Beezone edit and
adaptation from 1973 talk (see link below)
True Sincerity
True sincerity is a quality that is
naturally alive in a person who understands
himself.
Cultic forms of concentration of
attention and absorption don’t produce this kind of
self-knowledge. They distract a person. They are calculated
to fascinate and distract you, to enforce your attention.
There is one fundamental law involved in all forms of
sadhana, the yogic law that you become the thing that you
concentrate on. So all forms of sadhana done without
self-understanding are ways of concentrating on what
ultimately are supposed to be forms of the Divine-mantras,
chants, the Guru’s form, what the Guru does outwardly, all
the images and pictures – so that you become more and more
absorbed and ecstatically distracted. As soon as the source
of distraction is taken away, the individual falls back into
the state he was in to begin with.
Whenever the genuine principle of
the spiritual process is brought to bear, it is a dangerous
affair. From social, traditional points of view, you lose
the artifices that are native to these external approaches,
both the so-called “spiritual” and the secular.
Creating an artificial environment
essentially handles people’s disturbances, their neuroses,
and their gross pride. They feel relatively at ease, and
they walk around being soupy and spiritual all day, thinking
they are doing sadhana. All they have done is remove the
gross influences from their lives. But that’s the condition
under which sadhana in fact begins. You must penetrate your
core of ordinariness.
In true sadhana you are dealing
simply and directly with your state, your atmosphere, your
ordinariness. It is truly perceptive to see that in your
actual state, your very presence, is disturbance, completely
independent of qualities that condition you are obviously
disturbed. But your very presence is that disturbance. You
can see that there is no genuine rest in you, except a
mediocre experience of no disturbance which comes from
without or within. When those gross disturbances are
removed, you begin to see that your actual state, your very
presence, is disturbance, completely independent of
qualities that may appear to you. It is always this
contraction. You begin to see that. You see it in your
ordinary moments of relative ease and happiness, not just in
your neurotic highs and lows, but in this neutral state in
which there is no peculiar event. When you begin to see it
then, understanding has begun. But people buy out at that
point. Instead of truly becoming perceptive and carrying on
the real activity of consciousness, they just enjoy that
neutral time until the next disturbance arises or the next
high arises. The highs and the lows are too baroque, they
are not fundamental, they are extraordinary. This
ordinariness is an omnipresent quality against which all
other qualities play. The secret of understanding is in
recognizing that.
The self-contraction is taking place
in, not only gross forms but in its most subtle form. If it
were not, you would have no separate self sense. You
wouldn’t hold onto mediocrity, which is itself a form of
desire. The desire to be undisturbed manifests as
mediocrity. Some people think that is being spiritual. But
it is just being mediocre. People generally don’t have any
tolerance for that mediocrity for long periods of time, so
they always return to the highs and lows. They are both
forms of distraction, of standing outside yourself. Even the
lows, the disturbances, the aggravations, are forms of
distraction, fascination with qualities. In fact, most
people pursue those. As a respite from that, some turn to
this mediocrity and think that it is spiritual. It is just a
particular state. A capacity for this mediocre pleasantness,
this moveless happiness without any great
intensity.
QUESTIONER: Everyone just says,
“Turn to the Guru, “Guru-kripa,”‘ but they don’t say why and
they don’t understand. That’s the force of God coming
through the Guru as a separate entity.
ADI DA: The true Guru is not some
superman. He must always become nothing so that the Divine
Siddhi becomes active. God’s Siddhi is perfect, absolute, so
it is not by becoming a perfect superman with all kinds of
overwhelming, fascinating qualities that a person awakens to
the Divine activity. It is only when all that is undermined
and no longer active in him that the Divine Siddhi appears
spontaneously. The Guru, then, is a unique presence and a
unique process.
Above all, he is unique by virtue of
the fact that he can enter into a concrete, living
relationship with people, and they likewise can enter into a
concrete, living relationship with the Guru. He has a
living, material form, and that makes it very
tangible.
QUESTIONER: As the Guru sheds the
physical body, is it the Divine Force that becomes alive in
the disciples and other people who live in relationship to
the Guru?
ADI DA: Sure. Then the devotees of
such a one become the functional means for the presentation
of that Force in the world. They have that living
relationship with the Guru, who is now gone in his ordinary
human form. Their relationship is unbroken, so the activity,
the Divine Siddhi that was the Guru continues to manifest
through them as a community.
It stands present in the community,
not necessarily in the form of another individual who does
this, or has the same responsibility. In some cases a Guru
leaves behind a devotee who has the same function and
extends it. But the purpose of all such Gurus, even if they
do follow one after another, is to create a community in
which the Siddhi is alive, in which it is the living
presence, the living condition.
The only problem is that these
communities tend to become not communities, but cults. They
tend to be centered in the personality of a Guru, directed
to that Guru as a form of fascination.
It is the community re-enacting the
ritual of the ego that people all enact individually. So
they never become a community, and they never turn outward
and become functional and truly live this Siddhi. They
remain inward directed, always concentrating on this one who
is gone. I have told you that the Guru comes to manifest
that Satsang that existed prior to his physical birth.
People don’t relate to that. After the Guru’s death they try
to relate to that Satsang that he apparently generated
during his lifetime.
So they go around trying to remember
what he looked like and carrying that whole cult of his
personality, instead of truly living the Divine Satsang that
he was here to communicate while he was alive.
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