The Effort Toward Union Has
Nothing to Do with Realization
Adi Da Samraj
May 25, 1992
DEVOTEE: I want to be with You, not separate,
in Oneness.
SRI DA AVABHASA: Realization is not about someone
realizing union with someone, or with anything. If there is
any effort along those lines, it has nothing to do with
Realization.
DEVOTEE: You have Instructed me this year in the lesson
of self-effort versus giving You my attention.
In the past you have actually
been discussing a motive toward union,
such an effort has nothing to do with Realization.
The traditions are filled with methods, philosophies, and
goals that are built upon the model of the search for
union a model of a separate
someone trying to get rid of the feeling of separateness by
reaching toward another condition.
It is precisely this effort that must be understood and
transcended. When there is no such effort, no pursuit of
union, then there is Realization.
In the present time, and you
want to enact it somehow. Inevitably, however, what you are
also suggesting is that you achieve fulfillment by it. You
must understand that this is absolutely impossible. It is
not possible at all to fulfill yourself or to achieve
fulfillment or Realization by any means that seeks for
union.
This does not mean that you can instantaneously argue
yourself out of this motive. I am telling you that any
process of such “consideration” must be a process of
self-observation and self-understanding, in the context of
self-surrendering, self-forgetting, and self-transcending
feeling-Contemplation of Me. You must come to the point
where the motive to union itself is thoroughly understood
and ceases to control your existence..
Since the beginning of My Teaching Work I have
“considered” with you that you cannot merely make a judgment
and then cancel or bypass functional existence. The Way of
the Heart is a “reality consideration”, a real process. You
all want it to become unreal. For years you all have been
involved in an effort to replace the real process of sadhana
in the Way of the Heart with some convention of your own, an
egoic convention, a nominal religiosity.
I do not Call you to realize union with Me. I Call you to
transcend your separate and separative self through devotion
to Me. This is quite a different matter. Nevertheless, you
tend to superimpose the model of seeking, or union-seeking,
on your relationship to Me, as you tend to superimpose it on
all relations and all functions, all aspects of life. All
seeking is basically a search for union, or re-union. I have
Called you to understand all seeking and to be free of the
effort toward union.
A characteristic effort toward union is associated with
each stage of life. There are even many such efforts
associated with each stage of life, and there is also a
fundamental effort associated with each one. I have Called
you to observe and understand this effort in the context of
each stage of life. You cannot merely choose to bypass any
stage. You must understand it. You must understand it very
directly in a participatory manner. You cannot merely by
“considering” My Instruction assume the asana of the
Realization of the seventh stage of life. You must do the
sadhana.
Human beings are originally adapted to and bound to the
efforts associated with the first three stages of life. You
accumulate these stages one by one from the foundation years
of development. And, characteristically, human beings do not
exceed the efforts associated with the first three stages of
life. I Call you to Realize the seventh stage, but you must
do so by enduring the sadhana, the tapas, the ordeal, of
self-transcendence, stage by stage. The first three stages
of life are the root of your adaptation, the root of your
bondage. They describe your egoity, until you truly grow
beyond them and enter for real into the stages of life
beyond the third.
In general, you are all only beginning the religious
life, adapting to the fourth stage of life in a rudimentary
fashion. You cannot fully enter even into the fourth stage
of life, or do sadhana in the context of the fourth stage of
life, until this adaptation and bondage in the context of
the first three stages of life is thoroughly understood.
Such understanding is a very profound matter. It is a
profound ordeal.
You may observe in yourself and in the entire gathering
of My devotees that there is no grand march to the advanced
and the ultimate stages of life in the Way of the Heart.
Many seem to presume advancement in themselves, but that is
also part of the deluding capability associated with the
first three stages of life. At the root of this bondage in
the first three stages of life is the emotional-sexual
character. This is why, then, My “Consideration” with you
over these twenty years has very directly and very
frequently involved the emotional-sexual matter, not because
of some prurient interest of yours but because it is
absolutely essential that you deal with this dimension of
existence.
Why do you think I spent so much time and effort
“Considering” this matter with you in the years of My
Teaching Work? To Instruct you I have no choice but to deal
with this matter. Yet you have basically asked Me to step
aside from that Work and let you become an idealized
gathering that bases itself on idealistic presumptions. You
put on the attitude, the cloak, the appearance, of religion.
You turn the Way of the Heart into another form of
conventional religiosity, in which you dare not speak up or
certainly do anything very dramatic about your sexual
bondage.
In the process of this sadhana you must come to the
point, through self-understanding, of relinquishing the
motive of union with another, because the fundamental
understanding, the core of this sadhana, is the
transcendence of the motive toward union, or the search
based on self-contraction, the search for any conditional
object, stage, condition, or other. You have relinquished
this motive when you understand yourself thoroughly in these
terms and when you have come to the point of realizing that
the motive toward the search, in sexual terms or in any
other terms, must fail. It cannot be satisfied. It is itself
bondage. The emotional-sexual search is binding. It is
another characteristic of egoity, but it is a particular
characteristic of the born human individual adapted to the
context of the first three stages of life.
If you are to enter into the intensive process of
transcending the motives and bondage of the first three
stages of life, you must be in a position to relinquish the
choices that that adaptation seems to enforce. This does not
mean that when you transcend the emotional-sexual motive as
bondage you suddenly are absolutely free. You will always
discover more motives, more seeking, in each stage of
life.
Most Perfect Realization, then, is not dissociated, and
it is also not familiar with anything. There is no
contraction. And What Is, is Obvious. There is only One,
Absolute Being and Field, inherently Unmodified, appearing
in the Forms of Its own modification. This Realization is
Liberating. It is Itself Liberation.
|