The Need for Attention, Power and Love

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 could 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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