I spent last night down in Palo Alto, at Adyashanti's "Christmas Intensive." Ok, so to me, a boy trained in the Theravadan Buddhist (read: old school) tradition, a word like "intensive" means a LOT of sitting meditation and a bit of discourse. So I walked in with my pile of vipassana accoutrement --pillow, REI blow up sitting pillow, and Indian shawl--only to see that everyone was sitting on pews at the Unitarian Church. The vision in my mind came from day-long sittings I've attended, where everyone sits on the floor in a conference room.Arriving late, I sat outside till the doors opened at 3:30pm. When I sat down, Adyashanti began to speak, commencing satsang (which technically means, from Sanskrit, "In the company of truth"). Then, before the break, a bald-headed guitarist sang a couple songs, and people broke for dinner.
Well! I wasn't quite sure what to do with all this. My judging mind wanted to latch on to the totally un-Theravadan doings, but part of me was just tickled at being surprised, and at the strange mix of stuff. I sat during the dinner, just to be ornery, but also so I could move up in the pews to be close to Adya for his next talk.
But before that, more guitar and singing, including a couple carols. Yeah, traditional Christmas carols. Natch. We all got carol books to sing from, but I wasn't there yet, so just listened.
Then Adya took the stage, in his odd, David Byrne-ish big brown jacket, and began speaking, or continuing to speak about the Christ story, setting it in a non-dual perspective. It was great to hear his take, which struck me as dead on, that the story is not about a historical human, but about the experience of human awakening.
So I took that in, but much more so, I watched his eyes. Being up close now, I could see his face and eyes clearly, and though his physical eyes would twitch about the room, especially when answering the questions at the end of his talk, the energy of his eyes never wavered. It was really both amazing and utterly common to watch, in the way that all mythical things are when you see them happening in front of you. Enlightenment has all sorts of images attached to it, but seeing the awakeness right there in his eyes, it gives some meat to the bones of stories.
Listening to a cd of an intensive he gave some time ago (a "real" intensive, with periods of sitting and all), I had a moment in which the emptiness he always speaks of flashed in relation to him. The form of this man--his humor, physicality, mannerisms, speech patterns and tones--all became totally empty, like what he had been saying showed up as literally and simply true. There was an "Ah!" he was speaking metaphor, just describing the actual situation, and my mind held it for a second.
Not that it was an experience of eradication or void, something dead or deficient. His eyes bore some similarity to a sharks, in their unwavering awareness, but a shark's eyes are dead. His eyes are alive with something most people don't manifest, that is unwavering but utterly alive...but not alive because they change, but rather, unendingly alive because they don't flicker.
I kept watching because though I believed what I saw, I wanted to keep experiencing it, to let it sink in beyond just the thought level. And I also wanted to see what impact it had on me, particularly when he (at least seemed) to look at me.
On the last point, I remember a time in Northwestern Malaysia, when I saw the same energy or essence in the eyes of a young monk, descending a flight of stairs to board the funicular railroad car. There the experience was almost shattering. Being seen into like that felt akin to suddenly finding yourself stripped naked on stage before a huge audience. Utterly exposing because utterly disarming: my defenses weren't overwhelmed, just negated.
But last night, what I noticed was a joyfulness in the experience, and a willingness to be seen. There was certainly a narcissistic strain, wanting to be seen as special, different and better than my companions. And there was a loving sense of relief, of seeing myself emptied, but without any judgment or criticism. Empty. As he said of a student's narrative, "To call it a story is totally without judgment, the same as calling this microphone a microphone. It's simply what it is."
What also was apparent was that while there was some craving and grasping to control the experience, a substantial part of me saw the absurdity of that desire, how utterly unnecessary that is. And it wasn't some big high of perception, some huge acid trip of a state change, much more common than that and it felt much more substantial.
Then, Adya's banjo playing friend took the stage, the fellow wearing the buck teeth and Harley Davidson shirt, who when I spotted him earlier I was on the verge of judging till I felt the same emptiness of form that came through in Adya. He commenced to tell a string of raucous Tennessee jokes, play some beautiful banjo (he apparently was on Hee Haw and the Grand Ol Opry), and then told some more jokes, including reading a hick version of "The Night Before Christmas." Then the guitarist and three women (including Adya's wife, Mukti) led a slightly rag-tag bunch of carol renditions. And the guitarist sang, "Baby Sings the Blues," about what an infant might thing about this new life thing, set to a far south blues riff.
And then we all went home. A sweet, wonderfully weird.
