Does the World Disturb
You?
Volume 3, Number 3
MAY/JUNE 1980
ADI DA SAMRAJ (DA FREE JOHN): The impingement of
experience is constantly frustrating one’s sense of ecstasy.
Noise, disturbances, idiotic people, just the pressure of
ordinary events, all constantly cause us to react, to become
more imbedded in our superficial consciousness. We feel
there is no alternative to experience, you see, and, having
no alternative, we try in all kinds of exaggerated ways to
find relief and to feel pleasure by exploiting the functions
of the body and mind. Yet we will only be happy by transcending
the whole affair of experiencing. In the midst of an
idiotic world of idiotic people who are always tormenting
one another, it is very difficult to realize even this
insight, let alone to hear anyone communicate another
possibility! It is also very difficult to manage a way of
life in which the capacity for transcendence can be served,
in which it is honored and nurtured.
The world is a place of endless disturbances created by
constantly disturbed people. The only way whereby to realize
the alternative is to come into contact with someone who has
found the root of existence beyond disturbances, who has
been able to break through the realm of superficial
consciousness and experience, and who has a different
relationship to all of that, who can speak from the point of
view of another condition of existence, having already
realized it. This is the function of the Spiritual
Master or the Adept – to call your attention to the
droning impingement’s of life that put you to sleep in your
superficial mind and associations. The Spiritual Master
awakens you to your real responsibility, which is not to be asleep
in the world, moving with its flow and suffering
whatever destiny others want to create for you, but to get
angry, to penetrate the stupidity of your existence, not be
a mild-mannered dolt, but to start changing yourself,
changing the world, and making new conditions. Your new way
of life must begin with you! The more of you there are who
actually make such changes, the more the world
itself can change and stop being simply a place of
disturbance where only obsessed and unenlightened people can
live.
“The dogma of the world is that only unenlightened people
can exist. Everybody is supposed to be a dumb idiot who does
not know what is happening, who is as simple as pie, and who
just does whatever feels best.”
The dogma of the world is that only unenlightened people
can exist. Everybody is supposed to be a dumb idiot who does
not know what is happening, who is as simple as pie, and who
just does whatever feels best. The world is not made for
enlightened people. It does not teach people to be
enlightened. It does not demand that they be enlightened.
When was the last demand for enlightenment you heard? What
have you heard on TV that is a demand for enlightenment? The
world has been taken over by the idiots, by unenlightened
people, and the voice of the Adept, you see, has been
smothered by all kinds of stupid, impenetrable mythologies
acquired by priests, both “religious” and “secular.”
Therefore, the Spiritual Master must come alive, and he must
be heard even outside the realm of religious cultism.
That is why I have been born with no associations
whatsoever with traditional religious cultism, without any
high-born associations of any kind. All associations in the
world have become corrupt. Even the Divine Teaching of the
Adepts has become corrupted in the cults that are supposed
to preserve the tradition of Enlightenment. In such a world
it is necessary to speak the Word of Truth from outside all
high-born associations, all traditional associations, even
all ordinary advantages in the world, because the world is
universally corrupt. The world has universally abandoned the
disposition of Enlightenment. Therefore, those who have
anything at all to do with the Way of Truth tend to be more
or less hidden. They carry on their pursuit in hidden places
and in ways that are not obvious. Thus, the world does not
benefit from their work. The Spiritual Master, if he or she
is rightly used, is more or less a public person. He comes
to teach the world at large and he comes to teach people
openly in order to reverse the trend of the present destiny
that has overwhelmed the world.
Today the world is overwhelmed by suppression, by the
frustration of ecstasy. It has therefore become devoted to
all the things to which human beings devote themselves when
they are obsessed with the body-mind itself and feel they
have no way to be happy except through the satisfaction of
desires. They feel frustrated in their native yearning to
transcend the body-mind. They see no way to do it. They
simply feel frustrated and uptight. They simply feel they
are suffering. And they feel that the only way to feel good
is by exploiting the thing that they are suffering, the
body-mind itself, to the point that it achieves a pitch of
pleasure. There is no permanent realization of pleasure or
ecstasy in Truth by such means, because ecstasy means to
stand outside or to transcend ones conditions, whereas
merely to satisfy oneself produces self-satisfaction,
self-meditation, self-possession-but not
self-transcendence.
You must approach the spiritual Way of Life through this
consideration, through this self-transcending insight. You
must also understand, if
you will hear this argument, that there is no way
whereby you may live in this ecstasy, or this enjoyment, if
you do not literally surrender body, mind, and heart in the
Radiant Transcendental Consciousness. The process that
transforms you is literal. It is not simply a matter of
nominally associating with me, or performing mechanical
activities of the body-mind, however religious those
activities may be interpreted to be. You must enter into a
deeper consciousness, a consciousness that does not belong
to the autonomic nervous system, which is the conventional
nervous system of inward and outward experience. You must
enter into the core and the current of your own being and
transcend the mechanics of the body-mind, or there is no
relief, no ecstasy. Only those who realize this insight,
this whole bodily, heartfelt intuition, can perform the
practices of the Way in Truth.
The practices
of the Way can be engaged by self-possessed people,
without insight, as merely mechanical affectations or
manipulations of the superficial nervous system, the
superficial body and mind. Thus, people can read a lot,
chant a lot, make holy gestures to one another a lot, and
talk about the Teaching a lot. Still they only exploit the
body-mind, although perhaps in a somewhat different way than
other people exploit it. Perhaps they are a little more
benign, a little more orderly than others who recklessly
indulge themselves, but, even so, they are not entering into
a dimension or condition of the body-mind that is other than
superficial. In other words, they are not becoming ecstatic
through their mechanical repetition of religious activities.
These activities are the necessary disciplines of the Way
but they must be expressions of transcendental insight,
literal God-Communion, literal self-sacrifice, literal
ecstasy.
If you would practice this Way truly, you must enter into
a state of Consciousness that transcends ordinary thinking
and hallucinating and physical experiencing of waking life.
You must be able to enjoy that state of consciousness quite
naturally, randomly, at will, and more and more
profoundly.
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