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This is a Beezone
adaptation and edit from various essays by Adi Da
Samraj.
The First Truly Humanizing Stage
of Development
MRI of normal
brain
People
are constantly engaged in thinking, thinking…talking,
talking, talking. Thinking and talking are really
conversations, dialogues with ourselves and others. In
thinking you’re talking to yourself and in talking your
expressing your ‘thinking’ with someone else and in many
cases it is quite a humorous affair. Did you ever observe
people having a ‘conversation’ where it is clear that people
are just talking AT each other rather than WITH each
other.
The chronic, obsessive thinking (and
talking) mind is a problem. It actually takes the form of of
a problem. “What about this”? “What about that”? “Tell me
about this”? “Tell me about that”? By using the mind one
tries to get free of a problem or discover a solution to a
problem, hoping that it will produce some understanding or
some release.
When people talk with one another, they often talk about
their hard times. They talk about difficulties relative to
“money, food, and sex”. They meditate on their difficulties
through the instrument of social communication. Such social
magic is a way of meditating on the failure of life, on
one’s self-indulgent and irresponsible life of conflict and
seeking.
Thinking and bodily experiencing
work together and are natural and ordinary conventions. They
are useful, practical, inevitable functions, with every kind
of personal and social significance. However, the doubt,
anxiety, seeking, and answering (or escaping) that arise on
the basis of confrontation with the inherent limitations of
the body-mind are an exaggeration, a distortion, and a
binding superimposition that we add to the simple processes
of thinking and bodily experiencing. The inherent
limitations of the mind or brain and the body create stress.
Therefore, the search for answers must be understood
and transcended before true relaxation, peace and the actual
state of things are to be realized.
Speech is a form of sacrifice. It is a sacrifice of the
life-force. It is not entertainment. People generally talk
in order to empty themselves. That is another form of
throwing the force out of this contraction so they don’t
suffer it anymore. Whenever there is speech, whenever there
is communication with the environment, whenever there is
relationship, whenever there is use of the life-force, it is
sacrifice.
Huang-lung Hui-nan (Jap., Oryo Enan,
100269).
Chan/Zen master of the Rinzai school
It quite humorous when people try to
use the mind and it’s thinking capability to discover an
answer to the larger questions of life. It’s humorous
because of it’s utter futility. If we are going to begin to
help ourselves (and therefore others) we must clearly
observe this mechanism and understand it. The search for
answers to larger issues of this life must first begin with
understanding the mind, it’s limitations and it’s source or
root.
According to Adi Da the approach to
understanding the larger questions of life with the mind are
generally understood as the “talking” school of spiritual
practice. The talking school of spiritual practitioners are
those who analyze the larger issues though mind and it’s
thinking capability. The method of discovery tends to
attract those who have a minimal capability for real
spiritual practice, yogic discipline, and deep meditation.
Talking school disciples, commonly
referred to a Pundits or Talking Heads, are habituated to
chronic thinking (reading) and obsessive talking (writing).
They find the noble search for answers in objective
cognitive and brain level analysis of existence. The
“discipline” and the “Realization” in the “talking” school
disciples are generally minimal, weak, superficial,
arrogant, egoic and merely mental.
“I could study 10 hours and
prepare a really good lecture on Freud or Human Motivation,
but it was all as if it were behind a wall. It was
theoretical. I theorized this or that. I espoused these
ideas, these intellectual concepts, quite apart from my own
experiential base. Although I could bring all kinds of
emotional zeal to bear on my presentation, there was a lack
of validity in my guts about what I was
doing.”
Andrew Cohen and Ken
Wiber
The “Truths” and the understanding
that we all seek, not only for ourselves but for the
betterment of our planet and world are founded on noble
causes. Searching for answers about further evolutionary
development is necessary especially in our present time. But
we must first understand ourselves before we can
begin to understand something as large and complex as ‘the
world’. A disturbed, troubled, fearful and strategically
active state of mind (and body) cannot discover the larger
conditions of our mind, body and world.
The first truly human or humanizing stage of development
is to transcend our dissociative emotional reaction to the
inherent limitations of the body-mind and its experiences.
It is only on the basis on this understanding that the
actual Realization of Truth can be founded. It is not the
problem-solving exercise of mind or psyche that Realizes the
Truth, but only the relaxed openness or tacit suspension of
mind, psyche, or attention itself permits that Realization.
It is not the strategic exercise of the body, or the total
body-mind, that Realizes the Truth of the body-mind, but
only the relaxed openness or tacit suspension of all
contraction, all knowledge (or “knowing about”), and all
self-possession permits that Realization. The human
individual must grow into an understanding of himself, such
that the reactive programs of knowing and acting are
transcended in a tacit Realization of the Transcendental
Condition in which the body-mind is arising, floating,
changing, and passing away.
Therefore, the Way of Life or Truth is a sober enterprise
that is founded upon the mature equanimity of the body-mind.
That Way is not itself characterized by mental knowledge,
mystical states of the psyche, or physical and mental
strategies for attainment. Those who take up that Way must
have first matured to a sensitive state of psycho-physical
equanimity, or freedom from reactive and self-possessed
programs of thinking and bodily experiencing that cause one
always to seek the Truth rather than presently surrender to
the obvious Truth. Only when such maturity or equanimity has
stabilized the body-mind can actual practice of the Way
begin.
Due to copyright restrictions Beezone is limited in
its ability to present any more of this talk.
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