Adyashanti & Susanne Marie Interview

Summary

The discussion explores the movement from unity consciousness toward the falling away of a separate self, including how these shifts can arise through crisis and become embodied over time. It also examines the difference between temporary spiritual experiences and a normalized way of living, while considering how functioning and individuality continue without a fixed center.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is the difference between unity consciousness and no-self?
• How can the sense of a separate self fall away?
• How can someone tell the difference between a spiritual experience and an ongoing transformation?
• Can a person function normally after the sense of self dissolves?
• How can spiritual teachings and maps help someone navigate major shifts in consciousness?

Key takeaways

• Unity consciousness can gradually mature into the falling away of its remaining self-reference.
• Major shifts may arise when personal control reaches its limits and surrender becomes unavoidable.
• A temporary insight into no-self is different from living without a fixed center day after day.
• The body and mind can continue functioning without a separate self directing them.
• A sense of personal identity may remain when needed without becoming a fixed belief in separation.
• Spiritual experiences become ordinary as consciousness acclimates to them.
• Clear descriptions of possible stages can help people trust unfamiliar changes in consciousness.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. There have been over 365 of them now, and if this is new to you, go to www.BATGAP.com and look under the “Past Interviews” menu, where you will see them all, organized and categorized in various ways.

It is my pleasure today to be conducting a discussion between Adyashanti and Susanne Marie. Adya is a very well-known and beloved spiritual teacher who lives in the Bay Area, and Susanne is a less well-known but nevertheless beloved spiritual teacher who lives in the North Bay Area.

Susanne had some interesting shifts take place in her life, which has been a series of shifts and spiritual awakenings for many years. But something happened to her about a year and a half ago that she hadn’t foreseen or anticipated: a falling away of the sense of self. I would like her to elaborate on that to get us started, but that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

She had had some conversations with Adya about it, and the idea came up to do a BATGAP interview on that theme. Adya very graciously agreed, all the more graciously because he’s had a rather nasty flu in recent days, and this whole interview was sort of touch and go. We are up at Adya’s house conducting the interview.

So, Susanne, maybe we could start by you explaining what happened in terms of this falling away of the sense of personal self, and then we’ll take it from there.

Susanne: Okay. Well, I had been living in the state of what I call “Unity consciousness” for probably about eight years or so, growing more used to the experience of being unity, and even having the sense of unity kind of thin out.

Rick: I’d like you to define unity, because we can’t take for granted that everybody knows what you mean by that.

Susanne: It’s just the sense that the inner division has fallen away, and there’s this sense of feeling unified inside. When I look outside of myself, there’s a sense of unification; there isn’t a feeling of separation between myself and what I’m seeing, what I’m feeling, or what I’m experiencing.

Everyone is going to have a different experience. We’re all wired differently. But for me, when I was in that time period—which wasn’t always exactly the same kind of experience, because it changed over time—not only did I become accustomed to it, but it also expanded. It was a time of inclusion, like including more and more as myself.

Rick: Like the circumference of unity kept expanding and taking more in.

Susanne: Right. The sense of my being whatever I looked at—for instance, when looking at a plant or looking at a person, I was part of the experience. That expanded to include more and more, not just my body but also the chair, then the room, then others, and then the feeling of everything.

Rick: So when the experience initially dawned, were you the primary focus of perception, in terms of unity, but secondary and tertiary and so on were not? Then did that continue to expand until nothing could be found outside the circumference of unity?

Susanne: It was just that I didn’t have the sense of something not being unity. It was all just one, and it was really, really obvious. Even though there still felt to be a differentiation between me and other things, that didn’t conflict with the sense of it being one. There was also this increasing capacity to become, in a way, whatever I was putting my attention on—sensing into the bird and sensing into that kind of thing.

At first, it was just this kind of “Wow!” That came on the heels of an emptying-out experience, like the experience of emptiness and the absence of content, of being really emptied out. Then the unity came in like a wave. It just took over and filled me back up with myself, with the sense of my self as all things.

First it was this emptying out and then this big filling in. During the next eight years or so, I would sit—it was like an embodiment process, and I love that word—where everything that didn’t feel like it was that knew that it was that. All the aspects of self that felt separate and didn’t have that knowledge, that wisdom that they were included in it, came back home.

So whatever traumas or things like that, even including things from the outside—people, things that are happening in the world—including that also as an aspect of myself, that was kind of like this long period of adjustment.

Rick: Was this all just happening automatically, or were you doing something to shepherd it along?

Susanne: I think there was just the wisdom of life at the helm, and there was this love affair with having everything included. When I would discover something that didn’t feel included, energy would go toward that out of love, total love. Over time, this sense of unity just became normalized, as everything does. All spiritual experiences become normalized, and we get adjusted to a new way of operating—a new operating system.

The sense of it started to ebb—not the sense of being at one with, but the sense of it being different from whatever it was before. This felt sense of self was thinning out over time. It felt like it was a bubble that was expanding and expanding, and it became thinner and thinner. If you said, “So, can you find yourself?” I couldn’t really say I could.

Then one day, another total shift of perception occurred that I didn’t know was really coming.

I had heard a bit that there was something beyond oneness and something about it resonated. I could tell that there was truth to that, but it didn’t really matter to me because I was quite content. Whatever sense of self was left was totally included in the oneness. There was no problem; there was nothing more that was needed.

⛰️ A crisis and a final letting-go

Susanne: A lot of my shifts over time have come from crisis. It’s kind of like life puts me in these crazies, backs me up into a corner, and then another letting-go happens.

I was in this crisis a year and a half ago, a health crisis and a home crisis. I was getting ill, and I didn’t have a place to live that felt good to me. I felt cornered once again. There was this moment, this kind of koan moment, this tightening of the grip, and I thought, “There is nothing I can do to make this go away.”

Rick: By “this,” you mean your external situation?

Susanne: My situation, which was really difficult for me because I couldn’t be with my daughter, and I wanted to still be a mom and take care of her. Life was really challenging, so I was like, “Yeah, there’s nothing I can do.” And so another release happened.

What I feel is that there was this separate-self sense—and I think it might be different for different people as to where it is held in the body, kind of like a “last grip.” For me, I think it was in the body. I think that the separate-self sense was still being held in personal will, in the body, because I was “Mom.” I was this single mom for years, and I needed to hold it together, even though I was going through so many different openings and letting-goes.

There was this one part I did not know, where I was holding it together, and I couldn’t hold it together.

I called Adya about three weeks later, and I said, “I just need to talk to someone about this!” I feel that when these shifts happen, what supports them is this trust, this major trust that it is okay what is going on, and these shifts in perception—that some aspect of you is okay.

The separate-self sense was still being held in personal will, in the body.

Because the change in consciousness was so radical, I had not realized that there was still this medium lying between myself and reality, and that the state of unity consciousness was part of the medium. It was still a landing place inside.

Rick: Let’s shift to Adya. Let’s get your perspective on what she just said, or any kind of feedback.

Adya: We all have our own unique journeys. And yet, even though we all have our own unique journeys, it does seem that there are real similarities. It’s just how we each individually experience those almost universal transition points.

It is very common that the real no-self experience comes out of that. It doesn’t always work that way. I’ve seen people get it just the opposite: they get the no-self first, and they don’t get the unity until later. But usually it comes out of a more mature unity experience that’s not all flowery, where you get swept away with it.

When I hear you give your description of it, it has the feel to me of the quintessential journey from unity consciousness to no-self. It sounds very familiar, and yet the way each person goes through it is so unique.

Susanne: What happened for you with the shift in consciousness?

Adya: For me, the no-self part of it was actually very simple. In retrospect, you can look back and see that there are aspects of that sort of no-self experience long before it bloomed—very little pieces of the puzzle.

For me, it wasn’t heralded in by anything dramatic. It was literally as simple as sitting on the couch, reading a book, and then getting up off the couch. When I got up off the couch, I had a visceral sense that something got left behind. I had no idea what it was. I didn’t go, “Ooh, this is a mystical thing.” It was just like, “Something didn’t get up off the couch. I wonder what that was?”

Later, when I was going to bed, I sat on the edge of the bed, and somehow the little pieces—the cognitive understanding of what happened—came. I went, “Oh! I lost my self. Oh, okay.”

For me, it was very simple and gentle. Some people can experience this no-self thing as immensely destabilizing. I experienced it as just the way that I had always been hooked up with all the spiritual experiences I’d had. It was just like, “Oh, there’s an odd thing I see now,” and that was it.

Susanne: With no-self, you can have the insight of no-self or an understanding or a taste of it, or even a very logical argument for the absence of a self. But one of the fundamental confusions I often hear is that, because someone has this figured out in their mind or they’ve had a moment during some shift, they equate that with a lived reality.

When we hear someone’s experience, we automatically go searching through the memory banks for something that corresponds to what we hear. I think this leads to a lot of mistranslation.

When we’re talking about the experience of “no-self,” I think that’s different from a lived reality. Someone can have a beautiful experience of unity and then it may be almost like nothing ever happened. It may still be there obviously, or as an undercurrent, almost like a perfume, and in some cases it can be completely gone.

The hard thing about this conversation is that there’s the lived experience, which is day to day to day, and then there’s a revelatory moment. Revelatory moments can come and go like flashbulbs, and the actual living of all this stuff is not different from the insight, but at the same time something seems fundamentally different.

Adya: The desire itself, as you mentioned, that relatively soon after that part of our humanity often touches in and says, “Is there another being here that understands where I’m at?” I think that’s a very human connectedness thing.

Susanne: One value of speaking about it is that somebody may see that this is something that can be trusted and that it’s safe, and that it can be let go into the undifferentiation of our being, which is not fixed and not localized and doesn’t have a self-referencing component to it; it’s just pure experiencing.

At times we all drop into that during the day. We’re just experiencing directly. But the habit of self-referencing, of an “I,” of a landing place—it is at first the egoic place of being, and then in unity it’s the self-referencing of the Divine center that gets referred to.

You think it’s actually done and over with on some level, but really there’s still a landing place. When that landing place ebbs and is finally taken away, it doesn’t need to exist for this vehicle to function. Functionality is occurring quite well. It knows how to move, talk, and do; it doesn’t need an inner prop or intermediary in order to make things happen.

For some people it is easeful, but with other people it is a big thing. I’m a bit of a “fireworks” kind of girl—a mystic.

Adya: A big experiencer.

Susanne: A big experiencer! And to be honest, it’s kind of enjoyable, almost.

Adya: It’s what most people want, right?

Susanne: Four months of being on a Disneyland ride. But luckily, over time, having someone to speak with and hear about the phases of change means that when something of this magnitude happens, one doesn’t feel like one is going crazy.

Life is so gracious, and it weaned me over time. I didn’t even have that much of a sense of self. I had a sense of self, but it wasn’t so thick or fixed. It is a little tenacious thing, and there is nothing wrong with it; it is totally innocent and fine.

We’re just forces of nature with a sense that there’s a person there, until it’s not. This has an ebbing-away journey that we call a spiritual journey.

Adya: You use that term “force of nature,” and that’s the exact same term that I had in my mind for a while after that dropping away happened. The only way I could think about myself at all was as a force of nature, in the same way a wind through the trees is a force of nature.

Maps, language, and lived experience

Rick: Adya, you made a course on The Falling Away of the Self, which is an online course that people can still take. One point you made is that you can’t really understand something until you experience it. You could spend years describing the color red to a blind person, and words wouldn’t do it.

You make the point that one can’t really understand this falling away of the sense of self unless one actually goes through it or experiences it. It is good to try and get an understanding, because it smooths and safeguards the path. You have a sense of what’s coming, so that when it does come, you can recognize it.

Adya: That’s the primary reason: to have a map. We still have minds, and our minds are in their own domain. They want to know what’s going on and what has happened. I did the course so that there is at least enough of a map or structure that someone can go, “Ah, okay!”

Rick: I think that’s really valuable. The knowledge of the whole possible range of spirituality might be comparable to the knowledge of the topography of North America in the days of Lewis and Clark. Perhaps a few hundred years from now, our understanding may seem relatively primitive. We were also talking about agreement and verification of truth claims.

I can’t honestly say that I’ve experienced a falling away of the sense of self. But there was one point in your course that jumped out at me: “We are multidimensional beings and we have the capacity to simultaneously experience paradoxically different realities and incorporate the paradox.”

For me, there is a paradox where very clearly there is no person, there is no self, and yet there is. If you ask me where I am or who I am, I would say, “There’s nobody here, and there’s somebody everywhere, and yet there’s somebody right here, and I’m all that.”

You also say, “There remains a sense of self; it’s like a perfume. If there were no sense of self whatsoever, someone could call your name and you wouldn’t turn around.” So even though there seems to be a universal quality, which is impersonal, I don’t know how we can live as human beings without some semblance of localization or identity.

Adya: When it is necessary, it happens. You can get into a really deep samadhi state where you have no idea where to put the food. I’ve been there, and I’ve seen people at retreats with food in front of them, trying to decide, “Where do I put it?” That has a no-self quality, but it’s a temporary state of absorption and obviously not particularly functional.

Rick: Like when Ramana Maharshi sat there being chewed up by insects.

Adya: If we took that as the pinnacle of enlightenment, then yes. But do we just become so absorbed that someone eats our legs off and we don’t even know? That’s not much of a selling point. I’m not being critical of Ramana; he, like everybody else, went through his own process. There was obviously a reason that he started to speak and came out of his cave and engaged with people.

We all undergo our own process. I want to give voice to something because I’ve met many people who disregard what they have as an experience of no-self, or who sense it coming and are thrown into terror. It can go anywhere from mild disorientation to an absolute, catastrophic, four-alarm psychological fire.

Rick: Susan Segal’s book, Collision with the Infinite.

Adya: Susan Segal is a great example. She experienced no-self for at least a decade before she ever ran into unity consciousness, so she had things just the opposite way from how we are describing them.

Rick: In the meanwhile she raised a daughter and got a master’s degree, but said she was in abject terror the whole time, constantly looking for a self and not finding one.

Adya: It would have been helpful if she had had a useful map. Most of the time, these experiences also come into contact with our personal psychology. Everybody has unmet demons, and certain spiritual experiences will invoke them. If there is unresolved material, a no-self experience can be frightening because there’s no place to land, no place to hide, and nothing to buffer you.

A good map that’s simple enough to understand can say, “Hey, you’re not going crazy here.”

When you’re experimenting with consciousness, you can experience really wild things. Sometimes you don’t know, “Have I gone off the deep end or not?” Part of the function of a spiritual teacher or mentor is to mirror back, “No, everything is okay,” or, “You might want to check what you’re doing.”

Susanne: One can have a premonition that something is coming. I had forgotten that the year before I had a vision that I was possibly going to die when I was 51. I was preparing myself on a certain level with the idea of, “Maybe I’m actually going,” making sure my kids and everything were in order.

I wasn’t scared. There was a sense that something was coming to an end, and whatever it was, it was going to be the end of me.

Adya: I had the same thing, by the way.

Susanne: The being knew that this timeline of selfness, the birth of self, had a kind of evolution and inner-development aspect to it. It’s a beautiful journey. I didn’t feel like it should end. It was more like when a child grows up and becomes a teenager and launches from a place of doing quite fine.

When this occurred, I recognize now that it was a premonition of the end of Susanne. Whatever was left of Susanne-ness had a sweet sense to it, even though it was so thinned out—just a little trace. It was included in the whole, within unity, and it had been with me from childhood until that moment. When this occurred, it was no longer.

That is why, as much as one can say, “There’s still some individual left,” I can’t say that I can find it. I’m not saying that it’s not there. It might be so thinned out and diffused that there’s more, and that’s totally fine. Intelligence knows what it’s doing.

When someone asks, “Who is it that’s feeling confused?” I can’t find it. I can’t find it.

Rick: Can anybody ever find it?

Susanne: This no-self is already everyone’s experience, truthfully, without a medium, and that’s part of the exploration.

Adya: I think it’s also the words and the way we talk about it. If I taught that course again, I might say “a sense of being” rather than “a sense of self.” When you’re hungry, you know where to put the food. When someone calls your name, you turn around, and you don’t turn around when fifty other names are called. There is a recognition that differentiation is occurring.

That recognition can occur without a separate-self sense, because a separate-self sense lives experientially as a sense of definite locatability—not merely pragmatic locatability, but a concrete sense of being located.

Rick: What those words really signify.

Adya: Exactly. I’m always listening for what’s underneath the words we speak—for the person who is speaking them, rather than the way I might understand those words from my background.

In the tradition I came from, when they talk about the selfless absolute nature of reality, they remind you that it is not enlightenment. It’s a step, but it’s not ultimately it, because it’s only when all fixation is done with, whether it’s self or no-self.

For me, no-self is not a philosophical, definitive statement about the nature of anything. I use it to describe a perception. It is based in experience rather than anything else. I’m not talking about whether there is or isn’t a self. I’m asking, “What’s your experience of self? What’s your experience of not having that there any longer?”

Susanne: Without a filter of reflecting on experience, that filter is what disappears. Feeling, sensing, thinking, and speaking—it’s all just happening now. I don’t know if that touches on what you were saying.

Adya: I think it’s a really good explanation. A big part of what self is is that thing inside—or imagined thing inside—which is not just experiencing, but talking to itself about experiencing. It is always putting itself as an intermediary.

That’s why adults look longingly at children: they’re unself-conscious, completely being the moment. Adults look at little children and go, “Wow! I remember that.”

Susanne: Children have that clear look of just being here. I remember sensing that there was something off when my parents were hijacked by personality. That was where the beginning of the spiritual search happened for me.

I wanted to speak about the experiencing of this because it touches the heart. We can all relate to it; it isn’t necessarily something elevated or out of reach. We can just be our natural self.

Adya: Almost everything we do for pleasure is a way to temporarily escape the sense of self. Whether watching television, listening to music, going to the movies, taking drugs, or trying to meditate, the commonality is that these things help us achieve a kind of forgetfulness of self.

Susanne: We can be here again, to feel ourselves rather than shying away from it. Nature is the most direct teacher. It is totally unfiltered; there’s nothing lying between. The natural world has such sentience to it. You can feel the life force of it, and it is simply being itself without any medium.

It is healing to go into nature and feel where the veils or separation are between yourself and the natural world. That is a great meditation. You can feel when the veil starts to ebb and you relax into an unfilteredness. We don’t even have to call it no-self; it’s just natural.

Adya: Nature is wonderful because it’s not “selfing” all over the place. One tree isn’t comparing itself to another or having an existential crisis because it isn’t the tallest or brightest. The trees are just being trees.

Rick: I know people who talk to trees and plants.

Susanne: Oh yeah, definite conversations.

Rick: David Spangler once ran through a field whacking ferns with a stick, and suddenly heard the ferns cry out, “Why are you doing this to us?”

Adya: I don’t mean to imply that nature is just unconscious matter with no relationship to us.

Rick: There may be some spirit, essence, jiva, soul, or self in things like that.

Adya: There’s some consciousness there, some sentience.

Susanne: It’s all back to unity. Everything is one; everything is God, creative intelligence. Even though millions and billions of people feel a separate-self sense, it’s all the same thing, and it has its own divine timing of when it ebbs and goes.

If the change is frightening, find a good mentor or teacher who can assuage your fears by modeling the natural state. Human beings are forces of nature as well, and we can model that for one another. We’re meant to be in service to one another.

What changes when personal will falls away?

Rick: One reason we’re doing this interview, and one reason you did the course, is to give people a sense of what they may encounter along the spiritual path. Knowledge can inspire and motivate, and it can safeguard the path. It enables us not to be terrified if something develops, or to recognize that it is what we were told might happen.

The falling away of the sense of self doesn’t sound like much of a selling point. One may wonder, “Am I going to lose interest in my children? Am I going to lose interest in my business? Am I going to lack motivation and just sit around contemplating my navel?”

Adya: I get asked that all the time. With no-self, people often have a preemptive fear because they sense that they may not have the same options they had when they had a self. The other part is the dropping away of personal will, which is the motivating energy that moves the self or ego.

When that goes, your options for moving through the world in that way may change. Sometimes that’s painful, but when that energy goes, it goes, and something else can come instead of it.

Rick: Not necessarily overnight.

Adya: No. Sometimes it never goes all the way for some people. Traditional ideas of enlightenment emphasize the goodies: “I’ll be happier, freer, more connected, more intimate.” But no-self isn’t the goodies. It isn’t bad, but it doesn’t fit into the sales pitch.

Susanne: There’s no “you” anymore that is expanding, growing, developing, and improving. It’s over—for the idea of yourself.

Adya: That doesn’t mean evolution stops, or that we stop learning from what happens to us in life.

Susanne: The personal will is a big piece. The ego-driven self is run by personal will. When that initially drops, that’s what we call awakening. But then there is the Self itself, or Divine will. My experience is that Divine will kicks in.

Divine will’s motivation is the will toward God, the will for God’s will, and the will for an ever-deeper allowance of whatever that is. It’s a different kind of will-force. It works toward the whole in a selfless, altruistic way, while still having motivational energy.

But when the other falling away occurred for me, the will-force that drove this body simply fell away. The body still walked, but there was disorientation: “I’ve been walking this whole time just fine, and this will-force that I thought was me never really made it walk. That was a layer superimposed over the walking.”

I’d love to hear more from you about personal will, Divine will, and the falling away of will.

Adya: You mapped my experience. Divine will is almost like the atmosphere, the inner atmosphere of inspiration. It is positive and beautiful and has a power to it. For a while, most of us become accustomed to it. It is benevolent, though that doesn’t mean it always makes everybody happy.

One woman experienced the bottom dropping out and later said, “You stole my God from me!” I understood it, because she had had that Divine-will experience for a long time and had been unified with it. It was beautiful, and then it was gone.

Rick: Meister Eckhart said, “You can only fully know God from God’s point of view; to know God you have to be God.” If God is omnipresent, is there anything that is not God?

Adya: That’s right.

Rick: If everything is God, is everything Divine will? Some things don’t seem very Divine. Human beings go through a teenage phase, with individual volition and motivation, and then the spiritual process seems to lead to relinquishing that individual bias and returning to alignment with Divine intelligence.

Adya: Animals and infants are in a merged state, but that isn’t the same as mature oneness or no-self. It would be the pre-trans fallacy to equate a pre-self state with a deeper spiritual state. I think of no-self as a state after self—not pre-self.

Susanne: Unity consciousness is an important phase. A lot occurs during it: embodiment, welcoming, adjustment to differentiation, and being not a localized focal point. The sensing being wakes up, and what has been gained intelligently doesn’t go away; it is the medium itself that falls away.

Rick: So if “to know God you have to be God,” and if God is running the show once the self falls away, is it God driving the chariot of your life?

Adya: When you lose your personal self, you lose your experience of a personal God with it.

Rick: A personal God.

Adya: Right, they go together. Of course life is still guided by Divine intelligence, like everything else is. But “Divine will” is another way of saying “what is.” What is is God’s will, the will of nature, the will of existence.

Rick: When I say God, I mean Divine Intelligence—not some guy in the clouds, but all-pervading intelligence with no gap anywhere.

Adya: That’s fine to utilize. But for me, even the terminology fell away. I don’t think of this stuff in spiritual terms anymore. It’s just life.

Rick: “Spiritual” puts a special aura over it.

Adya: Yes. The terminology can make the whole thing more obscure. It is perfectly fine to express it as “God is,” but part of what fell away for me was all the overlays.

What remains after the overlays fall away?

Rick: Here’s a quote from a well-known spiritual teacher named

Your sense of your own being is no longer the ego, which fell away, but this empty center—aware empty space. Eventually it reveals itself to be Divine, the Source of all life. When this becomes mature, you look “out” upon the world, you see or intuit that same Divinity in everything. You experience, in a very concrete, obvious way, that everyone and everything is that Divinity. This takes on a kind of normalcy.

Adya: In terminology, that seems like a contradiction to what I’m saying. Experientially, it is perfectly fine to talk about this as Divine or God. I’ve become more sensitive to the implications of the terminology I use and to what actually serves people.

Language has baggage because we learned it from somewhere. But whatever words we use, we need a connection to what is beyond the words. It is no longer a cup of coffee; it is going to be what it is, whatever we call it.

Susanne: That is part of the evolution: learning concepts and taking on some baggage, with the hope that it serves the unburdening. Can we unconceptualize ourselves over time, take off what is no longer necessary, and keep letting go of what isn’t needed?

Spirituality can have its own ego identity and its own stink. It can take on identity. We need to see what we’ve taken on and tell ourselves the truth about what is in the way of simply being ourselves.

Nature is helpful as a teacher and feedback loop. Whatever is seemingly in the way between what we are and the natural world is a belief or a construct. Nature does not reflect on itself and come up with ideas about what it is; it simply is itself.

It is just about unburdening ourselves of what we’ve taken on that is unnatural.

Rick: Here’s a related quote from

When the unseen subject is no longer there, the outside world disappears as well. You become like any other force in nature, not an extraordinary person. If you want to be extraordinary, stay in the highest dimension of Self; that’s where all the saints are.

And Nisargadatta cautioned that many so-called adepts, yogis, siddhas, avatars, and jnanis have settled for identification with universal consciousness, or “I Am,” rather than surrendering into their prior-to-consciousness absolute nature.

Adya: When I say that the outside world disappears, one meaning is that the way we have structured our seeing of it disappears. As soon as we call it “the world,” that structures the way we see it. Another meaning is that in a deeply absorbed state, our whole experience of the physical world can disappear for a while. Both understandings can be experienced.

When I refer to saints, I’m talking about the saintly state people have in their minds: “When I’m enlightened, I’ll be holy and radiant.” That is closer to unity consciousness than no-self. I’m not comparing saints and non-saints. I’m saying that the exalted state of unity and no-self are different states.

Susanne: Until this occurred, I wasn’t aware that unity had a landing place inherent in it. There is a ground of being, a peace that surpasses understanding, a Divine center that feels one with the whole, and a place that seems free of whatever is happening.

That peace was inherent in every experience. What I saw in retrospect was that there had still been a veil between experience and life experiencing itself directly. That landing place can feel like it is the end, and there is nothing wrong with it. It is simply useful to include in the map that it is a phase that can fade.

Rick: Is there any end phase? Is there an end to spiritual evolution?

Adya: I don’t think there’s any more end to it than there is a beginning. Anyone who says, “This is the ultimate thing,” is really saying, “This is as far as I’ve realized.” I think it is life. Where is the end of life? No-self could be one step in a long series of steps.

Susanne: Later you could look back and say, “There was still something else.”

Rick: The absolute may not change, but the relative expression may continue to be refined and evolve indefinitely. Would you concur?

Adya: Sure. I don’t know if I’d use exactly the same language, but I think that gets to the point. We divide reality into absolute and relative, but those are also concepts.

Susanne: Even to say that the absolute is fixed is a point of view. I only know what I’m experiencing: the worlds of absolute and relative collapse. There’s just this, and it appears that evolution is happening, with constant growth and movement.

Rick: Is there some stone we haven’t left unturned?

Susanne: There are other things we could touch on, such as the power of attention, creative potential, pure potentiality birthing itself, and what opens up when the medium falls away. Attention is no longer hung up on being a self, and that frees a lot of creativity.

Adya: There is also a physical transformational aspect. I’m convinced that the brain gets wired differently. Even my experience of thought is more precise than it used to be, though it can get muddled when I’m tired or sick.

I’m happy that we’re talking about this authentically. Some ways it is talked about don’t feel authentic to me or to many people. Even the idea of no-self can become a great ego-defense: “There is nobody here to do anything.” If that were really the case, you probably wouldn’t be using it.

Rick: It has sometimes been used as an alibi for egregious behavior.

Adya: That is why I’m glad our conversation is based in actual experience. One nice thing is that the self-referencing mechanism isn’t operating in the old way. You don’t have to defend yourself or assert yourself onto every moment.

Susanne: Within unity there is still development, and within no-self there is still development. I don’t want people to imagine that it is the end of evolution or the end of a type of development that can continue without the self-referencing mechanism.

Adya: If we conceptually remove the self-referencing mechanism, that’s all we’ve removed. Life doesn’t come to a halt. We don’t stop learning or growing, even on a personal, human level.

It doesn’t confer perfection. Absolute jerks can realize this, and saintly people can realize it. A person whose personality development is stunted would still do well to continue evolving as a human being.

Susanne: It doesn’t mean that there is a person working on themselves. Life itself is wanting to clarify and clean out the vehicle. It is out of love and purification.

Adya: It is also interest: “Look at that thought I just hung myself up with for a moment.”

Susanne: But there isn’t a center of consciousness where it is landing. That’s the difference.

Adya: And that’s a big difference.

Rick: I want to comment on the jerk point. There are conditions more or less conducive to realization. That’s why spiritual traditions offer behavioral suggestions and purificatory practices. As one Zen saying puts it, “Enlightenment may be an accident, but spiritual practice makes you accident-prone.”

There will be people on the fringes who are not living wholesome lives and who wake up somehow. But cultivating purity and integrity creates a more conducive environment. Once awakening has taken place, that doesn’t mean you are perfect or that all possible cleaning up has taken place.

Ken Wilber likes to say there are three things: waking up, cleaning up, and growing up.

Adya: They don’t always come together as a package deal. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they are segmented in people’s experience.

Rick: There seems to be a correlation, but not a tight one—more like a big, stretchy rubber band. Eventually it pulls the other strands along, but the stretch can get quite large. People can achieve remarkable degrees of realization and still behave in troubling ways.

Adya: You can be quite realized but still be bad at relationships because of your family of origin or other factors. Awakening doesn’t immediately download information about how to relate to people well, any more than waking up makes me a physicist.

If you don’t have the same barriers to seeing your own moments of “I could be a little truer” or “I could develop there,” you may not resist seeing that. There can be a combination of curiosity and compassion moving toward those places.

Waking up, cleaning up, and growing up don’t always come together as a package deal.

Susanne: That’s a good place to leave it: growth continues; it’s never-ending.

Adya: Hopefully, if we came together and talked about this two years from now, it would be a little different because we would have all grown a little and seen something a little deeper.

Connecting with Susanne and Adya

Rick: Susanne, why don’t you say a little about what you have to offer? As a teacher, what do you do, and how do people connect with you?

Susanne: You can connect with me through my website, www.susannemarie.org. I offer teachings and mentoring, and work with people one-on-one and in groups, in person and online.

Rick: And you are available for retreats?

Susanne: Yes, I would love to. I feel really in alignment with what I’m offering. It is just an extension of this life.

Rick: Something I know about you is that you are very humble about wanting to make this available to people. You charge reasonable amounts for what you do, which keeps it accessible.

Susanne: In the past 15 years of being a single mom, I’ve gone through all kinds of things, including not having enough money at times. I have a special understanding of what that’s like. Life seasons us and supports us in the work we do, opening us to understand other people through our experiences.

Rick: Your website is www.susannemarie.org.

Susanne:www.susannemarie.org, s-u-s-s-a-n-n-e. It’s German, but it’s Susanne. Thank you for your support, and thank you, Adya.

Adya: It’s fun to do this.

Susanne: Thank you so much, and to Mukti, too.

Rick: Adya’s site is www.adyashanti.org, where people can find out more. Both of you have mailing lists people can sign up for to be notified of events. Adya also offers a live online talk many Wednesday nights, where people can call in with questions.

Listeners should go to www.susannemarie.org and www.adyashanti.org to find out more about what they do.

Thank you both for doing this, and thank you for listening and watching. I really appreciate your attention and hope this has been valuable for you.

As I mentioned in the beginning, this is an ongoing series of interviews. If you would like to see previous ones, sign up to be notified of future ones, or get the audio podcast, go to www.batgap.com—b-a-t-g-a-p—and explore the menus. Thank you.

Adya: Wonderful to be here with you.

Susanne: Thank you. Likewise, thank you.

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