THE “BRIGHTENING” WAY TALK SERIES – The Yajna Discourses of Santosha Adi Da (1995-1996) An excerpt from, A Mastered Life – A Gathering “Consideration” with Adi Da Samraj Sugar Bowl Ski Resort, California – December 29, 1995.
Beezone note:
This excerpt was shortened by many paragraphs from the original talk (link to original below). The purpose of this editorial liberty was to focus on the topic of ‘hearing’ that was so eloquently elaborated in this talk by Heart Master Adi Da Samraj.
Hearing is No Small Matter (part two) – (part one)
AVATARA ADI DA: To Realize Me, you must transcend point of view, self-position, egoity, the separate position. You cannot, through any exercise of the separate position or the body-mind, Realize the Truth. The body-mind is simply a modification of That, like the room itself . It’s a complexity, or a maya, that cannot be comprehended.
So rather than exercise the separate self, as if to Realize the Truth in the manner of the “great path of return”, you see, the separate self is directly transcended. That is the “radical” nature of this Way that I have Given you.
So that’s the work you’re here to do. that’s the sadhana you’re here to do. And you must have a clear understanding that it is so, or you will re-invent the Way, as you all have done, individually, even collectively re-invented it in your own likeness or according to your own egoic disposition, instead of adhering to My Word and maintaining this profound consideration moment to moment, and doing so in the context of embracing all the disciplines I’ve Given you. Then you are involved in the direct listening process.
See, the listening process is not just struggling with the practices, the disciplines, all that. that’s all just something to do. The listening process is this profound consideration, engages Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga, making use of the technical elements of practice, of the “conscious process” and conductivity”. The disciplines and such are simply the order, the structure, within which you do this profound consideration, because you cannot become profound in it or one pointed in it if you don’t simply establish those disciplines covering everything. There will always be vacation-land for you.
So it has always been My expectation, even, that you would embrace all these disciplines, all these forms of practice, and enter seriously, profoundly, into this consideration, and move on through these stages, get on with this process. But individually and collectively You’ve been rather retarded about it.
To really be in touch with the self-contraction in this Communion with Me is to be on the verge of hearing.
If You’ve heard Me, then you’re in that position of your own making, that knot you’re making, or that pinch you’re giving yourself. And you can’t get rid of it, you can’t shake it. You don’t allow yourself to even make an effort in that direction.
So it is tapas. It is a profound ordeal. At the same time, it is full of absorptive Communion with Me and all the things associated with right life.
You must constantly be dealing directly with this self-contraction. And if you are in touch with it, then you don’t like it. You want only this Communion with Me. You don’t want this self-contraction, but you’re having to feel it every moment. And it’s your doing, you see.
So if you have heard Me, you don’t want to spend a lot of time getting beyond that knot, because it’s not comfortable at all. You become profoundly sensitized to it if You’ve heard Me, and likewise profoundly sensitized to Me. that’s why seeing is next.
But the knot is there, and it’s unavoidable, and you don’t like it. It is pain. It is fear. This is what makes a renunciate out of people, the discovery of Me and the self-contraction at the same time. In full hearing and seeing, that’s what makes people renunciates, because it is pain. It’s extraordinary pain, at the same time extraordinary bliss but the pain is where you sit, and you are moved to feel out of it, and be relieved of that enclosure, that divorce from the Divine, that sinfulness. You dislike it so much, you dislike that knot so much, that you become utterly concentrated in going beyond it. It’s not that you have to just sit in a room all the time, but you’re just all the time feeling beyond it, practicing the exercise of going beyond self-contraction into the state of Radiance, Love-Bliss, Energy, Light. And you would not be distracted from It, because you do not want to be simply sitting in that pain of self-contraction.
This is basically what Rudi was referring to, not really knowing altogether what He was talking about. He just wanted to deal with this incredible stress, frontal stress. But it’s the ego-knot. You can’t bust it from outside. You can’t relax the body that much. You have to deal with the root of egoity itself-it’s in the conscious domain-and in Communion with Me move beyond it. You can’t just work on the body-mind. You have to find out the ego-act, and exercise the flower constantly, every moment.
But it is a pain, and it’s associated with lots of adaptations that keep producing results somehow. So you’re always going to have to feel beyond egoity itself, but also all of it’s results. So that makes it an ordeal of pain, of tapas, which you endure because you’re also in Communion with Me and have My Wisdom. But it’s still pain. Hm? But you become intelligent with it. You know what you’re doing and can make this exercise of going beyond the contraction, the self-contraction.
DEVOTEE: I’ve never felt the overwhelming strength of that so fiercely as tonight.
AVATARA ADI DA: Tcha.
DEVOTEE: I’ve experienced this bindu that she’s talking about, this place, too, recently.
AVATARA ADI DA: that’s to be outside it, as I just said. It’s not wrong. It’s just a level of finding it, of locating it. Any of you could perhaps, by some exercise of attention, feel something about the right side of the heart. That doesn’t mean that you’re established in that position.
Profound transitions in practice are about being inside, or at the Source-Position.
The exercise of hearing, then, is to be sensitive to it as contraction itself, to be in the position of the pain, not outside it or avoiding it but actually in that position. It is not comfortable at all, not likable. It has all kinds of artifacts-physical, emotional, mental, and so forth, even in the breath. So the self-contraction itself is fundamental pain altogether, disturbance altogether, and ordinary life is motivated by it, because it is so profound, and it is detached from the fundamental Reality, the Divine Reality. It is lost in maya, in appearances, presumptions, even imagining that you are seeing the room, whereas in fact you’re just seeing one little view.
So it’s confusing. You’re not seeing Reality. You’re seeing an appearance associated with your own egoity. You can’t be in another position. You can’t be in the position of the totality of the room. What position are you in? Some self-enclosure of thoughts and perceptions.
So it’s very uncomfortable to make this discovery of egoity. But as I said to you earlier, it’s not truly profoundly discovered except in the condition of Grace, of Communion with Me, and reception of My Teaching, and then, it’s in that total context that the ego is located also. That’s hearing, the true discovery of the self-knot, coincident with this whole process of Communion with Me, full of the Wisdom of Instruction that you apply.
What about that?
DEVOTEE: I think you’re talking about the matter of hearing includes, then, this reception of You.
AVATARA ADI DA: Mm-hm. I know what we were talking about! [Laughter.] I wanted to know if you had a response to it.
DEVOTEE: Beloved, I feel, like You’ve always Said, feeling-Contemplation of You is primary. The first thing you have to do is “Locate” You before you can even become sensitive to the self-contraction.
AVATARA ADI DA: Yes.
DEVOTEE: It seems the whole listening process is just staying with that feeling-Contemplation of You, but along with whatever the body-mind goes through.
AVATARA ADI DA: But always give Me the leading faculties. don’t be played upon by these natural arisings. Even the intensity of converting life to sadhana can sometimes produce more arisings, reveal more things, that require to be purified or made “Bright”, which is what purification is really all about.
Once you dare to allow yourself to hear Me, then the process becomes intensive and profound. Maybe you have some sense of that, those of you who are taking a long time to get to that point. And that’s why you’re taking vacations. It’s even a kind of fear of the self-contraction, a fear of becoming aware of the limited nature of your experiencing, and then the mortality that you’re locked into because of that. you’re afraid of it. you’re not merely afraid of it. It is fear.
DEVOTEE: It is fear.
AVATARA ADI DA: You don’t want to be afraid, so you distract yourself and minimize your awareness of this. But you must stand in that position. That doesn’t mean to go insane with fear or anything like that. It’s about being in that place where you make this knot, this fundamental discomfort. Yes, it has the characteristic of fear, but you basically experience that fear as a kind of anxiety in the pit of your stomach or something.
If you are but really in touch with the self-contraction, you do experience the anxiety that is the constant underlying everyone’s behavior, everyone’s moment to moment existence. They just build all kinds of stuff on top of it and desensitize themselves, but the self-contraction is the quality of anxiety, stressful anxiety, and so on.
So, as I Said, you may want to forestall that realization, because you can’t get rid of it once you got it. Once you get bit, that’s it. Unless you find yourself out, you can’t escape it. And so that’s when the sadhana really begins, you see. that’s when it starts becoming effective at a profound level. Before then, there are life-improvements and so on, fine. But this is how the sadhana gets intensified, quickened, full of light, full of heat, therefore.
You see even student-beginners and so on having – even apparent to all – experiences, kriyas and all kinds of things going on with them. But that’s not seeing Me. Those are effects, and they can be sought or clung to and whatnot, and become means to delay the course like anything else.
So those who are involved in the seeing Yoga may very well have kriyas and so on as spontaneous happenings, but they’ll be focused in this direct Spiritual “Locating” of Me, Given up in Me utterly, because of the foundation of hearing, so that you can be entered into the Source Point of the “Perfect Practice”. To engage in the “Perfect Practice” you must be at the Source Point of egoity, not on the other side of it, wandering in the body-mind. To Awaken to the Witness and then enter into the profound “Perfect Practice” is to Stand on the other side of the ego, and the focus of the practice is no longer dealing with the body-mind, feeling beyond egoity in the mechanism of the body-mind. It’s a matter of entering directly into the Self-Radiant Sphere of Divine Being.
Of course it’s done most profoundly in meditation, where you separate yourself from other matters. And so, even though the practice is also engaged in a fundamental sense in every moment, there still is, after the profound meditation, return of ordinary associations.
And the associations will not necessarily themselves change all that much. It’s in the seventh stage of life, the third stage of the “Perfect Practice”, that the Source-Position itself is Realized utterly, and no conditions are placed on It. It is not held in place by anything whatsoever. So the gesture of dissociation drops, and the “Bright” Realizer Expands into the sphere of the body-mind. And through the process of Recognition, all aspects of the body-mind are “Brightened” by that already Realized Condition. So someone engaged in the “Perfect Practice” in the context of the sixth stage of life shows a very different sign than a devotee who will have Realized Me in the seventh stage of life.
So once you truly hear Me, once you get the taste of all of this, you will not want to delay the course. Everybody has their own manner, and the imperfect qualities of the body-mind in it’s adaptations, so everybody’s sign in the course is different. Some may be, in their depth, apparently more a renunciate than others and so on, or more intensively involved in all the aspects of practice than some other. If they’ve truly heard Me, they all practice from the same disposition and would not delay the course.
It’s just like if you’re ill, you don’t want it to last. Maybe sometimes you don’t mind feeling a little woozy, a little sniffly, and hanging around in bed all day. But if you’re really sick, you don’t want it to go on. Well, to hear Me is to be really sick, you see. [Laughter.] it’s to get really sick, at the same time really well altogether and knowing what to do, but otherwise really sick, really in touch with the ego-act and it’s result and it’s disposition and so on. And you do real work with it, because it’s such an urgent matter. You don’t want to be sick anymore. that’s how sick you have to be, in other words, to have heard Me, because it is a profound motivator, a profound capability.
Brightening Heart Series – Index
Beezone White and Orange Project* is a study method based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Blue & Brown Books books. The Blue & Brown Books of Wittgenstein’s were dictated as a set of notes to his student in 1934-1935.
Beezone uses a number of formats for assembling a project. One is to present a short piece directly from Adi Da. Then Beezone will write down the highlighted points from said paragraph and/or a group of like paragraphs.
The second format is ‘thematic’. Beezone will take a ‘theme’ of Adi Da’s teaching and go through various talks and essays and write down a sentence or two related to that theme or topic.
Lastly is a compilation or remix. This is a blend of the two other methods. In this style Beezone will take a number of talks and essays based on a theme. Beezone will then use the ‘cut-up’ method. The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. This method can be traced to at least the Dadaists of the 1920s, but was popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs, and has since been used in a wide variety of contexts.
Beezone
This is project is not to be confused with:
Humble One-Liners
DEVOTEE: It is like the left and right (or the world of opposites)…..Life is suffering, and then there is God.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: That is one way of putting it, in your humble one-liner fashion.
Humble one-liners are sufficient for most people to generate in them a sense of feeling consoled. They are like teddy bears.
So a lot of people reduce the religious life to something like one-liners that they pull out to snuggle with. But how can one settle for that couple of sentences worth of comprehension as the attitude of ones existence? It is a profound matter.
The only way to save yourselves from the destiny of religious one-linerism is to constantly and directly study my teaching, read the great traditions, study them. Stay in the process of this great “consideration”, instead of just sitting around and ‘smoking the pipe”, rapping out dharma and consoling yourselves with your teddy bear knowledge…”