What opens inside you when you’re willing to entertain the possibility that things may be different than you thought they were is what I call the “great internal space”: a place where you come to know that you don’t know.
This is really the entry point into the end of suffering: when you become conscious of the fact that you don’t really know. I mean that you don’t really know anything—that you don’t really understand the world, you don’t really understand each other, you don’t really understand yourself.
This is such an obvious thing when we really take a moment and look around. When we look at the world that human beings have created and how we relate to each other, it’s so obvious that we don’t really know anything at all.
This is one of the things that I saw when I was a little child: This adult world has an insane quality to it. Everybody’s going around pretending like they really know things, pretending like they know what’s real and what’s not, pretending they know what’s right, pretending they know who’s wrong, but actually nobody really knows. But this is something we’re afraid of. We don’t really want to admit that nobody really knows.
Again, we can see that there’s a great unwillingness in most of us to be disturbed in this way. But if you’ve suffered enough—and I imagine that you have suffered plenty—then maybe you are willing to be disturbed. Maybe your suffering has created a longing for this great internal space.
- Adyashanti, Falling into Grace
This is really the entry point into the end of suffering: when you become conscious of the fact that you don’t really know. I mean that you don’t really know anything—that you don’t really understand the world, you don’t really understand each other, you don’t really understand yourself.
This is such an obvious thing when we really take a moment and look around. When we look at the world that human beings have created and how we relate to each other, it’s so obvious that we don’t really know anything at all.
This is one of the things that I saw when I was a little child: This adult world has an insane quality to it. Everybody’s going around pretending like they really know things, pretending like they know what’s real and what’s not, pretending they know what’s right, pretending they know who’s wrong, but actually nobody really knows. But this is something we’re afraid of. We don’t really want to admit that nobody really knows.
Again, we can see that there’s a great unwillingness in most of us to be disturbed in this way. But if you’ve suffered enough—and I imagine that you have suffered plenty—then maybe you are willing to be disturbed. Maybe your suffering has created a longing for this great internal space.
- Adyashanti, Falling into Grace
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