Everything is “organized water”, the fluid in which we inhere. All this is Liquid. You are above, immersed in His Fluid Light, Breathing Him down into the body-mind realm. From “up here”, Transformed and Inhering in this Radiant Water of Consciousness, the hole in your head that you were looking up into, looking for God, is where His Divine Light Flows down and Transforms what is below. – Devotee notes on gathering with Adi Da Samraj, August 31, 1999
The Pleasure Dome Is Organized Water
INTRODUCTION
by Bill Godlove
Jaya Adi Da Samraj.
The evening of April 8 – an evening of the Bodily Revelation of the Formless Divine; an evening of the Worded Transmission of Perfect Silence; an evening of happy drowning in Organized Water; an evening of tears and sarongs and laughter and Rama and the Mama, and, in the forgotten outside, the serene trees contemplating His “Bright” Gifts-that evening was the first time I had ever been in a small gathering with My Heart-Master, Adi Da Samraj.
The Third Congregation Arrives in Hawaii
The gathering was at Quandramama Shikhara, Beloved Adi Da’s Hermitage in Hawaii. But, oddly, I had not come to Hawaii at Beloved’s Invitation-in fact, I didn’t even expect to see Him on that occasion, since at the time He was in a period of solitude, not seeing devotees. I was there at the request of the third congregation.
The third congregation of Adidam is a form of participation in the sacred relationship with Him that was just recently created by Bhagavan Adi Da. That congregation is comprised of individuals who recognize Adi Da Samraj as the Divine Person and are moved to serve His Work and receive His Blessing, but without engaging all the disciplines involved in fullest participation in the Way of the Heart. Third congregation members must be individuals who can do “significant service”-who have either the professional expertise or the financial resources to help support Beloved Adi Da’s personal Circumstance and assist in the success of His World-Work to Liberate all beings. Beloved Adi Da has given the third congregation the simple practice of feeling-Contemplation-to simply invoke Him, love Him, serve Him, and breathe Him. They can also, if they choose, engage brief periods of meditation and/or sacramental worship of Bhagavan Adi Da. And, in their commitment to Him as their Heart-Master, they take on a formal vow of lifelong devotion and service.
In the weeks before April 8, the newly-forming third congregation had twice prepared a statement expressing their understanding of what their responsibilities should be in relation to Beloved Adi Da, but neither document had shown the breadth of vision required. Finally, Clive Smith, the chairman of the Third Congregation Council, wrote to Beloved and told Him that he wanted to come to Hawaii-and would not leave until the third congregation had satisfactorily come up to their responsibilities to Him. Beloved Adi Da replied that it was fine for Clive to come-but that He shouldn’t expect a business meeting with Him. Clive could come to lay his head at Beloved’s Feet and receive His Blessing. So Clive assembled a team of third congregationists-himself; David Sawyer, a leading expert in the management of non-profit organizations; and Tony Musso, a successful entrepreneur-and also invited a number of fulltime Institutional servers: Bill Stranger (representing the Advocacy Department), Michael Macy (CEO of the Institution), Brian Gelfer (Manager of the Sacred Treasures Division), and myself (manager of the Publications Mission).
Most of us arrived on Friday, April 6, and by early Saturday morning we were deep into our deliberations. Then, on the afternoon of Sunday, April 7-with one wall of our meeting room covered with large sheets of paper diagramming the possible future of the institution, culture, community, and mission of Adidam-we were invited to Quandramama Shikhara.
Darshan Again and Again
The rest of the day was the Heart-conjured Magic of the Living Divine. Beloved sat in Darshan at the site of Grace Straightens-wearing black briefs and two earrings; regal, beautiful, serene; His eyes painting each person in the soft and forceful colors of His Love. He then went on an “Easter egg hunt,” walking around the property to locate eggs that had been hidden, laughing, joking, Blessing. Later, after a brief stay in His House, Free Standing Man, he came out to sit in the hammock out on the lawn, and there He accepted gifts from both Clive Smith and David Sawyer, and talked at length with Clive about the handmade Japanese papers that Clive had given Him. Then we were invited into Free Standing Man to see some paintings by Schim Schimmel-an artist who places realistic animals in supernal settings of water, space, and light. While we were there, Beloved walked in, and proceeded to Talk with us for 30 minutes or so about Schimmel and his work. We left Quandramama filled with the Joy of the Master of our Hearts.
Monday, April 8: From the sea to the Shining Sea
We woke Monday-and went back to work. But we knew we would see Beloved Adi Da later in the day-He had accepted our invitation to dine at the Beach House restaurant in Poipu on the south side of Kauai. We arrived at 7:00 p.m., and He walked in a few minutes later, looking beautiful in a caftan with a tiger skin print, and sat down at a table overlooking the ocean. That evening, Beloved Adi Da accepted gifts from everyone who was at the third congregation conference: each of us approached His table, knelt beside Him, and gave Him our gift. He received a traditional Tibetan scarf from David Sawyer, kissed it, and put it around David’s neck-and then hugged him. He accepted a beautiful frog pendant from Clive-and then Clive bowed at His Feet, and Beloved rubbed Clive’s back. Michael Macy gifted Him with a small, lovely vase-and He hugged Michael, while Michael thanked Him for the Gift of his service. And I gave him a pair of gold earrings-and He took my right hand in His right hand and gently massaged it for a minute or two, His Face a miracle of Mudras: lips barely moving, eyes gently shifting, filling me with the intimacies of Perfect Freedom.
Later, He sent Godfree Roberts, a devotee who served His intimate Circumstance in Kauai, to our table, and Godfree asked us if we had any “considerations” that would justify a gathering. We said we did. And at 11:30 that night we were in the main room at Free Standing Man, now known as the “Laughing Mama Temple”-once again, happily and excitedly waiting for our Beloved to arrive.
In the Pleasure Dome of Adi Da Samraj
After this gathering was over, a friend of mine who is a longtime devotee characterized it as one of the most sublime gatherings he had ever attended – and he has attended hundreds. Beloved Talked about the Laughing Mama Temple; about the Yoga of being the servant of the Divine King; about the Pattern of His Vehicle of Manifestation, and how He did not “cause” His Incarnation but was “invoked” by the “Great”; about the right way to communicate Him to the millions – a “heart-communication” that is simple and direct.
But most of al l- and most beautifully – He Talked about the Pleasure Dome. Those who had been present for Beloved Adi Da’s previous Discourses at Quandramama told us that on the night of April 8 He summarized and advanced the entire “consideration” of the Pleasure Dome that had been occurring for months.
For me, the evening was a wonder of Beloved Adi Da-His Beauty, His Discrimination, His Humor, His Body, His Love, His Sphere of “Brightness” enclosing the room and the world. For the first half of the gathering-before the first break-I was somewhat physically restless, shifting positions quite often, even as my attention was with Him. But after the break I wanted to Contemplate Beloved Adi Da more intensely, and I began to focus on His eyes. Soon, I felt drawn into the Mystery of His Feeling, His changeless changes. He is, as He says in this Talk, “Organized Water”: fluid, shining, various, wondrous, always different, always the same, refreshing, enlivening, overwhelming, mysterious, intimate, transparent, the Life of our life. By the end of the evening, I was heart-broken in worship, weeping quietly as He talked. In the car on the way home, I broke into sobs, heart-filled by my Beloved.
May His Words open your heart, and may you be filled by His Divine Radiance. Even as you read His Words-even now-He is with you in His Great Pleasure Dome of feeling and the senses: “So immense is My Sensory Domain, it includes everything that arises, that can be perceived. My Regard of you is beginningless and endless.”
Om Sri Adi Da, Avatara Hridayam
The Pleasure Dome Is Organized Water
A Gathering “Consideration” with
Beloved Adi Da Samraj
Quandramama Shikhara
Free Standing Man
April 8, 1996
Beloved Bhagavan had already begun speaking at the gathering on this evening when it was brought to His attention that the guests had not yet visited the Mama Temple. They were immediately sent to offer their gifts to the Laughing Mama before they could return to Beloved’s Company. Once everyone returned, the gathering “consideration” began.
SECTION 1 – Samraj
BILL S: Beloved, while we were waiting to come over the other day, I read for the first time some of Your Notes about the “consideration” of patterning, and You as the pattern of Lord Rama, and You as the Adept-King of this realm. And I remember many years ago You described how in ancient times there was a split in human culture, and Adepts left the community of the people and became ascetics living in the woods, apart from general civilization.
And it seemed to me that that split has climaxed today. We recognize You as the Divine World-Teacher, as the Supreme Adept, but actually there seems to be a taboo about acknowledging that the Adept Himself must also be the Master of the total order of Man-political, natural, and so on.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-tcha.
BILL: So this matter of You as Adi Da Samraj, the Divine Realizer-King must now be one of our principal communications.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: In the progress of My Revelation to you and the signs there were from you, all these namings have been part of My Revelation to you – those Names, references, along with everything else. But, of course, it’s not just a matter of telling people Who I Am. It’s a matter of people relating to Me as I Am.
BILL: It seems like it’s actually crossing a great taboo in culture. But it seems like people. . .
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Which taboo is that?
BILL: This matter of a great Spiritual figure representing himself as a king.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: I’m not talking about some mockery, like the “emperor’s new clothes”. Nor just using conventional “king talk” in some klik-klakkish, slick fashion, you see.
CLIVE S.: But there is no other form for the recognition of a king at this moment in this culture, in Western culture especially, Beloved.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yesterday was Easter for the Christians. They think in these terms, don’t they? Such notions are not absent from the cultures of the world. It’s not like I’m claiming political kingship or any of that sort of business. It’s got nothing to do with that. It may be a description of My Manner, in some respects. It’s also, more than that, a description of how people should relate to Me.
In the Rama Rajya, the Kingdom of Rama, everyone is the servant of Rama, and that’s that. Rama serves all, and everyone serves Rama.
BILL: It seems to me that the notion of the Divine King is the only thing that can truly order human culture.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. But culture is not ordered along Divine and Spiritual, Ultimate lines. It is ordered for other reasons. A king can be viewed as a political device for ordering society along conventional lines – as it might otherwise be ordered in a democracy, but through a different kind of authority and such. That’s not it. Divine Kingship is a matter of Dharma.
If everyone related to Me rightly, there would be a Kingdom, a True Divine Rajya, Adi Da Rajya. However many come to Me, to be Blessed by Me or to Realize Me altogether (even if a relative few at the moment) it is still My Domain, My House – My Kingdom, then. That is the nature of the gathering. You all would be served by Me. Therefore, you must become My servant.
But to be My servant is not a matter of convention, either. It is to fulfill one of the four principal elements of the Way I’ve Given to you: Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga itself being the submission of the four leading faculties, moment to moment. That same Yoga can be used as a description of the Way in its simplest sense. The body must serve Me. The heart must love Me, feel Me, surrender to Me. The mind must become attention for Me, moment to moment. And you must breathe Me with every breath. This simplest practice is the practice for all to begin with.
So to practice Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga is to be My servant, moment to moment, always in Love-Communion with Me, remembering Me constantly, breathing Me constantly. If all do this, it is the Rajya, the Divine Kingdom, of Adi Da. However many do it, that’s what the Kingdom is.
But it’s not a rulership in the sense of Me sitting in My office daily and governing your affairs. My Kingship is beyond such worldly matters. I Give that service to My devotees to do. This is their gift to Me. I’m not here to manage and to be their King in this sense of managerial ruling, political ruling, and such. It’s not about that at all. But order comes to those who live with Me, who attend to Me, who serve Me, by virtue of just that. That practice itself conforms them to Me, and their life is rightened in the Pleasure Dome of their love of Me. The more they enjoy this Happiness of Communion with Me, the more inclined they become to be rightened, to be purified, to embrace more discipline and such.
Whenever I Speak of discipline to you all, then you start tuning out. Think of it as dharma, then. When you think of discipline, you think of some self-suppressive something-or-other. You somehow expect that before there can be Realization, you somehow or other have to get rid of sex. That’s because of your notion of discipline.
Think of discipline as Dharma, as rightness, as Divine association, conformity to the Divine Lawfully, to the Divine Purpose, to the Divine Person. You think of it as some struggle with yourself, some necessary self-mutilation that you must make in order to justify receiving the Gift of Divinity.
Well, you see, you are all infidels. This is not the Way that I have Revealed. The Way of the Heart is not about self-inflicted suffering. The seat of the Way of the Heart is the Pleasure Dome, Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga, in other words-the “conscious process” and “conductivity” in Communion with Me. That being the case, what reason is there to embrace suffering?
You must be equipped to love Me, to Commune with Me, under difficult circumstances, if they arise. And many inevitably arise, including the one you’re always waiting for – the death one, you know? So you have to be able to be My devotee under such circumstances. But the moment of Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga does not require any self-inflicted suffering. It requires complete freedom from self-concern.
Self-contraction altogether must be felt beyond. You can’t be doing that and whipping yourself at the same time! That is to deny Me, to fail to be My servant. It is to fail to love Me. It is to be full of self-attention, a problem in yourself, a search, a method you’re using apart from Communion with Me.
So you must be conformed to Me happily. In every moment you have the opportunity, then. The integrity you should generate in life is that of the Pleasure Dome. I mean nothing bizarre about that at all, if you understand Me. I mean the seat is that of Communion with Me, not of self-inflicted suffering. The Way is transcending suffering all the while, not embracing it. Suffering must be transcended in its every moment. There’s enough of it, in this moment. You needn’t add a single stripe to it. The suffering is sufficient in any moment.
So you’re not called to suffering in My Company. So discipline in this Way is not about this self-inflicted suffering game that you all like to play. Sometimes you are committed to that for cultural reasons. This notion of self-inflicted suffering, embrace of suffering as the Way itself is generally part of the Christian tradition as you have likely received it. It’s a rather ascetical disposition, a complaint against oneself. I’d rather you bring your zwieback to My Mama form here, so I don’t even have to listen to it.
I’ve a special agreement with this extension of Mine here: I receive absolutely nothing from it. Your objections given with your zwieback stop right there. That’s how I get rid of it. You must make the act, but I will ignore it utterly.
MALE DEVOTEE: That is Your Blessing, Lord.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. So all of your objections, all your complaints, all your problems, all your seeking-I Call you to understand this: they have nothing to do with the Way in My Company.
So you’ve all been imagining I’ve been Instructing you all these years in some sort of ascetically-oriented self-inflicted-suffering Yoga. I never uttered a word of this kind! You all apparently preach it to one another somehow. I’ve been speaking to you about this Pleasure Dome of self-transcendence, even a discipline of life that is pleasurable altogether. The emotional-sexual discipline, dietary discipline, community discipline, and so forth, all these things are modes of pleasure, Pleasure Dome life.
Samraj Authority
You brought it up, Clive, something about taboos about this kind of recognition. Meaning what? Who doesn’t like this? What is it that they don’t like?
CLIVE: Authority.
BILL: I think the sacred Authority of Divinity.
CLIVE: Any authority.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, then I guess they will not want to come to Me.
BILL: We’ll get ’em ready.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: [laughs] But I don’t see why their disinclination to want to acknowledge somebody in that mode means that you should not be communicating about Me in that fashion.
BILL: It won’t stop us.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: It’s up to them to choose it or not. It’s not being imposed on them. I don’t impose anything on anybody.
WILLIAM:: Beloved, You’ve distinguished between the worldly king and the Divine Master. As in India, there were the rajas, but they weren’t regarded as Divinized Realizers in that state. There was a distinction made there.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, sometimes they were as individuals.
WILLIAM: Right.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: And there’s always the attribution of Divinity somehow, in kingly rulership. But, yes, they weren’t necessarily presumed to be Realizers otherwise.
WILLIAM: And we’re using the term “Samraj” with all of the Spiritual connotations.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: It is a Spiritual title. It’s not a common title.
Well, what else is there, then? I didn’t hear you all speaking at the table behind us [when they were eating dinner earlier]. Except one moment-I don’t know how it happened-I just heard some brief reference to Jesus, having something to do with prophecy or something. Was that being said by someone?
CASPAR P.: Beloved, this was when Clive and I were talking about the crown of thorns starfish. It’s very much like the crown that Jesus is supposedly wearing.
CLIVE: We were talking about patterns, Beloved, and the pattern of the crown, and its interrelatedness to this starfish, which is similar to the coral reefs.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. So it’s a rather poetic reference that comes from a religious tradition. And you’re not suggesting any such meaning, then?
CLIVE: No, it was more just the wonder about patterns. In the culture at large, there are so many conflicting cosmologies.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: World culture, you mean?
CLIVE: Struggling to make sense of the many changes that are increasing in rapidity. Chaos and complexity is one.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: What was the other one?
CLIVE: Kali. Names for change and absence of pattern so extreme that you don’t understand how to pattern it. And so, coming out of some place, like those dolphins You were talking about the other night [in a Schimmel painting], there is this contention in the culture to claim the emergence of pattern. And so understanding that process will give the group or the tradition the word, or the gathering, that understands that most profoundly, and can bring that forth with great impetus. And so Your “Consideration” about the Rama Pattern as Your Pattern .
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, we can address that for a moment — how that came up. Over the course of many years, there have been “considerations” of the Vehicle of My Manifestation, or the Vehicles of My Manifestation, if you see it in terms of many past lifetimes, and so on. So “consideration” such as this has been going on since the earliest days of people coming into My Company.
And so there has been some of that recently. Conrad Goehausen, James Steinberg-principally they and some others-have been examining historical figures and such, in terms of looking for the Pattern of My Vehicles. How can you account for Me, or even the Vehicles of My Manifestation, by examining the pattern in the conditional domain strictly in terms of physical, or otherwise gross human-scale appearances?
So this “consideration”, taking the form of looking at historical personalities and so forth, has actually been going on, as I said, for a couple decades and has still taken the same form recently. Conceivably it would have just gone on that way for years and years-no greater dimension to the “consideration”. So this is the first thing I pointed out, some days ago-that you have to enter into such “considerations”, the “consideration” of My Vehicle, or Vehicles, by addressing Me, by doing samyama on Me, and not just doing your ordinary mind “looking for some kind of likenesses in historical reports about individuals”. That certainly cannot be the exclusive line of such “consideration”. It has content to be “considered”, yes, but the Pattern of My Manifestation is not proceeding merely from the human scale.
Also, the egoic presumption, identified with the body-mind, or “point of view”, in time and space, looks at everything as if it’s surrounding itself, you see. Take up any position in time and space and look out-it’s a straight line to everything and anyone. It all seems to surround you, somehow. Everything looks that way, from “point of view”. And in “considering”, then, continuance, transformation, reincarnation, and so on, the immediate tendency is to look at it all from that point of view. So you look back in this sort of linear way. There was that lifetime, perhaps, and then there was one before that, and then there was one before that. It’s naive realism, based on egoity.
That’s not how the flow of patterns works. I’ve used the simile of water running down through a sand mound. It cuts through, divides, breaks up, rejoins-you know how fluid works, in a relatively loose medium to reveal itself. The pattern of flows in which humanity is appearing is like that, then. It is not linear, as you would expect.
It’s not that there is nothing revealing in looking at it in linear terms. It is just, ultimately, a false view that reinforces egoity. And it’s not true even to how conditional patterns work.
So the pattern of My Vehicles is not something that can be understood merely by looking at linear human time. Vivekananda-Ramakrishna, and whoever else-separate lifetimes, not intersecting in time and so on. That’s not how it works, even in the human scale. It’s much more complex than that, and in some respects incomprehensible-certainly from the gross point of view incomprehensible.
The pattern that is patterning, and therefore, the Pattern of My Own Vehicle of Manifestation, is operating far beyond the gross dimension, and yet coincides with it, obviously. You can’t comprehend it merely by looking at historical events or historical figures, at all. You can’t even see it by merely looking in the human scale. It doesn’t originate there. My Vehicle of Manifestation is not originated from the gross plane. But it is associated with a process that has coincided with the gross plane in a very complex fashion.
So I wanted those who are continuing this “consideration” to understand these things and listen to My Words and do samyama on Me. Whatever you’ve heard Me saying about these things, in spontaneous manner, casual remarks, and doings, are signs one way or another. Do samyama on Me, you see. Listen to what I’ve Said in these transcripts recently – all this Divine King matter and so on and on. Finally had to point it out to everyone, then, all those who were “considering” this directly.
I told them to look at the Rama tradition. Not merely the Ramayana tradition, but the entire Rama tradition. The source of My Vehicle is as much in the realm of what you would call “archetype” as it is in the realm of gross figures. You call it “archetype” based on a certain interpretation of mental phenomena. They’re simply pattern. It is alive, active, real, profound, and enforcing itself more profoundly than anything you can take into account by the human gross things, or gross lifetimes.
So the Rama sign is a further context of this “consideration” and lifts it out of the linearity of reincarnation ideas, and lifts it out of the merely gross plane of “consideration”. It makes it, in many respects, more complex, perhaps less ready to most people’s “consideration”, in terms of actively getting down to what this is all about. And nonetheless, this is the way it is. That is how the pattern is. To approach it in any other way, is to falsify it or to undermine understanding of what it’s about.
So now this Rama Tradition, all of it, in all the stages through the sixth, should be fundamental “consideration” for all. But it’s not that I’ve read these books. I haven’t. So, tell Me stories, send Me reports about the Ramayana literature, the Rama literature altogether. I know you will find My Pattern there, but I haven’t read it. This is your “consideration”. I’ve told you something profound, and now “consider” it further. It is not comprehensible in the ordinary sense, but it would be a great “consideration” for those who enter into it seriously.
And by calling you to address the Rama tradition, I’m not suggesting that I am, in any sense, limited to it, or by it. But you’ll see My Pattern there, more fully and more readily than you will by looking at any historical individual. You will then have a further overriding pattern, by which to examine historical individuals, taking more into account than you would if you were to continue going about it as you have done up until now.
WILLIAM: In the Ramayana there’s a summary moment at the end in which the essence of Spiritual Teaching that Rama has given to his wife is passed on.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: To who?
WILLIAM: To his brother, Lakshmana. And basically it’s the same summary as what’s in the Sri Rama Gita. One of the things that is interesting about that book, particularly, and also the Ramayana, is that it’s not about Rama’s personality, it’s about the Dharma, the essence of his communication of Liberation. And it’s similar to the Bhagavad Gita in that his final instruction is summarized as “Worship this Form”. And that’s the summary of his entire teaching to his brother. Rama goes through an entire “consideration” about what he calls misapprehensions to anything that the ego performs based on the body-mind-emotion, anything that arises in that context.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm.
WILLIAM: And there is this whole “consideration” of Rama’s teaching. He instructs his brother, ultimately, to “worship this form”. And he mentions in there that what you see is a Spiritual form, is the Divine form. This is very similar, in some ways, to the language that You use.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes.
WILLIAM: So there’s a definite form of pattern patterning at the level of Dharma beyond human play, human appearance and so forth.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes.
WILLIAM: An extraordinary dimension of it is the significance of the Ashvamedha. First, in the Ramayana, Rama is born as a result of the Ashvamedha.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Tcha.
A report I Received a few days ago said that a previous King, Rama’s father, had the Ashvamedha performed for the sake of having a son. Presumably not merely for the sake of having a male offspring, but one who could succeed him with fullest capability for doing so, Divinely Blessed, Divinely Infused, the Very Divine Itself. So it was an invocation of an incarnation. An incarnation caused by invocation.
So it is with Me. This Manifestation has been caused not by what you might describe as My Intention, in the manner you understand such things typically. Rather it is by invocation, by call, that this conjunction has been made, but a very complex process altogether of that. My Manifestation has been called upon, called for, called to the degree of appearing to one degree or another, in Vehicle Form.
But not My Incarnation in the unqualified sense, Incarnate with fullest Realization, beyond all limitations. So the call has been persistent, and yet opposed, or undermined by other incarnations, and lesser dispositions and so on. This conjunction, then, is unique. But you do not understand it in the fullest, rightest sense if you presume that this is simply something that I have Intended to do.
If it were so, there would be no logic for My Appearance that could coincide with beings. So it could only occur by invocation. It is the invocation of the Great. Not only, or merely, the invocation such as might be in the ordinariness of the mass of beings, but in the mode and form of those who made the greatest sacrifice by invocation. They, and also the mass of suffering, heart-feeling, yearning, calling, of all beings, is the Source of My Incarnation.
This is why I’m not here with a plan. You tell Me. You show Me what you want to do about it. You got Me here. And if it winds up I just sit on My couch and nobody comes around Me, then that’s the way that will be. Or if you make a Kingdom, and bring Me all beings, then that’s the way it will be. I have no plan whatsoever. Anything that you could call “plan” is so utterly beyond comprehension that even if I were to describe it in some relatively straightforward terms, it still wouldn’t look like a plan to you.
How can there be a plan in this klik-klak, which is utterly formless and can take on any form at all? The genius required to coincide into My Manifestation in that context, with all of its un-utterable variability and unpredictability, is beyond comprehension. To (so to speak) “trick” that which is overwhelmingly un-Enlightened into allowing My Manifestation, is a profundity beyond comprehension, because the plastic is not predictable, and therefore, how can any plan take it into account? The plan, then, is not superimposed from without. The plan appears as beings. The pattern demonstrates itself to the point of coinciding with Me. I’m not the “doer” in it, in the “making” sense you conceive of.
I’m not in your position nor in your state of mind as you conceive of things. For instance, as I was Saying to some here last evening, you presume to be un-Happy. You might feel pretty good at the moment but, on the other hand, there certainly is something about it you would object to. This moment does not coincide with absolute Happiness. In terms of your perception of it, there are all kinds of limitations, including inevitable death, separation and so on-change. Whatever the relative discomforts in the body-mind associated with each of you individually, your moment contains a complaint, an acknowledgement of un-Satisfactoriness.
This is not the moment of Perfect Happiness in your experiential view, and you look for experience to become Happiness. You seek for it to become Happiness. It’s why you don’t settle in any moment. You cannot be without being bored. You’ve got to be “doing” in order to work toward feeling better, or finding Happiness Itself.
That is, generally speaking, a true description of human beings. And that’s your point of view. That’s the basis on which you do your doings, generally speaking. And yet it is a disposition that has nothing whatsoever to do with the Truth, or Reality. It’s an utter fabrication. Reality Itself is Happiness Itself. It is Always Already the Case. And here you are, and you’re not Happy. How could you be perfectly coincident with That Which is Always Already the Case, or Reality Itself, which is Happiness Itself, and not be Happy, Happiness Itself?
That’s curious to begin with, but then in My Meeting with you, you want to discuss with Me, or live in My Company on the basis of that point of view-you want to become Happy. You are not Happy and you want to become Happy. This is the basis of our Meeting, it seems.
But to carry on with you on that basis is absurd. There is something inherently wrong. We can’t carry on from here. You’re un-Happy and so I’ll help you get Happy-it’s an absurd proposition. The fact that you’re already telling Me you are not Happy is the matter of interest, and must be addressed in this very moment, because any program based on the presumption of your un-Happiness is dharmically incorrect.
Now then, that’s something you have to understand to begin with-something very fundamental to understand. Reality Itself is Happiness Itself. You can’t do anything about that. You can’t do anything about Reality, or what is the case right now. It is Happiness Itself. There isn’t a damned thing you can do about it. You can’t keep it from being the case. Well, since you’re un-Happy, then something unusual is going on. The only means whereby the Inherent Happiness can be lost, avoided, or not known, is if you’re adding something to Reality, and presuming to exist on that basis.
This was My long “Consideration”, then-rather quickly resolved, by the way. It only took maybe three years of the most extraordinary suffering of that un-Happiness for a fundamental insight to awaken in the college years. And then, the “Sadhana Years” were simply the unfolding of that, you could say. The reason you are seeking, the reason you are not Happy at the moment, not Happiness, not acknowledging Happiness Itself at the moment, is because of something that you are doing. And you’re doing it now.
You’re always doing it therefore, and you’re doing it in every respect, and universally in the context of every faculty, every kind of experience. It is the inherent context and pattern, presumption, of every moment of your experiencing, every moment of your seeking. This is what must be discovered and understood, otherwise it simply is the pattern of seeking in the midst of the presumption of unsatisfactoriness, un-Happiness.
So you have all come to Me acknowledging, in your own fashion, your un-Happiness, your search. Your disposition is ordinary. The ego-disposition is to go on seeking, and therefore, coming to Me, the ego-disposition is to get from Me some method, some whatever, that will show you how to seek better, or help you to fulfill your search, whatever. You want to carry on in your own presumption. My “Consideration” with you is an immediate counter to that intention, that tendency.
You can’t make the culture of the Way of the Heart out of that, although you’ve certainly tried to (in fundamental terms) bastardize the Way of the Heart in order to conform it to this egoic seeking point of view. You tend to eliminate the relationship to Me, which is the foundation of the Way of the Heart, in order to have the Way of the Heart be essentially an egoic performance.
So I Am the Realization and the Means. Your participation with Me, then, is devotion, Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga. You are equipped to fulfill that practice most profoundly by hearing Me and then seeing Me. Hearing Me is to understand most fundamentally, and enjoy the capability most fundamentally of transcending your own act that falsifies Reality and binds you to the egoic search. Therefore, in this Way I’ve Given you, this is what there is to understand. What there is to practice is Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga. What there is to Realize is Me.
So in every moment, you must discover you are doing, not merely a separate self-idea, something that is an ego-idea, that you must somehow think yourself out of or relinquish. In the context of conditional existence, egoity is an activity. That you have an idea about it is simply an expression of that. In other words, this activity is reflected in the mind. It’s reflected in, or made of, feeling, or emotion. It’s reflected in every breath. And it’s reflected in all your bodily doings.
The contraction done in any moment expresses itself universally in the entire body-mind and in your sense of Reality. Based on this false presumption generated by your own action, you seek. You seek in all terms that the body-mind can exercise itself within, including what can be called religious terms, therefore.
But it’s all made of the same knot, the same act. It is the complex avoidance of relationship. It is self-contraction. It is your own doing. All your questions, all your doings, all your experiences-mental, emotional, in terms of breath or energy, and physical-are engineered by the same fault in every moment, unless you yield the fault, yield the action of self-contraction, through self-understanding exercised through Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga, Communing with Me, forgetting the complex of self-contracted meditation, self-meditation.
Truly, then, anything we might consider together, in and of itself, is not mere subject matter, but it’s always a species of self-contraction. In any moment, no matter what you might bring up in “consideration” with Me, perhaps it would be more fruitful if I asked you, “What are you doing? What are you always doing?”, “Avoiding relationship?”, and such. Well, yes, I do this anyway. Sometimes I do it in those very words. But in one fashion or another, My spontaneous Play-which is not merely self-generated but which is just always My Pattern combining with Yours, you combining with Me, all My Doings-is serving your most fundamental self-understanding, as I just described it, and otherwise drawing you to Commune with Me and Realize Me, or in that very moment doing so.
In every moment, then, it is simply a matter of self-contraction or not. Fundamentally, that is sufficient to say about it. The Way I’ve Given you is the utter Means for the transcendence of that self-deluded course.
And so, to get back to you, then, Clive, what exactly are you suggesting should be a “consideration” or communication about patterns, that you were concerned about earlier?
CLIVE: Well, Beloved, my own background, professionally, has been in the diffusion of innovation, the field of study that attempts to understand how something new disperses through a culture-mostly commodities of one kind and another – the principles behind it. And so in bringing my service to You, and trying to understand what it is that could be said, or gestured, or represented about You that would be compelling and persuasive in this moment, and especially in the moments to come, that would allow Your Sign to be seen and heard by the billions that You would reach, I try to understand, for example . . .
ADI DA SAMRAJ: What, directly? You can go with that, we could talk as long as you like. You’re talking about billions of human beings, presumably, or large numbers of human beings responding to Me. If you’re talking about such numbers and not merely some group of scholars, intellectuals who can share certain language in talking about these matters, what is the message that is usable to billions? The kind of thing you’re talking about? Or something else entirely?
CLIVE: Your Art, Beloved, for example.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, that might be interesting to some. Perhaps not to everyone on the face of it. Some Words of Mine on any number of topics might be of use to some. Others might not find it very comprehensible, perhaps, and so on. So any number of things that you could say about Me, or that You could quote Me on, My having Said them, might be useful to some one or other. But you’re suggesting basically one kind of communication that somehow serves the drawing of many?
CLIVE: I’m suggesting, or groping to find in my service to You, those forms that would be most compelling right now, that would allow us to move to the next stage of the Work.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: There is much to be said, if saying is of interest to people to listen to. All kinds of things can be said. You all seem to think that there’s something about this communication about Me, and bringing people to Me, that is set with inherently immense difficulties. Like somehow or other, people aren’t going to understand it if you just say it the way it is. That you have to somehow be much more complicated about it, or say it somehow in a certain kind of language of the current day, or whatever, or it won’t be grasped, or people will be offended, or they won’t be interested, or they will dismiss it somehow and whatnot. I think that’s just total nonsense. It’s not the case.
Even before you deal with the hard cases, bring Me many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, doing little more than telling My Name, showing My Picture, telling My Leela, and telling them that they can have a relationship to Me if they choose it. And speaking to the hearts of beings is quite a different matter than speaking to the minds of your contemporaries. Speaking to the minds of your contemporaries – well, there are all kinds of things that you might say to particular people who have a discipline and so on.
So there’s no end to the kinds of communications that could be made. But, fundamentally, the communication is a direct heart-communication, full of beauty, that is moving inherently. You all make it much more complicated. There doesn’t have to be any complication.
Now, if it’s a matter, however, of wanting to address people of a certain mind, or in a certain discipline, or who are “considering” certain matters, well, that’s a particular kind of communication. But if it’s a matter of billions, however, or anyone coming to Me, it is necessarily a direct heart-communication, a religious communication – just that. There’s no being on earth who does not wish to be Happy. There’s no being on earth that would oppose the discovery of the Divine Person, and the Awakening of Bliss.
Who’s opposed to such a thing? Never met anyone who’s opposed to that. People may be full of doubts, complaints, on and on, struggling, I guess-fine. But nonetheless, everyone is heart-moved toward Happiness, and the discovery that Happiness Ultimately is True, is Real. That’s what truly can be called “religion”, is Truth. And if you take it seriously, and if you practice seriously, then having done so, much is illuminated just in the doing so.
There’s this culture of competitive egoity at the present time in which everybody wants no authority at all, and wants to somehow or other (they presume) figure it out themselves. You’re never going to figure it out. Never, ever, are you going to figure it out. It cannot be figured out. You can define your discipline, your language, the structure in which you’re going to converse, on and on, all those games, but you won’t crack the case. You cannot comprehend this maya. “Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah” and still what is this hardening of the heart?
So the fundamental communication that the gathering around Me as a whole needs to make, is very straightforward. But then there are specific kinds of communications that individuals can make within some field of association, and so forth, or discipline and whatnot. Generally speaking, if you put yourself to My Word, you would already find all the contents you require.
DINA: Beloved?
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mmm?
DINA: What You Said is so significant, that Your Incarnation here is simply a Response, and then You’re Saying, “you tell Me what now”.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Not just yearning toward Me, but exhibited most profoundly in the form of the Great, then the conjunction was made. I’m not what takes a step. In some respects, you can say you’ve been lifted into My Sphere by the invocations of the Great.
DINA: So all we need to do is tell everyone that You’re here.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Fundamentally.
DINA: Because we’ve been calling for You, Beloved.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.
DINA: That’s very simple, because the heart-response is already there.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: So you must speak to “who” called Me, which is the heart. The serious person. Not merely talking endlessly. Not merely going through cycles of emotion. Not merely acting randomly. Not merely stuttering in the breath according to the changes of body-mind. But an integrity-the body-mind a Pleasure Dome of Communion with Me.
For instance, as I’ve been “considering” here recently, the Pleasure Dome has been eliminated from human life, largely speaking. The scale in which human beings, generally speaking, live from day to day, is entirely social and public. Even human pleasures, then, have been made to conform to public life, to social expectations that have to do with gross political and social purposes. In the process of that adaptation, humanity, generally speaking, has relinquished the sacred Domain, the Pleasure Dome of life.
The Pleasure Dome, including everything of temple, and rightness of life, must be the context of human life. It must be the “home”, so to speak, of daily existence, from which you enter into the course of daily activity or service-as you may be required to enter into the general circumstance of human activities, the public or social world, from day to day, to one degree or another. But each day entering into it, you should step out of the door of your Pleasure Dome, and go and do business in the world, knowing that you have something to preserve, something you would not have be violated, something you would not have be destroyed, by anything that occurs in the public, social, and political domain.
If you don’t have any Pleasure Dome, you have nothing to protect, nothing to preserve, nothing to serve, nothing to perpetuate that makes any difference whatsoever. The content of mere social and political life is reduced to godlessness, “self-possession”, materiality, gross ordinariness, mere organism concerns, mere survival concerns. Surviving for what purpose? What is there that must survive? It’s the Pleasure-Dome context of life that must survive. The core of life must be preserved as a Pleasure Dome – of everything sacred, everything most profound, everything most intimate. The entire environment of the heart is the Pleasure Dome.
If you destroy the temple and the greatness of woman, you’ve reduced life to some scandalous garbage-male-reduced, monotonous, aggressive exchanges, and petty concerns and rivalries, and all the rest of the nonsense of mind erected by the same fault. You must have the Pleasure Dome, temple and all. And then you’ll know what to do when you go to do business, when you go to the Parliament, or whatever. You will go there to make sure the Pleasure Dome is preserved, because you all want to go back there tonight! You’re not going to do any war or mayhem that’s going to prevent that, or destroy that circumstance.
But you all are throwing it away with both hands. Everything about woman, in other words, everything about the domain of feeling and senses, and pleasurable association with the feeling and sensuous domain, or sense domain, is corrupt at the present moment, and opposed. Not just the Divine Spirituality, but woman is opposed-that which woman is, that which she incarnates, that which her pattern is about. The “She” altogether requires mankind to be integrated with it, as the core of life.
This fundamental transformation is something that I am Calling for-the restoration of the Pleasure Dome as the context of human life. The complete restoration of it. The liberation of the human disposition from the opposition to woman, to Shakti, to feeling, to the art of all the senses, glorifying and turned toward the Divine condition of existence. Done in temple, done in bed, done at meals, done in community. The Pleasure Dome must be restored.
And all those grim and monotonous people who go to the Parliament, and daily business, will be profoundly transformed by that restoration. The sacredness of sex must be restored. No more anti-sexual garbage, including all your self-suppressive embrace of such as if that is the Way. That’s ego, nonsense. It’s the talk of males, of Parliament, and the war room.
If you’re full of Me, full of She, full of Yoga, full of love, full of art, and all the yin that woman is, combine with it, then the male, or the yang force (in this apparent division here, or duality) is made whole, is gentled, is integrated with what it refuses through its apparent discriminative search, this embrace of mentalizing and physical hardness, and brute intentions relative to what appears to be the controlling force, the force of nature, the force of the cosmos, the force of what’s simply happening.
You’re all male-like, utterly defended against it. You tend to think your way, and bully your way, into some control over all of it-that you will never have, by the way, because it will destroy you long before you ever come to that point of absolute control. It’s a terrible intention that has overcome humanity. And rather than talk some more in the Parliament, and “blah-blah” further to try and figure it out (as if at the end of that there’s going to be some golden age), it would be better if, world-wide, everybody reconstructed the Pleasure Dome.
Of course, there are traditional cultures that did, in fact, maintain the Pleasure Dome and know the difference between the front door to the Sacred Place and the world of daily activity. But the world of daily activity is simply governed by what took place in the Sacred Domain, the temple and bed, and community. So to come out of there with that look on your face, that feeling in your heart, and all of your body-that’s not going to allow you to kill the woman anymore.
Your sexing is a destruction of women, a denial of the feminine force, of Shakti, of energy, of delight, of feeling, of Happiness Itself. You must be combined with it. You must make art again, which is a great exercise in integrity. Make it with all the senses. Make environment and life out of it. Make a Pleasure Dome. Make community out of it.
The temple and the place of embrace, and of community of right life, is a place of art, in every detail-the senses embraced pleasurably as women teach men, if men will respond. Women teach the lesson that the realm of the senses, the domain of the senses, is the domain of feeling, and it is to be organized pleasurably. The lesson of the male, having embraced the woman, having embraced the domain of feeling and the senses, is that all this must be “considered” in the context of the Divine Reality, and oriented to It.
The settlement is the women make the palatial bedrooms of the community, and the places of delight, and the men make the temple. And the men insist on the temple, the women insist on the bedroom. Everybody agrees that the temple and bedroom, and everything in between, is an immense Pleasure Dome as the core of life, and then the business of daily life has its logic. It’s no longer made of competitive male-like egos trying to figure out the problem and control the world aggressively.
The interactions between human beings become constructed on the basis of presumed pleasure, presumed orientation to Happiness, presumed conformity, lawful right conformity to the Ultimate condition of existence, Happiness Itself-a true commitment to this, engaged hour by hour, made even into architecture and art and community-speech also, then.
If you can loosen your tongue in bed, you find you speak a totally different language. Men and women speak differently in that embrace, if it’s real, profound. That’s the language of the Pleasure Dome. Not specifically the language of sexual intercourse, but the language of the Pleasure Dome, the language that precedes the language of the world detached from the Pleasure Dome, the language that is prior to mere male-ness, mere strategic mind, or problem-solving mind, seeking for power, or seeking to control-softened by that, in the domain of art, of women, of feeling. Men and women all sublimed and oriented in that Pleasure Dome to Divine Communion, the entire pattern of daily life immediately possesses a totally different logic than makes the world at this moment.
Determine to make the Pleasure Dome, restore it again, immediately-that brings an end to conflict. You don’t have time for it. So much is eliminated immediately, by getting down to the business of remaking the Pleasure Dome. So if you want to tell people something about Me, tell them this first. This is the nature of My Kingship and Royalty. A concern for the restoration of the Pleasure Dome not only for humanity, but for the non-humans, even the walls, then. So immense is My Sensory Domain, it includes everything that arises, that can be perceived.
Well, let’s understand it in your human terms. You know what I mean by the Pleasure Dome, then. Make an immensity of Pleasure Dome at the center of your lives. And every day when you go to work, begin from there. If you can find a way to stay in the Pleasure Dome, that’s good, too. If everybody who went to Parliament tomorrow came from the Pleasure Dome, they’d know they have a lot to lose by continuing their struggles with one another, their obnoxious arm-wrestling, and manipulations, and the goring of the world and the earth and humanity, with nothing but sheer stupidity.
So I’m not here to suggest idealistic poetic notions about religion. It is a most profound, concrete matter, and I have no fairy notions about anything whatsoever. If you want to know what to do, I can tell you exactly. If you want to know what to change, and how to change it, and what the Law is, I can tell you exactly. If you don’t like the fact that I know it all and can tell you that, and you want to figure it out yourself, I’ll see you later. [laughter]
Why would you want to resist Me? If you find Me out, then I’m here altogether for your good, and have some really interesting happy ideas for things you can do right away. So straighten out your act. Of course, I’m not suggesting that you just take everything you do with feeling and the senses and sex and all the rest of it and make a Pleasure Dome out of that. No, I’m suggesting you make a Pleasure Dome, or Calling you to make a Pleasure Dome, on the basis of My Instruction and your relationship to Me altogether. So it’s not a matter of just going and casually indulging your limitations relative to these things. It’s a matter of engaging it all in an utterly and profoundly different way.
But there’s nothing puritanical about it, nothing even moralistic about it. It’s not about a problem. It’s just about rightness itself, Happiness Itself, well-being itself. Are you suggesting to Me that there are human beings who aren’t interested in that?
Everybody getting to work universally on re-establishing the Pleasure Dome according to My Instructions-that sounds like a good thing to begin with. It includes everything about this way: temple, bedroom, community, the arts, right life, right relationship-everything.
As My devotees, then, you’ll make right politics. Those who become My devotees change their lives. So you do the politics, you do the social world, you transform it by being rightly related to Me. I’m not going to do it. Those who become My devotees have all the doings to do. I’m not here to be a politician and such, or even run an organization. That’s all your business. Make the Pleasure Dome of this Way. Maintain right relationship with Me constantly. Talk is only so much of it anyway. Approach Me as I’ve Told You. Receive My Blessing, and that will convince you.
Look at the “consideration” of sexual and emotional-sexual matters in the 25-year period. Basically, your presentation, or the presentation of those who came to Me during all those years, was that of having a problem about all of that, and limitations with it, and so on. All kinds of bondage. From your point of view, then, that’s what I appear to be addressing. But My Communication was that of the Pleasure Dome, of Yoga.
It’s not about the sex thing merely. It’s an emotional-sexual practice. Entirely whole and full of delight. Not inimicable to Yoga at all. Not contrary to it at all. It is Yoga. It must be made Yoga. To make it into Yoga, however, is not some terrible ascetic discipline. But you act as if it is. Because if I Say anything other than how you and your limitations and problems in emotional-sexual terms can maybe improve your relations and such, if I Say more than that, and call you to Yoga about it, well, then you say you’re not prepared, or you’re not interested in that, or something less, really householderish about it, or conventional about it, and on and on and on. Well, if you tell Me, as you have been for 25 years, that you’re not up to the Pleasure Dome relative to emotional-sexual matters, ultimately, then what are you choosing? Either emotional-sexual bondage, or eventual abandonment of emotional-sexual life.
Whereas if you convert it, in relation to Me, and by My Instruction, then it is Yoga, it’s wholly fit for the Pleasure Dome. There’s no double-mindedness about it required. All the conventional forms of bondage that people institute in their relations can be changed entirely with agreements for intimacy made. So you can live this Way as the Pleasure Dome in My Company. But you refuse to do so. You reject the Pleasure Dome, or have been doing so-in spite of the fact that it seems you all agree that it’s a good idea. Don’t you?
DEVOTEES: Yes.
CASPER: Beloved . . .
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm.
CASPER: There’s this peculiar experiment that was done some time ago, that if you put a frog in a pan, and put a heating element underneath it, the frog won’t jump out of the pan.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Won’t?
CASPER: No, even to boiling point. It simply hasn’t got it in its behavioral repertoire to feel the slow changes of the heating.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mmm.
CASPER: And it seems to me that the world is heating up more and more as well, and there’s nothing in our behavioral repertoire to stop it or react to it. But it seems to me that You are the Person that lifts us out of that particular situation.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. Tcha.
STANLEY: And into the Kiln!
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm. So I’ve not been describing, or “considering” with you an ascetical Way, a puritanical Way, a double-minded Way, a Way of seeking based on problems. This is not what I’ve Given you at all. But you have somehow changed this Way in your association with it. It is nothing like all of that.
You insist on your independence, your refusal of heart-submission, hard-heartedness. But it’s something you’re so used to, because you’re doing it all the time with one another. What heart submission is in your sexing? Your sex problem, your emotional-sexual dramatization that you’re always struggling with, your double-mindedness about it, your guilt about it, your shame about it, your fear about it, your weakness, whatever. That’s what you’re doing with this Treasure, that’s what you’re doing with woman, that’s what you’re doing with the senses, the world, then. Your refusal of Me is the same as your refusal of woman. Your refusal of woman is your refusal of the world. Your refusal of the heart and the Law of the senses, Divinely “considered”.
You’re all doing sex, but you’re not allowing that meeting in the balance to make life whole. Instead you’re using it as a means to differentiate male and female, yin and yang, dissociate them from one another, protect them from one another. If you’re so full of sex, the emotional-sexual disposition, then where is the Pleasure Dome? Where is art and the Temple? Where is the community of wholeness?
If you’re doing this emotional-sexual thing profoundly and rightly, all those things would be there. But somehow in your sexing, or emotional-sexual games, you wind up eliminating the Pleasure Dome from life, and making life into a struggle to dominate, and (otherwise) be superior to, the arising world, the domain of feeling, and the senses altogether-to woman therefore, and to Me.
You will not submit at heart, relative to Me, relative to woman, or relative to the world. If you will not do these things, discussion can be endless, and nothing will be Realized. Heart-submission is what you must do. The thing you are refusing to do, or excusing yourself from, is what you must do. It is the Law. The conflict with Me, with woman, and with the world, must cease. And you must embrace these three.
To embrace Me, you must embrace woman, everything that woman is, yin is-feeling and the senses, and therefore the world. You must embrace it all. Like that image of the innocent seals on the wall of My Bedroom there. Some of you have seen it-little gentle naive seal just holding the world to its heart. Too cute for most people’s aesthetic acceptance.
You can’t “do” cute. Your aesthetic appreciation is cool, rather male-like, rather oppressive of the feminine, incapable of luxury, of generosity, or openness, or pleasure. You talk yourself out of every pleasure. You’ve talked yourself out of Happiness Itself to begin with. Your arguments against God are arguments against the world, arguments against feelings and the senses, arguments against woman, then.
In the current political and social agitation, women, for all kinds of reasons, are agitating to achieve the status of men, or the kind or status they presume men have enjoyed. There are all kinds of reasons to justify that and so forth in the political and social circumstance. But the calling of woman is not about that. Woman doesn’t have her work to do if you don’t establish the Pleasure Dome again.
Otherwise, they’ll all be wearing stiff collars and kicking male ass like men kicked one another’s asses. Women don’t have a domain in which to function except the male domain, at the present moment. Perhaps women will listen to Me, then, and insist on the restoration of the Pleasure Dome, so they’ll have something to do, other than heating up the TV dinners, you see.
The woman is the very source, the substance, the sign of art, of feeling. Regeneration of the Pleasure Dome of the arts, also man-woman relations rather than merely male-female relations, or male-female adolescent relations. Women prepared to be women, not virgins, or reluctant objects. You men are not interested in woman.
You’re interested in getting off, or whatever, getting your stress off, using women, females somehow or other, but you don’t want to enter into the domain of feeling and the senses, and be pleasurized there. You can’t see yourself guiltless, lying on a sack of silk pillows, listening to music, talking spontaneously and happily with your friends about God and nonsense. You’re too stressed up. You want to get off, and get out and kick ass.
You want to forget woman and treat the world, then, as some sort of object to be manipulated because it’s so dangerous to you. Male is afraid of the female now. In some respects, women have more balls than men-more intense about something, it seems. But it’s misdirected by the current circumstance because the Pleasure Dome doesn’t exist. It would need to be an immense Pleasure Dome at the center of life, and also the field of daily activities in order to preserve that, to handle the survival requirements of humanity. Well, then, there would be two different spheres of occupation to “consider”.
A woman might think twice about going downtown. Might prefer to function in the great Pleasure Dome domain, and see to great art and pleasure, and see to it that males have their domain of feeling, and are obliged to conform to it-not just in the bedroom with their individual females, but in their community with one another, at temple and bed and meals and play and so on.
To have respect for woman, there must be respect for the natural world, then, and (ultimately) respect for Me-even as a basis for all of it. Respect for women, then, is respect for the feminine, for She, for yin, for the domain of feeling and the senses, to embrace it utterly, to be conformed to it, to be gentled by it, to be enabled to become whole through that association, woman to man, man to woman. You have to grow up, and abandon your adolescent sexuality, and your adolescent religion.
The thing about true devotees who have gone to Masters of one degree or another in the past is that they knew, and really found out by experience, that they couldn’t figure this all out, and were not Happy. And their reluctance to accept authority was burned out of them by that, and they were willing to make their submission to a true Master discovered. Now it seems everybody’s got to be talked into it, like you have to be talked into caring for the natural domain, or embracing the feminine, so that it changes the male disposition, the disposition of mankind altogether, then.
A few weeks ago, I called those who were serving Me here at Quandramama to “consider” this matter of Pleasure Dome, how they would gather with Me if they came into My House, and so on. It was amazing how inept, unprepared, and basically unresponsive you all were-even to wearing clothing that’s simply comfortable and aesthetically pleasing, not wrapping the body up military style, such that it’s unrevealed. The simplicity of accepting a social circumstance of pleasure and delight and art, freedom from prudery and all the rest-you’re all amazingly disinclined. And yet I’ve been hearing your emotional-sexual rap for 25 years. So you’re all very much crippled by the absence of the Pleasure Dome, and you’re not going to do much making of things right in the world until you restore it. Trying to figure out things together downtown, without restoring the Pleasure Dome, you will simply perpetuate the ritual of your aggressiveness.
Your problem about Me, your problem about the Divine, is a construct of your own, made by self-contraction, but in the midst of human exchanges. You have trouble about God because in the human scale you’re not only self-contracted but you’ve rejected the woman-the other half of the play of the world. The seat of Divine Realization is the heart. Therefore the domain of feeling is fundamental. There is no integration with the Divine Light without integration with the feminine. In other words, the domain of feeling, and the senses, must be embraced by you-not as a threat or a negative, but as the obligatory Pleasure Dome. Cease to reject the feminine, you will cease to reject the world, and you will also cease to reject Me.
You all have an immense emotional-sexual problem based on your self-contraction. It’s the root of all of your difficulty. You cannot accept to be in the feeling-place, comfortable in the senses as you would be with a true woman, if you were a man-or a true man, if you were a woman. You cannot accept it as the foundation of life. You think it’s not serious, or it’s wrong, or it’s dissociating you from the Divine. You only feel that because of the self-contraction, yes. But the result of that is you don’t know what even a single thing is! Not even a single thing.
You don’t know what a single thing is, so you don’t know What Is, and yet you want to perpetuate some massive drama of mankind in the absence of this most fundamental knowledge. This knowledge is regained by the elimination of the ego-act, in practice, and the meaning is in that realization, whereby all of that is transcended. And it’s not merely a going-to-meditation matter. It’s not only in the Hall, or the temple. It’s altogether, in the context of every function, every moment. The Way cannot be reduced then to meditation practices and such. It touches absolutely every aspect of your experiencing, your activities, your functions. It must all be Yoga.
How do you make it Yoga? Very simply. In this attracted response to Me, practice Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga. That’s the logic of all other changes. But, of course, the practice of Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga requires your heart, this surrender, this submission, this relinquishment of the denial of Me, of woman, and of the world. The Way of the Heart is not the way of embracing the world in the utopian sense. That’s using it from the egoic point of view. It’s not that at all. It’s just that in this apparent context, the Law is that of the Pleasure Dome. That is how you conform to Me.
You must make your reconciliation with Me, and with woman, and with the world, and with the entire cosmic domain. You have shunned and abused Me, and continue to do so in all your doings. And the sign among you is this heartless abusiveness, not of conditional existence but of the world itself, the earth-world, all human beings, all non-humans, She, the feminine itself, what the world is. It is the domain of energy, of feeling, shown by a pattern of the senses, a pattern of perceptions-that’s all what can be called She.
I Am She. I Am Whole and One, not Consciousness apart, but Self-Radiant, inherently One with what is traditionally called the Shakti, or the Mother-Force, or She.
The exclusion of That is not in the Way I’ve Given you. The acceptance of it and the principle of the heart, of feeling, and the Law of conforming the realm of the senses pleasurably to Me-that is the Yoga of this Way.
So you want to talk and figure it out, and “blah-blah-blah-blah-blah” in male-like fashion. But if you erected a Pleasure Dome on the lawn here, you’d still tend to be talking bullshit to one another over your sugar-free colas. Ready to be very busy there, in meditation and puja.
In right life-all on the silk seat, the kusha grass, the seat in a well-made place, only occasional peacocks. Temperate, not mere hot, yang. Not mere cold, yin. But temperate in that combination, or mutual embrace, in Communion with Me.
So if you tell Me you’re not up to it, you want to be householders, you only have a little bit of sex in you, and so forth, you refuse the Pleasure Dome, if you will. If you want to practice this Way for real, you must embrace the Pleasure Dome and become Yogis. Until you are a Yogi, as a man in sexual terms, you are rejecting women, rejecting the feminine itself, rejecting the domain of feeling, the domain of the senses, the world itself. You’re thinking in double-minded terms of Consciousness apart from phenomena, and escaping the world at last.
Escape the world from where? You are already only Consciousness Itself! Where is there to escape to? You have to find your way into this domain, not escape from it. You’re not in it! You are sitting there as Consciousness “apart”. No matter what arises, even attention itself is object to you. You’re already Consciousness-and you don’t know what a single thing is in this mysterious association.
Your rejection of God and woman; and the world itself is so profound, you recognize nothing whatsoever. You’re not in a position to escape from the world. You’re not in it to begin with. You’re standing apart from it, unknowing, but your unknowingness is a result of your own act. But that act amounts to the rejection of the world, the rejection of the domain of feeling and the senses, the rejection of woman, rejection of Shakti, rejection of My Blessing, My “Brightness”, the rejection of Me.
I am not that emptiness, Consciousness “apart”. That is your version of the Witness. I Am She. How did I get to be that way? Because I Husbanded her. In the last slice of it, I saw that I had to do this, which was a dare beyond comprehension. But I was in a Position to do it, not some fantasy. This utter acceptance without “difference”, having Husbanded the She, was necessary in order to be abandoned to Her, without losing that Mastery, that Husbanding itself, in other words, without releasing her to be un-Husbanded, the Force of She.
The Force of My “Brightness” must be accepted, heart-full, and all over the body-mind, Invading. In your devotional embrace of Me, you are Husbanded and given up. And I likewise am not dissociated from you in any respect. You are in My Kiln, My Sphere of Radiance. Your Yoga with Me, your devotion to Me is sublime. The emotional-sexual embrace is a paradigm for it, a kind of metaphor, or a subservient structure, subordinate structure. The Samadhi of Bliss, Love-Bliss, Happiness Itself, is Truth. It is the Inherent Reality, which you fail to inspect or know or Realize because of your own act. Self-contraction at the heart dissociates you from feeling, and then knowing, the Recognition of phenomenal existence.
All of this is Me, or What (from the dualistic perspective) can be called “She”-literally so-and all-Pervading. You are in My Sphere of “Brightness” as in a sea of fluidity. Seeing this beyond the constructs of your own psycho-physicality, it is a Flow without “difference”. It is a “Brightness” without limit. It is an Infinite Upwelling of Love-Bliss, without differentiation. It is, in the egoless Yogi, obvious even to the eye, or to the taste, or to the hearing, or to the touch. It is inherently perfumed. It is the breath of Fullness.
Seventh stage Realization, then, is not Consciousness “apart”, nor is it Consciousness becoming bound by choosing phenomenal existence on its own. It is the Divine Self-Disposition, Recognizing all arising, Inherently Recognizing all arising.
What is then? What is anything?
It is Me. Or, as I might Say, it is She. But there is no She apart from Me, anymore.
So there’s all this leaving of the plane of phenomenal association for sixth stages, progressively. In the seventh, the leaving is abandoned. Six was not enough for Me. Still the self-contraction registered there by this dissociation-the ultimate Yogic moment, the ultimate dilemma of Yoga, you could say.
I know you don’t know what I mean when I say I Husbanded Her. You are in no position to know what that means. You are in no position to do it! But if you understand what I mean by true Yoga in emotional-sexual terms, you have a metaphor for something about it, the loosening of the disposition of “difference”, of dissociation, of separateness, even of relatedness.
The abandonment of the presumption of “other”. You as “other”, other as “other”. The acceptance of She and the embrace of Her. To be, as a man, made whole, integrated with what you are not. Conformed to it, changed by it, added to discriminative mind and brute force-in between you get the feeling and sensuous body-mind that makes you whole. And then you don’t club the seals. And so on.
So, in your heart-rejection of all of this, you are always looking for some alternative to what I’m telling you. You’re looking for some way out of having to indulge in this heart-submission. As long as that’s your point of view, as long as you insist on that, well, you can’t go very far with Me.
Disregard the babbling mind for the moment, as you would whatever is going on in your intestines at the moment. And just feel with Me here. So do you find, in that, any inherent suggestion of “difference”, or separation, or problem, or reason to seek? [Pause]
I’ve talked to you all exhaustively for 25 years. I could keep on talking. I’ll probably speak sometimes. Basically, I’ve said enough. Enjoy My Company.
Now, if you want to know about Pleasure Dome, I’m showing you in My House every day how to go about it. I’m Calling you to do that in kind in the community-but as My devotees. Whatever you all are always talking about in your endless meetings, it sounds to Me like the kind of thing you say to your women friends and men friends in anticipation of intimate occasion. It still doesn’t amount to real sexing, anyway.
You men don’t even want women to be women. You like them to be sort of virgins and complicated and just sort of good-looking somehow, so you can use them. You don’t want anything to do with what they really require of you, or probably you wouldn’t want so much to do with them. You’d certainly know that you had to come up to something far different than you’ve done with women before, or females before.
Men don’t like what women really want. They’re not ready to do that. You’re not ready to do what I want. You’re not ready to do what the world requires. You’re fouling the nest, My Domain, My Hall, and all women in the world. That Very Person that’s She is rejected by you. You don’t want that kind of relationship to Me, you want to talk and do male exchanges with Me, instead of surrendering. You can’t accept that heart-woman in yourself, you males.
And in your undoings you’ve compromised the mind of women, and the hearts of women, too. Some women slip out of the loop, and they stay in the woods with Krishna, or whoever. They just become distracted. And then the husbands follow suit-according to the traditional stories-because nobody is coming back from the cows to make their TV dinners and dote on the husbands just for the sake of that little snappy bit of sex you do with them every now and then, but rather go to the God-Man and be heart-full, and allowed to be women, and not cursed anymore.
And the non-humans would rather come to Me and stay with Me as well. They know I support their Contemplation-their Contemplativeness and their freedom from bondage to this world. The non-humans are all avadhoots of a kind. Unless you trap them, like you trap women, and talk them out of their simplicity.
Men need to realize that simplicity, and women, therefore, likewise-having been propagandized out of it. The simplicity of heart-surrender is what you must volunteer for. Women would serve all men by standing firm on this point. Even the Earth is standing firm on it, don’t you see? And I certainly am.
My Standing Firm required Me to step apart from this gathering as it has been. Not intending to separate from devotees at all, but, I require devotees to relate to Me rightly and practice this Way as I’ve Given it. It’s your business to accomplish, in your response to Me, in your conformity to Me, you rightened-yourselves and the world. It doesn’t require Me to become your political master. I’m not interested.
I prefer to spend My time in the Pleasure Dome, with the women. I find their company very satisfactory, and I don’t suppress them. I enjoy the changes they make in Me. I enjoy that conformity. So I don’t intend to show you any sign but this Pleasure Dome Sign, and My most direct Manifestation of Myself.
What is this called-the durbars-of the kings? These great events, these great convocations, even daily. Anyone would come into the company of the king-all in their greatest art and finery, their fullness of delight, their Pleasure Dome sign. All Blessed, all Instructed, all fed, everyone celebrated and celebrating. All alive with mutual respect and love. You got any better idea?
DEVOTEES: No.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, then do what I tell you.
DEVOTEES: Yes.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: You want Me to Do what I Do, you have to do what I Say. I know it’s no big deal, because I know this Way can be fulfilled by the simplest of beings, and the most ordinary human beings, and the most presumably sophisticated. Anyone can do it. I’ve “Considered” the matter thoroughly in infinite detail. Know that the Way that I’ve already Given you is sufficient and can be practiced by anyone. Of course, you have to give Me your heart. And everything else must follow. If you love Me, and love Me altogether, then you will embrace all arising in this Pleasure Dome of Mine.
So it’s not a complicated intellectual matter. It is a heart matter, simply. Tell everybody Who I Am. Tell them My Instruction. Tell them this Opportunity. I’m happy to Give this Opportunity to those approaching Me most simply in the beginner’s sense. There can be a fourth congregation-“third world”, if you like to call it, and so on. There can be a third congregation of the “rich and famous”. There can be the congregations of those implementing the Way in greater detail, for the sake of Realizing Me.
No one should be denied My Blessing. No one should be denied this relationship to Me. And it can be served and implemented in all kinds of ways, such as you’re “considering” now, with the use of technical means, Internet and whatnot. Every day anyone who regards Me with devotion can pick up a telephone, it seems simply, and see My Play told and My Image shown. Easier and easier to maintain and serve this contact with Me, if you only do it.
SECTION 2
ADI DA SAMRAJ: When you accept a thing seriously, just as it is (like the Schimmel paintings, or Disney art), no prejudices, just take the image or the sound, whatever it is, seriously, and allow yourself to participate in it fully, and notice altogether whatever you notice by doing this, some of the most ordinary things-things that you would not have taken seriously before-can achieve, in your experience, aesthetic emotion and so on, even great profundity. Everything artfully done, then; making great integrity, therefore beauty, contributes to this Contemplation that is your relationship to Me altogether. Therefore, every detail, ultimately, if you have the leisure, the opportunity, the means or whatever, you can manufacture, make a Pleasure Dome in infinite detail. A glorious place that, by right participation, enables people doing right sadhana, understanding what this is all about, to enlarge it profoundly, to be integrated with it profoundly.
Art should do this service. Just as women should do men this kind of good. It makes them feel, and allows humanity to be preoccupied with art and Divine Contemplation and love-play. Politicians who do not allow this are far from the Pleasure Dome.
BILL S.: Beloved, in Your Great Art Puja, You’ve really been making clear to all of us, that what’s really significant about any so-called “great” work of art (whether it’s music, plastic art, or poetry) is that it’s somehow a reflection of You, somehow a reflection of the characteristics of You, an expression of the Attractiveness to You.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: A means of participating in Communion with Me, therefore. There are the conditions in the Hall, where it’s all silent, you allow yourself to relinquish attention on bodily matters in order to Commune with Me. But I call you to do the same in Puja, and therefore in the Pleasure Dome, which is an extension of the temple. In other words, enter into active Contemplation of Me, as well as what you might call relatively “passive” Contemplation of Me, as you might do in a meditation Hall.
Every moment must be this practice, this exercise of Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga. So the arts should be a pattern of Contemplation of Me in the place, or circumstance, of the body-mind. The principal occupation should be that of the Pleasure Dome, not the assembly, the public place.
There’s business to be handled, agreements to be made, and so forth, in the context of the larger world. You must do this by living in the Pleasure Dome. Even if you’re bereft of means, you can reside in My Pleasure Dome through the exercise of Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga. Therefore you can do so in the circumstance of pain and suffering, as it arises. But you need not manufacture pain and suffering in order to Realize Me. In fact, that is self-occupation. You should have nothing to do with it. Be active, then, in the Puja sense.
Everything should be done artfully, fully given to Me, in Communion with Me, but in such a fashion that you relinquish the grotesque patterning of your self-stress, and become more and more profoundly aware, more and more profoundly perceptive in the process, more aware of the pattern that’s arising, in all of its forms, learning more and more the artfulness of the clear straightforwardness of Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga in every moment, and how to generate the pattern or context of the Pleasure Dome, no matter what the circumstance is. That doesn’t mean always go about looking for bad circumstances. Make the most profoundly good circumstances. Be occupied with this. Be occupied with the total enjoyment of Me. Be devoted to Happiness, and not otherwise in any respect whatsoever.
BILL: Yes, that’s also the expression of the yearning for You.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. But rather than yearning merely, you should be completely given over to Me, completely in touch with Me, moment to moment. That’s the most profound exercise. If you are yearning, you must be away somewhere. [laughter] Loving to yearn-yes. It’s another one of those terrible addictions that even musicians can get.
Baba Muktananda spoke one time about an elephant that had become crazed, destroying houses and crops and killing people and whatnot. And they called in a musician-Yogi, and simply by playing his instrument calmed the animal down. And that’s just one example in that tradition of musician-healers, sound-makers in one form or another, brought in to heal. It was and is commonplace. Doesn’t have to be proven in some laboratory. If you want to find out if it works, you do it.
But so much of the esoteric knowledge is lost. Just some outer performance, public level of the arts remains. They don’t have the basis for their integrity because they have lost the Pleasure Dome, the esotericism, the relationship to the authority of Revealers, and, therefore their relationship to the pattern of Divinity altogether.
So for the Pleasure Dome to be restored, the arts must not only be in place, they must be regenerated-and regenerated by being reassociated with the authority of Revealers.
Of course, the Pleasure Dome has to be incarnated as well as pictured. But that’s what I mean by the community, the cooperative community of devotees. It is itself the fundamental Pleasure Dome. Within it, it has everything including the meditation hall, the temple, pujas, and so on. It has that dimension, but you must generate places of association with one another that are also the Pleasure Dome-places of intimacy and so forth, of course, if it’s to be made a true Pleasure Dome.
But those who live the Pleasure Dome as a way of life must, in that cooperative community, have all of their associations connected in the same manner. But you’re not. You’re always becoming somebody different or adapting to expectations, patterns that are just arbitrarily there, to be repeated, klik-klak.
So the Pleasure Dome must extend all throughout the community, even its more mundane level to the place of meals, the place of spending time with one another just pleasurably-not to just engage in arbitrary social discourse with one another, but to be in the Pleasure Dome with one another, as you are when you are in the Hall together, and so on. You must make your society with one another as devotees, in which you assume the disposition of the Pleasure Dome in your society with one another rather than assume the disposition that belongs “outside the gate”, so to speak.
Live as My devotees. Speak as My devotees. But that doesn’t mean only talk specifically in those terms. Speak of everything. “Consider” everything, but in that disposition altogether. Make changes in your manner altogether, in the controllable sphere of devotees organizing themselves by agreement, to live the Way itself, altogether-to incarnate it and go beyond all the limitations on it. It’s a profoundly interesting matter, if you enter into it actively, rather than just thinking about it, talking about it, or suggesting things about it. If you “consider” it together as devotees of Mine, there’s an amazing immensity of things to change. Every moment being puja, then.
I was watching a documentary a couple of nights ago about Jacques Cousteau. And in a segment there, underwater, the display of the local organisms in one particular depth and place was shown, with some of the complexity there and so on. He described that locale as “organized water”, a form of, “organized water”. In other words, it’s a watery place that has all kinds of specifics contained in it, organized in it, that allow for the survival of the particular organisms there.
He didn’t invent this term, I presume. I assume it’s a term used by people who are scientifically trained in some particular discipline. But like the term “compulsory dancing” which I used in a book once, which is a term used in dancing contests and such, I found the words to be suggestive more profoundly and without any association with dance contests particularly. I like this term “organized water”, like I like the term “hive”. It is particularly apt because, as I’ve indicated to you, the entire cosmic domain is a fluid. I use the reference “water”, and have in all My Word to you, over and over again. It’s a fundamental term in My Discourse.
The Pleasure Dome is organized water. And literally so. Metaphorically so, but literally so. All of this is organized water. Or, let us say, it is water as a fluid. There’s all kinds of structure associated with it. It could be organized. It has inherent capability of right pattern. But you could not say this water realm, apparent now, is organized. It has all kinds of disorder in it and so forth. In all kinds of respects, you could say it is lacking organization. So it must become organized, rightly patterned, rightly aligned.
There is a glass block in our art collection, made by a man named Kuhn, from cold-pressed glass, optical quality. Fine glass cut into tiny slivers, shapes of one kind or another, by machines that have remarkable precision. So these pieces can then be laid next to one another in various patterns and a kind of epoxy is used that is totally invisible.
And then all this is placed on larger transparent optical pieces, to make a large cube. But he has to have a kind of cube in its center, transparent cube with another cube in its center made of complex arrangements of cut glass. Actually, I have two of his sculptures, almost identical, except one has some bits of colored glass in the core and the other has only clear glass.
The clear glass one, if you rotate it a certain way, align to it a certain way, appears to be totally transparent. But if you rotate it another way, it looks like it’s a very complex prism of opposing glass slivers, making a kind of shape at the center, a cube within. But with the other one that has the colored particles of glass and a somewhat different arrangement of the slivers of glass, there is no position you can take, there is no way of rotating it, to have it be totally transparent.
These forms are a way I use to make a point sometimes, when I’m showing people the glass objects. Perhaps you know the phrase in the Buddhist tradition, “Original mind is pure from the beginning.” This transparent glass cube, this cube that appears to be totally transparent when you are aligned to it a certain way, is like that. It is the Enlightened Disposition. It may appear to refract the light and be in play and so forth, but inherently it is transparent, it has no inner form, no separateness whatsoever.
The ego-mind is quite different. It’s like this other block with the colored glass and the shift of shapes at the core. It has no original clarity. It always appears to have a separate block within, no matter how you rotate it, no matter how you jumble the thoughts. No matter what configuration you assume, what position you assume relative to it, you can’t see through it. The core of separateness is always inherent, it seems.
There’s a senior pattern, not obvious to the conventional view, or the egoic point of view, or the view of “conventional realism”, so to speak.
When you look within, you “think” you are noticing yourself. You can’t rotate that mind, that disposition quite right, to discover its inherent transparency. It seems that you’ve made a bad bit of sculpture, an unsolvable maze, by this act of self-contraction. It is not soluble by any address to itself. No self-meditation Realizes Me. Self-meditation does not Liberate. Self-contraction does not Liberate itself.
So, along with the fundamental self-contraction, the total psycho-physical self-contraction, there’s also a mind part of it. But it’s just one of several outstanding features. There’s the perceptual-conceptual mind, of course-the fundamental element of which is attention. But there’s this domain of feeling-energy, too-quite a different matter. You’re going to have to yield something of this perceptual-conceptual mind business to enter into the feeling dimension. It’s a whole other category, it seems.
And then, of course, there’s all of this mottled action through form. It’s a pattern also different from thought-mind and the domain of feelings. There’s also the fact that the human condition is like that traditional metaphor in the Upanishads in which it’s suggested that you “consider” there to be a tree in the midst of a growing place, and in the tree there are two birds.
One of them is constantly busy eating the fruit, and the other simply stands by, merely Witnessing. You can, by examining the pattern before you, through My “Consideration”, discover that both of these are true of you. You’re busy now-thinking, doing, feeling, breathing, whatever, altogether. You think, or feel, or see.
And yet, it is also true in any moment, if you’ll “consider” it-no matter what is arising, even attention itself, you are the mere Witness of it. Even attention is object to you. Every form or exercise of thought, discriminative or otherwise, every mode of feeling, every motion, every kind of action or sensibility or sense of form-all this is object to your view. Any characteristic that you might assign to yourself, calling it “I”, is in your field of view, objective to you. This is true in any moment, if you will “consider” it.
Oblivious to that, you appear, or feel yourself to be, the fruit-eating bird, the active body-mind-self, the ego-self. But even while presuming that, acting obviously as such, moment to moment, if I ask you in any moment, “Isn’t it true, no matter what is arising, even now, even attention itself is object to you, as the mere Witness?” Isn’t this true? Mm?
DEVOTEES: Yes, Beloved.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: So all the while you are appearing to be the fruit-eating bird, you are merely Consciousness. Which one is true? Consciousness, obviously. Because in any moment you “consider” it, that’s clearly the case. When you don’t “consider” it, anything can seem to be the case. But this is actually and truly the case. Nonetheless, there is this mysterious association with conditions arising, pattern arising.
And that is the “consideration”, ultimately. You do not know what any thing is. And this is the fundamental characteristic of un-Enlightenment-the un-Recognizability of phenomenal arising. So you have all kinds of questions in the midst of this experiencing, and all kinds of difficulty in the midst of it.
By contrast, I do Know what every thing is, and What Is. But it’s not a mere knowing. We’d better call it a form, the Form of Existence Itself. It is Inherent, obvious – not grasped, held onto, contained by a faculty or a particular experience. The restoration of the Recognizability of conditional arising is Enlightenment. It is “Bright”, all-Bliss. And, yet this is the Essence of Enlightenment, then, ultimately. But it is of the seventh stage nature.
When you are in self-surrendering, self-forgetting Communion with Me, it is not merely that you have surrendered and forgotten yourself, it is that you have become disarmed and have entered into Communion with Me. You are in a position to Realize Me. It’s not merely that you are free of your self, because you have now surrendered and forgotten. You didn’t begin to seek just to settle for that, did you?
Just to be relieved of something – as someone once constipated experiences a bowel movement. It’s not enough to be relieved of pain, even temporarily, as it must be. I assume you are moved to Fullness, Happiness Itself, without the slightest limitation in it. No trick Enlightenment, you see. Rat-a-tat-a-tat about Enlightenment – big deal. And when you finally get what’s called “Enlightenment”, it turns out that all you did was get your body amputated, or become dissociated from phenomenal existence so that you don’t have to be bothered by the inherent dilemma of it, the inherent un-Recognizability of it.
The context of the process of Realizing Me is the Pleasure Dome of organized water, the pattern of Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga, pervading the psycho-physical domain in every respect, in every detail, ultimately – not making a utopia out of conditional life. No utopia can be finalized. But in the context of whatever is arising in the moment, the Pleasure Dome is to be established, because it is the context of Communion with Me.
STEVE H.: Beloved, when You say that there is a Truth that can’t be contained in any faculty, it strikes me very strongly that I have no archetype in my mind – what is in my mind is the six stages of life. And there’s nothing in my mind, there is no archetype of What You Are in my mind.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Exactly. None whatsoever.
STEVE: In that sense, I can never understand You. I can only Contemplate You.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: And Realize Me.
DEVOTEES: Mm.
STEVE: But part of the Realizing seems to be, you know, the understanding that I can never understand You. I could never contain You with my mind.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Right. No faculty can be extended that far. I’m the Context of every faculty, you see – the Water Itself. While you contract upon your faculty, you refuse to drown in Me. To Realize Me, you must drown in this organized water, this Pleasure Dome of Communion with Me, in the Samadhi of Realizing Me.
You must organize your life, then, according to this Water Law of Mine. The Pleasure Dome, the unique Way within klik-klak, whereby its overwhelming deficiencies are not only transcended but used to defeat the binding power of conditional force itself. It klik-klaks-just replication, with a shift, but infinitely complicated, incomprehensible to the view, no inner logic displayed. Klik-klak is indifferently, infinitely amenable, like that smiling clown you see over there. And you’re concerned about your presumed self.
My Mama Form over there has Given you a Revelation. All your sulking and troubling about yourself, and wanting to be taken into account while klik-klak rolls over you is an utter waste of your time and life. Your “case”, and all the rest, is an objection that will defeat you.
So I have My Mama Form over here. “Your objections to anything don’t mean shit!” Understand that this is the Law of klik-klak. You are not taken into account, because you do not exist. The “you” you presume and want to preserve and defend, does not exist. It is not taken into account in the pattern of klik-klak at all. And therefore it will ride over you, through you, disregard you, and wind you in any direction you care to be frivolous about. It’s perfectly amenable. Its binding power is absolute. It can be as you like, and be utterly contrary at the same time.
That is the nature of the maze of mere conditionality. But it’s not that you are in hell. It is the ego-vision, the separate vision, this klik-klak. You don’t recognize it, you see, because of your self-contraction. Not your self-contraction, like you are doing it in some separate sense. You are the self-contraction. In the context of conditionality, you are that. You are doing it by being it. You’re not separate from it doing it. You are the action-as attention, as feeling, as breath, as bodily motion.
Understand this. Be Attracted to Me, responsive to Me. You’re already feeling beyond this knotted heart, and becoming radiant rather than contracted. And in this motion of Attracted Communion with Me, more and more of the artifacts of this pattern you’ve self-made and self-generated moment to moment are noticed. This makes your understanding, finally, most profound and comprehensive. It is one fundamental observation to be made, and it can only be made in the place of the self-contraction itself, where you no longer regard the objects, something you thought about, something you discovered in your field of perception, to be something away from you, you see. You are the self-contraction. The only understanding of it, then, is in its very place. See the totality of you as self-contraction, covering every faculty, every thought, every emotion and feeling, or context of existence.
To be in this Communion with Me is to be Granted the great Gift of arms to transcend the totality of this knot, that is manifested in every detail of the body-mind and experience-the single, voluntary, at-the-core heart-gesture, feeling beyond self-contraction in Communion with Me. This is the capability of one who hears Me, who understands most fundamentally. There’s no resort to any faculty or context of experiencing. There’s simply the devotion of the faculties to Me-utterly given, utterly surrendered, not contracted.
Everyone will find themselves thinking, reacting, feeling, jiggling, breathing, whatever the complexity that you want to meditate on right now. One who hears Me remembers in every moment: This is self-contraction, it’s the avoidance of relationship, this whole thing need not be addressed, need not be meditated on at all. If you want to diddle with this phantom of thought, emotional reactivity, physical automaticity, breath disturbance, energy disturbance, energy limitation, limitation on bliss-you meditate on that problem, or seek on its basis.
It’s all just the picture of self-contraction in the moment. That’s it-the complex avoidance of relationship, the self-contraction, the act that defines the notion of separate self. It’s not done by a separate self. It’s the very act that generates the notion, that is the notion itself. It’s entirely, so to speak, your doing-when you are that knot, or possessed as such. It’s to be understood in Communion with Me and felt beyond, voluntarily, intentionally, in every moment, once this most profound discovery is awakened in you.
And then to See Me, to enter into My Spiritual Sphere, is to congregate with Me in organized water-the Pleasure Dome expanded beyond the faculties and the mere physicality of self-presumption. The end of it is not in the fourth stage of life, or the fifth or the sixth. The traditional endings, or resolutions, or what was settled for, are not the end of it.
You must utterly Recognize this – just this, and any other moment or pattern apparently arising, but therefore this one. Just utterly Recognize it, such that it does not in the slightest diminish the Infinite “Brightness” of Love-Bliss. Nothing else is True Enlightenment. It is as much the Enlightenment of the body as of any other faculty. It is “Brightness” acknowledgeable by the body, by feeling, by mind, by breath-inherently obvious.
If you don’t know what any thing is, it’s the same as saying that you are not enjoying the Condition of Infinite Love-Bliss at the moment, because the Recognizability of arising phenomena is the only basis for the Realization of Infinite Love-Bliss. Your non-Recognition is the mark on it. It is simply an indicator of the reality of self-contraction, or ego-bondage. If you are not now bound to self-contraction, but yield egoity, you would Recognize this, all this, and it is simply the “Brightness” of Love-Bliss, Self-Existing and Self-Radiant.
This Recognition does not generate utopia, because it is a spontaneously demonstrating “Brightness”. This Siddhi of Recognition Flows the Water “Brightness” more and more profoundly, to the point of Translation. So this seventh stage Realization is not a return to the world or to any diminished condition whatsoever. It simply does not refuse the world. It’s not attached to it nor does it refuse it. It simply Recognizes it, which is simply the Expansive Regard of Love-Bliss Itself.
So you’re concerned about a self that does not exist, and klik-klak does not take you into account. Your concerns for that one you want to preserve do not count in klik-klak land. So you shouldn’t waste your time being diverted by self-concern. Take your licks from the Mama, state your objections very briefly, get your ass out of Her Temple there, cease to object, and get on with it.
So everyone should approach Me in the royal manner in My Pleasure Dome. My Pleasure Dome must be made big enough to include all. Therefore it is necessarily a Rajya, Kingdom.
CHRIS TONG: Beloved, it’s interesting to see the way You’ve organized the water in Your Bedroom.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mmm? Yes, all these water pictures. The non-humans thrive in water. Mmm?
BILL: This whole night with You, to me is the most beautiful night in my life.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Tcha.
BILL: The desire I have to Contemplate You is, as much as possible, to see everybody share this Vision of the Magnificence that You Are. You are a King, Raja.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Invite them to My Durbars, make them huge durbars in a magnificent place of a section in My House-Pleasure Dome only. And then all will come there and enjoy the art of My Great Pleasure Dome, My Great Durbars, and Contemplate Me in every moment with full attention and feeling, serve Me with every action, breathe Me with every breath. You do this in My Company, serving Me even outside My Physical Company at the moment. You’ll begin to discover something, and I’ll prove Myself to you.