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HEART CONVERSION TALK SERIES Volume 1, Number 11 DISCOURSE 3 Realize Responsibility, and Love Flows from You A Discourse Given by Sri Da Avabhasa on March 27,
1993 DEVOTEE, A WOMAN: Beloved Gurudev, one of things I
have observed about myself over the years is the strategy of
being a victim and martyr. I have been served by taking on
disciplines, but I feel that I am still not entirely aware
of how I dramatize this. SRI DA AVABHASA: Listen to your tone of voice. I so
frequently have to point out your tone of voice whenever you
speak to Me. I frequently bring it up. Be mindful of it. You
are being the victim right now just by the manner of your
speech. DEVOTEE: I see myself falling into it, and I observe
how the mind keeps it going. I feel that I can be
responsible for that much. But in our group “consideration” today, one of the ladies said to me that she feels I am not
aware of how often I am in the mood of the victim and the
martyr. For years I have had the discipline of not
complaining, and I have applied myself to it at different
times. In the gatherings of the last few days I feel again
how important it is to assume this discipline completely
consistently, or else I will just fall back into that
tendency and keep going. SRI DA AVABHASA: Of what use is a discipline if you
do not apply it consistently? If you let yourself off the
hook when the stress of your tendencies starts coming to the
front, then the discipline is ineffective. Then you only
apply yourself to it when it is easy to do, and it has no
effect. You will not observe anything. You must not let yourself off the hook. That is why
you must be kept accountable by the culture. You must be in
the position to be observed regularly, and obviously you
must also observe yourself. The whole point of assuming a
discipline is to embrace it consistently and not find room
to let yourself off the hook. You must be served by others,
but you must also observe yourself. Dealing with yourself is
the root of discipline. DEVOTEE: I have observed that this does have to do
with something I have carried from childhood, definitely a
negative self-image. SRI DA AVABHASA: In addition to that an incredibly
positive self-image, or an image of great self-importance.
You want to talk about the victim, and even that does not
sound like an overwhelmingly bad social characteristic. You
are not talking about the sense of great self-importance
behind it. All martyrs feel very self-important. To view
yourself as a victim is to be very self-important. DEVOTEE: I try to get attention. SRI DA AVABHASA: So – it is not just a weak self-image,
is it? DEVOTEE: No. SRI DA AVABHASA: It is strong egoity, manifested in
a particular fashion. A strong egoic tendency is also what
you got out of your childhood, a great sense of
self-importance and difference, even superiority. [to a man] You said you wanted to talk about
this victim mentality this evening. THE MAN: Sri Gurudev, my own life has been
characteristic, I think, of white, middle-class males in
America who, in spite of every attempt not to be a victim,
have gone out of our way to enjoy a victims status. I speak
of my own personal experience. I have not had any traumas or
any life-threatening situations that would have produced a
victim consciousness. Still, somehow, I find it appealing to
be, in my own mind, a victim. SRI DA AVABHASA: You need not have had great traumas
to be in that position. Everybody has difficulties. Life is
difficult, and it requires something of you. Another way of
characterizing the so to speak victim consciousness is that
it is always looking for something or someone to blame even
for the most petty of lifes difficulties and demands. If you
feel you are the victim, you always look for somebody or
something to blame, some past incident, whatever it may be,
to justify your lack of responsibility, your lack of
clarity, your lack of effectiveness. It is not just in
reaction to the most traumatic of lifes incidents that this
mechanism is generated. It is an ordinary mechanism, and it
is also culturally enforced, socially reinforced,
politically reinforced, reinforced by social and political
institutions even. It is not associated with traumatic life,
really. It is just the strategy of living life in such a
fashion that you are always relieved of responsibility,
because there is always something or someone to blame and
you, therefore, need not be responsible. You just presume
that the seat of responsibility is not in yourself but in
all the causes in your life. And they are just what they
are, so there is nothing you can do about it. DEVOTEE: I was reflecting on the root of it. I was
struck by Your phrase in Breath and Name , “in rooms
protected or threatened by your father”. The dual nature
that the father brings, not only protecting but also
threatening, is a set-up to produce a victim. The time when
one sleeps is a time to be nurtured and protected while you
are safely vulnerable, yet the threatening father is there
somehow-and one wakes up feeling the victim. SRI DA AVABHASA: Sometimes people wake up in the
middle of the night sweating or screaming or wary. DEVOTEE: Wary indeed. SRI DA AVABHASA: Sometimes you may not get to sleep
because of your wariness, your trouble. You are
worrying. DEVOTEE: That has characterized my life and also the
lives of men who are my friends and acquaintances. It has
always been a puzzle to me that Americans, who are a small
percentage of the human race and who enjoy a much larger
percentage of the natural resources, have themselves been
defining, in my lifetime, a characteristic victim strategy
that allows us to do things in the world that ordinarily we
would take responsibility for and not do, such as use up the
planet to our own advantage. There is a self-help movement
in America of several millions of people who meet every week
to deal with their victimhood. SRI DA AVABHASA: Yes – they go there to blame
something! They are always running through the time-streak
of memory to find where they were victimized, to find what
there is to blame, what incident they can blame for their
trouble, what people-mommy, daddy, whoever else-what
incidents, what experiences, what diseases. They are always
going down the time track to find what to blame and then
dramatizing being victimized there and receiving sympathy
from everybody else about their bad experience. This is characteristic not just of Americans, by the
way. It is characteristic of Western culture, and it is also
characteristic of mankind. It is shown politically,
socially, culturally in certain ways in America, in Europe,
and in other parts of the world. It is a rather universal
disposition. The root religions, the original religions, were
rather local, tribal, and, in general, shamanistic. I have
told the story about my checking out a gypsy woman, one time
when I was traveling across the country, and getting a taste
of what the shamanistic ceremony is all about. It is always
about blaming some curse or evil spirit, the curse of some
living person or persons or some evil, discarnate
personality that is somehow surrounding you or effectively
disturbing you. The shaman directs you to perform a ritual,
and then the shaman does a ritual, does a dance, says some
words, whatever it may be. The whole intention is to somehow
eliminate the bad spirits, the curses, that are affecting
your life. No responsibility has been generated in you by
those rituals. You have resorted to somebody else, someone
who could do a song and dance and direct you to do a song
and dance. Maybe that sugar-pill relaxes you a little bit
and you feel a little better when you go back to the herd,
but it does not become great responsibility. What is psychiatry but shamanism, then, in a rather
sophisticated, modern form, looking for what to blame, what
incident, what people, what experiences, what events, going
through the ceremony of letting you talk about it, dream
about it, then explaining it to you, describing you as the
victim of whatever those events and those people may be.
Through that sugar-pill ritual maybe you feel a little bit
more relaxed, but what has become your responsibility? Responsibility is in the person, the “own” state,
the ego place. That is where responsibility must arise. You
must understand that it does not make a bit of difference
who has done what to you, or what experience you had in the
past recently, long ego, before this lifetime, in this
lifetime-it does not make any difference. You may discover
how in the past you established patterns that are effective
now, but there is no true healing in such discovery unless
you get down to the “consideration” of your responsibility
for your own reaction, ultimately for your own
self-contraction. In the “own” position, the egoic self-position, you
must realize responsibility for your own reactivity, your
own dissociation, your own separativeness, your own
generation of a victim ritual. There will be difficult
events in the future just as there have been difficult
events in the past. How are they to be dealt with? By
responsibility for your own reactivity, your own egoic
“self-possession” (or self-absorption), your own
self-enclosure, your own dissociation, your own
separativeness. This is the key to healing people of their various
disorders and life-problems-the development of
responsibility, not the constant finding of things to blame
and, in effect, practicing shamanistic rituals to just relax
your mind so that now you feel cured. No – responsibility is
the key, responsibility for the ego-act, the
self-contraction itself, and all the reactivity,
dramatization, seeking, desiring, pursuit of objects and
others and so forth that arise by your own act. Realize that responsibility, and love, forgiveness,
flows from you toward all events, all past, all future, all
present, and you can live freely and transcend
life-difficulties. That is religious life manifested in
action. Of course, the religious life most fundamentally is
about self-transcendence to the point of Most Perfect
self-transcendence and the Realization of the Divine
Self-Condition. But as a manifestation in life, it shows
itself through responsibility for the self-contraction, not
through rehearsing the victim rituals. What else about it? DEVOTEE: Sri Gurudev, You have said it already this
evening. You remind us that we have agreed to practice the
Way of the Heart in Your Company, and this reminder
straightens our spines because in each moment we are tending
to forget that we have made this agreement with You and that
we are not engaged in a therapeutic process. Unfortunately,
because we have not adhered to Your Admonition about yamas
and niyamas consistently, we let ourselves off the hook by
presuming to be the victim in our own life. SRI DA AVABHASA: Thus, you bring the world into this
gathering with Me, and you carry on in a worldly fashion
instead of applying the religious discipline I have Given to
you. DEVOTEE: That is right. We are not assuming that we
each have the strength, the clarity, to take on a discipline
and consistently abide by it and be responsible for it. SRI DA AVABHASA: To be so responsible is what it is
to be a man, male or female. That is manly responsibility.
That is appropriate human responsibility. That is true
civilization. To be civil is to be responsible for yourself,
to know that what you do not only affects yourself but also
that it affects others, and therefore to assume
responsibility for yourself. For the sake of your own life,
continued growth, development, and freedom and for the sake
of the same in others, you must experience a great
unwillingness to contaminate other living beings. This is another way of describing the Bodhisattva
principle of Buddhism – to live in such a way that everything
you do your whole life serves the Liberation of others
instead of yourself. To live casually and to be worldly in
the egoic fashion is to agree to contaminate others
constantly, to agree to have a bad effect on everyone, not
to mention on yourself. Such is not the religious
commitment. It is a Godless, ego-based disposition – not only
Godless but Truthless, without Reality, without
understanding, without discrimination, without seriousness,
without commitment to life as a serious process that has
great dimensions to it and not just the local, contaminated
point of view of the herd at the moment. True religion is a
willingness to be clear in yourself and to live the
righteous life, whether anyone else does it or not. You have made that agreement, and you have come into
the company of My other devotees. All of you must have made
such an agreement. Now you are here with one another and
with Me for the purpose of getting down to living a truly
human life, a great culture with no diversions and no
dramatizations. DEVOTEE: Sri Gurudev, for my own clarity, at one of
the very first Darshans I had of You – it was a slide show – You
were Radiating Your Love-Bliss and I just fell in love with
You. Your voice said, “Every mans life is bullshit.” The
Force of Your Radiance and this statement of the life
ordinary people lead . . SRI DA AVABHASA: Which is delusion, nonsense,
knowing all kinds of things, most of which are not true,
crapola, garbage, presumptions based on the most limited
point of view, not only egoic but the most limited, the
lowest possible. DEVOTEE: And then further, in a gathering You also .
. . SRI DA AVABHASA: You wanted to get higher. It is
still garbage. Apart from the Most Ultimate, Absolutely
self-transcending Divine Self-Realization, it is all
garbage. That is it-flat. DEVOTEE: Flat. Yes. It is a hard message, Sri
Gurudev. SRI DA AVABHASA: Good. Find out. Find out the truth
of it. DEVOTEE: In these gatherings You have also said that
if one is doing anything at all, which covers . . . SRI DA AVABHASA: Everything. Apart from Divine
Self-Realization Most Ultimate. DEVOTEE: . . . it is a dramatization of the
self-contraction. SRI DA AVABHASA: Exactly. It is egoity. DEVOTEE: With all due respect, it is easy for
someone to flip into a victim mentality in response to that
message. SRI DA AVABHASA: Not at all. Not at all. I Give you
My whole Teaching, not just one-liners like this one. I am
not a fool. Such descriptions are Given in the context of My
address to you about being responsible for the
self-contraction, responsible for your illusions,
responsible for your dramatizations. This does not suggest a
victim consciousness in the slightest, and you are deeply
offending Me by suggesting so. It is not at all what I
suggest. Not at all. DEVOTEE: I have never taken it that way myself . .
. SRI DA AVABHASA: I do not take it personally. I am
just suggesting what it is you are offending by casual
remarks, by superimposing on Me more nonsense that has
nothing to do with the content of My Communication to you.
To say it is all garbage means victimization is garbage,
too. Why, therefore, would you think I am suggesting
victimization? It is all garbage. In other words, it is
something for which you must be responsible and which you
must outgrow. You must transcend it. I have told you exactly how to do so in thorough
detail relative to every potential of life. I do not suggest
victimization to anybody or justify it in anybody. Only
responsibility, understanding yourself, becoming responsible
for this mass of illusions and the self-protected, egoic “self-possession” that you are dramatizing and calling
“life”. Sometimes you even call it “the Truth of Divine
Communion”, whereas it is, as I say in My New York manner,
bullshit! And you must deal with it rather than finding some
other way to avoid dealing with it by calling yourself
either a “victim” or a “mighty whoever”. You must take
responsibility for the fact that you are embedded in
illusion and dramatization, egoic “self-possession”. There
is no way out of it except to observe and understand
yourself and outgrow these limitations. No victimization is
suggested in the slightest. DEVOTEE: It is clear to me that the therapeutic
process as it has developed in the Western world in the last
150 years is incompatible with Your Wisdom-Teaching. SRI DA AVABHASA: With the real practice of the Way
of the Heart, certainly it is incompatible. It is an
extension of shamanism, just that. It is not about
responsibility. It is about being the victim. The shaman
always suggests that you cannot handle your
life-difficulties, but you can participate with the shaman
by doing some ritual yourself. The gypsy I went to once
suggested I wrap a tomato in my handkerchief and put it in
My shoe under My bed for the night. That was not a
responsible act on My part. According to the gypsy, I could
not do anything about the evil spirit that was attacking me,
but she would do what was necessary. She would burn candles
all night, make prayers, and do her rituals. The next day I went back to her and brought her the
tomato wrapped in a handkerchief. She took the handkerchief,
and she very carefully manipulated the tomato so that she
could stick into it a little sculptured golem with a really
weird little face. She broke open the front of the tomato,
and there was this ugly thing inside! She was telling Me
that her ritual had been effective. The evil spirit had left
me and was now in the tomato. She would throw it away, and I
would be all right. DEVOTEE: It has all the elements of modern
psychiatry. SRI DA AVABHASA: That is it exactly. Substitute for
the little sculptured golem mommy, daddy, childhood sex
experiences, all the blah-blah and difficulties since. The
only way you can get free of it is by
mommy-daddy-psychiatrist doing his-her candle ritual-or the
intellectual interpretation and explanation-and then
everything will be okay. Okay?! You do not get God-Realization by having a
psychiatrist do anything! If the sugar pill works, you may
get some ability to be better integrated as a social
personality, to be a little more relaxed about it, a little
less aberrated, a little less dramatic, if you are willing
to be all those things. There are evil spirits, there are evil intentions,
and there are all kinds of things that affect people. But
the way to deal with them is to generate the position of
responsibility in your own case. This Way of devotion to Me,
Ishta-Guru-Bhakti, is not about irresponsibility. It is not
about giving yourself over to somebody who is going to do a
shamanistic ritual for you. It is about responsibility,
right use of the Divine Self-Realizer. It is a religious
discipline. It is laudable and most profound. It should not
be mocked. It must be understood, and it must be rightly
practiced. You are not called to irresponsibility in My Company
but to complete responsibility – complete and from the
beginning, responsibility from the beginning and growing
more and more. I do not invite people into a cultic relationship to
Me, a phoney relationship to Me. I am not a fake. Therefore,
I must constantly address your tendencies to be cultic in
relationship to Me, to be childishly dependent on Me, to
play out adolescent games with Me with
dependence-independence, two sides, crazily. I must
constantly address your bad tendencies, your worldly
tendencies, your misuse of Me, your wrong approach to Me. I
am not interested in surrounding My Self with irresponsible
people who are like some stupid, cultic herd-not in the
slightest. Such cultism in you offends Me mightily, and I
will have nothing to do with it. Therefore, understand what it is I am talking about
and what Ishta-Guru-Bhakti is about. Be responsible for it,
and communicate in the world what a great and truly
responsible matter it is. Make it plain. Educate the world
to this true, responsible practice in My Company. Do not be
fools. “Consider” this: Every time you dramatize
reactivity, you are thinking you are the victim of someone
or something or some event-every time. Reactivity is the
sure sign that you have this point of view. If you react and
dramatize reactivity, you are always blaming the event,
blaming the other, instead of introducing the
self-responsible discipline into the occasion of difficulty
or stress. Always. It is always so. Of course, there are all kinds of events in life,
and there are reactions to them. Therefore, perhaps you
cannot altogether stop reacting to the events of life. But
to dramatize the reaction, to extend it into a whole period
of drama, irresponsibility, egoic “self-possession”,
weakness, non-practice, is to act like the victim. It is to
blame the event, as if the event or the other is the reason
that you are weak, the reason that you are not responsible,
the reason that you cannot deal with yourself, the reason
you get crazy. It is your own reactivity, and you must
become responsible for it. Perhaps in an instant a reaction cannot be avoided.
If a tiger jumps out of a bush, fear occurs-fine. But to
make a life out of such reaction, even when the tiger
disappears, that is the dramatization of reactivity, egoity
showing itself in a life-form. Every time you dramatize
reactivity you are blaming something or someone and not
being responsible for yourself. Before your reaction becomes dramatization, you must
deal with the reaction itself. And to truly deal with the
reaction itself, you must come to the point of most
fundamental self-understanding, before the reactivity,
before the action that precedes all reactivity, all
desiring, all seeking. You must become responsible for that
action in every instant-moment by moment. Especially from
that point of view, then, you can retard the dramatization
of reactivity. Even before you realize such maturity, however, do
not blame non-hearing or use it as an excuse to dramatize.
Even from the beginning of the Way of the Heart, My devotees
are supposed to understand themselves and be able to deal
with their dramatization with significant
self-understanding, apply discipline, not roll with their
dramatizations and abuse everyone. Every dramatization
abuses others, because the dramatizing ego thinks it is the
victim of others and events. As long as you think that way,
you will display sometimes horrific dramatizations and abuse
and collapse. Such drama is infantile, certainly adolescent,
and not the kind of thing that adult human beings should be
doing. Even though you may be older than 18 or 21 years of
age, you perhaps feel you still have the right to react like
an adolescent or to live and react in an infantile manner.
You should still be at home with your parents in that case!
You should not be permitted association with adult humanity.
Unfortunately the world is roamed and infiltrated by
adolescents and infantile characters who never finished
their life-business in the first three stages of life, never
became responsible for themselves. What part do they play in
a civilized life, then, a human life, an adult life? They
are not prepared for it. If we sent all the aberrated characters back home to
their parents to be locked in their room, there would hardly
be anybody functioning in the world! The world, as it is, is
based on the adolescent mentality and the infantile
mentality. The world justifies a mentality that is not
civilized and that has nothing to do with true religion. It
is suffering. It is chaos. Unfortunately, there are no norms for true, adult
human behavior. Many petty expectations are brought out of
the hip pocket whenever it seems convenient to abuse
somebody, but real norms of human life, of civilized life,
of politics and social life, do not really exist anymore.
What is regarded to be an acceptable way of living is
brought out as a matter of convenience usually in order to
abuse somebody. But where is the presumption of real
adulthood? Where is true humanity in politics? Where is it
in the relations between nations? Where is it in the
relations between people face to face, one by one? The psychology of irresponsibility pervades the
entire world, not only in the West, not only in America. The
whole world is dramatizing the self-contraction and losing
its order, losing its positive human basis, losing its true
religious basis. Real human life is being thrown down the
toilet by dramatizations. Everybody is in the trenches,
wary. DEVOTEE, THE WOMAN WHO BEGAN THIS CONVERSATION:
Beloved, everything You are saying I feel so served by. SRI DA AVABHASA: Make sure you remember it. Do not
just forget about it tomorrow because the gathering is over.
Keep it in your notebook, keep it in your heart. DEVOTEE: I wanted to say before that I really have
seen how I create this strategy. SRI DA AVABHASA: To call yourself a victim sounds
okay. It sounds mild. But when you think that to call
yourself a victim or a martyr is to blame other people and
events, to hold blame, you realize that it is not so
nice. If anybody is dramatizing, that person is blaming
everybody. They are blaming Me, blaming you, blaming the
world, blaming the past. They are being fussy about that,
pretending to be just overwhelmed by it, and you are all
sympathetic, crawling all over the person with your
consoling blah-blah. But all the while that person is
engaged in an aggressive act of blaming you, blaming others,
blaming everything. It is that persons justification for
collapse. What does that have to do with the Way of the Heart?
Why should that contaminate this culture of My devotees?
There is no one to blame. Straighten out! Wake up. You cannot work anything out with dramatization. You
only leave victims of yourself all over the place-people
abused, shut down, turned off, worked over, and you calling
yourself a victim, which sounds sort of cute and mild,
inoffensive. But you must understand the aggressiveness of
this notion that you are a victim. Dramatizers are abusing
people. Always. They are always blaming people. To do so is
not nice-and not true either. They are only resorting to an
adolescent or infantile disposition, which has no business
in an adult, human society. Do not carry on a dramatization for any period of
time at all. Be sufficiently responsible for yourself. You
can just stop it while you are right in the middle of it.
Just straighten out. Understand what you are doing,
apologize whenever necessary, and just get out of it. Do not
wither the gathering of the community of My devotees with
garbage. Just drop it flat. Such is the expectation side of this culture of
inspiration and expectation, and it requires the human signs
of responsibility for your dramatization. ANOTHER WOMAN: Beloved, Sri Gurudev, I remember
several occasions in my life when, by Your Grace, I was able
to just drop my normal, complicated, egoic, reactive
relationships with my intimates and really feel deeply my
love for them. Unfortunately, it was in times of real
crisis. Once my sister was to have brain surgery for a
massive tumor, and it was very possible she was not going to
survive the operation. She was a nurse, and she knew very
well what she was submitting to. There was sheer terror on
her face. I felt such a simplification in that moment and
such profound . . . SRI DA AVABHASA: Why cant you feel that all the
time? DEVOTEE: I dont know. SRI DA AVABHASA: Yes, you do. You know exactly. I
have told you. DEVOTEE: When I let myself really feel and drop this
chronic, stressful effort, I feel virtually incapacitated,
unable to function. This is really a confession, I know, of
non-practice, but I havent yet found a way to . . . SRI DA AVABHASA: Yes, you have! You have to do it!
That is it exactly. Does somebody have to have a brain tumor
to make you feel? Do you have to have breast cancer to feel?
And the rest of the time you are dull, too complicated, with
no self-understanding, no clarity, no precious thing in
life? These moments mount up. They become months, years.
Your life flashes by. The older you get, the faster time
passes. You are wasting your life. Your life is a precious
thing with a great purpose. Why waste it in dramatization
and self-immunization? Live simply, do your service,
understand yourself, be happy. Dont we have a happy life together? All the time,
not just now when you are gathering with Me? Make your
notes, carry it on tomorrow and every day. Do not forget it.
The destructive people, the fools, the dramatizers, who have
nothing to value, nothing to protect, nothing to preserve,
nothing to love, are willing to die because of their
emptiness, willing to abuse and even to kill other people in
this world because of their own emptiness, because for them
there is nothing precious in it and they are not heart-born.
Do not be like that. I am here. You are attracted to Me. Your Communion
with Me is present. Do it. Be heart-born, free, with no
expectations, nothing left over. How is such freedom possible? All kinds of things
can be said about it, but you must embrace the discipline of
the Way of the Heart. That discipline enables you to be
clear, straightforward, free of casualness and conventional
dependencies so that you can live the Heart for real. Be sensitive to yourself to discover the root of
your own egoic self-possession, and abandon it in your love
of Me.