“What if you let go of every bit of control and every urge that you have,” asks Adyashanti, “right down to the most infinitesimal urge to control anything, anywhere, including anything that may be happening with you at this moment?” If you did, he says, you would be “a spiritually free being.”
Yet, as he describes this freedom and letting go, Adyashanti emphasizes that authenticity is even more important: “The best thing that human beings can do for themselves is to always be absolutely, totally, and completely coming from an honesty within themselves, a total internal integrity.” A student asks if one should stop asking questions, since questions are a form of control. Adyashanti replies that if “you stop asking questions, that would be a rotten thing to do because then you would just be controlling in the opposite direction.”
This “controlling in the opposite direction” can make it difficult to let go, but authenticity, opening honestly to one’s own urge to control, enables true surrender.
I spent a good portion of my week looking forward to the weekend, to spending time at the beach, which sounded utterly sublime. The day arrived, and all the paradisical imagery that filled my mind approached reality. I was so excited! As I walked toward the beach, I imagined what I would experience. The beauty of nature, tranquility, a connection with spirit.
Gradually, I felt myself tighten around my expectations. I was looking for a sequence of perfect moments. “If I don’t relax,” I thought, “I’m going to mess it up.” I needed to let go, but instead, my instinctive strategizing continued. The focus was my sensory experience of the world, which is sensitive to the mind and heart, and so it’s important to have your mind and heart in the right place in order to experience the joys around you. But that knowledge was tying me up in little knots. I was compelled to manipulate my inner state in order to engineer the perfect moment, and that, of course, is not the sort of inner state that allows joy and love to enter.
How do you receive an experience without trying to mold it into your ideal? How do you anticipate something wonderful without trying to control it? We seem built to approach each new moment with an attitude of control. We want to make it into our fantasy, and yet often what fulfills us most is to open up to the moment as it is and allow it to fill us in its own way.
I have heard some say that the pinnacle of “perfect moment” engineering is the strategic use of recreational drugs. I recently heard a story of someone who spent his life mastering that strategy only to end up confronting his profound troubles in rehab. At the same time that I was stepping onto the beach, this person was grappling with withdrawal from chemical paradise. In rehab, the first step is to admit one is powerless. Instead, he described his strategies for engineering the perfect recovery, unaware that he was still approaching the world with the same attitude that got him stuck there in the first place. In that intense state of control is so much fear. He is terrified of what the world would be like if he were not manipulating it.
What is the world like in the raw? Au naturale? What do we get when we’re not exerting control? What experiences would we have if we truly let go? The fear is that, if we let go, pain and suffering would rush in. We would have to face all of our deepest agonies… like the pain of drug withdrawal, the pain of losing paradise. Perhaps there is some truth to that, but resistence to authentic experience seems to be one of the deepest agonies of all.
I was lying on the beach feeling some tightness and tension in my body, a clenching in my orientation to my experience, and I realized that I could not make the tightness go away. The harder I tried to let go, the more I clenched. And the paradox became clear.
I was trying to control my experience by trying to stop controlling my experience. My tightness IS my experience, I thought. And so, I opened up to my inability to open up. “It’s okay,” I thought. “The universe is here for me, and I’m surrounding by nothing but love and compassion. I can be clenched, and that’s okay. Today, I will feel the beauty of nature through my clenching.”
In that moment, I felt my heart open wide and pulse with the heartbeat of the earth beneath me. I felt so much love. The energy of the earth and the trees and water circulated through my body. I felt blissful and embraced. Totally at peace. I wanted nothing more than to allow the moment and everything around me to be itself.
I entered the water and touched its surface and let the current pass through my fingers like the flow of time. Impermanent, yes, but eternal at the same time. This moment was engineered, I thought, but not by me. I gazed at the sky and glistening water and said thank you.
