Are You Your Own Guru? - Beezone Library

The following is a discourse by Adi Da Samraj which took place on November 4, 2005. Adi Da just finished reading chapters 6-9 of ‘The Scapegoat’s Book of Perfect Knowledge’. After a brief exchange with another devotee a question is asked about the Ashtavakra Gita and the need for a Guru.

DEVOTEE: Great Ruchira Da, now as always You are gifting us with all we ever need—that’s the relationship to You. You have told us that this relationship continues through all the stages of life and that the devotee in the seventh stage of life is in perfect relationship with You, practicing the fundamental forms of devotional and spiritual practice in the context of that great relationship.

And traditionally you’ve told us many times that this great relationship is the only means for realizing Who You Are and upon reading the Ashtavakra Gita, I had a question about how Ashtavakra would ever say the following: “He who gains complete knowledge of the true nature of pure Consciousness through indifference to the world, equal mindedness and ontological reason, saves himself from the succession of births. He has no other spiritual master except himself.”

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: That, in fact, is a mistranslation. You are reading a translation, in fact, the one published about twenty-five years ago by the Dawn Horse Press. It takes a great fool to select that verse as the basis for an exchange with Me. Among all the verses in the Dawn Horse Press publication of the Ashtavakra Gita, that is perhaps the most egregious translation of them all.

It’s not about you have no master but yourself or and so on. Ashtavakra didn’t say that. The Ashtavakra Gita doesn’t say that. It’s just a form of translation made by the translator, published in translation of the Ashtavakra Gita by the Dawn Horse Press. But that’s one of the verses he doesn’t do well, because of the prejudice of his own and trying to, it seems, make the Ashtavakra Gita sit well with the modern so-called disposition.

Adi Da continues the instruction ….(see below for full instruction)

So Ashtavakra wouldn’t say that. How would it have come up in that setting of Janaka coming to Ashtavakra devotionally for instruction, for guidance, for awakening. Why would Ashtavakra say “You’re your own guru.”. What would be the point? And in any case, in saying it, he would be being instructed. He would be being guru, saying “You are the guru”. So it’s a kind of instruction coming from somewhere else and if were already the case, why would there have had to been instruction.

If you are already all your own gurus, then what’s the point of instruction being given to you anyway? Why should any realizer bother? Why wouldn’t all realizers simply retire into the background of the world and be invisible, unknown, uninvolved, not teach, not submit, not suffer people for the sake of awakening them, not do any of that?

If the world were let go to ride into oblivion and not a finger be lifted or a word spoken to deter them from it. If everybody’s their own guru anyway, their own resort, and there’s nothing greater or beyond it, no master otherwise, then why do people have to be told it? So much the worse for them, then.

Whether they hear such a thing said or not, why should anybody bother to say it? Everybody’s just going to go their own way anyway. Why should somebody who realizes what is greater than that try to intervene? Because if there’s the Realization of what is greater than egoity, then egoity isn’t its own master. It’s a fool. Something needs to be said, but it’s not that the fool is his or her own guru. That’s exactly not true. It’s really, incredibly not the case, and there is great and perfect Divine Self-Realization and it is beyond self. There is the Great Reality beyond self and it is the identity of the realizer. The Realizer is master or guru.

And no disciple, including someone like Janaka, is the master of his guru then. He is the devotee of his guru.

DEVOTEE: Is it possible, Master, that Ashtavakra was testing Janaka in terms of getting rid of any great fools in the crowd that would run with such a statement?

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: If you mean is it in principle possible, could it have been written that way—it could, but it wasn’t written that way. It’s a book of wisdom, not of falsehood. And such an idea is false, that egos are masters for themselves or even others is false. And the idea that egos can receive and instantly realize great Truth is false.

You can be called from your everyman condition, male or female, to realize what is beyond egoity and break out of the herd of destiny But you must pay the price. You must enter into the stream of practice, of sadhana, of devotion, of Realization. You have to go through that process, you have to be submitted to it.

Great purification is required, great transformation. Great seriousness is required. So this is the appropriate message to every man or every woman, and not that Truth is simply always already the case, and all you have to do is be told that, and now you’re a realizer. Or “you don’t have to change anything, you don’t have to practice discipline, you don’t have to practice devotion to anyone, you don’t have to do anything much other than attend a lecture or whatever or play with some gimmicky procedure and you will thereby realize ultimate realizations just as was realized by traditional masters or yogi saints and sages. The same stage realized by those great individuals can be realized by you as an ordinary, essentially non-practicing ego.” That’s what the common hype proposes, you see.

This is designed to persuade and exploit egos, ordinary people. There is now a mass audience for virtually everything, so everything is designed to flatter the presumed individual member of a mass audience, the lowest common denominator of the herd of consumers, so all communications are addressed, all appeals are made to that presumed individual, that kind of individual.

TV advertising or TV style advertising, promotions of any kind in the world today is a don’t say, “we have something that only 2 1/4 people among the six billion in this world can use, and you’re probably not it” [laughter]. You cannot find a lot of buyers by defining it out front as being something for which hardly anybody could possibly be qualified, you see, so it’s put in the form instead that everybody listening, “you, every one of you without doing anything, without changing anything, you see, are an immediate suitable client for this product, this idea, this whatever it is. You’re eminently qualified. You have all of the wonderful qualities already, all of the wonderful qualities that all the greatest realizers who ever lived had. Those poor realizers, look at all the work they did [laughter], all the struggling, all the suffering, all the profundity of practice, all the years they spent on it, all the torturing of themselves, it seems. They didn’t have to do all that. They could have just called in now [laughter], two easy payments of $19.95, and they could have had it without anymore than that, without even leaving their living rooms. If you have a PC nearby, you don’t even have to really put your beer down first [laughter]. You hold your beer in one hand and tap in the numbers right here, and Realization will be on its way in the mail [laughter]. You’ll receive it within the next forty-eight hours. We guarantee it or your money back [laughter].”

You see? The already immensely flattered consumer ego wants to believe great things about himself or herself, you see. You’ve all been subject to salesmanship at every level of your experience all your life and it has reinforced in you a sense of being vastly individually important and vastly individually capable. Everyone from politicians to this or that with a secret ingredient on TV, you see, salesman on TV, every one is directed to you as if you are of vast importance and vast capability and vastly capable of making use of this message, the message presented by the advocate of one or another thing or product.

So your illusion about yourself is what is being played upon. Your capability for being a sucker is what’s being made much of. And things like this aren’t really said, then, criticizing the whole game, you see? This is not part of the P.T. Barnum game. The P.T. Barnum game is to keep making much of the consumer, because there is one born every minute.

Full Discourse

And traditionally you’ve told us many times that this great relationship is the only means for realizing Who You Are and upon reading the Ashtavakra Gita, I had a question about how Ashtavakra would ever say the following: “He who gains complete knowledge of the true nature of pure Consciousness through indifference to the world, equal mindedness and ontological reason, saves himself from the succession of births. He has no other spiritual master except himself.

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: That, in fact, is a mistranslation. You are reading a translation, in fact, the one published about twenty-five years ago by the Dawn Horse Press. It takes a great fool to select that verse as the basis for an exchange with Me. Among all the verses in the Dawn Horse Press publication of the Ashtavakra Gita, that is perhaps the most egregious translation of them all.

It’s not about you have no master but yourself or and so on. Ashtavakra didn’t say that. The Ashtavakra Gita doesn’t say that. It’s just a form of translation made by the translator, published in translation of the Ashtavakra Gita by the Dawn Horse Press. But that’s one of the verses he doesn’t do well, because of the prejudice of his own and trying to, it seems, make the Ashtavakra Gita sit well with the modern so-called disposition.

The other principal available translation which I’ve referred to here also is having problems, mistranslations of the text, is better on this particular point. Knowing great fools would likely be in attendance here this evening, I brought that translation [laughter] specifically in order to read that verse [laughter, Da, thank You, Lord, loud clapping].

In this translation, by Swami Nityaswarupananda, published by Advaita Ashrama—and this in fact is the translation pointed out to Me that I located on the shelves at Baba Muktananda’s ashram years ago and that was referred to by Amma as I have told you all—he translates the line, or that verse or aphorism, as follows: “He who gains knowledge of the true nature of pure Consciousness by complete indifference to the world, by equanimity, and by reasoning and saves himself from the round of birth and rebirth, is he not really the spiritual guide?”

Further, this is a description of the characteristics of a true teacher or spiritual master and so on, and simply about having a different view about the meaning of this text or how to translate it. These aphorisms, as I have said, don’t simply read as English sentences would with an obvious clarity to how they unfold. They are structured very differently. The word by word transliteration reads, in this case—using the words of this translator of course—but he takes them to mean “Who by indifference, sameness, and reasoning of pure Consciousness, realization of the true nature gaining from metampsychosis saves himself, he, in perogative, spiritual guide not or is he not really the spiritual guide?” So this is a description of qualifications of a true teacher as opposed to one who is not true.

There are other problems with this translation introduced by this translator, Swami Nityaswarupananda, that are principally about how he understands the chapters that contain the utterances of Janaka. He seems to, well not seems, but his interpretation is that Janaka is always countering Ashtavakra. Ashtavakra is testing and instructing and testing. And that Janaka is arguing for a position that is superior or an advancement upon the position proposed by Ashtavakra in his discoursing with Janaka. And if this were the case, then this would be called the Janaka Gita, rather than the Ashtavakra Gita. If Janaka invariably presents the superior point of view or argument—which, by the way, allows for various ambiguities of the Evelyn kind, because Janaka is traditionally taken to have been a prince living at court, a person of wealth and pleasures and so forth, however managed or whatever about it; but nonetheless that was his circumstance, as opposed to the circumstance of a sannyasin, traditional sannyasin.

So this translator, Swami Nityaswarupananda, basically takes this to be an exchange between Ashtavakra and Janaka viewed according to the traditional imagery of who they were and so on. And it’s a kind of testing of Janaka by Ashtavakra. Each time Ashtavakra speaks, Janaka replies. Janaka, in fact, says the last two chapters of utterance in the book, which is curious, since it’s the Ashtavakra Gita—why is Janaka the last one to speak?

Well, he speaks only briefly in those last two chapters, after the chapter just before the last two, in fact, the 18th chapter, Ashtavakra speaks. And Janaka’s replies are the last two chapters, but they’re quite brief. Ashtavakra’s 18th chapter is 100 aphorisms long, obviously intended to give a summary of his instruction, and not one in which he winds up agreeing with Janaka. Ashtavakra’s proposals, instructions, teaching word altogether, argues for renunciation in essentially the full or sannyasin form.

All that can be said about Janaka may be the reason for the structure of the text being what it is, that it’s a kind of person being instructed by his master and is shown developing greater understanding as the exchange proceeds, and ultimately has some kind of level of maturity closer to Realization, or somehow or other associated at least with thinking in those terms, some kind of listener’s conclusions and so on.

The Scapegoat’s Book of Perfect Knowledge maintains a conversation between the great sage, Raymond Darling, and the great fool, false teacher and Super-criminal, Evelyn Disk. In other words, there is no ambiguity about the nature of Evelyn Disk. And there is much language made by Me in this book that expresses a summary opinion about Evelyn Disk that is utterly without the slightest ambiguity. And Evelyn Disk’s nature and disposition and status and state and so forth is clearly communicated, even for his sake, by Raymond Darling. And there should be no doubt, then, that the views he expresses are false views. They are directly said to be such by Raymond Darling. He counters them over and over again. Evelyn Disk’s arguments are presented through language that makes clear he is a self-indulgent fool without the slightest Realization whatsoever, but is the living ego brain itself bound to this world through desire and seeking, and in fact is an example of the unlimited exercise of efforts to satisfy all aspects of desire and seeking in the framework of bodily human life.

So My reply to you, having full certainty before I came here that the great fool would identify himself by asking Me about this verse, My reply is that it’s a mistranslation, an inappropriate translation. This text is not written for amateurs, egos, so that every man can read it and declare himself or herself realized. Realization is not merely a trick of mind, come about through following a logical argument to some logical conclusion in mind, but that is how people want to translate this text or have wanted to translate it and have indeed translated it to justify something of that popular view of ultimate esotericism.

It is a popular view. It is also utterly a false view. The Ashtavakra Gita, you see, is an ultimate form of teaching. It’s a kind of teaching that at the time this Ashtavakra Gita itself was written—given even many hundreds of years of possible dating, span of hundreds of years—but at that time this was the kind of instruction that was not popularly known. There was no public or popular way for this teaching to be known. It was only uttered in the company of essentially sannyasins of the most mature type and otherwise perhaps occasionally to unique individuals who were not of the type of Evelyn Disk at all, but who may not be in the traditional setting of a sannyasin, but who nonetheless had a disposition like it while they yet lived in circumstances that didn’t appear to be of sannyas at all.

Janaka, in fact, is presented in the great tradition as being that kind of person. So possibly such an individual might have been addressed by a sannyasin and taken seriously as someone prepared for such ultimate or perfect instruction. But generally speaking this kind of teaching was not known commonly at all and was reserved for uniquely prepared people.

So what was everybody else doing? What was the teaching given to them? Well, you see there were other teachings and traditions and schools, plus there was the common life, the temple life, or the common life associated with the temple and other means for conveying dharma to the general population of mankind and extending it by various means, temple means, political means, various social means of one kind or another. So there were teachings for people commonly.

There were teachings in what I describe as the first three stages of life. There were teachings of a more esoteric kind that were associated with what I describe as the fourth stage of life, and within the setting of ashrams and the company of realizers of one degree or another, what I describe as yogi, saints, and sages in the great tradition sense.

There were esoteric fourth stage teachings beyond the conventional religious instruction that were commonly given to people which had some fourth stage characteristics. But esotericism, great disciplines associated with the fourth stage of life, that was communicated by realizers of the fourth stage type. In other places there were realizers or masters of the fifth stage type and they taught yogic means, esoteric yogic means associated with the fifth stage practices.

There were sages, generally speaking, in the context of sannyasin ashrams and schools who would pass on sixth stage instructions, variants in one form or another, but involving one or another kind of practices, still yet conditionally based in one way or another, but could be said to belong to the sixth stage tradition.

These were passed on in sannyasin ashrams and to sannyasins. Sannyasins were then developed intensively and when they were of unique preparedness they were given the more fundamental teachings, what could be called transcendental teachings which would be engaged in the traditional mode of Sravana, Manana, and Nididyasana— listening deeply, examining, and then made the basis of profound entrance into modes of contemplation and contemplative Realization in the sixth stage sense.

So this Ashtavakra Gita belongs to that great tradition that acknowledges everything that precedes this teaching of Ashtavakra, teaching in the mode of Ashtavakra. But it’s even something of an advance beyond traditional sixth stage teachings, and it’s very much a renunciate teaching, and uncompromisingly so. But it’s about a different kind of renunciation. It’s actually one of the reasons I describe it as premonitorily seventh stage in its disposition. It’s not simply seventh stage teaching, but it has elements, characteristics, a likeness with aspects of the seventh stage of life—only some, otherwise it’s a sixth stage tradition, but it’s not about doing any practices.

And that doesn’t mean that it thinks practices are illegitimate. However, the point of view of this teaching represented by Ashtavakra, is that when there is availability for this mode of instruction it is because there is no need for practices, in other words, exercises of the conditionally manifested faculties, to enter into depth meditation and so on. The truth could be heard and entered into most profoundly and be perfectly liberating, not based on merely thinking about it, but by this inherent identification with Consciousness Itself, using the language of the Ashtavakra Gita.

So this is a renunciate teaching given under only special circumstances, generally to sannyasins only or otherwise to uniquely prepared people. And Janaka may be thought to have been something of that kind, a person of that kind, and therefore he wasn’t an Evelyn Disk. Understood as that kind of a person, he wasn’t an Evelyn Disk. But he is also not somebody in the Ashtavakra Gita presenting a perspective superior to Ashtavakra. That’s an inappropriate interpretation, so this translation and commentary by Swami Nityaswarupananda is flawed on that count.

The translation presented by the Dawn Horse Press, which in some form or other will be published again before long, is by a man, I believe, named Mukerjee—isn’t it? And his interpretation, even though it’s something of an awkward translation, nonetheless doesn’t contain that particular interpretive flaw relative to Janaka. It does have inaccuracies and ambiguities in translation and the verse that you wanted to discuss is one of the most outstandingly wrong of them all. But the self-guruing, self-possessed ego will fly to it with eagle eyes and embrace it wholeheartedly as a justification for its own self-possession, which so many of you have done over all these years.

So you don’t need that particular verse to be mistranslated anymore and that will be corrected in the upcoming edition, should be, not because I just don’t like how it’s stated, but because it’s just not correct.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, it’s totally obvious that it’s not correct. The relationship to you …

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Was it?

DEVOTEE: Yes, Beloved.

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: What were you wondering about when you asked the question?

DEVOTEE: I was also wondering if it was perhaps an error of the sixth stage Realization in the sense that, as You describe it, the ego becomes abstracted or focused on the Self as an abstracted principle or …

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, the true sixth stage orientation is not of that nature. Its limitation is that it exercises conditional faculties, essentially the causal body, or the action of stepping past or dissociating from the causal root and thereby dissociating from the subtle and gross aspects of the manifest person also or the apparent person, the body-mind ego.

That exercise, that effort, is a dependency that is a limitation and therefore is not a characteristic of Perfect Realization, could not be. So abstraction and whatever, the kind of suggestion you were just making, is not precisely a characteristic of the sixth stage tradition. It may be a characteristic of some people who associate themselves with sixth stage teachings or traditions and so on. But it’s not a sixth stage characteristic per se. Nor is this translation that you read out, correct. It’s not in the Ashtavakra Gita itself, so it’s simply a mistranslation, so it can’t otherwise be said to be part of the sixth stage tradition either.

It’s more of a characteristic of lecture hall guruing on the part of people who represent popular views about what could be called sixth stage teachings.

QUESTIONER: Like J. Krishnamurti, Beloved?

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: He is an example, but there are others. In fact, it’s a kind of popular movement now. There are many who promote a sixth stage kind of teaching argument as if all you have to do is talk about this argument or listen to it stated over and over again, at least for a period of time, and you’re suddenly realized and could even go out and become a guru.

This is promoted by individuals like Nisargadata also and certainly by those associated with him. And there is even an element of popularization of the sixth stage orientation in the case of Ramana Maharshi and the school or tradition that has developed around him, just an element of it is there.

In other words, the idea that somehow egos can listen to the sixth stage teachings and without any other practice or foundation, even without any preparation for listening to such arguments at all, they can realize it, realize the truth of it, and you don’t have to change your life or do anything about it whatsoever. Put into its most exaggerated and absurd or to its most exaggerated and absurd degree, it’s Evelyn Disk talking, you see. That’s his view of it. He thinks he’s somehow got it, what Raymond is saying essentially about Consciousness Itself and so on, but apart from that he is not changed in his body, his mind, his life, at all, and Raymond points this out, of course.

There is much at the present time to counter these popularizing arguments about sixth stage teachings or really about anything at all in all of the great tradition. It’s being hyped or promoted, TV and P.T. Barnum-style in all of its parts, all over the world, or in much of the world. It’s a kind of hucksterism associated with esotericism.

It became more or more prevalent as time has passed over the last 150 years as a general number, something like that. It became more and more the case that the person to whom teachings are addressed is a worldly consumer, a man off the street, every man or woman who will believe he or she doesn’t have to do much, don’t even have to pay too much to get the secrets, and then you own them and can readily achieve them in terms of the Realization indicated.

The conversation in the Ashtavakra Gita took place in the traditional setting between a realizer of a sixth stage kind and a person presumably prepared to receive the teaching of such a person. Of course it wasn’t always absolutely true that only such prepared people listened to the teaching arguments of Jnanis ,or sixth stage masters of one kind or another, in one tradition or another, including Buddhism and so on. Because various traditional texts indicate that such Jnanis or masters of one kind or another, sixth stage type in this particular case, that I’m pointing to, or I’m talking about activities relative to that particular tradition which is a sannyasin or renunciate tradition otherwise—such individuals would appear at court.

Debates occurred that were public, events, or at least attended by many including important people at court itself and the general mass of people who might appear at court or attend sessions at the royal court, be present there, and debates would occur between teachers of various kinds, including Jnanis and they would debate with other presumed important teachers who may have a totally different kind of perspective or one that’s similar and they would debate very subtle issues, nuanced issues, rather than major differences.

Or there might even be arguments with a royal figure there, perhaps Janaka then in some past time was a royal figure who might himself, because he had some degree of learning or whatever, have had an exchange, a kind of debate, with a master, perhaps named Ashtavakra.

So it wasn’t absolutely necessarily the case that the only person Ashtavakra might have debated with would be a uniquely prepared person. It generally was the case. Any kind of serious, most serious exchange that was actually intended to be instructional based on a master accepting someone as disciple or devotee formally, that was always in very special circumstances.

Debates were something else. Somebody might hear a debate or even participate in it who wasn’t sufficiently prepared to receive sixth stage teachings. They might in fact be somebody arguing a fourth stage teaching, or a fifth stage teaching, or even about virtually anything. And apparently, according to the traditional texts, there was a possibility of such debates occurring relatively openly in the setting of whoever might be at court and so on.

Even exchanges took place in the travels of someone like Shankara, for instance, so he might come into contact with another teacher representing whatever tradition or point of view and a debate would occur between them and whoever happened to be anywhere around there might show up. So there was a degree, then of overhearing, you could say, or some kind of debate style participation in argumentations that involved the presentation of teachings, at least in a philosophic form, expressed through philosophical language, and people without any preparedness to actually practice in accordance with those teachings, might overhear or be in attendance.

So that’s the exception to the rule. That’s the other side of how things were traditionally and would have been at the time that the Ashtavakra Gita was likely made, whenever exactly that may be said to be. It seems like possibly it was a post-Shankara text. It could be before Shankara’s time. There is no absolute way to pin it down. Looking at the teachings contained in it, one can make some kind of a judgment about it.

It seems, it seems to Me, that it probably is in the era of the time of Shankara or somewhat after his time because there is so much of Shankara’s perspective reflected in it, but it’s also spoken in a kind of voice that’s not directly referring to Shankara or other texts and so on. It could conceivably, then, be some kind of older text that Shankara may not even have known about, or that may have been part of the tradition passed down, even to the time of Shankara. It can’t be said with any absolute certainty exactly how to date it.

But still it was there in the more or less ancient world in that setting where sannyas, formal renunciation, was the circumstance in which sixth stage teachings were communicated as instructions to be followed, given by a presumed realized teacher to individuals he formally accepted, he or she formally accepted as disciples or devotees, people to be instructed in these transcendental teachings or sixth stage teachings of one kind or another.

There were these other circumstances in which people might hear something about it, but how many could actually understand it, even such argumentations, or how many people had the education even to grasp it. They might just pull off arbitrarily this or that idea like anybody might attending a lecture in a who knows where.

So there was some of that, but direct instruction and this purports to be that kind of a situation, the Ashtavakra Gita does, would have happened in a sannyasin circumstance with someone formally accepted to be instructed and they would have therefore been tested in their qualifications. And it wasn’t that no other practices than sixth stage ones were said to be unnecessary, but rather it was presumed that any individual sufficiently qualified would have already engaged in the various kinds of practices, including various practices that could be understood as certainly forms of self discipline or even renunciation and modes of esoteric practice, temple practice, devotional practice, yogic practice and so forth, practices of concentration and meditation elsewhere, previously and so on, or perhaps even in the school of some otherwise sixth stage master himself or herself. So people received other kinds of instructions before this sixth stage instruction would have been given formally.

So when they were prepared by all of that, then this teaching was considered to be relevant and was given formally. A debate in the company of who knows who, was not formal instruction. So it wasn’t that Ashtavakra might argue at court and it would be said that everybody in attendance, all 20,000 in attendance, became realized that very day, you see. All that’s nonsense, although some statements like that do appear in some texts, traditional texts. Often in the Buddhist traditions there are those kinds of statements.

So it wasn’t about that, because Realization was understood to be something that occurred, not only on the basis of all kinds of right practice as a preliminary, but it occurred in the company of a realizer who accepted you as a disciple or devotee, instructed you, guided you, tested you, measured you, blessed you, moved you, awakened you, and so on.

That was always the presumed setting of anything or anyone who would be otherwise known then as a realizer. They were always somebody’s disciple or devotee or virtually invariably. So a debate, as I said, wouldn’t constitute instruction, wouldn’t be understood by anybody to be instruction in the sense of a transmission. It was just about listening to arguments and arguing points about arguments, strictly in terms of the content of the arguments themselves, their logical consistency and so on, or how they corresponded to some presumed authoritative texts and so forth. But those debates were not the setting for anybody to become a realizer, or to realize on the basis of what might be spoken.

So this exchange between Ashtavakra and Janaka is clearly indicated in the text to be of the kind that a master would give to a formally accepted devotee or disciple and therefore that that person was presumed to be qualified to receive the instruction. So it’s an exchange in the mode of Sravana, Manana, and Nididyasana, you see.

If there can be anything to be said to be legitimate about Janaka, it is that he’s going through a process of being instructed and tested and grown in his understanding by Ashtavakra. And his replies then are not indicators of a superior position or realization and so forth, but represent errors which are then in the next speech made by Ashtavakra, countered by Ashtavakra.
So that’s the nature of the exchange. The Mukerjee translation, “The Song of the Self Supreme” translation, gets that basically right. But it’s otherwise also somewhat amateurish. It’s not a translation made by someone who had realized what was communicated there. It is a scholarly, somewhat popularly oriented translation and commentary—as publications tend to be, generally speaking. And when publications are intended to be sold, absorbed, or become instructional for every man, then every man must be accommodated.

So people who are presenting texts or teachings of one kind or another to a popular audience, generally speaking, try to sell it to the popular audience by saying great things about that audience or the typical person from the audience. It’s something like TV advertising. As I’ve said, I have compared it to that, where an advertisement for weight loss which often appears on TV commercials, is sold to people for a price—but you are often told, it is often put in something of the language, “you can eat all you like, you don’t have to give up anything. This doesn’t take any time, involve a lot of exercise, or anything else. You don’t have to change your lifestyle, you really don’t have to do anything but listen to this commercial and call in immediately and pay the price indicated which, of course, is hyped as being uniquely cheap, if you call in now. If you don’t call in now, it’s a little ambiguous as to just what penalty you’re going to suffer, but you’ll certainly have to pay more for it, whenever you do show up.

That’s the word to a popular audience of consumer egos, you see. So teachings, popularly presented at the present time, are designed for people just as you all want to be by tendency.

As a gathering you all have struggled with Me for a third of a century, essentially argued with Me Evelyn Disk-style, for the egoic and gross resolution of life. You want a way without discipline, without true devotion, meaning surrendering, ego-surrendering and ego-transcending devotion. You want it easy, you want it quick. You like the notion of having it stated briefly, and you’ve now got it, and so on, you see?

You’ve been in some sense trained or fooled into believing about yourself, that as an ego, and a rather grossly bound one at that, you are actually capable of ultimate Realization, of most profound practice and developments of practice. In fact you aren’t. People are not. You are potentially capable of all kinds of growth and outgrowing, and therefore potentially possible Realization, or realizations of one kind or another, but it’s a matter of potential, as meaning it’s the potential in reality—not merely the potential in you. The potential is in that to which you can resort, be submitted. You must be submitted to that which you would realize.

Necessarily then, there are practices. There is discipline required. And there are many forms of practice and even renunciation long before the Perfect Practice is really possible for any devotee of mine. But if you want a quick fix for your egoity, you can suck up false translations like that particular verse you recited, or conventional interpretations of the Ashtavakra Gita altogether that read as if every man can put a little attention on this argument and you’ve got it. And it’s not true.

You can get some of the logic of it, you can feel moved by it and so on. It’s certainly true, is it not, in this moment, that no matter what is arising, even if it’s only attention itself, you are merely the Witness of it. This can be tacitly, become tacitly obvious, self-evident, if you will simply take that question seriously, take it from Me seriously in some moment. But it doesn’t amount to Realization. It’s just simply a noticing about something that is self-evidently the case. It’s simply not actually the case.

In other words, it’s not true of you in time and space or in life. It’s true of you in some prior sense. But if it’s to be true of you in life, true altogether, then there must be profound practice, profound grace, profound transformation, profound outgrowing of egoity, a real process of real practices that cover the limitations of the stages of life that precede perfect instruction And then when you have the evidence on you, in your life altogether, the evidence of all that is necessary as the foundation for the Perfect Practice of this Way then, that’s when it can be practiced. But it can’t be practiced merely based on the tacit obviousness or self-evidential nature of the yes answer to My question, “Isn’t it true that no matter what arises in this moment, even if it’s only attention itself, you are the mere Witness only?” In this moment the tacit obviousness of that, of the fact that it is so, can be obvious. That’s not Realization.

In the next instant, the structures of body-mind are the state that characterizes you. That being the case, there must be practice, right practice, there must be sadhana, there must be blessing, there must be real devotion, real self-discipline and so on, and a real process that is really effective in a real lifetime.

This is presumed by the text or in the setting of text of the Ashtavakra Gita. It’s presumed in the traditions generally. It’s presumed in the tradition of Advaita Vedanta, in the teachings of Shankara for instance. So these sixth stage teachings, yes they are renunciate teachings, but they’re not given out of the blue, so to speak. They’re not given as a something in and of themselves for which there are no necessary qualifications or preliminaries, then. There ARE presumed preliminaries. There ARE qualifications required and all of that is what could be described as all of the teachings relative to the stages of life that precede the sixth.

Participation in various modes of teaching and practice that precede the sixth stage of life are the foundation required to be qualified to enter into the real practice that IS the characteristic of the sixth stage of life. And for such teachings to be presented as if there are no qualifications, no other legitimate practices, no preliminary practices necessary, is a misrepresentation, not only of the sixth stage traditional way, but of Truth.

There are preliminaries, and you must be instructed, guided, blessed—and you are not your own guru. You are not qualified to guru yourself anymore than you are qualified to guru anybody else. You are the ego, Evelyn, fool—and that’s that. Your help is in front of your eyes and if you continue to argue against that, then you are truly a great fool.

Anyone who claims to be their own guru purposed to ultimate Realization has a fool for a devotee [laughter]. There is no separate self or ego that can claim Realization in its real event. No one is realized, there is only Realization. In the case of true perfect Realization, there is no one, no egoic person, no body, no mind, no world, no other, no thing, no object, no separate subject, no subject at all—only the Self-Existing and Self-Radiant, inherently egoless, Self-Evidently Divine Reality Itself.

The realizer of this appears in the human circumstance to be a someone, but is not—only apparently, but not really and not merely in the sense that it’s true enough to be said if you think about it and interpret the psycho-physical state to somehow be nonexistent, you see. For any apparent one in whom there is perfect Realization, there is no experience of a separate self, absolutely none. There is no separate self, nor is there any ego-I or mind or body or world that has to be accounted for. There is only the Self-Evident, Self-Existence of the One and Only Conscious Light.

Perfect Realization speaks the realizer. The realizer is not a someone speaking about perfect Realization as a theme or subject for the mind. So perfect Realization is not merely about some philosophically argued position for the mind. Nothing can convince the mind of Truth. The mind itself cannot be convinced. Evelyn Disk cannot be converted. He is a fool. He is a false teacher, presumes himself to be a teacher. The ego presumes itself to be a master. That’s inherently Self-Evidently false. No ego is a realizer.

You all laugh when I read the description of Evelyn Disk as a notorious eccentric super-criminal. You haven’t yet understood the criminal nature of Evelyn Disk, so you think there’s something comic or funny about him, and there is in some sense. He’s so exaggerated, he does have qualities that one can laugh at on some basis or other, but he is false. He is a fool. He is self-deluded. He is the ego itself, and he is criminal. He is of a criminal disposition, not merely in the public law sense, whatever may be said of that. Something could be said of that in his case, but it’s more fundamental than that.

It’s spiritually significant criminality. Crimes against Reality are in his guilt, and crimes against the realizer. The egoic nature of the devotee does crimes on Me, not necessarily crimes that you may describe in legal terms or in offenses of that type, but crimes associated with refusal and oppositeness, otherness, non-practice, and so on.

Why should one want to be the egoic master of oneself? Why does that seem to be an attractive notion anyway? Just imagine what if you, just as you are, as you think and live with all your tendencies and patterning, what if you were indeed your only resort? What if there were nothing beyond that to resort to, no help, no one, no grace, no teacher, no Divine intervention possible? What if you were just that mechanical ego body-mind and that which is Realization itself depends entirely on you? What if there simply were no help and therefore it’s entirely up to you? Does it seem hopeful? What would be the result of your effort, your desiring and seeking? Where would it lead? Does it have any but death results?

You can be hopeful about yourself and your seeking effort, but all seeking is applied desire, desire magnified. You make an entire culture or lifetime out of it. You are constantly exercising yourself on the basis of faults, that you argue to yourself, rationalize to yourself. And you’re even, as you all have tended to do, keep your distance from Me and avoid My instruction, avoid the implications of My instruction and My Person here, and rationalize your own behaviors and bondage and neglect of what is necessary, in fact, for your growth and outgrowing.

This is a kind of criminality then, you see. Egoity is criminal with reference to Reality or Truth. A traditional word for it is sin. In the Christian tradition it comes from a Greek word, hamartia which means “to miss the mark”, as a bowman shoots an arrow, but it misses its bull’s eye, its target. It’s off the point of Truth, off the point of Reality. All behaviors, all attention is off the point of Truth, of Realization, of Reality Itself.

You are misdirected by your own fault. It may seem to you maybe it’s just a slight compromise, it’s off just a tick. But by the time it flies through space to where the target is, it widens toward the horizon and doesn’t even come close. So this is the nature of the way that ego makes for itself. So if you are your own guru, you are your own destiny and it’s made by desire and seeking, and therefore by the self-deluded state that is egoity itself, that is in every moment missing the mark, exercising self-contraction, the self-contraction that covers the entirety of the body-mind and of the life, therefore.

The Way I have revealed to you and give to you deals with all the fundamentals and all aspects of the dramatization of egoity. And if you enter into this Way truly, then it is a process of outgrowing, through discipline and devotional surrender, a discipline that is not merely self-applied lifestyle changes, but is obedience, Guru devotion, Guruseva. Grace is Given and received in that process, and it can become perfect. But the self-guruing ego, Evelyn, the great fool, argues himself or herself out of the Way in every moment. The mark is always missed.

And no disciple, including someone like Janaka, is the master of his guru then. He is the devotee of his guru.

BRUCE: Is it possible, Master, that Ashtavakra was testing Janaka in terms of getting rid of any great fools in the crowd that would run with such a statement?

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: If you mean is it in principle possible, could it have been written that way—it could, but it wasn’t written that way. It’s a book of wisdom, not of falsehood. And such an idea is false, that egos are masters for themselves or even others is false. And the idea that egos can receive and instantly realize great Truth is false.