“Radical” Politics
for
Ordinary Men and Women
a Talk by
The Divine World-Teacher,
Avatar Adi Da Samraj
Characteristically, human beings in this “late-time” (or
“dark” epoch) have, both collectively and individually, renounced their
real and true politics. Generally speaking, human beings everywhere have
renounced both collective and individual responsibility for their truly
human lives. In general, human beings are not freely and rightly
establishing and preserving the truly human character of
their individual livesand the collective of mankind is not organized
to establish and to preserve the truly human character of
human life in general.
In this “late-time” (or “dark” epoch), human beings do
not, generally, assume cultural, social, and political freedom of right
association, right commitment, and, altogether, right lifebut
they assume, instead, that they have to subordinate themselves to the ideas
and the plans of power-seeking bureaucrats, benighted intellectuals, materialistic
scientists, religious fundamentalists, and disturbed political revolutionarieswho
(because they are mere egos, and yet bound to Spiritually un-Enlightened
interpretations of human existence) work to effectively prevent the truly
human politics of intimate, cooperative society. And
this universal failure of right (and, necessarily, truly religious and
Spiritual) life reflects (and results from) every human individual’s frightened
(and, altogether, egoic) suppression of the universal Unifying Life-Principle
and of the life-positive vitality of Spiritually-Awakened bodily existence.
Because present-day human individuals are everywhere socially
indoctrinated to be afraid of their own inherent life-impulse toward unity
with all and All, we have the present-day worldthe “late-time” (or “dark”
epoch) of a benighted, ego-bound, and universally misled humanity. Present-day
mankind is a global mass of mere individuals, whobecause they
cannot freely “connect” with one another (and with Reality, or Truth, Itself)live
as slaves of their own minds and egoically separate selves. For the most
part, human beings in this “late-time” (or “dark” epoch) are an unconscious
mass, “Narcissistically” enslaved by their own egoic motives, and, inevitably,
controlled by other egos who are shrewder than themselves.
In their true human freedom, men and women are
(naturally, and at heart) oriented toward intimately felt human unity and
the Oneness of Truth (or of Reality Itself). Such human individuals positively
participate in the cosmically extended Pattern of the universally Self-Evident
and All-in-all-Unifying Life-Principle. However, ever since the advent
of the modern dichotomy between other-worldly religions and this-worldly
utopian idealisms, people have, paradoxically, assumed (in their egoic
double-mindedness) that the inherent unifying impulse of life is supposed
to be negatively (or at least puritanically) manipulated, suppressed, and
(thus) made unconscious, while, at the same time, they assume (or falsely
hope) that life in this world is, by means of double-minded human effort,
to become an eventual utopian paradise. As a result of this cultural double-mindedness,
modern people are deeply troubled about the vital impulses of their natural
lives, and about the ultimate purpose (and the Ultimate Truth) of life
itself. Therefore, the global human society in this “late-time” (or “dark”
epoch) is built around the manipulative suppression of the life-force and
the simultaneous manipulative exploitation of the materially oriented mind.
Inevitably, double-mindedness becomes “dark” control.
Therefore, at last, everything and everyone become emptied of Reality and
Truth. The modern doctrine is that people are supposed to work.
That is the asceticism of the common man and woman. You are supposed to
be a mere salt-of-the-earth worker, and you are not to be fundamentally
and ecstatically involved in True (or Divine) Delight. You are not expected
or permitted to be fully and freely consciousand Consciousness
(Itself) is not valued. You are supposed to work, buy junk food and television
sets, and always stay tuned (and subordinate) to the propaganda of the
daily “news”and you are not to allow yourself to be aware of anything
“Fundamentally Curious” that might cause you to become ecstatic and profound.
Some anthropologists say that what makes human beings
unique is that they make tools. In any case, that is only a secondary and
debatable unique feature of humankind. Truly, human beings are unique in
that they interiorize the problem of survival. The sense of existence
itself as a problem, as a dilemma, is characteristic of the un-Enlightened
(or merely natural) human condition. And, through the tool of desire, human
beings constantly create new solutions.
Human beings tend to seek a condition of release that
exceeds the limits of gross experience and death. Thus, human beings invent
an interior mental, or even mystical, process, through which they can step
out of both ordinary mind and ordinary body, into the illusion of another
world. Also, by virtue of having a mind, human beings are capable of entering
into transformative (or, at least, manipulative) relationship to the functional
processes in their own case and in the world. Thus, human beings create
sciences and technologies, as practical tools for dealing with the material
conditions of existence. However, both of these possibilitiesboth
interior (or mental, or even mystical) and exterior (or technological,
or even utopian)are extensions of the ordinary game of problem-solving.
Until human individuals begin to develop some basic understanding
of their limited (and ego-bound) conditionand, optimally, to directly
(and, necessarily, in an ego-transcending manner) Commune with the Non-Dual
(or One and Divine) Self-Condition and Perfectly Subjective Source-Condition
of every limited condition, state, or beingthey are exploitable by individuals
and influences that arbitrarily assume a material power that exceeds their
own. Therefore, the usual man or woman, who works in a factory or an office
and listens to the “news” faithfully, is constantly (and inevitably) exploited
by all kinds of shrewd people who are materially in charge of his or her
political, social, cultural, and intimate life.
For the usual person, politics is merely a matter of listening
to the “news” every night. Politics in this “late-time” (or “dark” epoch)
is either a childish or an adolescent reaction to the fact of being controlled
by the “news” of the world and by the abstract, all-controlling politics
of the State. One individual plays the “system”, and the other is a revolutionary.
The child buys the “system” and expects it to work, and the adolescent
is a perpetual revolutionary, whose childish expectations were not fulfilled.
Both types are merely relating to the world as a parentlike “thing” that
controls them.
If you stop listening to (or, otherwise, believing in)
the “news”, and if you simply observe what is really going on, you, inevitably,
become depressed by the feeling that your life is not under your control.
However, “depression” is only a very minimal insight. Obviously, everybody
is (both naturally and humanly) controlled. The typical response to the
observation of the controlling forces of life is to react by joining a
revolution, getting drunk, kicking a couple of bad politicians out of office,
having a war, getting “high” on popular illusions, becoming “against” a
political “something”, or becoming “for” a political “something”but reaction
is obviously not the way to rightly transform real politics. What is needed
is to establish a completely different principle of human culture and politics.
What is needed is a principle of human culture and politics that is not
based on reaction to all the bad “news”.
Fundamentally, there is only bad “news” in the
ordinary, ego-based, un-Enlightened, chaotic world. Instead of waiting
for action from “sources” out in the world somewheregovernment sources,
media sources, interplanetary sources, mystical sources, or whatever it
is that you wait for all the timeyou must, yourself, become involved
in intimate, cooperative community with other human
beings. In a responsible, mutually dependent, cooperative, tolerant, peaceful,
and intimate relationship with other human beings, you must create and
protect the basics of a truly human culture and of a truly intimate daily
human society.
The only reason the “news” of the world and the abstract
(or non-intimate) politics of the State can exploit and control you is
that you are in vital (and, altogether, ego-defining) shockor a double-minded
and self-defeating recoil from the universal Unifying Life-Principleand,
because you are, thus, alienated from (and emptied of) Reality Itself (Which
Is One, or Non-Dual, Inherently egoless, Inherently Free, and Most
Perfectly Love-Bliss-Full), you believe that you need a number of things
you cannot acquire without playing for or against the “system”. However,
if you are always already truly alive, always already Full of True
Humor, True Love, and True Light, and, Thus, always already in Communion
with Reality (or Truth, Which Is the only Real God), you
need not be greatly concerned about any of the “news” of the world of egos.
You can and must create your own politicsin intimate, cooperative
association with your fellow human beings.
The existence of the big political “system” does
not make any ultimate positive difference in the daily life of the individual.
You can and must live a truly free, responsible life, regardless of the
“system” or the “news”. Of course, it can be done a little easier if the
“system” is relatively accommodating and the “news” is relatively
benign. You would have to be more inventive to do it in an absolutist society,
or during a war in a bombed-out town. Neverthelessregardless of the larger
politics, or the State of the “news”the truly human (and humanizing)
politics of intimate, cooperative living can (and, indeed, must)
be done. And, therefore, the ego-transcending discipline of intimate, cooperative
living is the only true “radical” politicsor the only genuine “realpolitik”
for ordinary, or truly human, men and women.
The true change that you must create is not principally
in the “system” itself (or in the parentlike world of competitive egos)
but in the ordinary, daily associations between yourself and other human
beings. People who would be free must live in a non-egoic and non-competitive
manner, in intimate cooperation with one another. Human beings must truly
understand themselvesin all of their external and internal
egoityand they must, on that basis, adapt to a cooperative and mutually
tolerant arrangement of daily life, in which they are each personally responsible
for the character of daily existence, and in which they simply live together,
intimately and seriously, free of reactive and dependent association with
the parentlike abstract world of the “news”.
A truly rational and benign politics cannot be
enacted merely by investing mankind in a world-wide system of parentlike
bureaucracies. The abstract system creates childish dependencies and illusory
solutions, and it discourages the general possibility of genuine personal
responsibility, or daily “right life” (and the ego-transcending Realization
of the Only and Non-Dual Self-Condition of Reality and Truth). The true
politics of the individual is in relation to what is intimate to him or
her. Truly human politics is in the sphere of directly effective relationships,
experienced on a daily basis, where the individual’s voice and experience
can be directly heard and sympathetically felt. That, fundamentally, is
politics. All the rest is only the vulgar and inherently disheartening
daily “news” of the world-machine of human egos.
A politics based on truly human, cooperative relationships
is not likely to take place on a large scale in a present-day cityalthough,
ultimately (if such cooperation is first done by everyone on the more intimate,
or local, scale), even that is a possibility. Present-day cities are merely
a random collection of subhuman emergencies. People crowd together in modern
cities for all kinds of conflicting and subhuman reasons. These are not
genuine cities, in any fully human sense. A true city would be a large-scale
cooperative communityan essentially autonomous,
fully cooperative, truly intimate, and Spiritually
oriented order of mutually dependent people who are devoted to the advanced
developmental culture of truly humanized (and Spiritually Awakened) mankind.
However, that kind of human order does not exist in the cities of today.
Today, a city is just a collection of disturbed and fascinated peoplenot
a conscious, positively organized association of truly human (and truly
Spiritually Awakened) beings.
Without a community of responsible relationships and advanced
cultural agreements, there can be no right politics. Truly right
politics is, necessarily, an expression of right life. Right politics is
a functional realization of the collective right relationships between
individuals living in free cooperation with one another.
The true cooperative human community is not merely a utopian
commune, in which every ego tries to be perfect, or to be perfectly fulfilled.
Such perfection or fulfillment is not possible for the ego (or for the
inherently limited and mortal patterns of human life itself). Advanced
human and Spiritual understanding is the principle of life in true cooperative
human community. Communities are rightly established when human beings
rightly understand the functional design of Manas an ego, as a single,
or simultaneous, whole, and as a Spiritually Awakened totality. And communities
are rightly organized and managed when the problem-solving, creative capabilities
of human beings areon the basis of a true culture of ego-transcendence
and of true Divine Self-Realizationrightly disciplined, and always measured
in terms of their relative importance. Therefore, fundamentally, human
beings must understand and be responsible for their egoityand,
thus, for their tendencies to live life as an inherent, or irreducible,
dilemma (or as a state of disunity), or, otherwise, as a perpetual search
for self-glorifying fulfillment of loveless (or separate and separative)
inclinations.
In a true cooperative human community, every one knows
what every one else has the tendency to become (when irresponsible)
and the possibility to become (when responsible). And all serve
one another at the level of that understanding. They all also know
the functional character and capability of each one among them, and they
amuse and enjoy and serve and employ one another at every appropriate level.
Right responsibility for functional life (and, thus, for the positive
unifying of the structures of the human individual, and of all the members
of the human collective itself) must always be assumed and demanded in
a truly human (or truly ego-transcending, and cooperative, and mutually
tolerant) community. When it is not, that failure of responsibility (and,
thus of individual well-being and of collective unity) will, inevitably,
weaken the communityand, thus, enable (or even oblige) shrewder men and
women to exploit and oppress the members of the community, and make them
slaves to their own egoity again.
If men and women will enter into true cooperative
human communityand, therefore, into intimate cooperative and higher cultural
relationship with one anotherthey will no longer be exploitable by any
life-negating (or disheartening and freedom-negating) influences from the
abstract social and political realm of the worldly “news”. The negatively
dominant bureaucracy of the world of egos becomes obsolete only through
non-use. And, once its negative and parentlike powers become obsolete through
non-use, even the State will be obliged to become the simple instrument
of the responsible agreements of the people. If the people become truly
intelligent and freely cooperative, then the State will, inevitably, do
(or become) likewise. And if the people truly become collectively intelligent
and responsible, then individual freedom can never really be eliminated
by the State of the “news”.
Conventional politics has always been associated with
an ideal of one or another sort. In the modern era, the ideal has, generally,
switched from a humanistic to an economic one. Nevertheless, all
merely idealistic systems tend to depend on temporary, emergency solutions
to basic problems. This is because conventional idealism is an abstractiona
basis for a politics of manipulation of people by an abstract State, and
not for an intimate, cooperative politics of practical responsibility,
on the part of the people, for both themselves and the political union
(or State) of their lives. The tactics of abstract State politics always
relate to a more or less irresponsible and externally controlled populaceand,
therefore, the State tends to be fixed in a view of human life as a dilemma
that continuously requires new emergency reactions to solve the constant
crisis of new emergency problems. As a result, politics becomes an insane
conglomeration of temporary solutions, enforced by a bureaucratic State
that is oppressive, rigid, immense, and intolerable.
The fundamentals of life must be pre-solved at
the local levelat the regional level where the daily, cooperative
community exists. Within the cooperative human community, every member
should be guaranteed access to the basic necessities and opportunities
of life (provided each individual functions responsibly and cooperatively
within the community). Generally, the basic solutions to human needs do
not (or should not) require resort to any of the resources of an abstract
Statebut they should be managed locally, in one’s own community, and
in natural cooperation with other communities. (In other words, first establish
intimate, cooperative community and the planned solutions to fundamental
needsand, on that basis, see what kind of agreements are useful in cooperation
with other communities and with large-scale cooperative agencies.)
True cooperative politics is a great human adventure,
in which human beings are inherently obliged to realize their humanity
as an ego-transcending discipline. Human beings do not, in
Reality and in Truth, have the option to renounce their humanity or the
universal Unifying Life-Principle (or cosmically extended Pattern of Oneness)
that sustains them. Rather, human beings must assume the inherent responsibility
of human relationships. Human beings must assume all the structures
of Man (both lower and higher) as real conditions of existenceand human
beings must become functionally responsible for positively conducting the
life-force in every area of their experience. To the degree that they do
all of this, human beings are obliged to be committed to right life in
the dimensions of time and spaceand only in that case are they free
to carry on the creative developmental and ecstatically ego-transcending
(and, ultimately, Spiritual) process of their humanly born lives.
If human beings do not assume right, ego-transcending,
and cooperative collective responsibility for their lives, the daily “news”
of the world of egos becomes their inevitable destiny and their dreadful,
minimal inheritance. In the world of egos, everybody tends to persist like
cattle, grazing on the daily “news”, expecting it will all eventually develop
into some superior politics or fate. However, truly human politics, or
right human destiny, cannot happen unconsciously. Truly human politics
begins where consciousness (intelligent, and surrendered, beyond self-contraction,
into the Non-Dual Reality and Truth That Is the Heart and Light
of Consciousness Itself) enters the domain of human existence.
There is no right, or truly human, politics without conscious
responsibility. You cannot sit like cattle in front of the TV, dutifully
listening to the official “news” every day, and rightly expect or fruitfully
require that some bureaucrat “in charge” is going to announce some “Super-Program”
that will liberate you from your lowly, ego-possessed estate. Rather, you
must take responsibility for yourself. It is not by revolutionary
reformation of the State, or, otherwise, by mere self-indulgent reaction
to the daily “news”, but only by consciously stepping apart from your childish
ego-dependence on the abstract State and your adolescent reaction to the
daily “news”, that you carry on “radical” and truly human politics. Therefore,
you must provide your own life-requirements, in personal and local cooperation
with others. You must enter into truly intimate (or mutually dependent,
energetically cooperative, lovingly tolerant, and liberally peaceful) community
with others. You must cooperatively share your functions, your resources,
and your vitality with other human beings. That is the only right, and
truly human, and truly liberating politics for human beings. And, therefore,
the choice to enter into real, intimate cooperative community with other
human beings is the only true “radical” politics for ordinary (or truly
human) men and women.
The life of the usual man or woman is built on the idea
that the Law of life is survival, and that survival is the significance,
meaning, and goal of existencewhereas, in Reality and in Truth, the fundamental
process of Man, and even of the very realm of cosmic Nature, is one of
sacrifice (or ego-transcendenceor the transcending of egoic contraction
upon separate and separative self, and the transcending of loveless separation
from what is egoically presumed to be not-self).
Sacrificeor ego-transcending loveis the Law. The usual
life is not built upon the ego-transcending principle of sacrifice, but
on the ego-fulfilling principle of survivalor the aggressive ego-glorification
of the individualized, separate, and separative entity. This is the common
illusion, and this inherently loveless game of surviving as a separate,
self-contained, and separative “someone” is what makes human existence
the overwhelming chaos of troubles that it has now become for everyone
in this “late-time” (or “dark” epoch).
The fact is that all specific “somethings” must
ultimately be sacrificed (or released, and gone beyond), and, therefore,
human existence itself must become an intentionally self-sacrificial
(or truly ego-transcending) affair, in which no condition is aggressively
maintained merely for its own sake. The human individual must grow (by
right cultural means) to realize that the Law of life is loving sacrifice
of all temporary forms to the universal Unifying Life-Principle (or the
cosmic Pattern of Oneness) and moment to moment surrender of separate
and separative self to the Divine Self-Condition and Perfectly Subjective
Source-Condition of every limited condition, state, or being. Therefore,
the human individual must, by right cultural means, be grown to realize
that the inherent and ultimate purpose of life is not a matter of
mere and loveless “survival”, independent of the Inherent Unifying
Principle of both the conditional reality and the Un-conditional Reality.
And only if the individual is, thus, grown to relinquish the ego-principle
and to embrace the Unifying Principle can the individual become politically
free. Indeed, to be thus grown is, itself, to be (inherently)
politically free.
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The Da Love-Ananda Samrajya Pty Ltd.,
as trustee for The Da Love-Ananda Samrajya,
claims perpetual copyright to all photographs
and
the entire Written (and otherwise recorded)
Wisdom-Teaching of Avatar Adi Da Samraj and
the Way of the Heart, or Adidam.
© 2000 The Da Love-Ananda Samrajya Pty Ltd.,
as trustee for The Da Love-Ananda Samrajya.
All rights reserved.
Used in DAbase by permission.
note to the reader
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