The Zone of Profundity

DRIFTED IN THE DEEPER LAND

Chapter 1: November 29, 1996

The Zone of Profundity

 

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Samadhi is, truly understood,
a state that is prior to waking, dreaming, and sleeping.

In the waking state, you have the feeling that there
is body-based consciousness.

And then, when you go into a dreaming state, you sort
of leave body-consciousness and come into another kind of
picturing of existence. But in the dream state you still
feel you must be somehow interior to that, behind that. You
feel an impulse to get even deeper yet.

Then there is sleep. It has fewer “accessories” (in
the form of perceptual and conceptual phenomena), and
ultimately no “accessories” whatsoever—no lights, no
visions, no objects—and yet, its not an unhappy state
at all.

But Samadhi is beyond all those states. It is deeper
than those, not merely something other than those. It is
what is deeper and more profound than they are, not merely
an alternative door to go into in the same place.

The body-mind must be adapted to this profundity. You
must exercise the most discriminative “consideration”. You
must participate in the disposition of becoming serious and
profound. And you must handle your life-business, putting it
in order in the maximum sense, such that there is
fundamental order, predictability, and yet, certainly, life
in it. Handling your life-business is important, so that you
are not just having to live participating in the pattern of
anxiety and stress and low-mindedness and grossness, mere
fleshiness. It is not a matter of dissociating from physical
existence. It is a matter of always being established in the
profundity of existence instead of just being locked into
the pattern of grossness. Its a matter of always practicing
the Yoga of the Way of the Heart in every moment, whatever
the circumstances.

All of that putting in order brings appropriate
control into the zone of your daily life. And then there are
also special occasions every day—meditational times in
the morning and evening. These are not merely something you
do, they are the zone of profundity embraced, in and of
itself, for a day-by-day predictable amount of time and
occasion.

The profundities of this Way are not in the
jiggliness of the waking state. Yes, there is Yoga there.
There is Dharma there. There is practice there, too, yes.
But observe the non-humans. They move themselves, after
handling life-business, as economically as possible. In
other words, they take as little time and energy as
possible, and they always spend their set-apart time in a
place where they feel physically completely safe (perhaps
that is around some others and perhaps not), and they just
abandon all outwardness of attention and regard, all anxiety
and so forth, and just allow themselves to enter into a
profound depth. And it is not merely sleep.

Of course, non-humans sleep, and that can be observed
as well. And you can at least notice when they appear to be
showing signs of dreaming. You have perhaps seen dogs
showing signs that they are having a bad dream, twitching
and yelping sometimes. You can imagine that they might be
dreaming then. It seems likely. And there is their obvious
waking-state attention.

But there is another zone of depth that non-humans
look to enter into. And they do this freely, voluntarily.
They dont regard this to be dangerous or threatening—to
enter into this pleasurable, deep swoon into the
Source-Domain.

Every non-human knows that what they do socially is
not the most important thing about existence. They know that
it is not. So they exhibit a kind of (what you might call) “natural” predisposition to Contemplate, to feel
beyond—even beyond waking, dreaming, and
sleeping—to a depth-domain. The non-humans carry on the
tradition of going beyond in a very simple, straightforward
manner. They are working that out—and have been for a
long time, so they are quite good at it. Their pattern of
natural understanding is interrupted only when other forces
intervene and interrupt the pattern altogether. So you see
what non-humans become like in zoos that are not congenial
to them and so on.

Of course, human beings are suffering from loss of
habitat more and more as well. From a physical point of
view, looking at the natural zone of earth, things are not
very good because of all kinds of political and other
disturbances. Mankind already has a long history of this
kind of disorder, in moving more and more toward a secular
disposition and toward a disposition without
depth—chaotic, merely physical, or gross-minded.

Feeling to the depth, to the Source, is fundamental.
This self-surrendering, self-forgetting Yoga of devotional
Contemplation of Me is simple and straightforward. This is
sacred means to maintain the zone of the sacred, the zone of
Contemplation, the zone of association with the Source.

People are always saying it is important to make a
living. Yes, it is a responsibility. But this zone of the
sacred is the profound core of existence. Just as you make
sure that you handle your ordinary life-business in the
grossest sense, make sure that you never minimize this
profundity—in the moment to moment sense, but also in
the setting-apart-the-time-and-place sense, as a part of
every day.

It is a process that is always becoming more
profound. Yes, it has its evidence in daily life, but the
profundity beyond attention to all of that—like the
lizards when they go out on the limb—the depth level of
it, is beyond all those kinds of concerns. It is a deepening
and ever-deepening process.

The stages of life can be seen this way, as passage from the waking
state (the earlier stages of life) into the dreaming state
(the whole process of advanced fourth stage of life and
fifth stage of life) and then, deeper than that, into the
realm of sleeping (the sixth stage of life). It is always
deepening—waking to dreaming to sleeping.

The entire Great Tradition5 is about assuming
different levels of presumption about that entire course.
But the profundity is as I am saying to you. It is always
deeper, always beyond. It is more and more profound, and yet
it is not self-involvement. In the Way of the Heart, this
devotional Yoga is your basic occupation, and you must serve
the possibility of this becoming truly more and more
profound. So you dont want to waste a lot of your life in
trying to just bring some sort of order to (or, perhaps,
make an illusion of paradise out of) the more mundane
aspects of your existence. Yes, there is that to handle, but
then there is getting on with the deepening process, which
ultimately goes beyond waking, dreaming, and
sleeping—goes beyond the first three to four stages of
life, goes beyond the advanced fourth to fifth stages of
life, goes beyond the sixth stage of life, ultimately.

So the seventh stage of life is fully the Domain
that transcends the three states—waking, dreaming, and
sleeping—Recognizes and Inherently Transcends all the
conditional appearances. That is profound, and that cant
even be described as “deepening”, but it ultimately
Outshines everything.

The seventh stage Awakening is simply unobstructed
God-Consciousness, or Divine Consciousness.

It is beyond all of the disposition of separateness
or “difference”.

It is a Depth, the Zone of Reality, in which the
process is one of being given over into that more and more
profoundly.

In the Ultimate Demonstration of It, there is no
clinging to any aspects of the conditional form—the
bodily manifestation, and so forth.

So it is an Infinite, Self-Magnifying Swoon that is
not a collapse.

It is neither deep nor high.

It is beyond explanation.

It is beyond waking, dreaming, and sleeping.

It is beyond “turiya”, or the fourth state.6

It has no conditional references whatsoever—for
or against, with or absent from, conditional arising.

If you are serious, you must cultivate the
demonstration of your seriousness. You must set aside the
sacred domain, the sacred portion altogether, or you get
profoundly out of balance, profoundly detached from True
Reality. You just get shuffled about and made disorderly in
all these arbitraries of gross pattern. Its like people who
never sleep, never get enough rest—they are just busy
in whatever their business may be. It is a characteristic
habit of everyone.

You dont see much Contemplating going on. It is
considered unusual to do such a thing. How absurd that the
Contemplative and sacred dimension of life should be
considered amusing and something to raise the brow about and
wonder about. “Is it really something to be done?”—that
kind of sentiment. But it is not built into the common
world. Often in the past, and in all kinds of cultures over
the world, there has been a culture that is “managed”, so to
speak, by hierarchies of one kind or another. So it is
always there. All you have to do is be born there and you
are part of this sacred culture. But that is not the way it
is for you all. You did not appear in a sacred culture, you
appeared in a secular culture where the sacred has been, you
could say in some sense, eliminated. It becomes more and
more profoundly reduced.

So you all can be very helpful to one another in
getting life-business handled, and helping one another do
that, sharing and cooperating in various ways, and, in all
of that, create a circumstance in which you can exercise
your sacred intention fully from day to day.

Otherwise, you lose your profundity, become more and
more not only ego-bound, but ego-bound in the waking-state
manner, just indiscriminate physicality, with concerns
relative to a physically based life, and more and more
stressfully that. You know, even in your daily experience,
that there is a level deeper than waking—that is
dreaming. And a level deeper than dreaming—that is
sleeping. You know at least that much. And maybe now you
have a taste of something deeper than that in your practice
in relation to Me.

The non-humans like to do it such that they can
minimize the time required to do survival things—like
getting food and shelter and whatnot. They like to spend as
little energy in that as possible, generally speaking. They
conserve themselves relative to this, minimize it so that
there is maximization of time set apart from that.

Of course, there are some non-humans—like bees,
for instance—that dont seem to be doing that. They seem
to be very much on the move. But there is another element
added to this unique structure, which is about the structure
of the hive and the patterns around it. It is a kind of
ecstatic dance, a unique interior in which they have been
fed with liquid, a nectarous substance, royal jelly, that
gives them energy in the sense of ecstatic well-being.

You see, all that physical business is not to be
handled in some so profoundly simplified manner that it is
harsh. But dont just exhaust yourself in the development of
the outward-directed life itself. Whatever your circumstance
is on any particular day, this sacred space must always be
located and used, otherwise the conditions of the ordinary
world are not knowledgeable about anything very profound.
They will take you on and you will just become part of
it.

So if you neglect that zone, you allow yourself to
be turned into the gross pattern only, without
discrimination. The general cult from the world wont give
you this time, even this inclination—will talk you out
of it, in some sense, you could say. So you must not permit
that to happen. The common world has become something like
when animals or non-humans are taken out of their natural
environments and put in confinements that are obviously not
congenial to them. You know what happens to them. They
demonstrate that nervous chaos in which there isnt that
elegance of being set apart and utterly calmed—not
merely calmed in the feeling of the physical, but calmed or
entered into a depth beyond that. So that happens in
zoos.

Well, the same thing happens in the secularized,
citified world that you all are involved in. To turn to a
depth, to Contemplate the Source-Condition Which is
Ultimately the Very Self-Condition, to Me, is perfectly
obvious. But I realize it is not obvious to you all
even—beyond a point, anyway. People in general do not
seem to even have any association with profundity. They just
sort of hope that everything is going to turn out okay. They
try to keep buzzing along—really a mess!

As I was saying earlier, it is not the washing
machine, it is what is coming out of the wall (which makes
the washing machine do all that stuff) that is interesting.
Well, nothing is sufficient as long as it is conditionally
based. This is not just a philosophical
proposition—”consider” your own experience. Whatever it
is, your experience is never finally enough. You can repeat
it. And, eventually, as you continue repeating it, it
becomes a bother, a disturbance, a form of bondage.

No matter how interesting (in the phenomenal sense)
the deepening process becomes, it is like all other
experience. Even that process is not It. So there is the
tacit knowledge that experience is not It.

Why should you, at any time, want to have the depth
of your feeling-profundity lessened or set aside? Your
impulse in My Company should be to magnify that
profundity—the heart not conditioned by the klik-klak7
variations all over, not patterned by the waking, dreaming,
and sleeping domains. But you have to magnify that
profundity intentionally, as a personal matter, and
participate with others cooperatively to serve the sacred
domain for everyone.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, washing machines require six
times as much energy to start up as they do in running.

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. And you dont want them to
go off or shut down. You dont want that to happen to your
washing machine! You are concerned about that, very
concerned, and its always there in the background, always
ready to pop up a little bit of anxiety, or actual fear, a
little uneasiness. There is always this
mortality-stress.

Well, you can make positive conditions in life, but
you cant make utopia out of it. Utopia is not enough in any
case. No conditional arrangement is satisfactory. Whatever
is achieved is a kind of moment in the hierarchy of
achievement. There is the constant passing beyond. It doesnt
mean that what you have been associated with earlier
disappears, it just gets integrated with a process that is
always more and more profound, and serves a profound life.
People should serve the profound life in one another and not
merely this outward-directed, social, TV-and-business-world
kind of pattern. There is just no balance and peace in that
pattern, and not in the world in general.

In any case, the human body persists only within
some range of a general reasonable expectation. Then what?
Where is it at? What has it been for? What are you all
about? The entire process should be associated with a
progressive profundity. Even, perhaps, in due course,
setting aside more and more time for sacred occupation, in
the “set apart” sense—this corresponding with getting
older, so that you are entering into a process of profundity
altogether, rather than fighting against it. But also, it is
not about yielding to negative possibilities. It is a
balance.

You see how difficult it is for people to establish
a balance in the world circumstance anywhere at the present
time? People are mad, like caged zoo animals. That is just
happening. There is no real political and economic will to
do anything about most of it. And nobody knows how to get
out of here alive. It is just dreadful. It is actually a
cultureless world-scene at the present moment, the “late-time”, or “dark” epoch.

Therefore, the “Brightness” must break through it.
But not merely in the believers terms, in the social
religiosity terms of religion and such, but in the
ever-deepening terms of the sacred profundities of real
practice.

There is no other “consideration” in life that is of
greater significance. It is the Core of Existence, this
dwelling in profundity. And if there were right culture
altogether in the world, there would be integrity to this
matter of the pattern of human life and so on. That is
lacking in the world, but it is certainly Given to you in
your relationship to Me. So that is how it must be kept
activated in everyone, through a truly accountable culture
that really honors and respects this fundamental core of the
practice.

How can you have a culture that doesnt value the
sacred, that only values this outward-directed, so called “materialistic” kind of grossness—that doesnt account,
for real, for the sacred dimension of the Depth of
Existence? And not just “When did the big bang begin?”, but
to the Depth that is Prior even to material
perception—the Depth of states, not merely the depth of
appearances.

Right culture includes what is outside the gates and
what is inside. There is the household domain, the domain of
the community, and so forth, and all of its sacred places.
And then there is what is outside, where you have some
exchange with people who are doing whatever they are doing,
for whatever their reasons—sometimes religious,
sometimes not. So you do some things out there, but also
every moment out there you are engaged in this sacred
profundity at the heart-level. So, fundamentally, you must
be obliged, or called, and expected—you, in all of your
service to one another—to understand this balance of
life.

Do you like the mortal aspect of this experience you
are having?

DEVOTEE: No!

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, then it is not enough.
There is something about it that is not enough, obviously.
It is not deep enough, not profound enough. You have dreamt
better than this, thought better than this! There could be a
lot better than this. In fact, you are not going to settle
for anything less than better than this. But then that means
you have to commit yourself to doing what you have to do to
Realize what is better than sheer gross patterning. That is
the Pleasure Dome of this accommodation of the sacred in
your personal and collective life in day to day
terms—not digressing from the fundamentals of it. It is
always there, every day.

That is what it is to be serious, and this is how
you enter into the consistent experiencing, Realizing, of
That Which is Sufficient Inherently, That Which is Profound.
If your only association with it is some sort of
emotionalism based on some words you use to stimulate that
emotionalism, there is no depth to it. You have to live the
Way in depth, through the practices that are depthful, more
and more. There is always beyond. Just like the non-humans,
you set aside time every day for this Contemplation, this
entering into depth. In the Way I Give to you, I have
accounted for all the aspects of it, all the Secrets of it,
and the Great Means that I Am, for the sake of your
Realization.

Youll not be satisfied on any day in the waking
condition if you did not enter into the sphere of
profundity, beyond superficiality and fear, and so forth,
and touch the Depth more and more, the Prior Condition. To
have lost that taste in being mix-occupied for a day is a
great fault.

The depth in the set-aside time of the waking state
shows itself spontaneously in the dreaming state, shows
itself in depth and profundity—perhaps there is a depth
of restfulness in the sleep state and so on. All kinds of
other things, too. There is no utopia anywhere in the
conditional signs, but they become more and more in balance.
The Pleasure Dome Law is to be comprehensive relative to all
aspects of life, giving you maximum time in that zone,
inside the wall of the gathering where the sacred matter is
honored by the practice of it, and the setting of it apart,
making it be holy. Never let it be undermined. Never give it
up.

There are the balanced pleasures of life, as you are
able. But there is also this fundamental profundity which is
at the root of it, the “radical” dimension of it. It makes
that thing coming out of the wall to the washing machine
interesting. There is this domain of perceived reality that
is pervaded by, floating in, a sea of energy. It is energy.
But in the self-contracted reaction, this awareness is lost,
this participation is lost, this non-separation is lost. So
that has to be re-introduced through the culture of right
understanding, right practice, right community, and so
on.

The relationship to Me is the Core of this sacred
practice.

 

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