Epilogue: Love of the Two-Armed Form – Adi Da Samraj

Your Master speaks:

I will tell you a parable of ancient understanding. Imagine
a deer in a garden of flowers, his attention caught by a female in the
garden. Therefore, his senses are swooning in the fragrant maze of grazing
grass, humming aloud with honey bees, where she moves. Thus distracted,
he does not taste the scent of wolves, that wait ahead of him, hungry for
blood. Nor does he hear the arrow at his back, that kills him at the heart.

Need I say it? The deer is Man in the ordinary way. He
is the soul, involved with mind and senses. Flimsy passion wanders in the
company of thighs. But lovers are like flowers. Their blossom is sudden,
and suddenly it is gone. Attention wanders in the garden of the senses.
Therefore, Life Itself is spent, in payment for exaggerations of taste
and touch. But all our superficial pleasures and all our moving desires
are themselves nothing more than the mechanical achievements of vagrant
attention. A lifetime is nothing more than self-illusion, a temporary and
troubled distraction from the Bliss of Eternal Transcendence.

While the soul sleeps in an unmindful state, attention
wanders into realms of possibility. Now we are absorbed in sexual love,
clinging to the household sounds of lovers and children. Like the deer
in the garden, our ears are occupied with creaturely conversation, and
our senses are fixed upon the taste and odor of the petty object we are
born to Idolize.

Thus exiled in our dreamy houses, the years of days and
nights pass unnoticed in their suddenness. But we are always fed upon by
search and satisfaction, as by wolves in secret, unconscious, unobserved
in our deadly meditation. Suddenly, the garden is undressed. Suddenly,
the eloquent weapon of our devourer, who always followed us, is felt within
the heart, heard within the mind, and all this Life is stolen in a moment.

Consider this well in the lesson of your own desiring.
Bring the motive of the senses to rest in the mind itself. Convert the
Current of Life from its worldly course, and surrender bodily, toe to crown.
When the mind is thus made Full of Life, surrender it also, in the Heart.

Abandon the “married” disposition. Awaken to the Disposition
of a devotee. Exceed the company of ordinary desirers, who only talk of
food and sex and casual amusement. Yield attention to the Life and Self
of all. Be Absorbed in the Living God, and thus transcend every kind of
experience.

(Book 4, chapter 29, verses 52-55)

Thus Awakened, the true man says: I am amazed! This soul,
the King of the World and the Master of Man, gave itself up to the mind
of desires, and thus played into the bodily trap for years and years. I
became nothing more than the pet deer of a childish woman.

I deceived myself. For what is there in common between
a woman’s body (full of excrement and bad smell) and the imagery of flowers,
such as fragrant purity and eternal beauty, which I attributed to her?
I saw in her body what I only had in mind. A man thus becomes attached
to the dying flesh of a woman, praising her in his heart: “Oh, how I love
this face, this shapely nose, this goddess of smiles.” But, at last, what
is the difference between a man whose principal delight is in a woman’s
body-made of skin and flesh, blood, fat, nerves, bone, and marrow and a
worm that loves to luxuriate in excrement, urine, and pus?

Through the senses of the body, attention comes in contact
with the various objects of desire. The mind arises and moves when there
is contact with the world of experience. But no one is disturbed by what
he cannot see or hear or touch. Therefore, a man may transcend the play
of desire by turning his attention from things in themselves, and yielding
all attention to the Divine Person, through Love-Communion in the Good
Company of the Spiritual Master. In this manner, a man’s mind becomes tranquil
and clear. Then he may give up even his mind to the Radiant Self, the Master
of the heart. When a man is thus free at the heart, he may live in the
world as long as it is given, but he will only Exist in the Domain of God.

(Book 11, chapter 26, verses 7-26)

Thus Awakened, the true woman says: O Master, what mortal
woman Awakened to this understanding of Life could surrender herself to
any ordinary man, who is always meditating on the great fear? The Master
of the heart is the Domain of everything auspicious and wonderful. Those
who surrender to the Divine Person are liberated from all experience by
Transcendental Love. Awakened to my true need, I surrender only to You,
the Radiant Self of all beings.

The body of a mortal man is an odorous corpse. It is nothing
more than flesh and blood and bones, full of excrement, mucus, and wind,
held together with a little skin and moustache, with nails and hairs from
head to toe. Only a stupid woman, who has not Realized the Bliss of surrender
in Your fragrant Company, would make a mortal man the Husband of her heart.

(Book 10, chapter 60, verses 42-45)

Thus Awakened in the garden of the world, the lady surrenders
to the Master of the heart, Who Abides Eternaliy in Radiant Bliss. And
the Master gives Himself up to loving conversation with her, in the manner
of a man. In that same Eternal Moment, the All-Pervading Master of Man
appears simultaneously in the households of all devotees. In the form of
His own devotees, male and female, husbands and wives, who transcend the
garden of desire through Love-Communion with the Living God, the Eternal
Master is occupied in all the two-armed ordinariness of humanity.

(Book 10, chapter 60, verses 58-59)