Daily Reading Beezone






 

Franklin Jones (Adi Da Samraj) – 1973

Understanding and Our Primary
Activity

There two aspects appearing side by side in the Knee of
Listening; the yogic or phenomenal aspects, and the teaching
relative to understanding. They appear side by side
throughout my life, throughout my teaching work. And by this
you must see that what I mean by understanding is not simply
some sort of philosophical calm or, you know, way of feeling
somehow free of your own movements in a philosophical way.
Though a life of understanding cannot be separated from
yogic transformation. There is no understanding without
yoga. It is simply that yoga, or the process of our internal
mechanism, our fundamental mechanism, is not the principle
or point of view of spiritual life. But the way of
understanding spontaneously manifests the yogic
transformation, or true functional transformation of
consciousness in life. It’s just that the principle of
spiritual life is understanding in Satsang. Its phenomena
are these transforming yogic phenomena.

What understanding reveals is a primary seemily
unconscious activity, the prior activity in consciousness.
And what is the nature of that primary activity? It has two
aspects. The one is separation in consciousness, this
continual realization in consciousness, of separation. And
the other is contraction in life. And life and consciousness
are not separable, but the peculiar qualities in which this
activity within us manifests itself are a separative
activity at the level of consciousness and contraction in
the mechanisms or functions of life. So it appears always as
identification, differentiation, and desire.

It appears as a separate self sense, it also appears as a
knot in the navel. It always appears as contraction and
separation. And I saw that perhaps we can think of this in
evolutionary terms as the gigantic organic process of the
universe manifests the human function, the human
possibility, the psycho-physical entity that may or may not
become fully conscious in all that it contains.

The next stage after the universal or organic production
of this psycho-physical entity is for each manifestation of
that type, that human type, to realize itself fully. And the
process of understanding then, could be said in this sense
to be the instrument or agent or process of the evolution of
man. In other words in order for there to be humanity, the
human function as well as what is above it, there must be at
the level of each individual, real observation of this
activity, understanding; as an individual process must take
place. There can’t be any wholesale sort of blessing into
understanding. It must take place as a real activity in
every case.

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