You Need Not

Which way did you say?
…you need not…

This is the Law. Nothing can distract you from it once you
become Happy, but you need not even “become” Happy –
you need only Realize that you are Happy, that the Truth, if
it is the Truth, is the case, even now! God as God is God
now! The Condition of our condition is our Condition now.
Everything else is a superimposition we lay upon it in our
un-Happiness, our neurosis, our Narcissism. Understand this
contraction and Realize that you are Happiness.

Adi Da Samraj

Sai Baba showed a marked favor to
Kasinath (Upasani Baba) and this made several of the
devotees jealous. Kasinath stayed in the village shrine of
Kandoba and kept alone most of the time on the orders of Sai
Baba who said, “He must simply sit quiet in the temple doing
nothing.” He told Kasinath, “Have nothing to do with
anybody. Your future is excellent. No other has such a
future.”

But the annoyance caused by the
jealous devotees of Sai made Kasinath long to go away from
Shirdi. He sought Sai’s permission through Shama again and
again. But Baba always said that he had to ‘clear his
accounts’ with Kasinath and did not permit him to go. He
told the devotees, “Everything I have got has been
completely given to him.” He told Kasinath in 1911,
“Hereafter you need not come to me frequently. Come
only occasionally. You should not however talk to me. Nor
will I talk to you. After 4 years you will have the full
grace of Lord Khandoba.”

Kasinath had to experience an
extreme aversion for food and he used to throw it away to
dogs. Sometimes he went and saw Sai Baba when the latter was
on His rounds. Baba always assured him, “I am always with
you, you need not fear anything. The more you suffer
now, the most excellent and happier your future will be.”
Pivoted on such trust in his Guru, he stopped eating
altogether for one year during 1913-1914. Strangely enough,
although he was going without food and lost considerable
weight, he was doing hard manual work like grinding,
road-laying or ploughing fields! It was on a full moon day
in July-August, 1913, that Sai Baba indicated the near
completion of His spiritual dispensation with Kasinath when
he ordered his devotees to worship the latter in the temple
even as Sai Baba was worshipped in the mosque.

Upasani Baba and Sai Baba of Shirdi

So as long as there’s the yielding
of the body-mind or the dependence of the Samadhi on the
body-mind, its not it. It’s not enough. Theres no reason to
dally there, you see. Be released in your energy and
attention from that. you need not spend any time
there. No sadhana done by the body-mind is the Perfect
sadhana, and its therefore not satisfactory when its done by
the body-mind, not Ultimately satisfactory.

To simply Abide as That, if there’s
any noticing of the body-mind, you’ll notice its this and
that, and its death perhaps peripherally, if you care to.
But its not your destiny any longer. It may have its own
destiny, whatever it is, but its not you. you need
not become entangled in it, you see, are not, in fact.
[silence]

Adi Da Samraj

M.: The ‘I’ is always there – in
deep sleep, in dream and in wakefulness. The one in sleep is
the same as that who now speaks. There is always the feeling
of ‘I’. Otherwise do you deny your existence? You do not.
You say ‘I am’. Find out who is.

D.: Even so, I do not understand.
‘I’, you say, is the wrong ‘I’ now. How to eliminate this
wrong ‘I’?

M.: you need not eliminate
the wrong ‘I’. How can ‘I’ eliminate itself? – All that you
need do is to find out its origin and abide there. Your
efforts can extend only thus far. Then the Beyond will take
care of itself. You are helpless there. No effort can reach
it.

D.: If ‘I’ am always-here and now,
why do I not feel so?

M.: That is it. Why says it is not
felt? Does the real ‘I’ say it or the false ‘I’? Examine it.
You will find it as the wrong ‘I’. The wrong ‘I’ is the
obstruction. It has to be removed in order that the true ‘I’
may not be hidden. The feeling that I have not realised is
the obstruction to realisation.

In fact it is already realised;
there is nothing more to be realised.

Ramana Maharshi

In The Knee of Listening I described
it as “understanding.” It is the same as Love, unobstructed
feeling attention, God-Communion. If you will adhere to it,
you need not be concerned for any complexity of
experience. Experience is altogether without significance.
Not a single vision or experience adds to God Communion. All
experience only realizes a lesser destiny than the Destiny
of God-Communion, which moves not to heavens but directly to
God in every moment.

all of the wisdom is potential in
the human situation. you need not go elsewhere to
Realize it. Of course, many do, even using subtle means,
serve their purposes in the gross plane, and others serve
them in the subtle plane. These are karmic entities doing
karmic things. All in need, all seeking. All the planes are
dual, made of opposites. They all have their
limitations.

So the Way is to Realize the Truth
of the world, the Truth of the conditional domain, the
Cosmic Domain – rather than commit yourselves to the Cosmic
Domain itself. You’re associated with conditional things,
therefore you’re in exactly the right position. You can use
those things as means of God-Realization. you need
not look for other things. Instead of seeking, you
should put your place in order where you are, and enter into
this heart-seriousness, going beyond egoity, with
Me.

When there is no obstruction to
feeling-attention, then what is Divine, without
qualification, is completely obvious. you need not
create any strategy in your attention, to invert it or to
exteriorize it, in order to find the Divine. Finding God is
the illusion of the sinful individual, the one obsessed with
suffering.

Whatever conditions are to arise for
you will arise for you, and you need not be the least
bit concerned about them! You are finally free, in
God-Realization, of the idiotic game of rising and falling
with the conditions of existence.

Adi Da Samraj

There is nothing more for the
Spiritual Master to do for the sake of the revelation of the
Teaching. The difference is not in God. The difference is in
man. The test is whether you will continue as you are or
pass beyond your self-possession through the intuition of
God. In every moment, that is the test. In the meantime, I
can serve as a priest for you, but the great matter that has
been my work since birth has already been shown. It is up to
you to measure up to the Teaching. So you need not
wait for some great moment in my Company. You should just
prepare yourself for my ordinary Company.

Bubba Free John has submitted to the
same Reality to which you must also be submitted. Sri
Ramakrishna, in his last days, brought Narendra to his side
and touched him. He put Narendra into samadhi, gave him all
kinds of visions, and said, “I have given you everything.
Now I am just a poor fakir. I am completely empty.” That is
the position of the Spiritual Master. People imagine that
the Spiritual Master is possessed of all the glorious
experiences that they may on occasion possess, and that the
Spiritual Master, as empty as lie is, may be an agent for
the transmission of those phenomena. But the Spiritual
Master himself has absolutely nothing. He is retired from
all consolation. What you see is what he is.

Thus, the Spiritual Master
represents nothing other than this sacred Communion of love.
The Spiritual Master is reduced to Divine Communion, to the
very thing that he recommends to devotees. I am not a man of
powers and of visions. The essential incident is without
form. In this moment I am not having an experience. I am
consoled by nothing. Nothing. And I am happy. I am zero in
the midst of experience. That is the only
difference.

Adi Da Samraj

THE MAN: Sri Gurudev, my own life
has been characteristic, I think, of white, middle-class
males in America who, in spite of every attempt not to be a
victim, have gone out of our way to enjoy a victims status.
I speak of my own personal experience. I have not had any
traumas or any life-threatening situations that would have
produced a victim consciousness. Still, somehow, I find it
appealing to be, in my own mind, a victim.

SRI DA AVABHASA: you need not
have had great traumas to be in that position. Everybody has
difficulties. Life is difficult, and it requires something
of you. Another way of characterizing the so to speak victim
consciousness is that it is always looking for something or
someone to blame even for the most petty of lifes
difficulties and demands. If you feel you are the victim,
you always look for somebody or something to blame, some
past incident, whatever it may be, to justify your lack of
responsibility, your lack of clarity, your lack of
effectiveness. It is not just in reaction to the most
traumatic of lifes incidents that this mechanism is
generated. It is an ordinary mechanism, and it is also
culturally enforced, socially reinforced, politically
reinforced, reinforced by social and political institutions
even. It is not associated with traumatic life, really. It
is just the strategy of living life in such a fashion that
you are always relieved of responsibility, because there is
always something or someone to blame and you, therefore,
need not be responsible. You just presume that the seat of
responsibility is not in yourself but in all the causes in
your life. And they are just what they are, so there is
nothing you can do about it.

Adi Da Samraj

Why put yourself in a position of
being constantly vulnerable to superficial communications?
Just because most people in the downtown world allow
themselves to be so subjected, you need not live in
the same tunnel of confusing information. you need
not be bombarded by endless voices, endless media,
endless hype, and endless noises that shock the nervous
system. Go somewhere else. Turn off the instruments.
Disassociate yourself from these things. To put an end to
them is a responsible act-and you are free to do it. Just as
the yogi is free to withdraw from society in general, you,
as a kind of yogi or spiritual practitioner, are free to
concentrate and simplify your life and not be open to
endless disruptive phenomena. If there is something you want
to consider, then give it your attention, but do not live
with superficial communications constantly in the background
of your life.

Adi Da Samraj

You Must

You Need
Not

You must Become Responsible as Feeling-Attention in
Every Moment

Adi Da Samraj

You must become rooted in
your natural disposition and presume again the position of
the heart or the feeling being. Now you feel yourself to be
isolated as a separate awareness, surrounded by flesh and
thinking. But that perception will begin to break down once
you have adapted to this Way by presuming the feeling
position again, by pervading the mental and the physical
dimensions with feeling, by becoming responsible for
feeling-attention in every moment. Then the whole affair of
spiritual practice becomes simply the maturing of that
response.

Likewise, you must prepare
yourself for this meeting with me. You must be
unobstructed in your feeling. You must approach
without obstruction, without recoil, without self-reference.
Simply be present in my Company, and the Presence of the
Divine will establish itself. You must be able to
feel in spite of the effects of reactions, self-possession,
inwardness, thinking, and all the rest that you tend to
become involved with, and you must abide as
feeling-attention completely, not only on the formal
occasions of our being together, but characteristically,
constantly, ultimately.

Adi Da Samraj

The usual man needs exaggerated
conditions in order just to feel, to have a sense that he is
experiencing pleasure. Thus he becomes addicted to excesses
because he does not already live in the condition of
pleasure, happiness, or fullness. Such people cannot feel,
in other words. If you cannot feel emotionally, then you
cannot live a life of love, you cannot be intimate. If you
cannot feel with the head, you cannot enjoy clarity of mind,
and you cannot consider things as they truly are. If you
cannot feel, if the core of the being, the heart, is not
operative, not active, then at the physical level you
must be self-indulgent.

Adi Da Samraj

Part of the discipline of the Way of
Divine Communion is not to be concerned about the
continuation of your old adaptation, the physical,
emotional, and mental signs of your old way of living. Allow
them to come and go, rise and fall, without concern, without
dramatization. Live the discipline of love, physically,
vitally, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. By living
that commitment as a discipline, you will see the old
adaptations fall away and become unnecessary and obsolete.
New adaptations of existence naturally come into being when
you change your act. It is as simple as that. But you
must persist in this discipline. You cannot indulge in
playing with yourself and falling back constantly. You
must become stronger in your hearing of the Teaching so
that you do not fall and then collapse under concerns and
low-grade dramatization. You must be stronger than
that to bring feeling-attention into the present. Do not be
concerned when subjective stuff arises. It eventually
disappears, if you only persist in
feeling-intuition.

Adi Da Samraj

You must constantly be
refreshed in this hearing through study of the Teaching,
through hearing it read, through recitations, through
communication with one another, through devotional society,
Good Company, right counseling. You must bring
yourself in this spirit to the fulfillment of the
discipline, consistently.

Adi Da Samraj

You’ve got to become mature at this
middle self, this conscious mind, which means that you
must realize the relationship between this middle self
and this lower self that’s something like that between a
true parent and its child. You must become the
parent. You must come to an understanding of this
vital life, and cease to be without arms, constantly
complicated, motivated by childish subconscious, unconscious
urges that relate to the realm of your ordinary
vital-physical, emotional-sexual life.

Adi Da Samraj

With Understanding, you must
begin to adapt in a way that you have never adapted before,
never fully. That means you’ve got to begin to enter into
adaptation to the high self. You must adapt this
thinking mind and this vital personality to the evolutionary
mechanism that is in the body or the body-mind of
man.

Adi Da Samraj

You must become stable in the
third stage of life. You must be able to Understand
the Teaching and accept the discipline and accept this
relationship and allow that to be the situation, the
condition of existence within which you adapt, within which
you live.

Adi Da Samraj

You must become strong
enough, you must have that capacity for self control,
not like the solid, single minded desire, you see, but like
one who Understands, so that you can consistently live this
discipline, so that you are not always coming to me at zero
wanting some sort of energy zapping to make you feel good
and then you feel intoxicated for a little while and then
you go and do what you have always done. That’s not
enlightenment, that’s not yoga, that’s not mysticism, that’s
not God-Realization. It’s just an extension of your
childhood, your earlier adaptations trying to conform this
this Teaching.

Adi Da Samraj

Within the theatre of sacrifice
things appear, things change, and things disappear. But if
we worship just one aspect of manifestation, that of
creation, or appearance, we will be anxious, insane, and
self-possessed. The true principle is sacrifice, not “God
created it and ultimately His creation will freeze into an
unchanging heaven that survives eternally.” There is no such
event nor any evidence for it. you must give up
everything. Everything must be given up, but it is not the
ego “you” that gives it up. When you are one with the Divine
through Communion with the ultimate Reality, then everything
becomes a sacrifice. The process of sacrifice becomes your
native orientation. All your adaptations become forms of
sacrifice. That is also what the practical disciplines are –
a Lawful adaptation to sacrifice, to the process of feeling
attention and yielding.

Adi Da Samraj

True spiritual practice is
inspection of the whole revelation of existence. We have
always emphasized the critical aspect of this argument, or
Shiva, the considerations that require you to confront what
you are avoiding. You must become responsible at that
level if you are to live a real spiritual life.

Adi Da Samraj

You must find the ways to
overcome the stresses, to transform the chemistry of the
body literally, so that you can live long and without
stress, both chemical and social, or cultural. Such a life
is not possible for a group of people until they create
sanctuary with one another, a mutually protected, stable,
basically unthreatened way of life.

Adi Da Samraj

Sex is a heart-matter. The heart is
the basis, the foundation, the seat, of your sexuality. This
is what you must discover, and the sooner you
discover it the better for you.

Adi Da Samraj

You just do not indulge it. When it
arises as a reaction to some circumstance, some moment, some
physical moment of weakness, whatever it is, you must
identify it with great clarity and not indulge it. You can
not afford to indulge it even as a fantasy. you must
maintain in a very natural way your responsibility as
feeling-attention in relationship and not collapse beyond
it, not get into the solitude, the brooding, the whole
business, as a blind for disturbance.

You just cannot indulge it. You
must stop being concerned for whether or not you are
loved in signs, in demonstrations by me or, anybody else. It
is the responsibility of the devotee to love, not to get
love, but to be love. That’s what a devotee is. People have
just the opposite idea. They think to be a devotee is to be
somehow cherished by the Divine. The Divine is the Beloved.
Devotees are not the Beloved. The devotee is not the one who
gets loved. The Divine gets loved.

Adi Da Samraj

If you agree to become involved in a
feeling relationship with someone, you must also
agree to endure the changes in the other person and the
difficulties in the relationship. Whatever is going on in
the other person altogether, you must be able to
endure the loss. It all comes with the relationship. The
discipline of love is quite a different thing from
indulgence in attachment.

Adi Da Samraj

All these symptoms are the results
of a very simple mechanism of contraction in the frontal
line of force. The contraction is registered especially over
the solar plexus because the battery of the body is the
great region of the solar plexus, including the lower
abdomen. You must therefore become sensitive to how
this frontal mechanism works, how it changes in reaction to
external circumstances and local or internal
circumstances.

You must hear me first of
all. You must awaken, through hearing, to
self-observation, self- insight, awareness of how you
operate as a contracting personality. Then you must
see, you must become emotionally converted. You
must, with the total feeling of the being or the
submission of the total body-mind, enter into sympathy with
That Which is Transcendental and All-Pervading, and begin to
practice on the basis of hearing and seeing. In other words
you must live or animate the body-mind in all its
relations and functions in such a way that the living force
is permitted to course freely in the body-mind without
obstruction.

Adi Da Samraj

You must realize (the)
capacity for discrimination, or you really cannot cut it in
the Spiritual process.

Adi Da Samraj

The Summary

As I have said to you all, you are
dying while alive. Your life is about dying. You are
enduring the psychology of beings and have heard they are
going to die and are spending your life going through the
mass of rounds of anger, denial, bargaining, depression,
acceptance — every complex that could be described out it,
you see. You are living a death process while alive, but you
are not really accomplishing it, you are not really dealing
with it altogether. You are dealing with it piece meal and
you are all the time coming up with strategies to avoid your
sensitivity to it, to avoid the imposition of 1t, and
that is
your whole life, that is the
search.
Because the
surrender is not accomplished the self-contraction remains
in tact. It is all
reactivity, desire, seeking, objects, others, drama! You
allow your entire life to become just that when you could,
not just on your death bed but now, in every moment of life,
be so submitted as one in a terminal state and go beyond all
those illusions, all those strategies you see.

Adi Da Samraj