You Must Hear the Teaching Argument – Adi Da Samraj – 1981

My Avatarically
Self-Revealed Divine Word Of Heart-Instruction Is Founded On
Two Basic (and Complementary) Teaching-Arguments. The First
Is My Teaching-Argument Relative To “Radical” Understanding
(or Most Direct – and, Most Ultimately, Inherent, and
Inherently Most Perfect-Transcending Of the
self-Contraction).

The Second Is My Teaching-Argument Relative To Divine
ignorance (or Inherent, and Inherently Most Perfect, Divine
Self-Realization).

HEART-MASTER DA: I
started Communicating this Wisdom-Teaching, rather
bright-eyed, more than a decade ago already, and I am still
Struggling with the same lack of response in people that I
encountered when I began. Nobody is really interested. I
have not really seen any response to my Work. I have seen
the usual, gleeful, sitting­around-at-a-lecture
attitude with which people respond to movies and TV. The
Teaching Argument is just a commonplace. To enter into a
higher frame of existence is just not very important to
people. They really do not care to do it, particularly if it
requires great effort, great energy, great attention, great
intelligence, great will. Anything great to be Realized
requires all of those things, but people are used to being
sold everything, as if they can just have it at a cost they
can comfortably afford.

Like everyone else,
you are adapted to the psychology of the consumer. If
something exists to be desired, you can have it just by
coming into contact with it, or by going to a store, by
picking up a book, and by going someplace for a weekend.
Everything is supposed to be instantly consumable. The
message is that what is between you and a mouthwash is the
distance between here and the store. You only need to plunk
your money down. Everything is like a sex-object, conceived
solely in terms of its consumability, its desirability. Even
the great Realizations of human life have somehow been drawn
into the stream of communications that propose such things
merely as desirable objects. However, the substance of
Spiritual life is not merely a desirable object that you can
notice and then desire just because it is there, or that you
can acquire simply by coming in touch with it. The
conventional consumer’s mind says that there is nothing
between you and anything you might desire but space, whereas
what is really between you and What is Great is much more
than space!

The distance between
you and What is Great is not only space but time, or mind.
It is the distance between where you are now and your
ultimate overcoming. God-Realization is not a consumable
product. Spiritual Teaching cannot be presented as a
consumable object. To become a successful institution or
religion business involves making the Teaching somehow
consumable, an object you can sell. And if the Teaching is
to be an object you can sell, then not only the Instructions
but also the Realization must become salable.

People are not
interested in coming to your church if Enlightenment is not
what they get by coming there. If they do come to your
church, and you tell them all the things they must do in
order to become Enlightened, they go to sleep. People simply
do not have any tolerance for the Way whereby the Great
Things are Realized. They reject the whole process. It is
too much. They think it is evil. They cannot desire the Way.

If you cannot make a
religious or Spiritual offering in its fullness available
like a consumable object, you cannot generate the growth
that seems desirable. Religious institutions grow,
therefore, by creating religious illusions, consumable
religious products, consumable Spiritual products. Religious
institutions hype illusion, or ideas, in such a fashion as
to make them desirable, make them somehow seem like
Enlightenment itself. You would think that just the ideas
themselves were the equivalent of ultimate Realization, or
ultimate Happiness. All you have to do is consume these
things. All you have to do is get kriya initiation, and
right then, having gotten that now, you are happy. People
flock to organizations to get products that are hyped,
thinking that they are getting Happiness, or getting the
ultimate Great Thing. But they are not getting true
Happiness at all. The religion business exists to make the
unattainable seem like a product that can be purchased.

I have been Teaching
the Real Thing to people all these years, and I know what
happens to people when they are confronted with the
realities of Spirituality. Unless they are unusual people,
they basically do not respond. They somehow can get attached
to the Teacher, or attached to whatever organization may
seem to develop around the Teacher, because they are hopeful
of something, or because in the context of belonging certain
goods come across so consoling that people do not mind being
hangers-on.

But we do not have
an “Enlightenment-product” to sell here. The Way must be
lived. The Way requires disciplines. As soon as we emphasize
the disciplines in The Laughing Man Institute and talk about
the profound orientation to practice, every student wants to
retreat and become a friend. But if we keep The Laughing Man
Institute a kind of middle-class religion business, wherein
we do not make demands too heavily and we permit people to
dramatize their human ordinariness, then we can make that
department into a business. People do not mind being
consumers of The Laughing Man Institute business we produce
here-although even so it is very difficult to develop that
business!

One of the reasons
it has been so difficult to establish The Laughing Man
Institute is that the Wisdom-Teaching is inherently critical
of the point of view of religion business. This
Wisdom-Teaching just does not have anything to do with
anything like religion business. The Wisdom-Teaching is not
consumable. The Way is not consumable. The Way is not
something some smiling jerk can purchase and tell his
friends about. It is too difficult, too profound.

The problem with the
people who are involved here is that they have not observed
life itself in such a light that they are motivated toward
the Great Process. Life still seems to them to be an amusing
opportunity. They want to continue with its consolations.
They are not really observing life as a whole. They are not
really seeing what is before them. The profound nature of
existence escapes them. They are involved in a very
superficial level of existence, largely oriented toward
bodily amusement. For them, life is the proposition of
bodily fulfilment. Of course there is mortality and
difficulty, and therefore they like to throw a little
religion into their heads, just to protect themselves.

This Teaching is not
the kind of religion that can serve such a purpose. The kind
of religion that can serve that purpose is conventional,
exoteric, downtown churchism and all the hype of self-help
groups. The ultimate, Transcendental, esoteric Spiritual
Process has always been a great matter. Very few have ever
been involved in it. Very few even heard about it before the
last century. The ordinary run of humanity just is not in
touch with it. Thus, it has always been reserved.

Yet, because the
world has gotten into such a bad state, and because the
science of communication has advanced, the secret stream of
human evolution and higher Teaching has become more public.
As a result, the secret Teaching became part of the domain
of business and superficial culture. And that is our double
bind: We are involved in a Teaching that is fundamentally
only for those who can use it, and at the same time we have
an apparent obligation to the world at large that requires a
worldly business.

Today all kinds of
weak-minded people are making commentaries on great matters,
as if they were authorities. The Great Teaching has been
made an object of abuse and casual treatment by the general
public, who are threatened by its existence. If you want to
succeed as a religious institution, you must reduce yourself
to a common message. You must present yourself as a
congenial, friendly little thing, a little character that
does not know too much or own too much, is not free too
much, is just a good guy. You must be like everybody else.
You must present something that is consumable by all people
just as they are. “Jesus loves you just as you are” is the
message, you see.

All people want to
be just as they are, and they want to enjoy themselves just
as they are. Such is the common motivation to be exactly as
you are and to enjoy yourself. People basically come around
here expecting to find out that they can simply enjoy
themselves and not have to change one whit. They merely want
to be what they are, the born physical character. They
desire all the things that would be fun to do, and they want
to know how to do them. The reason they are asking about how
to get happy, of course, is that they are frustrated and
unhappy and mortal, but they do not want to get too
philosophical about all that. They do not want to look at
their frustration and unhappiness to the point of becoming
something else altogether. Of course, if they come to me,
they are told, “You should really examine all of this and be
something entirely different.” Yet they keep coming back
every week, asking, “Are you sure that is the way it is? Are
you sure I have to do all this stuff? Are you really
serious, or is this just a bit of theatre? Are you just
setting us up for a big party? What you are really going to
wind up telling us is that we really do not have to do
anything but simply enjoy ourselves, right?” Meanwhile, I am
busy working myself over, trying to Communicate the Truth to
you in such a form that it will make a difference to you.

Now, why should I be
worried about that? Why should I be concerned to find some
new way of phrasing the Truth that will somehow make the
difference for you people here? If you had half a wit, The
Knee of Listening would have changed your life! It has been
in print since 1972, but you simply do not like the
implications of The Knee of Listening. It suggests that you
must change, you see. It suggests that you cannot enjoy the
consoling religious ideas, You must have a fundamental
understanding now, and if you live on the basis of that
fundamental understanding, you will change your life. Your
whole life will be taken up by disciplines, meditation, and
God-Realization, but you do not want it.

What do you want?
You want some promise, some graduated path. Why must a
Teaching based on the Wisdom that there is no graduated path
and that the ultimate Realization is not the goal of human
life busy itself creating a graduated path wherein the goal
of Realization is constantly sought? Why must a gradual path
be created? Because of the nature of the people who come
around. Because they are not really available to the Wisdom
that is offered to them, they must be given something else
to do in the meantime so that perhaps they will gradually be
brought around. Not only are people not ready for the
esoteric dimension of this process, but they are not even
ready for the basic communication.

You simply do not
use the radical Wisdom. You insist on being associated with
the conventional archetypes. As long as I use archetypal
words, you feel you are in the presence of something
religious, you feel all right, you will keep struggling
along, applying yourself in some very minimal way because
you are not truly motivated. You are motivated only if you
wake up, and then you have great energy. But since you have
not awakened yet, you only want to be surrounded by a few
comfortable slogans and archetypes, and you will apply the
discipline only to the degree that you are not burdened by
guilt.

The trouble with
religious and Spiritual institutions all over the world is
that people do not practice. In general the institutions do
not even regard this reality to be a problem. They become
immune to it. They are willing to exist specifically for
people who do not practice. Lack of practice has likewise
always been a problem here. I have been able to function as
someone who communicates, but I have not been able to
function as somebody who communicates in the company of
people who practice. The institution itself takes on more
and more of the quality of non-practice, on the
justification that “If we are going to succeed and grow,
then we must give up on this idea that people are supposed
to practice seriously, if at all”

If all there is is
what there was at the beginning – which is me, having
Realized the Truth-then that is all there is about this
institution that is real. All the rest of it is a worldly
machine that has developed around me because of my poor
interest in bringing other people into God Realization. But
I ask myself, “Why should it be a concern of mine?” Why am I
concerned about whether or not people hear me and change
their lives? That concern just led me into more and more
involvement with people and with the world, an involvement
that confines and threatens my own existence and that does
not represent a change in other people.

I did not become
involved in this Teaching Work in order to create a religion
business, not at all. My Teaching Work was a serious
impulse, a real impulse, based on what I had observed in
everybody since the day I was born. What I had seen in other
people seemed to make them worthy of being instructed.
Something needed to be found out, and if it could be found
out, there would be profound change. It always seemed to me
that if I could find it out, then to let other people know
about it was something important to do. Such has always been
my impulse, but it is an impulse that is always frustrated,
even subverted and reinterpreted by the institutional
process of communicating the Teaching Argument to people.
Something could be profoundly different about everybody’s
life, but the fact that I am interested in its being
profoundly different does not mean that other people are
interested in its being profoundly different. Basically
people are not interested.

You know that saying
in The Knee of Listening, in “The Man of Understanding”
section, something like “Nobody understands so he makes
himself happy with the idea that you have already
understood.” There is no way whereby you get to understand.
There is nothing I can do to make you understand. The
Bodhisattva vow does not really work, not in any ultimate
sense. Some sort of Transmission is involved in the
awakening of one individual, because the Divine Reality
Transmits Itself to the world in one way or another, but
such Transmission is required eternally. It must happen
again and again and again and again. Nothing one individual
can do in one lifetime is going to make the ultimate or
absolute difference for mankind as a whole because of the
nature of this material bondage that is humanity.

I have had only the
best intentions, but this world, and the people who come
around to hear the Wisdom-Teaching, and the people who are
available to listen to it, are doing something different
than I am doing. I lived what everybody else lives in the
midst of this Teaching Work in order to be instructive. It
became very clear to me in the midst of that submission that
everybody is interested in my living what they are living
forever. What they liked was the fact that I was living
their kind of life, not the fact that I was Teaching in the
midst of their life. Everybody was really very disappointed
by the fact that I did not want to live that kind of life
very long and by the fact that I am not doing it now.

Everybody is
wondering where the good times are! People become worried
when they see me just as I am, when I am not taking on their
qualities, playing life just the way they want to play it.
They start getting uptight. If I am just sort of invisible,
criticizing things and making demands, people become
uninterested. They feel burdened by everything. When all
they hear about is the disciplines of Spiritual life, they
lose interest.

The survival of the
institution should not be dependent on immature people who
presume they are already Enlightened beings. Because
immature people are what they are, we must have a proper
formal structure for their involvement. That is the way it
was always done traditionally. If there existed a core of
renunciate or esoteric practitioners, they related to the
public and to beginners through the kind of very formal
temple structure I have described in the past. They did not
create folksy, informal association with inappropriate
expectations and access to beginners.

It is a nice idea
that there be a gathering of mature practitioners, but it is
very difficult to manifest, particularly in this wasteland
where forces propagandize against the higher possibilities
of humanity from all directions. It is basically against the
law to become Enlightened. You must violate basic human
taboos to enter into the real Process of Spiritual life.
There is not enough free space. Everyone is obliged to be
the same. How can you possibly create an authentic gathering
under such circumstances? It would be a rare case if any
single Realized individual came out of that, and it is rare
and unusual, but today everybody wants to maintain the
egalitarian view of humanity. Everybody imagines that if one
guy can do it, everybody must be able to do it in a weekend.
It must be as easy as pie.

Adepts almost never
appear. Real practitioners are very, very rare. That is the
way it has always been, and it is still the way it is. To
hear people talk you would think there were thousands of
Adepts all over the country. There are not even thousands of
real practitioners. There are people famous for their
Spirituality who are not even real practitioners. This is an
Alice-in-Wonderland world. It is not real. That is why there
must be the Great Teaching. That is why the Truth is of such
great consequence, because it is hardly understood, and the
real implications of Spiritual Wisdom are not grasped.

Even in the optimum
circumstance of the traditional setting, it still took years
and years to develop a disciple. And there were very few of
those. Look at the history of the traditions and consider
the people who were associated with Adepts. How many Adepts
were, in effect, fathered by other Adepts? How many Adepts
produced one or more other Adepts, even in the apparently
optimum circumstances of the traditional setting?

All of the Adepts
basically act as if, in their sort of bright-eyed fashion,
they are going to save the world. What they have Realized
obviously has great consequences. If everybody else could
Realize it likewise, things certainly would be remarkably
different. Thus, the Adepts are always laying the Teaching
onto people and suffering and being abused for doing so.
What is the history of mankind? It is not the absence of
Adepts and Teachings. These have always appeared. It is the
non-use of them, the non-response, the abuse, the
suppression. Yes, religion is famous, but not as true
religion, not as the servant of Truth, not even as the
medium of Truth. Religion has become famous because it is
not really religion. It is the same thing that existed
before the Truth was proclaimed. And it makes the Truth or
the atmosphere of Truth into something else entirely,
basically a justification for the conventions of
worldliness, not Enlightenment.

And yet religious
institutions have value in that they keep some sort of
stream of Spiritual teaching in the world. What they present
is often falsified, manipulated, suppressed, abused, and
miscommunicated, but these institutions are the only vehicle
apart from the occasional arising of an Adept. This is why
it seems important to me to create an institution that
functions rightly, but not because I have even the slightest
sense that the world could be suddenly changed by hearing
the Truth. It has never happened, and it is never going to
happen, at least not with humanity as it is. In general, it
is not going to happen in the manifest realms, and there is
no other place where it could happen.

To communicate the
Truth is always difficult because the Truth is about waking
up from the presumption you are making on the basis of
manifest existence. Even religion and so-called Spiritual
endeavor tends to be based on that same presumption. The
religion people hold on to, cling to, feel consoled by, is
the religion based on that error, that false presumption.
The Truth is another matter. The Truth is taught in a
religious or Spiritual context, but if it is to be
practiced, the error you are making on the basis of manifest
appearances must be thoroughly transcended. Such
transcendence is Enlightenment. Such transcendence is
hearing the Teaching.

Just to begin the
Way you must hear the Teaching. You must Awaken.
Whole-bodily Enlightenment in the most thorough, full, and
high sense involves a Great Process, but Enlightenment is
not its goal. Enlightenment is its root. Enlightenment is a
fundamental Awakening, a fundamental insight, which you then
use moment to moment to create the Way. A practice that is
not based on that fundamental insight is not based on Truth.

Therefore, the basic
Teaching this institution should represent is the
understanding of this fundamental error, or the mechanism
associated with manifest existence that makes it into an
illusion, into suffering, un-Happiness, un-Enlightenment,
Godlessness. You cannot merely believe something positive
and develop a true religious or Spiritual life.
Enlightenment is not simply a matter of believing in
conventional God-ideas that motivate you to be better. All
such ideas must be understood. You must enjoy this
Awakening, this insight. You must hear the Teaching
Argument.