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Beezone adaptation and edit from
original talk by Adi Da (see below)
Old Patterns, New
Responsibilities
The purpose in considering your whole history is to see
how that demand for attention, your need for love, the
acquisition of knowledge and the love of power and fame are
all coming from the same disposition. It comes from pattern
that already exists, it doesn’t originate in any specific
relationship. That is the value of being able to trace your
history.
By trying to manipulate your present situation either
internally or externally is not the solution because the
problem doesn’t arise in the present, the problem is simply
the continuation of habits, patterns of memory. Your present
situation is only a reflection of patterns repeated from
incidences of the past, frozen moments in time, repeating
themselves over and over again. So it wouldn’t make any
difference how you or anyone else or how the situation cold
change and so forth. Your basic life pattern would still be
the same.
You are fundamentally in a reactive state in which you’ve
existed since before you can remember, you are always
already presuming separation, the absence of attention,
having to struggle to get attention, having to struggle to
get into a pleasurable state. You struggled and connived and
so forth as a little kid. You enact a ritual of either being
angry, sorrowful and resentful. You’re unhappy and pissed
off.
You look for replacements, temporary satisfactions but
they never seem to be enough. They may be satisfactory for a
period of time but they are not ‘scratching the deeper
itch’, the deeper ‘gnawing’ that seems to show itself
cyclically.
As long as you are presuming that you are in principle
separated from loving attention, you can never get in touch
with it, even when you become intimate with it, because it
is not the same as being in connection, it’s a temporary
acquisition. The acquiring of it occurs within a situation
in which you are inherently separated.
When you are an infant there is survival value in the
recoil or reaction to life, and all of the manipulative
games you created had something to do with reality, but when
you get to this stage of your life, the conditions that
created this assumption to begin with no longer exist. And
instead of it being factual that you are rejected, not
getting attention, not being loved, and so forth, it winds
up that that is what you are all about.
It’s natural to develop this separative ego, the
self-possessed strategy, in your early years. Its
development coincided with incidents that affected you
mentally and emotionally emotionally, and which seem
themselves to be a kind of betrayal but it would have
occurred in any case weather you had negative events to
react to or not.
It’s a dangerous creative process for the child to become
differentiated and be an individual. If you have negative
factors in your life, within which to develop your
functional independence, it can look as if are a little
delinquent or crazy. So there are two sides here: one is the
situation in your childhood or your infancy in which you
were cut off too soon or whatever. And then there is also
just the natural course of the human being’s differentiating
himself or herself egoically.
But you are living these patterns in the present. They
are memories in the form of tendencies. You’re living them
in the present and getting lessons about them. Sometimes
easy and sometimes not so easy. You should pay attention to
what life is telling you.
The mere willful attempt to not do it is not sufficient,
because you can’t account for all of the aspects of your
behavior and feeling and thinking that are versions of this
ritual. It will happen in any case. And it will happen
particularly mightily when your guard is down. So you can’t
make a decision not to do it, independent of inspection and
responsibility for the pattern that you’re involved in
because it’s not in the present that this situation exists.
The situation that you are struggling with emotionally
doesn’t exist in the present. It’s memory, it’s old
adaptation, it’s tendency. Not particularly memory of
incidents, but of the reactions, the patterns of adaptation
that you developed relative to incidents that bind you.
That’s what you all must realize; the incidents in the
past don’t have any significance in themselves, it’s the
patterns of adaptation that you created relative to them.
Those are what you’ve got to be responsible for. The
incidents are already gone, they don’t have any force except
by association. You’re not suffering the incidents of the
past, nor are you suffering the incidents of the present.
You are suffering from the patterns of adaptation, the
habits that are tending to persist. They are very ordinary
and you cannot do them once you’ve inspected your life and
see the pattern.
Everyone has done the same old thing their whole life;
you do it every day. You’ve done it in every new situation.
Every time a new level of experience or whatever appears,
you just adapt it to this pattern. You’ve always been doing
the same thing fundamentally, the same little scheme or
script, the same emotional habit. So it’s not overwhelmingly
complicated; it’s just that it is tending to persist. It’s
not by manipulating yourself in the present that you are
free of it, it’s by seeing this history and this pattern
that is present in the form of tendency, and being free on
the basis of that inspection to adapt to a new condition in
the present through the whole discipline of your spiritual
life, the Communion that it represents.
There isn’t anything complex about you or anybody else in
the whole world. Everybody has done the same thing; on the
basis of the vulnerability in the infantile situation when
they were moving into incarnation, everyone developed a
reactive pattern and presumption that essentially amounted
to not being responsible for love, or feeling-attention, and
through various games always looking for it to come to them.
Everybody in the whole world is doing that; that is all
anybody is doing unless they are understanding it, being
responsible for it and entering into the eternal incident
that is spiritually communicated to them in this moment.
That is the only way you can do something different than
everybody else in the world is doing. And there is no
magical release from the past, there is only responsibility
for it. Once you become responsible for it and adapt to the
eternal incident in the moment, then the past starts
becoming obsolete because you are adapting in a new way. The
reason it hasn’t changed yet, even though you’ve thought
about your life for years, is that you haven’t adapted
differently.
more:
Become
Responsible (original talk)
The
Spoiled Child
Seven
Stages of Life
I
Call you to Go Beyond the “Oedipal” Sufferings of
Childhood
You
Are Not the One Who Gets Loved
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