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by Adyashanti

The revelation of Oneness brings a great peace and rest at the center of our being. But it also opens up an opportunity and an impulse to live and express that revelation in the world of duality. To transcend the world of time and space is not the end of spirituality but rather the beginning.To express the timeless within the world of time is to fulfill our true potential.

Only in our love of Truth does the heart break open, and we finally stop asking, “How can I hold onto this Truth? How can I maintain this realization?” We don’t look at it that way anymore. We only look at it as “How can I serve this realization?” There’s no more interest in holding on, finding safety or satisfaction.

When the real heart breaks open, the question becomes, “How can one serve the One?” How can one be this Truth?” And there’s no final answer to that kind of question. It’s always in the moment, at every moment, to be it now—not “How can I be it?” in some image, but just to be it now. We discover that we’re no longer a gatherer of beauty, a gatherer of bliss, a gatherer of peace. We’re not a hoarder. We’re its servant, you and I.

You can’t lose what you serve. That’s the secret. What you serve, you can’t lose. What you don’t serve and what you try to hold onto, you can’t hold onto. It’s always slipping out of your fingers.

That’s why you can never separate wisdom or insight or realization from love or devotion. One has to find in their heart the devotion to serve the Truth that’s found, moment to moment. That’s an act of love, to serve. It gets us out of the last vestige of self-centered relationship with our experience.

When you touch into real love, the farthest thing from your mind is “How can you serve me?” It’s just not there anymore, not in the true spiritual heart. It’s not there in the heart that’s broken open by realization. Then we’re not looking at that Truth for what it can do for me, even though it does for you and for me, over and over, constantly giving itself.

This is an open secret, an obvious secret to living in Oneness: you have to serve it—not because anybody said so, because you don’t have to serve it if you don’t want to. But you don’t get to live it all the time unless you serve it all the time.

When I say serve it, I don’t mean anything that might even be really obvious. I don’t mean serve it in a way that might even be noticeable. It doesn’t have to be served with career, life meaning, goals, and all that. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about each moment, each moment, each moment. Is Oneness being served, or is it not? Is it being embodied, or is it not?

After 15 years of Zen practice and a series of ever-deepening realizations, Adyashanti’s Zen teacher asked him to teach. Since then, many spiritual seekers have awakened to their true nature while spending time with Adyashanti. Adyashanti’s unique expression of the living truth emerges spontaneously from emptiness, free of any tradition or ideology. His teachings have been compared to those of the early Chan (Zen) masters and to the nondual Indian wisdom teachings of Advaita Vedanta. Adyashanti lives with his wife, Annie, in his native San Francisco Bay Area and teaches throughout the Western United States and Canada.

There will be an event, Mysticism & Global Transformation, with Adyashanti & Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee on November 19 & 20, 2005 in San Rafael, Califonia. Please visit the events page for further information. This is the second event they are holding together.

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