Everything Comes Back to Nothing

[Guest guest]

Everything Comes Back to Nothing Inexplicably it comes. When you least expect it. For

a reason you can never know. One moment you are striving, figuring,

imagining, and then, in the blink of an eye, it all disappears. The struggle disappears. The striving disappears. The person disappears. The world disappears. Everything

disappears, and the person is like a pinpoint of light, just receding

until it disappears. And there's nobody there to witness it. The person

is gone. Only, only awareness remains. Nothing else. No one to be aware. Nothing to be aware of. Only that remains itself. Then it's understood, finally and simply.Then

everything—all the struggle, all the striving, all the thinking, all

the figuring, all the surrendering, all the letting go, all the

grabbing hold of, all the praying, all the begging, all the cursing,

too—was just a distraction. And only then is it seen that the person was, is, and ever will be no more than a thought. With a single thought, the person seems to reemerge. With more thoughts, the world seems to reemerge right out of nothing. But now you know.The

incarnation is nothing more than a thought. A thousand incarnations are

but a thousand thoughts. And this amazing miracle of a mirage we call

the world reappears as it was before, but now you know. That's why you usually have a good laugh, because you realize that all your struggles were made up. You

conjured them up out of nothing—with a thought that was linked to

another thought, that was then believed, that linked to another thought

that was then believed. But never could it have been true, not for a second could it have actually existed. Not ever could you have actually suffered for a reason that was true—only through an imagination, good, bad, indifferent. The intricacies of spiritual philosophy and theologies are just a thought within Emptiness.And so at times we talk, and I pretend to take your struggles seriously, just as I pretended to take my own seriously. You

may pretend to take your own struggles seriously from time to time, and

although we pretend, we really shouldn't forget that we are pretending,

that we are making up the content of our experience; we are making up

the little dramas of our lives. We are making up whether we

need to hold on or surrender or figure it out or pray to God or be

purified or have karma cleansed—it's all a thought. We just collude in this ridiculous charade of an illusion pretending that it's real, only to reveal that it's not. There is nothing really to purify. There's no problem. There is only what you create and believe to be so. And if you like it that way, have at it! But we cannot continue this absolute farce indefinitely. We cannot continue to pretend this game we play, indefinitely. It's impossible. Everything comes back to nothing. And then it's a bit harder to hold a straight face consistently for the rest of your life.Transcribed from a talk in Pacific Grove, CA, June 9, 2006.© 2006 by Adyashanti. Love~All~Ways*~Karma*