Self Understanding and True Hearing
Adi Da Samraj speaking with a devotee in 2005.
DEVOTEE: Beloved Bhagavan. You Spoken to us tonight with absolute clarity and Truthfulness. I feel [inaudible]. Beloved, recently You engaged me about my Zoroastrian ancestry and heritage, for which I am very grateful. And I was brought up in India as well as in England and lived in America as well. In a sense I feel a bit of a mess in terms of understanding what I represent as a pattern. And something I felt in terms of just my own self understanding of what, how it important or was to important to understand what I represent in my entirety as a pattern in order to transcend it, or is it irrelevant, and is it the directness of the relationship to You.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, you know if you’ve studied My Teaching as a whole that the context of all of the practice is always the relationship to Me and the enactment of Ruchira Avatara Bhakti Yoga. But there are numerous associated practices and variations of the conscious process and conductivity and so on.
A fundamental stage following the beginnings is what I call true hearing, fundamental self-understanding. So the relationship to Me is directly associated with the process of self-understanding and self-transcendence. It is the means for this. It is the circumstance, and context, of all of self-understanding and is what enables all self-understanding to ultimately become most fundamental or true hearing. It’s the most fundamental self-understanding, which is the unique understanding, a tacit understanding of the body-mind as a totality, and egoity as an action–not just a concept of self, the word “I” in the mind and so on.
How much of what you call a mess you need to be dealing with–though all of it, of course, is there in your thought and there to be observed and considered by you–but how much of it needs some kind of intensive address in the midst of that process?
Well, that’s not really a question to be answered verbally. That’s for you to find out by doing the sadhana.
What this mixture of India, England, America, Zoroastrianism, Western ways, other modes of the ways of India and so forth–how it all comes together–Christian ways in the West and whatever else you came in touch with, secularism and so on–all of that is in your experience. How much of it is fundamental to your character is something to discover. And what your pattern is, having been in all of these kinds of circumstances, and having them all effect you needs to be discriminated out from just the glom of all of that stuff in and of itself.
What of it all in its complexity is recognizable as your pattern, your characteristic egoic pattern? This of course must be observed and understood and transcended–not merely the factuality of different kinds of experience, but the pattern of the self-contraction as you live it by tendency.
A lot of it, you see, occurs rather unconsciously or automatically or habitually. So there is a necessary process of, wherein you are reflected back to yourself, when you observe yourself in various circumstances, where you examine your history, recall your history relative to elements of your life’s activities and so forth–including your emotional sexual history and so on–so that you can recognize the patterns in these histories or dimensions of your history and be able to account for them as a pattern of behavior that animates you; and become therefore conscious of them rather than just habituated in the patterned sense; and able to directly address yourself ultimately, moment to moment, in a manner wherein you directly transcend the patterns and don’t merely affirm something in the mind.
So there certainly is not just Bhakti in what might be considered a rather exclusive zone of how to practice, as defined in some systems of tradition, but a comprehensive Yoga of devotion that includes all of the elements I have Taught you, and which you must study thoroughly.
And make full use of all the different dimensions of the discipline in which, in the surrendered disposition to Me, you find yourself out. And also in order to find yourself out, you must become more–through this turning to Me, this surrender to Me–willing and able to find out anything about yourself.
You must be without regard, without concern, without resistance, to finding out anything about yourself, whatever it is that’s true of you–whatever kind of patterns, whatever’s in your history or memory–everything. You must come to the point for this understanding to be most fundamental and operative as a capability. You must lose your concern for self-image. This is part of the process of devotion, then, this turning to Me, where you turn from the contents, you turn from therefore the self-image of the contents, you turn simply to Me and become capable of self-knowledge without limitation, without prejudice, without false face, you become capable of discarding that and seeing everything about yourself and in various appropriate circumstances culturally being able to be communicative openly to other devotees who are selected and agreed with you to be those who are going to be party to your dreadful story–whatever the hell it is. [Beloved Laughs Loudly.] But of course, you’ll have the same advantage with them. [Beloved Laughs again.]