts we have about ourselves–good, bad or indifferent–that we're not all the various ways we identify ourselves. So in spirituality the Way of Subtraction is finding out who we are by finding out who we are not. Sort of ironically, when we find out that we're not anything we thought we were, or were taught we were, what we are shines of its own accord, it sort of leaps forward into our consciousness.
VM: That leads me to my next question. In “Emptiness Dancing” you say we're not the stories we tell ourselves. How can we break from roles we've lived with for so long?
Adya: The first is a good, powerful spiritual question; we have to question those roles. We even take roles that are very common for us. Like right now, I'm playing the role of spiritual teacher and you're playing the role of interviewer. And really easily, if we weren't careful, we could actually become identified with these roles. In other words, interviewing wouldn't just be something you're doing, all of a sudden you would actually think, I am an interviewer, that's who I am, that's my role. You're identifying with your role in the same way if I mistakenly thought being a spiritual teacher wasn't just a role, but if I thought, I am a spiritual teacher–that would be identification. So we break identification by really questioning what's a role and what's a true identity. Or what's an image we have of ourselves and what's a true identity? So mother isn't actually someone who is a mother, mothering is a role you play when you have children, and fathering is a role you play. Father, son, daughter, manager, employee, employer–these are all roles we take on, but sadly, for most human beings, these roles become so familiar that actually one's identity gets solidified, we literally go into a sort of a trance of consciousness and then unconsciously we really think and feel we are the roles we play. So when we really try to meditatively and very deeply ask ourselves, is this role actually what I am? You're interviewing, are you actually an interviewer, is that your identity? I'm teaching, am I actually a teacher, is that my identity? So you're questioning, which is not really analytical, but just a very simple questioning of is it true? Anything I take myself to be, any role I'm playing, is it actually what I am? It's identifying the difference between a role and true identity.
VM: Where do you think these roles come from, are they taught to us when we're young?
Adya: Yes, I think we acquire them when we're young, primarily as coping strategies–we take on the role that helps us to cope well or get recognized, get what we want or need. And then as we go on through a lifespan, we tend to just keep modifying the role we play, again in order to basically get what we need, or more negative motivations could be the desire to control others or be controlled. We play roles that help us get through life or our family systems and later we usually just keep adding to the role. It starts very young and that's why our roles become our identity. I'm sure you've heard people who think they are the good person or the black sheep in the family. We play these roles, but if you start them at 2 or 3 years old, by the time you're 20 it's no longer a role, it's not something helping you get through the family, you actually really feel like that–I am the black sheep of the family, that's how I know myself. So a big part of spirituality is actually getting consciousness out of its trance state with the roles we play or have played.
VM: Do you think there's something innate in us that drives us to explore our identity?
Adya: Sure, I think there is. I think 2 things. One of them is that our innate, true nature drives us. It always stands in the very background of consciousness as a reminder; it is the essence of the spiritual urge in its most sincere form of who am I and what am I doing? I think that's really the essence of spirituality when it comes down to one's identity. So the urge for that is actually anchored and derived from our true nature. If it weren't, there would be no hope of ever waking up out of the separate personal identity. So that's a source that's really positive you might say. Another one is more of a negative motivation, which is when we are in the trance of a personal and separate identity, it just leads to unhappiness, to suffering. It's just not ultimately a completely satisfactory way to live and move through life. So that becomes a motivation I think for people as well.
VM: And you connected to this desire for truth at a young age?
Adya: I think in a conscious way when I was 19 or 20. Pretty young. I can't even remember what the book was, but it was one of the first spiritual books I ever read, and I read the word “enlightenment” and thought I have to find out what that is. I certainly had no idea at the time why it was so important. There I was reading a book, thinking I was doing it out of mere interest, and the next thing I know, this immense desire to realize reality or truth woke up inside. In many ways, especially at 20 years old it was shocking. It's just about the time when we're putting a lot of energy into creating our new identity, our new roles in life and new ways to move in the world; to have this immense desire to see through it all, it's very disconcerting I suppose, if it happens at a young age like that.
VM: Do you think that reflects a problem in how we set up the path for our children?
Adya: It seems like we are asking and putting pressure on people younger and younger to define themselves, to know exactly what they're doing, where they're going and who they're going to be when they grow up. I think now the desire and pressure to solidify into a role, whether it be a career or a direction in life comes earlier and earlier. To take on an identity, an egoic identity seems to be a natural development of our consciousness. I don't really see it as a mistake more than a natural developmental process from which we later move on and awaken from. But yeah, I think we're under much more increasingly cultural pressure to solidify into our role. We see it all around us; we see it on TV where every news program has people who are for and against, it defines almost everything in our culture for and against, like, where do you stand? And we're always in subtle and sometimes overt ways being asked to define ourselves in very concrete terms, which I think makes the whole process much more difficult.
VM: One of your teachings is that awakening is really not that rare, and the idea that it is holds us back from our own awakening.
Adya: Yes, that's probably the most powerful detriment. When we think of spiritual awakening or enlightenment, often times it's an idea where human beings have laid their highest aspirations and almost fantasies. If you asked 10 different people, they come up with 10 different answers and usually the answers are sort of fanciful. We have a vast amount of misunderstanding of what enlightenment actually is, and I think that in itself is what makes this whole thing difficult and really muddies the water. Because really, enlightenment in one sense is nothing more than realizing the oneness of all things–the direct abiding realization that all things are in fact one, and that you are the one and the person you meet is the one, and that everything is the one. That's in essence enlightenment, and through various means we've been taught that it's difficult. I couldn't tell you why, but we've been taught that. And what I've seen as a teacher, as soon as I can open up someone's idea about enlightenment being difficult, all of a sudden it's very possible for it not to be difficult. By and large we live the beliefs we have; so if we think it's going to be difficult, we'll live that belief out.
VM: So in that way we can be our biggest hindrance to ourselves?
Adya: We often are our biggest hindrance to ourselves, exactly. We're usually chasing our own idea of what enlightenment is instead of really sort of innocently looking at it, like, what is it? Most spiritual seekers, especially when they come to a spiritual teacher, the mistake they make is they think, Okay the teacher must be enlightened; I'm un-enlightened, therefore I will suspend all of my own intelligence and abdicate it to the teacher. They don't think that consciously, but that's what happens, which really is the beginning of making enlightenment very difficult, because what helps them in realizing what's really true is honing in on their own sense of truthfulness. It's sort of an intuitive, almost inherent, instinctual sense.
VM: You say there is no separate personal self. Does this mean we all share the same identity?
Adya: The same ultimate identity, yes. Identity itself is a word; it's a tricky word because the experience we have when we really start to wake up from our true nature is not that we get a better identity. That's one of the interesting things about spirituality, when you really look into yourself, behind your ideas or conclusions about yourself, it's like, What is it that's noticing the feelings I have, the identity I have? What is it that's noticing the personality, what is it behind all this? And when you turn within in an introspective and go What am I really?, it takes you through the various layers of who you think you are. What you find is, in the center, you don't find a better, bigger version of you. What you find is My god, there isn't, actually, without the thoughts about myself, without identifying with exterior things, there isn't an inner identity. There is just, well, as we say in Zen there's just emptiness, openness; we could call it spirit also. But there is no personal separate entity with distinguishable boundaries when we look inside ourselves. Almost like who's wearing this mask I'm pretending to be, what is that? And in experience it reveals itself to be a very awake, alive spaciousness. So in that sense, when you look in to find who you really are, you loose your personal identity–it's still there in thought, you can still find it–but once you've seen through it, you know that identity based in thought is not really what you are, it's really just a familiar pattern of thought.
It's strange that we call it coming to our true identity. That is the assumption that when I look into myself and I see through my sort of false self, I'm going to find a truer self. We talk that way in spirituality, but it's also misleading because your true self is no self. That there actually isn't one there, and what is there when we don't find a separate entity inside? What actually is there? What are we when we see through this illusion of separation that's contained within the mind? And that's where it gets really interesting: What am I when I see that I'm not this separate entity? Well, what I am and what you are then starts to be seen as the same thing, underneath the mask we wear. It's the exact same thing, whether we want to call it emptiness or consciousness or Buddha nature or spirit, these are all words for something that is ineffable, ungraspable in words, but in direct experience it's actually very simple, very singular.
Adyashanti will present a host of events in the Bay Area in November. For a complete listing of events, go to www.adyashanti.org and click on “Calendar.” Copies of True Meditation and Adyashanti’s other titles are available through www.SoundsTrue.com.
The Last of the Inuit Shamansby Bente Mirow
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Nobody can explain indigenous shamanism, inherently engulfed in secrecy as it has always been and still is, whether in the Americas, Brazil, Siberia, Africa, Indonesia, the Arctic, or elsewhere. What we know is that great knowledge and healing comes from special individuals, known as shamans, living in remote areas around the world, and presumed to possess powers not available to every man.
Recently new material has been presented about shamanism in Greenland, which allows us a rare glimpse into their world.
Danish filmmaker Karen Littauer, who's father was a medical doctor in Greenland and who has had close ties to these people since her childhood, set out in 2000 and 2001 to interview various elder Inuit and trace their stories. For two years she interviewed and filmed more than 40 elders, who offered to tell their stories of growing up with parents or grandparents who were shamans. Finding the stories and the people willing to tell them was an enormous task and involved much money, traveling, searching, and patience, and was primarily a result of word of mouth. As Littauer realized it would be impossible to paint a complete picture and to address the whole of Greenland, she decided from the beginning to concentrate on the outlying remotest areas of Greenland, where modern life had arrived last, namely the communities of Qaanaaq, Tasiilaq, and Upernavik. Littauer's film, I Remember, Tales from Greenland, was shown at the independent film festival in Mill Valley, California in the fall of 2003. From the more than 70 hours of material Littauer collected, only a small part of which went into the 72 minute documentary, a book was compiled by Littauer and edited by Kirsten Thisted, an Inuit scholar, who also added an extensive introduction about the oral traditions in these specific areas. The book is in Danish and unavailable in any other language, as of yet. Littauer received the distinguished Danish “Hartmann's” prize for the huge and original work of collecting and translating these stories, which will assist in preserving the history of this important cultural time and place. The prize is given to individuals who add a uniquely valuable contribution to the Danish society, and Littauer was named the first, since Danish polar explorer Knud Rasmussen at the beginning of the century, to undertake such a pursuit.
Littauer lost her heart to Greenland when she was 14 and explains how her more than 40 visits have been because of the pull of the people. “It's not that they are a different kind of people than people elsewhere in the world, but perhaps because the colossal nature gives larger proportions in their lives. Life and death are always close, and at the same time the entirety of their people's history lives in them.”
Littauer's love of stories from other times, told by those who have experienced the stories, and especially stories that need no explanation yet cannot be explained by accepted “normal” knowledge, was one of her motivations to help preserve both the tradition and the stories. Especially fascinating to her were the elders who have lived in both worlds, the old one and the new one. But Littauer was also driven by the question of so-called civilized peoples forcing their belief system onto so-called uncivilized peoples, and wondering, in this time we live in of wars and disruptions 
due to religious differences, who were the civilized ones?
The 40 people interviewed are direct descendants of the great shamans. In their lifetime they have lived and witnessed their parents' and/or grandparents' powers and contact with spirits, and heard magical and mysterious stories repeated endless times. In 1894 Christian missionaries arrived and built a colony in Ammasalik (Tassilag today) with directives from the Danish Government to convert the local people from their Eskimo faith to Christianity. Then a colony of Denmark, (Greenland has since obtained independent local governing, although still under the Danish Government in Foreign affairs), most of the Inuit interviewed were born 10-20 years after the first Christian missionaries arrived. As small children they were told that the Christian God was the only acceptable guidance and that shamanism and the stories that were told equated to worship of the Devil. This has naturally contributed to the lack of openness to the outside world. Their lives and consciousness have been true spiritual identity challenges, in which spirits and firsthand knowledge of paranormal happenings had to exist in relative harmony with the new divinity inside their souls as they lived their earthbound existence. Only one woman of all those interviewed dared to express the shame and guilt they must have felt as the world they knew was diminished and annulled as nonsense by missionaries from a greater world.
Inoqusiaq Piloq explains: My grandfather was a strange man. He used to tell me about the time when he was baptized. He told me how he loved living with his spirit guides. He could get his guides to help him with anything. Spirit guides had souls very much like peoples'. They were people after all.
My grandfather was a great spirit caller. Just while he was at the height of his life's powers, the missionary Gustav Olsen came to the Thule area to preach Christianity. I had not been born yet, so I never experienced my grandfather as [a] spirit caller. He had already been baptized when I was born.
But he told me about the time he was baptized. I don't know how old he was. He was adult, at least. Maybe even married. He said it had been a very, very difficult time for him, when he decided to get baptized, because his spirit guides kept begging him not to. His body was hurting all over, and he was not the least bit sick. He said it was as if someone was sticking nails into him all over. He had been convinced that it was better to live as a Christian than as a spirit caller. His wife held his hand all the way to the church. It was as if someone was slapping his face. He had to fight to get into the church.
He was baptized, and his spirit guides continued to come to him anyway every time he danced to the drums, even though he had become a Christian.
He said the transition from living with spirits to becoming a Christian had been difficult. He had been followed by voices other people couldn't hear. It had been very unpleasant to have two strong spiritual powers fighting against each other inside of him.
What emerges from the Inuit stories in Littauer's work is that the spirits the shamans surrounded themselves with did not exist in a collective conscious and were not projections of the self, but were experienced and documented by many “ordinary” people on an occasional and often unwanted basis, and not always achieved through long periods of fasting and isolation, as is generally believed to be required.
“Shamanism is not a belief system. A shaman doesn't believe in spirits. He talks with them, interacts with them, he lives with them. A shaman no more believes in spirits than he believes he has a house to live in,” says Michael Harner, Founder of The Foundation of Shamanic Studies.1
Hunter and teacher Assar Pivat tells about the confusion in his personal universe: I believe there is a God. I believe it completely. I also believe there are spirits.
I believe there are spirits because I often get touched on my feet when I walk. A spirit is following me when I walk. I can't see it and I can't touch it. But I can feel it when it touches my feet. Someone is following me when I walk. When I stop and try to touch the spirit, there isn't anything there. But I know it's there. It's just that you can't see them, the spirits.
It was commonly understood among the Inuit that spirit guides became invisible when they were close to ordinary people. To the shamans they served, they were an integral part of their identity web.
One woman was given her grandfather's ability to hear people's thoughts. It has plagued her life, and she is upset because she did not want to know what other people are thinking. But she is not a shaman and has no way to undo the magic. Her life is a reality of voices in her head, not imaginary voices, but the voices of the people around her. Her inner web is complete with visuals and sounds existing in the real world of her community.
As the struggle for personal identity takes place within these Inuit it is worth noting that personal identity does not necessarily translate into what you and I experience as we question who we are. Unlikely to stand in front of a mirror in their igloo asking themselves, “Who am I?” or stating, “I love you” to their mirror image to find self reliance, the Inuit's identity is defined within his or her community. Some talk about how they had been given great powers, but lost them when they broke the taboo of eating certain meats. As such, a person could go from being identified as a shaman by his or her community to someone without shamanic powers. Even though there are angry spirits, quittoqs, a true shaman, or angakkoq, brings his abilities to the community to benefit his people. And everyone was a witness and beneficiary. In this way, being told that their experiences were invalid and untrue challenged the individual Inuit's sense of identity.
It is clear that in the Inuit community spirits are tangible, their existence clear to all, and the powers sometimes obtainable through heredity, a sudden “gift,” or occasional coincidence, and that spirits can be living human beings as well.
While shamanism does not preach to be the only way of healing or understanding life, Inoqusiaq Oiloq talks about how her grandfather's spirit guide tried to explain to her why she shouldn't convert to Christianity. We get the impression it is more of an ego-trip on the part of the spirit, and that spirits love the humans they have chosen and want to help them:
My husband and I had gone by a dog sled on a fishing trip. My husband put up the tent for me as I had suddenly become very, very tired. My husband went to find little auks, and I went to lie down in the tent. Suddenly someone was standing in the tent next to me. I got so frightened I was completely unable to move. A big dark man tried to move me around to my other side and I resisted all I could. He said: “Finally, I meet you. You are your grandfather's grandchild. From ever since you were very little I have come to see you, the time when I was your grandfather's spirit guide.” He kept trying to move my body over. I was sweating so much, sweat was running down my face from the hard work of resisting. I don't think that I said anything, but it turned out that I had answered him by my thoughts. Imagine that, he could read my thoughts! And so he could answer my questions. And imagine, he was really my grandfather's spirit guide. My grandfather had died so long ago, but his spirit guide was not dead yet. He kept talking to me and he said something that made me very sad and confused, because I was a Christian. He said to me: “Your faith is not going to help you. Spirit guides are very helpful and of great use for humans. If something happens to humans, we are there right away to help. No matter if you are hungry or what happens, Christianity will never be able to help you the way you spirit helper will.”
He kept arguing and trying to turn me over. I knew that if he managed to turn me over, it would mean I would not be able to stay with my faith. Suddenly I heard my own voice and he was gone.
Littauer had to rush a bit to put the stories together as many of the elderly were eager for the crew to return with the finished film. They wished to survive their stories. Once Littauer and her crew returned with the result, several of the elders passed away. It meant a lot to them to share these stories, and they felt they could now “retire.”
The film and the book were both generously received by the Inuit themselves, the press, and the public. Littauer received funding from 60 different sources, yet a large amount of material remains still unused, waiting for the next round of financial aid.
To Littauer herself, doing this work has left a profound sense of the importance of following one's intuition and staying with what our hearts tell us is right, no matter how much we are pushed to believe something different. Her own “intuition” has been strong since childhood, and she was able to turn occasional fear into strength and belief in the validity of her own experiences.
Our lives are a web of interrelated parts: culture, social dynamics, nature, religious or spiritual practices, heredity, historical memories, personal memories, et cetera. Together these pieces become an expression of values in stories and beliefs and form our own personal identity web. Our true power and essence is recognized only when we know and understand our relationship to all things, to one another, and within the community.
While the shamans themselves did not operate with probabilities or the challenges of belief, the ordinary Inuit were caught between three worlds, the so-called real one and two opposing spiritual ones, all inhabited by sentient beings.
For the last surviving direct descendants of the great Inuit shamans, the direct experiences are gone, but the symbols remain. The oral stories presented with great care and with great attention to the specifics of their Eastern Arctic Inuit oral tradition, will no doubt be told for generations to come, as no written Inuit language exists. And as we have seen, while the Inuit themselves would never doubt the existence of the spirits, they go to great lengths not to lay claim to such belief without also making clear it's a story.
Of course it may be that all I have been telling you is wrong, for you cannot be certain about what you cannot see. But these are the stories that our people tell.
Stories and information about the Inuit culture provided by Karen Littauer and Kirsten Thisted in the book Groenlandske Fortaellere: Nulevende Fortaellekunst I Groenland (Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 2002). To order a copy of the film, email nukafilm@nuka.dk. Bente Mirow writes what her heart and mind demand. She met and assisted Karen Littauer during her California Independent Movie premier in 2003. Mirow can be reached at hyggemer@netscape.net.
1. Bonnie Horrigan, “Shamanic Healing: We Are Not Alone. An Interview of Michael Harner,” Shamanism Magazine, Spring/Summer 1997, Vol. 10, No. 1.