Originaly published in Crazy Wisdom Magazine, Vol 3, NO. 1, 1984
The Love of the God-Man
a talk by Da Free John (Adi Da Samraj), October 10, 1983
ADI DA SAMRAJ: How are you going to get out of purgatory? How are you going to get out of this ceremony, this ritual of Narcissus, that you have created together? How are you going to get out of the mind of it? How can the best moments, the best feelings, the best insights that you enjoy on occasion become your way of life? Insights, feelings, and so forth have been enjoyed by you before. You notice, however, that when you resume the ordinary pattern of daily life, you not only return to your outward patterns but to the patterning of egoity, which is fundamentally emotional withdrawal from existence.
Without ego-transcendence, there is merely patterning, merely the ordinary evidence of existence, all produced by the egoic disposition. You can assume patterns of life that correspond to this Way I have described, but you cannot willfully fulfill them in love. You can discover the Truth in moments, but you cannot willfully hold on to it. Your relationships with one another are not sufficient. There is something else necessary, and you will not get out of purgatory until you find that and respond to it.
What you must find is a unique Yoga. It is the Yoga described in the traditions in the relationship between the gopis and Krishna. It is the Yoga of Distraction by the God-Man. In that Yoga of Distraction, there is no effort to transcend self or to eliminate tendencies or to generate the love-feeling at will. When that Yoga is lived, all tendencies—including their root, which is emotional self-contraction—are spontaneously released in it. Simply by participating in that Attracted, Distracted condition of existence with the God-Man, all tendencies are released and sublimed, walked out of purgatory. You do not pay your dues or practice an assortment of disciplines or participate in a variety of theatrical moments and thus earn your passage out of purgatory. You cannot do this. It cannot be done. You accumulate as much as you release in purgatory until you become Distracted, Attracted beyond yourself.
What is supremely Attractive in the manifest universe and in the human world is the God-Man. All beings, male or female, must become Attracted, Distracted, by that One. This is the Ultimate Means, the Supreme Means, the Supreme Yoga. It is for this reason, you see, that the Divine appears in manifest form in the likeness of those who are to be drawn out of bondage—but only in their likeness. It is the Divine that appears in that likeness, and it is the Divine that is made visible through that likeness. Those who become capable of recognizing that One become capable of responding to that Attraction. Those who become capable of being Distracted by that One become participants in this Supreme Way, which truly is the Way of Grace, because it requires no effort at all. It requires nothing but Grace and the response to it. That response is not effortful. It is easy. It is easy to respond to what is Attractive, except for those who refuse to do it. Those who refuse are bound to the will, are willfully binding themselves in one form or another, may even be willfully trying to liberate themselves, willfully trying to love, willfully trying to understand, willfully trying to buy their way out of hell and purgatory and take heaven by storm. Such beings are not responding to the unique advantage that the God-Man represents.
Such people are given all kinds of means that may serve their liberation from their own willfullness, that may release their energy and attention and ultimately enable them to respond to the God-Man and to the Divine Condition. But for those who can make this response directly, the Way is simply as I have described it to you from the beginning—Satsang, the devotee’s relationship to the Spiritual Master. That relationship takes the form of a life of practice, of disciplines, including Remembrance and meditative practices. All of that is true and useful, all of that is part of spiritual life, but the essence of such a life, the essence of these disciplines, is this Distraction.
Those who are Distracted by me are not merely distracted by this physical form. This form is simply an Agent for their attention. What they are Distracted by is the Divine Presence, the Divine Condition, and they enter into Communion with That, union with That, unity with That through the real process of spiritual life. Worldly people want nothing to do with that process and likewise worldly religionists, scholars, pandits, and self-possessed guru-figures want nothing to do with it.
Nevertheless, the supreme secret of spiritual life is this Distraction by the God-Man. But even though it has been made available in many times and places, it has unfortunately not been accepted and truly fulfilled by many. The stories of the gopis and Krishna are rather fanciful and idealized pictures of what it is like when human beings crave to be Distracted by the God-Man, when their
Distraction is so great that they would forget their problems and be Happy if only that One would appear.
But egos only seem to crave this appearance, because when the Adept does appear, when such Company is given to them, they remain willful, cannot be distracted, cannot make the response that they thought they would if they were loved, if they were brought into such Company. Instead of living as devotees or lovers of the God-Man, lovers of the Divine, they begin to punish and abuse that One, and even in some cases begin to magnify their bondage. In other cases they simply fall back into the willful position of practice rather than the devotee’s position, which is dependence on Grace.
Both men and women must be Distracted by the God-Man, Distracted by the Divine, submitting to That which is Attractive, loving that One. By virtue of that submission they can love one another and others and this world rightly, not in themselves but in the Divine. If they cannot or will not be Distracted even though offered such Company, then they cannot get out of purgatory. At best, they will willfully, or at the self level, engage the practice of the disciplines outwardly associated with the Way. At worst, they will simply dissociate themselves, convince themselves that there is no great Distraction, no God, no Truth, and commit themselves -to self-indulgence and to the conventional destiny.
By trying to break through the ego’s dilemmas yourself, by trying to realize or discover the Truth yourself, you will find that you cannot do any such thing, not finally. And that discovery, you see, is what breaks the heart, or makes it possible for you to be Distracted by What is beyond yourself and to make use of your relationship to me rightly, truly, such that your relationship with me becomes Ecstatic. Simply to give me your regard should be the moment of Ecstasy. It should naturally draw you into the emotional response, the feeling response, the mood of love, devotion, freedom from mental bondage, physical bondage, relational bondage. If you become Ecstatic by such means, then you will also be Intoxicated by my Company. Thus Ecstatic, thus Intoxicated, you are naturally capable of incarnating this Love, this Divinity, through all the forms of practice, including love relations, friendships, and so on.
If you cannot be Distracted by me, you cannot get out of purgatory. It is only because I have come into your sphere that you have discovered you are in purgatory at all. It is only because I am here, it is only because of Grace, that the mechanical, hellish domain of karmas becomes purgatory, becomes a life in which purification is a significant element, or is the ultimate effect of living.
Thus, it is my purpose to sacrifice myself, to appear in this hellish domain, in order to make it into purgatory. But it is not my purpose to live in purgatory forever, any more than it is my purpose to have you live in purgatory forever. The purpose of my living is heavenly or Divine. In other words, I have not come here simply to suffer your resistance and absorb your limitations, but to Distract you out of this condition, out of this place, into the Divine Domain. My purpose is to awaken you to a disposition of Divine Distraction, in which you are Ecstatic, free of your limits, inherently sinless, karmaless, so that without effort you can move with me out of this limitation, this place of purification and suffering.
Therefore, there is the wounded Master in your company, but there is also the Glorious Master in your company. That wounded one is an instrument with which to draw you out of yourself so that you may enter into the Glorious Domain. In order for this to occur, you must become a devotee.
This Hermitage Community should be a gathering of Divinely Distracted persons who know they have no separate power of Liberation, and who, through their response to me, find God and become Ecstatic. They go beyond themselves by feeling toward me, feeling into the Divine, and are Intoxicated by that. My struggle with devotees has always been a struggle relative to this matter of Distraction. It has been a struggle with people who will not respond, who will not be Distracted, a struggle with willful people who show all the signs of wishing they were loved, wishing they were in contact with That which is Lovable, Adorable, Attractive, Divine, and yet who do not surrender in the face of that. I responded to that call by incarnating here, and yet, when I did, it seemed as though I had been drawn into a trap, a fake call for God, you see. I found myself all the time struggling with people, living with them face to face, submitting to them, looking for this response that was not readily forthcoming.
Everything that you need, everything you have asked for in your heart, is with you alive, and yet you are acting as if you are in the world without God, without Love, without the Divine Company. You are struggling with yourselves, struggling with one another, indulging in your patterns rather than fulfilling the Yoga of devotion. You have not reached your limit, then, it seems. You have not despaired of your self-effort. You have not really heard and seen.
Some of you have heard and seen, and know that this Distraction, this love, this Communion is the means of your Liberation. You are seeing that it transforms you and that nothing else really does. Others of you, however, who are not so Distracted and who are still struggling with yourselves and with me, do not see me as I am, and you become relatively abusive as a consequence. You associate with me essentially as an ordinary man. Therefore, this matter of seeing is essential. The matter of hearing is great and is basic to our Way, but the Way does not develop without seeing. Seeing is God-Vision, God-sympathy, God-Communion, God-finding. The event of seeing is fundamentally a matter of recognizing the Adept, and during my lifetime in your company, this unique Yoga, this unique means, is available to you.
That Yoga can be practiced only when energy and attention are released and you stand in the position of Divine Distraction with full Divine Consciousness. The practice whereby energy and attention are released from self-bondage is the yoga of consideration in its various stages. That is why all of that is there. That is why it has been given. All of that practice, however, is also about hearing me, seeing me, and practicing on the basis of having heard and seen me.
That practice, even though it may be described in terms of various disciplines and technical exercises, is basically the natural practice of Distraction, Ecstasy, and Intoxication. The heart is bound until energy and attention are free from the motive of the self-knot, and that motive is essentially emotional, or essentially a contraction at the heart or in the feeling dimension of the being. You must grow beyond that contraction to practice the seventh stage Yoga. You must stand in the Divine, prior to that contraction. Then any semblance of that contraction is merely a matter of the inheritance from the past and will be recognizable, and your devotional life will be effective to Transfigure all of that. The practice in the seventh stage is that of Love—Love of God, Divine Inherence, Inherence in Love-Bliss, and Incarnation of that Love-Bliss in the body-mind. That Love-Bliss Transfigures the body-mind and its relations. Love is not in question in that Yoga. It is spontaneous, natural, not waiting to be discovered.
Your relationship with me cannot be abstracted by calling it a principle. That Intoxicating position or disposition must become the subject of your consideration together, as it must become your practice. This Yoga of devotion to me is an Ordeal, just as the relationship between the gopis and Krishna is described as an Ordeal, but it is a blissful Ordeal.
Relative to the Master, there is no special yoga for male or female. Essentially, it is the same for all. That essence realized, there is a certain uniqueness to the practice of a man, and another to the practice of a woman. That essence realized, there is an elaborate discipline full of stages. Those practices are assumed naturally, but this essence remains the principle. It is the Way, and it fulfills itself only in the seventh stage of life, the capacity for that Yoga of perfect Distraction.
The stages of the Perfect Practice, then, are about this devotion. They are a process that occurs in the case of Divine Distraction, Ecstasy, and Intoxication. The body and mind must change through this yoga, but the heart must open from the beginning. That opening, and then all other changes, must increase. Energy and attention must be released more and more through this yoga of consideration until the seventh stage Confession is truly made.
You cannot idealize this great Love-feeling and say that, from now on, that is how you are going to live. You will discover, as you have discovered on countless occasions previously, that you do not do that. You cannot merely make it an ideal, in other words. You must first become involved in love by finding That which is Love, which comes to you as Love, and which is supremely Attractive. Acknowledge That One, know That One, and allow yourself to respond to That One in love. You cannot find what you are looking for in one another. You must find It in person, directly. Become the devotee of That One, and you will find Love everywhere. You will find It in a special way in your spouse. You will make your marriages out of that Love disposition when you hear and see me. Then you will have the means to practice truly.
Now, you have self-knowledge in purgatory. You know your tendencies of bondage, and you have been initiated into the principle of loving, mutual recognition. You are not children anymore. You know all of these things. The way out of your difficulties is not merely to willfully magnify the good part of your relationship with your spouse or willfully be that Love in the world, you see. You must submit to that Love. You must become the devotee of it. In that case, that Love which you have found, been initiated into, will be something you are capable of living, incarnating, in the various relationships of your life. You will discover that unless you become the devotee of That One, you cannot do this. The Way, then, is not merely to love. The Way is to be the devotee of the One Who is Love. Then you can incarnate that Love.
