A Beezone Enquiry and Study Guide
The Paradox of
“Turn to Me”
Counter ego effort
“You are presuming that the practice is to turn to Me, and also to deliberately forget everything else. No, if you turn to Me, there is no “deliberately forget everything else”. When you are turned to Me, the contents of “experience” do not bind you. Turning to Me does not make you dysfunctional. There is nothing about turning to Me that undermines compassionate association with others. Why should it do such a thing? Turning to Me is not a strategic means of forgetting everything else.” – Recognition of Me is Liberation
“The individual can turn to me with his whole being only if I turn to Me with his Being”
Adi Da Samraj
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“You can’t set that aside and reduce this Way to techniques or practices or ideas alone. All of those kinds of content can be fitted into the body-mind in its independence from Me, in its self-contraction. So you may think The Way is about turning the faculties to Me. Yes, it is, but it’s not merely about turning the faculties, it’s about Me, turning the faculties to Me, not merely by objectifying Me into something from which you are detached, but on the basis of the present recognition of Me, knowing of Me”
“You must represent the true devotee in the fourth stage of life, because such a devotee enjoys the constant Company of the Transcendental Personality in all forms and as his or her very consciousness and being.
This manifestation that you see is God, the Self. Therefore, do not divert your attention, do not become absorbed in attention. Be relaxed, aware. Do not concentrate, do not move a muscle, do not turn anywhere. Do not go within, do not go up. Do not turn attention to the third eye or to the sex organs. Do not think. Do not do any of these things. See that this is God. This is the manifest Reality. This pattern is the Divine manifestation, as it is presently arising. What you see in this moment is the Form of God. The configuration of every moment is the Form of God. This Vision is the Realization of the devotee who is Awakened in the Way.”
Compulsory Dancing – 1978
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DEVOTEE: Sri Gurudev, I am feeling tonight as You are talking that all the things I have done in my practice that I thought were counter-egoic activities were not. I am feeling that most fundamental self-understanding must be in place before I can even really engage in looking at it.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: How can you engage in anything counter-egoic if you do not understand egoity? You may be doing things to work against the results of egoity and to try to feel a little better, but to be practicing Truth, to be practicing truly counter-egoic activity, you must understand the ego, you must be in the place of understanding it.
You are already in that place! You are doing this act! What is so remarkable is that you cannot grasp this fact.
Adi Da Samraj 1993
“The foundation principle is that of being attracted to Me, moved to Me.
Being moved to Me, then you do this counter-egoic effort”.
“The Truth is Where you Stand. The Truth is Inherent. You don’t have to turn away or within inside or outside to realize it.”
The motivated meditator is involved in a process of exclusion and reduction. He is always turning from conditions, sensations, thoughts, etc. toward what is prior to them, what transcends them, what witnesses them, etc. But one who understands no longer turns in this way, for this turning is a part of that which his understanding has penetrated. He is not motivated to turn even in the inclusive and expansive way characteristic of the way of the devotee. The apparent activity in him is spontaneous and intelligent. He is not turned toward anything nor turned as anything. But the process of all that is arising is firmly met by the force of re-cognition. He does not turn away from what arises toward the “self”. Nor does he turn to it as the ego or the Self. There is simply the arising, clearly arising in consciousness, in the force of present, spontaneous, continuous re-cognition.
Those who suffer from their own action may hear or read the teaching of the man of understanding and begin to understand. Others in the same way, may enter into relationship or Satsang with the man of understanding and proceed under the intensity of the condition. For those who are fit, regardless of the way by which they are drawn, the same bliss of no-turning or re-cognition is their enjoyment”
Franklin Jones (Adi Da Samraj), 1971, unpublished notes.
“What do you do to feel better? You notice why you are not feeling good, and then you try to make a counter effort. All your desiring, all your activities, all your emoting, and all your thinking are a kind of monastic discipline. They are what you are doing in the solitude of your un-Happiness, no matter how many people you are associated with. I suggest we must do more than make this minimally intelligent and ultimately ineffective counter effort.”
Adi Da Samraj
“The ego is the centre of human activity, and the attempts of the ego to secure its own extinction may be compared with the attempt of a man to stand on his own shoulders. Just as the eye cannot see itself, the ego is unable to end its own existence. All that it does to bring about self-annihilation only adds to its existence, for it flourishes on the very efforts directed against itself. Thus it is unable to vanish through its own activity, though it succeeds in transforming its nature. The vanishing of the ego is conditioned by the melting away of the limited mind which is its seat.”
Meher Baba – God to Man – Man to God
“How can you turn to me? Even trying to turn to Me is not how to turn to Me, because that itself could be an ego-effort. In that case, you will be a mummer, playing at devotion – seeming, bowing and scraping, genuflecting, wearing labels of states of practice, and all the rest of it. Everything is made into complete nonsense.
How do you become turned to Me? Through devotional recognition-response to Me. That statement itself is a paradox and tautology. The practice is not a matter of just following an instruction from me telling you to turn to me. If just telling you to turn would do it it would be simply following my instructions. But it doesn’t work that way.”
Adi Da Samraj
“Thus, there is no force prior to understanding. All that is encountered in the phenomena of life and consciousness is its proper field. Therefore, once it has known the evidence of suffering, and then also known the falsity of the alternatives, the paths out of the suffering, understanding still continues.
And what has been realized to this point? First, that separation or suffering is primary to the whole of life experience. And, second, that the alternative or counter response to suffering is simply that, a counter-effort, and thus false because it is founded in and inseparable from the continuous creation of suffering.”
Adi Da Samraj
“Turning to Me transforms and purifies participation in the conditions of life – it does not eliminate them from the view. Otherwise, how could there be any “self’-understanding awakened in the process? What would it have to do with life? What would it have to do with anything? In that case, to be (so-called) “turned to Me” would simply be another mode of “self”-contraction.”
Adi Da Samraj
“What is transcended in the turning to Me is the “self”-contraction. Turning to Me is not a “technique” for dissociation.”
Adi Da Samraj
” I was recently asked about working at a computer. For the devotee who asked that question, the computer had his attention. He wanted to know how he could possibly turn to Me in the midst of working on a computer. Anyone can operate a computer and be turned to Me at the same time. How is that so? You must practice until you find out the secret of this. You must practice devotion to Me until it is right, until it demonstrates its fullness and establishes equanimity in the midst of the functional, practical, and relational conditions that are associated with the natural circumstance of beginner’s practice. That natural circumstance is, generally speaking, in the context of daily life.
Turning to Me is not a dissociative strategy. You are not moving away from something and turning to something else. It is not a movement of attention from something to something else. In your presumed practice of turning to Me, you have added the “method” of turning away from what is in the field of view of the faculties. That is not the practice. That is something you are egoically adding to the practice. Some form of religion. You are applying a willful religious “method” of your own, and not simply resting the faculties in Me. That is the cult. That is narcissus. You have put a priest between yourself and Me. It is your own ego, your own mind. It is performing the practice for you. You must relinquish your association with this priest.
Resting the faculties in Me does not mean that you willfully turn the faculties away from their contents and associations. Their contents and associations will be brought into a condition of equanimity, by virtue of your devotional turning to Me. Thus, purification of the faculties will occur, “self”-understanding will awaken, depth of Communion with Me will come as a Gift. You cannot steal it. You cannot force it. Seeking is not the “method”.
That intuitive recognition or identification is simply rest of the current of the being in its prior Condition. It is felt in the grosser body sense at first, and as we come to rest in it, it is enjoyed in all kinds of ways, none of which is in itself fulfilling as mere experience. These enjoyments are simply the secondary reflections of our fulfillment of the Law, our present resting in that Condition which does not have any content, which is unspeakable.
Turning to Me transforms and purifies participation in the conditions of life – it does not eliminate them from the view. Otherwise, how could there be any “self’-understanding awakened in the process? What would it have to do with life? What would it have to do with anything? In that case, to be (so-called) “turned to Me” would simply be another mode of “self”-contraction.
You must find out how to practice this turning to Me in the midst of all conditions. And that means you must do the practice. You must do the practice until you get all of its secrets. You must grow in the practice.“
Adi Da Samraj
” Therefore, My devotees must be committed to the moment to moment devotionally Me recognizing and devotionally to-Me-responding practice of ego-surrendering, ego-forgetting, and (more and more) ego-transcending feeling-Contemplation of Me. This is the counter-egoic Principle that relieves My devotees of the struggle with “Narcissus “.”
Adi Da Samraj
” The common religious or Spiritual cult is based on the tendency to resist the disciplines of real (and really counter-egoic) practice….”
Adi Da Samraj
” All cults, whether sacred or secular, thrive on indulgence in the psychology (and the emotional rituals) of hope, rather than on actual demonstration of counter-egoic and really ego-transcending action. Therefore, when all egos meet, they strive and compete for the ultimate fulfillment of searches and desires, rather than cooperate with Truth, Reality, or Real God, and in a culturally valued and rewarded mood of fearless tolerance and sane equanimity.”
Adi Da Samraj
” That is to say, the ….traditional gnosis (or Great Argument) is Liberating (or has the Capability to Liberate the listener from “work”, or counter egoic effort, or intensive practice toward, or, otherwise, preliminary to, Realization) only to the degree (or in the Event) that the original subjective conviction becomes Samadhi (or Inherent Identification with the Perfectly Subjective Condition That Is the Great Truth) .”
Adi Da Samraj
” Therefore, the sixth stage of life is the final stage of the progressive counter-egoic action of submitting the conditionally manifested being to its Perfectly Subjective Source-Condition.”
Adi Da Samraj
“….the only-by-Me Revealed and Given Way of Adidam is characterized by non-seeking, and by truly counter-egoic (and always already ego-transcending and Divinely Infused) self-discipline.”
Adi Da Samraj
” Therefore, because the true devotional relationship to Me is entirely a counter-egoic discipline, it does not become a “cult”.”
Adi Da Samraj
“The answer is expansion. Contraction is suffering. It identifies centers, locates and defines the being in illusion. The whole affair of release, then, is expansion, counter to the reactive, unconscious recoil to which we are subject by birth. Transformation at every stage is a matter of expansion, not through an effort to be expansive from the egoic point of view, but through the undermining in consciousness of this contraction. The conscious process is, effectively, expansion, passage beyond the zero, the center, the self-definition, the point of view that defines consciousness.”
Adi Da Samraj
“This Way is fulfilled by Grace, not by personal efforts. But the reception of Grace depends upon the response of responsible fulfillment of the Law, or sacrifice. Thus, life and attention must be wedded in the form of every action, so that these become effectively equivalent to a counter-action (no-self) to the root action (the actor) that is the signal of suffering. Therefore, the devotee acts always in relationship to the all-pervading Reality, making every action, every moment of attention, every moment of participation in the rising worlds a service to the Divine.”
Adi Da Samraj
Understanding is not a matter of turning toward the Heart or the true Self. I was talking before about the form, of self enquiry that Ramana recommended. The traditional motivated forms of meditation and spirituality are ways of turning to the Self, turning to God. This is the method.
But that to which you are trying to turn by these various methods is your own nature. It is that which you already are at any moment. So can you see then that to be turning to it is always to be turning to something else, it is always to be directing yourself toward some assumption. Some configuration that’s elsewhere, some quality with which you can identify. In other words, you are not assuming and living the quality that you are, but you are performing some secondary motivated activity in order to discover what you are.
To turn to the Self then through meditative means or any other means, or to turn to God, to seek God by any of these traditional means is sin in the sense that is meant by sin. Sin means, as I’ve said before, to miss the mark. So to seek God, to turn to the Self, is a form of this sin. All turning, then, is sin, all turning is to miss the mark. To pursue Truth or Cod through experiences or on a lover level is to miss the mark, to miss God, to miss the Self. To turn to the Self or God through experiences on a higher level is to miss God, miss the Self. To turn within to find, to turn away from something to the within to find God, the Self, is turning, is to miss the mark. All turning then, turning is the quality. All turning is to miss the mark. All turning is sin. So the activity of turning then is the quality of separation, the quality of Narcissus, is the quality of contraction.
Resort to the Guru is not then sin. It is not a turning – it is not a turning away, it is not an exclusive turning toward, it is not a form of seeking. It is the assumption of the Real Condition. And all true Satsang has this quality. True Satsang is not a form of the search. When the qualities of the search are generated in one relative to the Guru, it is simply that you have taken on the sinful life again. You have become a sinner again. Simply by turning to spiritual things doesn’t mean you have ceased to be a sinner, if we can use this word, this traditional word.
So It is not a matter of concentrating on or in the Heart by any form of enquiry or search. It is not the action of meditating on the Heart or the Self by any means. Thus, understanding is unlike ‘Self enquiry’ or any other form of traditional meditation.
The Life of Understanding, Week 9, ‘The Meditation of Understanding”
” Therefore, at last there is no turning within, and no strategy without, but dissolution in Ignorance-Radiance itself.”
Adi Da Samraj
” The Current or Life of the Divine Person pervades the body mind. Therefore, we may, by turning attention into the Current of the living body, concentrate the force of the Current of Life in various aspects of this body-mind. By moving the attention in a certain way, we can even have the sense of moving into the psyche independent of the physical body. But we do not Realize the Current itself by moving attention through the body-mind. We do not thus surrender into the Current itself. Rather, we move attention about within that Current, within the confines of the body-mind. Generally, our effort moves us toward the brain core, or the higher end of the spectrum of experience.”
Adi Da Samraj
TURNING TO ME AWAKENS A UNIVERSAL COMPASSION
DEVOTEE: How is it possible to still feel compassion-feel any sorrow, or my own mortality-if I give my attention to You, and just remember You, and forget about everything else?
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: I have not forgotten about anything.
Turning to Me is the practice. This is the other side of the question I was recently asked about working at a computer. For the devotee who asked that question, the computer had his attention. He wanted to know how he could possibly turn to Me in the midst of working on a computer. And you are saying just the opposite. You want to know how you can give attention to anything else in the midst of turning to Me.
The process of turning to Me is not one of two practices – one in which you turn to Me, and the other in which you forget everything else (as if there is a separate “technique” of forgetting that goes along with the turning to Me). You are presuming that the practice is to turn to Me, and also to deliberately forget everything else. No, if you turn to Me, there is no “deliberately forget everything else”. When you are turned to Me, the contents of “experience” do not bind you. Turning to Me does not make you dysfunctional. There is nothing about turning to Me that undermines compassionate association with others. Why should it do such a thing? Turning to Me is not a strategic means of forgetting everything else.
The practice is to turn to Me regardless of what arises, regardless of your circumstance, regardless of conditions. This does not mean that you deliberately ignore conditions. It means that you turn the faculties to Me instead of wandering in conditions (and, in so doing, not turning to Me). Turning to Me is to be done moment to moment, under all conditions. If you turned to Me and somehow simultaneously succeeded in forgetting everything (or ignoring everything), you would never have any “experience” whatsoever – except some kind of whatever-it-is that you “experience” in your turning to Me. What is transcended in the turning to Me is the “self”-contraction. Turning to Me is not a “technique” for dissociation. Turning to Me transforms and purifies participation in the conditions of life – it does not eliminate them from the view. Otherwise, how could there be any “self’-understanding awakened in the process? What would it have to do with life? What would it have to do with anything? In that case, to be (so-called) “turned to Me” would simply be another mode of “self”-contraction.
Anyone can operate a computer and be turned to Me at the same time. How is that so? You must practice until you find out the secret of this. You must practice devotion to Me until it is right, until it demonstrates its fullness and establishes equanimity in the midst of the functional, practical, and relational conditions that are associated with the natural circumstance of beginner’s practice. That natural circumstance is, generally speaking, in the context of daily life. If you are feeling less concerned – in the worried sense, the disturbed sense-about what is going on in your homeland of Israel, that is positive enough. It allows you to be aware of the situation in Israel with more clarity, and more of what can truly be called compassion. To not have a reactive or disturbed view-but, rather, to demonstrate equanimity and the capability for unobstructed feeling-association-is quite a different thing from being mixed up and concerned and “self’-contracted in an ego-possessed manner. That kind of change would be a sign of right practice. The effort to forget is not part of the practice I have Given you.
The turning to Me brings equanimity to the body-mind-complex. It reverses the gesture of “self”-contraction, thereby establishing equanimity in the disposition altogether. Therefore, turning to Me relaxes the seeking disposition. Turning to Me is not an activity of “self”-contraction. Turning to Me is not a dissociative strategy. That is why, if you are rightly and truly turning to Me, you can practice devotion to Me under all conditions. But you must find out how to practice this turning to Me in the midst of all conditions. And that means you must do the practice. You must do the practice until you get all of its secrets. You must grow in the practice.
As I Said, I have not forgotten anything. I have not become incapable of noticing the suffering of humankind, or the conditions of the moment. I Respond in a manner appropriate to the moment in terms of right discrimination and feeling-responsiveness. And, for My, devotee, such noticing and responsiveness are enhanced by right practice of turning to Me.
I am also Aware of what goes on in Israel and elsewhere. There is no barrier to My being Aware of it. I am more intensely Aware of it than you are. I have no obstruction to being Aware of it. Your awareness of it is limited to what information you can get, your memories, your past associations – all of which are conditional means. My View is Unobstructed, without any armoring or limitation at all. Thus, rather than that awareness becoming obstructed by the fact of Realization, My Perception of conditional realities is, in fact, entirely free of obstructions. I have access to what is happening all over the Earth, without getting on the phone or watching television. I see it now.
Relative to your question, then, it is similar to the questions that virtually everyone asks. Something happens in your “experience”, and, all of a sudden, it makes you wonder what the practice is. It seems to require a new Instruction, or a new Teaching but, actually, it does not. It merely leads to questions.
When you are diverted by something, you suddenly do not know what the Teaching is. You say you are diverted by the sense of dissociation from your homeland attachments. Your sense that, if you are turning to Me, you are necessarily dissociating from your homeland attachments is precisely what moves you to ask the question whereas it is really not anything but an error in your own practice, by which you become uncertain about the practice itself. It is a factor in your own “experience” that is making the practiced seem ambiguous. You are simply distracted by something, and that is undermining right practice. Therefore, you must do the practice as I have Given it.
In your presumed practice of turning to Me, you have added the “method” of turning away from what is in the field of view of the faculties. That is not the practice. That is something you are egoically adding to the practice. You are applying a willful “method” of your own, and not simply resting the faculties in Me.
Resting the faculties in Me does not mean that you willfully turn the faculties away from their contents and associations. Their contents and associations will be brought into a condition of equanimity, by virtue of your devotional turning to Me. Thus, purification of the faculties will occur, “self”-understanding will awaken, depth of Communion with Me will come as a Gift. You cannot steal it. You cannot force it. Seeking is not the “method”.
Practice in My Divine Avataric Company is a lesson in surrender. Surrender transcends willfulness. The strategies associated with seeking are relaxed by, right practice of devotion to Me. You must suffer through the tapas (or purifying heat) of being brought to right practice – simply by turning to Me and living by My Instructions-until you show the signs of maturity that indicate another stage of practice-demonstration is established. in your case.
You have put a priest between yourself and Me. It is your own ego, your own mind. It is performing the practice for you. You must relinquish your association with this priest. And it is the process of right practice, right devotion to Me, that will move you beyond this priest you carry in yourself, that stands between you and That Which There Is to Realize.
Compassion must also grow in you. Inevitably, because of your life in Israel, you are firmly combined with its situation – but suffering is everywhere. Suffering covers the Earth. Indeed, all beings are suffering, all nations are suffering. A universal compassion awakens, in which ego is transcended, and an equanimity arises. There is compassionate regard for all the persons and places with which one is (in some fundamental manner) “karmically” combined. Your attachments and history are in Israel – and that is, in some sense, a kind of provincialism, in that it defines what your attention will go to with regard to feeling sympathy, and compassion, which is understandable enough. But, on the other hand, suffering is everywhere. So, everywhere you look, you are seeing the diaspora, of humankind. How could you miss it? It is before your eyes. It is in the person next to you. It is wherever you are.
If your presumed turning to Me excludes your capability for sympathetic (or compassionate) association with whatever persons and conditions are arising, then it is not true practice. Instead, it is a kind of blindness and rigidity, another kind of ego-possession – kind of hiding. Thus, in the midst of trying to practice seriously, you run into an obstacle that is a characteristic of your own egoic patterning. That is what it is. Therefore, you must persist in the practice – until the secret of right practice reveals itself in an equanimity and a rightness relative to your associations.
“You talking about “Narcissus” and how, as “Narcissus”, or the ego, you’re helpless, bound by your tendencies and you must turn to me, and so forth. It’s true enough, but that’s not an expression of hearing.
My discovery of “Narcissus”, the nature of the ego, or the nature of bondage, was liberating. I didn’t simply notice something and then thereafter simply have some description of myself that explained why I was so bound. The understanding, the realization was utterly transforming, liberating. It wasn’t, “Meaculpa, I’m the ego, I’m Narcissus, I am bound, I am all kinds of tendencies, I am boring, I’m limited and a seeker and I cant get out of it.”
The understanding of “Narcissus” is not a self-description. It’s a liberating understanding. To come to this understanding doesn’t merely give you a means to describe yourself and your bondage. That understanding itself is profoundly clarifying, and its coincident with self-transcendence”
Adi Da Samraj
The Absorptive Samadhi of Devotion to Me