Torque of Attention – Adi Da Samraj – Yajna Discoures of Santosha Adi Da

ADI DA SAMRAJ: So what are we “considering”?

DEVOTEE: Beloved, where You utter that phrase and You take us through this process—You have the phrase “You are in Me”—everything so mysteriously turns inside out. I don’t really know how to explain it, but the sense of being in something conditional dissolves. And it’s a Samadhi.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. Tcha. It’s the basic intention behind fourth stage devotional practices, to achieve a Samadhi, or whatever it may be called, a feeling state, a sublimed state, of being contained by the Deity, or the whatever the Ultimate is called, through the thread of self-giving devotion, exploiting the emotional faculty therefore.

But if you do so, attention goes with it. You are bodily completely involved in it, the breath follows, you see. So it’s an effort to achieve a state of Contemplative absorption in the Real, or the Divine conceived as being All-Pervading. If you look in the Bhagavad Gita, something of this is suggested. There are numerous suggestions actually. But that’s what’s suggested in the Cosmic Vision that Krishna is said to have given Arjuna. And He tells him afterwards always to remember Him. That’s a prescription for the commonly proposed Bhakti Yoga.

So by being immersed, felt to be contained in, even breathed by, Me—you are calling it Samadhi—you’re suggesting a fulfillment of sadhana of that kind in this moment. But it is the fourth stage fulfillment of the intention of sadhana. And it potentially could magnify to the point of fifth stage as well. But it is not the sixth or seventh. You are enjoying the fact of being in Me, arising in Me. In other words you are continuing to assume the position of the body-mind, but nonetheless given up and absorbed. Whereas the Fully Awakened Realization that You are in Me is the Realization in My Place, in the Consciousness Position, Transcending the body-mind, because you see it arising merely in the Transcendental Self, which is oblivious to it, Standing Prior to it.

And then there’s the even fuller seventh stage Awakening. Finding all in Me, but without “difference”, not separate from Me yourself. So if everything’s arising in Me, you see the important part is the Me part. [Devotees murmur in understanding.]

If you are arising in Me, then you should see it arising in Me, in My Position. So that is the ultimate fulfillment of what at first is this absorptive meditation you’re describing.

You can only feel Me Pervading All if you presume a position less than All.

DEVOTEE: It’s more of a sense of what follows is that there’s only You, and there’s a. . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And that’s a shift in awareness, shift in Consciousness—from the position of attention, or the body-mind position.

To Realize I am All, you have to stop being something. You have to be in My Position. Then the appearance of arising is seen in That, As That, in that sense Pervading it, you see. Because it’s the only Consciousness and Light that there is.

Once the “Perfect Practice” begins, you are basically just going beyond the insult that is the body-mind, and Cosmic existence. It still is, for the individual in the “Perfect Practice” in the sixth stage, the sense of association with the body-mind in the context of daily arising.

So there is that Sublimity Transcending all, and yet coincidentally there is this apparent association. There’s no “motto”—in order to be bound by it or to it—but it is arising. Even the association, then, is not wanted, not required. So it’s not only that egoity falls away, bondage falls away—all of it falls away in due course, Outshined.

So part of that “Perfect Practice” is this deep spontaneous relinquishment of the body-mind, or the association with it, or the picturing of it, or the noticing of it. It’s not strategically pushed away in the seventh stage of life, but it is Recognized and felt beyond, Shined beyond. So the Perfect Demonstration, the “Perfect Practice” Demonstration is this utter going beyond conditional existence.

That process is displayed in the three stages of the “Perfect Practice”, as I’ve described it to you. But you see, ultimately, it is about the utter Outshining, not merely the relaxing of self-contraction and so on, it’s the Outshining of everything. So part of that Demonstration is the showing, then, of the release from the insult of the body-mind, release from it’s implications. Ultimately, release utterly from association. But not by dissociation, rather by Recognition and Outshining. Never retiring from the “Bright” Position.

So psycho-physical existence, conditional existence is inherently a disturbance, suffering. To Recognize what it truly is ultimately, is not to, otherwise in conditional terms, make it something it isn’t. It is a limitation being Outshined, not manufactured or embraced.

So, some of it you could say is like getting used to being mindless and bodiless—getting into what that’s all about, getting hip to it. You know? It’s not like being the body and being frightened by the prospect. It is to be in that Very Condition. It is your Condition.

DEVOTEE: Yes, wonderful Lord, wonderful. Thank You.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: So in that case it is all Happiness. Happy to relinquish, Happy to Outshine, Happy to be unburdened by this illusion of the necessity of conditional existence.

The common religions keep praising it, blessing it absolutely by saying “God created it, God intends this, this is what He intends, do this.” But the whole system of thinking about it all is structured by certain presumptions, ultimately by egoity and the non-Recognition of conditional existence for what it is.

Isn’t it true that no matter what you pick up here, you don’t know what it is? In other words, from the point of view of the body-mind, you don’t know what this leaf is. Not Is. You see, you can break down it’s parts, see it’s gross associations, you can see what it’s about. But you’re never in that position to know what it Is, because you’re not in the “Is” Position.

But that’s the secret then. You can Realize what everything Is. You just can’t comprehend it from the point of view of the body-mind. You don’t have a clue there, because you’re not in the Is Position, as I said. But you can Realize That Position. And therefore, in the seventh stage Awakening, it is Inherently Obvious what Everything Is. It is the Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Divine Self-Condition, All-“Bright” Love-Bliss.

What happened to the necessity of the world then? And the need to call God “Creator” and justify your enmeshment in conditional existence? Because you’re so afraid, you have to believe that it’s a necessity with a Divine Purpose in that thing itself? As if some developmental ultimacy

DEVOTEE: Beloved, during this last “consideration”, You completely relieved me of the fear of death.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm. Tcha.

DEVOTEE: it’s amazing to me, how we can be here with You right now. it’s like. . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. But that’s the way it is.

DEVOTEE: That’s the way it is.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Always.

DEVOTEE: Already.

[pause]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: It says in the old books, “A little bit of the dharma casts out great fear.” It also says, “Wherever there is an other, fear arises.” So you can, in “consideration” with Me, in Contemplation of Me, become Deep, so that you’re beyond your fear. In doing so, you have to go beyond your separateness, you have to go beyond otherness, relatedness, separation. You have to enter into Communion with Me, forgetting all. As long as there is the feeling of otherness or separation or relatedness, there is fear. So to transcend fear is to transcend that feeling of separation, otherness, relatedness. As long as that’s there, there is a fundamental fear, immense vulnerability, full of negative possibility.

So that’s why you are experiencing what you’re experiencing. And the sadhana eventually becomes Perfect, so that you are established as That Which is Itself Inherently fearless. Whereas at the moment, absorbed in Me, you’re still associated with the body-mind, attention, all kinds of potential, experiencing of separateness and otherness. So you’re submitting that into Communion with Me to the point of getting deep, going beyond fear. But the process must become Perfect, must be persisted in, until you are established in My Position, the Domain of the Witness, wherein there is no fear.

And then you must Stand in that Position, given up in it utterly, magnifying that fearlessness, that Love-Bliss, “Bright”. So that even the appearance of the body-mind is Outshined. You must magnify the disposition you find in the Witness, so that it “Brightens” everything. You must allow it to be So. And not dissociate from it or suppress it. [pause]

Well, what else is there?

 

DEVOTEE: Beloved, do You remember that movie The Three Christ’s of Ypsilante?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Ypsilante? It was made into a movie?

DEVOTEE: No, but it was a play, You had talked about a play before.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: It was a book. Which I’ve put on The Basket of Tolerance, called The Three Christ’s of Ypsilante. It’s not a bit of fiction though, and I never heard it was made into a movie.

DEVOTEE: Well, the one I’m talking about . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: It was a psychiatrists report on three patients he had in a hospital called Ypsilante.

DEVOTEE: Right. And there’s always a line that You’d comment from it, and that is, when he [the psychiatrist] asks who he [the patient] talks to he asks, “Who do you talk to when you talk to God?” And he [the patient] says, “I always end up talking to myself”.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: [Beloved chuckles softly.] But the real action, so to speak, in that book—as I recall, how it went is that this psychiatrist had various patients individually, and he had some cases who all had the same hallucination, or illusion or whatever. They all thought that they were Jesus.

DEVOTEE: The messiah illusion, I think it’s called.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. So he found these things about them in his just one-on-one communication with them. And he found that all of his interactions with them were fruitless, nothing was changing. He couldn’t get through the game, couldn’t break through it no matter what he did. So he got this idea of having three of these individuals who all claimed to be Jesus Christ in the same group with him. [laughter] And they had to deal with one another’s presence there. And so that was the source of the drama of the process in the book. He hoped by that to break through some of their illusions and make them socially sane, you see, as much as possible.

So, I guess it seems there was some improvements or whatever. I don’t think any of them actually became totally straight about it all. [laughter]

DEVOTEE: Right. Deluded to the end.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: But what about that? Just that line, you wanted to quote that line, is that it?

DEVOTEE: I was thinking in terms of your own Sadhana, Beloved, when You were describing Your History with Rudi and then Muktananda—it seems very amusing to me—that You were actually Teaching Yourself. That there was . . . am I making any sense?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. In other words the “Sadhana Years” were a spontaneous process, generated from the “Bright”, but in that process I came into various conjunctions, had influences of various kinds in the midst of all of that. But then after that part of the process was done, it just moved on spontaneously. So there were several such associations. You all know that story.

So That in Which I was Always Already Established was the Source of it, and I had periods of association with various individuals on the Way.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, earlier on You were talking about turiyatita, the state beyond the fourth. I still don’t have a clear idea of what that is.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Of course, you don’t have a clear idea of what it is. it’s impossible to have a clear idea of what it is. [laughter]

Its not of the mind at all. “Turiyatita” means, literally, “beyond the fourth”. And it may be taken to mean something different according to the tradition using the term. I use it, carrying on the traditional term, to refer to the seventh stage Realization. It could also mean, and has been used to mean in the traditions, there is the Witness. But in some cases it becomes an even greater Samadhi than that. So if you take the Witness to be the fourth, then Jnana Samadhi, or what is Realized in Jnana Samadhi might be said to be turiyatita, in that tradition.

The passage truly, though, between turiya and turiyatita is the passage from the sixth to the seventh stage of life. Because the gesture, as in sleep, dissociating from conditional things, is what must be gone beyond to go beyond. So turiya is the Transcendental Condition of the Self, separate from objects. Turiyatita is the Divine Self-Condition, Recognizing all objects in Itself. So I use the term turiyatita to refer to that. Hm?

DEVOTEE: Mm-hm.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And you understand what I’m talking about?

DEVOTEE: Yes, I do.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: What else?

DEVOTEE: Master, I would like to know about the nidra state during meditation.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yoga nidra? We were actually talking about it earlier, I didn’t use the term.

DEVOTEE: But, where does that fit in?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: “Nidra” means “sleep”. The term Yoga is usually added to it to mean something more than the usual sleep.

DEVOTEE: Is that at the beginning of the process of the transition?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, as I was describing it earlier. it’s an in-depth equanimity of attention, in which the transition could be made to the Witness. You go through sleep, or through objectless attention—through and beyond that. So Yoga nidra could be associated with that in-depth objectless meditation. That’s something like sleep, but it’s attentive. But the phenomenon of Yoga nidra could occur anytime.

Don’t you remember I always used to mention this about Patricia [ ] even from years ago? You would observe her in the meditative setting or even on other occasions, where she did become meditative, but she would look like she was asleep. You know that nodding and then jerking back and all that kind of thing.

Well, that’s an example of Yoga nidra, but it doesn’t necessarily result in Awakening to the “Perfect Practice”, you see. Doesn’t usually, until there is that unique capability. So it is a kind of objectless deep meditation though. So externally it also looks like the person is sleeping. If it’s Yoga nidra, the person is attentive. If it’s just plain old sleep, the person is not attentive, and not aware of being attentive. And feels unconscious. When you get up the next day, you say you got a good nights sleep, you see. But that’s simply because you became objectless and relatively unconsciousness.

So Yoga nidra can be basically just like that, just a temporary rest, but with attentiveness at it’s core. And it’s a relatively deep state of meditation. But it can be associated even with the beginning of practice, so, in itself, is not associated with the transition to the “Perfect Practice” necessarily. That comes with all of the other aspects of practice, all coming to the same point, you see.

So, no matter what is arising, you are the Witness, even now.

But if you somehow associate that with the generalized sense of the body—just very generalized, basically just noticing that you’re bodily here, without moving attention about, just this general awareness—well, you’re asleep. [Devotees chuckle.]

If you close your eyes, you are asleep. But you are attentive, so you are responding to Me.

But notice this state. It is identical to sleep.

Fundamentally, in your conscious experience, you are always asleep. You don’t just go from one state to the next—sleeping, dreaming, waking, waking, dreaming, sleeping, so forth—you are always in all three of them.

And at the root, you are asleep, just aware—attentive, but without body-mind association. You’re always asleep.

But you are noticing that you are asleep now, because you Stand as the Witness.

That’s the fourth.

Enter deeply into that to the point of transcending “difference”, you Realize the fifth.

So all the time you are asleep, all the time you’re dreaming too, you do intentional thinking. But notice: Apart from your intentional thinking, there’s just thinking and memories, or internal perceptions. There’s a reverie process that goes on all the while in the mind, and that is the dream state. If you relax deeply into it right now, you would experience basically what you experience when dreaming, you see.

And you’re also awake all the time. You do guard the body. So there is that component. And even now, while waking—certainly awake, in the body—you are, if you experience yourself altogether, not only awake in the body, as the body, you are dreaming in the reverie aspect of your mind, and you’re sound asleep. All right now.

Once you’re awake, you’re also dreaming and sleeping. If you’re not awake with the body, and you’re dreaming, then you’re still asleep also. And if the mind is relaxed beyond, then you are simply asleep.

Remarkably, you’re always asleep, and yet able to function, dream-wise and waking-wise. And you never truly become unconscious, because you are Always Already the Witness. But you can have experiences of being unconscious, when attention becomes so steady it has no object. Then when you wake up, you have nothing to refer to. So you assign it the label “unconsciousness”.

But you are the Witness of sleep. You tend to want to make a life, a philosophy, an understanding of Reality out of the waking state. And in the tradition of Advaita Vedanta, a great deal of effort is spent to argue to this point. it’s argued over and over again in that tradition, all of your presumptions, everything else, are based on waking state matters. For some reason or other you don’t want to take into account dreaming and sleeping in your view of Reality. You want to have all of your mental constructs and so forth be associated with the waking state, body-based consciousness.

But in all this making your presumptions about Reality, what about the fact that you dream also—you enter into the dream state? What about the fact that you enter into the sleep state? And yet they’re all you.

And what is the condition then, in which the sleep state arises, the dream state arises, and the waking state arises? Whatever your point of view about it all, it must take into account not only waking but dreaming and sleeping. And the fact that you Witness all three.

So as Baba Muktananda said to Me, “You’re not the one who wakes or sleeps or dreams. You are the Witness of it.”

That’s the Instruction I received, and therefore that’s what I Realized. [laughter] [Beloved laughs.]

DEVOTEE: Nicely put, Beloved.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: There seemed to be a lot of intermediate Yoga prized otherwise there [at Muktanandas ashram]. Well, to Me that was exactly right—I just came from Philadelphia [where Beloved passed through the Event in Seminary during which He Realized complete identification with the Witness], and that’s what I found there.

So in all that Kundalini Yoga stuff, all that went on there from that time on, that fundamentally did not impress Me. I mean, it just was not it. That’s all waking, dreaming, sleeping stuff. “Now, Baba, didn’t You just tell Me, that I am not the one who wakes, or dreams, or sleeps, I’m the Witness of it? So what’s all this stuff about the blue pearl?”

Its all trivia you see. Within the next forty-eight hours, or whatever it was, Id passed beyond all phenomena into fifth stage Nirvikalpa Samadhi, and that covered the entire path that He valued. Everything after that was just looking at the parts. The ascending Yoga was fulfilled in an instant, and was not enough.

But I never presumed it had to be enough! Not only Baba had said, “I’m not the one who wakes, sleeps, or dreams, but I am the Witness of it”—as I said, I just came from Philadelphia. The Event in Seminary was the proof of it to Me—not merely words, but the words corresponded to it and confirmed and affirmed the Realization. And therefore nothing about the Kundalini developments in Babas Company and so on was “it” for Me. It was over when the Realization in Seminary was confirmed by Him verbally.

Of all the things He could have told Me, of all the things He usually would say. . . .

DEVOTEE: Yeah, right.

DANIEL : Yeah, it really is remarkable.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I remember Amma coming to Me one day. She brought me The Ashtavakra Gita, and she said, “This is what You’re all about”.

DEVOTEES: Whoa. Mmm. [Beloved chuckles.]

DEVOTEE: Had Muktananda said that to her?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I don’t know if she spoke to Him or not about it really.

DEVOTEE: Wow.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Of course, Ramakrishna gave that book to Vivekananda too, didn’t He?

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: She must have given Me the book probably when I was there in 970. She was reconfirming the teaching that Baba had given Me when I first came to His Ashram. And the developments in My Case were proving all of that as well. She was confirming, as His first Instruction to Me confirmed, that the fulfillment of the Way, the Truth, is not in the permutations of psycho-physical experience. The Truth is the Self, the Divine Self-Condition, first located as the Witness.

When I was with Rudi, essentially He was focused in the frontal Yoga, but the practice we were to do actually involved some work relative to the spinal line and upwards to the head and so forth as well. So it was Rudi who I asked about this Spiritual process, Spiritual Yoga, Kundalini Yoga—asked Him if that’s what He did. And He said, “You cant teach it if you cant do it.”

And so—yes, with emphasis on dealing with frontal matters—nonetheless, I was practicing this Yoga, Yogic intention, Energy intention, movement of attention in it and so on. And did all that very seriously for whatever the three years, whatever it was, until in Seminary there, when it had all just become immense and overwhelming.

There were all kinds of limitations in it, not just the frontal orientation. It was full of Shakti, yes, but it was this, for Me, mass of obstructedness. So that produced this spontaneous Event that started one day when I was in class in Seminary. I became completely detached from the mind, and it seemed to pick up immense speed, and the thought processes going at immense speed and so on. To the point of it becoming extremely disturbing—because I was supposed to be sitting there in class, and it was as if I was going mad. I was going Mad.

So I tried to pin it down by just writing everything the teacher said, or maybe sometimes I wrote thoughts if I was having them—I just kept pinning it down. That gesture itself introduces time, and some more direct association with the body and so forth.

So I did that long enough to sit through the class and then went whirling out in this horrific state in which the body-mind was going on, on it’s own, without control by attention and so forth. It was just a whirl of uncontrolled events, and sensations and feelings—positive ones, also extremely negative ones. It became just an immense fear.

So it was in some ways very similar to the event Ramana Maharshi described. I remember looking at My face in the mirror, putting something on—after-shave kind of thing, a skin cleanser or something—just saw the plasticity of the body and so forth. So there was all this disorientation from the physical and mental, or gross and subtle aspects of the body-mind, in which I had been doing Yoga so intensively for those years. All of a sudden it, instead of being full, was utterly confused and dissociated from Me, or I dissociated from it.

So that’s how it went on in My Case, and the fear though—which is a reaction to that whirl—got to the point where it was fruitless to try and do anything about it. It just kept growing immensely, became the totality of life, the totality of the body-mind, the totality of Reality—just this immense fear that could no longer be avoided, nothing to do about it. It was a death. So it’s just what it became. It was just endured to the point that what was afraid to be let go just was let go. There was no choice.

So it passed. In other words, the body-mind, even attention, was no longer associated with My State. I was simply Realizing the Native State, and then gradually the body-mind returned to normal—not only become aware of it again—but it was essentially normal from then.

So this was not merely a process of madness and so forth, in the usual sense, clinical sense. It was an extraordinary Spiritual Event. Spontaneously—instead of all this Circle work—there was the Heart-Awakening to the Witness-Position. There wasn’t the goal of Rudi’s Yoga, of Kundalini Yoga and so forth. It was simply My Own Disposition, the “Bright”, Prior to the body-mind, that enforced this Revolution in the directedness of the Kundalini Process.

So it flew to the right side, you see.

So then in the time following that, all those months, I spoke to various people about it including professors at the Seminary, guys who were in this sort of T-group sort of thing we had to have every week. I didn’t talk to them about it frivolously, I spoke to them seriously about it.

And I was considering leaving the Seminary. You know the reasons why I was there, and I just didn’t feel—it was just utterly absurd. Like Rudi was saying, “Well, do it as a discipline,” but it certainly has to be more than that. Beyond a point, it was just absurd. There was no way to work through that mechanism, as Rudi was suggesting. And people in that disposition just have no Spiritual sense whatsoever. Absolutely zero—utterly uncomprehending and superficial, and full of anathemas even about, [mimicking a disdainful attitude] “Spiritual matters, mystical matters”. So I didn’t speak to people generally, but I spoke to a few of the professors that I thought I had the kind of relationship to that would allow such a conversation. And then in this group where you’re supposed to say anything, I said something of this. Talked about My Spiritual experience and so forth, and the man who conducted these groups resigned. [laughter]

DEVOTEE: You never told us that story.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Finished out his contract that year and went somewhere else entirely. Into what I don’t know, but he was extraordinarily moved by what I was saying. And he just couldn’t do it anymore.

Anyway, I was perfectly willing to stay there if that was Rudi’s admonition, but it had just, by then, gone beyond any purpose to be served by such a thing. And He eventually agreed as well. So then I got the job at Pan American and went to India. But the preliminary to that was that Event in Seminary.

But Rudi didn’t want to hear anything about what I was saying about this Seminary Experience and all this sort of stuff. Basically assigned it to something wrong with Me or something wasn’t working, you know? [laughter] He doesn’t want to hear about it. He didn’t really understand anything about it. But it was the case.

So that’s how I went on to Baba Muktananda, because Id finished what I could do with Rudi. Id already gotten to the point where all He had I got, and that’s the end of that. And there’s something to be gone beyond yet, you see. But I was still in that general tradition, or in that same tradition. By going to Baba, I was going to Rudi’s Guru—still in that lineage, though, still in that tradition.

So generally speaking, Baba was about the same kind of process Yoga and so forth as Rudi, with His characteristic difference from that. Rudi, as I said, looked for the things in the frontal life. Baba Muktanandas Yoga was always focused in the internal. And so remarkably, I walk in the door and He tells Me, “You are not the one who wakes or sleeps or dreams, dreams or sleeps. You are the Witness of these states.”

DEVOTEE: Where did that come from?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I went there for more Kundalini Yoga, you see?

DEVOTEE: That’s remarkable.

DEVOTEE: What an opening line.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And so, no matter what did occur—all those things occurred over the next couple of years or so—what Id already Realized back in Seminary was simply validated by it. It was validated by Baba Muktananda, but then it was clear that the course Id been on with Rudi and then continued with Baba Muktananda was not it.

And it was the Awakening in Seminary that was the basis for that. It brought an end to that Yoga in the Circle for Me. I was associated with the tradition of it and continued to examine it, but the Realization in Seminary was fundamental and so became the core of the practice. It no longer was about the usual Kundalini Yoga, or Yoga in the Circle. The very same force, Maha-Shakti, is Hridaya-Shakti. So, for Me it was just the next step in the process. But Baba Muktananda didn’t know about that next step, or didn’t sympathize with the notion of it—having a strictly fifth stage point of view. Although He’s the one who gave Me that great Vedantic Admonition, Advaitic Admonition—remarkably. So for Me, it was the continuation of the Yoga in the Circle—it passes from the Circle to Amrita Nadi, you see?

So quite spontaneously in this disinterest, inherent disinterest in the phenomenon of Yoga in the Circle—even though they were happening—this in-depth Realized in the Seminary Event became the ground of the practice, it became the “Perfect Practice”, spontaneously. Already established obviously, in the Seminary time. But it came without any other “consideration” or gesture or noticing.

But it was all in the Divine Radiance, Shakti—re-unioned with Me, Energy and Consciousness no longer separate in My Disposition. So there were aspects of the signs, Yoga, vision, and so forth, in the period in the Vedanta Temple, leading up to the Final day. They were just images representing the Realization, and were entirely peripheral to the Depth of it all. So the sixth stage Awakening process became the seventh stage Awakening there. Then, in the period that followed, the characteristics of the seventh stage became Obvious.

And what I’ve told you in My Descriptions of the seventh stage of life, are those very things which I have noticed in this process.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, You were mentioning earlier, that you don’t really move into the Witness-Position until the duality . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: One does not.

DENNIS: One does not move into the Witness-Position until there is the understanding of the torque of duality.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: The torque of the place of attention.

DENNIS: Right.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Characteristic of attention. There’s the feeling of relatedness and the feeling of separateness at the same time. The fundamental contraction is in the mudra of attention.

DEVOTEE: Right. And . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: [holding up His fist] This mudra—the clinched fist—thats what attention is, a clench, a contraction. And then you become that, you become what you meditate on. And there’s a torque in it, as I said, relatedness and separateness. That is the principle of two—all dualities within energy, and also the duality—the separation between Consciousness and Energy. So it’s the source of all dualities—that simple torque, which is inherent in attention, contraction to a point, the center of the Cosmic Mandala.

Yes, it may look like a blue ball up there, but it’s your clenched fist. [laughter] it’s the bindu of attention. You have to get into it’s position to go beyond and Realize the Truth. So I had to contradict Baba on this point. You see? Not frivolous at all.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, then You also just mentioned, in the Vedanta Temple Event, when You Re-Awakened to Your Prior Condition, Completely, Your images associated with that transition . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: In the days previous to the description.

DEVOTEE: Right. And then You said, I’m not exactly sure, but I think You said they were somewhat superficial.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, the process or the Event Itself was profound, Most Perfectly profound. So I did describe these visionary references that were also part of it, but peripheral to the profound Process Itself.

People like to hear about visions, so you may think that I was sort of overwhelmingly involved in the visions. No, as I said, they were the peripheral signs that characterized the Realization, Awake in that very moment.

And so what about it?

DEVOTEE: And—this may be not correct, but this is something that I was feeling—is that this duality that You talked about earlier, the root of attention, that the opposites . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: This duality is attention. Polarized in itself, and so the body is two. Two halves, yin/yang both there, full Circle there.

DEVOTEE: Right.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: In some basic sense, male and female there—own-body as whole. But it’s made of opposites, just like attention. You’ve probably seen videos or films or whatever, of cells developing. Very often it’s shown in films about reproduction, and they will display the egg having been contacted by the sperm. And they show it quickly torquing in half. Then they all do, and a mass of cell growth occurs spontaneously from this core of chemistry and energy and such—right?

Well, that first moment, if you ever see that, where it sort of—zap!—it just sort of happens all of a sudden? Have you ever seen such video?

DEVOTEES: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: That is a physical representation of the nature of attention.

DEVOTEE: [quietly and with wonder] It actually just explodes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, it explodes, it’s the basis of everything. Everything comes from that. And for anything to come of it, everything has to come of it. That’s why there’s not only all of the good stuff, there’s all of the bad stuff—the extremes of right and left, yang and yin. They have to be there as well for there to be anything at all. Because it’s a simple torque—generates all possibility.

Of course you can control attention to go towards various objects you may want, high and low, with varying degrees of success. But you cant get beyond the knot, the torque inherent in attention, or feeling attention itself. It is fear. it’s the sense of otherness, separateness. So to go beyond that you have to go beyond attention. You must find the Condition in Which it is arising. Prior to attention is Consciousness.

Consciousness is not attention, it’s not the mind. Those are objects of Consciousness, merely Witnessed. Consciousness is just That, Consciousness. it’s the root of all the other things you could observe that you call yourself. No, it’s not the body—thats objective to you—its not energy in the body, emotion, on and on—these are all objects to you. Finally you Realize that attention is object to you as well, where you’re merely in the Witness-Position.

So it’s simply by analyzing yourself, you go further and further back to locate yourself. You are in the Position of Consciousness. it’s another way of Locating the Witness—to do that exercise, or just Enquire: Isn’t it true, no matter what is arising presently, you are the Witness of it? The mere Witness, not identified with it, not attached to it, utterly Free of it.

So it’s only by noting the torque of attention arising in the field of the Self, of Consciousness Itself, that you then are in the Position that Transcends attention, and therefore that Transcends the self-knot and all of the cells of gross and subtle that proceed from that fundamental duality, torque, or knot that is not Consciousness, or that becomes not-Consciousness by opposing it, by replacing the In-dwelling in Consciousness with an object on which you’ve meditated.

Attention is what you meditated on—and lost yourself.

So Freedom is in the meditation Prior to attention, Prior to sleep, Prior to death, Prior to the body-mind. That—and no place, center, in or beyond the body-mind—is the Truth, and the Place of it’s Realization. That is God, That is Truth, That is Reality, the Divine Person, Nirvana, the One.

Seventh stage Realization is not about being Consciousness and just presuming that all this stuff happening out here is the Energy of Consciousness. Energy, the “Bright” Shakti is not separate from Consciousness in that Awakening. Pervasive Energy becomes Pervasive Consciousness.

This was My Realization, in the Vedanta Temple. But it’s to be All-Energy, Conscious As everything, everyone—not of you confined to this body.

I am simply Radiant in This Body and every where. Except this is really known in This Body, so I can tell you. it’s the same for you, but you are not noticing it usually. You’re invested in identification with attention and the body-mind, and conditional objects altogether.

Even in sleep you are thus attached to separateness and struggle. You have invested yourself in an inherently painful and unhappy circumstance—so you’re always seeking pleasure, painlessness and Happiness.

Why would you be seeking it, if it were already true of you?

So your ordinary existence is about feeling pain and lack of pleasure, and fear and suffering. And you’re always struggling, seeking to get Happy, to get infinite Happiness, pleasure, no pain, no threat, no death, you see.

So you’re spending your whole life seeking that—your heart is seeking this, psychologically you’re seeking this—whatever all the routines of your living, you are exhibiting the sign of pain and suffering and seeking. And all your devices, patterns, habits, personal and whatever—little devices of the social personality—everything is something you are using, something you’ve developed or adapted to, that promises some sort of peace, pleasure, painlessness—heaviness, you see?

But you are always seeking, because it’s not found. These are your devices patterned to the world, yes, but intended by you to make Happiness.

But you never stop seeking Happiness, so one must assume that it didn’t work. And your report is not only local and present time, this is the report of all mankind for thousands of years. And I have certainly made it clear.

You are always seeking. Always un-Happy, seeking Happiness. Always, even when pleasurized, not pleasurized yet. Associated with pain constantly and anxiety, and even fear.

You want to put on those civilized smiles, and pretend everything is okay, because you’ve done this and that, had this and that and so on. Like the people on TV when I was a boy. I was wondering then similarly, “What are these people smiling about? They seem to be totally unaware of the situation they are in.”

So you can cover it up with all kinds of social bullshit and busyness, but you are experiencing fear, anxiety, pain, contraction, separateness, lack of radiance, un-Happiness—at a deep level. Because no matter how good you try to feel about it, this thing only changes and dies.

You can add more time. That’s the best you can do, a little bit maybe, if you’re lucky. it’s a place of seeking, because it’s rooted in self-contraction, and identification with what changes and dies, and is not you.

You are the mere Witness, Prior to the body-mind. You belong to That Domain, and that’s what you must Realize. You must be Established There and then you must Realize the Greatness of the Domain Itself.

So you must have noticed all of this. Its, I presume, a basic reason why you came into My Company—because of, in one or another way, noticing this about your life.

You read the book in the office, and you had the examination, the diagnosis. The prescription written in clear hand. So you did everything but take the Medicine. Or you didn’t take it all and regularly enough—yet. Picking and choosing and not taking It regularly.

DEVOTEE: Still holding on to the illusion…

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You’re supposed to hold on to Me. That’s why the core of this practice is Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga, all the faculties turned to Me in the self-surrendering, self-forgetting manner, until it becomes self-transcending Communion with Me.

So don’t bullshit Me about your case or your conditions, or whatever else. That’s not Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga, that’s why you’re dwelling on that.

DEVOTEE: Beloved I feel that . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And it’s rather funny, by the way—excuse Me for the moment—but to come to Me with all that earnestness, even your sad tale, and give Me those tearful eyes of devotion. [Beloved chuckles.] Then I give you what you came for, and you start bargaining with Me about it, or are lazy in your adaptations. Well, that’s kind of silly, what were you going to say?

DEVOTEE: I was going to say that it seems to me that if I was established in the seeing disposition for a period of time, that the gross level of life would like fall apart like a bunch of cartoon characters.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm. Tcha.

DEVOTEE: Just dissipate.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, well that’s the force of Spiritual Communion with Me. It breaks down your entanglement, Outshines it, “Brightens” you, so that you can see Me, be attracted to Me. In other words, be Relocated Prior to attention in My Place.

This is the literal Work of My Blessing, it’s not just a poetic description of something you’re going to have to achieve by practicing some techniques. If you enter self-forgetting into this Communion with Me, then My Very Person and Presence does the Yoga of the body-mind. Your role is Communion with Me. Communing with Me, then, you Realize My Condition. You yield your place to Me.

So it’s not because you see [in the technical sense] that there is this Profundity that you presume would happen, it’s because you see Me. You’re entered into literal Spiritual Communion with Me, and allow My Presence to do the work it has to do, rather than get involved in the psycho-physical effects you notice happening in the process. Rather than that, you remain focused in Me. Because you have the means of hearing, you could practice seeing. Focus in Me rather than focus in experiences, or effects, you see. When the bull runs through the china shop, everybody grabs for the china, but the bull has no such concerns. [devotees sigh]

DEVOTEE: Beloved, throughout the evening, in this consideration with You, I’ve been feeling what an incredible Sacrifice You are.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I don’t want to hear about it. [laughter] Do I have to be a sacrifice now?

DEVOTEE: No.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, good. You should appreciate that.

[silence]

Its not an exercise that I intend to perpetuate, you know? It has it’s course, it’s Work. But it’s not embraced in the karmic manner, such that it will have to be repeated, or such that it is binding. So it will take it’s course to Translation, as proof to you of what I said. I’m not in the position of clinging to the body-mind. And any excursion into it is pain. You’re here to Realize Me.

Now do so, because there’s nothing in Me that’s going to manufacture this anymore, this insertion in the body-mind with all that that involves—even with full Consciousness, allowing it, and everything that followed from that. Well, yes, that’s a Sacrifice—one made because of unique conjunction and for that reason. But it wasn’t about choosing the body-mind. It was about Blessing, necessitating this Revelation—but not something to be chosen in itself. And when that Work is Served, there is no motion to perpetuate it. It has a Divine cycle, not a karmic cycle.

So it’s not binding to Me, and there will be no seed of perpetuation. I don’t like being in the body-mind. Realization is about transcending that bondage and dissociation. You do it because you love it.

DEVOTEE: I’ve seen the light, Lord. I’ve seen the light. I’m going to make a few changes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: How many times have I heard ….tell Me that? [laughter]

DEVOTEE: [laughing] I know. I didn’t want to say it, but I wanted to make sure I got it out there.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, it’s on tape and these people are going to hold you to it. [laughter]