CHAPTER 33 Transform Your Speech SRI DA AVABHASA: Talk less. *** What is true is all that should be said, and only when it
is appropriate. Therefore conserve communication. *** Your speech should sustain you. Your life of speech
should be a form of your communication in Communion with Me.
Your speech and your eating and your every action should
dwell in your feeling-Contemplation of Me. *** The self-indulgent and irresponsible person is not aware
that all action, all manifestation, is itself sacrifice.
Speech is sacrifice. Sexual activity, even emotional-sexual
relationship itself, is sacrifice. All action tends to break
the life-current, the sphere of descending and ascending
force. Where action is performed, the internal circle of
life, or energy, tends to be broken and released
temporarily. Do that enough, do it in ignorance and
absolutely, and there is only death as a result. Do it
intelligently, and it gives life, it generates life through
relationship, for relationship is a universal duplication of
the internal circle of energy. To sacrifice oneself, or open
oneself, into relationship is to realize the greater Form,
the true and perfect Circle, the Completion that transcends
limited, or separative, individuality. Therefore, true and
conscious sacrifice is a form of completion, not of
interruption or separation. *** I have told you that 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. Sexuality is a form of
sacrifice. It does tend to make you empty, unless you know
fully how to make use of that process, how to conduct its
generative energy into the cycle of regeneration. If I sat
here and talked endlessly, occasionally going to sleep and
taking food here, the talking alone would eventually kill
me. I would die from speech! Any exploitation of the
life-force will kill you, and people are in fact dying from
this abuse. People are dying from a complex exploitation of
the life-force. They don’t conduct it. They only use it.
They don’t refresh themselves. They do not live this circuit
of energy even a little bit. *** Therefore, the True Heart-Master is Unique in the world.
The devotional relationship to the True Heart-Master is the
Unique Method of Awakening, provided by the Grace of God to
living beings. The practice is to transform the activities
and functions of body, mind, and speech into real and
constant feeling-surrender to the One Who Is Present in and
as the Bodily (Human) Form, the Spiritual (and Always
Blessing) Presence, and the Very (and Inherently Perfect)
State of the Master of the Heart. *** 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. *** Speech should be responsible to My constant
BlessingTransmission, rather than betraying My Divine
Presence in the service of childish reactivity and
degenerative society. *** Honesty is to be highly valued in the Way of the
Heart-highly valued. Traditionally, one of the primary disciplines is to be
truthful, to be true. *** Do not participate in gossip, or casual, negatively
suggestive communications about other people. You are not
practicing the Way of the Heart if you are only meditating
on others’ limitations, reinforcing and magnifying them,
doing harm to others, and playing “gotcha” games. In the
“village life” of conventional society, some sort of ideal
form of life is projected onto everyone, and everyone talks
about everyone else’s failure to live it and such talk is
gossip. In the Way of the Heart, there is never an appropriate
time to casually discuss the failure of someone else’s
practice or to pass on rumors that suggest such a
failure. *** The usual man or woman thrives on irony, on subtle
negativity. Until you have been transformed, at least to
some degree, by your practice of the Way of the Heart, all
your usual humor, so-called, is irony. Most of your
conversation is irony. You tend either to be ironic with
another, or else to tell another ironic stories about how
ironic life is. Or how ironic it all was: “How ironic it was
that this and that happened when I was twelve.” Not yet converted at heart, you generally communicate
irony, rather than love. The analytical hammering of
another, the righteous correcting of another’s practice of
the Way of the Heart, is a form of irony. And really it is
fundamentally unnecessary. You should feel free to correct
another when it is appropriate. But if your habit of
correcting people becomes a repetitive liturgy, you must
observe that you yourself are bound to the principle of
irony, or “Narcissus”, which is the refusal and withholding
of love. *** Do not ever manifest intolerance in your speech and life.
You must exhibit tolerance, compassion, love, freedom from
egoic “selfpossession” in your life, in your speech, in all
your acts. This is not a moralistic matter. It is necessary
even for survival.
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