In a moment of radical awakening, the mental commentary stops. When mental activity solidifies again, as it does for most people, the mind often offers up these questions: How will things get done if there is no me to do them? If there is no desire, what will get me out of bed in the morning? Who is going to pay the bills? Who will look after the kids? How can I make things happen? Not only are these fears unnecessary, they are in fact unfounded. As translucents live more in the fullness of natural presence, they report that things happen with more spontaneity and natural ease than ever before.

Questioning the Mind
In the moment of awakening, for the first time you know yourself to be something other than just the mind. You experience the activities of thought as events at which you are a spectator, rather than the fabric of who you are. In Iago’s trance, we often mistake our thoughts for reality. If you have a jealous fantasy (a mental event), you feel as though you have actually been betrayed rather than watching a point of view arise, pass, and dissolve again. The same thing happens when we get lost in a good film. When we are living translucently, we still have thoughts, and we are also aware of their being thoughts. But for the first time, we can question belief without it threatening our identity.

As soon as we are able to recognize thought as a passing event, we become unglued from it. We can then question its reliability. However translucent we may have become, this process of letting go of a personal reference point always feels like a small death, but it always brings with it a rebirth. Thought and action can occur in completely new ways, as direct and innocent responses to the present moment, unclouded by the undigested past. Translucents still take action, but as a pure response to each moment, free from indecision, beliefs, or agenda. In a highly translucent moment, we know nothing with the mind but are able to act without hesitation, in inspired certainty. This certainty does not come from rigid belief, as it might for a righteous fundamentalist, but from an open and innocent capacity to respond to life, moment to moment.

Adyashanti told me a story that dramatically illustrates this process. His mother began to show symptoms of an undiagnosable illness: heart palpitations, strange sensations in her head. She would often think she was dying. This went on for months. No doctor could help her. One day he got a call from his father:

He said, “You’d better get over here, your mother is convinced that she’s dying and she wants to see you.” So I got in the car, and I drove over. There she was on the bed, terrified, and thinking she was dying. “I just feel like I’m slipping away,” she said. “I’m slipping into this blackness, and as soon as I slip in there I’m going to die.” I had no idea what to do...

For some reason, out of nowhere, I got up on the bed, and I was straddling her body, right about where her waist is. I took one of her hands, and said, “Well, Mom, if you’re going to die, let’s die right now. You know where it’s black? Let’s go there together right now.” I can’t explain the intensity that was there. It wasn’t like I was thinking, “This isn’t real; she’s not going to die.” I really didn’t know, but I grabbed her hand. She was so frightened that she was willing to go. I entered the space she was in, and I could see why she was experiencing it as death, it was just this utter blackness. We dove in there together. I didn’t know if I was helping to lead my mother to her last few heartbeats, I was just following what was happening. I was moved by it. She went into the void, and the perception of the one who could die disappeared. I opened my eyes, she opened her eyes, we could feel it, and that was it. It was gone.

Adyashanti’s actions came without his needing to think at all. He told me that he deeply loves his mother; he loves to be around her. Had she really died, he would have been in deep grief. He did not want her to die. But all the same he told me he had the feeling, “If you are going to die, we will die right now together, because that is what is happening.” While not every invitation to act without thought is so dramatic, these are the moments when the rubber meets the road, when we find out how free we have really become of old beliefs and habits.

Satyam Nadeen runs three retreat centers, one in Costa Rica, one in Mexico, and a new facility in Georgia. His centers employ hundreds of people, in three countries, and accommodate thousands of guests every month. Millions of dollars pass through his business every year: “All day long, people come to me needing decisions to be made. I don’t make those decisions from thinking; I can’t. There is no way for me to have access to all the factors involved. I have to relax and wait for the right response to come. And almost invariably, it is the right thing.”

When we act outside the mind, we experience almost no indecision or complex mental processing. When translucents are presented with a new situation, a spontaneous, unresisted response arises that is not questioned. When we can see the world without the filter of belief, it becomes perfectly obvious what to do in each moment. Since we are not resisting anything, life itself keeps asking us to play, to dance beyond our habits. To resist this playful invitation would itself be to cling to a point of view.

We know what to do, not from weighing pros and cons, or making lists or asking people, but from an open clarity, where there is no belief for or against anything. There is just quietness and a capacity to respond spontaneously to the present moment. Life is doing itself through you, and there is no need to interfere.

Translucents are always in an ongoing evolutionary process. After a radical awakening, all the usual trappings of a personal life can continue. There are, however, two notable exceptions. Almost all translucents report that they no longer have any experience of either boredom or indecision. Adyashanti explains:

Liberation is when there is no longer interior human conflict going on inside, subtle or overt. When conflict has ceased, a huge part of your human way of experiencing life is over with, and it is never going to come back. You literally cannot walk around with conflict inside. That doesn’t mean that you’ve arrived, in the sense that you are the whole divine, absolute, total expression of God. It just means that that conflict has ceased.

This is not to suggest that life is always safe and secure. Many people report that they only know what to do, with inspired certainty, at the eleventh hour, and until that point the temptation to take impetuous action remains. When the mental processes of indecision have subsided, there is room for a real sense of integrity. Lynn Twist calls this process taking a stand rather than a position:

A position is usually for or against something; it calls up opposition and creates a dialogue that is adversarial. It creates fragmented pieces, because somebody takes this position, and then somebody takes that position. If you take a stand, like Martin Luther King, or Gandhi, or Mother Teresa, that’s a different domain of life. You access a portal, a domain of “stand-taking,” that gives you access to true power, tapping into the real truth and destiny of the human family. I take a stand. I don’t necessarily say that what I stand for is true or false, or right or wrong, or that I’m accurate and that others are inaccurate. I stand for these things, and I know from standing in this place of possibility and power I can navigate myself and the people that I have the privilege of interacting with more successfully and more gracefully through the world we live in.