There Is Nothing Left But the Ash

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You can see
the history of My Work, its various stages of development,
beginning with the birth itself. Then after the birth there
is the time I have told you about, in my second year or so,
of accepting the circumstance and the process that went on
from there, until sadhana became necessary, it seemed. A
great Urge appeared that produced the whole adventure
leading to the Vedanta
Temple.

But that was not the end of it. That
simply was a sign that the work with these vehicles had gone
on long enough that Teaching Work could begin. A sufficient
transformation of these vehicles had occurred for the
Confession of Awakening to be made in the context of this
body-mind, gross and subtle, or deep. But it was just the
beginning of the Work for which I had taken birth. It was
the beginning of my taking on and transforming the qualities
of others through this vehicle.

That is what I did for all those
years of Teaching Work, until the Great Event in 1986 in
which all that was accomplished by a unique Gesture, a
Demonstration about which all of you have heard something.
Some of you were around me at the time, heard me say things,
observed me in one way or another. And I have talked about
it on a variety of occasions over the last two and a half
years or so, said things about it that were intended to be
revealing about it. But I also called upon you all to
consider it, show me your response, show me your sign,
indicate your understanding to me. And there has been almost
nothing in response. Just an amazing creation of chaos has
been going on here and no response whatsoever,
really.

Looking at this gathering as a
whole, it seems to be in many ways living in the past, in
terms of being stuck in a negative withdrawal over the last
few years, and living in the past in the sense of wanting to
go back and do it all over again or resume the quality of
relationship that you had to me in past years during my
Teaching time when I was trying to help you come to the
point of being able to do this sadhana fully. But neither
one of those tendencies is appropriate.

You all may be lingering in the
reactivity and withdrawal of the last few years, and I am
here trying to work with you on the basis of this Great
Event in 1986, which you hardly had the attention even to
observe. You all want to associate with me as you did in the
past, and I am not even here anymore in that form. Yet you
persist, approaching me as if I were, and dramatizing all
your reluctance and amateurishness, as if I am going to
respond by Teaching again, I suppose, or by letting you off
the hook, or by associating with you on some other basis
than the demand for real practice. And I am not going to do
that. It is not there to be done. It is not there to be
repeated once and for all with grand changes even in my own
Sign. It is not something than can be repeated, but it would
not be fruitful to repeat either.

Because of the accomplishment of
this Great Work, a great opportunity exists for you, for
anyone who will practice, but there is really nothing much
that has been done about it to date. I have indicated to you
some very basic things that would have to change. I am
simply here to do the one do thing that I Am. You all need
to establish the Treasures. You all need to establish an a
culture, and a community rightly serve practitioners. And as
the basis for both of those you must establish the first
circle beyond the Kanyas in this Mandala. In other words,
you bring forward a gathering of devotees who can provide an
appropriate link between me and practitioners generally. I
am looking for those who can, who do, understand my Work,
those whose acknowledgment is true, those whose relationship
to me is right, those whose practice is exemplary, to those
who understand all these matters and can therefore rightly
communicate it to others and align them to me rightly so
they can make use of me, even as beginners.

Fundamentally the Kanyas am only
ones who do sadhana in my company, the only ones who
maintain a intimate association with me, are accountable to
me in their prate function as devotees in my They are the
only ones. All the rest have left and are out there in
religion-business land or in the midst of your reluctance,
whatever it may be. They are the only ones who have
continued this direct sadhana.

Everyone must do such sadhana. That
is what the Way of the Heart is all about. But the rest of
the gathering has not, to date, rightly and fully
established link with me. And that is, in some basic sense,
what we are trying to create here, a restoration of that
link. To do so requires establishing the Treasures, putting
the institution, the culture, and the community on the right
track for the first time really and it includes the coming
forward of a gathering of devotees.

DEVOTEE: Love-Ananda I wasn’t
completely clear on the distinction You were making between
the in Awakening into Sahaj Samadhi at Vedanta Temple and
the Death Event in Fiji in 1986, particularly in relation to
what You are referring to as the gross personality and the
deeper personality and how the sadhana changed, and how the
sadhana developed through the end of Your Teaching
Work.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I
wouldn’t call it sadhana. I didn’t do sadhana after Vedanta
Temple Event. I did my Work after the Vedanta Temple
Event.

All aspects of this manifest
personality, gross and subtle, became capable of the great
Confession in the Vedanta Temple Event. That was full
Awakening in the context of this body-mind, gross, subtle,
and causal. It wasn’t my Enlightenment, so to speak. It was
the product of my work with this vehicle, all those thirty
years, so that this Awakening could be brought into the
context of the body-mind rather than simply be Prior to
it.

After that Event my Teaching Work
began. That Event initiated the Teaching Work. It initiated
a process. So did the Death Event two and a half years ago.
The Death Event also initiated a process, which has been
going on since, but a different kind of process. From the
time of the Vedanta Temple Event until the Event in 1986
there was all that Teaching Work, which was submission to
others in order to Teach. I used all the ordinary and
extraordinary signs in this vehicle, all the ordinary signs
of the gross personality, all the extraordinary signs of the
deeper personality, in a Play with others to Instruct and
Awaken them. I used my capacity to assume the likeness of
others for all those years to reflect them to
themselves.

In that process of assuming the
likeness of others in my submission to them, the vehicle,
gross and subtle, took on all those karmas, absorbing all
that likeness and ultimately forcing the crisis of the Death
Event in 1986, when the Work ceased to be one of submitting
to others, and my life in its appearance ceased to be one of
assuming the likenesses of the grosser and deeper
personality associated with this birth. Whatever qualities
there may be in this body through its inheritance, and in
the deeper psyche by virtue of its inheritance, are no
longer animated in any sense on their own, so to speak. Such
things are inherently karmic entities. Their karmas are
purified.

But in the Death Event in which, as
I have said, all of this was assumed by me to the toes, all
that had been inherited in this body-mind in this lifetime
and previously was likewise submitted, providing a unique
vehicle for the service of others, a unique nakedness of
Siddhi, which only devotees can confess. Find it out then.
How much more do you want me to tell you? If you come to me
as a devotee and do the practice in my Company, you receive
the Gift. You tell me what it is. You tell one another what
it is. You find out what it is.

You do not receive that Gift merely
by coming into a room where I happen to be, you see. You
must do the sadhana. And what you experience in my Company
is based not only on the sadhana but also on your current
stage of availability, your current stage of practice. You
make room for this Blessing by getting out of the way, by
making the great submission, by truly doing the sadhana, by
entering into the real practice in my Company, the true
engagement with me, which is real sadhana, not some abstract
religion-business version of it all, but the real sadhana,
which requires you to give up your conventional destiny. It
requires you to do what a human being should do, which is to
submit all aspects of the manifest personality to the Divine
Condition in a process that transcends
limitations.

But instead of doing that, you see,
human beings ordinarily are submitting to their own apparent
mechanisms. They are deluded by their own energies, their
own Shaktis, so to speak, their own tendencies, their own
vehicles of manifestation. They are deluded by the gross
personality, and then if they break that up a little bit,
they start becoming deluded by the deeper personality, you
see. They move from being little egos to being bigger egos,
and still it is all the egoic process. It is all a matter of
the illusions of the cosmic display. What must be Realized
is the Divine Condition Itself, the secret of Which is Prior
to the body-mind, Prior to the gross and deeper aspects of
manifestation. It is Consciousness Itself, yes, but
Consciousness Realizing Its Inherent Condition.

I am here to serve that Process, to
establish that Process, to Awaken others if they approach me
understanding Who I Am and what my Work is, and if they are
able to seriously enter into the real and Great Process. If
you will not do that, then there is really nothing more I
can do, you see. I have done what I can do and said what I
have to say, and now it is completely up to every individual
to make a decision about the matter.

Do you have any more questions about
the difference between these two events?

DEVOTEE: I think You
clarified it. Thank You.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: The
Vedanta Temple Event initiated the Teaching Work or the Work
of submission to others. The Death Event brought an end to
the process of submission to others. It initiated that time
of my Work in which it is required, obligatory, that people
enter into the traditional Guru-devotee relationship, that
they make their submission, that they respond to me and no
longer require me to respond to them as I did as Teacher.
All that submission to others became summarized in the Death
Event in 1986 and was brought to an end there, and now a new
Work continues as a potential, if people will make use of my
Company. If they will not, there is no Work going on. It is
not that there was one kind of Enlightenment in 1970 and
another kind of Enlightenment in 1986. I am not talking
about my Enlightenment! I am talking about your
Enlightenment, Work done for your sake, which appeared in
different forms, stages of Work for your sake at various
points in my apparent lifetime.

At the time of the Vedanta Temple
Event that Work produced one particular Sign, the Teaching
Work. After the Death Event another particular Sign
appeared. Is there anything about it that is not
clear?

DEVOTEE: One of the things
You said that was clarifying for me was that the Process is
revealed over time. I was just thinking of Your own Teaching
Work, how it began after the Vedanta Temple Event. It took a
few years for Your Teaching Work to really take hold and
then a period where it became very animated and instructive,
and You drew all of us to You very directly and concretely.
It was very useful for me today to hear You talk about the
Death Event as a process also. It is a process, I feel, of
Revelation for us because there had been such a reluctance
on our part to really understand it and feel the
significance of it so that we can allow You to actually
animate that Sign in its Fullness.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You won’t
be able to understand it really until what it requires of
you becomes acceptable to you. It carries with it an
inherent demand, if you understand it. If you say you
understand it, you must do what it requires. But you would
rather put some mind in between and not understand it, so
that you can pretend you are a beginner and do not really
have to practice very much yet and all the rest of
it.

The psychology of not wanting to be
obliged has a great deal to do with it. More than anything
else, I think, that is it. You want things to be as they
were and you want to be let off the hook relative to
sadhana. When sadhana becomes the point and you become
serious about it, then my Sign becomes comprehensible to
you.

As we just pointed out again, this
Event in 1986 initiated a process, the first aspect of which
was the sign of penance, or “tapas”. Just as the Event
itself was associated with a death, or a giving up, its
continued sign for some period of time is the sign in some
exaggerated sense of tapas, or penance, beginning with the
“sannyas” time. All that had been accumulated was naturally,
not through some kind of effort, but quite naturally and
spontaneously, released, purified. The initial sign took the
form, then, of extreme detachment, and over time that
detachment became more normalized. It has not gone away,
obviously, but something about it has been absorbed,
understood, accommodated by you.

I did that initial work to the point
that it was finished and no longer necessary. The next stage
came, which was the stage of dealing with your neglect and
abuse of this one. That was last year, during the “Indoor
Yajna” period, and to this day I have endured your continued
neglect and abuse, and your apparent lack of understanding
of what I am about, what my Work is about, what the
relationship to me is for, and the reluctance on the part of
practitioners to seriously accept their responsibilities for
the practice and for everything that relates to the
Treasures and for the institution, the culture, and the
community. There is a kind of tapas I must endure by
standing firm and raising my voice as necessary, to simply
make it clear that this is something you are going to have
to deal with, something you are going to have to understand.
I am not here to take a step back to do the past again. The
Way is here for you now as a demand, a Calling, and if you
want to respond to that Calling, you must accept the
responsibilities that come with it.

Is there anything more about
that?

DEVOTEE: No. Thank
You.

DEVOTEE: I realize that part
of my reluctance has been a misunderstanding of the process
itself, which You have made very clear, yet I have held out,
in a sense, hoping that somehow the past could be repeated.
In fact what You are now for us is merely Present. I realize
that You have altogether stopped making that gesture, that
what actually died was that gesture rather than a person.
And I realize that what we have to do is make a
sacrifice…

ADI DA SAMRAJ: It wasn’t
that I decided not to make the gesture anymore. I made it
completely. The gesture was submission to devotees,
submission to practitioners, submission to others,
submission to the world. That does not come to an end until
death. Submission to death is such a process. I didn’t
decide to not do it anymore. I did it completely, and my
doing it completely forced another sign, another
demonstration, of this Siddhi that changed the Work itself,
changed the stage of my Demonstration and my Work with
others.

DEVOTEE: I realized that
similarly we must die to the gesture we have been making, or
refusing to make.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: The
gesture you have been making is submission to yourself. So
you have to have a “death event” to submit to the Divine,
submit to the Sat-Guru. You have to change the course your
life – which you have done not done up until now. You all as
a gathering have not done this until now. You have been
indulging in my submitting to you for as long as you have
known me. You figure that is just something I do, it is just
there, it is the way it is supposed to and you all go on
remaining rather superficial and unresponsive. That has
nothing to do with sadhana. That has nothing to do with
Liberation. That is foolishness, see, worldliness. To do
sadhana you must die to yourself in some sense. You enter
into the process of such dying submitting your own body-mind
to Divine, submitting your own body to the Sat-Guru through
the practice sadhana, submitting these conditional
mechanisms to the Condition that is Free of limitation, to
the Samadhi of the Realizer Himself, Which is nothing but
Samadhi. This is the ancient offering, the ancient
means.

But yes, you are right. A death,
then, a throwing off of your own egoity as the principle of
existence and accepting sadhana as your destiny. This is a
great gesture. Each person making this gesture may say it is
an act of faith or it is based on understanding. It is
always both. Both the heart-response and some intelligent
consideration are required in any case. It is just that some
people, because of the quality of the personality, say it is
more the act of faith, and some others say it is more the
act of understanding. This quality you read in yourself is
responsible for the choice later on of which of the two
basic approaches to practice you take up. But both of those
approaches are fundamentally the same, with just a somewhat
different emphasis.

Everyone who goes through this death
makes this gesture, makes it on the basis of faith and
understanding, spontaneous response and considered response,
both. But in doing so you submit yourself. You turn yourself
in a greater direction. You stop submitting to yourself,
just as I stopped submitting to you two and a half years
ago. You have to stop submitting to yourself if you are
going to truly live this practice in my Company.

What else about it?

See original
talk here.