The Way of The Mirror Is Me, The Aletheon.
The Constant Message in Life
Our Search, Despair and Play with the Fact of Death
Adi Da Samraj, 1976
Adi Da talking informally to a small group of his devotees at the Mountain of Attention Sanctuary.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Death is your philosophy by virtue of the fact that it is something external and therefore factual. You are a body, you see other bodies die and you feel the sorrow and loss connected with it. Death ceases to be a matter that you can be responsible for, it becomes a fact of life. Therefore, you can only submit to it, you can only realize death. You are totally committed to it as a fact of life without inspection and therefore you can only bring it about. Because it is a fact, a something, something completely independent of your spiritual realizing, you’re getting consoled, your ability and inability to cope with it. No matter what you do, it is a fact.
If you examine really death and its profound implications you will see in yourself and in everyone else that basically the assumption and the reality of it is made from moment to moment. What is being communicated to one another is death, failure, mortality, limitation, suffering, and the defenses of it with no resort no God, Truth, or a higher sense of Reality. That’s basically all that is going on. Everything is a servant of that image, that belief. Every time things get a little difficult you opt for it, you go for the feelings, the negativity the bad circumstance. You immediately make them the condition. It’s constantly being fed to you in every form of media, moment to moment. Another disaster, a mass shooting, and all the while the enemy is lurking in the dark corners of towns and cities. You don’t have any real comprehension that there is a higher form of presence that you really represent. This higher form of presence is independent of all the negativity you’re involved with every day.
You can be fundamentally responsible for what can be rightly called the ‘death message’. It is not until you come to the point of responsibility, knowing that the communication of death and fear the media and you are manufacturing and living is a matter of your own responsibility. This sense of limitation and the sense of death, mortality, and limitation is being created by you, and everyone else moment to moment.
Prior to that responsibility, you can’t make a real gesture because the whole impulse and belief in the death message is not just a superficial one that you can play around in your mind. It’s not just a little diddly philosophy. You are entirely committed to it. It’s a part of your consciousness. Your body is working it out. A little positive thinking or rehearsing positive message in your unconscious is not sufficient. You must come to the point of Consciousness in your unconsciousness. In your daily life, you must see the messages that you are creating.
The culture is a great enterprise that serves whatever individuals are doing. But this process by which the death message appears is present in every individual prior to all this culturing. It is this separative activity, this contraction. That’s the root of it. That’s the source of it. That’s why culture can develop. That’s why you all can be involved in it. This great desperate scheme. That is this culture.
You can not see what it is, you can’t inspect it because its root is in yourself and your just exploiting that. Its root is not out there. You can’t find ‘a why’ a reason for it. You are committed to the point of view, personally. This gives you all sorts of justifications. The culture indoctrinates, glamorizes, justifies, reinforces, and brings it out of the realm of subjectivity, into the whole theatre of life. When it reaches the level of culture it is very difficult to find a way back. That is why the Guru appears in the particular form of the human being at random times. When the whole force of ignorance has not become just subjectivity but culture, life itself than were is wisdom going to come from? There are no windows within any longer. In that case, the Guru comes as an individual, a person. The Guru must become the window, must reestablish, reinitiate that possibility. Because there is no ordinary possibility to which the Divine Influence is being generated.
After it’s initiated then it can take on the form of the community because at that point there is a cultural and human representation of it. There is subjective representation of it. There are human lives, individual lives that have become involved in that process. Whenever it does exist, when the dharma exists in the world the Guru doesn’t appear. The Guru is a specific kind of function that appears when there is no option when the dharma is for all practical purposes dead. When things called the dharma are identified with the death message, the failure, the mortal view, where they seem to be talking about God and Truth and Realization and all the rest. They are still representing and serving that limitation. They are not serving the liberation or transformation in Truth of living beings.
So, when the Guru does appear he is just as much a critic, just as much prophetically annoying active relative to the remenants of dharma the spiritual traditions, as he is to any other appearance in that culture. Its all part of the same trip, same game. It must all be undone. It must all be inspected. All must be transformed, every single piece of it. None of it is good. They don’t want to hear that! (laughter)
Suffering is every day.
Illusions are the constant content of ego-bound existence.
Who can—or should—be comfortable with any and all of that?
Only a fool could be comfortable with any and all of that or would want to be comfortable with
any and all of that.
Adi Da Samraj – The Aletheon
The game of life is being played in those terms it is false. Everything even the most seemingly harmless and positive things are really the servants of that ultimate event of failure of death, of separation of no God. In that sense when the individual has been transformed in their consciousness and is responsible and transformed in life then changes occur. He changes his culture, his society of living, his community of living. Then there are plenty of good things to be said about it. It’s not life itself that is wrong, life is not death, the Divine influence is a positive communication about life, only when life is known in truth.
The contraction that I’m always talking about is not just a little anxiety reaction in your stomach or something. It’s the force of your being. The force of your life. It’s transformed into the life of understanding. The force that others represent to you become something that you become capable of dealing with. This affair of avoidance of relationship, this contraction, and so forth. It is that activity in you in which you make that assumption in you becomes a separate one, a dying one, to become limited to the lowest dimension of perceived functions and experiences. There must be sadhana done. Not just a message that is benign, but there must be sadhana done in which you uncover this activity. Which has you making these assumptions, has you dramatizing life as you do.
When you haven’t examined it to the point of responsibility then it doesn’t take place any more. Then there is a real influence a real siddhi appears in the case of the individual. But from the cultural point of view, one thing unique about this time is that that dimensional influence itself it not permitted. It is excluded culturally. Whereas in traditional cultures it was not excluded. People were still making these negative assumptions but the warfare between the Divine point of view and the mortal point of view was a cultural process known and permitted. But in our time and place in the appearance of the World Culture it’s not permitted and more and more institutions become established in which that dimensional influence is excluded.
The kinds of movements or influences that are acceptable today are those that make promises or gives expectations of improvements. These kinds of approaches can be sold as ways of making you able to cope better but not to change fundamentally your point of view. The real esoteric practices are supposed to be hidden in India somewhere. You’re surely not going to sell the Guru number to anyone today in America. But you can sell the ideas that you can make someone happier, thinner, more relaxed, richer, and more able to maximize one’s hidden potential. People today are having difficulty keeping up with the fast pace of change in today’s global world. Tribal conflicts in Syria are played out on major network channels as lead stories in BBC world news broadcasts if they have real consequences for someone in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The death message enters the homes and lives of everyone on Facebook every two seconds, refresh the page and your whole world view changes instantly. Soft warm fuzzy cats play in the mirror and flowers and sunsets with quotes from world leaders professing peace and equality to all are championed as hope for humanity.