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Editorial note: Heart-Master Da has remarked that when He speaks He is almost always talking about us. He rarely speaks about Himself. He has humorously said, “I tell you things on a need to know basis.” August 15,1988, was one of those rare occasions when Da Love-Ananda spoke about Him self. He said that He had read our signs and felt that there was more that we “needed to know” about the significance of His Death Event in 1986 before we could finally let go of our attachment to His Teaching persona and understand the nature of His present Work as Sat-Guru. The occasion was sudden and unexpected. Although Da Avadhoota was living at The Mountain Of Attention, there had been no formal Darshan of Him since July 9. The group of invited devotees was smaller than on previous occasions this last summer, and so Heart-Master Da elected to sit in the large downstairs room of Huge Helper, the old Hotel lobby, which had been prepared as a Darshan Hall at His request a couple of months before. As the talk begins, Heart-Master Da is commenting on notes He gave earlier in the day, a summary of which has just been read to the group before Him.  THERE IS NOTHING LEFT BUT THE ASH A TALK BY HEART-MASTER DA 1. HEART-MASTER DA: The “deeper personality” is a term I use over and over again. It includes everything that we call the subtle dimension of the being and what is called the causal dimension of the being. It is not really “high”. It is not really the “subtle”, you see. It is the deeper personality. It exists prior to the physical. It is not unconscious. It is functioning, conscious, but the body and its brain have no awareness of it. You do not think its thoughts. You do not have its memories. You do not remember previous incarnations, usually. But even so, this deeper personality is appearing. Its destiny is being manifested through the present incarnation. Its tendencies are being shown there. Just as the physical body itself shows its lineage by looking like its parents, so this deeper aspect of the personality demonstrates its qualities, its lineage, its past, through a wide range of tendencies. Not in mind, you see. It is the dimension of mind that is commonly called the unconscious from the point of view of body-based psychology. It is outside the brain. Instead of appearing as thoughts, therefore, it appears as tendencies, appearance, qualities. Physically any individual looks like his or her parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, back through time. But that individual does not know those people, his or her ancestors, unless he or she is informed about them, you see. If at birth you were separated from your mother and father, you would never know who your mother and father were, or your grandparents, or your great-grandparents. You would have to be informed about them. The physical personality is not inherently aware of its lineage. Why, then, do you expect the deeper personality to be inherently aware of its lineage? And why do you as a gross personality presume that you are a reincarnate? You are not a reincarnate. The personality of which the typical human being is aware is simply the gross personality, the brain-based mind, the etheric energy, the physical vehicle itself. This is what most people call “I”. That one is not a reincarnate. It has no memories of past lives, because it hasn’t had any past lives, only parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. But the deeper personality has previous incarnations. The dimension of the personality that has past lives is not something of which the physical personality is aware ordinarily, but it is nonetheless appearing through the physical in the form of tendencies. And it can come about that there is a transcendence of grosser limitations and an opening to subtler, or deeper, aspects of the being, in which case various aspects of deeper experience may appear, including perhaps the memory of previous incarnations, not the previous incarnations of the bodily personality, but the previous incarnations of the subtler or deeper personality. Even this deeper personality is not the ultimate Identity of any being. The Very Self, or Divine Consciousness, is the ultimate Identity, and this Consciousness is aware of both the grosser personality and the deeper personality. Whatever is arising, the same Self is aware of them. But in the mechanics of manifestation the grosser and deeper aspects of the being are in fact two different beings, so to speak, two different mechanisms in the cosmic domain that coincide in any present lifetime, but the deeper part is outside the brain-mind. Its mind is not what you call “I” but a form of mind outside the range of your experience except in the form of urges, tendencies, destiny, operations at the level of what is commonly called the unconscious. DEVOTEE: Love-Ananda, as I look at You and Your body, it feels that Your deeper being or personality is reflected in Your physical body. HEART MASTER DA: As in every case, it is reflected there. The gross personality is in some sense a mirror of this subtle or deeper personality in everyone’s case, except that in most people the gross personality is dominant almost to the point of excluding the deeper personality. Only through greater evolution, greater development, do the subtler and ultimately deeper aspects of the personality begin to come forward and become more conscious and more obvious. You could say, then, in my case that what you may be observing is the direct appearance of the deep aspects of the personality as well as the gross aspects of the personality. On the other hand, I am neither of these and have been simply at work with these mechanisms. You can see the history of that work, its various stages of development, beginning with the birth itself. Then after the birth there is the time I have told you about, in my second year or so, of accepting the circumstance and the process that went on from there, until sadhana became necessary, it seemed. A great Urge appeared that produced the whole adventure leading to the Vedanta Temple. But that was not the end of it. That simply was a sign that the work with these vehicles had gone on long enough that Teaching Work could begin. A sufficient transformation of these vehicles had occurred for the Confession of Awakening to be made in the context of this body-mind, gross and subtle, or deep. But it was just the beginning of the Work for which I had taken birth. It was the beginning of my taking on and transforming the qualities of others through this vehicle. That is what I did for all those years of Teaching Work, until the Great Event in 1986 in which all that was accomplished by a unique Gesture, a Demonstration about which all of you have heard something. Some of you were around me at the time, heard me say things, observed me in one way or another. And I have talked about it on a variety of occasions over the last two and a half years or so, said things about it that were intended to be revealing about it. But I also called upon you all to consider it, show me your response, show me your sign, indicate your understanding to me. And there has been almost nothing in response. Just an amazing creation of chaos has been going on here and no response whatsoever, really. Looking at this gathering as a whole, it seems to be in many ways living in the past, in terms of being stuck in a negative withdrawal over the last few years, and living in the past in the sense of wanting to go back and do it all over again or resume the quality of relationship that you had to me in past years during my Teaching time when I was trying to help you come to the point of being able to do this sadhana fully. But neither one of those tendencies is appropriate. You all may be lingering in the reactivity and withdrawal of the last few years, and I am here trying to work with you on the basis of this Great Event in 1986, which you hardly had the attention even to observe. You all want to associate with me as you did in the past, and I am not even here anymore in that form. Yet you persist, approaching me as if I were, and dramatizing all your reluctance and amateurishness, as if I am going to respond by Teaching again, I suppose, or by letting you off the hook, or by associating with you on some other basis than the demand for real practice. And I am not going to do that. It is not there to be done. It is not there to be repeated once and for all with grand changes even in my own Sign. It is not something than can be repeated, but it would not be fruitful to repeat either. Because of the accomplishment of this Great Work, a great opportunity exists for you, for anyone who will practice, but there is really nothing much that has been done about it to date. I have indicated to you some very basic things that would have to change. I am simply here to do the one do thing that I Am. You all need to establish the Treasures. You all need to establish an a culture, and a community rightly serve practitioners. And as the basis for both of those you must establish the first circle beyond the Kanyas in this Mandala. In other words, you bring forward a gathering of devotees who can provide an appropriate link between me and practitioners generally. I am looking for those who can, who do, understand my Work, those whose acknowledgment is true, those whose relationship to me is right, those whose practice is exemplary, to those who understand all these matters and can therefore rightly communicate it to others and align them to me rightly so they can make use of me, even as beginners. Fundamentally the Kanyas are the only ones who do sadhana in my Company, the only ones who maintain a intimate association with me, are accountable to me in their private function as devotees. Everyone must do such sadhana. That is what the Way of the Heart is all about. But the rest of the gathering has not, to date, rightly and fully established link with me. And that is, in some basic sense, what we are trying to create here, a restoration of that link. To do so requires establishing the Treasures, putting the institution, the culture, and the community on the right track for the first time really and it includes the coming forward of a gathering of devotees. DEVOTEE: Love-Ananda I wasn’t completely clear on the distinction You were making between the in Awakening into Sahaj Samadhi at Vedanta Temple and the Death Event in Fiji in 1986, particularly in relation to what You are referring to as the gross personality and the deeper personality and how the sadhana changed, and how the sadhana developed through the end of Your Teaching Work. HEART-MASTER DA: I wouldn’t call it sadhana. I didn’t do sadhana after Vedanta Temple Event. I did my Work after the Vedanta Temple Event. All aspects of this manifest personality, gross and subtle, became capable of the great Confession in the Vedanta Temple Event. That was full Awakening in the context of this body-mind, gross, subtle, and causal. It wasn’t my Enlightenment, so to speak. It was the product of my work with this vehicle, all those thirty years, so that this Awakening could be brought into the context of the body-mind rather than simply be Prior to it. After that Event my Teaching Work began. That Event initiated the Teaching Work. It initiated a process. So did the Death Event two and a half years ago. The Death Event also initiated a process, which has been going on since, but a different kind of process. From the time of the Vedanta Temple Event until the Event in 1986 there was all that Teaching Work, which was submission to others in order to Teach. I used all the ordinary and extraordinary signs in this vehicle, all the ordinary signs of the gross personality, all the extraordinary signs of the deeper personality, in a Play with others to Instruct and Awaken them. I used my capacity to assume the likeness of others for all those years to reflect them to themselves. In that process of assuming the likeness of others in my submission to them, the vehicle, gross and subtle, took on all those karmas, absorbing all that likeness and ultimately forcing the crisis of the Death Event in 1986, when the Work ceased to be one of submitting to others, and my life in its appearance ceased to be one of assuming the likenesses of the grosser and deeper personality associated with this birth. Whatever qualities there may be in this body through its inheritance, and in the deeper psyche by virtue of its inheritance, are no longer animated in any sense on their own, so to speak. Such things are inherently karmic entities. Their karmas are purified. But in the Death Event in which, as I have said, all of this was assumed by me to the toes, all that had been inherited in this body-mind in this lifetime and previously was likewise submitted, providing a unique vehicle for the service of others, a unique nakedness of Siddhi, which only devotees can confess. Find it out then. How much more do you want me to tell you? If you come to me as a devotee and do the practice in my Company, you receive the Gift. You tell me what it is. You tell one another what it is. You find out what it is. You do not receive that Gift merely by coming into a room where I happen to be, you see. You must do the sadhana. And what you experience in my Company is based not only on the sadhana but also on your current stage of availability, your current stage of practice. You make room for this Blessing by getting out of the way, by making the great submission, by truly doing the sadhana, by entering into the real practice in my Company, the true engagement with me, which is real sadhana, not some abstract religion-business version of it all, but the real sadhana, which requires you to give up your conventional destiny. It requires you to do what a human being should do, which is to submit all aspects of the manifest personality to the Divine Condition in a process that transcends limitations. But instead of doing that, you see, human beings ordinarily are submitting to their own apparent mechanisms. They are deluded by their own energies, their own Shaktis, so to speak, their own tendencies, their own vehicles of manifestation. They are deluded by the gross personality, and then if they break that up a little bit, they start becoming deluded by the deeper personality, you see. They move from being little egos to being bigger egos, and still it is all the egoic process. It is all a matter of the illusions of the cosmic display. What must be Realized is the Divine Condition Itself, the secret of Which is Prior to the body-mind, Prior to the gross and deeper aspects of manifestation. It is Consciousness Itself, yes, but Consciousness Realizing Its Inherent Condition. I am here to serve that Process, to establish that Process, to Awaken others if they approach me understanding Who I Am and what my Work is, and if they are able to seriously enter into the real and Great Process. If you will not do that, then there is really nothing more I can do, you see. I have done what I can do and said what I have to say, and now it is completely up to every individual to make a decision about the matter. Do you have any more questions about the difference between these two events? DEVOTEE: I think You clarified it. Thank You. HEART-MASTER DA: The Vedanta Temple Event initiated the Teaching Work or the Work of submission to others. The Death Event brought an end to the process of submission to others. It initiated that time of my Work in which it is required, obligatory, that people enter into the traditional Guru-devotee relationship, that they make their submission, that they respond to me and no longer require me to respond to them as I did as Teacher. All that submission to others became summarized in the Death Event in 1986 and was brought to an end there, and now a new Work continues as a potential, if people will make use of my Company. If they will not, there is no Work going on. It is not that there was one kind of Enlightenment in 1970 and another kind of Enlightenment in 1986. I am not talking about my Enlightenment! I am talking about your Enlightenment, Work done for your sake, which appeared in different forms, stages of Work for your sake at various points in my apparent lifetime. At the time of the Vedanta Temple Event that Work produced one particular Sign, the Teaching Work. After the Death Event another particular Sign appeared. Is there anything about it that is not clear? DEVOTEE: One of the things You said that was clarifying for me was that the Process is revealed over time. I was just thinking of Your own Teaching Work, how it began after the Vedanta Temple Event. It took a few years for Your Teaching Work to really take hold and then a period where it became very animated and instructive, and You drew all of us to You very directly and concretely. It was very useful for me today to hear You talk about the Death Event as a process also. It is a process, I feel, of Revelation for us because there had been such a reluctance on our part to really understand it and feel the significance of it so that we can allow You to actually animate that Sign in its Fullness. HEART MASTER DA: You won’t be able to understand it really until what it requires of you becomes acceptable to you. It carries with it an inherent demand, if you understand it. If you say you understand it, you must do what it requires. But you would rather put some mind in between and not understand it, so that you can pretend you are a beginner and do not really have to practice very much yet and all the rest of it. The psychology of not wanting to be obliged has a great deal to do with it. More than anything else, I think, that is it. You want things to be as they were and you want to be let off the hook relative to sadhana. When sadhana becomes the point and you become serious about it, then my Sign becomes comprehensible to you. As we just pointed out again, this Event in 1986 initiated a process, the first aspect of which was the sign of penance, or “tapas”. Just as the Event itself was associated with a death, or a giving up, its continued sign for some period of time is the sign in some exaggerated sense of tapas, or penance, beginning with the “sannyas” time. All that had been accumulated was naturally, not through some kind of effort, but quite naturally and spontaneously, released, purified. The initial sign took the form, then, of extreme detachment, and over time that detachment became more normalized. It has not gone away, obviously, but something about it has been absorbed, understood, accommodated by you. I did that initial work to the point that it was finished and no longer necessary. The next stage came, which was the stage of dealing with your neglect and abuse of this one. That was last year, during the “Indoor Yajna” period, and to this day I have endured your continued neglect and abuse, and your apparent lack of understanding of what I am about, what my Work is about, what the relationship to me is for, and the reluctance on the part of practitioners to seriously accept their responsibilities for the practice and for everything that relates to the Treasures and for the institution, the culture, and the community. There is a kind of tapas I must endure by standing firm and raising my voice as necessary, to simply make it clear that this is something you are going to have to deal with, something you are going to have to understand. I am not here to take a step back to do the past again. The Way is here for you now as a demand, a Calling, and if you want to respond to that Calling, you must accept the responsibilities that come with it. Is there anything more about that? DEVOTEE: No. Thank You. DEVOTEE: I realize that part of my reluctance has been a misunderstanding of the process itself, which You have made very clear, yet I have held out, in a sense, hoping that somehow the past could be repeated. In fact what You are now for us is merely Present. I realize that You have altogether stopped making that gesture, that what actually died was that gesture rather than a person. And I realize that what we have to do is make a sacrifice… HEART MASTER DA: It wasn’t that I decided not to make the gesture anymore. I made it completely. The gesture was submission to devotees, submission to practitioners, submission to others, submission to the world. That does not come to an end until death. Submission to death is such a process. I didn’t decide to not do it anymore. I did it completely, and my doing it completely forced another sign, another demonstration, of this Siddhi that changed the Work itself, changed the stage of my Demonstration and my Work with others. DEVOTEE: I realized that similarly we must die to the gesture we have been making, or refusing to make. HEART-MASTER DA: The gesture you have been making is submission to yourself. So you have to have a “death event” to submit to the Divine, submit to the Sat-Guru. You have to change the course your life – which you have done not done up until now. You all as a gathering have not done this until now. You have been indulging in my submitting to you for as long as you have known me. You figure that is just something I do, it is just there, it is the way it is supposed to and you all go on remaining rather superficial and unresponsive. That has nothing to do with sadhana. That has nothing to do with Liberation. That is foolishness, see, worldliness. To do sadhana you must die to yourself in some sense. You enter into the process of such dying submitting your own body-mind to Divine, submitting your own body to the Sat-Guru through the practice sadhana, submitting these conditional mechanisms to the Condition that is Free of limitation, to the Samadhi of the Realizer Himself, Which is nothing but Samadhi. This is the ancient offering, the ancient means. But yes, you are right. A death, then, a throwing off of your own egoity as the principle of existence and accepting sadhana as your destiny. This is a great gesture. Each person making this gesture may say it is an act of faith or it is based on understanding. It is always both. Both the heart-response and some intelligent consideration are required in any case. It is just that some people, because of the quality of the personality, say it is more the act of faith, and some others say it is more the act of understanding. This quality you read in yourself is responsible for the choice later on of which of the two basic approaches to practice you take up. But both of those approaches are fundamentally the same, with just a somewhat different emphasis. Everyone who goes through this death makes this gesture, makes it on the basis of faith and understanding, spontaneous response and considered response, both. But in doing so you submit yourself. You turn yourself in a greater direction. You stop submitting to yourself, just as I stopped submitting to you two and a half years ago. You have to stop submitting to yourself if you are going to truly live this practice in my Company. What else about it? DEVOTEE: I just want to say how grateful I am and what a great gesture it is. I remember when I first saw You after the Death Event in 1986, how absolutely beautiful and wonderful You looked and how something obviously had profoundly changed. It was a great sign and revelation to me. And You continue to make that sign to us and make it possible for us to make this gesture. HEART MASTER DA: The one thing you may be observing is that this body is not so much showing the signs of the company it keeps anymore. [Laughter.] Or it is not keeping bad company anymore, let us say. It doesn’t have to endure that absorption. On the other hand, because you will not use me rightly, I am basically living in isolation. You are not using my Company. I am not interested in being accessible to you if you are not going to rightly use my Company. I am not here to absorb your limitations and abuses, but I am here to be available to real practitioners, people who are seriously here to do the sadhana. You have to find such people and create the circumstance of our association. All of that is your business, you see. Until you do that, all I can do is wait and stay confined to my quarters – which is what I am doing. end of part one. Go to PART TWO of talk
A TALK BY HEART-MASTER DA
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