You Need Not
This is the Law. Nothing can distract you from it once you become Happy, but you need not even “become” Happy – you need only Realize that you are Happy, that the Truth, if it is the Truth, is the case, even now! God as God is God now! The Condition of our condition is our Condition now. Everything else is a superimposition we lay upon it in our un-Happiness, our neurosis, our Narcissism. Understand this contraction and Realize that you are Happiness.
Adi Da Samraj
Sai Baba showed a marked favor to Kasinath (Upasani Baba) and this made several of the devotees jealous. Kasinath stayed in the village shrine of Kandoba and kept alone most of the time on the orders of Sai Baba who said, “He must simply sit quiet in the temple doing nothing.” He told Kasinath, “Have nothing to do with anybody. Your future is excellent. No other has such a future.”
But the annoyance caused by the jealous devotees of Sai made Kasinath long to go away from Shirdi. He sought Sai’s permission through Shama again and again. But Baba always said that he had to ‘clear his accounts’ with Kasinath and did not permit him to go. He told the devotees, “Everything I have got has been completely given to him.” He told Kasinath in 1911, “Hereafter you need not come to me frequently. Come only occasionally. You should not however talk to me. Nor will I talk to you. After 4 years you will have the full grace of Lord Khandoba.”
Kasinath had to experience an extreme aversion for food and he used to throw it away to dogs. Sometimes he went and saw Sai Baba when the latter was on His rounds. Baba always assured him, “I am always with you, you need not fear anything. The more you suffer now, the most excellent and happier your future will be.” Pivoted on such trust in his Guru, he stopped eating altogether for one year during 1913-1914. Strangely enough, although he was going without food and lost considerable weight, he was doing hard manual work like grinding, road-laying or ploughing fields! It was on a full moon day in July-August, 1913, that Sai Baba indicated the near completion of His spiritual dispensation with Kasinath when he ordered his devotees to worship the latter in the temple even as Sai Baba was worshipped in the mosque.
Upasani Baba and Sai Baba of Shirdi
So as long as there’s the yielding of the body-mind or the dependence of the Samadhi on the body-mind, its not it. It’s not enough. Theres no reason to dally there, you see. Be released in your energy and attention from that. You need not spend any time there. No sadhana done by the body-mind is the Perfect sadhana, and its therefore not satisfactory when it’s done by the body-mind, not Ultimately satisfactory.
To simply Abide as That, if there’s any noticing of the body-mind, you’ll notice its this and that, and its death perhaps peripherally, if you care to. But its not your destiny any longer. It may have its own destiny, whatever it is, but its not you. you need not become entangled in it, you see, are not, in fact. [silence]
Adi Da Samraj
M.: The ‘I’ is always there – in deep sleep, in dream and in wakefulness. The one in sleep is the same as that who now speaks. There is always the feeling of ‘I’. Otherwise do you deny your existence? You do not. You say ‘I am’. Find out who is.
D.: Even so, I do not understand. ‘I’, you say, is the wrong ‘I’ now. How to eliminate this wrong ‘I’?
M.: You need not eliminate the wrong ‘I’. How can ‘I’ eliminate itself? – All that you need do is to find out its origin and abide there. Your efforts can extend only thus far. Then the Beyond will take care of itself. You are helpless there. No effort can reach it.
D.: If ‘I’ am always-here and now, why do I not feel so?
M.: That is it. Why says it is not felt? Does the real ‘I’ say it or the false ‘I’? Examine it. You will find it as the wrong ‘I’. The wrong ‘I’ is the obstruction. It has to be removed in order that the true ‘I’ may not be hidden. The feeling that I have not realised is the obstruction to realisation.
In fact it is already realised; there is nothing more to be realised.
Ramana Maharshi
In The Knee of Listening I described it as “understanding.” It is the same as Love, unobstructed feeling attention, God-Communion. If you will adhere to it, you need not be concerned for any complexity of experience. Experience is altogether without significance. Not a single vision or experience adds to God Communion. All experience only realizes a lesser destiny than the Destiny of God-Communion, which moves not to heavens but directly to God in every moment.
all of the wisdom is potential in the human situation. you need not go elsewhere to Realize it. Of course, many do, even using subtle means, serve their purposes in the gross plane, and others serve them in the subtle plane. These are karmic entities doing karmic things. All in need, all seeking. All the planes are dual, made of opposites. They all have their limitations.
So the Way is to Realize the Truth of the world, the Truth of the conditional domain, the Cosmic Domain – rather than commit yourselves to the Cosmic Domain itself. You’re associated with conditional things, therefore you’re in exactly the right position. You can use those things as means of God-Realization. you need not look for other things. Instead of seeking, you should put your place in order where you are, and enter into this heart-seriousness, going beyond egoity, with Me.
When there is no obstruction to feeling-attention, then what is Divine, without qualification, is completely obvious. you need not create any strategy in your attention, to invert it or to exteriorize it, in order to find the Divine. Finding God is the illusion of the sinful individual, the one obsessed with suffering.
Whatever conditions are to arise for you will arise for you, and you need not be the least bit concerned about them! You are finally free, in God-Realization, of the idiotic game of rising and falling with the conditions of existence.
Adi Da Samraj
There is nothing more for the Spiritual Master to do for the sake of the revelation of the Teaching. The difference is not in God. The difference is in man. The test is whether you will continue as you are or pass beyond your self-possession through the intuition of God. In every moment, that is the test. In the meantime, I can serve as a priest for you, but the great matter that has been my work since birth has already been shown. It is up to you to measure up to the Teaching. So you need not wait for some great moment in my Company. You should just prepare yourself for my ordinary Company.
Bubba Free John has submitted to the same Reality to which you must also be submitted. Sri Ramakrishna, in his last days, brought Narendra to his side and touched him. He put Narendra into samadhi, gave him all kinds of visions, and said, “I have given you everything. Now I am just a poor fakir. I am completely empty.” That is the position of the Spiritual Master. People imagine that the Spiritual Master is possessed of all the glorious experiences that they may on occasion possess, and that the Spiritual Master, as empty as lie is, may be an agent for the transmission of those phenomena. But the Spiritual Master himself has absolutely nothing. He is retired from all consolation. What you see is what he is.
Thus, the Spiritual Master represents nothing other than this sacred Communion of love. The Spiritual Master is reduced to Divine Communion, to the very thing that he recommends to devotees. I am not a man of powers and of visions. The essential incident is without form. In this moment I am not having an experience. I am consoled by nothing. Nothing. And I am happy. I am zero in the midst of experience. That is the only difference.
Adi Da Samraj
THE MAN: Sri Gurudev, my own life has been characteristic, I think, of white, middle-class males in America who, in spite of every attempt not to be a victim, have gone out of our way to enjoy a victims status. I speak of my own personal experience. I have not had any traumas or any life-threatening situations that would have produced a victim consciousness. Still, somehow, I find it appealing to be, in my own mind, a victim.
SRI DA AVABHASA: You need not have had great traumas to be in that position. Everybody has difficulties. Life is difficult, and it requires something of you. Another way of characterizing the so to speak victim consciousness is that it is always looking for something or someone to blame even for the most petty of lifes difficulties and demands. If you feel you are the victim, you always look for somebody or something to blame, some past incident, whatever it may be, to justify your lack of responsibility, your lack of clarity, your lack of effectiveness. It is not just in reaction to the most traumatic of lifes incidents that this mechanism is generated. It is an ordinary mechanism, and it is also culturally enforced, socially reinforced, politically reinforced, reinforced by social and political institutions even. It is not associated with traumatic life, really. It is just the strategy of living life in such a fashion that you are always relieved of responsibility, because there is always something or someone to blame and you, therefore, need not be responsible. You just presume that the seat of responsibility is not in yourself but in all the causes in your life. And they are just what they are, so there is nothing you can do about it.
Adi Da Samraj
Why put yourself in a position of being constantly vulnerable to superficial communications? Just because most people in the downtown world allow themselves to be so subjected, you need not live in the same tunnel of confusing information. you need not be bombarded by endless voices, endless media, endless hype, and endless noises that shock the nervous system. Go somewhere else. Turn off the instruments. Disassociate yourself from these things. To put an end to them is a responsible act-and you are free to do it. Just as the yogi is free to withdraw from society in general, you, as a kind of yogi or spiritual practitioner, are free to concentrate and simplify your life and not be open to endless disruptive phenomena. If there is something you want to consider, then give it your attention, but do not live with superficial communications constantly in the background of your life.
Adi Da Samraj
You Must
You must Become Responsible as Feeling-Attention in Every Moment
Adi Da Samraj
You must become rooted in your natural disposition and presume again the position of the heart or the feeling being. Now you feel yourself to be isolated as a separate awareness, surrounded by flesh and thinking. But that perception will begin to break down once you have adapted to this Way by presuming the feeling position again, by pervading the mental and the physical dimensions with feeling, by becoming responsible for feeling-attention in every moment. Then the whole affair of spiritual practice becomes simply the maturing of that response.
Likewise, you must prepare yourself for this meeting with me. You must be unobstructed in your feeling. You must approach without obstruction, without recoil, without self-reference. Simply be present in my Company, and the Presence of the Divine will establish itself. You must be able to feel in spite of the effects of reactions, self-possession, inwardness, thinking, and all the rest that you tend to become involved with, and you must abide as feeling-attention completely, not only on the formal occasions of our being together, but characteristically, constantly, ultimately.
Adi Da Samraj
The usual man needs exaggerated conditions in order just to feel, to have a sense that he is experiencing pleasure. Thus he becomes addicted to excesses because he does not already live in the condition of pleasure, happiness, or fullness. Such people cannot feel, in other words. If you cannot feel emotionally, then you cannot live a life of love, you cannot be intimate. If you cannot feel with the head, you cannot enjoy clarity of mind, and you cannot consider things as they truly are. If you cannot feel, if the core of the being, the heart, is not operative, not active, then at the physical level you must be self-indulgent.
Adi Da Samraj
Part of the discipline of the Way of Divine Communion is not to be concerned about the continuation of your old adaptation, the physical, emotional, and mental signs of your old way of living. Allow them to come and go, rise and fall, without concern, without dramatization. Live the discipline of love, physically, vitally, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. By living that commitment as a discipline, you will see the old adaptations fall away and become unnecessary and obsolete. New adaptations of existence naturally come into being when you change your act. It is as simple as that. But you must persist in this discipline. You cannot indulge in playing with yourself and falling back constantly. You must become stronger in your hearing of the Teaching so that you do not fall and then collapse under concerns and low-grade dramatization. You must be stronger than that to bring feeling-attention into the present. Do not be concerned when subjective stuff arises. It eventually disappears, if you only persist in feeling-intuition.
Adi Da Samraj
You must constantly be refreshed in this hearing through study of the Teaching, through hearing it read, through recitations, through communication with one another, through devotional society, Good Company, right counseling. You must bring yourself in this spirit to the fulfillment of the discipline, consistently.
Adi Da Samraj
You’ve got to become mature at this middle self, this conscious mind, which means that you must realize the relationship between this middle self and this lower self that’s something like that between a true parent and its child. You must become the parent. You must come to an understanding of this vital life, and cease to be without arms, constantly complicated, motivated by childish subconscious, unconscious urges that relate to the realm of your ordinary vital-physical, emotional-sexual life.
Adi Da Samraj
With Understanding, you must begin to adapt in a way that you have never adapted before, never fully. That means you’ve got to begin to enter into adaptation to the high self. You must adapt this thinking mind and this vital personality to the evolutionary mechanism that is in the body or the body-mind of man.
Adi Da Samraj
You must become stable in the third stage of life. You must be able to Understand the Teaching and accept the discipline and accept this relationship and allow that to be the situation, the condition of existence within which you adapt, within which you live.
Adi Da Samraj
You must become strong enough, you must have that capacity for self control, not like the solid, single minded desire, you see, but like one who Understands, so that you can consistently live this discipline, so that you are not always coming to me at zero wanting some sort of energy zapping to make you feel good and then you feel intoxicated for a little while and then you go and do what you have always done. That’s not enlightenment, that’s not yoga, that’s not mysticism, that’s not God-Realization. It’s just an extension of your childhood, your earlier adaptations trying to conform this this Teaching.
Adi Da Samraj
Within the theatre of sacrifice things appear, things change, and things disappear. But if we worship just one aspect of manifestation, that of creation, or appearance, we will be anxious, insane, and self-possessed. The true principle is sacrifice, not “God created it and ultimately His creation will freeze into an unchanging heaven that survives eternally.” There is no such event nor any evidence for it. you must give up everything. Everything must be given up, but it is not the ego “you” that gives it up. When you are one with the Divine through Communion with the ultimate Reality, then everything becomes a sacrifice. The process of sacrifice becomes your native orientation. All your adaptations become forms of sacrifice. That is also what the practical disciplines are – a Lawful adaptation to sacrifice, to the process of feeling attention and yielding.
Adi Da Samraj
True spiritual practice is inspection of the whole revelation of existence. We have always emphasized the critical aspect of this argument, or Shiva, the considerations that require you to confront what you are avoiding. You must become responsible at that level if you are to live a real spiritual life.
Adi Da Samraj
You must find the ways to overcome the stresses, to transform the chemistry of the body literally, so that you can live long and without stress, both chemical and social, or cultural. Such a life is not possible for a group of people until they create sanctuary with one another, a mutually protected, stable, basically unthreatened way of life.
Adi Da Samraj
Sex is a heart-matter. The heart is the basis, the foundation, the seat, of your sexuality. This is what you must discover, and the sooner you discover it the better for you.
Adi Da Samraj
You just do not indulge it. When it arises as a reaction to some circumstance, some moment, some physical moment of weakness, whatever it is, you must identify it with great clarity and not indulge it. You can not afford to indulge it even as a fantasy. you must maintain in a very natural way your responsibility as feeling-attention in relationship and not collapse beyond it, not get into the solitude, the brooding, the whole business, as a blind for disturbance.
You just cannot indulge it. You must stop being concerned for whether or not you are loved in signs, in demonstrations by me or, anybody else. It is the responsibility of the devotee to love, not to get love, but to be love. That’s what a devotee is. People have just the opposite idea. They think to be a devotee is to be somehow cherished by the Divine. The Divine is the Beloved. Devotees are not the Beloved. The devotee is not the one who gets loved. The Divine gets loved.
Adi Da Samraj
If you agree to become involved in a feeling relationship with someone, you must also agree to endure the changes in the other person and the difficulties in the relationship. Whatever is going on in the other person altogether, you must be able to endure the loss. It all comes with the relationship. The discipline of love is quite a different thing from indulgence in attachment.
Adi Da Samraj
All these symptoms are the results of a very simple mechanism of contraction in the frontal line of force. The contraction is registered especially over the solar plexus because the battery of the body is the great region of the solar plexus, including the lower abdomen. You must therefore become sensitive to how this frontal mechanism works, how it changes in reaction to external circumstances and local or internal circumstances.
You must hear me first of all. You must awaken, through hearing, to self-observation, self- insight, awareness of how you operate as a contracting personality. Then you must see, you must become emotionally converted. You must, with the total feeling of the being or the submission of the total body-mind, enter into sympathy with That Which is Transcendental and All-Pervading, and begin to practice on the basis of hearing and seeing. In other words you must live or animate the body-mind in all its relations and functions in such a way that the living force is permitted to course freely in the body-mind without obstruction.
Adi Da Samraj
You must realize (the) capacity for discrimination, or you really cannot cut it in the Spiritual process.
Adi Da Samraj
The Summary
As I have said to you all, you are dying while alive. Your life is about dying. You are enduring the psychology of beings and have heard they are going to die and are spending your life going through the mass of rounds of anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance — every complex that could be described out it, you see. You are living a death process while alive, but you are not really accomplishing it, you are not really dealing with it altogether. You are dealing with it piece meal and you are all the time coming up with strategies to avoid your sensitivity to it, to avoid the imposition of 1t, and that is your whole life, that is the search. Because the surrender is not accomplished the self-contraction remains in tact. It is all reactivity, desire, seeking, objects, others, drama! You allow your entire life to become just that when you could, not just on your death bed but now, in every moment of life, be so submitted as one in a terminal state and go beyond all those illusions, all those strategies you see.
Adi Da Samraj
