mediocrity:: of moderate or low quality, value, ability, or performance, ORDINARY, SO-SO
ADI DA SAMRAJ: You cannot avoid pain. This is a primary part of the motive to be superficial and mediocre. You do not want to feel the difficulty, so you will never address it. Therefore, you just smile and say [Adi Da puts on a very squeaky voice and a forced, superficial smile] “I love you.” Devotion must be suffered. Intimacy must be suffered. It is a unique kind of suffering that Awakens you. It is joyous if you suffer it most profoundly. If your life is to be transformed by it, then you must go beyond pain.
Love has a wall of pain in it. If you do not endure that, then you make love into a social convention, and your so-called loving does not amount to anything. Everybody is smiling at one another and shaking hands and speaking pleasantries. That is not love. Love is very serious, even when it laughs. Realization is not the avoidance of the pain of life but it is to suffer it to the nth degree, to the point of Awakening, to the point of Freedom, to the point of being utterly transformed, in effect, by love, to murder the murderer, to be free of limitations. But not by evading them.
DEVOTEE: That vulnerable Heart-Position is quite a profound, depthful position, and that is what I feel You have been showing me, how I tend to be either cool, superficial, “everything’s fine”, or else what You refer to as the “folded frog”. Neither of those is about love or vulnerability.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mediocrity is the universal solution of humankind. Mediocrity, superficiality, convention—this is how everyone desensitizes themselves to reality, to death, and to the great requirement that is the Heart, that is the depth of existence. You are always ready to make an arrangement that is sort of smiling, superficial, that desensitizes you, makes you get pleasant. You are always ready to do that. That is not it. And you who propose yourselves to be renunciates, especially, you must go far, far beyond that through a most intensive participation in life every day.
DEVOTEE: I felt that heart-wound so much tonight. You just reflected to all of us our failure to live this intimate love with You. I know exactly what You are talking about. And then it was just magnified again in this incident with Kanya Suprithi. After that I felt myself to be in a much more feeling disposition and not so superficial and light about things.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: People think they have a right to be superficial and mediocre except in the worst of circumstances. They do not realize they are already in the worst of circumstances—always. Death is not the only worst. It certainly is not fun, but you are willing to get serious around death or some obvious gross calamity or My raising My voice, even. Then you get serious.
If you were sensitive to the situation you are always in, you would be serious all the time. You would not settle for mediocrity or superficiality. It would not occur to you. You would never lose the Heart-Wound, ever. You could be in a circumstance that, to all appearances, is the most pleasant, amusing, happy, in the ordinary sense, and have tears in your eyes, because you feel where you are, you feel the situation, you feel your limitations, and you will not endure being limited. You press yourself beyond it.
You do not submit to superficiality or casualness. That is what it takes. That is what a renunciate is about. That is what any of My devotees should be about, for that matter.
ADI DA SAMRAJ
JULY 4, 1992
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