The Seeker, the Search, the Mirror and the Crisis
Part II – (Part I)
The Study – Responsibility
The search (see part I) is motivated by the seekers unconscious suffering and separation which create the perpetual activities of identification, differentiation and desire.
“You have no games to play”
It’s only when consciousness returns to this zero2 of the one thing known from moment to moment in the ordinary sense that this insight that I’m talking about arises that breaks the bondage. It’s only when you’ve become so limited, when you have no options truly. When you realize that the one quality of knowledge and experience and existence from moment to moment is as far as I’ve described it, it’s at that moment that you truly are confined. You have no games to play that you can depend on any longer because you know all games are essentially based on the same impulse, the same structure and realize ultimately the same vision, the same cognition. So when you are truly locked in to this one form of existence, which is ordinary suffering, the search. It’s in that entrapment, that isolation of real re-cognition, that the whole process is undone.
That’s why I continue to stress that there is a crisis in consciousness involved in spiritual life, because you must come to this zero of re-cognition in which you see the one thing congaed, the one state lived, in which you see the search as your very condition. It’s only when you’ve returned to this condition of suffering without recourse, it’s only when you have fallen into your own limitation, that the insight can arise as I have described it. So there must be a crisis. There’s a purifying dis-ease involved in spiritual life.
This purifying effect that is generated in the company of Truth or Real Spiritual Life is seen at first as a crisis because of one’s irresponsibility. This irresponsibility always includes a sense that something is happening to you. The usual man imagines everything is happening to him or her. Where as when the process is alive in you, the process of true sadhana, the sacrificial process, then it is no longer something happening to you. When one awakens one sees that there is always a choice of responsibility. The world is not just something happening. There is something that one can be perfectly responsible for at any moment.
to understand what is going on”
It must be a perfect crisis in consciousness in which this one form of ordinary knowledge is seen perfectly and known to be your condition from moment to moment. Knowing that you have no way out of this in the ordinary way. That the search does not lead outside of it. At that point all of the hopeful forms of the search, even the hopeful forms of it, become unavailable to you. Not just the negative forms. It’s not like a conversion experience where all of a sudden you are going to become good from now own. It is a moment of realization in which you know you have no options, no alternatives, either to be good or to be bad. Neither to exploit yourself nor to become spiritual. When you have no turning possible, when no direction means the Truth, and only when this crisis becomes your actual condition, when you truly are suffering, not when you are throwing your suffering away, not when you are forgetting it, but when you are truly realizing your suffering. And I mean this in a very literal way. You must realize your own suffering. You must have the profound vision and conscious realization of your own suffering. Your own ordinary condition. It is only at that point can you truly begin to understand what is going on here, with you, with yourself.
For more see: Sadhana
Adi Da Samraj
Notes:
1. The search for Happiness is the basic human convention. It is an effort based on the problem of unhappiness. And it is a program that characterizes the total spectrum of human enterprise, from the lowest level of physical self-indulgence to the highest level of magical and technological invention, psychic ascent, and ascetical inversion. All of humanity is seeking Happiness and presuming that it is “natural” for existence to be devoted to such a search.
2. Zero – The condition that is our suffering is not a fixed, objective, or subjective “thing” that is the self or ego. Rather, the condition that is our suffering is the habitual action of self-possession. The action of recoil toward self is always a form of contraction, or withdrawal from the universal pattern of relations. That action ultimately leads to disintegration of experience, possession by illusions of mind, reduction of phenomena to Chaos, and, finally, reduction of the dynamic self to Zero.
I have engaged the conventional patterns of both Eastern and Western experience. I have explored the internal and the external dimensions of our human possibilities. And I have been Awakened from confinement to the problems, reactions, illusions, and limitations of our yet self-divided and unevolved humanity. I have Awakened from the separate motions of East and West, and this Awakening established me in the true Equanimity and Unity of the body-mind, so that I have become moved as a single sacrifice in Love.
The “I” that is each one of us is not merely a mysterious internal self. The self or “I” is indeed mysterious-since we do not ultimately know what it is – but it must be understood to be not other than the total, obvious, and dynamic body-mind. “I” is the body , or the total body-mind process.
The Western Way of Bodily Sacrifice
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The body of the Guru is not God. God is the body of the Guru. Relations with the Guru are God-realizing, but not when the are cultically conceived. The relationship to the Guru is always undoing the false principles with limitations.
So, in my play with you I am serving a process that will undo your identification with this body, this psyche, this mind, this memory, this person, this self-definition. In the midst of that undoing you will see me clearly, in stages you will know me differently. You must realize a relationship to me that is enjoyed under all conditions, not by identifying me with this body, but through your approach to me in this body, realizing me in Truth. Only then can you live with me under all circumstances, without images. Well, that requires a certain kind of maturity that develops over time, and it requires the upsetting of your conventional position, the complete upsetting of it. Naturally this involves confusion, self-doubt, and failure of this personality with which you identify. In general, it’s a process that takes place over time with a few unique moments that are difficult. It doesn’t happen in one moment living with me.
An excerpt from, The Decision to Eat, 4/4/76, Bubba Free John(Adi Da Samraj)
“I am simply pointing out that the search for Happiness is based upon a lack of seriousness (or real understanding) relative to actual unhappiness. Instead of seeking Happiness, we should understand unhappiness. Then, and only then, are we capable of Wisdom and the Way that I Teach.”
THE SEPARATE SENSE OF SELF SEARCH
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“In the ancient Greek myth, Narcissus is absorbed in an image—but he does not even notice that it is an image in a mirror. The key to understanding “Narcissus” is not that the “self”-image is an image of oneself. Rather, the key to understanding “Narcissus” is that the “self”-image is an image reflected in and by a mirror.”
Aletheon: The Mirror and the Checkerboard
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“Your mind is your reflection, the image in the pond. You are the one who is looking at the image. You are the one who is deluded. But you are the one who is posturing. You are the one who is believing in illusion. Therefore, merely to talk about yourself is not sufficient. You must actually look at what you are doing. Narcissus can describe the image in the pond forever.”
The Drama of the Total Body-Mind
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Seeking
“One of the first things to notice then in the development of real self-understanding and the first thing to notice is that you are seeking and nothing more. That’s it. It doesn’t make any difference what you are doing or what particular this that or the other thing you are seeking to achieve or associate with, or enjoy, or whatever it may be, it’s all the same.
Everything is that, that search. It’s not only just so. It is painful. It is stressful. It is agonizing. It knows at you constantly. And it’s not just one thing you are seeking. You are constantly seeking, sometimes seeking many things simultaneously. At any moment there may be something particular or other that you are particularly obsessed with, unioning with you see. Whatever it may be.
You examine your life and you make this discovery that it is seeking and nothing else. It is entirely that in every fraction and even coming to me can be a form of your seeking. The best way to come to me would be with the profound sense of the failure of your seeking.”
THE SEPARATE SENSE OF SELF SEARCH
Due to copyright restrictions Beezone is unable to provide the links – See copyright letter to Beezone from Adidam.
Understanding the separate self search
You must know that everything I am doing is a means to bring about this crisis. I desire this crisis in you.
I do not want it not to happen.
I do not want to console you.
I do not want you to be contented in your unconsciousness.
I want you to become sensitive to your actual state.
I want you to know very well what you are always up to.
I want you to become capable of observing yourself under all kinds of conditions.
I want you to notice the machine of your ordinary activity.
Due to copyright restrictions Beezone is unable to provide the links – See copyright letter to Beezone from Adidam.
“The first great crisis of life occurs in all of us. But most of us simply go on from there to seek Happiness, or even to despair of It. The second great crisis of life occurs only in the case of those who can seriously accept and understand the Lesson of the first great crisis of life. Therefore, I Argue that Lesson, so that you may become serious, understand your unhappiness, and begin the Way of Happiness Itself. The second great crisis of life is this process of serious understanding of unhappiness and conversion to the Way of Happiness (rather than the futile search for Happiness). Such understanding is what I call “hearing” and such conversion is what I call “seeing.” It is only when such hearing and seeing prevail that the practice of the Way can begin.”
The Bodily Location of Happiness
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“Normally we assume: I am having this experience. Every moment of life is informed by this affirmation. Moment to moment this awareness of being a separate identity is communicated to the whole of life. And life becomes an expansion out of the idea of this individuation, a process whereby the separate and absolute ego tries to predicate all reality to itself in order to regain the totality intuited ultimate state in which reality is recognized exactly beneath the mind. This is the source of life as dilemma and mortality, suffering and tragedy, dark humor and search. It is simply a matter of a failure to recognize the truth of our condition, our right relationship, the actual reality. In fact the Divine Lord, the conscious subject and source of all manifestation, is the one experiencer of everything, and what we now identify as our selves is simply our awareness of the Reality of the Divine.
The quality of life proceeds from the form of cognition we assume. It is only necessary to return again and again to the form of reality, which is the actual and conscious relationship to the Divine Lord, who is that alone of which we are conscious.”
The Knee of Listening – Chapter 14
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The Beginning of the Way
Complied and edited by Beezone
The Teaching of The Way of Adidam is fulfilled by Grace, not by personal efforts. BUT the reception of Grace depends upon the responsible fulfillment of The Law, or sacrifice. The Law is a demand by The Great Power of the Heart. Until The Law, which proceeds from Divine Ignorance or Radical Understanding, is fulfilled and The Heart comes to rest, there is only contraction, separation, avoidance of relationship and the search for fulfillment or release.
The Way of Adidam is not truly either exoteric or esoteric Path or Way. Rather, the Way or Path of Adidam involves Transcendental Awakening, or radical intuition, from the beginning. That intuition, or the Realization of Divine Ignorance or Radical Understanding, is Awakened through “hearing” or truly understanding the argument of the Teaching of Truth, and “seeing” or truly surrendering into the Company or Presence of the Spiritual Master or Reality Itself.
Once this hearing and seeing are true of the devotee, the Way begins. And the beginning of the Way involves the transcendence of self through application to exoteric disciplines of a religious, moral, and personal kind. But these very disciplines are engaged from the point of view of true understanding, or prior Awakening to the Disposition of Divine Ignorance and direct surrender into the Transcendental Current of Life.
Prior to Hearing and Seeing all preparatory and preliminary practices are for those beginning or ‘approaching’ the Way. The actual practice of The Way is founded in a radical insight into self and the avoidance of relationship, The Conviction of Narcissus. This ‘radical insight or intuition’ reveals the factuality of reactive self-confinement and fruitlessness of the search for salvation, release, or perfect fulfillment.
The Way must necessarily be preceded by a period of preparation, testing and humanizing growth in relation to the seven states of life in the Way of Adidam or Adi Da, the Revealer, Realizer and Way Itself.
