THE COMPLETING DISCOURSES OF THE 25-YEAR REVELATION
Being Without a World
May 19, 1995
During the month of May 1995, Beloved Adi Da was developing the “Consideration” of what it actually takes for devotees to enter into the “Perfect Practice, including the transcendence of the ordinary human urge to identify with the body-mind. In the following excerpt from a Talk Given on the evening of May 19, Beloved Adi Da speaks of how human beings do not take into account the profound implications of their presumed need to identify with the body-mind. Perhaps the greatest of these implications is simply the fear of all that is suggested by not presuming such identification.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: One of the inclinations people may have in the context of the first five stages of life is the inclination to make conditional existence perfect or to perfect the body-mind. It is an illusion, but it is certainly an effort that people make and that they even idealize in a way. They idealize this notion of the conditional existence of the individual personality becoming perfect – a utopian world, an immortal ego. These are not possible, but it is an idea people can get and they can do various things that they hope will produce that effect.
But the Realization of Perfection is the Realization of That Which is Inherently Perfect. Perfection is not in conditions-Perfection is Prior to conditions. Therefore, the sadhana must pass from an exercise of the body-mind, done in the context of the body-mind, to an exercise in the Domain of the Perfect, Prior to the body-mind. But you have to prepare yourself for that, by growing beyond, being purified beyond your egoic identification with the karmic personality or the body-mind.
One of the principal fears, sometimes declared to be the great fear described in the ancient traditions, is the fear of being without a world. The body-mind cannot become perfect, the world cannot become perfect, but you are afraid to do without it. However, there is no world in Consciousness Itself. Until you Realize the Witness-Position as such, undeniably-and that cannot come about as a result of seeking-until you are truly established in that Position, fundamentally you would not choose it. And that is why you cannot be stable in it.
There is a fundamental fear of being without a world. So you try to make it perfect. That is one of the motives: to make it perfect, to live forever. So you are always servicing this impulse to always have a world, and have it also be basically comfortable at any rate. And that being the case, how could you take up the Witness-Position, which is inherently without a world? So you always move out of that Position, even if you can notice that it is so in some moment or other. You all immediately move out of it, because what you do not like about it is that it is without a world.
So until you are so stabilized by purifying sadhana that you can accept the Witness (it is always already the case, so you cannot seek it or create it, therefore it is about accepting it-it is just so and you have no movement to abandon it), you will always abandon it in order to get yourself a world.
Because people are full of fear, they are identified with the body-mind. The energies from the Domain that is Prior to conditional existence are then passed into the cosmic domain into the apparently personal existence, such that the sensation of the knot, the difficulties, is intensified by that very fact alone. The being is already apparently in a world and does not want to be without one, and therefore does everything possible to continue to have a world.
DEVOTEE: Beloved, it seems interesting that in the first five stages of life the self-contraction has taken this form of wanting to make sure of having a world, but in the sixth stage it is about not having a world, in some sense.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Exactly that! But the sixth stage of life is not only about the device or exercise to not have a world, it is about entering into that Domain that is Prior to the cosmic domain. And this is why, traditionally, sixth stage disciplines were not given to householders or to unprepared people. They were given to advanced ascetics, or advanced renunciates in one form or another, who had come to the point of relinquishing attachment to having a world, or to being a separate being within a world. People in the context of the first five stages of life generally do not have that disposition. They very much want a world, and do anything to keep having one. So profound detachment must awaken, such that Identification with the Source-Condition Prior to the conditional worlds is established. And so in the traditional setting people were not given this profound practice that transcends worlds, conditions, separate person, and so forth, until they exhibited certain signs, unique signs.
CAROLYN: In a sense, though, in the traditions, they were shutting out the world. They were excluding the possibility of a world.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: In the sixth stage context, yes, just in that context. Not otherwise. All the traditions associated with the first five stages of life are about having a world, and being a self, or separate individual, within it. They may have pursued certain kinds of absorption that transcended involvement in the world, but those were generally brief, not eternal anyway. It was about cosmic fulfillment, therefore. At most, absorption in the Power and Light that is the Substance of the world. But they are not about Realizing That Which Inherently Transcends all worlds, Inherently Transcends the cosmic domain itself.
Attention wants to have a world and insists on doing everything possible to have a world-not only a world, but a congenial one, because attention is identified with the body-mind. And no body-mind wants nothing. Identified with the body-mind, you are horrified by the prospect of absolute isolation. You exist as a personality with all of its inclinations and wants for a world, associations, congenial ones at that.
The Completing Discourses of the 25-Year Revelation