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Who Hears This Sound?

Adyashanti On Waking Up From The Dream Of “Me”

One day, when I was thirty-three, something happened without any emotion, which, for me, was absolutely necessary: I heard the call of a bird outside, and a thought came up from my gut, not from my head: Who hears this sound? The next thing I knew, I was the bird, and I was the sound, and I was the person listening; I was everything. I thought, I’ll be damned. I had tasted this at twenty-five, but there had been so much energy and spiritual byproduct. This time I didn’t get elated. It was just factual. I got up and went into the kitchen to see if I was the stove, too. Yeah, I was the stove. Looking for something more mundane, I went into the bathroom. What do you know: I was the toilet, too. Paradoxically I also realized that I am nothing, less than nothing. I am what is before nothingness. And in the next moment even that disappeared. The “I” disappeared completely. All of this — the oneness, the nothingness, and beyond both oneness and nothingness — was realized in quick succession. It all exists simultaneously.

Into Silence

Over the course of two years I photographed my grandmother Marjorie Clarke on my weekly visits to her home in rural Butler, Maryland. With her health declining and Alzheimer’s disease loosening her ties to everyday reality, I spent much of my time reading aloud or singing songs to her, attempting to hold her attention as long as possible.

The Road To Linzhi

We’re marooned in a bowl of mountains on the road to Linzhi, Tibet. Unlike the mountains of home, which are settled, full-grown, and staid, the Himalayas are brazen, thrusting themselves into the sky. These mountains are an epic in the making. These mountains humble us: forty-four American and European scientists and their spouses, led by a Tibetan guide, Sangkar, who has lived here all his life.

The Frog Prince

For the first hundred years at the bottom of the well, the frog prince rehearsed his memoir. It went like this: He was born into a sweet life of silks and pastries. Then one day this humpbacked hag of a peasant came to plead her case before the king. What did she want? He couldn’t remember. Something trivial.

Waking Up

Without cancer, from an overdose, to the truth of a marriage

This Is Not That Story

The boy fell from the dormitory balcony sometime between two o’clock and four o’clock in the morning. It had already been snowing for several hours, and it continued to snow after he lay on the ground, so that by the time the dirty white truck rumbled up to the residential quad at 6:15 and three men — the university groundskeepers — climbed wearily from the back, armed with shovels, the snow was nearly six inches deep.

Adrift

Renee and I walked quickly into the sand dunes, out of sight of the water. My last backward glance found the seal pup floating in the surf like a piece of kelp. He haunted my thoughts the entire way home. That night, curled in bed with a pillow, I sobbed off and on for hours. The pup adrift in a tumbling world had cracked open the grief that I had felt the need to hide.