When the Well Never Leaves the View You are There

The “Brightening” Way Talk Series

The Yajna Discourses of Santosha Adi Da (1995-1996) (12/95 and 1/96)

THE “BRIGHTENING” WAY TALK SERIES

The Yajna Discourses of Santosha Adi Da

When the Well Never Leaves the View, you are There

A Gathering “Consideration” with Beloved Adi Da Samraj in the Manner of Flowers on January 9, 1996

[For about thirty minutes or so at the beginning of this gathering, devotees engaged Beloved Adi Da in casual conversation, finally reminiscing at length about the history of television.]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

So why are we talking about all this? Because you forgot where you are again? Did you all lose it today, or preserve it, or what happened?

DEVOTEE: I preserved it, Beloved.

DEVOTEE: It was preserved, Beloved.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: That’s two.

DEVOTEE: Beloved?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm?

DEVOTEE: Throughout the entire day since we left here, I’ve just been feeling You so much, just so, so strongly. I mean, I went home and I was eating my meal, and every motion I took was You, just Your entire Being was, I was saturated with It. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Tcha.] And it was just so easeful for me to fall into that place. And, you know, it felt so natural.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: The place of Contemplation or the Place of the Witness, or which in particular?

DEVOTEE: Well, I took it as Contemplation [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. Tcha.], just putting my attention on You and just feeling, you know, as deeply as I could. And it was just Grace. I mean, it was just completely Your Grace. And I long to be in that Place.[ADI DA SAMRAJ: Ah Tcha.] And I just want to thank You for that.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Tcha.

DEVOTEE: Beloved?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm?

DEVOTEE: Yesterday morning when I awoke, I woke up very still and already Contemplating You, enjoying Divine Communion. And as I got up and started to move in the day, I noticed that there was a mood of being conservative. And I could see what I do at other times, . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: It’s the same kind of thing you do at other times, you mean?

DEVOTEE: No. It’s different than what I do at other times. In that conservative posture I could see the other thing that I do thats non-practice, beginning to give away my energy and attention.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I see, mm-hm. You felt a kind of sila, you mean, when you woke up?

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mmm. That’s what you mean by conservative?

DEVOTEE: Yes, mm-hm. And so throughout the day my act became different, my relationship to, you know, what I ate and how I spoke, and just not over-extending myself, doing what I needed to do in the moment to be functional. And over the period of the day, in that constant enjoyment of Communion with You, I also began to relax and be sensitive to the self-contraction itself. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.]. And it just became stronger throughout the day. And . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Your sense of it?

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: And I didn’t do anything about it, try to address it in any way, [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.] just let it be. And I would give my attention and energy to You. And at times it would begin to break up a little bit, that contraction, and as I began to just give my attention and energy back to You and not try to deal with it, I caught that practice to do that. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.] And before we came over, that sense of just flowering through, not just breaking through a little bit but just, the flower would open right into the other side and be there and enjoy that.

And when we came over in the evening, still this sense was strong but flowering through. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Ah, Tcha.] And about, at some point in the evening, when You were guiding us to Your State and Your Condition, I just sort of woke up, just in the Witness-Position clearly. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.] And it has remained that way throughout the evening. It never changed after that.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And then today?

DEVOTEE: And then today, the qualities are a little different somehow, but the fundamental thread is still there. And I know that in my practice I have to take care of fundamentals and plug the holes, and I completely understand that. It makes complete sense to me to live those conditions. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.] It completely preserves this more fundamental Contemplation.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Ah Tcha. We could talk about some aspects of what you said. You said, the one thing you repeated several times is that you were aware of the self-contraction but you didn’t do anything about it. You just kept giving Me your attention and so on.

DEVOTEE: Mm-hm.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: On the one hand you could say its a kind of Way of Faith gesture you’re describing, just response to Me and the self-contraction follows it, is released and flowers, you see. So thats one thing it suggests.

Another thing it suggests is not hearing.

DEVOTEE: Mm.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: The hearing disposition is in the place of the self-contraction. It’s in that position of that action and able to release it, feel beyond it, through Invocation of Me or self-Enquiry, whatever, added to all that Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga is about. But it always takes place in that position.

Your way of describing it, at any rate, sounds like you felt it somewhere, it was objective to you, you see. You felt it as a sensation, you were aware of it, and you didn’t do anything about it. That was your language basically.

It suggests like, as Daniel was, I was commenting on something Daniel was saying yesterday or the day before suggesting the same thing, its objective to you, you observe it, you maybe sometimes try to do something about it or sometimes you don’t, but you’re not in its position, you see. The hearing discovery is the discovery of that very position and the act thats being done by you there.

DEVOTEE: Right, right.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And finding that means you’re in the position to feel beyond it. You know you can, because its not somewhere else. It’s not, you’re not out of touch with it, you see.

DEVOTEE: Mm-hm.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: So its a fundamental discovery about oneself that one is performing this action and not just having an experience that suggests its there. Hm?

DEVOTEE: Mm-hm. Yes. [murmurs from everyone]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, so maybe both things are being said by you. You have a feeling for the Way of Faith disposition, and you haven’t heard Me yet maybe.

DEVOTEE: I noticed the breath and the Name during the day was what it was about for Me, breathing You, intending towards You, recalling Your Name.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Of course that in itself would be an aspect of the experience of anyone, whichever of the two approaches they made. Even everyone uses Name-Invocation sometimes, for instance. You can either understand yourself, and through self-Enquiry, whatever, go beyond that self-knot in Communion with Me, or your response to Me could be of such a nature you’re just given over to Me, but in being given over, the self-contraction follows, you see? [sounds of swooning from devotees] So you get the same understanding. It’s just a somewhat different attitude or asana. But both are practicing Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga, so its the same fundamental direct practice in both cases.

DEVOTEE: Beloved?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm?

DEVOTEE: Throughout the day I was constantly informed by Your Samadhi, which I enjoyed last night in the guided meditation but mostly in the form of Your Body, and the sounds that Your Body would make. And recalling the sound of Your Voice would begin to soothe me. And the vision, especially of the shape of Your Head, and the Beauty that You Are, watching Your Complete repose as You ate Your meal, Perfect Enjoyment. All these things informed my day as I Remembered You.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. And all the means you use to Remember Me are ;basically I’ve described them in The Dawn Horse Testament, including this, perhaps listening to My Voice. It’s not just part of the ascending practice. These kinds of recollection of Me are used by devotees, any kind of sense recollection or whatever, at all, can serve the movement of your feeling-attention to Me. Last night when we were engaging what you call guided meditation, what was your experience?

DEVOTEE: My experience?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I was very specific about “You’re in the Witness-Position”, whatever. I was speaking very specifically about your orientation. Did you follow that directly and have such experiences?

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Or were you basically practicing the kind of meditation you just described.

DEVOTEE: I was following Your Instruction. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.] But what began to occur, as You were describing in detail Your State with Force, I was following that, but then I was again distracted by Your Form. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.] And my eyes were open a bit, even though the energy was drawing me out of the body. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Ah, Tcha.] And I was noticing that Your Description was of Consciousness, but it was also what I saw in Your Body. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. Tcha.] And Your Body informed me as well as Your Word, and it drew me into a very beautiful state, Remembrance of You.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Did you enter into this situation of the Witness?

DEVOTEE: I don’t know. I wasn’t aware of my body. I was in a certain sublime state. And there was this feeling, I was mostly aware of this cascading forward into blue light and absorbed in Your Bliss. Is that the Witness-Position?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: So you were engaging more in the kind of meditation practice you just described today, which is probably, I assume, rather typical of how you meditate?

DEVOTEE: Mm-hm.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And, so it sounds like you were following the language of Admonition to some degree, but dominantly were practicing this absorptive meditation, using My bodily human Form with your gaze occasionally, otherwise feeling energy phenomena in your body and so forth. That’s fine. It wasn’t what we were specifically getting at last night, but I’m glad you had a good time. [laughter] [Beloved laughs.] So Joan completely missed the Witness and the seventh stage Realization. Did anybody else get into a different kind of meditation? Or did some of you enter into exactly what I was putting to you?

DEVOTEE: Well, I felt I did, Beloved. I felt how You continually drew me into the Position beyond the body-mind where I was seeing clearly that everything was arising in You.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. And you were not different than That?

DEVOTEE: Right. It was extremely blissful in Contemplation of You as That.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: So I’ve been asking you numerous times: What is going to occur tomorrow or a few weeks from now and so on? Will this disposition continue to be true of you? We’ve even done a couple of experiments and gone to a diversion of some kind of completely different subject matter, or whatever, and then I reminded you again and asked you about it, and generally you said you did, by exercising the mind and so forth, wander from that Native Position, and even in the circumstance as it was.

So to leave the circumstance, you know, the pujas over and you go about your daily life, those elements will not be present unless you learn something about it, notice something about it, and will do something else thats continuously and really effective, the sadhana that enables you to truly receive this Gift.

So something to notice about this circumstance, then, is that you’re physically relaxed and not obsessively thinking. It’s rather relaxed. And that allows the deeper or sensory background, the perceptual background of the personality, also to relax. Just by doing that, it itself relaxes.

So this openness, this self-given openness, is necessary for the development of the great aspects of the Contemplative or religious or Spiritual life. This is why there are foundation practices, and expected disciplines and such, not for moralistic reasons but because of what the Contemplative purpose requires to be really effective. You have to eliminate the bondage to modifications. You have to undermine the accumulated tendencies to be associated with this, that, or the other thing as an automaticity. So there’s a certain purification and balancing that must take place, certain disciplines that need to be maintained so that your asana is steady, your disposition, your asana, your psycho-physical self-presentation in Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga, is fully a matter of responsibility, and not just something that happens every now and then. So the foundation is profoundly important as it turns out.

And I just pointed out some difference again talking to Devotee, talking about the difference between hearing and listening, or the hearing realization and everything that listening is about otherwise. Something fundamental to say about it is that its not hearing until you’re in the position of the self-contraction, having understood yourself in those terms and that it is your own action, and therefore you’re always in the place, whatever the circumstance or the peripheral games, you’re always in the place where you can feel beyond that knot. It carries all of these kinds of knowledge or realization.

Whereas the listening process, where you assume the position of the body-mind, even though you’re practicing this devotion, in that you just examine this or that aspect of your life-patterning and how you function in various situations and whatnot to observe yourself, to notice that you do have patterns, that you do dissociate, all these kinds of things, and see how you do it in various circumstances, and then you apply some new discipline to that every time you discover something, all that is useful basic practice and growth, but its not hearing. It may involve insight into this or that area and proving it and so forth, but you’re still not in the position of the fundamental knot thats behind everything, and that, no matter how much you clean up your act, is still in the background of your feeling.

So it is only discovery of that that is most fundamental self-understanding. It’s not merely a noticing of the ego. It’s being in the very position of that act and using the capability to transcend it. So its not a matter, then, of leaving the self-contraction alone, not strategically anyway. It’s a matter of doing Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga from the position of the self-contraction, rather than doing it at the self-contraction as if its an experience somewhere not under your control, just happening to you.

So the ability to do the “Perfect Practice”, even in the first and second stages, requires foundation sadhana and purification, or else energy and attention will move, modifications will arise automatically, attention will identify with conditions automatically. You can come back to the presumed Witness-Position if called upon or intended somehow, read My Words about it briefly, and so on. But anybody could do that. That’s not the uniqueness of the capability for the “Perfect Practice”.

Many times, as I’ve done here, I’ve asked devotees in some circumstances of gathering, “Isnt it true, no matter what is arising, you’re the Witness?” And everybody sees that it is so, you see. So the fact that you know you can get back to it intentionally, does not mean that you’re prepared for the “Perfect Practice”. The sign of preparedness for the “Perfect Practice” is that you Stand in the Witness-Position, and thats that. You don’t have to do anything to get back to that. It’s like hearing. It’s a fundamental awakeness, a fundamental discovery. And its not conditioned by the body-mind, so it cant be lost. It’s just something you have forgotten. But once you so-called remember it, rediscover it, it cant be lost. It’s just the case.

So thats why, even though I enter into the “consideration” of the “Perfect Practice” with devotees on occasion, I have to keep reminding them what it takes to actually do that practice. They may feel they’re ready for it because they can notice no matter whats arising they’re the Witness. “So it must be so. I can do the Perfect Practice now,” you see. The “Perfect Practice” is constant, and its only constant because you are established in the Witness-Position, plain old.

Having fewer barriers in this form of “consideration”, you could perhaps not only be directed toward it but feel it for a longer period, or have a sense of the reality of it for a longer period. So thats useful for the moment, in order to pass on this Instruction. But you have to do the sadhana if there’s going to be steadiness in that Position. It’s not that the Position gets unsteady. It’s that attention is unsteady, energy and attention. And thats why the Witness is lost constantly, seems to be lost, because you’re in the mode or world of attention, meditating on objects and taking on that form, those forms.

Also you must understand that this discovery of the Witness in the Way of the Heart is not merely like something you could have read about and done yourself, because its not just the Witness in the sense of feeling that you are Consciousness prior to attention. Yes, it is that, but it is a Spiritual development. It requires the devotee to do the seeing sadhana, the Spiritual sadhana, of Communion with Me, and to be moved in such a way, aligned to Me in such a way, that My Spiritual Presence can do some Work in the body-mind, as well as draw you, draw attention and the focus of energy into the right side of the heart.

So when there is the Awakening to the Witness, its not just a noticing anybody could do about their consciousness. It is associated with purification, balance, release of the motions of attention, but its also about the steadiness of energy, which is not separate from Consciousness, but which is its own Radiance.

So devotees who take up the “Perfect Practice” do so on the basis of “Locating” Me Spiritually in the right side of the heart, and being Awake as the Witness, all of this together, you see. And then Standing as the Witness, in the second stage of the “Perfect Practice” they allow themselves to be without “difference”, drawn into that Deep of My Spiritual Presence, Which is Consciousness, but Self-Radiant. It is a Yoga of Bliss. It is a Spiritual Yoga in the Way of the Heart, not merely a mind Yoga. Theres not only the Unqualified Nature of Consciousness It’self, there’s the Unqualified Radiance, the “Bright” It’self. It is the Conscious “Bright”. [sounds of swooning from devotees]

So even though you can feel, if I ask, “Isnt it true, no matter what is arising now, you are the Witness?”, something about that is obvious, you say, but not that State of Identification with the Witness Given Spiritually by Grace, which is the foundation for the “Perfect Practice”.

So all of that must equip you to do the “Perfect Practice”, not the fact that even now you can notice that you Stand in the Witness-Position. What fullness is there? Where is the steadiness? Why would attention wander if you Stand Prior to it?

So to take up the “Perfect Practice” you must be simply established as the Witness, without cause, without having to remember to return to It, kind of thing, you see? And Spiritually full, Identified with My Current of Love-Bliss, the Well of Being, without “difference”, so that you can enter into most profound Contemplation of My State, One with It, One with Me, beyond attention. So thats the capability for the “Perfect Practice”. And don’t confuse it, then, with mind dharma, traditional Advaitism, or forms of Buddhism that may seem somehow similar to it to you. It’s quite a different matter if you understand all aspects of the “Perfect Practice”. And I hope I’ve made this clear in My Books. Have I?

DEVOTEE: You have, Beloved, very clear, beautifully clear.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Part of My unique Revelation to you, is the non-separation between Consciousness and the “Bright”, and therefore ultimately between what is conditional and What Is Unconditional, Energy and Consciousness, or Being. They are not two. They are One. That’s the Sign in the Vedanta Temple, also.

So My Revelation is the Revelation of the “Bright”, the Divine Person, Consciousness It’self, Self-Existing and Self-Radiant, All Love-Bliss. So I don’t teach you simply the mind dharma of realizing you stand prior to attention. That is an element of a total Revelation, which is Spiritual.

So there must be the sadhana before there can be the “Perfect Practice”, even though you can sympathize with it in My “consideration” with you here. You couldnt do it without effective sadhana as the preliminary.

So in our discussions here I’ve been covering with you everything from the beginning through the seventh stage. We keep going back and forth through that whole cycle of all these different elements of the total process. And I’ve been enabling you to experience, notice, feel these very transitions, so that you will have a better sense of what I’m talking about altogether, or “being here”. But after the “consideration” is over and you have this body of Instruction, its not like there’s something unusual for you to do. Theres just the sadhana. And whatever parts of it you haven’t accomplished yet, then those are what you have to do in order to move on.

No matter what stage of practice you’re in, if you allow a deficiency in some earlier stage, thats the stage you’re in for that moment. So you have to keep the entire practice intact. Otherwise, the lowest common denominator always drags you down, or becomes your ground of identification. So you got to straighten out these more ordinary, grosser aspects quickly and not waste any time at it, because it is binding your attention in a low manner and making you superficial, so that you’re always active in body, and reactive emotion, and conceptual thinking constantly, obsessively, you see, modifying the energy such that its a block to your deeper realization, keeping attention moving and forgetting the Native Place, getting more and more entangled in gross business, for its own sake, or in such a way that it destroys your Contemplation. [pause]

So in some sense we’ve already answered the question I put to you: If you leave here, are you’re going to continue in this Disposition and move ahead in practice and so forth?, we’ve been suggesting that you examine yourselves that way when you leave here each day, as if after some days or weeks, some of you are going to say you’re ready for the “Perfect Practice”, or whatever. I certainly expect you all to move on in practice and on to the “Perfect Practice” before many ages pass, or many months or years, for that matter. But still, you are not equipped to practice in these advanced and ultimate stages without the foundation and without all the prerequisites of transitions that I have Given you.

So inevitably, basically all of you are going to have to do more sadhana to be taken seriously about hearing or anything beyond it. Maybe not much more. Who knows. Well see. But tKanya Navaneeta here are obviously some even practical aspects, or whatever, of your practice that you don’t take seriously enough yet in some cases. What I’ve been discussing with you for a few nights is this matter of the profundity of the practice. So whether or not there is any practical details or ground details you haven’t dealt with, at the very least, you all lack profundity in practice, as we’ve been “considering” it here. And so thats the dimension you’re going to have to develop.

So I got this intensive list now. [mild laughter] I don’t know how many lists there are actually. It’s a combination of two or three lists with varying meanings. [laughter] So after all this it seems like what I finally wound up with is another LRO intensive, instead of an LRO. But at least you’ll have all this “consideration” to get on with it as it really is. And those in the intensive who are, as soon as they are truly. without any loopholes, should within six months, I would say, move on to ., generally speaking, perhaps sooner. Well see if anybody takes any longer than that. But, in other words, I expect this LRO intensive to produce results within six months, the results of a Lay Renunciate Order, in about six months as a maximum, and hopefully sooner. So thats the kind of intensive it must be, you see? Do you?

DEVOTEES: Yes. Yes, Lord.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: No more one-liners, Frans. The Way cannot be reduced to one-liners or simplistic “thiss” and “thats”, that are just consoling religiosity. So you cant do this intensive on the basis of one-liners or superficial grasping of this and that. You have to go to My Word fully and constantly, and practice going through it, but in detail, just as it is, no self-“guruing”. But if you do that seriously and leave no loopholes, a six-month intensive of the real process of listening to Me, everything else intact, sounds like it ought to hit the mark to Me. [laughter] So the only limitation on it would be whether you were really participating seriously or not.

Does anybody have any questions about all that kind of business? The disciplines or whatever else?

DEVOTEE : I didn’t have a question, Lord, but I wanted to thank You because I know when I woke up today, I felt You so strongly that it was as if I were still here with You. And I started noticing human disturbance and it seemed to be odd that anybody would be choosing to do anything in any moment that wasn’t about Contemplation of You. And I certainly could feel myself in every kind of, actually every moment in the practice and making the choice of practice. And it was always about, well, would this enhance or diminish my Contemplation of my Master. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.] And it just seemed obvious that thats how youd be practicing in every moment.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: We’re you in some of your ordinary work service today?

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: At your office and so on?

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: So you had a good opportunity to see how what you do from day to day might affect you.

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: What happened?

DEVOTEE: Well, one of the main things I felt was, in approaching what I had to accomplish functionally, instead of it being what I was identifying with, it was something I knew I just wanted to handle very efficiently and quickly because it was my responsibility. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.] But then my greater responsibility was to be in Contemplation and I would have to refresh that in concentrated ways and make my life be more about that, to be able to just grow in the practice quickly.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, did you find you were basically able to do this?

DEVOTEE: I was surprised at how effective it was but there wasn’t anything perfect about it.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: It was . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: It was only the first day, Devotee. [laughter] [Beloved laughs]

DEVOTEE: It was just a…

ADI DA SAMRAJ: But you got the idea?

DEVOTEE: Yeah, yeah. I got the idea.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And thats what I mean about Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga. It’s not something you do just on certain occasions. You do it in a special way on certain occasions, meditation, and so on, but it is a moment to moment practice because it covers everything. It doesn’t just cover you when you’re sitting there, it doesn’t cover you only when you’re sitting there with nothing to do. It covers you all the rest of the time, which actually turns out to be more of the time than you spend sitting that way. So its the same fault all the time, so you have to do the same work.

And there’s an art to doing it in meditation. Theres also another art in doing it in all the other circumstances of life. But thats what you must do to make it moment to moment practice. You also, if you really do it, discover there are all kinds of benefits to it that are, apart from the great matter, worth doing, more ease in your disposition altogether and jealous for your time and action so that you don’t waste time and action. So there’s a kind of sila in it, without trying to be uptight.

And then there is the great matter, the profundity of the essential state replacing all the harried ego-life.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, last night You talked about how we tend to live the practice, which is that we have our brief moments of Contemplation of You, and You said its as if we tithe to You and tithe to the actual practice. And it should be the other way around.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes.

DEVOTEE: We should be completely immersed in the practice and then tithe what we have to, you know, to kind of handle our survival and being.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And your responsibilities to others in general.

DEVOTEE: Right. And . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: We were talking about capsuled traditional Teachings like in the New Testament the other day, about “Love the Lord, thy God, with all their heart and their soul and their mind and their strength and your neighbor as yourself.” Well, that could be understood to be a kind of tithe, you see. You’re supposed to be altogether involved with every faculty in Divine Communion. Life is there, yes, but you tithe to it. You don’t make the life-transactions into the Way of life. The Way of life is God Communion. Those traditional prescriptions are not prescriptions for large-scale social work, social agencies, and so forth. That’s a different kind of use of those kinds of admonitions. The traditional admonitions are for personal practice. So that particular one is not telling people to go out and do social work as it might be understood today. Some might choose that, but its an admonition about how to live, utterly Godward, and on that basis made benign in your attitude toward those with whom you come in contact. But you don’t then take the life-business and magnify it so profoundly that you’re tithing to the Divine business, which is your primary obligation. It should be the other way around.

By virtue of association with apparent others you have certain duties. These have been presumed, traditionally, to be obligations, unless some individual steps out, becomes sannyasin and such. So its not just nice ideas or doing it at your pleasure. Theres dharma to be upheld in the daily life. And so traditionally its understood to be a duty and not simply an ideal or something you do for fun or insofar as it gives you pleasure. You see? It’s done in any case. You wouldn’t be here even having the opportunity to practice, if your mother and father didn’t live and if this society hadnt done this, that, or the other thing that has served your survival, your education, whatever.

Theres a mutual responsibility that comes with birth. And so thats duty. So the traditional prescriptions are referring to that, not to make a utopia out of this world but, as far as you have duty here, how should you do it? As far as you have relations here, how should you do it? The traditional recommendation is that it is a duty. You assume it, do it as the wise suggest, and as a general rule don’t do to anybody else what you wouldn’t want them to do to you. Simple moral prescription because it basically was intended to be a simple moral matter. Your basic preoccupation was supposed to be with the Divine. How can you love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and all your strength and have there be, you know, utopian egoism left over to do? [DEVOTEES: Mm.]

It pretty much covers the four faculties, by the way. Heart is the feeling faculty. Soul, you could say, is even the breath, pneuma, the in-depth. All your mind covers that part. And all your strength, your vital, your body, your life. So you can understand that law passed on by Jesus, according to tradition, as being a description of Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga. In some rudimentary way it is basically that, particularly if you understand Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga already, having heard Me. You can see there’s elements in that recommendation, cant you? [Devotees murmur yes.] And he didn’t really altogether invent it anyway. He was carrying on a known tradition, the Jewish tradition and other things here and there that got mixed in, if indeed Jesus had anything whatsoever to do with the particular saying, but its reported that he did, because basically the kind of wisdom of the elders from Judaism was not something he had to invent, particularly.

And as good a capsule of what that tradition is about is the Nicodemus story we were talking about. It’s something like that. You see? It’s about a conversion of life, conversion of disposition, conversion of point of view and orientation from the world to the Divine, from being mere, apparent fleshiness to being one with the Spiritual reality.

So all the traditions have basic instructions that are about this fundamental, at any rate, same thing that is inherent to the religious life. And it wasn’t just a bunch of guys like you who made all that stuff up. They may have amended it, added stuff to it, and so forth, over time. But basically all that wisdom comes from Realizers. And all of them, in all their degrees, whoever they were, taught, essentially, a common truth, a common message that is about the foundation of the religious life. And they each had their esotericisms and whatnot also. It could have gone through and beyond the fourth stage to the fifth, and even perhaps on to the sixth.

But the fundamental idea is the same as the one that all the non-humans grasp and that we have “considered” together. Apparent existence, conditional existence, physical existence is not a thing in itself. If you choose it in itself, you become dark and Godless and un-Enlightened and disturbed. It’s not to be chosen for its own sake or embraced inordinately. Rather, the law of life is that you are given, surrendered, into the Divine Condition, or the Truth, Reality It’self. And you take this as your responsibility and do it constantly. And you have duty in this world up to a point because you’re born here. So there’s a way to do that rightly based on that kind of sympathy with all others that makes you know that they are in the same boat you are. And then you should do no harm to one another. So thats one of the reasons for making community also, to gather with others who are not here to do harm to one another, but they’re here, definitely, to support one anothers principal interest, which is this life of Communion and Realizing Me.

So the traditional message then, as is part of its basics, suggests this. Dont choose the world for its own sake. Be devoted to Realization moment to moment. And like My grandfather said, “Make sure you’re right and a hole through ya.” [laughter] He also said to another uncle, a younger one, “Keep your peter in your pants and your name off the notes.” [laughter] So all those Hebraic laws. [laughter]

It’s basically a matter of disposition rather than rules. And it comes from Godwardness. You are supposed to keep that simple and stay in Contemplation, keep it as simple as possible and stay in Contemplation. And in any case, whatever arises, even if it is difficult, stay in Contemplation.

So for thousands of years the most serious people in the world who have entered into this kind of “consideration” have commonly, without even knowing one another, said essentially the same thing about the nature and purpose of life. And all the non-humans, likewise, demonstrate this and say this in their fashion. It would seem like all that ought to be sufficient to convert some people, like you all. I mean, its a massive cloud of witnesses, you know, to this same point of view, based on most serious “consideration”. All but the most ego-fastened of humans agree. It seems to Me there’s some force and authority to that mass of instructors. And, of course, you must be converted to respond to such instruction because, as you all have been saying here, you do something quite the opposite by tendency.

Some people like the idea of coming into My Company and it arouses their devotion and they become full. And then they don’t do anything else. They just hope its going to saturate and change everything. Then, after howe’ver long it takes, hours or days or whatever, then they think theyve got to do the same thing all over again. And if its not available they get discouraged. In other words, that point of view doesn’t understand the necessity for sadhana in combination with Me. And thats a common fault in this gathering, to date, you see, a kind of willingness to be consoled and to some degree instructed, but still independent and not profound about the practice. And expecting, by mere association, to have all great things occur is to accept conventional religiosity and its results and have that be enough for you. It’s not the Way of the Heart, except in the most nominal sense.

Of course there are your mothers and fathers, mothers and fathers traditionally, and almost inevitably, don’t want their children to make renunciate choices. [Devotees murmur.] And they don’t want them to get too religious. [Beloved laughs.]

DEVOTEE: That’s true.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: So all of you must have shown some inclinations toward the religious life one way or another, at least in some sign of interest, or otherwise just showed signs of laziness, perhaps, and your family would get, in one way or another put it to you, probably it happened, that you’ve got to be productive and do your best in this world and accomplish all you can and whatever, the various imperatives. But they pass on to you a very strong, social message about the purpose of life having to do essentially with social purposes in relation to parents, family, the world, the community, whatever, the local political community.

And then there are larger doctrines that are part of the politics of the time, that are about taking the first and larger half of the Western summary of religion about “loving the Lord your God”, you see, and putting that in the background, and blowing up the secondary part, the “love thy neighbor” part, to being ninety percent or perhaps even a hundred percent, and devoting yourself entirely to being a political or social entity constantly preoccupied with the things on this perceived, material plane. And everything else is supposed to be in doubt and basically disregarded.

Theres a strong taboo against getting too religious, and being too religious. One of the ways of being too religious in the common view is that you make renunciate choices, especially if you become some kind of a monk or something, leave the social round entirely. But isnt it strange that there are such taboos clearly expressed, taboos against the asocial or metaphysical or ecstatic life? Anything beyond the horizontal, or beyond the common plane is subject to taboos.

And as I said, a lot of that is just family business. Parents insist their children do some sort of thing as a matter of duty. But its been magnified into a universal expectation through political and social doctrines and such, in which the human being is defined by being a social or political animal and a material one basically, and everything else is anathema. Used to be mommies and daddies wanted to make sure their children got jobs and all that, and took care of their responsibilities, but you could still do something else. There was a large voice fundamental to the cultural that suggested renunciation might be a good choice and Realization is certainly what life was about. You see? So some, then, just told their parents they have to go and find out about all that. But there was something to do.

In this world as it is presently constructed, yes, there are religious institutions and alternatives, but fundamentally the culture is about anti-religion or secularism, materialistic utopianism. In other words, the religious life is not integrated with the culture, itself, as it is now.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, this reminds me of when I was eighteen, I wanted to go to India. And my father said he wouldn’t pay for it, that he would pay for my trip if I would go to Europe.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Instead? [Devotee: Mm-hm.] Or along with?

DEVOTEE: No. Instead.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. [Beloved softly chuckles.]

DEVOTEE: And so I got a part-time job in high school and saved the money to go to India because I had no interest in going to Europe.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. Did you go to India then?

DEVOTEE: Mm-hm.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: How long ago was this?

DEVOTEE: .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Hm-hm. And what happened in India?

DEVOTEE: I went there to see my, at the time I had a teacher. I was in Anandamarga.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Hmm. So, thats basically what you did, spent time in that Ashram or whatever?

DEVOTEE: Yes, well, he was in prison. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.] But I went there anyway and I did see him.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: In prison?

DEVOTEE: Yes. They moved him, like from one room into another.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You saw him personally or in a group occasion or what was it?

DEVOTEE: It was a group. I had practiced in Anandamarga for many years, four years. And then I went to see . . .

DEVOTEE: Neemkaroli Baba.

DEVOTEE: Neemkaroli Baba.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Hm-hm. How long were you in India?

DEVOTEE: Three months.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And you spent how long in Neemkaroli Babas place?

DEVOTEE: Ten days, two weeks. But I remember not wanting to go back to America. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.] But this was right after high school when I was already signed up to go to college, and, you know, I had an apartment already rented for the summer, so that as soon as I came home Id have a place to, I just remember going back because I felt like my parents expected me to, you know. They had arranged the apartment and put out all this money and had paid for my college, and so it just reminded me of what You were saying.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: What was that? [laughter]

DEVOTEE: The influence that parents . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Oh, yes.

DEVOTEE: . . . have and the expectation and . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, they birth you physically, and raise you and so forth in that context, so they have these expectations that you’ll, sometimes a matter of you’ll take care of them, there’s a lot of that tradition, but that you do it like they did, that you even respect how they lived by doing it yourself, again, the householder matter. And, of course, that is what a high percentage of people do. They do become householders and whatnot, still. It’s a reasonable enough expectation relative to most people, or a lot of people anyway. So its part of social morality, social structure. It doesn’t have any bad intentions really. It’s just that everythings gotten reduced to that point of view. There are no alternatives even for those who do live in the world, or do live in the householder circumstance, or whatever. What teaching do they get? Basically some sort of instruction thats supposed to change their behavior socially, and thats it. What God-Communion, you see? What life of Realization? Just endlessly trying to use some sort of religious belief or whatever to reduce anxiety temporarily.

So everybody needs the esoteric Teaching. It’s not something to be hidden from people in the world or from householders any longer. It shouldnt have been anyway, barred from them. But its had to be sought in the past, and so hidden that there was no common access to it at all. And then with the current politics, everyone is denied, unless you can somehow break out of the pattern, “consider” what else. [pause]

So what are we talking about? [pause]

Are we at the beginning of the evening, the middle of it, the end of it? Where are we?

DEVOTEE DAVIS: Oh!

DEVOTEE: We just began.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: We’re still at the relative beginning?

DEVOTEE: Oh, yes!

DEVOTEE: Relative beginning.

DEVOTEE: [laughing] Past the sprinklers. [The sprinklers in the lawns at the Manner of Flowers are timed to operate at around five oclock in the morning.]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: So you all had some idea of what you wanted to talk about this evening that you discussed before you came?

DEVOTEE: Some have already begun to talk about that with You, Beloved.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: The few things they brought up?

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: That was it?

DEVOTEE: No. I think every, pretty much everybody said they had things they wanted to talk about.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, lets take a piss break and find out.

[piss break]

DEVOTEE: Beloved, I mentioned a little earlier about what You said last night relative to, you know, giving our lives over to Contemplation and not just tithing a portion of it.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. That’s right. You started to say this earlier.

DEVOTEE: And . . .

DEVOTEE: Groundhog . . .

DEVOTEE: Groundhog Day. [laughter] [Reference to the recent movie Groundhog Day, in which the main character, played by Bill Murray, wakes up everyday to the exact same events in his life as the day before.]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes.

DEVOTEE: I just felt so much the Gift of You being here with us, you know, over these last number of months.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Doesn’t Devotee say this every time he speaks? [mild laughter]

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I mean, its nice, but he says it every time, doesn’t he? [laughter]

DEVOTEE: Hes really impressed. [laughter]

DEVOTEE: Now I’ve forgotten what I was going to say. [some laughter]

But last night . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You’ve only spoken a few times, Sugar Bowl through here, and each time you’ve said this same thing. [laughter]

JANIS OHKI: Hes being grateful.

DEVOTEE: Yeah, I am very grateful. [laughter]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: It was the entire summary of what you’ve had to say each time. [laughter]

DEVOTEE: Well I hope I can extend what I was going to say.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Okay.

DEVOTEE: And, but what I felt last night was I felt that You Gave such an incredible Gift of the practices and Communicated it and actually drew us into a profound level of Contemplation of You.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And?

DEVOTEE: And I can see how, you know, I could even feel all day, as everybodys been saying, what a difference that makes in terms of our overall life, what it must be.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: [breathily imitating Devotee] “Our overall life!” [laughter] Theres very strong breath emphasis on the “overall life” part there. [continued laughter]

DEVOTEE: Another summary!

ADI DA SAMRAJ: A true Westerner, you see! I mean if it doesn’t result in something very dramatically concrete in your [imitating Devotee dramatic emphasis again] “overall life”, [laughter] then its not acceptable in the West as religion. Theres got to be a lot of overall life and social work.

So what about your overall life, then? [laughter] [Beloved laughs.] Well, you’ve been doing a lot of overall life over these last twenty-two years and more.

DEVOTEE: Mmmm.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And?

DEVOTEE: Well, I feel by Your Grace, Lord, that, thats coming to an end. [Everyone breaks out in laughter.]

DEVOTEE: [laughing] The overall life is coming to an end.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Generally speaking, the non-humans, in the highest number of cases, when they go to Contemplate they don’t sit down presuming that there’s even a great deal of likelihood they’re going to have any more overall life. [laughter] And thats why theyve entered into Contemplation. You see? It’s all limitation, death, no guarantees, struggle. So they willingly contemplate, release all of that. But it sounds like you do it in order to come out the other side with some better way to make a living or something more interesting to do with your overall life. [laughter] [Devotee coughs.] Will you stop coughing? This is supposed to be being recorded.

DEVOTEE: I’m sorry. [laughing] My overall life isnt working. [laughter]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: See, the non-humans, they Contemplate real hard, with no intention of coming back. If it happens, thats the way it is, but they’re not looking forward to any overall life. Theyre looking forward to everything that Contemplation is, and real serious about it. Well you just described the householders approach, Devotee. [a few people laugh, including Devotee] Hes not going to meditate all that hard, because hes got to go on and get involved with some overall life, and likes that overall life stuff.

DEVOTEE: Now, Lord, what I’ve been trying to say . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Overall, he likes it. [laughter]

DEVOTEE: I . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, Devotee.

DEVOTEE: I’ve actually suffered . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Are you contradicting what I just said?

DEVOTEE: Well, its true enough to be said, Lord.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: That’s so true I wish I didn’t have to say it. [laughter] But you’re the one who said that, you see. It is true. This commitment to overall life, or whatever you want to call it, you see, its indulging in the organism possibilities under these present-day circumstances. It’s not only something to which you as others are bound, its something that you like. It’s something you’re intending to be bound to. And there’s all kind of doctrine that wants to tell you that thats basically what you ought to be doing, and nothing metaphysical, you know.

So if you just spoke in those terms, this is revealing of something that ought to obviously be examined by you.

Theres a kind of a guiltiness about religion in the West. And people do get into it: “I wonder if I should I be doing all this meditating when I could be out doing some good, getting some goods?” You don’t feel quite right in going for the big time in religion. You see? Theres a kind of guilt about it. You got to pay your dues like everybody is expected to them, got to do it the way everybody is expected to do it, kind of thing, its not right to pursue the religious rewards in this life, kind of idea. It’s supposed to come after life. So this life is supposed to be about doing good. And then after you’ve done good, then you get the reward after death. It must necessarily be the case, because if you devote your entire life to worldliness, positive or negative, you’re not going to have any time in this life for Realization of the purpose religion. So if there is any reward to come, its going to have to be afterwards. [DEVOTEES: Mmmm.]

I think we need a few more middle-class ghosts [referring to A Christmas Carol] making themselves known, so characters like you all will realize the fruits. I mean if you don’t live for God-Realization, then God-Realization is not going to happen to you just because you die. Whatever you enforce in life, enforces itself afterwards. So if you don’t enforce the profundity of the religious life, its not your karma, so to speak. It’s not being created or allowed by you. But all kinds of other things are. So its not true that if you’re preoccupied with positive worldliness, righteous worldliness, that after death you get all the fruits that have to do with God. It doesn’t work that way. It’s a myth. Being positively human and so forth, well, thats a kind of purified life of a kind, so it is followed by results in that likeness. But its still about conditional existence in the ordinary sense, egoic life perpetuated. You’re not suddenly free of the egoic life simply because you die. It’s not enough. Everything goes on automatically at that point, and then you get what you have created, what you’ve reinforced.

DEVOTEE: I hope, Lord, that thats not all I was communicating, or thats not what my intention was, just to communicate that.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well you certainly did communicate that, though, Devotee.

DEVOTEE: Well, I . . . [laughter]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And there’s stored recollection of you doing a lot of choosing of something like we just discussed.

DEVOTEE: Yeah. No, thats true. But what I’ve also felt, you know, during this time by Your Grace is really seeing the futility of that and actually moving my life, feeling drawn . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I like the terror conversion myself. [some laughter]

DEVOTEE: The what?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: The terror conversion, like Ramana Maharshis. I mean, you’re making a judgment, a calculation, by looking at a life that has positives and negatives and so forth. So its still a “consideration” for you. It’s something to think about and you’ll make a decision. And maybe itll be a temporary decision or a superficial decision or a profound one, whatever, but the terror conversion such as Ramana Maharshi, in Maharshis case, He saw the whole thing of life as terrifying. [DEVOTEES: Mm-hm.] There wasn’t any bargaining to be done about that, you see. Theres no, “It’s sometimes a little upsetting and threatening, but there are a lot of enjoyments in this life, and its a great gift, and lots of pleasures you can get out of it. And if you’re righteous or do right, you’ll have fewer of those difficulties, and stick with it and get on with it.”

See, from His point of view there was nothing to like about it. Well, thats a different position to be in, in such a “consideration”. Be full of worldly propaganda and minimally sensitive to your own state, then you can believe such suggestions or be guided by such a point of view. It’s only when you are nakedly associated with what this psycho-physical life is in itself, without any arguments or resistance or propaganda, without any insensitivity, that the most profound judgement gets spontaneously made. [pause]

You’re making the judgement if somethings pleasurable, somethings painful, only after already having contracted upon yourself, and immunize yourself against your own fear in doing so. So the better way to get at it rather than weights and measures is to get at the root of it, the stress of self-contraction, the mood of separateness, the fear in it inherently. [pause] Get in touch with it at its root and there’s no argument about it. You see? [pause] So thats what made Maharshi serious, discovering that His life was about death, that the body is about death. And He just couldnt find anything in Himself to justify identifying with that, ever.

Of course, His manner was rather ascetical, but it need not be necessarily. But there must be that fundamental awakening certainly, free of the propaganda of the body-mind and its associates, responsive only to Truth It’self, Reality It’self, the person of Being. [silence]

That’s why in traditional cultures such as the Tibetan one and environments or places around it, from the time they’re tiny children they’re told whats going on here, this is a place of death, a place of mortality, suffering and modest pleasure here and there but it ends in death, perpetuates itself, unless you break the cycle. In other words, they don’t spoon feed a lot of horseshit to the children. They tell them, right from the beginning, the nature of life in and of itself, and that there is, therefore, the great purpose that you should serve instead. Not all those people became monks, or ascetics and so forth. But this was their understanding of life from the time they were children. So they were to maintain good humor and practice right life, not be overwhelmed by the mechanical world, or seduced by it.

Householders always want to bargain about the practices. [Beloved chuckles.] It’s always been so, because they think they have so much to lose. They want to hold on to it. Whereas one of the, looking at it in a certain way, advantages of being some place where the Western orientation is not so strong, is that they don’t believe there is anything to hold on to. Everything is ephemeral. It’s a play. What’s serious is at the core. And thats where your endeavor must be, principally. They tend the sheep and weave the rugs too, you know. I mean, they do their life-business, but this is their presumption about the nature of the place they’re in, the circumstance they’re in.

Whereas in the Western world of egalitarian, middle-class aspirations and such, you talk to them about what religion really requires and they’re holding on to their wallets. That’s what they think its about. And I guess maybe thats the way they’re pinching themselves, usually keep the sucker in their hip pocket, right? And they grip it all the while they listen to discourses on truth. In other words, they feel there is something to hold on to, there’s something to lose, something they’re afraid to lose, and they feel thats threatened by real religious “consideration”, so they sort of buzz off on it. They sniff off a couple of one-liners, because they don’t feel that they can respond or that they want to really hear it that profoundly that they would want to respond.

So its a totally different view, you see. It’s a view that arises in people who have been instructed by a wrong calculation. I mean, you were told all kinds of propaganda, Santa Claus and everything else is true. But as soon as Tibetan children are big enough to blow their nose, they’re being told what life is about, not in a way that threatens them, makes them turn dark and so forth. Theyre among the friendliest, smilingest people as a cultural characteristic. It’s just that they are instructed about the futility of worldliness as a basic principle of life, whereas in the case of you who are typical Westerners, its just the opposite. You’ve been instructed in the doctrine of going for life and doing it big and accumulate all you can and live life for its own sake. That’s the ground doctrine you got, even as children. So when you’re “considering” the religious life, you’re “considering” it from that point of view, [in a voice imitating our mood of fearful anticipation] all you have to give up, you know. And the Tibetan kid hears it and says [Beloved chuckles], “I can get out of this.” [laughter] “Beautiful!” [Beloved laughs.]

And the Tibetan kids doctrine that he got is an ancient one also. But you’ve been propagandized into a bizarre worldliness. You’re afraid and bewildered, separate and separative. And even so, you’re willing to sort of buzz off that, or put it in the background somehow, in order to feel some social imperatives and enjoy some kind of relative luxury, perhaps. So you have an entirely different point of view for approaching religion than the realistic one that has been the basis for the “consideration” of religion in the past, and especially elsewhere than in the West, but even in the West.

The philosophies of the Western world for the last few hundred years have been all one building on the other to generate this presumption of scientific materialism and competitive individualism as the basic reality and truth. So you all are living that religion, or that philosophy, that culture, by tendency you are, speaking of human beings generally, thats largely the case. Therefore, even as devotees of Mine, you are retarded by your own presumptions, and you have to examine them. That’s why I “consider” it with you. So often you seem not at all aware of your limitations, as if you have no self-understanding. Sometimes you seem to have more. You are more intelligent with self-understanding than you were long ago, but its still modest application.

So what were you talking about, Devotee?

DEVOTEE: Beloved, I was just saying that its been such a gift to be in Your Company because . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Is he. . .? [indicating that Devotee is saying the same thing again] [Everyone laughs.]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: He did it again! [laughter continues]

DEVOTEE: [imitating Devotee] “And I’m really, really grateful.” [laughter continues]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: That’s basically what you wanted to say then?

DEVOTEE: No.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Oh. So you have something further?

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Because we did hear that part. [laughter] And, then what?

DEVOTEE: I can just feel the Call, you know, and the need for renunciation.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Except you want to do it as the wealthy do it. Right? [laughter]

DEVOTEE: [laughing] Theres something about that. [lots of laughter]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Old money, of course. [again, lots of laughter]

DEVOTEE: Old San Francisco money.

DEVOTEE: [still laughing] Old money!

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You have to take your renunciation from the inside out. If you try to dummy it up on the outside, you will never agree. If you understand it in that way also, you understand that renunciation is not about all the “thiss” and “thats” that you like that you have to give up.

DEVOTEE: Right.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: It’s about the transcendence of egoity.

DEVOTEE: Right.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And when that is your true disposition practicing in Communion with Me, then you economize your life as is appropriate for your practice and everything that belongs to your life altogether.

DEVOTEE: The vision of what You Gave yesterday was so much, it affected me in the manner of what realization really is, that, You used the term of the flowering, the blossoming, the . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: . . . the . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Of being in a disposition of radiance rather than self-contraction. Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: And that level of renunciation . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Which you don’t do, by the way, by trying to oink it out. [DEVOTEE: Right.] The flower responds to the sunlight. That’s why it opens or waits for another day. So the heart doesn’t flower by you trying to make it so. The heart flowers by your response to Me, your devotion to Me.

DEVOTEE: That was very clear last night, also, Beloved.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: From the inside out, in other words.

DEVOTEE: Right.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Then you take care of all the rest according to that disposition.

DEVOTEE: Right. That’s the, You are the great informant of everything. And by conforming everything to You, life is free and happy.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: [whispering, breaking the stride of the expected affirmative] No.

DEVOTEE: No? [laughter] [Beloved laughs.]

DEVOTEE: That’s what renunciation is.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: [trying to repeat Devotee favorite phrase from earlier in the evening] “The totality of your life”? . . ., what was it?

DEVOTEE: Oh no, no!

DEVOTEES: Overall! [everyone speaking at once]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Overall?

DEVOTEES: Overall life.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Overall what was it?

DEVOTEES: His overall life.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: His overall life, yes.

DEVOTEE: [as in work pants] The overall life!

ADI DA SAMRAJ: His overall life, yes. Back to that again. [laughter] See, it sounds like you’re doing meditation and all the rest of it in order to have a more enjoyable life. It’s not a pitiable inclination but its . . .

DEVOTEE: Sounds pretty pitiable to me! [laughter]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, I mean, its not like you’re craving some grotesque something or other. It’s . . . [Devotees laugh.] But you seem dominated by the idea of your life improving as a result of paying the dues of some kind of religious exercises. That’s why people commonly go to church and pray. They put in a couple of minutes of God-Communion in the form of prayer and then they wait for God to send them the requests. It’s like calling in one of these T.V. shows, things where they show you a diamond watch and you phone in. Right? So you get the idea you want a diamond watch and you do your two minutes of God-Communion to ask for one, and then you expect to get it!, which is even more remarkable. [A few devotees laugh.] But its something like that, meditate to . . .

DEVOTEE: Bad news!

ADI DA SAMRAJ: . . . meditate to improve your life, that sort of T-M mentality. You know?

DEVOTEE: Jesus, I am reverting quickly! [Beloved laughs.] [laughter] I’m not even T-M! [gales of laughter]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: The transcendence of egoity, or the self-knot, is for the sake of Communion with Me and Realization of Me, thats it purpose, and to persist in that, you see? By disciplining yourself or this, that, and the other thing, you may also provide a right asana of the body in good health and whatnot, if you’re able. But its not about taking some power or relaxation out of the zone of meditation and sort of carrying it around like Scrooges bag of bucks, you know, and using it to make your life better, to have more money or health or whatever it is that you think is a good life altogether. There may be some of that inevitably, and its at most, we could say, a secondary part of the process, that there are indeed life improvements. But you seem to be talking about it like its the measure of religion, or the true purpose of it altogether, when its purpose is Communion, Realization It’self, transcending all this, because life does not become, what was your word?, something like happy and something or other. What was it?

DEVOTEE: “Free and happy”.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Free and happy. It’s no freer and happier than you are in the domain of Communion.

DEVOTEE: Right.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Otherwise, in and of itself, its just what it is and it has all the limitations that were the basis for you entering into Communion to begin with. And those limitations are inherent in the thing itself. So its not merely a free and happy life. It’s that body-mind there, that limitation in bondage, which must be given up to be transcended in the Divine Condition. In and of itself, its not just free and happy.

DEVOTEE: Right. I understand that part. Or at least I thought that I did understand part of it.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: No, you’ve been talking this heavy universal pop religion stuff to us here, so far. I mean, is anybody else noticing what hes saying?

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Am I right or not?

DEVOTEE: You’re right. You’re totally right.

[Devotees talk at once.]

DEVOTEE: It was like country and western music.

DEVOTEE: Pardon, what was that?

DEVOTEE: It was like country and western music. [laughter]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yodeling.

DEVOTEES: Yodeling.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: The yodelers version of the Way of the Heart. [laughter]

DEVOTEES: Ohhhhh noooo.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: The rich yodelers version of the Way of the Heart. [Devotees exclaim.]

DEVOTEE: Old money.

DEVOTEE: The old rich.

[Devotees laugh and talk at once.]

DEVOTEE: The old rich version of the Way of the Heart. [Everyone quiets down.]

DEVOTEE: This is what its become. [Devotee laughs a little, Beloved chuckles.]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I said, the non-humans enter into Contemplation without any intention to return. If it happens, it happens. But they see reality as it is. On the other hand, there’s nothing about life in the service of Realization that should be regarded as a negative. But thats the positive nature of life, its alignment to the great purpose, and then you can see its value.

DEVOTEE: [Devotee and everyone is aware of his speech tendency and he tries to change his action on the spot] Beloved, I, I was just, I don’t, [starts to laugh], I just cant believe that, [other devotees begin to laugh]

DEVOTEE: You just cant talk.

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: [kind of laughing, to Devotee] The what? [laughter]

DEVOTEE: It is what it is. [laughter]

DEVOTEE: Oh, god.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: So, Devotee, yes, you’re astonished by your what?

DEVOTEE: I’m astonished by the level of [pause], well, I thought when I initially started communicating with You, I thought what I was going to communicate was that Id understood something about that.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Something really profound?

DEVOTEE: Pardon?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Something really profound, was what you wanted to say.

DEVOTEE: Well, maybe thats what I, something really profound.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: But you haven’t said that yet.

DEVOTEE: No.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: No. You said all those other things that I’ve had to comment upon at such length for so many hours now. [laughter]

DEVOTEE: That’s really an embarrassment.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: So you said all that, and then now what you, in summary, really want to say is that you’re very grateful! [Beloved laughs as do all other devotees.]

DEVOTEE: [still chagrined] Oh, god.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: So is that it or is there something more?

DEVOTEE: No. I think that what I’ve realized . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, Devotee. Then was that the end of it or is there a punch line there, somewhere [laughter] . . .

DEVOTEE: His summary statement.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: . . . that will knock everybody on their asana? [laughter]

DEVOTEE: I think I just better shut up. [laughter]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You’re going to leave it at that?

DEVOTEE: I certainly don’t want to leave it at that.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: In the meantime who else has something to say?

DEVOTEE: Beloved?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Hmm.

DEVOTEE: I have something to say.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Did you just raise your hand? [laughter]

DEVOTEE: [laughing] Yes. I’ve been in class for a long time. [Beloved laughs.]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Hm?

DEVOTEE: I had a question about hearing.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: Many years ago I went through a moment that changed my life, from that time on, in some very fundamental way. And it wasn’t anything that was exterior about anything that was going on. It was, I would say, like turning around degrees and walking through myself.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: And from that time I really have never been in the same place that I was before. But, on the other hand, nothing changed about my life, in the sense that having gone through that and being in a different place altogether, nothing was different in terms of the content of my life. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.] And what happened was a very great intensification, a purification, that nonetheless has taken a great long time just to bring me to this point.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: Howe’ver, it had an entirely different, there was nothing, no comparison between the moment and the moment after, in terms of my relationship to what was arising. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.] But in terms of what You’re describing about the process and what I’m understanding in the course of my own sadhana in Your Company, is that, as I’m hearing You describe hearing, I’m hearing that as being kind of at the end of the cycle that for me began in that moment.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: But it seems to me that I would be more on the spectrum, now, eighteen years later, of approaching that summary crisis of hearing, based on what I believe You’ve been saying about it, and then entering into the . practice of adapting and sensitizing myself in the process of seeing, and then entering into that most profound Contemplation that You’re describing in terms of the development of the seeing process.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: So what seems to me, and my question is: Is there another crisis that occurs, prior, you know, thats summary? Because that to me was kind of . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Other than the one you’re suggesting about yourself, earlier?

DEVOTEE: Yes. Is that . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well why don’t you describe it more?

DEVOTEE: Well, it was like stepping into the place where I could see that I was “pinching myself”.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. What was it more exactly, rather than metaphor?

DEVOTEE: It was like, it happened a long, long time ago, and basically . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Eighteen years ago, you say?

DEVOTEE: Mm-hm. Eighteen. Eighteen years ago.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. or something like that?

DEVOTEE: Right before I started going off the walls, [laughing] writing Marxist manifestos, you know, thats like, whew! [Beloved chuckles.] It went wild! It went, you know, just went completely wide open in terms of how everything picked up. And I wasn’t looking at it from all the pieces anymore, from all the separate moments, but as a process that is inevitable, is obvious, is,

ADI DA SAMRAJ: But what is, what? What are you referring to exactly that goes on?

DEVOTEE: Well, I don’t know . . . It initiated a thread of consciousness, or a way of being oriented to my experience that was utterly different than the way I was oriented to my experience prior to that moment.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. And what more exactly is that?

DEVOTEE: Well, its had eighteen years of content to it in terms of its effect in my life.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You also, youd have to characterize it then, in itself.

DEVOTEE: Well, in itself, I would say it was a reversal of consciousness in some fundamental way.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm. Yes? In what way, thats fundamental?

DEVOTEE: Very, very basic. [Beloved laughs.] [Julia laughs.] We’re talking kindergarten, I’m sure.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Whatever it is, what is it? It certainly seems basic enough to you.

DEVOTEE: “Basic” is a very good way of describing its characteristic.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: But what is it?!

DEVOTEE: It’s, I don’t know what it is. I don’t know.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: After all of this, you don’t know?! [mild laughter]

DEVOTEE: [laughing] No, but it works! [Beloved laughs.] I mean slowly, but . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, you call it a reversal of consciousness and so forth, yes? From what to what?

DEVOTEE: From the point of view of being identified with a whole stream of isolated events, kind of trying to go at experience from the point of view of that particular moment, fragmented, superficial [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.], and then approaching everything from an entirely different point view, which is . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Which is what? Yes?

DEVOTEE: [pause] It’s never felt anything but alive and full of, kind of its demonstrated itself as a capacity that wasn’t there prior to it, although . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You had the capacity to do what?

DEVOTEE: . . . none of the content of my life changed as a result of it. There was no outside manifestation.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, I know. But you said there was a capacity, or a capacity of a kind.

DEVOTEE: A capacity, a capacity to feel. A capacity to feel. A capacity to feel very, very bad, [laughing] in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of moments, over a great deal of long period of time. And at least feel that, and in graduated, over many long years, degrees of intensity and directness. And its a characteristic that straightens, kind of like You say, from the inside out. As opposed to . . . I mean its never felt to me like I haven’t . . . I don’t . . .

Theres been a diminishment, over all the long period of years, of seeking. And its getting more and more steady, the availability of free energy and attention and the ability to understand what the right use of that free energy and attention is, and the ability to understand about the things that You’re talking about. About the fact that, at the life level, at the level of the first three stages of life, as good as it gets, it never gets good.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: And as much as you love, it never perfects, it never satisfies. In and of itself its, as You say, its inherent in this place. It’s just that it kind of works out that way.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: And, just, you know, increasing willingness to be straightened out, be conformed to You, become serious, do the things that demonstrate that seriousness, and learn how to do it more and more progressively.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, thats very good, but you’re not describing the thing itself very exactly yet.

DEVOTEE: It’s . . . That’s kind, thats why I was asking if that . . . I cant imagine if you were . . . To me I cant, it doesn’t seem, it seems like . . . [Beloved and everyone laugh heartily.]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: What were all of those again?! [laughter]

DEVOTEE: It’s fundamental.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, I know. You said that.

DEVOTEE: It’s not that I anticipate something else of that nature occurring again. It seems that it, it . . . And yet its not, its not the Witness-Position.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: No.

DEVOTEE: And it seems that coming to even anywhere near the crisis of hearing is, you know, now beginning to, I can understand Your Teaching in that context, with some seriousness about what this summary crisis of hearing is. But because,

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, that sounds like the area you’re talking about, not the Witness or the “Perfect Practice” and so forth, [DEVOTEE: Right.] but a disposition that makes practice work for you. It seems to be in this whole area of listening and hearing somewhere.

DEVOTEE: But You describe listening in a way that, from a point of view that I don’t relate to.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm, hows that? What’s that?

DEVOTEE: The point . . . It’s just whatever You describe. . . It’s not, its not that lis, thats I guess where my fundamental confusion is. [laughter]

DEVOTEE: Shes doing it again!

DEVOTEE: Because I hear listening being described in the context of a point of view that I feel related more to how I approached reality in my life and existence and my relationship to You prior to that moment.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: What’s that exactly, then?

DEVOTEE: What? What my relationship to life was prior to that moment?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, or what you feel the listening “consideration” is, you said, “its like the listening consideration” thats been going on, but the description of it.

DEVOTEE: Well, that my understanding of the Way that You’ve described, [Janis interrupts Julia and they whisper briefly to each other about Beloveds question to her.]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Hm?

DEVOTEE: I do not understand what You’re saying to Me.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, I was just trying to get you to make direct references to the things you’re suggesting. You just said something about the “consideration” of listening that we’ve been engaging here. And it was about something not familiar to you.

DEVOTEE: Yes, and yet I feel from the way that You’re describing it that that does characterize what my current involvement with the practice is in some way, also, in the sense that I don’t feel that I’m as serious as You describe the true crisis of hearing to be.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: So I feel like, yes I do, I am in the listening process, and at the same time I’m . . . Maybe I, prior to that moment, wasn’t, . . . [Julia lowers her voice] I don’t, I wish I could, I wish I could understand it. It’s kind of not really understandable to me.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, sometimes by talking about it from different angles something gets clear about it. So what else can you say about it?

DEVOTEE: Well, I could say that in some kind of very fundamental way, I abandoned the disposition of being willing to suffer altogether, and at the same time went about creating a mad mayhem of suffering for myself. And then in this Way its also been more of a very broad spectrum of behavior and experience, but that its never appropriate not to practice inhering in You and making that the foundation of my life as opposed to anything less than that. And doing that mostly, and allowing that, it kind of covers everything, you know, rather broad and very basic and very complete. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.]

In other words, it moves, it moves stably, though in my case, slowly.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. But you seem basically to be describing a kind of basic or increased seriousness, of a kind, in the “consideration” of your life and practice altogether. And that is part of the listening process. It’s part of taking your vow seriously and realizing a seriousness about this Way of Life altogether, and realizing that you, yourself, have a basic seriousness that you didn’t take seriously so much, maybe, at some time. But those are arms of basic practice, not themselves descriptions of hearing or seeing or the “Perfect Practice” and such.

You’re very much working on yourself or observing yourself and going through changes in yourself or in your “life”, as Devotee was describing it earlier.

So its an orientation relative to all that. That’s the listening focus as it tends to be. It must constantly be gone beyond through Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga for real. So you’re working at doing that better also, but the process you’re describing is in that domain of foundation listening, examining yourself, preparing yourself.

DEVOTEE: Thank You.

[pause]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Did you get any further with it, Devotee?

[Brief pause, Devotee lets out a kind of an exhaled “Ah” sound.]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You and Frans are the “Banal Bros.” [laughter]

DEVOTEE: I thought they were the “Meditation Brothers”.

DEVOTEE: [laughing] Banal Bros.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I think I was mentioning this this afternoon when I was commenting on the gathering. [to Kanya Tripura] Didnt I?

DEVOTEE: Mm-hm. I passed it on.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I didn’t call them “Banal Bros.”, but something more vicious, I assume. [laughter]

No, I was just commenting on the, there’s something similar in the way that both of you were talking last night that was rather conventional, institutional, and so on. And then again, I’ve been talking about that in you in this conversation, Devotee. Do you have anything further to say about all this?

DEVOTEE: I’m afraid to put my foot in my mouth.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Why? Did you come to be taught or congratulated? [some laughter]

[short pause]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Hm-mm?

DEVOTEE: Well, there’s something . . . The way You’re commenting to me about what, you know, the way I live the practice, and it really isnt the practice, the choices that I make. And actually its the way I immunize myself from You. And its a protection to not feel the inherent vulnerability of my situation, the suffering of it.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You just reminded Me of that other New Testament story about the rich guy who came up to “blah-blah” with the teacher there, Jesus. And he said, “How can a rich man get into the kingdom of heaven?” And Jesus is reported to say, “Well, I don’t want to make you too uptight, [Devotee and others laugh] but if you want to follow me, go and give up all you have and come on back.” Of course, the guy stumbled off as quickly as he could. [laughter] There was a further report that Jesus then turned aside to his disciple and he said, “That boy has got about as much a chance getting into the seventh stage of life as a rope has of getting through the eye of a needle.” [laughter] [Beloved laughs.]

You all like the camel simile better, I suppose, but this is a mistranslation.

So there has, traditionally, in all the old stories, been this sense that a lot of “having” is a great impediment to God-Realization. On the other hand, there are a lot of other stories that talk about how you don’t have to be in a lowly station to Realize, and sometimes its your duty to uphold something or other in your station. But you can do that anyway, and if you’re serious about this great matter here, now Realize It and do what you will.

DEVOTEE: Mmm.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: So there are two messages there, one that says, you got any goods, you got to give them up. And the other says, if its your duty and right circumstance, do it as sadhana, somehow. Of course there’s just as much art in that. Embrace all those things if you must, but then you’re going to have to do sadhana there anyway.

A little bit like that other story of the guy who went to see a great sultan or whatever he was, and he was supposed to be a great holy man but he was in this palace and so forth, and dressed in beautiful arrayment, as they say, and all the rest. And, I believe this is how the story goes, this man got a little testy about it, perhaps. But, not wanting to offend, he tried to ask his question as plainly as possible without offending. He said, in effect, “You are reputed to be a holy man, thats why I came. But I see you surrounded in luxury and so forth.” And so the saint wanted, the rich saint wanted to give him an example of what its like, then, to be in his circumstances. So he said, he asked one of the servants to bring over a bowl of water and put it on top of this mans head. And then he said, “I want you to walk through my entire domain carrying this bowl of water on your head, and my man will follow you with his sword, and if so much as a drop falls out of it hes going to cut your head off on the spot.” [devotees murmur]

Who knows, as the story goes, whether the man actually did it and whether he survived, but at any rate this was supposedly the teaching of the rich saint. Yes, hes in that circumstance for reasons various, but his manner is utterly Contemplative, his attention is in God, or in the Divine Condition. His feeling is there, his disposition is utterly conformed to that. So when he goes about in the midst of all that luxury, its not binding to him. Hes got this concentration going and must not fail at it. You see? Because to fall, to fail, is to submit to death, is to identify with the body-mind in and of itself.

The rich saint did give up all that he had in order to follow the Master. But he still lived in his palace and so on. So he did fulfill the admonition attributed to Jesus. And yet he did not do it as one might suspect, by becoming a non-owner altogether, or even in the physical sense. He didn’t give everything away. So then its a matter of finding out what is your duty or what is the obligation in your circumstance, and what is your impulse altogether. Then conform your life to those answers. But to do it as the utopians do it now, not for its own sake.

What would you like to “consider”, Frans?

DEVOTEE: I was just sitting here, my Lord, and feeling everything that You’ve been saying, including, you know, how in the East they tell young children, or show young children that you’re going to die. And the doctrine of the West, specifically over the last three days I’ve seen how these doctrines are imbedded in me. And that I always do two things, either to try to work on myself religiously and make myself good that way, or in the worldly terms do it the other way around.

And it was last night and again tonight that I saw that because You are here sitting in front of me, I don’t have to look at myself and at life so much, but You sitting in front of me sensitizes me immediately to my suffering. And in my holding back did I see myself do all of that.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: But my Instruction to devotees is to keep Me before them at all times.

DEVOTEE: Yes, I understand.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And the Way is this self-surrendering, self-forgetting Contemplation of Me, yielding all the faculties to Me in every moment. It wasn’t just the circumstance last evening or now.

DEVOTEE: No, I know, I understand.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: It’s the Way itself.

DEVOTEE: Right.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Then you have sometimes turned it into a kind of self-help technique or something?

DEVOTEE: Yes. I see that. I saw that also when I was in Hermitage, that I would use “conductivity” and even the “conscious process” to keep myself together and, you know, basically avoid,

ADI DA SAMRAJ: It’s like people using Hatha Yoga for physical development.

DEVOTEE: Right.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Theres a lot more to it.

DEVOTEE: Yes, I understand that.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You can use it for just that much, but there’s much more if you’ll choose it.

What else about it?

DEVOTEE: What I wanted to say is that I’ve seen so clearly now that in that Contemplation, you know, in giving You the faculties, and even when I had an experience of the Witness-Position last night, how it is only then that I truly see what I’m up to.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. [pause]

And you’re not established in the Witness-Position now?

DEVOTEE: I’m not, no, I don’t think so.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You don’t think so, no.

DEVOTEE: I know I’m not.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, isnt it true that no matter what arises, you’re the Witness of it? [pause]

DEVOTEE: [very softly] Yes, Lord. [pause]

I saw You sitting in front of me last night, My Lord, when you were talking about Ganesh, and I saw You as a dead person.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: You were physically dead, and Radiant Beyond it. And at the same time that I saw that, and I can even feel it in this moment, I felt it actually all night here, that is a terrifying vision, in some sense.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm? In what sense?

DEVOTEE: The sense of being that dead, you know, beyond physical death, to be so utterly relinquished from the body-mind and attention holding on to anything, is at the same time sublime and terrifying to me.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, its not like being a physical body in a cell, or confined in nothingness. It’s not that at all. It is a Spiritual state, a sublime state, not one of isolation at all. But if you think of it in terms of what you’re separating from, then it can seem like maybe its dark or threatening.

DEVOTEE: Right.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: It’s the holding on to the body again. Antonina was talking about it, or I was talking about with her, and with all of you in various terms. You get to be so foolish with all this, that you think of the body as a luxury you want to cling to, whereas your fundamental experience of it is of something limited, vulnerable, and threatening, and dying.

Since you can taste the Witness at the moment, examine It.

It is inherently free of the body-mind. It’s already the case. That is your situation already, without a body-mind.

If you stop looking back at the body-mind and just enter into this Position prior to self in the body-mind, and you feel it is not dark, you see, or isolated or un-Happy, its not dissociated, it is Radiant. [pause]

It’s the body thats daunted, thats threatened, that has all kinds of weaknesses and whatnot. The Native Self does not have any of that, doesn’t want any of that, has nothing to do with any of that. [pause]

DEVOTEE: Beloved, that was one thing that I was feeling last night also, and even now as You speak to me: from that Position it seems why would you ever look back? Or even, why would you have to go through, you know, the whole round of, in some sense boring round, of seeing what you’re up to, and getting to the self-contraction, and . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, you don’t have to go back to that.

DEVOTEE: That’s what I was feeling last night.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: If you do, then you have to do the sadhana suggested by your reality state, whats governing your attention and all the rest. You must do a counter-egoic practice, until you’re established in That Which is beyond the impediment. The Witness is. So the business from that point is to enter deeply into that Well, fall into It without limitation, fall into My Current of Presence without the slightest “difference”, without the slightest withholding, you see, not by submitting the body-mind, but by Standing in that Place of the Witness and letting It be profound.

Theres a Radiance in the Witness. It is Radiant. It is not merely your attention somehow abstracted from itself as awareness, detached awareness. No, it is Full. It is a Spiritual state, the Witness, in this Way.

I’m Radiant in the right side of the heart. The entire sense of being the Witness prior to the body-mind is Pervaded by that Radiance, One with It.

See, when the right side of the heart is Awakened Spiritually, not just the knot of egoity there but Awakened Spiritually, it is like Ramana Maharshi described it, like its a kind of a magnet. It collects all energy and attention into the sublimity of the Witness, Spiritually, as a Spiritual Reality, not merely the “wad” of awareness, or the point of awareness.

It is the true Divine Spirit. It is not only energy you’re experiencing on yourself, on your body.

It is Reality It’self.

It is Consciousness.

You Are That, Conscious Radiance.

See, everything is collected in That.

Everything dissolves in It, falls away, is just that Deep of Self-Radiant Being, Feeling-Being.

It’s the Realm of Bliss, not mere emptiness abstracted.

Yet there is no thing in It and no “difference”, no relatedness, but no separation, everything that is otherwise, Realized as One.

On the right side of the heart there’s a knot. It is the root of egoity. It is attention, the origin-place of attention. Merely to feel a sensation on the right side of the heart is not to enter into the Yoga of the “Perfect Practice” thereby. Rather it is to feel the sensation of relatedness, of separateness, of root-attention, and so on. There can be a kind of relaxed pleasure in it, but it is a knot. Whereas the “Perfect Practice” in this Way is beyond that knot.

So it is a Spiritual process of entering into the Current of My Presence without “difference” as the Witness, therefore not “different”, Consciousness It’self, dissolved in this Radiance and never disappearing.

It is without body-mind, without attention in that sense, without separation.

It is the “Bright”.

This is Who is in the body, you see, and Beyond.

So It’s free of the insult of the body. Theres no fear in It whatsoever.

Theres no reference to separateness or body-mind.

Theres no contraction.

It is simply Radiant.

To enter into It with full forgetfulness is Jnana Samadhi.

And one day after much of that, you see, the eyes without effort will happen to hang open, and all the usual events appear to be arising, but the Samadhi is not lost. It is still the Sphere of Infinite “Brightness” of Being.

And all these conditional events are there. They make no “difference” at all. They do not ever interrupt this Samadhi, this Realization of Reality As It Is.

And It doesn’t change, and everything is inherently Recognized in It’s moment.

Theres only the persistence of this Sphere of “Brightness”, of Being, Recognizing all. The slightest suggestion of “difference” appears, it is Recognized.

Theres only this One Radiance magnifying It’self, allowing nothing to be an obstruction, nothing perceived, nothing arising.

Eventually there is nothing to notice. The “Brightness” It’self is beyond references and Outshines all. Theres not the slightest giving up or dissociation in It, in that Translation. Nothing is given up. It is simply Recognized to the point where the “Brightness” is so “Bright” there is no appearance.

It’s the Realization of the Divine Domain without leaving anything, without dissociating from anything, just simply Recognizing it in that “Brightness”, which, in the summary of Divine Recognition, Outshines all.

There is no return from that.

There is simply that Eternal Bliss, of Divine Existence.

No form other than It’self.

Nothing objective. Only That Which Is Perfectly Subjective, the Source-Position, Self-Position, of Reality. [pause]

And it doesn’t improve your overall life in the slightest! [devotees murmur, a few devotees laugh]

DEVOTEE: [laughing] Beloved, what an end! [to the “guided meditation”] [Beloved chuckles.] What a funny end! [Beloved chuckles again.]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: As you may have observed, there was no overall life left to go home to. [laughter and swoons, long pause]

But you would rather linger here, Devotee?

DEVOTEE: No.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: To see whats going to happen?

DEVOTEE: No.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Then you got to either sell it or wear it on your head like a bowl of water.

DEVOTEE: Whooo. [pause] It’s been a real torment to me. You know, I’ve had moments when I’ve reacted to it and just kind of cut myself off from it. And I’ve had moments where, you know, I played with it. And the suffering of it is more apparent than, you know, its ever been before, making those choices.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: So you haven’t heard a word I said, have you, Devotee? [quiet laughter, and Beloved laughing]

DEVOTEE: Oh, god.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You all have a great deal of difficulty of persisting in the Divine State! Or even to feel you have any right at all to be in It.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, I just realized that You’re the only and first One whos ever said that to human beings, “the right to the Divine”. Weve always had to work on it, work our way back. You’re the first One to show us that its rightfully so.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Traditionally people were not permitted to become formal renunciates as long as they were doing sadhana in the context of the body-mind. They had to be prepared to do the body-mind-relinquishing practice somehow or other, and the highest course was presumed to be that of the sixth stage, what I call the sixth stage. So you had to meet certain qualifications to become a renunciate in any of the legitimate groups. So that meant there were preliminaries expected. You might receive some instruction, maybe told to come back some time. But the presumption in that case is that as long as you’re doing sadhana from the point of view of the body-mind that you have a duty to perform. But as soon as you do sadhana Identified with That Which is beyond the body-mind, then you have no duties to perform.

So its not even a matter of having to pay your dues, so to speak, exhaustively in karma-land, as if eventually to wear it out and then you can become a renunciate. No, its simply a matter of being purified of your attachment to all of that, your entanglement in it, so that your attention is free for practice in the Domain that goes beyond the body-mind. But you have this notion that somehow the world of karma or functional existence is an obligation absolute, or something somehow you even have a religious imperative to embrace. Whereas there are duties there, they shouldnt be obsessions or binding attachment, but they exist only so long as you insist on assuming that point of view.

So to become a renunciate means to yield the purposes of the body-mind as they are usually engaged, and essentially do the sadhana of That Which is beyond the body-mind, the sixth stage sadhana. It got expanded to allow people to become renunciates if they would practice the relinquishment of the body-mind in some traditional form, not yet up to the sixth stage of life, but nonetheless the attitude of going beyond the body-mind and relinquishing the common purposes.

So people who make that decision are effectively karma-less. That’s why they often do a ceremony as if its their own funeral and so on. They no longer have any obligations. They no longer are the body. The body has obligations, or the body-mind. But if you are not that, if you surrender it, give it up entirely to the Divine, or the Divine Purpose, then you don’t have to be busy dealing with karmas or fulfilling duties. This is the traditional understanding. The karmas are of the body-mind, and you’re doing sadhana as something else, or in the Domain of something greater than that. So the karmas don’t belong to you. The duties don’t belong to you. So you do the sadhana that simply focuses on That Which goes beyond the body-mind purpose.

Well, this essential view pertains even to the Lay Renunciate Order in this Way. It is truly a renunciate order. It is ego-renouncing, but it has to do with the body-mind also. It’s a declaration of how you will use it. . .

DEVOTEE: Oh, Beloved!

ADI DA SAMRAJ: . . . not for “bonding” to the world really, but for great “Bonding” to Me, Liberating Communion. And you declare thats how you will use the body-mind, that you will not use it for egoic purposes merely, or for worldly or social purposes merely. You may serve somehow in the domain of even non-renunciates and so on, even non-devotees sometimes, perhaps, associations there, but you do not bind yourself to it all.

And members of the Free Renunciate Order take a vow of no property, a legal vow of owning nothing. That’s one of the characteristics of the Free Renunciate Order. But even in the Lay Renunciate Order, where, as a legal matter, you can own property or whatnot, you must be like the man with the bowl of water on his head. You are a renunciate in the lay circumstance. So effectively you own nothing in that sense.

In the Free Renunciate Order there’s no ownings of any kind. That’s why the Free Renunciate Order is supposed to be a retreat order. Their vows have been made, and then you expect a member of the Free Renunciate Order to be business managers. They have no such duties. Members of the Free Renunciate Order don’t do sadhana in that kind at all. You have the duties and the luxuries of that. They do not. So because of their unique disposition in practice and the quality of their renunciation, the gathering must allow them to live on retreat and be occupied as I expect members of the Free Renunciate Order to be occupied, with their sadhana. That doesn’t mean they live in caves, but they’re not to be superimposed on by worldly or institutional obligations, as if they have duties to perform of that kind. They have none whatsoever. So anything they do as service is simply an aspect of their unique renunciation.

Members of the Free Renunciate Order are not just supposed to be in the Sublime Position on Sundays. And so their principal service to others is as a sign among them, discourse on the Way perhaps now and then or whatever, perform sacred activities and be viewed by others, without any superimposition on them of signs that you would expect from lay people. You want to see, yourselves, what does it look like when its done this way. You want to see what comes through that that serves everyone. So you must very formally relieve any such renunciates of the associations that you might otherwise impose on them. So its not so merely in relation to Me, or only in relation to Me. It’s so with anybody whos in the Free Renunciate Order. So you must respect the signs in your own Way by doing this.

The Order of Odalisques. [laughter]

And you all do sadhana, even as Lay Renunciates, under somewhat different circumstances. Fundamentally, howe’ver, its the same practice, apart from the differences made between the “Perfect Practice” and other stages. But its all fundamentally the same practice for all. It’s just that if you’re doing sadhana in the lay context or at any stage that makes use of the body-mind, you must serve. You must fulfill your obligations, your right obligations. They come with the body. They come with conditional existence.

Do you all know what I’m talking about?

DEVOTEES: Yes, Beloved.

DEVOTEE: Beloved?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm?

DEVOTEE: I just wanted to say that today, every time I lay down or got up, I felt You Installed in my heart. I felt Your Form Installed before me. And as I recollected Your Form, I also fell into the Witness-Position when I did that.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: And I know it takes real sadhana to purify the body-mind sufficiently to enter into the Witness-Position, but I also felt it as a very wonderful Gift from You to inspire us to that sadhana.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And so you’re grateful for it, is that it?

DEVOTEE: Yes, Beloved. [laughter]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You’re not introducing a “consideration”, then?

DEVOTEE: No, Beloved. [laughter]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Who would like to, then? Anybody wondering about anything at all?

DEVOTEE: We all had confessed to, after sleeping, waking up and the feeling that occurred in the evening has just maintained itself, something about it.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. Tcha.

DEVOTEE: What has happened with me, Beloved, since You’ve been here, which I’ve actually never experienced before, is that many times . . . [Beloved laughs, others laugh.]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I was just noticing similar language to Devotees “traditional” speech. [Devotee laughs.]

DEVOTEE: Yes, thats true. I can see that.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: But go on.

DEVOTEE: Many times at night Ill wake up just randomly and without any reason at all, and in complete terror, bodily terror. You know?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: And actually, for the first time, I’ve been, after a while allowed myself to just simply stay in that fear and feel through it, even as it, towards You, and even not see it disappear for a long time, and just have to sit with it. And in those moments seeing how desperately I want to get away from that particular feeling.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: And then in the days, in my day-to-day activities, I know that I’m not in that vulnerable state again, and I’ve already gotten myself out of that state. And as I said earlier . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: How did you manage to do that? Craig would like you to pass it on to him. [Beloved laughs.] Got out of it completely, eh? Well, thats good.

DEVOTEE: I remember that.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Hm?

DEVOTEE: Yes, I remember that. You once, what was it? You had to swim in those dark caves on the island?

DEVOTEE: Was he the reason we all had to go through that tunnel?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You mean the water hole initiation?

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, that was at Tumomama. All of us were put into this hole in the rock down there . . .

DEVOTEE: Yes, I heard about that.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: . . . head first, and people would hold your ankles, stay there for some count or other. It was very narrow. So if you have any claustrophobic kind of reaction, it would perhaps emphasize that. [laughter and commenting at once]

DEVOTEES: Perhaps, perhaps.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You get to hold your heels, [laughter] or somebody would be holding you, and of course you cant move yourself. You’re head down . . .

DEVOTEE: Oh, my God.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: . . . in something not much bigger around that your body.

DEVOTEE: How long did they stay down, Beloved?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I don’t know. What was it?

DEVOTEE: There were counts.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, there was a certain count. [Kanya Tripura laughs.] Count ten or a minute, or whatever it was. It’s a little awkward getting you out even, because you’re at the end of your breath, you want to get out. But they got to somehow get you up without banging you against the rocks and pull you out somehow.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Some ladies did it, too, right?

DEVOTEE: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Hm?

DEVOTEE: I’m sure Hellie did, too.

DEVOTEE: I was just thinking that, I think that whole time happened around the time when we were meeting over at Bright Behind Me. We were having “considerations” with You basically about fear.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: We were? Ah, Tcha.

DEVOTEE: And one of the things You said, I was actually thinking about this today, back then You said, “I checked into it, I’ve looked at all the possibilities, and I hate to say it, you’re all going to the chair.”

ADI DA SAMRAJ: [Beloved laughs.] Tcha. Mm-hm?

DEVOTEE: And I was feeling today how thats the end result of life, of egoity, is going to the chair, and feeling how everything that I try and do as an ego is to protect myself from actually feeling that, that stark, you know, reality of whats inevitable. And also feeling that its absolutely impossible to confront that fear. That its only through the Grace of being with You and Communing with You and feeling You that the being even allows itself to feel the truth, you know, of our condition, not the Ultimate Truth, but the truth of the body-mind prior to Realization. And feeling that the renunciate practice, when You Call people to renunciation, You Call people to the LRO, that its a matter of, I wouldn’t say confronting that fear, but allowing that fear and completely using the means of Communion with You that allows for the transcendence of it, the bypass or the transcendence of it.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, and the process grows as we’ve been “considering” it to the point where you’re not doing the sadhana of the body-mind or feeling beyond it, releasing it in its fear, you see, but being on the other side of the body-mind and of the fear altogether.

DEVOTEE: Right.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Then its a matter of Abiding as That infinitely. But it no longer has any fear in it, so its not a matter of confronting fear in the Ultimate practice, you see. [murmurs]

As long as you identify with the body-mind, you’re doing sadhana with a mechanism that is afraid, inherently, in itself, in its separateness, you see. But as I also said, all the non-living beings practice Contemplation. So they’re not busy being the organism itself, like you may feel when you’re preoccupied. So they don’t use the body-mind for fear. They use it for Contemplation, expecting to enter into a zone where they don’t have to be associated with that, perhaps not fearful all the time, but nonetheless, always threatened thing. So they look to Realize the Native State beyond the body-mind by their Contemplation.

You likewise should see, in doing this sadhana of Communion with Me, that when you’re doing it from the position of the body-mind you’re always dealing with something thats suffering and tending to be fearful and always has a level of anxiety drumming through there. And so you wont become content with that level of sadhana. Youll do it in its time, and do the work that its supposed to do, but you wont cling to even having that much esotericism, or having esotericism rather than exotericism be the focus of your life, because its still depending on that which is conditional, that which is threatened. And you’re still identified with it, because you have to keep making the gesture of it into Communion with Me.

So all the stages pass into the “Perfect Practice”. You shouldnt be retarded there in the preliminary stages or preparatory stages.

If you really examine the situation of the body-mind and saw its situation, youd become by that process very serious, but not merely serious and meditating on your mortality or your fear. That’s whats to be noticed and felt beyond. It’s serious about being beyond it, because without that seriousness, you’ll tend to be lazy and luxuriate in some more distractions while you’re being Spiritual with Me. So you get preoccupied with all kinds of experiences, not just whatever you refer to as the totality of your life in more first three stages of life or ordinary human terms. But there are distractions of other kinds. And if you’re not profoundly serious, profoundly intent, profoundly unwilling to be afraid, to be fear, then that will keep you moving and discontent.

It was thus in My own Sadhana years. The urgency was constant, and I did each portion of it with profound seriousness. And therefore I didn’t waste any time either in luxuriating in being this, that, or the other thing, in this, that, or the other circumstance, or whatever. It was urgent. It just went on and on. No, nothing could be accepted as final, unless it were Absolute. So I didn’t do any lingering in experiencing and so on.

So as long as there’s the yielding of the body-mind or the dependence of the Samadhi on the body-mind, its not it. It’s not enough. Theres no reason to dally there, you see. Be released in your energy and attention from that. You need not spend any time there. No sadhana done by the body-mind is the Perfect sadhana, and its therefore not satisfactory when its done by the body-mind, not Ultimately satisfactory.

So then there comes, after all of that is not of interest, the Awakening of the Witness Disposition, never-ending Stand prior to the body-mind. And thats where there’s no fear, you see, none whatsoever, no limitation whatsoever. To simply Abide as That, if there’s any noticing of the body-mind, you’ll notice its this and that, and its death perhaps peripherally, if you care to. But its not your destiny any longer. It may have its own destiny, whatever it is, but its not you. You need not become entangled in it, you see, are not, in fact. [silence]

So once the “Perfect Practice” begins, fundamentally it is just Abiding as That. Profoundly. “Bright”, you see. So all of the stages of the “Perfect Practice” have that characteristic. To be established in the Native Position is Samadhi. The “Perfect Practice” begins in Samadhi, and that Samadhi is made Most Perfect, Divinely Perfect. But It’s already there in the true establishment of the Witness, prior to the body-mind.

When the Well never leaves the view, you are There.

So if its true, then it is from then felt most profoundly as ones actual Position, without a word. So there’s no escaping from the “Perfect Practice” once that Awakening is true.

It’s a little bit like being an insect getting caught in one of those plants that have these convoluted structures and platforms and such, and there’s this odorous something that attracts them.

Even voluntarily they pass into it and are sublimely digested.

DEVOTEES: Mmm.

DEVOTEE: Mmm, what a vision.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: But of course thats a physical death and all that. But as a metaphor, it suggests passing into a space, and once you truly enter into It, there is no way out of It. It’s not that one wants a way out of It, its just something to observe, you see. Beyond that point, there is no actual turning back. Once you’ve found the View thats prior to the body-mind truly, you cannot become the body-mind again. So its not a trap in any negative sense, but its an entrance into a most profound process that, once it even begins, there is no return from. Once there is the Awakening to the Witness-Position, truly, stably, tacitly, really, without any effort to find It again, you are already established as That Which is Prior to the body-mind. That is Samadhi. It becomes what we can call more profound, and then Most Perfectly profound, but its still basically established with the Awakening to the Witness-Position.

Now you may tend to think because of the words used, “Witnessing”, that it suggests, that its just feeling that everything is objective to you, even whats inside, and you’re sort of viewing it. No. It is establishment in the Witness-Position, That Which Is Appearing as the Witness. It’s to be established As That, and therefore without “difference” to be given up in It. That’s the sadhana.

So its not the Witness Witnessing. It’s to Be That Which merely Witnesses, but Which is Standing Prior to the body-mind. It is not in the slightest involved in it. It has nothing to do with the body-mind. It is simply Conscious Light, the Love-Bliss Feeling of Being.

So that Realization and the process that comes from it, is Liberation. All else is striving toward it, moving toward it, coaxed toward it, you see, . . .

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: . . . being purified until, but its not it yet. The process is not inherently satisfactory until it becomes Perfect. In the exercise we’ve done here together you have found yourself located as the Witness, but thats not the Realization of the Witness-Position, not itself, because that is a Spiritual matter, a profound Realization.

Any individual can locate the Witness as we’ve done together as an exercise, you’ve done it, you see. But thats not to Realize the Witness-Position. It’s to notice something about it all, of course. That’s why I find it of interest to “consider” it with you sometimes. But its not the same as Realization of the Witness-Position.

To Realize It, you simply discover that That’s where you Are, That’s What you Are, and feel it, in the most profound Feeling-Energetic sense. And You feel the Force of Being prior to the body-mind. And you notice it is prior to the body-mind. Even attention, the last jot of it, you see, has nothing to do with it even.

So thats the beginning of the “Perfect Practice”, not merely the ability to assent to the fact that you are the Witness or locate It sometimes by an exercise, but to be established as That most fully, and Spiritually, truly established as That Which is Natively Always Already the case, Prior to the body-mind.

But as I said, when that Awakening does occur, there is no other choice but to do the “Perfect Practice”. It’s just that it will not occur unless certain conditions are met. And I don’t just mean the outer disciplines of the body and so forth. Now those are associated with it, but its not a matter of perfecting individual life, or whatever, by all of that. But overall there are conditions that must be met before it is obvious that you Stand in the Witness-Position, just Perfectly, inherently Obvious and perpetually.

So the attention must not be fitful. You must be dissolved, in a constant state of dissolution Natively. So unsteadiness altogether is what prevents the “Perfect Practice”, the lack of equanimity, the lack of one-pointedness.

So any preparation for the “Perfect Practice” basically involves all that, purification, steadying, balancing, establishing the asana, the poise of equanimity, or one-pointedness, free of the efforts of attention. So whats happening in your lives as sadhana is the process of release of energy and attention from the things that are binding to you. When something or other is not binding anymore, you just move on. It’s business handled.

But you all have all kinds of things you’ll have to talk about with one another, notice to one another, and so on, about how attention and energy is working in your case. And you don’t just sit about on those occasions and talk about how, “There is no motion. I’m Standing here prior to the body-mind.” No, you talk about your “case”, your flight of attention and energy, your patterning, how what you’re “considering” as the self-contraction shows itself in this or that or the other aspect of your ordinary life, your ordinary consciousness.

On the one hand one could say that its unfortunate you have to spend so much time dealing with all of that, but, and it can be quickened, so you should do what I’ve said about it, but the reason you’re doing it is because thats where your attention is. You have to do the sadhana where you are, as you’re functioning presently. That determines whats the appropriate sadhana for you.

It seems like, in principle, any of you ought to be able to take up the “Perfect Practice”. Or “consider” with Me for a few minutes, and you’ve heard now, thats that, you know. You sit in a room with Me for a little while, and now you’ve seen me. It seems like logically or somehow it ought to just be that simple. If you’re sympathetic with this argument about the Witness, why not do the “Perfect Practice”, then? Just keep re-noticing it, you know, that you are the Witness.

But that is not how it works. You must go through the process of being purified from your own bondage of energy and attention. But it can be quickened. And you can be serious, and that quickens it. And you can get down to it and assume all the sila and discipline thats appropriate, necessary, in your case. But if you don’t do those things, then you don’t go further, and you keep rotating around and around on the same “considerations” or the same examination, the same content. And it all amounts to basically unfinished business relative to these things that you’re always talking about. That’s why you talk about them again.

So there’s something to be done about all of that or there wouldn’t be anything more to say. So you do have to do this sadhana in the context of your ordinariness, but you have to get down to it, also. Otherwise it doesn’t go all that far.

DEVOTEE: It seems clear, Beloved, that the reason, one of the reasons why we have been stuck in the . level for so long is because, as You say, we meditate on that instead of keeping the “radical” vision that You Are in front of us.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. There are all kinds of limitations, and I’ve discussed them thoroughly. Go to your local editor. [laughter]

DEVOTEE: And with Your coming here, Beloved, You’ve Given all devotees the vision that You’ve always done, one more time.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I expect to continue to do this in My return to Hermitage, Frans, Doing My Work altogether, and have devotees come there, you see.

DEVOTEE: It’s wonderful.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I don’t expect it to take the form of occasions such as this, but this has just been an occasion to make some clarifications and so on. Then you’ll have to go on and do that.

DEVOTEE: I was just also “considering”, My Lord, listening to You, You’ve always told us how You’re the Living Adept in front of our eyes. And I don’t know why, but while I was listening to You and feeling again the Fullness of the Witness-Position, I was thinking about Krishnamurti and his “choiceless awareness” and how different it is from that.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. Yes.

DEVOTEE: I could suddenly see that. I read that before in The Basket of Tolerance, but I could completely feel it now.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. Tcha.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, when we went to see Krishnamurti that time in Los Angeles . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: . . . and then one time . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Back in , or whenever it was?

DEVOTEE: Yes. And then also when Krishnamurti was living next door to the place we stayed in Malibu. Remember he was walking on the beach that day?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I don’t remember seeing him. Are you sure I was there?

DEVOTEE: Yes. [to Nina] You remember that?

DEVOTEE: No.

DEVOTEE: I remember it.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You remember seeing him?

DEVOTEE: I remember the story of it. I didn’t see him, I don’t think.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I don’t recall actually seeing him.

DEVOTEE: You mentioned You were observing him and that . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I talked about physically observing him?

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, then I must have seen him. I just don’t recall it at the moment.

DEVOTEE: And that he was in a state in which he was dissociated from existence, and in some sense witnessing it in that position, but that there was no fullness there. There was no Radiance, as You were saying. It wasn’t the “Bright”.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: And You have Communicated in these guided meditations, even though You say all were really doing is assuming the position of observing, and seeing that we observe everything, You nonetheless Communicate, when I’m in that Position, something of the Fullness of Your State.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, of course.

DEVOTEE: So, its informed . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: It should be for you as my devotee. But I was talking about like just anybody on the street. You could walk up to anybody and say, “Isnt it true that no matter whats arising now, you’re the Witness of it”, and feel something about thats true. But in the case of devotees, there should be more to it.

What else about it?

DEVOTEE: Well, it was clear to me that without having passed through the process as You’ve always Instructed us of true hearing, you cant maintain that disposition [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes.] because you always fall back into the fundamental mood . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Nor will it be Full.

DEVOTEE: What?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Nor will it be Full unless you enter into the Spiritual process. Otherwise, it will be dry, as you suggest I said it was in the case of Krishnamurti. The mind dharma is not enough. There must be the Shakti-Dharma, Shaktipat, Hridaya-Shaktipat for you all.

DEVOTEE: You’ve also Communicated that in, I think also You were saying at that time that there was a certain seriousness in his disposition [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.], the seriousness not in the positive sense, but it lacked Your Humor, the Humor that You Exhibit in the Condition That You Are.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. He didn’t seem to have much of sense of humor. [quiet laughter]

DEVOTEE: And that Humor was a sign of that Fullness [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.], because it wasn’t a relationship in which You looked at the conditional existence as something that in itself was separate from the Unconditional. And therefore, if its seen as separate from the Unconditional, then its serious. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. Mm-hm.] But in Realization that its the same, its not serious.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. Tcha.

DEVOTEE: Theres no “difference”. And I think thats so much of what gets communicated, as we were doing these last couple of days, but it was Your Freedom to even get a glimpse and intuition of what it is to see this as something thats non-binding, and therefore, as You called it, a ridiculous play or manifestation of Consciousness that, as You described it in ecstatic moments, its infinitely chaotic and a dance and maya. But once you Recognize it, there’s an Absolute Delight in the midst of it.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: But its a Delight that transcends it, like the glow in the bush in your inherited tradition. [Beloved is referring to the story of Moses and the burning bush related in the Bible.]

DEVOTEE: Mm-hm.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: So the Ultimate Dance, then, is like Nijinskys. [A famous Russian dancer in the early th century, considered by many to be the greatest of his time.] One day he did a dance and was a psychotic from that moment on. He really danced, you see, in a kind of mad way. He was totally devoted to something very mad thats in the dance potentially, to be given up completely. In his case his orientation was such that he went insane. So its not exactly the dance I’m talking about. [laughter] Not at all, in fact. But I was using it as a metaphor for the dance quality you just referred to in the Fully Awakened State, or in the seventh stage of life.

It’s not that there’s some kind of necessary connection to conditional existence such that it has to become a glorious something sometime. There is no necessary connection. So its an utterly given over Dance, a mad Dance without clinging. It Recognizes all, It doesn’t cling to anything. It is Samadhi, the Dance of Samadhi, the “Open Eyed” Samadhi.

DEVOTEE: Beloved? Is another way of saying what we fear in the loss of the body and the mind, or the sense we may lose it, is it also this, the intuition of the embrace you have to make with the Madness thats inherent in that Condition?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, you could call it a Madness. It’s just a metaphor.

Theres no disorientation or chaos in it in that sense of ordinary madness. The Realization itself is simply Radiant. It is without motion or “spot”. So its not mad of mind and so on, you see. But you can look at the world in a fashion that sees it, presumes it, or understands it in terms of the Divine, and you can see the world in all of its happenings, relative positive, relative negative, and real bad, you know? [murmurs] And one way of looking at that as being in God, you look at it as the Play of God, then. Whatever it looks like, its still God. It’s still Bliss. It makes no “difference”.

So metaphors such as calling the Realized State, the Divine State, “Mad” are sometimes based on looking at the world and seeing its chaos and difficulty and so on, and feeling that to be involved in that and yet to be Dancing or Free, it must be some kind of insanity or, madness is a good word, somehow in an ecstatic state of chaos. But thats not it at all. That’s just how the Play looks, perhaps. But there’s not really a play. There is no other, no thing. Theres only the One Reality that is Infinitely Calm and Radiant. And its not about the world.

Just as your own negativity and pain and so forth are relinquished, gone beyond in the Native Position, so is all of it in the world. It’s not about viewing the world and seeing all the difficulties in it and just saying its Gods Dance. No. It’s Standing Prior to all of that implication and appearance.

Theres a play of mad visions in the traditional literature such as the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna shows Arjuna his Form beyond his two-armed form, Arjuna seeing everything in it including all of the bad news. He felt mad, Arjuna felt mad, but he was called to see Who that Is. It’s in Him. Well, if its in Him, then you Contemplate Him. Whos that? What’s That, you see? But he got uptight and said he wanted to see Krishnas two-armed form again. He wanted to see all that “stuff”.

So to see the terrible world as the Dance or the Body of the Divine is a way of feeling beyond the world, not merely embracing a mad metaphor. Those who look at the image of Kali, for instance, they look through and beyond the terribleness of the world, it makes sense out of the terribleness of the world, its in the Divine, you see. But that means they are moved into the Divine Condition by that vision and not fastening on the periphery of the terribleness, you see.

DEVOTEE: Beloved?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm?

DEVOTEE: Just Your talking reminded me of an incident that occurred at the La Brea Ashram back in , where it was the beginning of the “Guru Enters Devotee” Talk at the beginning of Garbage and the Goddess?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: On La Brea, yes. Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: Right. And You Gave that Talk “The Guru Enters Devotee”. That was a major turning point, I feel, in the Ashram and all of us in relationship to You, and we were allowing Your Siddhi to Do It’s Work and enter us. And there was one occasion in Your office down there where I came in in a particularly, it was after You gave that Talk, but a particularly vulnerable mood, and felt like I was, you know, having to let go of something real fundamental in my life and consciousness. And it was kind of very fearful. And I went into the room and I was going to say goodnight to You, because I had to go home, and You hugged me. And I completely lost body-consciousness, and I had no sense of anything that I could call a self.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: And then I was in this, it wasn’t even like a space, but it was just Consciousness somehow without form, and You were Abiding There, and yet there was no sense of separation. There was just this Consciousness. And I remember I was, I don’t know how long I was in that state, but I came back into the body. I actually felt myself resuming body-consciousness and being aware of my body. And I looked up at You, and You just kind of twinkled. I don’t know. There was like Your Radiance, but it was just all I could see in Your Freedom. And I remember starting to laugh hysterically, because I saw that, I saw Your absolute Madness, and that Madness was total Freedom, not confined. You know, there was no sense of confinement in You. It was total obliteration.

And I remember in that moment, I just kept feeling the words, hearing the words and feeling the words, of the Epilogue to The Knee of Listening, where You called Yourself all these names, showing that there was Absolute Freedom in Your existence and that You were everything and Youd gone beyond everything.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: And thats, I don’t know, thats such a sublime Gift that You are always Demonstrating to us.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm, Tcha.

DEVOTEE: And I felt You during these last few days animating that again, showing that, drawing us to You in that way.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm, Tcha. [pause]

Well, the Play Instructs you and relieves you in all kinds of things, but its to lead to this “Perfect Practice”. Then you enter into the Sphere of That Which Appears to you in this Play that has been shown to you, by Me. The Play is one thing, but the Realization is beyond everything.

DEVOTEE: You’ve also said many times, Beloved, that the only way you can Realize anything is to go for it completely.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: You cant Realize anything without completely becoming oriented to God-Realization and living on that basis.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: In what position are you in at the moment? Devotee?

DEVOTEE: I’m in a very different position than I was earlier, Beloved. [laughs]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: In terms of your, an awareness of your condition, do you feel identified with the body-mind in whatever mode its in at the moment, or do you feel identified with the Witness-Position Prior to it, or how would you describe your situation?

DEVOTEE: I don’t see myself defined or confined to the body-mind.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Do you feel associated with it or attached to it at all?

DEVOTEE: I’m aware of it, you know, the discomfort of it.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You feel discomfort in the body at the moment?

DEVOTEE: Right. Not major, but I’m aware of it.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. What else about, what can you say about it?

DEVOTEE: But thats not where the focus is.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-mm.

DEVOTEE: It’s, the focus is in the feeling-Contemplation of You, and . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: From what position?

DEVOTEE: From a position that seems senior to the body.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. What’s it like? What are its characteristics?

DEVOTEE: It’s Radiant. It’s focused and aligned to You, surrendered to You, submitted to You.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Do you feel yourself to be in the body? At the body? Or Prior to the body?

DEVOTEE: I don’t feel it in the body. There, I almost . . . It feels like attention.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: A tension? Or attention?

DEVOTEE: Attention.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Attention, A-t-t-e-n-t-i-o-n?

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You feel you’re standing as attention, observing the body-mind and so on?

DEVOTEE: Mm-hm.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Rather than Prior to attention? [pause] Which? [Devotee laughs.] Is there anything arising presently that you’re not merely Witnessing? Is there anything arising that you are, that you feel you are, like the body, or attention, or what? Because whichever one of those things you’re identified with is the position you’re assuming right now.

DEVOTEE: Right. [pause] I feel it is attention.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And you don’t Witness attention?

DEVOTEE: [kind of laughing] Well, when You, as You were mentioning this, I was starting to Witness attention.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. And then attention disappears in the feeling of the Witness It’self. [pause]

Then there is no attention, simply the feeling of the Radiant Current of Being It’self.

If you sense the body at all, feel the Current Shining from the right side of the heart.

Feel yourself established there, feeling there.

And the body simply rests on that point of Current.

If you allow it and enter into it more deeply, its, its no longer a point but a Space, beyond the sense of the body. [silence]

You simply Glow in that Space, in apparent association with the body, but It’s not at all attached to it.

[Beloved stops speaking for a short while.]

Enter into It most profoundly, you discover This is not merely the essence of the personal self, but the Very Divine Self.

No separate reference in It at all.

And if you allow the eyes to open, and not move about, but just focus, naturally, and feel the same “Bright” Depth, but allow the eyes to perceive, without motion, then it is clear the Space Realized is not the interior, mere interior, of the personal self, but is the All-Pervading Divine Self.

And all arising is just That.

It makes no “difference” whatsoever.

The One Conscious Radiance.

Beyond the body-mind.

But including it and everything and everyone.

As One.

[silence]

Well, did you all get that?

[murmurs of affirmation]

DEVOTEE: Yes, Lord. [long silence, sounds of swooning from devotees]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: So what else about anything? [long silence] [loudly] Hm?

DEVOTEE: Beloved?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm?

DEVOTEE: When You were just doing that exercise, I had the sensation of feeling Your Spirit-Force move into my body, as if liquid was being poured into every cell going down the spine, . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: . . . around the body-mind and up the spine.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm, Tcha.

DEVOTEE: And I was just feeling You totally Permeating every cell of my being.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: [whispering] Tcha.

And you were in the body then?

DEVOTEE: I was in the body initially. [laughs] And then You Inhalated me.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm. Tcha.

DEVOTEE: It’s funny how it really feels like a different position occurs, when that happens.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, it seems like You’re Alive as everything, and You Enter us. And thats the moment in which the separate self sense is extinguished really, because You’ve taken over, or we’ve granted room for, you know, Realizing You.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, I’ve used this reference “Crashing Down”.

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I remember it occurred in the, in discussions with devotees on the Island. And I think at the time I was talking about something like real surrender and piecemeal, and all that sort of opposite, and how if you were really open to Me and given up and not withholding, you see, Id Crash on down, and it would just be over, if you felt Me truly.

So that is how it works. That Transmission is then the dissolution unless you withhold, or limit it somehow.

So It passes through the Circle and into the right side of the heart. That’s where you Find Me. It’s just that once there is this Spiritual “Locating” of Me, there’s some limits, usually, on being drawn directly to the heart-root, then the Witness-Position. So thats the necessary Spiritual process, whatever is required to be drawn directly to the right side. You see? That’s, then, the event. Frontal signs are shown in terms of personality characteristics and emotions and whatnot, and feelings, energies, all that in the body. And then there are subtler dimensions to it, perhaps, that may be perceived, spontaneous phenomena of one kind or another.

But none of that is purposed for its own sake. It’s not a something to hold on to. It’s just a sign, a moment, in this rush of My Passage through the Circle where the obstructions are, whatever. They modify My Presence, and then they’re experiences, and you do the Yogic devotional work in such a way that those pass. But if you cling to them, or if you like something about them, whatever it may be, some subtle this or that maybe, then you maintain that modification and dwell on it, become it in a sense. And in that case, its, wherever that occurs, frontally, spinally, whatever, its an obstruction dallied with. You see?

You must allow the purification to take place. The purpose of the Spiritual Yoga in this Way is to be Spiritually Awakened to the “Perfect Practice”. So there is the Witness Awakened, but there is the Spiritual Revelation in the right side of the heart also, coincident with That.

So it is a Spiritual process. Without the Yoga of seeing Me, Spiritually Combined with Me, then you bypass that Revelation, that dimension of what should be there in any practice in the sixth stage of life. It is not typically, or traditionally, a Spiritual process. It is associated with mind-dharma.

DEVOTEE: Mm-hm. Well, You Give it Life and Fullness.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. The real process requires that it be Spiritual in nature. Both the “conscious process” and “conductivity” are involved, then, you see, attention, but also energy.

So all those Spiritual events that you like to have happen are just the way My Force gets modified in your shape, showing things to you and requiring you to change this and that, or open up, or whatever is necessary. The signs do not appear for their own sake. Theyre not the goal in any sense at all. Theyre just what happens, as I Move there. And purifications take place, and the modifications arise to the view somehow, if true, you see?

DEVOTEE: Beloved, I cant, its hard for me to imagine how that dharma or sadhana could be heart-satisfying, could be actually livable, if what it was looking toward were those kinds of conditional experience rather than the penetration that, you know, that You Are.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm, Tcha.

DEVOTEE: The Yogic process You’ve been Enlivening, or has been Enlivening Me, being in Your Company, has taken me on a whole tour from, of Revelation of kind of ascending experiences, and at first having to see that I have a fascination with them, and also, at the same time, almost a delight in being able to Commune with You and continue to be pushed out of any enduring fascination with them. And then by today, I don’t know what was happening, but the whole panoply of experience, albeit ascended, became a torment. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-mm.] And it just seemed like torture. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-mm.] You know?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: And its as if the same way You’ve sensitized me to the torture of more ordinary life, when not about Contemplation of You, I got the same lesson about the ascended possibilities, through Your Grace, in the last two days as well. It just reminded me that they’re both a torment unless about Communion.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: They are themselves a play upon the body-mind, thats all.

DEVOTEE: Right.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: The body-mind itself is the same in its quality, regardless of what appears to be arising altogether. You’re still that mortal, fearful mechanism.

So the experiences often are pleasant, interesting in one way or another. But its just that you must maintain your hearing and seeing discipline. So you don’t cling to them. But you don’t try to suppress anything about it, either.

DEVOTEE: Mm-hm. They just seem exactly as You Describe, doing a certain Yogic work thats required but in a Graceful way that just allows it and doesn’t regard it with any special attention.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: It’s remarkable to me how much Work You Do like that that just perfectly fits with whatever our vehicles need, to grow in our reception of You. And I know You’re Doing it in all the planes of the entire, well, all reality, conditional and Unconditional.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm, Tcha.

DEVOTEE: It’s just totally remarkable.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: This “Brightness” Covers All.

DEVOTEES: Mmm.

[pause]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You have to want the Samadhi more than you want anything that has to do with what dies.

DEVOTEE: You truly are the Vira, Lord. [silence]

DEVOTEE: Beloved, I’ve never really understood, or had it occur to me, the kind of profound Spirit-Power and Presence that You Described as coincident with being established in the Witness-Position.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: I’m feeling such a powerful and profound Spiritual Presence. You Said Locate It at the right side of the heart. And as You were Doing that Feeling, You were showing That to us. In fact, I feel it right now.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

But you pointed at your body and almost lost it. [quiet laughter] And It cant be Located with attention. It is a feeling Location, feeling beyond attention. If you point to the body, attention flies out again. But without pointing at yourself, pointing at your body, you do feel the association with the right side of the heart?

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Internally, so to speak?

DEVOTEE: Yes, but its also forceful, down and pushing down.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, you feel the pressure pushing down there.

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And then opening out.

DEVOTEE: Mm-hm.

[silence]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: It’s the same Yogic Force. You can feel It in My Company in the frontal line or the spinal line or wherever, but Standing there, Originating there, Collected there, without moving out into the body-mind. So the root is not in the bodily base, or in the crown, or between the eyes, or on the left or the middle, but on the right side of the heart, the Maha-Chakra.

[moments of silence]

When the “Eyes Open”, the Infinite Sphere of the Heart-Place Radiates in Amrita Nadi, to the crown and to the circle again, allowing all arising to appear.

So there’s the Flow from the Infinite Reservoir, beyond and through the right side of the heart, passing to the crown, without leaving the right side of the heart.

The being remains Established there, but the Current of It’s Radiance is allowed to pass into the crown, and then the circle, giving Spiritual Vision of what arises, seeing it as only That.

And the body is Transfigured by That Flow in the Circle, Freely from the Heart.

And Transformations occur, Recognition all the while.

So then in due course there is no noticing, much.

Simply Established in the Gaze in the Heart, without dissociation, all forms, gross and subtle, nothing but apparent modifications of That.

The causal root vanished in your Stand Beyond the right side Door.

And that “difference” becomes an Asana more and more “Bright”.

But everything is Outshined in That Indifferent Gaze.

[silence]

So there is a Yoga in the seventh stage of life, too, you see?, this Yoga of Amrita Nadi, without leaving the Stand of the Heart. Just as the Witness-Position is associated with Spiritual Revelation and Yoga, so is the seventh stage.

The Element Consumes even the lamp at last. You see?

[pause]

So there’s no fear in That whatsoever, Frans. You see?

DEVOTEE: Yes. I understand.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Nothing to fear in anticipation of It, then. You project your fear onto That. It has nothing to do with fear. The fear belongs where it arises. It’s in the body presumption. The fear is in the reluctance to give it up. In your giving up, the bodys worst fears are realized. But its your responsibility, that body. See? So you must conform it to your surrendered disposition.

[moments of silence]

DEVOTEE: Beloved, it seems that initially there is this struggle to relinquish the flight back to the body-mind. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.] And then the more that you rest in the Witness-Position, then what I’ve observed is that that struggle starts to just quiet down. And the body does actually conform to the Witness-Position.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, if you give it access to its Source, it shows the sign of being rightly aligned to its Source. So when you’re not giving it access by clinging to it, you don’t give it that access, then the struggle goes on. But as soon as you are truly Established in the Prior Position, the body conforms to It readily. Theres even an immediate great breath. You see? [Beloved inhales and then exhales strongly.]

DEVOTEE: Mmmm.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: It relaxes around that “Bright” Disposition.

To deal with the lesser, you have to get to the Source-Point, to deal with the lesser, even the Craig Lesser. [laughter]

DEVOTEE: The lesser of two lessers.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Craig Lesser, The Least! [laughter] [Beloved chuckles.]

DEVOTEE: Beloved, that is the paradox of Your Instruction, what You’re Describing.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

And what more would you like to say about it altogether? [pause] Or was that it? [laughter]

DEVOTEE: You find so many ways to say the same thing.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

So what are we discussing?

DEVOTEE: Amrita Nadi.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Oh, yes.

DEVOTEE: The circle in the body-mind.

DEVOTEE: Conforming the body to the Witness-Position.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. So we covered all those things. Right?

DEVOTEES: Mm-hm.

[silence]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And when the body-mind is flooded, as it is in the case of Divine Transfiguration, it what? [mild laughter]

DEVOTEE: It’s Outshined.

[Several devotees talk at once.]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: It goes through various changes potentially. In The Knee of Listening I used the expression “the navel dropped”, or something like that was the expression, kind of a snipping from inside, a kind of, just a way of using a body reference to somehow get you to feel something about the Yogic opening that occurred spontaneously. And of course then and always, I had great Force of Energy into the head that changed the shape of the head and so on.

So there are all kinds of unusual signs that come about from leading the body-mind to its Source, you see. You have to have a Yogic body, a Yoga body, not conformed to your purposes, but conformed to the Divine Work, used by Me, by My Invasion, and used Spiritually, Worked Spiritually, because its there to do that, rather than generate knots and patterns for merely organism purposes.

But that again is just part of the purification or opening up of the Circle, so that you can Find Me in My Place. So it is curious that things do happen to the body, or the body-mind, interesting but the work must continue.

And this Yoga of Amrita Nadi was going on in this Body when it was a child. That’s why I was able to Describe It, the “Bright”. You see? It was Realized then and actually Working This Body. So the seventh stage Demonstration went on in this Body then. You see? But the Body itself had to be Submitted too, in all of its conditions, and all the conditions of beings.

The “Bright” continued, and It’s Sign continued, especially in breakthrough moments. But essentially it was Submission to embodiment in the usual form. So it became Complete, and then the reversal, or Re-Realization Process, so to speak, went on instead. [moments of silence]

So what were we talking about, then?

DEVOTEE: We were talking about Signs of Divine Transfiguration, and the “Regeneration” of Amrita Nadi. [long silence]

DEVOTEE: Beloved?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm?

DEVOTEE: I once spoke to, ten years ago, to Shivabalayogi. And . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Shivabalayogi?

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: And was talking to him about Sahaj Samadhi, the so-called end result of sadhana. Of course, in his case it was Nirvikalpa Samadhi. And then You were, when You . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Fifth stage.

DEVOTEE: Fifth stage, yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes.

DEVOTEE: And when You heard the report, You Said Id given him the wrong dharma, because it was all about Translation. [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.] So like You’re Describing, the Ultimate Process takes place in the seventh stage of life, in Sahaj Samadhi.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi. Moksha-Bhava Samadhi. Or “Open Eyes”. [pause]

Which Transformations are in the domain of appearances. You see? Theyre not the point. It’s simply a matter of steady Abiding As That in Which everything arises, As That.

The Self-Position is not abandoned to start doing things with the body again. So whatever changes or Play may occur, there’s simply the constant “Bright” Self-Abiding, not in any capsule, flesh or otherwise.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, its completely obvious to me, as You Speak, that when You talk about the Divine Entering into the Circle of the body-mind, its That that produces all of our reception of Your Spiritual Power . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: . . . and that the way to receive That, Your Spiritual Transmission, is to always, as You Say, identify It as You and not get caught up in the phenomena itself.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: As You Speak, its so obvious to me that You are completely coincident with Your Spirit-Current.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: It’s not merely a matter of identifying It as Me, by analysis. It’s a matter of being Established in Me, by Communion with Me. [Sounds of agreement and understanding from devotees. Then long silence.]

How many more “considerations” such as this are we supposed to have?

DEVOTEE: I didn’t know we were counting, Beloved. [laughter]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You’ve been coming here each day for three or four days, isnt it?

DEVOTEES: Yes.

DEVOTEE: It’s the fourth.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Each day I ask you all is there anything further to “consider”, to go on with, and I’m told, “Absolutely yes. And were discussing it right now, and blah-ta-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, these questions,” and so on. But then when we get together, we do pretty much what we did the evening before.

So is there any end to this cycle? [silence from devotees] Are you going to tell Me tomorrow we should gather again because there’s some further “consideration”? [Devotees laugh, but no one answers.]

We can re-examine the same matter over and over again, thats good. Weve been doing that. But do you all have any questions or matters whatsoever which we should address? Or is everything clear?

DEVOTEE: It seems, My Lord, You’ve brought us to that clarity many times in these days. And it is now up to us to live it in the way that You’ve Described.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: At the same time, I would love to sit with You like this every night. [moment of silence]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Is it time for the fruit?

DEVOTEE: Mm-hm-mmm.

DEVOTEE: Forgot about the fruit!

DEVOTEE: What time is it?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: [looking at the clock on the table beside His bed] Oh, its only eight-thirty in the morning. But you’re not suggesting any further “consideration”, either.

LARRY HASTINGS: Beloved, in Your Work with devotees, have You Taken them beyond the Samadhi of tonight?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: There isnt any Samadhi beyond the Samadhi of tonight. [appreciative laughter] That’s It. Of course, its there to be Perfected, but this is what its all about. [silence]

[Some ladies leave the room to prepare Beloveds fruit meal and snacks for devotees.]

DEVOTEE: Fruit brigade.

DEVOTEE: The fruit people, fruit brigade.

JANIS: Beloved?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm?

JANIS: I was feeling over the last few days how clear it was to me that the root of egoity is felt and penetrated only through Communion with You.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

JANIS: And that that was the direct process and that wasn’t about trying to locate any sense of feeling in myself, but that it was just strictly through that Communion. And also, I was feeling, when You were talking about the bite, and how You sharpened Your teeth.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. [Janis laughs.]

JANIS: I felt that also as the same process of Transmission and Grace, and that both sides of Your critical Argument are Given in that bite. And so that is my resort.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. Tcha.

JANIS: And also I felt how You Said, “Pay Me now, or pay Me later”, because the teeth are going to get longer and sharper and deeper. [laughs] [Beloved laughs.]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: In other words, the longer you wait, the more you have to deal with.

JANIS: Yes.

DEVOTEES: Mm-hm.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I make the tooth, but you make the meat. [laughter]

Just think if you could do sadhana from now on with only that amount of karmic accumulation you had twenty years ago. [Beloved laughs.] Like Marley telling Scrooge, you know, that his, Scrooges, chain was as large as Marley the seven years before, and hes been working on it steadily the seven years more.

On the other hand, maybe also in some sense you’re less entangled than you were twenty years ago. But just generally speaking about the difference twenty years could make, its just more to deal with.

[long silence]

Can reach to Me with the body-mind, or you can Stand Where I Am.

[Very long silence. Sounds of swoons. Sounds of ecstatic breathing.]

What else? Anything?

DEVOTEE: Beloved?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm?

DEVOTEE: You’ve just shown Me all Your Forms. And You were completely Light. Your Face was changing all the time which is a vision I had never had before.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Ah, Tcha.

DEVOTEE: I am very grateful for that . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: [whispering] Ah, Tcha.

DEVOTEE: . . . because it was happening in the midst of, I was feeling how I was not, I was not responding very much to the “consideration” and I was feeling the opposite effect that all people are feeling, which is instead of expansion it was contraction, more and more and more. And my whole, everything that I am as the contraction was obvious to me. It was very, very difficult. But at the moment that You showed me Who You Are, that was totally unimportant.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm, Tcha.

[silence]

The Way of the Heart is not about dwelling on the self-contraction. It’s about feeling beyond it, to Me, and forgetting all of that.

What else?

DEVOTEE: Beloved, . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm?

DEVOTEE: I feel how You’re just constantly Installing Yourself in our hearts. And its like these last few nights, just to have the opportunity to sit here and Contemplate You has magnified that feeling and that Contemplation of You all day long.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: [speaking very softly, and with emotion] And I feel like its the gesture of surrendering, and it is being Demonstrated over and over again sitting here in Your Company.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: And I feel like You’re just Instructing us over and over again about why we make the choice to not stay in that Company with You.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: But I feel like You just widened my heart to that state of being intimate, . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: [whispers] Tcha.

DEVOTEE: And I feel like when You Speak about renunciation, and how its a matter of releasing things for the sake of making room for You, thats becoming so obvious to me that thats why you would make any choices . . .

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm, Tcha.

DEVOTEE: . . . to just keep remembering You, and to allow the body to become completely conformed to You, You as my Ishta-Guru.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Tcha.

DEVOTEE: And when I was on retreat, You Spoke a lot about the gopi sadhana, and how all Your devotees are Your gopis.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm, Tcha.

DEVOTEE: and then the retreatants just going wild [Beloved and Antonina chuckle together.], trying to spend as much time with You as we could [ADI DA SAMRAJ: Tcha.], just to sight You, and put flowers out around Your House, anything that we could do to magnify our devotion to You.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm, Tcha.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, thats our practice as gopis.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: You just Draw us into Your Love-Bliss and make Yourself so Supremely Attractive to us. It’s a profound Blessing.

[silence]

DEVOTEE: [also speaking softly, and emotionally] Beloved, I felt very grateful for that comment You made about that perhaps I should be practicing the Way of Faith.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.

DEVOTEE: Because I realized I was actually struggling to practice the Way of Insight.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Ah, Tcha.

DEVOTEE: And what had occurred for me more and more, after being drawn into Your, incredible Blessing of Your physical Company, Beloved, is just this direct attraction to You. It made everything very simple.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm, Tcha.

DEVOTEE: [with great emotion] And what You’ve shown over and over again over these last four days is all I want to do, Beloved, is Contemplate You. I know everything, all self-understanding and the entire process comes from Contemplating You.

[Long silence as devotees Contemplate Beloved Adi Da, end of gathering.]