DRIFTED IN THE DEEPER LAND
Chapter 7
The Realm of Opposites Is Not User-Friendly
During the time of these gatherings, Adi Da Samraj would sometimes have daytime meetings with a small number of the devotees in the gathering group, generally in order to discuss more practical matters relating to His Work and the community of His devotees. In such a small meeting on December 6, the discussion turns to the state of the world in general, which Adi Da describes in sobering and unvarnished terms.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Scientific materialism wants to look like it’s friendly to mankind in it’s infinite expansion and so forth, but it’s talking about everything just being a mortal moment, including any human individual. It’s dark propaganda that’s giving all these supposed “light” messages to everyone, but it’s real message is “mortality, materialism”. It reduces everything to this view, so it eliminates the basis for everything that exists that you could call “cultural”. Because if there’s nothing but momentary blobs of molecular accidents, then what difference does anything make? There’s no basis for any structure of rightness. Why should anybody care about anything, in that case?
Humankind is self-destructing. It is so distressed, so disturbed, even in its psyche, that it’s fundamental integrity has been lost. It’s so disturbed that it’s highest message to everyone is: “Everything is just chaotic, randomly appearing, temporary bundles of molecules. And that’s all it is. There’s nothing going on as Grace. It’s just this.” This is the highest communication of the day. This is the highest expression of philosophy. This is what persuades people, anyway.
It’s a strange philosophy for everyone to be attached to, as well. Why should it be the preferred philosophy? Of all the philosophies, it’s the one that allows the least hope relative to any matter whatsoever! If it were so -well, that’s that, that’s the way it is. But why should one hope that it is the one that turns out to be so? Why should one so much want it to be so that one is moved to presently affirm that it’s already so, even though you haven’t really found out that it’s so yet? Why are some people so intent on this being so? Rather than just willing to have it be that way or whatever the way it is, but here just to find out the way it really is, and not anything other than that.
The common presumption now is this “everybody is just a competitive blob” senseless nonsense, with a little bit of religiosity thrown on top of it that’s basically just about somehow giving authority to public morality. that’s the basic function of conventional religion. that’s why some aspects of religion are tolerated, because the political system, which is based on scientific materialism, knows it doesn’t have anything within its creed that suggests that any kind of public morality is of any use whatsoever, except as a way of making sure that everybody else is somehow not going to bother you.
On the one hand, you’ve got this “everything is just material lumps slamming against one another” message from the philosophers, the scientific materialists. And, on the other hand, from the people who are concerned about keeping some sort of order, you get all these messages telling you that even though everything is just materialistic, everything is just about temporary molecular groupings, when you’re dead you’re dead-somehow or other there’s a holy source that tells you to be a nice guy.
The philosophy tells you everything is blobs, and you’ve got blobs telling you that you have some sacred responsibility to be a nice guy! [Beloved Adi Da laughs.] it’s crazy. it’s all the product of a social/cultural event that is self-involved to the point of having become self-destructive. It came to the point of feeling that there isn’t anything else but this “you” that’s nothing more than a molecular blob. Apart from game-playing, everybody feels that everything is meaningless, mortal emptiness, just jiggling around, everybody trying to have their moment of feeling really wealthy and having everything they want, all their desires fulfilled.
It’s not enough to try to believe some “big thing”, either, when you’ve got a fundamental message that “there’s nothing but molecules” that sounds very, very convincing. Because you’re all kinds of set up in your patterning to accept that message at face value as being authentic, right on. You don’t really take the time to discriminatively examine it. You’re being propagandized, pulled by the nose. You’ve become couch potatoes.
Human culture in the present is a conversation and a look that is based on having no connection to fundamental Unity and to the Source of that and all within It. it’s not true that there are just molecular blobs. There’s a level of molecular blobness, no doubt, but there’s an immense process that includes far more than is talked about in this materialistic language.
Generally speaking, this is a society that has lost its culture. It has lost its reason. It has lost fundamental dispositions of tolerance and cooperation and so forth. If anything is sacred, it’s certainly that kind of behavior-respect in the world, and not just self-generated, competitive hardball about everything. Not self-destruction at all, but willing to grow, become right.
At any rate, the world will be whatever it is. There’s not a lot that can be expected in that big picture without a real fundamental change taking place. it’s to be seen.
In another sense, it’s not any worse than it ever has been. It changes, but it never gets better. There’s always someplace where it’s worse than it is anywhere else, and looks worse than anything that’s ever been. In terms of the psychological impact of all of this, it’s been just as “worse”, so to speak, for people in other times, too. I mean, it’s one thing to wake up as a predator, a lion (or something) with few natural enemies. it’s another thing to wake up as a deer who’s in the natural world treated as nothing much more than a fruit hanging out of a tree to be nibbled or taken directly without the slightest concern.
There have been all kinds of approaches to the pursuit of integrity relative to human experience-rightness, Happiness, and so forth. And a lot of blah-blah about it, because there’s more blah-blah than there is will that actually makes change, or response that actually makes change.
Your response to Me is how you change. I talked to you about the will last evening. Well, yes, it’s the will, but it’s not this bearing-down thing merely. it’s more like the body-mind responds to your intelligent disposition, which is the core of the whole body-mind anyway. It just sort of falls in line with you very sympathetically. it’s that kind of will where all you do is find when the pattern is right, and then that’s it. You resonate with it. You make changes readily from the core position, or the interior of the pattern. Therefore, from the inside out, you manifest a change in your structuring that corresponds to your heart-and-mind integrity and significant depth.
Now, when you begin to function in that depth, you’re also beginning to locate the direct experience of the inherent Unity of conditional existence, and, beyond that, it’s Source-Condition. You are reconnecting, in other words, with what should be built in culturally to humankind. In the past, under certain circumstances, there’s been at least a significant amount of that. Everywhere there’s been something or other of it. Nonetheless, its principal manifestations are the people who entered into it most profoundly , and generated signs of transformation and Realization and Wisdom that were signs of a kind of fundamental resolution toward which mankind aspired, with which it could associate, or which it could adapt to, and so on.
Instead of the chaos, a structure (that therefore had authority), or a pattern (that had integrity), was assumed by everyone-somehow communicated to everyone and therefore assumed. And people functioned on that basis, which included many planes. It wasn’t just material. It included the world of the psyche, that which is mysterious. Overall, it included the Divine, and so on. Every place had its different notions of it all, but a sacred order of some kind was always the pattern presumed order began to appear among human beings.
You don’t have it as your obligation, or your opportunity particularly, to change the big picture of how the world is going. You can establish integrity in your own life and real practice, and within your sphere of associations, relations, be communicating that sign and disposition, good-so that’s how you can serve it. Very few are in a position to even speak to the world about a change of view, a change of action, and so on. Most people aren’t in a position where that’s what they’re up to, beyond their influence among those that they know directly.
So the senior obligation of everyone is the work at the depth-level, and not the working for utopia in the world-level. There’s no reason to be a naive utopianist in your virtuous beliefs and so forth. that’s itself a sign of a kind of unresolved personality, disturbed personality.
You all are still there in the laundry room, thumping away and considering your design and how to perfect your situation, how even perhaps to get out of being a washing machine altogether. And becoming a perfume bottle, perhaps, or a pair of really groovy shoes! Become something entirely different than a washing machine.
The washing machine is not interesting. Even a pair of shoes is plugged into some mysteriousness about the source of it. So what’s interesting is, “What’s on the end of that line? What’s on the other side of that wall? What’s the Source of this jiggling around here?” And the nature of that Source is a great mystery.
It’s not “other”. it’s not separate “you”.
It is Only Me. It is just One.
It’s comprehending Reality, becoming sane about the nature of Reality.
It’s religion-true religion.
What you think Reality is presently is making you nuts. So it’s obviously not it yet. You haven’t found the correct view. You’re suffering from “wrong views”, as is said in the Buddhist tradition. Your entire society, world-society, is based on wrong views. it’s not that everything in its view is wrong-as a structure, it’s driving people crazy.
There has to be order and authority, but not in a negative sense, not in a despotic sense. There has to be more than just “everybody is a separate little entity of jiggly meat making absolute decisions about everything and being corrupted by it”. that’s the world, the experience, in which you all are participating.
The Way of the Heart is itself done by people in a reality-circumstance in those terms. So, yes, in your living in this world, that’s the kind of world-experience you’re having. You must practice the Way under those circumstances, and deal with the limitations you suffer in yourself that are based on adaptation to that pattern, the world-pattern.
But the Way itself is not about being political. It transforms your own disposition, if you allow it to be so, allow the body-mind to be sympathetic with your heart and understanding. it’s not a matter, then, of becoming political in some grand or obsessive sense, or whatever. Youll be positive in your domain of influences, but, fundamentally, youll be working in the depth-position, working at that level, and not becoming distorted by association with the world (however it may appear), or by your own play with those you do know. You dont become distorted or made superficial by that. You persist in that process that alone grants integrity to your life. And that’s this in-depth process of real devotion, meditation, service, self-discipline, always moving into a greater depth of surrender, self-forgetting Communion with What is Prior to seeking and Prior to self-contraction.
Whatever it may look like, the human world is the play of opposites – that’s it. it’s klik-klak. it’s opposites being extremely separate from one another. it’s opposites in a kind of unity combined with one another into something that for the moment is a single something, and then it changes, and so forth, eventually separates out again. So it’s this constant klik-klak. It is a yin-yang kind of design.
But the true play of religion is in the Zone of Freedom, which (if you enter into it rightly) makes it possible to transcend the obvious limitations, or limiting power, of gross-mindedness. It is beyond Spiritual in the usual sense. It is Transcendentally Spiritual (and, ultimately, Divinely Spiritual) Reality. The Way of that Reality is the Way of the Heart, the Way of this devotional Yoga that you have to practice moment to moment, the very means of being free of being merely patterned by the play of opposites, just pattern patterning, just like in your laptop computer. it’s all pluses and minuses, and the ones and the zeroes, whatever-just endless permutations of that. It doesnt have to mean anything. it’s just a structure, repeating it’self, revolving on it’self.
So mere structure is just that, but that’s not the end of reality, because that mere structure is associated with patterns and dimensions more profound. And, by being submitted into that structure and it’s Source-Condition, you become sane, even in the context of being still associated with human existence, because the thing that is disturbing has been found out about, has been understood, it’s been gone beyond. And, once you realize this, at any level, you have a base, a seed, at the root, from which to grow in this process of transformation and Realization.
This realm of opposites happening, patterning, is not exactly user-friendly. You have to be very intelligently involved with it and so forth, because it’s not really friendly to anything. And any pattern that has appeared will readily be destroyed by the system itself, if it gets out of joint somehow and has to be replaced. it’s indifferent to everything, every one. Any pattern that has been created already can be replaced. And as soon as it gets out of whack a little bit, it starts getting eroded and washed away. Something else happens-chaos, more chaos, and then maybe some other unity. The various resolutions possible in a paired reality that just keeps multiplying it’s paired variations, sometimes becoming more complex and overwhelmingly so, and sometimes becoming more simplified and apparently unified.
The play of variations on the opposites is what’s happening, and its message is not “Boy, howdy, welcome here, because this is the place of paradise”. No, it’s more like My Mama expression: “Your objections to anything dont mean shit!”-as long as you understand that that’s where you are. If you do understand that, then it’s not enough to just be washed along with the plastic of smiling mortality, propagandized into being just a unit on everybody’s computer screen, showing, as in a Disney film, all the appropriate, good-natured expressions.
Klik-klak by itself is not just going to produce paradise. it’s not about paradise. it’s about change. it’s not about anything becoming fixed, although things can sometimes be made better. But more than making things better, there is a central, fundamental, most profound requirement that gives integrity to everything, and that’s the work at the center, the work in the depth domain, beyond the self-contraction. And if there is this, and people function from the inside out, then they will also, within a right culture of this responsibility, sympathetically transform, or allow the transformation of, their behaviors, their manner, their structures of relating to one another, and so on.
The fundamental matter is not mere social change and so on. The fundamental work is the core. It is truly religious, and (in due course) truly Spiritual-ultimately, Divine.