Originally published in November/December issue Vol6, NO6, 1987
ADI DA SAMRAJ: If you look at the natural world as a gross process and see how it works, what it does with beings, what it does with everything that appears, you will by reflection get a reality picture of yourself. The image you have of yourself, which has developed culturally and through your own efforts to fulfill yourself, is rather idealized. You tend to think that the natural world and you yourself as a psycho-physical personality are somehow supposed to be enjoyable, or fulfilled, or become instantly happy in the context of your own design. Human beings in general, like you in particular, are possessed of this notion. But you will not find a likeness of that ideal in Nature. Nature does not operate that way. If you examine yourself, or mankind in its history, you will see that in spite of these idealisms, in spite of the self-image that every individual has, human individuals and mankind have not operated in the form of that ideal, or that self-image. Just as Nature destroys everything it manifests, so also do human beings. Just as Nature is a complex mystery of limitations, so is every human being, so is mankind, so is Man.
The idealistic view of Man or the self is a human fabrication. So much of human endeavor is based upon this fabrication, this self-image, this idealized view of Man and of the world. Even religious ideas tend to justify this self-image of mankind. Religious ideas tend to be associated with a principal idea of God as the Creator of the conditional universe, the Creator of Earth, the Creator of Man. This notion is not true to God, nor is it the confession of Realizers. It is confessed by egos, ordinary human beings thinking about life and wanting to fulfill it. Because human beings value their own existence, and therefore value the existence of the world in which they appear, they generate in their limitation the idea of God as the Creator to justify their existence, to justify their idealism, to justify their view of the world as some sort of God-made idealistic performance that leads toward the self-fulfillment of everyone manifested.
If you test this notion about God, about the self, about Man, about the world, really, in reality, the ideal is not proved, not demonstrated. That is why, even though possessed by idealisms of all kinds and God-ideas—the idea of God as Creator, for example—and all kinds of inspired notions about purpose, human beings are constantly frustrated, constantly suffering, constantly struggling, constantly creating more and more complication, constantly becoming disheartened, constantly wondering why there is so much negativity, so much death, even so much evil. Reality confounds human idealism, reality confounds the ego, reality confounds the ideal of selffulfillment that is projected onto the human individual and Man and the world of Man, and projected onto the Divine conceived to be the Creator of Man and the world.
When tested against reality, therefore, this idealism of the purpose of self-fulfillment, the conditional idealization of God or the world or of Man, is not proved. It is rather disproved. Therefore, if you bring yourself to the test of reality, an entirely different view is awakened, free of the idealization of the ego, and the world of the ego, and the Divine conceived by the ego. A reality process replaces the idealistic process, a reality process that is associated with self-transcendence rather than self-fulfillment, with transcendence of the world, not fulfillment of self in the world or perfection of the world itself.
Likewise, this process, based in reality, is inherently free of the conditional idealization of God. God is not conceived, then, to be the Creator, or the justifier of this idealized picture of Man in the world. God is the Ultimate Reality that inspires the process of self-transcendence and world-transcendence. The Divine is in fact the Reality that transcends conditional existence, transcends egoity, transcends conditional Nature, transcends the world, then, transcends all purposes.
Therefore, the Way based in reality is realistic and moved toward Liberation. Its process is renunciation and perfect Realization of Divine Enlightenment or Divine Liberation. The Way of the Heart, which I consider, and have considered, with you, is just that Way. It is free at its base from the insult of egoity and the visions associated with egoity. It involves a unique discipline that is self-transcending and God-Realizing in the perfect sense, not in the conventional or conditional sense.
In all of my Teaching Work, I have therefore been calling you to consider reality, observe yourself, consider your purposes, your various designs, your idealisms, your notions, your self-imagery, and all of your actions, until you understand yourself as self-contraction, until you come, in other words, to a realistic insight into the nature of existence. Then, having come to such a realistic insight or most fundamental self-understanding, you would be free of egoity, conventional self-imagery, idealistic imagery of the world, and conventional idealistic imagery of the Divine, and you would be purposed entirely differently than the ego is in its purpose. You would be purposed to the transcendence of the ego and all its conventional imagery, and to the Realization of That Which can be Realized only in the case of such transcendence.
Of course, there is a beginning of the response to that consideration, which is simply to consider this Argument—listen to it and observe yourself, just that, but very intelligently, very directly, and more and more profoundly. Eventually, in the course of that consideration, the self-transcending impulse will awaken, and you will discover the virtue of making use of various disciplines to reflect yourself to yourself. The process therefore unfolds in inevitable or systematic stages of development, but at the beginning it is simply a matter of “listening”, or considering this Argument and the entire Teaching Demonstration associated with it.
Apart from the positive things you may say about your seriousness and your response to this opportunity, you are still fundamentally addressing the Way of the Heart from the egoic point of view, still bound by the purposes of egoity in the context of the first three stages of life, still struggling with the fundamental matter of discipline—in other words resisting the process of self-transcendence, which necessarily is expressed through the sign of renunciation. You are yet purposed toward self-fulfillment. This is why your consideration for real, in terms of what you do in life, is an expression of concern for all that I place under the heading of money, food, and sex, rather than an address through real practice to the process of renunciation and Realization, for real.
If there is a fundamental and realistic consideration of self and the world and the Divine, such that the spell of egoity is broken, then the disposition of the human being changes and becomes associated with the purpose characterized by renunciation and Realization. Until then, even though certain ultimate matters may be of interest to you, even inspiring, you do not make the demonstration associated with renunciation and Realization, but rather you exhibit the sign of struggle between double motives. You dramatize a double bind expressing two primal motives—the one that may be somehow moving you idealistically, which is the motive of self-transcendence, and the other that inspires you or moves you, in the context of your real life-motive, toward self-fulfillment. And in that motive toward self-fulfillment, you see, you are possessed by an idealistic vision, or an idealistic view of life and therefore of the world, and God or Truth or Reality.
You would not be so whole-heartedly moved toward selffulfillment if you had truly and in reality observed your own nature, your own action, the nature of Nature, the action of the world, reality altogether, the process in which you are arising. If you thoroughly observed that, in reality, completely free of your idealization and mentalizing about it all in your selfpossession, then by that observation, by that consideration, you would be liberated from your false view. Just by encountering reality itself you would be relieved of the conventional purpose toward self-fulfillment, spontaneously the purpose of self-transcendence would be yours, and the sign of renunciation would come alive in you. But you are not free enough in yourself to observe yourself and the world and Nature altogether, just as they are. Even what you observe you reinterpret. You do not accept what you are observing. You do not take it into account. Your insights do not change you.
You are even willing, and to some degree able, to make mind out of the process of “listening”, or the process of considering my Teaching Argument, but you are very much less able to make life out of it. This is one of the reasons I call The Dawn Horse Testament an eternal conversation, an always living conversation with you. Every time you come to it or to any other form of my Teaching Word you are in a new disposition, a unique situation, uniquely available to the consideration to which you are listening. It is not just a once and for all set of words planted out in space-time, you see. It is a living consideration, the effect and the substance of which will be different for you every time you encounter it.
And even though from the very beginning something about your consideration of this Teaching Word may authenticate itself to you in your feeling or in your mind, this does not indicate that the full power of all the insights communicated through my Arguments is alive in you or awake in you. Not at all! Nor by merely reading or thinking about this Teaching Word will those insights be awakened and authenticated in you. You must do the sadhana, or endure the ordeal or real process of living, in the context of listening.
So much of the fundamental insights communicated in my Teaching Word, you see, is almost completely unavailable to you, at best suggested in your mind, until something fundamental occurs in your observation of yourself and the world and Nature and your ideas about God. Somehow the reality of reality must impress you—and in every moment you are differently impressed by the reality of realities, whether small “r” or big “R”. Your level of operative insight is thus always different. There is nothing very fundamental or most fundamental or profound about your encounter with the insights in my Teaching Argument until you become most fundamentally impressed with the reality of your own existence and that of the world and the Divine.
You must be relieved of your false and idealistic view of existence before these great insights can begin to become operative in you significantly, with great force. When they do, then the impulse fundamental to the Way of the Heart will begin to show the sign of renunciation in you. Realization will really be the purpose of your existence. It is in the devotee that such signs appear. Until then, the individual responding to this Teaching Word or this opportunity is not a devotee and is not responding in the fullest sense or in reality, but is still, however positively associated with the Teaching Word, quibbling or struggling with opposite motivations, struggling with self- contradiction, as I have described in The Knee of Listening.
You must be free of self-contradiction. It is not that you must acquire something—an idea, a thing, a state. You must be relieved of your contradictions, your dilemma, your fundamental problem, your opposing motivations. You may be somehow or other inclined toward self-transcendence, but coincident with that inclination and moving you more directly is the motive toward self-fulfillment. Until there is only the motive toward self-transcendence, and only That which is Realized only in self-transcendence, you are of two minds, and the stronger in you is the mind that is purposed toward self-fulfillment.
The signs of the awakening of the greater disposition that moves beyond the context of the first three stages of life are greater than your willingness to be a good practitioner, a balanced and disciplined human being, a serious advocate of the Way, and so on. Those are good signs, but they belong to the beginning. The signs that are fundamental to this Way in its fullness go beyond the beginning, beyond the context of the first three stages of life. They require the confrontation with reality that breaks the spell of the double bind, that relieves you of false vision, the false imagery of self and the world and the Divine, and moves you utterly, spontaneously, to transcend and to Realize, to relinquish, to be free. Until that disposition awakens through these great signs, you are still most fundamentally, most basically inclined to fulfill yourself as a psycho-physical entity, grossly based in the gross realm of Nature and even, to the degree you have some religious movement in you, to address the Divine as the Creator, the ultimate Parent-Force.
In my view, all those limitations belong to the first three stages of life, the context of egoity, the context of bound humanity. They do not belong to the Way of the Heart in its full or real demonstration. To one degree or another they naturally characterize beginners in this Way, those who are only beginning to consider the Wisdom-Teaching and make use of “pondering”, the whole process of listening, degrees of selfdiscipline, and so on. These means are of course good means and good to use, but they exist for beginners. Only when the beginner has broken the spell of egoity, broken the spell of self-imagery and false views of Nature and the Divine, has moved out of the context of the self-fulfilling effort, with all the bright-eyed views of Nature and conditional existence gone, only then is the human being equipped, through the demonstration of great signs, to practice the Way of the Heart in its fullness.
You all as beginners are basically, in your conversation and in your life-demonstration, concerned with all the things that come under the heading of money, food, and sex. Why is this? It is not only because you are adapted to functioning in the context of the first three stages of life, but it is also, and even primarily, because you are functioning egoically. Your life is a dramatization of conflict between two motives, one rather latent, in the background—the motive toward self-transcendence—and the other out front and constantly animated—the motive toward self-fulfillment.
You are still characterized by this conflict, still characterized by these ordinary concerns. You are not in your living, nor in your expression and your thought, demonstrating the signs of renunciation and the purpose of Realization simply, clearly, without contradiction, without problem, without dilemma. The distance between your level of practice at the present and what I mean by a “devotee” is great, and unfathomable, and not a matter of days or weeks of conversation. It requires the intervention in your case of great reality consideration, such that the spell of your own self-contradiction, double bind, double motivations, is transcended and freely relinquished.
This is the difference between what we might call exoteric practice and esoteric practice. Even though the Way of the Heart altogether is, we might say, an esoteric Way, it becomes an esoteric practice only when one becomes a devotee, only in the context of the fourth stage of life and beyond. It is a rather exoteric practice until then, in all of the stages of response or practice associated with the first three stages of life. Therefore, even though some of you are practitioners at the moment, many of you are still exoteric practitioners of the Way of the Heart. You are still dramatizing the grosser spell of egoity, this double bind, this conflict between the common purpose of egoity, which is to be self-fulfilled, and the Greater Purpose in the Heart Itself, which is to transcend egoity, transcend Nature, transcend all conditional designs and all illusions.
This is why so few in the history of humankind have truly passed into the domain of esoteric practice—because it truly requires a great, even evolutionary, event, the real transition from the egoic efforts associated with the first three stages of life to the Great Process that only begins in the context of the fourth stage of life.
You make gestures in the direction of self-transcendence but only by covering your bets. For every step you make in the direction of self-transcendence you make two or three in the direction of self-fulfillment, and when you are relatively selffulfilled, then you feel you have enough energy and attention residual in your left-over non-fulfillment to entertain the notion of self-transcendence. The process of self-transcendence is not a process to which you are committed for its own sake and directly and simply in the context of all your life of action.
Rather, you are always pursuing self-fulfillment in a variety of ways, and only if you are getting some of that self-fulfillment and experiencing some obviously necessarily left-over nonfulfillment of self will you then exercise this Greater Purpose. But if your life is simply frustrated, then, instead of practicing in the manner of a renunciate, simply transcending yourself in frustrating circumstances, you tend to react and become frustrated by non-fulfillment, you tend to doubt the Way, to doubt the process, to doubt your capacity for it. And you will not move out of that mood to become once again more positively disposed toward the possibility of self-transcendence until you get a little more self-fulfillment in your life. You really tend to entertain the possibility of self-transcendence only to the degree that you are relatively self-fulfilled and to a far lesser degree frustrated. If you are simply frustrated, you give up.
Actually, you see, the great signs of renunciation associated with Realization appear only in the context of absolute selffrustration, in the acknowledgement in fact that the self cannot be fulfilled, is not fulfilled and cannot be fulfilled, and that the arising world of cosmic Nature is not a machine that fulfills anyone, but that at most tantalizes everyone and inevitably frustrates everyone. Only the complete certainty of this reality allows the great Heart-Motive to come to the front and become Realization and renunciation. Only that absolute frustration, then, the absolute certainty of non-fulfillment of self, is the source of the Way as a real process.
Well—compare that to your own practice. It is as I have just described it. You entertain the notion of self-transcendence, but you entertain it only in the context of a life of action in
which you are basically disposed to fulfill yourself. Because you cannot be fulfilled, there is always residual frustration, but you need to feel somewhat fulfilled even to deal with that frustration. You are therefore always making gestures toward the process of the Way of the Heart that are unreal, secondary, or compromised.
This is how you trivialize the Way, you see, and communicate to yourself all kinds of positive affirmations of your practice. You fool yourself into feeling that you are a serious or effective practitioner, but basically you are feeling good and depending upon a variety of signs in the natural world and in your ordinary life to give you a base of sufficient good feeling to allow you to address something about the fuzzy edges of frustration, which you are only dimly perceiving and which you cannot look at directly. You do not even want to look at reality directly. You are afraid to look at it directly. You are afraid of the message of reality. You are afraid to find out that you are doomed. (Laughs.)
You do not want to find it out, you see. You do not want to look at the great machine of Nature and see what it does and therefore what you do. The great machine of Nature destroys all selves. It makes all selves in limitation, it frustrates them and goads them simultaneously, and it ultimately destroys them. Haven’t you noticed this? But you have not really taken it into account. You still like the fanciful idea of yourself as somehow a benign and absolute being, even manifested as a body-mind. You like the view that Nature is somehow an ultimate purpose, an ultimate design moving toward perfection, and you like the idea of God as the maker of all this, saying to you somehow because you are here, bodily, “This is good. This is what you should be doing—now struggle on and get perfect, get fulfilled here.” You prefer these notions, even though you have noticed that Nature destroys everything it produces. You do not really take that observation into account. It has not changed your mind, it has not changed your life, it has not awakened your heart, it has not allowed you to come to the front, you As you Are Ultimately, Standing Free. You have not come to the front. You are hiding there in the context of the body-mind, attached to it and identified with it, struggling to be fulfilled as it, struggling to have Nature fulfill you and fulfill itself absolutely, blaming it for not doing so, constructing God-ideas, blaming God for not fulfilling you, whereas you are entirely responsible for your association with this complex of limitations. You are. You!
It need not be so. In Truth it is not so. The Great Truth is that it is not even so. It only appears so. Of course this is what must be Realized. But one will not be moved to even approach that Truth of Realization until one is willing to allow the observation of reality to become certainty about the nature of existence, the nature of Nature.
Particularly as Westerners you suffer a special cultural limitation relative to this matter. In the Orient at some places and times the various cultural doctrines associated with the “alpha” orientation are, or have been, current. But in the West the alpha orientation is not current. It is even anathema. In the West the “omega” orientation is manifested culturally and exclusively. All Westerners are therefore indoctrinated into the idealistic view of Man and Nature and God. You all have been built from birth by all of your indoctrination in the midst of your experiencing to be affirmatively associated with the purpose of self-fulfillment, as if Nature were ultimately designed to be paradisiacal, and arising by the making of God. This is the common view communicated to Westerners and the common view to which Westerners are bound.
This is why, you see, in the West there has not been that kind of process of self-observation and self-transcendence, apart from a few Orientals getting on an airplane or sending books to the West. And apart, of course, from the rare individuals here and there, there has not been a religious movement in the West beyond the context of the first three stages of life, nor any cultural movement at all in the general frame of Western culture beyond the context of the first three stages of life. Therefore, not only as egos but as Westerners also—which includes most of those who have come into my Company so far—as Westerners as well as egos you are bound to the doctrines of the omega principle, and therefore by force of your acculturation you are disinclined to take your observations of self and the world seriously.
No matter what you observe about yourself and the world, you are still rather automatically and naively disposed to fulfill yourself and to see Nature as somehow a design leading toward the fulfillment of selves, whereas it is a machine that not only produces but ruins selves, destroys selves, confuses you, binds you through double messages, coaxing you through your desires and opportunities and frustrating you through the limitations on them and confining you to limitations altogether—and all the time you are the Heart, Already Free, Inherently Standing Free of all this, yet unable to investigate the Divine Reality because you cannot take your own observations seriously. You are even culturally, as well as egoically, divorced from the opportunity to observe reality and to have that observation become a unique certainty, a new way of living and of Realizing.
In all the years of my Teaching Work, I have been struggling with just such people. You have even come to the point of struggling with me about this very point, have tried to create an alternative to the Way itself, or in your mind at least you are always manufacturing alternatives, or trivializing the process, or excusing yourself somehow from the real force of this Argument and consideration. My Teaching Argument is not simply a proposition for you to believe. It is a consideration for you to engage through self-observation and the observation of reality. The Wisdom-Teaching is not there to be believed. It is there to be tested, if you will, by your own process. You must prove the Wisdom-Teaching, not merely believe it. And only when it is proved by your observation, and therefore by your demonstration, is the Wisdom-Teaching one with your own being, alive in you. Only then has it authenticated itself in you.
Until then the Wisdom-Teaching is only interesting, or inspiring, or something you want to be able to resist because of your self-possession. You play with it like a cat with a mouse, you see. You are sometimes serious and you are sometimes not. You sometimes practice with some seriousness and at other times you take vacations from the practice. You are always dramatizing your conflict, the double bind, the two-sidedness of your disposition. And the primary form of your disposition or demonstration is everything associated with the motive toward self-fulfillment. Look at how you live. Look at how you think. Look at what you do altogether. Is it not true?
In the meantime all this purposiveness toward self-fulfillment dissociates you from all other possible propositions. The proposition of self-transcendence is set aside while you experiment with self-fulfillment, and all the greater wisdom is denied for the moment—or for your entire life. It is not that I am suggesting you should have a negative view of living. You must take responsibility for the things associated with your living, and you should have a positive orientation, a compassionate orientation, therefore, toward others, toward the human signs, and try to generate, as best you can, a suitable circumstance wherein human beings can achieve sufficient balance to entertain the greater possibility.
In any case, ultimately what gives you sufficient balance for
the greater possibility is your own capacity to make use of Wisdom. Who can say in any moment what will be the circumstance in which you are called to practice? No matter what happens, you are still called to practice. The Heart is the Heart, Wisdom is Wisdom, and the Truth is the Truth. And you are at the present time associated with a circumstance relatively congenial at the moment—perhaps for some not so congenial—but your circumstance could be utterly uncongenial at the blink of an eye. And for perhaps the highest percentage of the five billion on Earth, life is rather uncongenial, even now. In some fundamental sense, if you only examined it, it is not even congenial to you. Here you are, struggling to fulfill yourself, and you are going to die—and that is an absolute fact. That is what the natural cycle is about. It frustrates the impulse toward self-fulfillment.
Self-fulfillment, projected without limit, is associated with immortality, delight, complete access to everything desired. Is this possible? You are operating as if it were possible, as if you believe that doctrine. Your idealistic self-image, your idealistic view of the world, even your idealistic view of the Divine is associated with the notion that you are immortal. Whatever level of fulfillment or non-fulfillment you are experiencing, enjoying or suffering—and enjoyments and sufferings follow one another like clockwork—whatever you are experiencing, you must always remember that it leads to death, and that the manifest self is frustrated inevitably.
Look at all the billions of beings within the single sphere of this island where we live now. All the kinds of beings, a relatively small number human, and all the kinds of animal beings, bird beings, flying things, insects, plant life, fishes, organisms of all kinds—how many billions of them have died today? How many did you kill today, even by breathing and digesting? They are all part of life, too, are they not? How much philosophy did you allow them today? How much idealism did you support in them? So how much should they support in you? How much idealism was supported by the universe today? Or even by your own body-mind? As the Buddhists say, life is a wheel of suffering. If you encounter it or observe it directly as it is, it is an unfulfillable circumstance.
The Heart must notice this and come forward. The Heart is always the case. The Heart is always the context of all of this. That Which is the Truth can be Realized, but only if you would have it be Realized. If you are so benighted that you can only conceive, through your ideal imagery, of a purpose of selffulfillment, then of course, great Realization is not going to be yours. You are constantly making gestures toward happiness, but you are making those gestures through the mechanism of self-fulfillment. Happiness itself cannot be Realized through the mechanism of self-fulfillment, but only in the transcendence of self. This you must Realize, you see. Fundamentally this is what “hearing” is about, in my view.
If you do Realize that, then what will happen to this enterprise that is seeking happiness through self-fulfillment, through everything associated with the immense complexity I have described with the three words “money”, “food”, and “sex”? Instead of struggling with your desires for sexual selffulfillment, sensual pleasures, including eating, and social pleasures, relational pleasures, and so forth, instead of struggling against those motives, observe and understand reality as it is, and that struggle will disappear. In its disappearance, you will not merely be disposed negatively, disposed to dissociate from all that arises, or to suppress it. But rather all arising will become profoundly ordinary, and not associated with the search for self-fulfillment. It will be the most ordinary context of the body, and you will address it in the simplest, most ordinary terms. It will not capture you through motive, as a search, but rather your motive will be the motive of the Heart. The disposition that shows the sign of renunciation and Realization will be yours, and everything associated with money, food, and sex will be a grand simplicity that you will not be struggling for or against.
This is what I considered for fifteen years with people who are committed to fulfill themselves. And this is why my Teaching Work took the form that it did. That special submission and all those special signs associated with my Teaching Work were made because of the nature of those I was serving.
It is also true that human beings in their ordinary pursuit of self-fulfillment tend not to be grandly affected by anything unless it is stark in its nature. Like my Uncle Gene1—he never seemed to learn anything at all, even under the grossest circumstance of difficulty. In some sense, then, he was like human beings generally. Because you are not subtle, simply intelligent, because you cannot observe the great tragedy of existence itself, the great reality in all of its limitations directly, just as it is in any moment, you somehow require difficult and dreadful circumstances. Even though some will occur inevitably, you even require them to occur, because you cannot learn anything or observe anything directly in the most ordinary moments.
Even when most difficult things happen, tragedies in your life, people dying, yes, you suffer. All of you must have suffered something along these lines at one time or another, but suffering did not change anything. It just affected your mood for the moment. It interrupted your trend of pleasure, it made you suffer, it made you react, it made you feel a little desperate, it made you feel unhappy, it put you into doubt. Suffering does such things, but only temporarily. As soon as a little time passes—someone dies, there is grief, then it passes—you reorganize yourself back in the direction of self-fulfillment. You did not get the message, you see.
If the inherently limited nature of conditionality is truly impressing you, bringing the Heart forward As It Is, you would not only be enquiring and practicing and applying disciplines to serve that practice, but certain other signs would also appear, the signs I have said should appear in those who, even though they may not be devotees yet, could make use of my simple Sign.2 Among those signs is a spontaneous freedom from the self-imposed motivation toward self-fulfillment, idealization of Nature, or conditional existence, or the body-mind—there is that. But also, then, in terms of demonstration, the sign would appear, in the case of such an individual really awakened by the force of real self-observation of existence, of a spontaneous release from the motive that exaggerates or exploits the mechanism of thinking, and therefore of self-stimulated doing.
- In the years of His Teaching Work Heart-Master Da many times lovingly remembered His Uncle Gene, as here, while also pointing to him as an example of the suffering usual individual.
- Heart-Master Da here refers to His Sign of Realization, or His “Mere Presence” as the God-Realized Adept.
A breaking of the spell occurs, a snapping of the gross connection, the aggravated connection, the egoic connection, the egoic dilemma, so that it is interrupted, gone, falls out, falls away. And without intending it, without trying to quiet the mind, you see, one is relieved of the imposition of the method of thinking, the search in the form of constant thinking over this and that and the other thing, reacting emotionally to this and that and the other thing, reacting physically, socially, doing this and that, agitated constantly to improve the conditions of existence, and to make them self-fulfilling, to make them all “Howdy!” and amusing and middle-class. That form of the search does not just become quiet, but it falls out the bottom, and when it does, then one becomes more deeply meditative when one meditates, and one’s life shows the sign of seriousness, an equanimity, a freedom from complication, a freedom from seeking. Agitations of body, emotion, and mind are spontaneously released, not strategically, but spontaneously, because that which motivated all that seeking has been disproved by self-observation, or reality-observation.
Someone is dying, someone you are attached to, someone you depend upon, you see, but death is the message of Nature. That is it. Everybody is dying. All of your attachments will be frustrated. Even your effort to not be attached will be frustrated. The whole machine is self-frustrating. If you notice this, then the search based on identification with that mechanism falls away. Then one’s meditation can deepen. Then one’s living becomes serious, deep, free of the arbitrary stimulations of the search that the ego makes.
I am looking for the Great Sign. You should likewise be looking for the Great Sign, or be about the Great Sign, or be about the process that spontaneously shows the Great Sign. Everybody is dying. Everyone with whom you are intimate, everyone you may depend upon, is dying, you are going to die, everything will be lost, definitely—and you never know when.
Just to keep things in place in the meantime, until things get so bad that you cannot even hold on to them anymore or keep them in place, to keep them in place temporarily, you must be engaged in a constant search, the stimulation of your energy and attention. All the time you are struggling with your intimacies, your sex life, your friendships, your emotional relationships, your social associations, everything you depend upon, want, need—so you think—all the time addressing them, suffering them, being complicated by them being frustrated. This is the context of your life, is it not?
That is not the Way of the Heart, or, let us say, that is only the beginning of an address to it. In other words, those signs characterize even people who are not associated with the Way of the Heart, or with Wisdom. You are only beginning to discover the process wherein the spell is broken. Whatever you call yourself—beginning practitioner, formal student, beginning student, friend, patron, communicator—whatever your present active level of response to this opportunity may be, it is still being demonstrated through basically the same sign, and you are yet rather immunized against the great impulse or change that must be Realized, or spontaneously demonstrated, in the Way of the Heart. And when it is, then you may move on to the devotee stages, and not before.
In all of your relations you must relate to one another in the full knowledge of mortality, the full knowledge of death, the full knowledge of the reality of conditional existence, so that you will not be surprised by turns of events such that the Way of the Heart somehow becomes confused, or you find yourself having to struggle with things you should already have dealt with.
If you are really involved in practice of the Way of the Heart, you will live your relationships, but in reality, in the constant full assumption of the real nature of relationships themselves, conditional existence itself. You will be living this dying time all the time, not just waiting for the time that may come when somebody is going to die, or somebody is going to leave, then all of a sudden you feel, “I am going to to have a lot of problems.”
But look how you play your intimate relationships. Your dependency, your insecurity, is constantly dramatized in these emotional-sexual relationships. Instead of living them as simple, direct, human associations, responsibly engaged by real practitioners, in the full knowledge and understanding and heart-realization of the circumstance and reality of it all, expressing signs of renunciation, heart-founded in Realization, making light even—instead you live these strange exchanges, all these relationships indulged in against the time when the inevitable is going to happen, “Maybe this one will leave, maybe this one will die, maybe I will die.” All the suffering of the potential that allows you to dramatize in the meantime must be transcended utterly, so that you do not dramatize in the meantime, so that there is no dramatization on that basis, but there is full acceptance in every present moment of the nature of conditional existence and the purpose in which your life is established, so that you will not then create a conventionally dependent relationship with anyone.
This does not mean you will not be humanly associated with others, but not as the ego is. And, you see, that difference cancels dramatization. Don’t you know?
Your relationships to one another should be based on the acknowledgement of the nature of existence, the inevitability of death. The sign of the freedom from egoic attachment should be the sign you manifest in your intimacies. You should live on the basis of the acknowledgement of conditional reality, and not wait to be cursed by the evidence of conditional reality. You should make relationships on the basis of the acknowledgement of reality. In other words, make your relationships on the basis of renunciation. If you do this, then, yes, a variety of human relationships will continue, but you will be a renunciate in the context of relationships.
And renunciation produces an entirely different sign than you all are demonstrating. You are not showing the signs of the renunciate in the context of money, food, and sex, or all the details of ordinary living. You are showing the signs of egoity, which is full of conflict, primarily between the motive to transcend self and the motive to fulfill self. This conflict is the source, then, of all of your complications in all of your intimacies and friendships, all of your relationships, and all of your doings. Even the failure of this Communion to really do its work fully is a dramatization, it seems to me, of the same fault or limit that is being signed in the case of every practitioner. What you are signing as an individual practitioner is inevitably signed by you as a collective of practitioners suffering those limitations. Isn’t that obvious?
In relationships you dramatize your hopefulness, and your illusions, and your idealism, and your dependency. This is how relationships of all kinds function for you, therefore including your intimate emotional-sexual relationships, whereas relationships should be the context of your demonstration of Wisdom. To demonstrate Wisdom is what you are called to do, but that is not what you are doing, because you are too full of conflict. You cannot accept the message of reality, the message of your own observation. And so you make relationships as if you are immortals, suffering just the possibility of the failure of relationships, but not realizing the reality that relationships necessarily fail. Will. Necessarily. Fail. Inevitably. They are already failing, because even though you are involved in relationships in your life, they are not fulfilling you absolutely. That is why you are complaining all the time.
You are suffering your relationships as well as depending on them, and dependency is suffering. All you have to do is come into a feeling association with someone with whom you are intimate, and you feel sorrow. Haven’t you noticed?
You must become wise, undress yourself from this limit, and become involved in relationships through a different disposition. When that different disposition awakens, then you will advance in this Way, and not until then. In the meantime all relationships are a circumstance of dramatization of your egoic conflict. And you always seem to be surprised every time something difficult appears.