Heart Conversion Talk Series – Adi Da Samraj – Use the Religious Means

 

HEART CONVERSION TALK SERIES

Volume 1, Number 1 

Use the Religious Means

 

A Discourse Given by Sri Da Avabhasa on February 26, 1993

 

(1) DEVOTEE: Sri Gurudev, I am the type of person who tends to dramatize superiority, and this is something that You have Helped me to understand and go beyond over all the years of my involvement with You. I am very grateful for Your Help. My tendency to feel superior to others is still an issue in my relationship to You. It affects my ability to fully surrender myself at Your Feet and fully serve You.

 

(2) SRI DA AVABHASA: Is this feeling of superiority based on a realistic estimate of yourself?

 

(3) DEVOTEE: I do not think it is realistic, but it is something that I presume.

 

(4) SRI DA AVABHASA: If it is true that you are superior to others, you have far less to surrender than they do. Practice will be easier for you in that case.

 

(5) DEVOTEE: When I actually make the gesture of going beyond this mood of withdrawal, it is absolutely true that surrender is easy.

 

(6) SRI DA AVABHASA: The mood of withdrawal is not exactly the same as the feeling of superiority.

 

(7) DEVOTEE: I tend to dramatize withdrawal by putting myself down in my mind, thinking that I am unworthy. I was raised in a Roman Catholic environment and went to parochial schools for twelve years. There was a tremendous emphasis on behavior, and also on confession. As I grew up, I became a chronic masturbator. I had to confess this to the priest on a weekly basis. I felt guilty, particularly as the number of times I masturbated each week got greater and greater. At first, I masturbated only two or three times a week, but then I began to increase the frequency until I was masturbating twenty or thirty times a week. Finally, I was so self-conscious that I just stopped going to confession. There was no way to release the sense that I was a bad person. This built up in me and gave me the sense that I am unworthy, unlovable.

 

(8) SRI DA AVABHASA: So how often are you masturbating now?

 

(9) DEVOTEE: I do not masturbate.

 

(10) SRI DA AVABHASA: How did you get over this?

 

(11) DEVOTEE: I just stopped doing it. Actually, I started taking drugs. The pleasure of taking drugs was greater than the pleasure of masturbation.

 

(12) SRI DA AVABHASA: Have you stopped taking drugs?

 

(13) DEVOTEE: Oh yes, I stopped taking drugs many years ago.

 

(14) SRI DA AVABHASA: Did you stop masturbating while you were taking drugs?

 

(15) DEVOTEE: Yes. I also started having relationships with women at that time, and that helped, too.

 

(16) SRI DA AVABHASA: In other words, you became involved with other people sexually. Obviously, that relieved something of your impulse to masturbate. So-now you are no longer a jerk-off and a drug addict. What was your question?

 

(17) DEVOTEE: The feeling of being a sinner still arises for me. I tend to feel that I am unworthy and that I do not “have what it takes”. This feeling also has to do with my manhood, with how I see myself as a man. It affects my ability to succeed in life. I have never done anything significant with work, career, or making it in the world yet.

 

(18) When I came into the community of Your devotees years ago, I did start to upgrade my jobs, and I have continued to do so. I also became involved with my present intimate partner, who has some wealth of her own, but I have tended to be involved with her in a dependent kind of way.

 

(19) I have realized on this retreat in Your Company that I grew up in a very matriarchal family. My father used to call my mother “the boss”. That created the feeling in me that I get everything from women. At one point in my relationship with my intimate partner, she actually supported me financially. When You Offered us the “architecture of living” and Called intimate partners to be financially independent from one another, it was very difficult for me to give up my financial dependency on her. I have moved past that difficulty now, but the tendency to dramatize fear in order to get attention or have somebody take care of me is still there.

 

(20) SRI DA AVABHASA: So you are a jerk-off, a drug addict, and a freeloader! Now what is this homosexual business? Were you not going to mention that part?

 

(21) DEVOTEE: It hasnt come up for me on this retreat, but I did have a homosexual experience once.

 

(22) SRI DA AVABHASA: It was mentioned to Me. What about it?

 

(23) DEVOTEE: I had a homosexual experience when I was a hippie and hitchhiking. I did not like it. It was disgusting to me. I thought I no longer had homosexual inclinations, but while I have been on retreat, I have noticed that I have a certain sympathy for men. It is not exactly sexual. I do not feel it is sexual. I am much more attracted to women sexually.

 

(24) SRI DA AVABHASA: What is it, then?

 

(25) DEVOTEE: I think it is a tendency to weakness that I have as a male character, of being kind of fay and not fully masculine. What I have been trying to do . . .

 

(26) SRI DA AVABHASA: What does “fully masculine” mean?

 

(27) DEVOTEE: Being strong, decisive, being able to make decisions.

 

(28) SRI DA AVABHASA: There are all kinds of ways to be a male, but you think there is only one way. According to that kind of thinking, either you fulfill that one way or you are inferior.

 

(29) DEVOTEE: I tend to dramatize. My attempt to be strong comes out as anger, unlove, being righteous.

 

(30) SRI DA AVABHASA: What else?

 

(31) DEVOTEE: I feel a limitation in the process of surrender in relationship to You, Sri Gurudev. I feel a heart-connection to You in my meditation and in my service. I feel really heart-connected to You in that. Since coming on retreat, I have found that I have abstracted or institutionalized myself in relationship to You. It is very painful. I do not want to do that anymore. I want to have a direct, devotional relationship with You that is not filtered through the institutional role that I have assumed. I thought I could be a man and prove myself to You by taking on an institutional function, but it has come to the point where it is too painful for me to do it anymore.

 

(32) During my retreat, I have been struggling with the impulse to fully animate my devotion to You and with my holding back, this superiority, this fear, going back and forth between the two.

 

(33) SRI DA AVABHASA: Fear of what exactly?

 

(34) DEVOTEE: I think it has to do with Your being a male and my fear of men, and of being hurt physically. My father was a very suppressed character. He would give me a little energy here and there, and then every once in a while he would whale me, actually beat me. Because of this, and because he was not the dominant influence in my life-because my mother was the dominant influence-I developed this fear of men and the unique stress that is associated with it.

 

(35) SRI DA AVABHASA: Oh, yes, this all sounds very psychiatric, very analytical. What does this have to do with the religious life and God-Realization?

 

(36) DEVOTEE: I thought it had something to do with self-understanding. It is becoming clear to me that I have just been working on myself. My relationship to You is Granted by Grace.

 

(37) SRI DA AVABHASA: What about the practice of the Way of the Heart? If you are going to live the religious life, if you are going to choose the religious life, you must choose the religious means to deal with your problems. You are talking as if you are using worldly, egoic means, psychiatric means. What does this have to do with the religious life?

 

(38) DEVOTEE: It is not getting me anywhere, Sri Gurudev.

 

(39) SRI DA AVABHASA: What does that kind of approach have to do with your practice? You have your experience, your adaptations, and your complex this, that, and the other thing. So what? What does that have to do with religion?

 

(40) DEVOTEE: Nothing, Sri Gurudev.

 

(41) SRI DA AVABHASA: The religious life, as I have Given it to you, is a very specific practice. At the beginning, it involves body-based practices. That is it. That is how your problems and your necessary growth are to be dealt with. By that practice, you receive My Blessing and grow. So what difference does your psychiatric history make?

 

(42) DEVOTEE: It seems like I have been interfering with that process by superimposing all of this.

 

(43) SRI DA AVABHASA: That is one way of putting it, but what you are doing is failing to engage in the religious practice. It does not make any difference what your complex history or your tendencies are. The practice is the same. It is one practice Given to everyone. The practice is what I have Given you, and it transcends all of that-if you are practicing. If you do not practice, then all you have is all of that. What about it?

 

(44) DEVOTEE: I feel that I have been practicing to an extent, Sri Gurudev.

 

(45) SRI DA AVABHASA: “To an extent” is not what I am talking about. Doing it is what I am talking about-doing it moment to moment. Not doing something else-just that. This tendency, this thought, makes no difference. The practice is the same. It is self-surrendering, self-forgetting, self-transcending feeling-Contemplation of Me moment by moment. What difference does it make what there is to surrender, what there is to forget? The practice is the same.

 

(46) You must demonstrate this practice through all the characteristics of devotion to Me, service to Me, self-discipline in devotional response to Me, and meditative feeling-Contemplation of Me. You must handle your life-business, fulfill your personal responsibilities, and fulfill the responsibilities you share collectively with My other devotees. This is My Calling. This is the practice of the Way of the Heart. It does not make any difference who you are in ordinary human terms, what your tendencies are. There is nothing to be done about all of that but this practice.

 

(47) If you do this practice, you are reflected to yourself, you observe yourself, you understand yourself further because you are obliged by what you observe. You practice self-surrendering, self-forgetting, and self-transcending feeling-Contemplation of Me, you take on various yamas and niyamas, you take on more self-discipline, you intensify your service to Me, you magnify all the practices of devotion to Me, you magnify your feeling-Contemplation of Me. These are the religious means. These are your obligation. 

 

(48) What difference does it make what your tendencies are? They are all garbage. You are just arguing. You are projecting your tendencies and pretending they are an obstacle. They are not an obstacle to the religious life. They are the stuff to be yielded, that is all.

 

(49) True religion is being corrupted by the worldly notion that it is some sort of support for social morality and really nothing more. If you have a problem of the social personality, you are not encouraged to use religion to deal with it. You are sent to a psychiatrist, you find a social worker, you go to some social agency or other. You try to deal with it by applying some method or other. Instead of using the religious means to deal with all of your limitations, you use religion as a secular support to make you feel positive about social values. You try to deal with all of your complexes and your difficulties, which are really egoic limitations, by resorting to secular means.

 

(50) In the religious life, however, you resort entirely to the religious means. The religious process deals with all of this.

 

(51) There were no psychiatrists one hundred years ago. How did people work to get well then? They did not go to psychiatrists. Those who were religious used the religious means. Like most people today, you propose to be a little bit religious and still use secular means, ego-based means, to go to a psychiatrist or do something to yourself, puzzling and worrying over this and that fraction of your social or anti-social disposition-all for what purpose? Just to be political? Just to be worldly?

 

(52) The religious means I have Given you will purify you of all your aberrations and transform you. The religious means I have Given you will also prepare you for a Spiritual relationship to Me, and the Spiritually-activated practice of the Way of the Heart. The truly religious life is not a struggle with social personality problems. Religion does address such things at the beginning, but then it moves on.

 

(53) The process of Satsang with Me is about perfectly self-transcending God-Realization. Therefore, it is about God-Communion. Your resort to Me is resort to the Divine. If you are Godless, you will not use Me rightly. Then I am just some male “other” for you to struggle with in the context of your social-personality problem. What does regarding your Heart-Master as an ordinary man have to do with religion? According to the traditions, to treat Me as an ordinary man is the worst thing you can do. This is how you deny Grace, and you deny the benefits of the religious life.

 

(54) Therefore, persist in this self-surrender, this self-forgetting, this self-transcendence, this feeling-Contemplation of Me. Be attracted to Me beyond your egoic self. Engage the practices of devotion to Me. Engage all the practices of the Way of the Heart that I have Given you. Do them more intensively. Do them more often. Do the fundamental practice of Ishta-Guru-Bhakti moment by moment. Resort to Me moment by moment. Demonstrate your practice through real Sat-Guru Seva. Be fully confessed in the culture of My devotees, and embrace yamas and niyamas to deal with your limitations. Be rightly self-disciplined. Handle your life-business, and do it from the beginning of your practice of the Way of the Heart. Handling your life-business is the foundation. Meditate more. These are the religious means I have Given you.

 

(55) The Ultimate Means is the Very Divine, your True Heart-Master, Who I Am. My Blessing of you is the Ultimate Means. But the religious means by which you express your practice of the Way of the Heart moment to moment are the ones I just enumerated to you. They are what you must increase, therefore. They are what you must intensify. They are what you must magnify. You must increase your resort to Me. Do it moment by moment.

 

(56) What difference does your history make? You hardly remember any of it, anyway, this little piece of time since you booped out of your mother. What about all the rest of it? You have no memory of what came before, and you do not sit around thinking about all the limitations you inherited from your past experiences. Yet they are as intact as any experience or limitation in this lifetime. Your present lifetime is just a reflection of all the knots of egoity that are intact in you in this very moment. You cannot account for all of it.

 

(57) To choose the religion means you must do religion and do it for real. You must also confess your tendencies as appropriate in the Way of the Heart-not like a “bad boy” who is prepared to be blamed, but as someone who is straight, known, cooperating with other devotees, and intelligent. In the Way of the Heart, the purpose of confession is to be known to yourself so that you know how to increase the details of your self-discipline and of your practice altogether. It does not make any difference what you have to confess, no difference whatsoever. The entire purpose of confession in the Way of the Heart is that you deal more and more profoundly with your limitations so that you become be more fit to practice the religious life.

 

(58) Confession in the Way of the Heart is the means for discovering what, precisely, you must do further in your service, to improve your meditation. This is the purpose of confession. Therefore, nothing should be hidden. Why hide anything? You will not be punished. What does “sin” mean, anyway? It comes from the Greek word “hamartia”, which means “to miss the mark”, the Mark of God, of Divine-Communion. Sin is dissociation from the Divine, not mere acts. All sins are the same. They are all about missing the mark.

 

(59) The purpose of confession in the Way of the Heart, then, is to improve your ability to meet the mark. What your limitations are makes no difference. Whatever you discover about your limitations is only conditional self-knowledge. Your practice is to be confessed, to be known, to embrace yamas and niyamas, to take on the disciplines of the Way of the Heart.

 

(60) DEVOTEE: What has kept me from being fully confessed is the feeling of being embarrassed, as if I am wrong somehow.

 

(61) SRI DA AVABHASA: You are! You missed the mark. Improve your act. It is not that you are bad. You are not a little boy anymore. It is not about your having some kind of wrongness as a self-image. You are missing the mark. That is why you have come to Me. That is why you have chosen the life of the Heart in My Company. You have missed the mark-it is just plain old so. However, you are using this fact as self-imagery. Your tendencies are just the stuff of the religious life, that is all. They are your impediments to Divine Self-Realization. They must be known by you, and confessed to others. Your confession must be plain, open, and simple. You must be willing to go further.

 

(62) All your limitations should be confessed, but the life in My Company is not merely about confession. Confession is just an element of the Way of the Heart. The practice is Ishta-Guru-Bhakti, moment to moment, to surrender and feel beyond yourself, to forget yourself in Communion with Me, to make this counter-egoic effort moment by moment and embrace disciplines that improve your ability to do so. Confession is just part of the means that enable you to do so more and more profoundly and to continue to grow.

 

(63) Realize the culture in which you live. Realize My Company. What difference does it make that your family was what it was? These are things to know about, but they do not make any difference. The practice is the same.

 

(64) I am Calling you to meet the mark and to improve your ability to do so, so that you can receive My Spiritual Blessing. I am Calling you to Commune with Me, to meet the mark so that you can more and more fully enter into this Divine Communion, this Communion with Me-just that. You will have to deal with your sense of embarrassment. See that it is just reluctance, a way of failing to meet the mark, and be willing to tell it all.

 

(65) What difference does it all make? Do you think that any of your friends here are less complicated than you? There are jerk-offs and drug users and dependent characters and free-loaders and people who have done every other damn thing that you have not even thought about doing just in this little crowd here. You are all sinners in the sense that you are missing the mark. You are here in this cooperative gathering to help everyone meet the mark.

 

(66) It should be a congenial gathering of My devotees-congenial to confession, congenial to self-understanding, congenial to practice of the Way of the Heart. Make your confession, as everybody else should do. You do not really stand out so much. You are just another damn fool, that is all, just another of My devotees. So what? Do you want to settle for any less? No? Then be confessed. Embrace the practice that I have Given you. These are the means.

 

(67) Do you need to go to a psychiatrist and psychoanalyze yourself or meditate on yourself? By tendency, yes, maybe, but you are talking as if you are psychoanalyzing yourself now. You present yourself as a complex personality rather than as My devotee who is simply doing this practice.

 

(68) What else are you embarrassed about? Is there anything you have not told anyone yet?

 

(69) DEVOTEE: I have confessed everything else, I think.

 

(70) SRI DA AVABHASA: Is there anything you are reluctant to say?

 

(71) DEVOTEE: Nothing is coming up right now, Sri Gurudev.

 

(72) SRI DA AVABHASA: Back there somewhere? Anything you want to whisper it in My ear? Anything at all? Say it out loud, if there is, because when you whisper it in My ear I am going to tell everybody anyway. [Laughter.]

 

(73) DEVOTEE: Yes, there is one thing. Telling You that I love You.

 

(74) SRI DA AVABHASA: Tcha.

 

(75) DEVOTEE: Sri Gurudev, I have a hard time saying that.

 

(76) SRI DA AVABHASA: Why is that?

 

(77) DEVOTEE: I do not know.

 

(78) SRI DA AVABHASA: Part of the reluctance to say to anyone that you love the person is that you do not want to trivialize your love. There is a great deal of this reluctance between intimates, between emotional-sexual intimates, for instance. Women tend to be more emotionally expressive and more emotionally expectant than men. Therefore, women tend to complain that their male intimate does not say the words “I love you” often enough. 

 

(79) You know that trivia. The drama appears in movies, so you all know about it. You have probably played it out yourself. The woman wants the man to say “I love you”, and he does not say it enough. Part of the male reluctance is an unwillingness to trivialize love, to say words without sufficient expression that the feeling will be noticed or felt to be enough, therefore always being required to be blapping out the greeting-card message. Part of the reluctance is the unwillingness to trivialize love, or the feeling of embarrassment because you do not want to trivialize it.

 

(80) Another element of it, however, is just the refusal to love-not merely the refusal to say love but the refusal to do it. Again in man-woman relations, if the man actually did love more, the woman would be more satisfied.

 

(81) I mentioned to you all recently that in the Islamic tradition, all Muslims are instructed to throw themselves in prayer at the feet of God, to implore the Divine like a child, to weep, to be utterly, fully given. Why would you be reluctant to do so? Why be reluctant to love in any case? To love is your obligation. Be aware of your reluctance, but surrender, forget yourself, animate yourself, be expressive, override your refusal, do the counter-egoic act. If at first you are embarrassed about it, do it and be embarrassed. Then do it some more. Animate the voice of praise, the expression of love. Say it. Do it. Live it. Oblige yourself. Do not just sit around meditating on your reluctance to do so. “Consider” the matter and then do it. And do it some more. And do it more and more.

 

(82) At your next devotional group, confess your devotion to Me and receive the discipline to increase your practice, to magnify your expression of love, your expression of devotion, your expression of praise. Make agreements there on how you will do it, and then oblige yourself to do so, in spite of your reluctance. Confess all your reluctance, all your embarrassment-that is fine-but the practice is to do it, to override your resistance. The more you override it, the more you are purified of the reluctance-not by your analyzing your reluctance and dwelling on it and meditating on it forever, but by accepting the discipline and engaging yourself in this counter-egoic effort, this responsible practice, whereby you override the very thing you know is your impediment.

 

(83) If your tendency embarrasses you, so what? After a while it will not embarrass you anymore. You will notice that it does not bother you anymore because you are doing something else. Doing something else is what the religious life is about. Doing the other thing, the “else”, the very thing you are reluctant to do. That is the cure.

 

(84) Instead of living like an addict, an ego, do the other thing. Do the discipline. It is difficult. It requires a confrontation with your limitations. It requires you to go beyond them. That is the how it is. You all think you are supposed to meet forever and talk about your limitations, then that is the end of the evening and you go on and dramatize some more. The whole purpose of that very setting of confession is that you receive new disciplines, you agree to new disciplines, new yamas and niyamas, and all the necessary intensifications of your practice, and then you are obliged by others who will measure you by your agreement because they are your friends, your fellow devotees.

 

(85) Accept that discipline and just do it. “Consider” the same matter again, some days, weeks, months later, and take on more. That is how you grow-by using the religious means, by actually doing the discipline. It makes no difference what your impediments are, what your limitations are. You must use the means, actually perform the discipline, and be obliged to do so. This is how you are cured by religion. Anything called “religion” that does not involve such practice is not real religion. It is not curing you of anything.

 

(86) You cannot bite the whole piece in one day. You cannot go to the seventh stage of life after a mere discussion and a little bit of improvement. It is a progressive matter. You begin at the beginning. You take on the disciplines and increase them progressively, and you grow. It is very simple, is it not? It is all a matter of actually doing it, that is all, instead of making a “talking” school out of it in which you never actually embrace the thing that you are not yet doing.

 

(87) You must oblige yourself to do it. The more you do it, the more open you are to Me and My Blessing, which is the primal means of your growth. Your response, your self-responsibility, your discipline must meet Me so that there is cooperation between us. Your must do your part.

 

(88) It is fine to discuss all the impediments of your past and all the rest of it, but what disciplines should you assume? What disciplines should you increase? What practices should you magnify? What should you do more often or moment by moment? Embrace the necessary discipline, and that is it.

 

(89) You must not fail to handle your life-business. Otherwise you are constantly preoccupied with the imbalances, confusions, and complexities of your ordinary living. These must be simplified and set straight. Handling your life-business, including, very importantly, your emotional-sexual business, is the very foundation, the beginning, of the Way of the Heart. To straighten out your life is your obligation.

 

(90) What is there to talk about? How to improve the discipline of your emotional-sexual life. What you should be talking about is this: sexual “conscious exercise”, regulation of the frequency of occasions, refinements such as that. However, you are always telling Me that you want to stay together or you want to separate, or you do not want anything to do with it, or you have complex reasons-this, that, or the other reason-why you cannot do anything at all. You do not handle your life-business as a basis for moving on. You are always dealing with the non-handled life-business, the things that precede responsibility. You are always creating more and more complexity. You put in a little time with some intimate, you break up that intimacy, and you start all over from the beginning again. Even if you stay with some intimate, you never handle your business there and you never get down to the refinements, the subtleties, the details of intimate relationship.

 

(91) The handling of life-business is most fundamental. Much of it is not about the emotional-sexual matter. Diet, for instance, work, occupation, and daily matters-all of this must be straightened out, conformed to Me, made straightforward. You must really work on these things. Do not presume that your relationship to Me is just about some romantic emotional expression or dependency, or about belonging to the club. It is about this real practice, and handling your life-business is most fundamental to it at the beginning.

 

(92) By life-business I mean, essentially, all those things associated with the first three stages of life. If you do not handle those things, how is there going to be any growth? The Way of the Heart is about Perfectly self-transcending God-Realization. You must deal with all the rest of the stages of life as well. If you waste your life complicating the first three stages of life, there is no growth.

 

(93) You all come out of the common world, which has particular features these days associated with a certain politics, a certain kind of social message, certain ideas that are rather European and lately American, rather Protestant notions that come out of the Christian tradition but that have also infiltrated the social life and the economics of the entire world. The egalitarian politics, the political extension of Protestant Christianity, has infiltrated all other cultures. The Western habit of recent centuries is more and more reducing religion to a support for social morality. It is a reduction of religion, the emptying of religion of its fundamental reality and process-which is God-Realization.

 

(94) Other Christian traditions are quite different from Protestantism. They are not egalitarian in nature. They are not suppressive of the individual. In the Orthodox Christian tradition, for instance, there exists a long-standing tradition of resorting to holy men and women. Who resorts to holy men and women in the Protestant Christian tradition? To do so is anathema. In the anti-Guruism politics that stems from this tradition, everybody is equal and religion is trivial, embraced merely for social purposes. Therefore, why resort to a holy man or woman, a Guru, a Realizer of any degree? It is not common in the ordinary world these days. Such is the emptying of religion.

 

(95) Part of the fault you have inherited as Westerners, and “Westernized” people, is the trivialization of religion, the reduction of religion to social morality and therefore to utopian-egalitarian politics. Such politics has nothing to do with God-Realization and nothing to do with true religion. It is just a social and political endeavor-and not very successful, by the way, if you listen to the daily news. It is not going to be successful ultimately, either.

 

(96) The transformation of humankind is about God-Realization, not the perfection of this world here. The world is to be submitted, not perfected. It cannot be perfected. Try to perfect it on its own, and you dissociate from its Source. If everything is reassociated with its Source, then everything becomes about Perfectly self-transcending God-Realization. Therefore, all the forms of your reluctance, which is based on your inherited political views and all the rest of it, your reluctance to resort to the Divine, your reluctance to use the Realizer, and your reluctance to practice submission are all common faults. They are heresies in fact, part of an anti-religious motive that ultimately values the ego and worldliness and body-based intentions only.

 

(97) Why are you troubled? Because you are dissociated from your Source. In other words, using traditional language, you are sinners. Such dissociation is what “sin” means. There are other words in other traditions, but “sin” is one that you are all commonly aware of. There are other ways to describe it-egoic “self-possession”, for example. What is it all about? Dissociation from the Source, from the Divine Self-Condition, the Condition of conditions. True religion is all about conversion from that dissociation to Communion with and, ultimately, to Realization of the Source, the Divine Self-Condition. 

 

(98) To choose the Way of the Heart, then, is to choose the Way of submission, of self-transcendence, of Divine Communion, Divine Realization, sinlessness, meeting the mark rather than missing it. It is a great discipline, a great process. It is the singular value of existence in this conditional world. All else is sin, diversion, egoic “self-possession”, dramatization. If you know this, then you know the discipline you must assume. That discipline is about surrender of egoic “self-possession”, forgetting of separate and separative self, Communion with the One Who Is , Communion with the Source. This is the means of release, of purification.

 

(99) To be merely worldly is to be a heretic, an infidel, without fidelity to the Source. True religion is not about that. What you in your egoity think is religion is a bastardization of religion, a reduction of it, an emptying of it. The Way of the Heart in My Company is true religion. It is about Divine Self-Realization, self-transcendence in the Divine.

 

(100) Having understood this, you must embrace the discipline. What difference does it make what the impediments are, what the limits are? It is just the fuel for the process, if you release more and more energy for the God-Realizing process by surrendering these impediments, these limitations, in true devotion to Me. Live the actively Contemplative life, the really done Contemplative life-not sitting apart dreaming but submitting all your parts, all your functions, all your actions into Divine Communion with Me and releasing your obstinacy. Are you too obstinate to surrender to your True Heart-Master? See this fault and practice the counter-egoic action that enables you to be purified and to transcend your limitations. It does not make any difference what the limitations are. The process is the same in all cases.

 

(101) You have been devoted to your egoic self instead. You want to think about yourself endlessly and be reluctant. All the flap you just told Me was about that, and that is not it. Certainly all of it is to be told. You can be confessed. But it is not the practice, obviously.