December 1994
Adi Da Samraj
Humankind is self-destructing. It is so distressed, so disturbed, even in its psyche, that its fundamental integrity has been lost. It’s so disturbed that its highest message to everyone is: “Everything is just chaotic, randomly appearing, temporary bundles of molecules. And thats all it is. There’s nothing going on as Grace. Its 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? 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.
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. 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 whos 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 The Source 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, its 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 arent 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.
What you think Reality is presently is making you nuts. You haven’t found the correct view. You’re suffering from “wrong views”, as is said in the Buddhist tradition.
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 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.