$30 thru Nov 14, $40 day of
This event is now full. If you wish, you may arrive and wait for a possible open seat. We may have up to 10 open spots due to “no shows”.
The spiritual life is one in which we are deeply attuned to and oriented around the deepest principle of being, whether we call that God or enlightenment, love or unity, or simply the highest value that we live by. The aim of our longing is of the highest spiritual importance, for it not only influences the depth and breadth of our realization, but also gives rise to the orientation and meaning of our lives. Join Adyashanti for this evening talk exploring the discovery of life’s meaning. Adyashanti, spiritual teacher and author of True Meditation, The Way of Liberation, and The End of Your World, urges listeners to stop, inquire, and recognize what is true and liberating at the core of existence. Asked to teach in 1996 by his Zen teacher, Adyashanti teaches of direct realization, prior to tradition or ideology. Learn more.
Read an excerpt from Adyashanti’s writings, below:
An excerpt from The Most Important Thing, by Adyashanti
What am I in service to?
This is one of my favorite questions. It is an awakener. It is an awareness practice and an honesty practice. It is one of the big questions, up there with What am I giving myself to? What is my life about? Who am I? and What is God?
If we are not asking these bigger questions, we tend to sleepwalk through life, skimming the surface, and acting and reacting from entrenched points of view and patterns of behaving.
Service is not a strictly spiritual idea or ideal; part of the human experience is to serve and to give back. To be human is to help in some way and to nurture the well-being of others. One of the beautiful things about service is that we are spontaneously taking part in the well-being of ourselves. This points to something essential about service: when it is done from a sense of wholeness, when it comes from an overflow and a sharing of an inner abundance, it is enriching and life affirming—not only for us, but for anybody involved in whatever we are trying to serve.
When I think about service, I think about my first teacher, Arvis Joen Justi.
She opened her house to strangers for more than thirty years. Her living room was set up for meditation—black cushions laid out on top of black mats and a small bodhisattva figure at the front of the room. Everything was understated and simple. Arvis cleared her schedule every Sunday and prepared a talk. She did not ask for anything in return. I was impressed by her quiet, humble way and the tremendous strength beneath her humility—a reservoir of clarity and wisdom, of a more awakened way of seeing and experiencing.
I will never stop reflecting upon the great devotion Arvis had to serving something that was important—something she loved. When she first started to offer teachings at her house, she would sit down after preparing everything, but nobody showed up. Still, she wrote a talk, set up her meditation room, and opened her house every single week, week after week. Sometimes, out of compassion, her husband would sit with her, but mostly she sat alone.
She continued to do this for an entire year without a single person coming. That is dedication! What service to the dharma, the Buddhist teachings—not being in service to how many people appear, to numbers or normal measures of success, but to doing what she was called to do.
Her dedication was a great teaching for me. It touched my heart because it spoke to what service is: the willingness to put ourselves in a position of giving, to be an embodiment of what we are dedicated to, and to put our life, time, attention, and energy into the most important things. Even when Arvis was sitting in her living room alone, she was in service to all the people who might show up in the future.