Hearing and Being a Victim
Adi Da Samraj
The following is taken from a longer talk – see below –
and interjected (in italics) with excerpts from other talks
DEVOTEE: In spite of conscious effort to do otherwise, we find we’ve ended up with our parents, and duplicating the type of pattern that our parents themselves manifested. In particular, Beloved, I have lived my life not being terribly mindful that someone who felt deeply was controlling my life for me. I haven’t particularly minded that because I have lived in the mind, and being safely tucked away there I didn’t need to feel as much. It was brought to me with great clarity and intelligence that my parents had a similar controlling relationship in their life. And I have allowed my intimate partner to set the emotional tone for the relationship.
AVATARA ADI DA: Of course, one’s history is useful to examine and be frank about and see how patterns developed and were stimulated and so on. But that’s not the essence of hearing. The notion of being the victim and so on is based on the idea that your suffering is caused from without. To understand this is the essence of hearing. One’s fundamental suffering is not caused from without. Yes, there can be pain, difficulty, bad circumstances, on and on, but your life of disturbance, of pain, and so forth is not caused from without. It is due to your own reaction, your own reaction to conditions of existence.
DEVOTEE: This reminds me of that line from Lawrence of Arabia , Beloved, that You always quote that’s so amusing, “The trick is not minding that it hurts.”
AVATARA ADI DA: That’s not true. Its not enough, anyway. That’s the way you like to look at things, you see.
DEVOTEE: Well, I was also thinking . . .
AVATARA ADI DA: It hurts, but there’s some great Truth that still exists. You just proposed it again, this downer kind of attitude you have that somehow or other you have to be committed to suffering. It must be given up. You must really not like suffering. Its not a matter of merely being immune to it. You must really not like it. You must really not like being afraid, not like being mortal and all the possible difficulties that come with that. You have to really not like it. You have desensitized yourself to discriminating about these things with all kinds of propaganda and self-indulgence, and forgotten that you really don’t like all of that pain at all . But its your own pain, self-created, by self-contraction. And that’s how you fail to participate in Reality, in Truth, the Divine. That makes you dark and troubled and a seeker, and you feel stuck in some bewildering trap.
There is No Escape there is Only Realization
That reaction is the self-contraction, egoity itself. Egoity is not caused from without. Egoity is your own act. This is what must be understood. One’s seeking, one’s disturbance, one’s dissatisfaction,-on and on, is one’s own activity. To understand this is to be free from the victim consciousness, or the whole notion that one’s fundamental difficulty is somehow caused by others or the conditions of existence, the conditions of manifested existence.
This is the essence of hearing, then. The transcendence of the victim strategy is the essence of hearing. The transcendence of the notion that your suffering is caused from without is the essence of hearing. This is most fundamental.
The essence of hearing is to observe and understand yourself at the feeling level of the being, the part of you that remains relatively untouched as long as you are designed in egoic fashion. The core of egoity is contraction at the feeling level, and that contraction infests every aspect of the functional being. Therefore, the core of liberation and hearing is at the feeling level.
To make yourself that vulnerable, to observe yourself that profoundly is a great ordeal.
The transcendence of the notion of being victimized by life is hearing, or another way of describing what hearing is about, you see. This is why hearing is the foundation of this Way. This Way is not a self-based developmental process, you see. It is a self-transcending process that even transcends all of the potential developmental stages of life. This is one of the unique aspects of the Way I have Revealed to you – and it must not be bypassed. One can enter into a developmental process, even Spiritually, and even in My Company, but that’s not the Way of the Heart. It’s just part of the human potential, that’s all. And it’s not enough – and is, in any case, part of the psycho-biography of the ego, unless there’s true hearing, the true capability for self-transcendence.
Every being must fulfill The Law, regardless of his or her past. It does not make any difference how difficult it is for you. The Law remains The Law. The Law is unobstructed feeling-attention under all conditions and in all relations to Infinity. If you are obstructed in feeling and attention, you fail to fulfill The Law. That is why you suffer, and why you stop growing.
You must accept the discipline of The Law of love and bypass completely all of your old victim and loveless ways.
So the victim notion, the victim self-image, the sense that one’s suffering is caused, is the illusion that must be transcended. It’s not just one among the things that you should have observed and understood, but didn’t, you see. It’s the thing to understand – the most fundamental thing. It is the foundation discovery of one who practices as My devotee. And, on its basis; all the rest of the Way develops,
Ultimately, then, you see, it doesn’t even make any difference what your parents were like, what you experienced in your childhood about any matter whatsoever. It’s useful to examine, but it hasn’t caused your life of suffering. Your life of suffering is your own activity. And you use events, happenings, experiences, to justify your own egoity – or in other words, the habit of self-contraction.
When you understand yourself most fundamentally, then you do not dramatize the habit of self-contraction. You do not dramatize egoity. Instead, you directly transcend it moment to moment.
To truly understand yourself and to be helpful to others, you’ve got to get out of this Western psychiatric mode of thinking that looks at causes rather than egoic self. It looks for excuses for being an ego. There are none. It is now, and always has been, your own activity. It’s your own choice in the face of the conditions of existence. And it winds you into a habit that binds you in the midst of conditions, all conditions. Right life is purposed to Ultimate Realization, Ultimate Liberation. Therefore, it’s not about developing the egoic self, enlarging the egoic self, evolving the egoic self, All those are conditional processes and searches, possibilities among conditions, They are all self-referring. The separate self referred to, the ego, the self-contraction, is what must be understood and transcended. The habit of egoity must be transcended. The results of egoity must be transcended. The conditions in which egoity arises must be transcended. All of conditional existence must be transcended.
Conditional existence is inherently unsatisfactory. When one understands this, instead of seeking, then, one transcends the seeker. And that is the fundamental process of this Way-and fundamental to its uniqueness.
That Which is to be Realized is not among conditions, not among causes and effects. It is not caused, cannot be caused, cannot be Realized as an effective action. It is There Where there is no self-contraction. It is inherently and always already There. But to Realize It, all the forms of self-contraction must be transcended. All bondage to seeking, all bondage to conditions, must be passed beyond.
“That Which is Prior to conditions is not obvious until the self-contraction is transcended.”
Even the process of energies in the body-mind, natural energies, Spiritual Force, all of this must be transcended. They are not Liberating in the Ultimate sense. For one who hears, the Spiritual process is part of the means of Ultimate self-transcendence, and not part of a process of self-development. That Which is to be Realized is Prior to conditions. That Which is Prior to conditions is not obvious until the self-contraction is transcended. And the self-contraction is reaction to conditions. It is the reaction that takes the form of separateness, the illusion of separateness, and the life of separativeness. Separateness is the foundation pain, and it is self-caused.
If you are truly serious in My Company, this is what you come to understand. So analysis of causes has minimal use. It’s a part of examining how you did this, your own reaction, the self-contraction, the act of separateness, the act of casting yourself into the illusion of separateness, of separation, of independence, isolation, unwholeness in the Ultimate sense.
“Some here speak of sometimes feeling something in the right side of the heart. They feel My Presence there. They feel a Current there. They feel some kind of tension there, and so on. That’s not it.”
In the process of Realization there’s a tour through the mechanisms of the body-mind, and the phenomena associated with those mechanisms. It covers all – all aspects of conditional existence ultimately. And then the heart-root is found. Some here speak of sometimes feeling something in the right side of the heart. They feel My Presence there. They feel a Current there. They feel some kind of tension there, and so on. That’s not it. I remember Saying last night to some who were sitting around Me, about some people describing this experience on the right side of the heart. I Said it is not energy. It’s Consciousness Itself, you see. The Realization at the root is a Realization of Consciousness Itself, not merely the feeling of energy in the right side of your physical heart, you see. It is the last place – in fact the first place – the last to be found but the original place of the self-contraction, taking the form of attention, the feeling of relatedness.
Prior to the self-contraction is the Feeling of Being-Prior to all relatedness, all illusions of separateness, and all illusions of caused suffering. Suffering is entirely your own action. The body-mind can suffer in difficult conditions, and there is pain. And one feels natural sympathy for others in pain. But the domain of pain is not the domain of Liberation. It is not the domain of Truth. It is just the domain of suffering. And to deal with it, you must transcend your own act and not merely uncover all the memories in which you were caused to suffer in the body-mind. That’s “Narcissus”, you see.
So this Way is altogether about transcending victim-consciousness, then. It is to cease to be victimized by the universe. It is to transcend the illusion that you are victimized by the universe, trapped in the universe, trapped in the body-mind and so on.
You can’t do anything about what happened in the past. You can only do something about your own reaction. So in all viewing of the past, all examination of the past, what you’re really there to do is find out about your own reaction, and how it took the form of various patterns and so forth. But ultimately it is always the same thing-self-contraction, movement into separateness, reacting to conditions, and then seeking in the midst of conditions for a solution of one kind or another, rather than simply transcending the self-contraction itself.
This Way is therefore not about seeking solutions based on the self-contraction, but directly, instead, directly transcending the self-contraction and moving beyond the search in the midst of conditions, transcending that search in Divine Communion, Ultimately Divine Self Realization.
DEVOTEE: Thank You Beloved. This is clarifying for me.