The following excerpts have been taken from a variety of essays and talks from Adi Da Samraj covering over 30 years of his teaching demonstration.
This style of presentation is called the ‘White and Orange Books” project and is based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown books. The Blue & Brown Books of Wittgenstein’s were dictated as a set of notes to his student in 1934-1935. I have been collecting materials from Adi Da that I find would be suitable for the same format.
Buddha had had reservations about his ability to communicate his message to the people. Words simply could not carry such a sublime message. So, on one occasion, while the monks around him waited for a sermon, he said absolutely nothing. He simply held up a flower. the monks, of course, were confused, except for Kashyapa, who understood and smiled. The Buddha smiled back, and thus the Silent Transmission began.
Meditation School — Dhyana, Ch’an, Son, or Zen.
“The best “term” of reference to Reality is perhaps silence, no-thought, no-indication, or no-action. Or, perhaps even better, all possible references, forms of speech, thoughts, indications, and actions are the best term of reference. Therefore, any term will do. (I commonly use the term “Radiant Transcendental Being.”)”
Nirvansara
***
“The Tathagatas of Silence are absorbed in the blissful state of Samadhi, they do not discriminate concerning this state, nor do they discourse on it. Blessed One, thou assuredly wilt discourse on this subject of duality. Thou art thyself a master of all things, an Arhat, a Tathagata. The sons of the Buddha and myself are anxious to listen to it.”
“Even Now (and Forever Hereafter) Only The Hearts Great Sign and Blessing Work Persists, In My Perfect Silence, Even If I Always Speak This Work Of Words.”
“I Only Speak The One Truth, Even Without A Word, By Utter Feeling Silence.”
“Bhagavan and Somerset Maugham sat opposite to each other for about half-an-hour without uttering a word. At the end of which Somerset Maugham looked nervously across in my direction and said, “Is there any need to say anything?” “No,” replied Bhagavan, “Silence is best. Silence is itself conversation.”
Somerset
Maugham and Ramana Maharshi
***
“The ultimate and simplest meditation is to gaze in the heart as no-seeking and allow its bliss to rise as fullness to the head, the silence of the sahasrar above the seat of the mind.”
“But in (this relationship) of the Heart what arises is confronted by silence without and the Heart within.”
“On his arrival at the cave he saw a lustrous figure sitting in a lotus pose and meditating. He had spread some earth on two logs of wood and covered it with the bark of a tree, and was sitting on that seat. His pose was quiet and absolutely motionless”
Science
of Soul
***
“To turn upon any object, or
condition, or experience, or the subjective being itself, as
Reality or Truth, before the Truth is Realized, is the
primal error of un-Enlightened being. And that very error is
not only fundamental to everyday life (or the first three
stages of life). It is fundamental to all of the sacred,
magical, mystical, religious, spiritual, and high
philosophical schools of the fourth, fifth, and sixth stages
of life.”
Nirvanasara
– Adi Da Samraj
***
“The ultimate and simplest meditation is to gaze in the heart as no-seeking and allow its bliss to rise as fullness to the head, the silence of the sahasrar above the seat of the mind.”
“But in (this relationship) of the Heart what arises is confronted by silence without and the Heart within.”
“It is not necessary (or even sufficient) to enter exclusively into the Pure, Absolute, and Undifferentiated Transcendental Silence (in Which there are no perceptions) in order for there to be Divine Enlightenment. Most Perfect Realization of the Divine can Exist in the midst of perceptions and appearances and forms and psyches and bodies. The Divine is not exclusively “elsewhere”, or only “deeply within” all this.”
He
She Is Me
***
“My life was born as a distraction for the sake of my friends. When Knowledge appeared, I was moved to speak and act for men. But the speech and every deed have begun to be economized by this same Knowledge. I think I have said and done the fundamental complication for which I was born. I speak less, I do less, I am not moved to explain beyond these explanations, to do any more to prove the path. I am not leaving this place, but, more and more, I am only present, and not full of words and acts. My function is Satsang, which is Silence, the Siddhi that is Silence, not a matter of words or acts, not a matter of proof or “influence.”
Announcing
the Way of Divine Communion
***
“The Zen Masters taught nothing but only sat comfortably in the company of wise disciples who displayed their knowledge of perfect truth without effort. And because of the endless kinds of ultimate demonstrations as well as the innumerable means the masters used to call there disciples’ attention to the nature of their own wisdom there are countless traditions about enlightenment experiences and the methods of Zen Masters.
There was great wisdom in these means, and great honor between master and disciple. So it is not longer useful to teach exclusively by these means. The demand for communications is so much a requirement of modern society that no one understands silence or feels the need to demonstrate the knowledge of truth, whatever that is. But one who understands will not fail to make appropriate use of the teaching methods of Zen Masters.”
Zen
Masters
***
“One of them asked me why you are so quiet, as if your silence were a threat. He feels uncomfortable about approaching you. One of the American disciples says he feels uncomfortable around you, and yet he has asked me some things, and I said you are absolutely Guru. He asked me if I think you are a Siddha Guru, and I said absolutely. That directly threatens their state, so this is a very dangerous place for you to be.”
“The manifestation of the Heart Siddhi itself does not require any kind of life-theatre, within or without, for its manifestation. It takes place, fundamentally, without media, in moveless silence. And the sadhana relative to it is a conscious one, prior to all strategies. It is an affair of radical intelligence, of dissolution of the principle of all dilemma, which is the conventional assumption of independent existence. Such sadhana is, therefore, not accumulative or goal-directed. It is an activity prior to the drama of solutions. It is not a matter of attention to the life-force in any yogic or mystical way, but of living this intelligence of understanding. It certainly involves contact with the Guru, but non-theatrical contact. It is contact with true Siddhi, Satsang, the Condition of Divine Communion in which one is not mystically absorbed but consciously awakened.”
“Thus, in the future, you may not often see me sitting down open-eyed, looking at each one and dealing with the yogic dimension of the life-circle in which each one lives. Most often you will probably see me just sitting there, with eyes closed most of the time. And it will not be because I am falling asleep or going into some trance. I could just as well sit with you with my eyes open. But the closed eyes will be a sign that it is not through the theatre of either external or mediumistic contact that this Siddhi is communicated and made operative. It is Present in silence, it is without qualification, it is not manifested through media. It is not manifested through psycho-physical vehicles, it is not manifested through psycho-physical processes. And it may not be received by any such means. It is immediate, direct. It requires no manifest media whatsoever. And it depends entirely on the conscious process, not on the experiential one.”
“Whatever arises in meditation, you should abide in understanding and simply enquire. In time the movement of consciousness will not even tend to the point of super-consciousness above. The enquiry will become radical knowledge prior to every kind of activity and perception. Then you will find that understanding even ceases to function as a mental activity. It will have become radically concentrated in that to which the enquiry always leads. That silence, incomparable depth and formless object of contemplation will become utterly absorbing. Then, suddenly, you may find that you are seated in the heart. All the movements of consciousness, on every level, will have fallen away, and you will remain tacitly aware as no-seeking in the heart, to the right side of the chest. You will possess unqualified knowledge of Reality and enjoy untouchable bliss. And it will be the same bliss you know as understanding.”
Meditation
and Understanding
***
“Truth is in the moment, this instant in which there is no meaning, no cause, no implication, no necessity, no motive to any effect. The Radiance of Ignorance is the Reality, and all phenomena only test our Realization of the necessity and sufficiency of That. It is the Condition of all conditions. It is neither subjective nor objective relative to this moment. It is Only, and It is unspeakable.”
The true Spiritual Master is one who originates spontaneous and true Teaching in the company of others, and who generates and awakens devotees to the sacred occasion of Divine Communion, not merely through apparent silence or no-response, but through a literal Power in Silence that communicates itself as a realized influence that quickens insight and awakens intuitive contemplation. Such a Master then leads devotees toward the radical Realization of that same awakening, prior to any world, body, force of life, mind, transcendental experience, or ego-soul illusion.”
Breath
and Name
***
“But much talk is simply the indulgence of the self-dramatizing activity of our ordinary mind. It is only a display and a scattering of the force of the Heart in forms that are not themselves intelligence or understanding. Much talk is not relationship but only a reproduction and reinforcement of a state that is not understanding. The patterns that continually arise in us are not served by the responses or answers they imply and demand. We are only served by understanding, enquiry and silence.” In other words, the verbal instructor, and personal criticism and instruction, teaching of lessons in their outward way has a real function in true spiritual life, in the real process of spiritual life. But it is not the way itself. It is one of the functions of the way, it’s one of the activities for which the man of understanding is responsible, and for which he makes his Ashram responsible. But these outward forms are serving what? They’re serving understanding, they’re serving this real process. They are not the thing in itself, and they are not intended to absorb the person’s life absolutely. They are aids to the beginning of this conscious process within him. So, actual understanding, the process of enquiry and the potent silence of Satsang are then the senior means, or the most mature means, the fundamental means of the spiritual process.”
“But the communication of the Heart is essentially a process in silence, whereby what arises gets no response, no reinforcement.” Again, the activity of the man of understanding is mere presence, that is what he does. His mere existence, his mere presence in relation to his disciple, mere Satsang – this is the method of the Siddhas. And it is prior to all forms of action so it is prior to speech as well, it’s prior to all outward activities. Satsang with the Guru is essentially an affair of silence without peculiar activities. So that form of our meeting together that we generally call Satsang is a time when you all sit in a room and do essentially nothing, and I seem to do essentially nothing. There’s no action, no words spoken, because the Siddhi, the true activity to which the disciple becomes sensitive has nothing whatever to do with either his ordinary games or anything that could be communicated indirectly, from without.”
“Then a man ceases to continue in the exclusive motion of what arises,” (the exclusive motion, the karmic tendencies) “and he will find himself as the Heart, which is the source and form of all this. This confrontation with silence, in relationship to a true teacher, one who manifests the Siddhi, the power of the Heart, is unlike our ordinary experience of frustration in life.” This is the peculiar function of the true Guru. The Maha-Siddha, the Great Siddha. In other words, I’ve said up here in his presence, his mere presence, or silence, what arises gets no response, no reinforcement.”
“Then what arises is confronted with silence. This company of silence, this confrontation with silence while remaining in conscious relationship to the teacher, causes the individual to be simply aware of what arises.” (Simply aware.) There’s a difference between simple awareness and sitting there equipped with all kinds of methods to deal with what arises. When one is truly living in Satsang, the condition of Satsang being the process you are living, then the things that arise simply arise. You witness them, you see them in the midst of the freedom of Satsang.”
“The way itself is the relationship to that silence, generated by the teacher and found within, until there is the unconditional perception of the potency that is the Heart.” So the quality of this sadhana in Satsang is where you, by virtue of the creation of the turiya condition within, which is created by the doubt of your tendencies, and you begin to fall into this prior state, this bliss in the company of the Guru. You begin to become sensitive to this unfathomable depth, rather than to the qualities that are arising. You become less and less distracted by the qualities that arise, and are more and more dissolved in this prior quality, the Force of the Heart. So the way of understanding, the way of Satsang fundamentally is this sensitivity, this obliteration, this sensitivity to falling into the Force of the Heart, the prior quality. Until this goes on, subtly, in the disciple, until there is unconditional perception of the potency that is the Heart, until the disciple himself becomes awake through the process of understanding in Satsang, to this very quality itself, becomes alive in it, as it, begins to perceive its functioning, its working, begins, prior to cognition, prior to mentality, enjoying his existence as that, his existence in the mere presence of it, in the form of his Guru. And he, himself, now becoming awake as that very quality that is his Guru.”
“I am the one who speaks from his own silence. In other words this one who is speaking is conscious. He is not experiencing the present manifestation as a mystery, as non comprehension, as a form of identification with qualities. He knows what his speech is and he generates his x own speech, he generates his-own qualities, he is responsible for his own qualities, and he knows also that his speech is preceded by his silence. The root of his nature is silent, not to be identified with a quality. So his creative activity is a spontaneous generation of his own absolute nature. “I am the one who always stands present in his own form.” Again, he’s not hidden, he’s not elsewhere. He’s not mysterious, he’s not in himself a paradox. [He is not separated from the ultimate reality. He is what he is and he always, the Guru, always stands present as what he is. I am the one who always and already exists. I am that one. I. am that self nature, enjoying his own form as all . conditions and states In other words all the conditions and states that arise are his own form just as his speech comes from his own silence or very nature.”
“As stated above, Captain Hatengdi found Swami Nityananda soon after the Swami had come to Ganeshpuri. The Captain, who spent many weekends alone with Nityananda in the jungle, would often sit silently for hours with him, Nityananda sat very close to him with his back turned. The Captain, however, often fell into a deep slumber, overwhelmed by the force he felt radiating from Nityananda. He recognized, though, that the power of Nityananda’s Presence was communicated to him in a very direct manner-in silence on the jungle floor.”
Swami
Nityananda
***