The Incarnation of Love – Adi Da Samraj

DEVOTEE: Sri Gurudev, recently I made a decision to move
out of the household where I have been living, because my
relationship, or lack of it, with one of the people there
was not tenable.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Why wasn’t it tenable?

DEVOTEE: Because there was always so much conflict.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Why is conflict not tenable? Why isn’t
it useful? Why isn’t that a creative situation?

DEVOTEE: For quite a while I felt that it was very useful
because of the heat it created for both of us.

SRI DA AVABHASA: It wasn’t really Spiritual fire, or
heat, because both of you became less and less involved with
one another. To love when you are not loved, that is the
heat of Spiritual practice. The heat is not to love less and
to feel unloved when you are not loved. That is not heat.
That is lovelessness. I believe I have called it “the
avoidance of relationship”.

DEVOTEE: Several times this person made it very clear
that she could not live in the household with me any longer,
and her refusal justified my departure.

SRI DA AVABHASA: That is probably the logic that had to
appear eventually. The whole episode obviously was a
dramatization, the rehearsal of a script. Everything became
inevitable, and now you are living alone. You made the
emotional choice, not necessarily the intellectual one. You
chose by habit to respond to being unloved by not loving.
Therefore, the rest of it became inevitable. But if you had
done the opposite, then that script could very well have
been unnecessary. You might not have become one another’s
favorite human being, but you could certainly have realized
a human relationship.

This is what you do when you are not loved. You separate
yourself. And when you get similar metaphysical feelings, so
that you are really not certain that you are loved by the
Divine either, the script continues to be one of isolation.
You go inside to find the “Big Self’. You take the inward
path in isolation, indulging in meditation for fifteen hours
a day and all the rest of it. You choose the loveless
life.

Do you think you are loved by Me, the Divine Person? Do
you believe that the universe is pervaded by My
All-Sustaining, Absolute, Immortal Love?

DEVOTEE: I feel that in Your Company.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Apart from what you may feel by
association with Me in Divine Communion-Satsang with the
Realizer of course being the cure for lovelessness
recommended since ancient timesand apart from the love that
you may feel is coming from any individual specifically,
when you are off naked in the universe do you feel connected
to the Divine through love? Or are you uncertain of it?

DEVOTEE I mainly feel in a state of shock.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Right. In the metaphysics of your
existence you are responding to a “Great Woman” or “Great
Being” or “Great Condition of existence” by Which you are
not loved.

DEVOTEE: It feels now like a great tension in the
heart.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Yes. That is the contraction of the ego,
the avoidance of relationship, the collapse from the Divine
Reality. At birth, when the human being individuates bodily,
the apparent individual feels cut off from the Divine. As a
born being you become dependent on the food source, on the
sources of love, in your childhood, when you are vulnerable.
But those sources are always doubtful. You always come to
discover that the love and attention any being can give you
is not steady, not absolute. Yet you continue to depend on
such gestures. This dependence, however, enforces a sense in
you that you are fundamentally disconnected, vulnerable,
mortal, unloved. That is the mood of the ego, contracted
from the Divine and in fear of annihilation. Independence is
the false incident of birth. It is a disposition a human
being inherits through psychological individuation. And you
must individuate because you are born.

The third stage of life should be the time when you are
unparented at last, thrown from the nest, when you are
guided to the point of responsibility for that presumption
of independent existence, that false incident, so that you
can assume your full humanity and enter into Spiritual life,
which is not founded on the sense that you are individuated
and moving toward annihilation, to be murdered by cosmic
Nature. In the third stage of life you are to become
responsible for all the adaptation that you have inherited
in your incarnation, and to be open-heartedly connected to
what sustains you in Truth. It is only on the basis of this
responsibility that Spiritual life begins, not on the basis
of the agony of your egoic life, struggling to be consoled
by some vision, some relationship, some functional
pleasure.

DEVOTEE: I never feel consoled by any kind of vision.

SRI DA AVABHASA: You have been looking for visions,
haven’t you? Trying to realize some state that is completely
pleasurable through meditation, perhaps!

DEVOTEE: I have always felt that I would realize such a
condition only in Spiritual relationship to You.

SRI DA AVABHASA: That is good. But in terms of your
position in the midst of things, this reaction to being
unloved is what you are all about. And of course the cure is
to find Me and enter into Divine Communion. That is the
cure: Abandon the incident of the ego and realize the
incident of Divine Communion, or reconnection to the Divine
Source-Condition That I Reveal to you.

DEVOTEE: Over time I have felt that realization coming
more and more into play.

SRI DA AVABHASA: But you are still dramatizing this
loveless lie. You are still dependent on being loved. What
you discover is not that love comes to you from Infinity, as
from a super-cosmic Parent. You discover in Communion with
Me that you are love. That is the Realization.

Divine Self-Realization is not a relationship to some
great Something that loves you. No one is the beloved of
God, absolutely no one. The Divine is not the kind of
Reality that makes beloveds out of individual beings. All
beings owe their love to the Divine. You do not Realize the
Divine by finding the Divine Being, Truth, and Reality at
the end of a great chain but by being wholly one with the
Divine so that you yourself are love. If you come to Me only
to get loved, expecting the Blossom of My Spiritual Heart
Transmission to be projected at you, there will be no change
because you will remain loveless.

Divine Communion begins when you love. Then not only are
you connected to love but you, are it. The only way whereby
you Commune with the Divine is by being love. Love has great
strength. When it is Realized Most Perfectly, Love is
Siddhi, the “Bright” Blessing Power of the Divine. It is the
fundamental Power, the great Power, when you are It, but not
when you dissociate from It in your egoic separation and
weakness.

What this “consideration” comes down to in your case is
that you are living the usual life of contraction, not just
in a relationship here and there but fundamentally. Your
infantile reaction to being unloved is not just something
that you bring into a certain few relationships. It is your
philosophy. It is an interpretation of things as they are.
It is an interpretation of the universe: to be loveless
because you do not trust love. You are not certain of being
loved and, thus, you cannot love. But to love is the Law.
You must love, regardless of the circumstance. The essential
principle of the Way of the Heart is unobstructed
feeling-Contemplation of Me expressed via all functions, in
all relations, under all conditions. That principle is to be
realized in all the complicated mechanics of your
relationships and in all the esoteric developments that may
be Given to you as you mature in the Way of the Heart.

Love is the principle, but love is not what you are
living. You basically feel unloved, unable to depend on
love. You are always reacting to the universe as a great
Something in which you are not loved, always protecting
yourself from death. This reaction is the essential learning
you must undo in order to become a human being.

The Way of the Heart is not a matter of reading signs
about yourself and going within, through meditative
techniques, trying to find the great absorption. That is the
method of Narcissus, whose solution is further isolation.
God-Realization is in the moment, yet it has nothing to do
with the conditions that are arising in this moment. They
are not it. God-Realization is the Awakening to your true
Condition, Which is Love-Bliss Itself, and to live It, not
just to believe It, not to depend on others for It but to
Realize that confidence, that overwhelming Love-Bliss,
unthreatened-that is the business of My devotees, not the
mediocre drama you are telling us about here.

Because of your emotional adaptation, which comes early
in life, you feel greatly justified in your un-love, your
weakness. You realize your true manhood, male or female,
when you are able to confront that contraction, when you are
able not to dramatize it any longer but to grow far beyond
it. Everything follows that Awakening. Then you no longer
seek Divinity in the form of either your lower functions or
your higher functions. All your functions are simply
conditions of experience. They are not themselves the Divine
or the not-Divine. They are simply conditions of existence
that are not other than the Divine. They do not have the
force, in other words, to separate you from Me.

The ego finds all kinds of consolation in the lower life,
and, if it can, it detaches itself from the lower life. The
ego thinks that the visions within the body and above the
brows are the Divinity that loves you. That is simply
heresy! All this nonsense about so-called Spiritual life is
My complaint. I have seen all those visions, and they are
not the Divine. You might as well call your intimate partner
“God”. Your intimate partner is not the Divine. He or she is
not other than the Divine, if you Realize Me Most Perfectly,
but he or she is not independently the Divine. Your intimate
partner is not burdened to fulfill you absolutely, unless
you make the egoic demand, which is what you tend to do. You
make that demand of all your relations, high and low.
“Fulfill me, love me, console me.”

Some people feel close to God when they go to the
mountains on vacation. Some people have to look into their
heads to feel that they are in touch with God. Some people
must be having an orgasm to feel that they are with God. But
none of that, in itself, is God. Those experiences are only
the possibilities of human bodily existence altogether, of
human adaptation in the most ordinary sense. They are
essential to human beings perhaps, but deluding, unless you
are Free as the Heart by virtue of Most Perfect Inherence in
Me. Only thus can you see these experiences for what they
are and become the sacrifice of them. If you are not free
from the egoic contraction, then you interpret all
experiences as sublimities and you become attached to them
as conventional Yogis, or as ordinary lovers, or as whatever
form of attention you are animating at the moment.

The key to your existence is at the heart, in
feeling-Contemplation of Me-not in the planes of experience
above or below the heart but at the heart. The condition of
the heart, the profundity of your devotion to Me, determines
your disposition, your Realization, your understanding of
every experience, high and low. That is the essential
Communication of My Wisdom-Teaching.

DEVOTEE: Yes. I have heard this Argument many times, and
yet there is just that contraction, that tension at the
heart.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Yes. But you are toying with all the
possibilities of experience, high and low, mainly low,
perhaps disposed at times to be meditative and to go up. You
are dramatizing this contraction, this dilemma of
independent consciousness, in the form of your experiences.
People look to increase their experiences all the time
without being responsible for the fundamental matter. The
conventional Yogi in his or her so-called Spiritual strategy
is also a loveless individual.

DEVOTEE: I always feel that it does come back to that
dramatizing, and yet it seems that what has to be cut
through is this contraction at the heart.

SRI DA AVABHASA: But in your case it is like using a hair
to cut through a twenty-foot marble wall! You are not
cutting through it. You are busy meditating on the problem,
busy being the contraction, and therefore self-transcendence
seems to be immensely difficult. But you see that there was
no purifying heat of real sadhana at all in the conflict you
talked to Me about. It was your dramatization of being
unloved and unloving. Such dramatization does not transcend
anything. There may be literal heat, but it is not the heat
of devotional practice of the Way of the Heart, not the heat
of love, of sacrifice. The heat of self-transcendence is the
heat that cuts right through selfcontraction. Your activity
must be the gesture of absolute certainty, not a tentative
feel, weakly asking, “Do you love me?”

DEVOTEE: It is not even a question of that, because I
knew she did not!

SRI DA AVABHASA: Nevertheless, you asked the question,
and the answer was no. And so you did what seemed
necessary-you left. You withdrew. You went into your
solitude. That is the very model of Narcissus! And that is
the model of your life. That is the way you have done it
since childhood. That is the level of your emotional
adaptation.

In that case, you are not living in Divine Communion with
Me. You are living with yourself. You are meditating on
yourself. You are keeping “bad company”! The traditional
recommendation is that the primary form of practice, the one
thing necessary, the essential of Spiritual life, is to
spend your time in the Company of a Realized man or woman.
But such practice is not just to be sitting here in the same
room with Me. You must pass out of self-meditation and
literally enter into Communion with Me.