Taking the teacher's words lightly

Last night I went to hear my beloved teacher, Adyashanti, talk. I hadn't seen him in person for almost two years, and still, as always, I felt such a deep appreciation for his being, so much joy in his presence.

A couple things caught my attention. He talked about the "immensity."  I actually find the word "boundless" more accurate, both in my own experience, and in terms of definition. "Immensity" implies size while "boundless" acknowledges that what we are describing is beyond measurement. For me, it's more like falling into a bottomless well -- you just go down and down and there is no bottom.

Nonetheless, words are meant to evoke, not only to denote, and in that respect "immensity" probably does the better job than "boundless." The body can feel that largeness, and I, for one, was moved deeply into that space last night as he spoke of it, as it seemed the whole room was.

Adya also talked about his experience of enlightenment as of first moving out of the body into the immensity (I'm paraphrasing, I hope correctly), and then, in time, the awake energy needing to move back into the body, to become "embodied." This has been Adya's teaching since early on, and for many years I tried to match my experience with his description.

Now I see it a little differently: We already ARE that enlightened presence. It lives us, in fact, whether we are conscious of it or not. So it makes more sense to describe what happens as the awakened energy recognizing itself as (not "in" but "as") the body, as form, as well the formless. It has never been any other way: we've just failed to notice.

The point is not to take what is said by any teacher, or anyone else, too seriously or literally. It is all just a way of trying to describe the indescribable. And when the pointers work, it's wonderful.