ADI DA SAMRAJ: Consider this. Every time you dramatize reactivity, you are thinking you are the victim of someone or something or some event – every time. Reactivity is the sure sign that you have this point of view. If you react and dramatize reactivity, you are always blaming the event, blaming the other, instead of introducing the self-responsible discipline into the occasion of difficulty or stress. Always. It is always so.
Of course, there are all kinds of events in life, and there are reactions to them. Therefore, perhaps you cannot altogether stop reacting to the events of life. But to dramatize the reaction, to extend it into a whole period of drama, irresponsibility, egoic “self-possession”, weakness, non-practice, is to act like the victim. It is to blame the event, as if the event or the other is the reason that you are weak, the reason that you are not responsible, the reason that you cannot deal with yourself, the reason you get crazy. It is your own reactivity, and you must become responsible for it.
Perhaps in an instant a reaction cannot be avoided. If a tiger jumps out of a bush, fear occurs – fine. But to make a life out of such reaction, even when the tiger disappears, that is the dramatization of reactivity, egoity showing itself in a life-form. Every time you dramatize reactivity you are blaming something or someone and not being responsible for yourself.
Before your reaction becomes dramatization, you must deal with the reaction itself. And to truly deal with the reaction itself, you must come to the point of most fundamental self-understanding, before the reactivity, before the action that precedes all reactivity, all desiring, all seeking. You must become responsible for that action in every instant–moment by moment. Especially from that point of view, then, you can retard the dramatization of reactivity.
People with some developmental maturity are supposed to understand themselves and be able to deal with their dramatization with significant self-understanding, apply a great degree of self-discipline, not roll with their dramatizations and abuse everyone. Every dramatization abuses others, because the dramatizing ego thinks it is the victim of others and events. As long as you think that way, you will display sometimes horrific dramatizations and abuse and collapse. Such drama is infantile, certainly adolescent, and not the kind of thing that adult human beings should be doing.
Even though you may be older than 18 or 21 years of age, you perhaps feel you still have the right to react like an adolescent or to live and react in an infantile manner. You should still be at home with your parents in that case! You should not be permitted association with adult humanity. Unfortunately the world is roamed and infiltrated by adolescents and infantile characters who never finished their life-business in the first three stages of life, never became responsible for themselves. What part do they play in a civilized life, then, a human life, an adult life? They are not prepared for it.
If we sent all the aberrated characters back home to their parents to be locked in their room, there would hardly be anybody functioning in the world! The world, as it is, is based on the adolescent mentality and the infantile mentality. The world justifies a mentality that is not civilized and that has nothing to do with true religion. It is suffering. It is chaos.
Unfortunately, there are no norms for true, adult human behavior. Many petty expectations are brought out of the hip pocket whenever it seems convenient to abuse somebody, but real norms of human life, of civilized life, of politics and social life, do not really exist anymore. What is regarded to be an acceptable way of living is brought out as a matter of convenience usually in order to abuse somebody. But where is the presumption of real adulthood? Where is true humanity in politics? Where is it in the relations between nations? Where is it in the relations between people face to face, one by one?
The psychology of irresponsibility pervades the entire world, not only in the West, not only in America. The whole world is dramatizing the self-contraction and losing its order, losing its positive human basis, losing its true religious basis. Real human life is being thrown down the toilet by dramatizations. Everybody is in the trenches, wary.
THE WOMAN WHO BEGAN THIS CONVERSATION: Beloved, everything You are saying I feel so served by.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Make sure you remember it. Do not just forget about it tomorrow because the gathering is over. Keep it in your notebook, keep it in your heart.