The following talk has been edited by Beezone. All Beezone edits are in italic. The talk has been shortened but ‘reads’ word for word as Adi Da spoke them in 1996.
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“This fundamental transformation of…the liberation of the human disposition from the opposition to woman, to Shakti, to feeling, to the art of all the senses, glorifying and turned toward the (Source and) condition of existence.” – Adi Da Samraj
The Law that is the Pleasure Dome
Avatar Adi Da Samraj Speaks of the Way of Adidam as a “Pleasure Dome”, recalling the poem “Kubla Khan”, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree . . .”).
Avatar Adi Da also uses “Pleasure Dome” as a reference to the Ultimate and Divine Love-Bliss-Happiness That Is His own Self-Nature and His Gift to all who respond to Him.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: I’ve been “considering” recently, Real Happiness has been eliminated from human life, largely speaking. The scale in which human beings, generally speaking, live from day to day, is entirely social and public. Even human pleasures, then, have been made to conform to public life, to social expectations that have to do with gross political and social purposes. In the process of that adaptation, humanity, generally speaking, has relinquished the deeper aspects, Real Happiness or the Pleasure Dome of life, as I like to call the inherent condition of life.
The Pleasure Dome…must be the “home”, so to speak, of daily existence, from which you enter into the course of daily activity or service – as you may be required to enter into the general circumstance of human activities, the public or social world, from day to day, to one degree or another. But each day entering into it, you should step out of the door of your Pleasure Dome, and go and do business in the world, knowing that you have something to preserve, something you would not have be violated, something you would not have be destroyed, by anything that occurs in the public, social, and political domain.
If you don’t have any Pleasure Dome, you have nothing to protect, nothing to preserve, nothing to serve, nothing to perpetuate that makes any difference whatsoever. The content of mere social and political life is reduced to…”self-possession”, materiality, gross ordinariness, mere organism concerns, mere survival concerns. Surviving for what purpose?
What is there that must survive? It’s the inherent Well Being of life, the Heart, that must survive. The core of life must be preserved as a Pleasure Dome – of everything sacred, everything most profound, everything most intimate. The entire environment of the heart is the Pleasure Dome.
The Domain of Feeing – The Woman
“If you destroy…the greatness of woman, you’ve reduced life to some scandalous garbage-male-reduced, monotonous, aggressive exchanges”
If you destroy the inner sanctum and the greatness of woman, you’ve reduced life to some scandalous garbage-male-reduced, monotonous, aggressive exchanges, and petty concerns and rivalries, and all the rest of the nonsense of mind erected by the same fault. You must have the Pleasure Dome… and then you’ll know what to do when you go to do business in the world. You will go there to make sure the Pleasure Dome is preserved, because you all want to go back there tonight! You’re not going to do any war or mayhem that’s going to prevent that, or destroy that circumstance.
But you all are throwing it away with both hands. Everything about woman, in other words, everything about the domain of feeling and senses, and pleasurable association with the feeling and sensuous domain, or sense domain, is corrupt at the present moment, and opposed. Not just… idea of Spirituality, but woman is opposed – that which woman is, that which she incarnates, that which her pattern is about. The “She” altogether requires mankind to be integrated with it, as the core of life.
“This fundamental transformation is something that I am Calling for – the restoration of the Pleasure Dome as the context of human life. The complete restoration of it. The liberation of the human disposition from the opposition to woman, to Shakti, to feeling.”
This fundamental transformation is something that I am Calling for – the restoration of the Pleasure Dome as the context of human life. The complete restoration of it. The liberation of the human disposition from the opposition to woman, to Shakti, to feeling, to the art of all the senses, glorifying and turned toward the Source condition of existence. Done in safety, done in bed, done at meals, done in intimacy. The Pleasure Dome must be restored.
And all those grim and monotonous people who trek through life and their and their daily business, will be profoundly transformed by that restoration. The sacredness of sex must be restored. No more anti-sexual garbage. That’s ego, nonsense. It’s the talk of males, the aggressors, and the war room.
If you’re full of the Source, full of love, full of art, and all the yin that woman is, combine with it, then the male, or the yang force (in this apparent division here, or duality) is made whole, is gentled, is integrated with what it refuses through its apparent discriminative search, this embrace of mentalizing and physical hardness, and brute intentions relative to what appears to be the controlling force, the force of nature, the force of the cosmos, the force of what’s simply happening.
You’re all male-like, utterly defended against it. You tend to think your way, and bully your way, into some control over all of it – that you will never have, by the way, because it will destroy you long before you ever come to that point of absolute control. It’s a terrible intention that has overcome humanity. And rather than talk some more in the high do-gooder offices, and “blah-blah” further to try and figure it out (as if at the end of that there’s going to be some golden age), it would be better if, world-wide, everybody reconstructed the Pleasure Dome.
Of course, there are traditional cultures that did, in fact, maintain the Pleasure Dome and know the difference between the front door to the Sacred Place and the world of daily activity. But the world of daily activity is simply governed by what took place in the Sacred Domain, the temple and bed, and community. So to come out of there with that look on your face, that feeling in your heart, and all of your body-that’s not going to allow you to kill the woman anymore.
Your sexing is a destruction of women, a denial of the feminine force, of Shakti, of energy, of delight, of feeling, of Happiness Itself. You must be combined with it. You must make art again, which is a great exercise in integrity. Make it with all the senses. Make environment and life out of it. Make a Pleasure Dome. Make community out of it.
“Women teach the lesson that the realm of the senses, the domain of the senses, is the domain of feeling, and it is to be organized pleasurably.”
The temple and the place of embrace, and of community of right life, is a place of art, in every detail – the senses embraced pleasurably as women teach men, if men will respond. Women teach the lesson that the realm of the senses, the domain of the senses, is the domain of feeling, and it is to be organized pleasurably. The lesson of the male, having embraced the woman, having embraced the domain of feeling and the senses, is that all this must be “considered” in the context of the Source in which you inhere, and oriented to It.
“Daily life..is no longer made of competitive male-like egos trying to figure out the problem and control the world aggressively.”
The settlement is the women make the palatial bedrooms of the community, and the places of delight, and the men make the temple. And the men insist on the temple, the women insist on the bedroom. Everybody agrees that the temple and bedroom, and everything in between, is an immense Pleasure Dome as the core of life, and then the business of daily life has its logic. It’s no longer made of competitive male-like egos trying to figure out the problem and control the world aggressively.
The interactions between human beings become constructed on the basis of presumed pleasure, presumed orientation to Happiness, presumed conformity, lawful right conformity to the Ultimate condition of existence, Happiness Itself-a true commitment to this, engaged hour by hour, made even into architecture and art and community-speech also, then.
If you can loosen your tongue in bed, you find you speak a totally different language. Men and women speak differently in that embrace, if it’s real, profound. That’s the language of the Pleasure Dome. Not specifically the language of sexual intercourse, but the language of the Pleasure Dome, the language that precedes the language of the world detached from the Pleasure Dome, the language that is prior to mere male-ness, mere strategic mind, or problem-solving mind, seeking for power, or seeking to control-softened by that, in the domain of art, of women, of feeling. Men and women all sublimed and oriented in that Pleasure Dome to Divine Communion, the entire pattern of daily life immediately possesses a totally different logic than makes the world at this moment.
“If you want to tell people something about Me, tell them this first.”
Determine to make the Pleasure Dome, restore it again, immediately – that brings an end to conflict. You don’t have time for it. So much is eliminated immediately, by getting down to the business of remaking the Pleasure Dome. So if you want to tell people something about Me, tell them this first. This is the nature of My Kingship and Royalty. A concern for the restoration of the Pleasure Dome not only for humanity, but for the non-humans, even the walls, then. So immense is My Sensory Domain, it includes everything that arises, that can be perceived.
Well, let’s understand it in your human terms. You know what I mean by the Pleasure Dome, then. Make an immensity of Pleasure Dome at the center of your lives. And every day when you go to work, begin from there. If you can find a way to stay in the Pleasure Dome, that’s good, too. If everybody who went to important businesses tomorrow came from the Pleasure Dome, they’d know they have a lot to lose by continuing their struggles with one another, their obnoxious arm-wrestling, and manipulations, and the goring of the world and the earth and humanity, with nothing but sheer stupidity.
“If you don’t like the fact that I know it all and can tell you that, and you want to figure it out yourself, I’ll see you later.”
So I’m not here to suggest idealistic poetic notions about religion. It is a most profound, concrete matter, and I have no fairy notions about anything whatsoever. If you want to know what to do, I can tell you exactly. If you want to know what to change, and how to change it, and what the Law is, I can tell you exactly. If you don’t like the fact that I know it all and can tell you that, and you want to figure it out yourself, I’ll see you later. [laughter]
Why would you want to resist Me? If you find Me out, then I’m here altogether for your good, and have some really interesting happy ideas for things you can do right away. So straighten out your act. Of course, I’m not suggesting that you just take everything you do with feeling and the senses and sex and all the rest of it and make a Pleasure Dome out of that. No, I’m suggesting you make a Pleasure Dome, or Calling you to make a Pleasure Dome, on the basis of My Instruction and your relationship to the Source altogether. So it’s not a matter of just going and casually indulging your limitations relative to these things. It’s a matter of engaging it all in an utterly and profoundly different way.
But there’s nothing puritanical about it, nothing even moralistic about it. It’s not about a problem. It’s just about rightness itself, Happiness Itself, well-being itself. Are you suggesting to Me that there are human beings who aren’t interested in that?
“For all kinds of reasons, are agitating to achieve the status of men, or the kind or status they presume men have enjoyed”
In the current political and social agitation, women, for all kinds of reasons, are agitating to achieve the status of men, or the kind or status they presume men have enjoyed. There are all kinds of reasons to justify that and so forth in the political and social circumstance. But the calling of woman is not about that. Woman doesn’t have her work to do if you don’t establish the Pleasure Dome again.
Otherwise, they’ll all be wearing stiff collars and kicking male ass like men kicked one another’s asses. Women don’t have a domain in which to function except the male domain, at the present moment. Perhaps women will listen to Me, then, and insist on the restoration of the Pleasure Dome, so they’ll have something to do, other than going out to dinner.
The woman is the very source, the substance, the sign of art, of feeling. Regeneration of the Pleasure Dome of the arts, also man-woman relations rather than merely male-female relations, or male-female adolescent relations. Women prepared to be women, not virgins, or reluctant objects. You men are not interested in woman.
You’re interested in getting off, or whatever, getting your stress off, using women, females somehow or other, but you don’t want to enter into the domain of feeling and the senses, and be pleasurized there. You can’t see yourself guiltless, lying on a sack of silk pillows, listening to music, talking spontaneously and happily with your friends about God and nonsense. You’re too stressed up. You want to get off, and get out and kick ass.
“Male is afraid of the female now. In some respects, women have more balls than men-more intense.”
You want to forget woman and treat the world, then, as some sort of object to be manipulated because it’s so dangerous to you. Male is afraid of the female now. In some respects, women have more balls than men-more intense about something, it seems. But it’s misdirected by the current circumstance because the Pleasure Dome doesn’t exist. It would need to be an immense Pleasure Dome at the center of life, and also the field of daily activities in order to preserve that, to handle the survival requirements of humanity. Well, then, there would be two different spheres of occupation to “consider”.
A woman might think twice about going downtown. Might prefer to function in the great Pleasure Dome domain, and see to great art and pleasure, and see to it that males have their domain of feeling, and are obliged to conform to it – not just in the bedroom with their individual females, but in their community with one another, at temple and bed and meals and play and so on.
To have respect for woman, there must be respect for the natural world, then, and (ultimately) respect for the Source– even as a basis for all of it. Respect for women, then, is respect for the feminine, for She, for yin, for the domain of feeling and the senses, to embrace it utterly, to be conformed to it, to be gentled by it, to be enabled to become whole through that association, woman to man, man to woman. You have to grow up, and abandon your adolescent sexuality, and your adolescent game.
Your problem about Me, your problem about the Divine, is a construct of your own, made by self-contraction, but in the midst of human exchanges. You have trouble about the Divine because in the human scale you’re not only self-contracted but you’ve rejected the woman – the other half of the play of the world. The seat of Divine Realization is the heart. Therefore the domain of feeling is fundamental. There is no integration with the Divine Light without integration with the feminine. In other words, the domain of feeling, and the senses, must be embraced by you-not as a threat or a negative, but as the obligatory Pleasure Dome. Cease to reject the feminine, you will cease to reject the world, and you will also cease to reject Me.
You all have an immense emotional-sexual problem based on your self-contraction. It’s the root of all of your difficulty. You cannot accept to be in the feeling-place, comfortable in the senses as you would be with a true woman, if you were a man-or a true man, if you were a woman. You cannot accept it as the foundation of life. You think it’s not serious, or it’s wrong, or it’s dissociating you from the Divine. You only feel that because of the self-contraction, yes. But the result of that is you don’t know what even a single thing is! Not even a single thing.
You don’t know what a single thing is, so you don’t know What Is, and yet you want to perpetuate some massive drama of mankind in the absence of this most fundamental knowledge. This knowledge is regained by the elimination of the ego-act, in practice, and the meaning is in that realization, whereby all of that is transcended. And it’s not merely a going-to-meditation matter. It’s not only in the Hall, or the temple. It’s altogether, in the context of every function, every moment. The Way cannot be reduced then to meditation practices and such. It touches absolutely every aspect of your experiencing, your activities, your functions. It must all be Yoga.
“The Way of the Heart is not the way of embracing the world in the utopian sense.”
How do you make it Yoga? Very simply. In this attracted response to Me, practice Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga. That’s the logic of all other changes. But, of course, the practice of Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga requires your heart, this surrender, this submission, this relinquishment of the denial of Me, of woman, and of the world. The Way of the Heart is not the way of embracing the world in the utopian sense. That’s using it from the egoic point of view. It’s not that at all. It’s just that in this apparent context, the Law is that of the Pleasure Dome. That is how you conform to Me.
You must make your reconciliation with Me, and with woman, and with the world, and with the entire cosmic domain. You have shunned and abused Me, and continue to do so in all your doings. And the sign among you is this heartless abusiveness, not of conditional existence but of the world itself, the earth-world, all human beings, all non-humans, She, the feminine itself, what the world is. It is the domain of energy, of feeling, shown by a pattern of the senses, a pattern of perceptions – that’s all what can be called She.
I Am She. I Am Whole and One, not Consciousness apart, but Self-Radiant, inherently One with what is traditionally called the Shakti, or the Mother-Force, or She.
The exclusion of That is not in the Way I’ve Given you. The acceptance of it and the principle of the heart, of feeling, and the Law of conforming the realm of the senses pleasurably to Me-that is the Yoga of this Way.
“So you want to talk and figure it out, and “blah-blah-blah-blah-blah” in male-like fashion”
So you want to talk and figure it out, and “blah-blah-blah-blah-blah” in male-like fashion. But if you erected a Pleasure Dome on the lawn here, you’d still tend to be talking bullshit to one another over your sugar-free colas. Ready to be very busy there, in meditation and puja.
In right life – all on the silk seat, the kusha grass, the seat in a well-made place, only occasional peacocks. Temperate, not mere hot, yang. Not mere cold, yin. But temperate in that combination, or mutual embrace, in Communion with Me.
So if you tell Me you’re not up to it, you want to be householders, you only have a little bit of sex in you, and so forth, you refuse the Pleasure Dome, if you will. If you want to practice this Way for real, you must embrace the Pleasure Dome and become Yogis. Until you are a Yogi, as a man in sexual terms, you are rejecting women, rejecting the feminine itself, rejecting the domain of feeling, the domain of the senses, the world itself. You’re thinking in double-minded terms of Consciousness apart from phenomena, and escaping the world at last.
Escape the world from where? You are already only Consciousness Itself! Where is there to escape to? You have to find your way into this domain, not escape from it. You’re not in it! You are sitting there as Consciousness “apart”. No matter what arises, even attention itself is object to you. You’re already Consciousness-and you don’t know what a single thing is in this mysterious association.
“Your rejection of Life and woman; and the world itself is so profound, you recognize nothing whatsoever. You’re not in a position to escape from the world. You’re not in it to begin with. You’re standing apart from it,”
Your rejection of God and woman; and the world itself is so profound, you recognize nothing whatsoever. You’re not in a position to escape from the world. You’re not in it to begin with. You’re standing apart from it, unknowing, but your unknowingness is a result of your own act. But that act amounts to the rejection of the world, the rejection of the domain of feeling and the senses, the rejection of woman, rejection of Shakti, rejection of My Blessing, My “Brightness”, the rejection of Me.
Men don’t like what women really want. They’re not ready to do that. You’re not ready to do what I want. You’re not ready to do what the world requires. You’re fouling the nest, My Domain, My Hall, and all women in the world. That Very Person that’s She is rejected by you. You don’t want that kind of relationship to Me, you want to talk and do male exchanges with Me, instead of surrendering. You can’t accept that heart-woman in yourself, you males.
“Males have compromised the mind of women, and the hearts of women“
Men need to realize that simplicity, and women, therefore, likewise-having been propagandized out of it. The simplicity of heart-surrender is what you must volunteer for. Women would serve all men by standing firm on this point. Even the Earth is standing firm on it, don’t you see? And I certainly am.