a talk by Heart-Master Da April 14,
1987 I ADI DA SAMRAJ: Spiritual
life is a profound ordeal. Therefore, you cannot enter into
it bright-eyed, looking to be fulfilled and mystified. As I
presume all of you know after years of consideration, you do
not really enter into anything like the Spiritual Process,
even in its beginning forms, until you have passed through
the ordeal of self-confrontation and struggle with your
childish and adolescent character in the context of the
first three stages of life. That ordeal is inevitable, and
it should occur while you live on the periphery of our
Communion. You should study the Wisdom-Teaching, receive
useful guidance, and endure the ordeal of confrontation with
self without projecting the struggle onto me or onto the
Communion. The Communion cannot just open its
arms and say, “Look at this loving Master and come and be
His devotee.” That point of view is totally inappropriate.
It invites cultism and egoic participation. The Communion
must present its point of view clearly, clearly describe the
Way of the Heart as it is in all its stages, and help people
to understand the limitations that necessarily exist in
someone who first expresses an interest in the Spiritual
Way, help people to understand that basically they are not
yet ready for the Spiritual Process, not even really willing
to endure what is necessary to enter into the Spiritual
Process. If you feel you are interested in
Spiritual life, you should have a serious appreciation of
your unpreparedness and not come to the Communion gleefully.
If you do walk in gleefully, sooner or later you will be
confronted with demands that will make you resistive,
because you are not prepared to meet the demands of
discipline. Discipline is not what you are asking for. You
are asking for consolation, something to believe in,
something to relieve you of the stresses of the failed first
three stages of your life. You are defending your egoity.
Even though you may be interested in Spiritual life, when
you are confronted by the real discipline involved, you will
inevitably resist. You should therefore appreciate this
fact with some seriousness at the beginning and not take too
many big steps. Simply listen, investigate what this Way is
really all about, feel your way into it, and do not become
involved any sooner than you are really prepared to. There
are many ways to associate with this Communion long before
becoming a practitioner even at practicing stage one. There
are many serious ways to study the Wisdom-Teaching and
consider it in your own life while you otherwise do whatever
you like. For even many years you can support the
publication of the Teaching literature, support the
Communion in various ways, and participate in some of the
services the Communion offers. Do not get too close to it
while you are yet unprepared, because inevitably you will
resist it. The Communion does not exist to
suffer the confrontation with your resistance, nor does it
exist to confront the resistance of the world. It exists to
offer a possibility to those who are attracted to this Way
of life and who are prepared to take it up. And that is it.
We are not here to win over the world or to beat people over
the head with the Truth. The Communion simply makes the Way
available, and nothing more. It does not exist to sell the
Way or to hype people into feeling that their unpreparedness
is exactly a qualification for the Way. Unpreparedness is a
disqualification for the Way. Unpreparedness may be
inevitable in people who are first approaching the Way, but
those people are served by listening, or studying the
Teaching Argument, coming to occasions at which the
Wisdom-Teaching is discussed, and talking to
practitioners-perhaps doing all of that for a very long time
until they knock off some of the edges of the antagonist,
the self-defending ego, and achieve a somewhat different
disposition that can maintain a balance and endure the trial
of self-discovery and self-transcendence. You must be
equipped to do that. I spent a decade and more with
hundreds of people, and although I demonstrated all kinds of
remarkable things and elaborated the total Wisdom Teaching,
the basic content of everyone’s involvement with me was the
ego in the context of the first three stages of life. Very
often I had to struggle with their abuse of me and the
Communion, simply because of their unpreparedness. Now my
Teaching Work is done, and I am no longer simply receiving
everybody who expresses an interest and then enduring the
struggle with their egoity. If I am to be free to renounce
my Teaching function, the Communion must establish
formalities. It can no longer invite the struggle with the
adolescent ego. It can provide services for everyone, but it
must not include within its culture people who are not
prepared, because inevitably – there are no two ways about
it – they will resist the Way and defend the ego. Some
individuals resist passively and some resist aggressively,
but resistance is what their involvement becomes if they are
unprepared. In that case they either become a pain in the
ass or they drop out. Such resistance has no
value. Many people may become formal
students and remain students for a period of time before
transitioning to practicing stage one. During that time they
come to lectures and courses, they study, and they live as
they please. They need not struggle with anyone. They study
completely on their own volition, and nobody demands
anything of them. They participate so that they can consider
the Wisdom-Teaching. In practicing stage one, however,
there is a necessary discipline, and that is the stage at
which unprepared people begin to resist. They resist because
they lack real interest in the ordeal of the Way of the
Heart, which is not a matter of getting your mantra and
humming yourself into a sublime state in your room twice a
day. At the beginning of the Way you must
break through the limit of the first three stages of life
and move on to the fourth stage of life, which is a profound
transition that very few have made in human time. Basically
all of humanity is at school, and the fourth stage of life
is the next transition. Therefore, this transition is most
profound and requires great preparation. Thus, you must
humanize yourself to a significant degree before you take up
practicing stage one. The Communion must not replace the
true Word of the Wisdom-Teaching with cultic affirmations
about me that invite people off the streets to a love
relationship. Certainly presentations can be made about me,
my Work, my life, and Who I Am. People read my books and see
my photographs, and they may respond positively – I hope
they do. But you must not create an alternative teaching
merely because people are in general not prepared for the
real thing. You must not create a cult as an alternative to
the Wisdom-Teaching itself because you notice that people
appearing at the various Centers are not really prepared for
Spiritual life and you feel you must mellow out and be
devotional for them. That is not it! It is heresy! It is a
falsification of the Teaching Word. Presumably people come to our
Communion with some background in religious and Spiritual
traditions. They must have some idea that those who have
Realized the Truth in the past, even those who were aspiring
to Realize the Truth, had to live a disciplined life. The
precise character of the discipline may vary from school to
school, but nonetheless, it is discipline. It involves self
transcendence. How could those who approach this Way not
know that? Have they only been watching TV? If some have
only watched TV, then you must help them become educated
about the Great Tradition before you invite them to what
this Way involves specifically. Everyone needs an education as a
preliminary to practice. That is one of the reasons I wrote
The Basket Of Tolerance. It has also been traditional for
individuals to be educated about Spiritual life-certainly
before they took up advanced practices, or anything beyond
the ordinary religious life and its rules. You must be
educated in order to become informed about the Great
Tradition, but you must also be educated to become
uninformed, to become deinformed, to lose your
prejudices. This reminds me of a conversation I
had today with one of you about evolution. This person was
arguing to me all the programs of scientific materialism she
had assimilated in school. She received that uninspected
point of view from her formal education in schools and her
informal education at the dinner table with her parents. It
is an uninspected education. We cannot call it brainwashing,
because it is simply the typical way in which people become
informed. However, it is not a discriminating understanding.
It is merely uninspected beliefs or presumptions received
from various sources, often from your schooling. These
presumptions must be inspected. You can inspect them by
confronting the Great Tradition and the total spectrum of
practices and realizations and Teachers and religions. By
this means you can lose your prejudices, untie your mind
again, so that your attention is free. In addition, you must move out of
your worldly frame of reference. People in these days think
there is no difference between Spiritual life and an
ordinary worldly life. They think all you add to ordinary
life is a mantra or meditation in the morning and in the
evening. There is a vast difference between worldly life and
Spiritual life, however, and one of the principal
differences is discipline, even an all-embracing,
all-encompassing discipline that touches every area of your
life. Every function, every practical detail, every
relationship must become subject to sadhana, or an
intelligent discipline. Such discipline is one to which you
agree in consideration, but it is nonetheless real
discipline. You must therefore move out of the frame of
worldly life. You must be educated out of the uninspected
mind, and you must come to understand through consideration
and by developing self awareness what Spiritual life really
requires of you. It requires the transcendence of
egoity. Therefore, enter practicing stage
one when you have achieved a relatively human balance, not
perfected certainly, but sufficient to associate with people
in this Communion in a disciplined way, a human way, and to
minimize your dramatizations. That is what we expect in the
context of this Communion. It is not only I who must retire
from Teaching Work. The whole Communion must retire from it,
should have done so by now. There should not be any more
struggling. The Communion should have a gentle
relationship to the world. It is not here to beat the world
over the head. It is not here to struggle with antagonists
or to make people believe something they want nothing to do
with. Why should it? Such a struggle has nothing to do with
Spiritual life. If people do not want a Spiritual
Way of life, that is their prerogative. We are here to serve
those who have a genuine interest in the matter, and to
serve them according to their capability. To do so requires
that we acknowledge their capability, and they likewise. It
is a very real matter, and I have communicated in detail the
evidence required at every stage. It is a human matter.
People must function responsibly. And to be inside this
Communion, whether as a leader or an average participant,
you must stably represent true human maturity. Period. The
threatening energy of you as an adolescent ego must be
undone. If it is not undone in you, you do not have the
right to be inside the culture of practitioners. II ADI DA SAMRAJ: I remember
talking to some people the other day about the generation of
my parents, the generation who grew up early in the
twentieth century, and who reflected previous generations in
the nineteenth century. The social norm ingrained in you as
you grew up, and expected of you very explicitly as you
moved toward adulthood in that generation, was that you did
not bother others with your problems. You were even reticent
about them. When somebody asked you, “How are you doing?”
you said, “I’m fine. How are you?” If you were suffering, in
pain, in poverty, you exhibited the signs of being able to
handle it, of not needing charity, of not needing a shoulder
to cry on. You presented a positive face. The limitation of
that social norm is that it tends to rigidify people and
limit intimacy and even growth, but it has a certain social
value. It tends to promote a balance in society in the
contacts among people. But after the first quarter of the
twentieth century, as you move into my generation and your
generation, a totally different norm has developed that is
the precise opposite. Now the norm is to bother everybody
with your problems at every possible opportunity, to
dramatize your problems, explicitly express every last
detail of your suffering, as if you are the only one who is
suffering. You are to be analyzed by everybody, draw
everybody into your case, infect your children with it,
infect your spouse, your family, your friends with it,
infect society with it, create a revolution every time you
open your mouth. Everybody is poisoning everybody
else and fundamentally poisoning themselves through this new
social norm. The old norm is still operative – there is a
kind of general expectation that everybody is supposed to
calm down and behave – but the expectation does not cut very
deep. Basically, everybody is dramatizing and being
unstable. That is the new norm. Be adolescent forever. To be
a pain in the ass is how you stay young and energetic – keep
kicking ass, keep aggravating people, stay angry, stay
lustful, stay as vital as possible, and stay young. To live
this way is even felt to contribute to survival and
longevity. Social norms are thought to
contribute to survival, but clearly this social norm is a
counter-survival technique. It poisons you and it poisons
everybody who takes you seriously. I was also reminding some of you the
other day of a story that one of the children told me at
dinner a couple of nights ago. On their retreat day the
children had been studying stories from the traditions, and
each of them told me stories, about Ramakrishna,3
Swami Ramdas,4 and others. One of them told me a
story about Gautama the Buddha. In the community associated with
Gautama there was a man who was very envious of him, envious
of Gautama’s prominence and of the devotion and honor
accorded him. He disliked Gautama immensely. He himself
wanted grand visibility. He wanted to be very attractive to
everyone, and he expressed his envy when he talked to other
people, by making very aggressive and critical comments
about Gautama and putting himself forward. One day at a gathering where Gautama
was expounding the Dharma, this man stood up in the
gathering and began to criticize Gautama for having people
around him who were so attached to him, and on and on and
on, just venting anger. Gautama listened to this for awhile,
and then he said, “Excuse me for a moment. What if you gave
somebody a gift and the person refused it. To whom would the
gift belong?” The guy said, “It would still belong
to me. If the person didn’t take it, it would still be
mine.” Gautama said, “Well, so it is with
anger. You are delivering a great deal of anger to me. You
are trying to make a gift to me of your anger, and I am
refusing it. So whose is it? You are just poisoning
yourself.” I, in a variety of ways, have
communicated something similar to this traditional story to
help you realize that you are suffering from the
self-contraction. You are not expressing a righteous ideal
or truth through all of your dramatizations. You are
poisoning yourself through your own contraction. You are
suffering yourself. And you are trying to give everybody
else the gift of that suffering through your dramatization.
You are trying to get people to receive it and imbibe your
thinking process, feel your emotions, and find similar
motivations and feelings in themselves. In every interview
with you, the interviewers come out angry, and you want
everybody to be like that. You infect everybody with poison,
with self-contraction. The practitioner must understand
something about just this principle. Do not inherit the
contraction from somebody else. Do not be stimulated to
contract by somebody else’s dramatization. If you are so
weak that you cannot help but do it, then avoid bad
company.’ Live more quietly. Go about your business and do
not get involved in “case” with other people. At first avoid
nasty, aggressive, angry, stupid, lustful, pain-in-the-ass
people altogether. Then as you become stronger and more able
to serve such people, you must understand a certain
principle: Do not receive. Do not inherit their reactivity.
Do not do likewise. Do not become infected by association
with bad company. Associate yourself with good company
constantly. Remember the True Heart-Master, practice the
Way, relate to true practitioners, ponder the Wisdom
Teaching, meditate. Do all those things. In addition, you
will perhaps be relating to people who are still suffering
from themselves. But if you do, then learn how not to
inherit the poison. Do not drink it deep. Do not become it.
Do not become likewise. Do not receive the gift. Do not
receive the transmission that you encounter in bad company.
Learn how to be indifferent to it, free of it. Learn how to
understand it. Learn how not to duplicate it. In good company, you duplicate
something. In bad company, you must learn how not to
duplicate it. Then you can serve such people. In that case,
it is true that they are only poisoning themselves. They are
not poisoning you. If the Communion associates with bad
company to the point that it duplicates the bad company,
then it is suffering from the same dramatization. If, for example, you lay hands on a
person who is full of poison, you must first of all be
balanced yourself. Then you must throw the poison off your
fingers. You do not take on the diseases of another, unless
you are a Siddha who has some purpose in doing so.
Fundamentally, do not take on the poison of another. Do not
absorb the vibrations of bad company. This is why the principal admonition
in the Great Tradition has always been “Spend time in good
company.” Although it is not really appropriate or even
possible to reduce the Great Tradition to just one
principle, we could say that if there is a most fundamental
principle, it is this: Satsang, the Company of the Realizer
and the company of those who love the Realizer or who truly
practice in the Spiritual Company of the Realizer, is the
most auspicious association. Absorb that Company. Imbibe it.
Drink deep of it. Duplicate it. Do likewise. Bad company is
a poison. If you must associate with bad company, you must
know how to stand free of it and know how to deal with it,
know how to relate to it. Otherwise, you will begin to do
likewise yourself, and a friend will have to point out to
you that what you are dramatizing is not you but a
duplication of the problems of another by
association. I have observed that children, for
instance, often reveal patterns that are a reflection of
their parents. Parents burden their children through various
devices, generally through the expression of their own
unhappiness and their need to cling to their children. They
burden the children with emotional distress. Children
reflect that distress by imitating the patterns of those
from whom they receive them. You must therefore serve
children by being clear, balanced, free of your own sub
humanity. Then you will be able to serve their growth, and
you will not burden them emotionally. You must not, or they
will cease to grow. You must understand the law relative
to bad company. Why is it that the principal admonition,
fundamental to the Great Tradition since most ancient days,
is to spend your time in good company? Because egoity, or
self-contraction, is a poison. Bad company is the company of
self-poisoned people. If you are not established in the
fundamental Happiness of true understanding and Spiritual
practice, you will tend to duplicate the qualities of bad
company. You will tend to absorb the poison by association.
It is a natural law. It happens inevitably unless you have
realized true integrity, Spiritual integrity, human
integrity. Your associations, you see, are a
vast field of poisoned air, poisoned grass, a swampland of
disturbance, unhappiness, Spiritual deadness. It is fine to
be compassionate with people and to relate to them
positively and to demonstrate your happiness. That is good,
if you can do that, but it takes a certain capacity, a
certain maturity. You should be able to expect and depend on
practitioners to be balanced human beings, good company,-and
you should be the same for them. Instead of bothering
everybody, dramatizing case, communicate your
happiness. Even in your intimate man-woman
relationships and so forth you should not communicate either
“I don’t need you” or “I need you absolutely. I can’t be
happy without you. My happiness depends on you absolutely.”
That is a way of burdening an intimate. Nobody needs
somebody else for happiness. If you are under that illusion,
you have not understood enough yet. You share happiness with
one another, you may participate in the fundamental and
ultimately Spiritual and Divine Happiness with one another,
but you do not need one another to be happy. If you are
communicating that absolute need to one another, you are
poisoning one another. You are burdening the
other. As a matter of fact, every single
one of you could live without a sexual relationship and be
happy. Every single one of you could live without the one
you are living with now and be happy. Happiness is a
Spiritual matter, a matter of self-transcendence, a matter
of Divine Communion. You do not need the other for
happiness. Others are natural for life, and relationships
are inevitable, but they should be a circumstance of mutual
communication of the Happiness that transcends relatedness,
separateness, the separate person. True intimacy is a
sharing, a communion. Spiritual community is a mutual
communication of Happiness. It is therefore good company. As
true practitioners you do not burden one another with
dissociative signals, and you do not burden one another with
“I-need-you, I-can’t-be-happy-without-you” signals. You do
not do that with adults and you do not do that with
children. Such relationships are fundamentally just human,
even pre-spiritual, requiring human maturity. Prior to the
fourth stage of life people should understand something
about this principle and achieve the capacity to live it.
Such understanding is the beginning of the conversion to the
fourth stage of life. I can tell by the response I feel in
you all that you still lay a bit of this
“I’ve-got-to-have-you-or-I-can’t-be-happy” nonsense onto one
another. I myself receive communications from a variety of
people that suggest they cannot be happy unless they are
hanging onto my toe. Unless they can be involved in physical
proximity to me or to one or another form of relatedness to
me that is direct, they cannot be happy. Their dependency
game is a way of bothering other people, burdening them. It
is a way of dramatizing egoity, dramatizing the self
contraction, trying to fill it up with the company of
another person. This is why I say to you all, as I
have said for many years, “Come to me when you are already
Happy.” Let our relationship, in other words, exist in the
context of Happiness and its Realization, its sharing, its
Communion, its Transmission. But do not come to me because
you are unhappy and you need to cling to me to be happy,
need to depend on me to feel anything like Happiness. Do not
come anywhere near me if that is your disposition. And it is
my point of view that you should not enter into acknowledged
relations of an intimate kind until that disposition is
outgrown. It may certainly be true that if we relate to one
another, we can be very happy, even express happiness
grandly. That is fine. But to have it or you cannot be
happy? That is a rather aggressive communication even. It
burdens the other, throws the other out of balance. It is
the poison. It denies God. It denies the Truth. It suggests
that only a certain conditional arrangement allows
happiness. Such is the antithesis of the
knowledge of the Lesson of life7 You cannot
become Happy by any means, through any relationship, under
any circumstances. Happiness is inherent. You can only be
Happy. Therefore, be Happy, and come to me. Learn the Lesson
of life and then become a devotee. Come to me when you are
already Happy, when you know the principle of Happiness,
when you know the design of it, when you know what it is all
about. Then my Spiritual Company can serve you. Then the
Spiritual Baptism that is constantly Transmitted in my Mere
Presence is alive for you, and you can use it. But not
otherwise. The devotional relationship to me is not this
clinging. It is not dependence on me. It is acknowledgement
of me. It is openness to my Spiritual Transmission. It is
Freedom. So do not lay cultic nonsense onto
me! That is not at all what I have ever Taught or ever
suggested! I have been criticizing it from day one,
observing it in everyone who has come to me. I have always
had to criticize it. You may be passion-bound to dramatize
that disposition, but I have not instructed you in it. I
have not told you to do that or reinforced it in you. It is
your own decision. It is an emanation of your own egoity.
You must be responsible for your unHappiness, your seeking,
your clinging, and your aversion. That is a human matter.
And on that basis you grow into the Spiritual
stages. ADI DA SAMRAJ: I remember
reading something about Shivapuri Baba.8 Someone
asked him, “What is the state of Realization? Do you not
experience pain anymore?” And he said, “The Realized
individual experiences pain just like everybody else. Pain
is pain. But in the case of the Realized individual, it
doesn’t hurt.” What was he suggesting? Not immunity from
pain, although it is possible to put your attention
somewhere else. If you have a pain in your foot, you can put
your attention in your head, for example, and feel an
alternative pleasure, or you can go into a yogic state and
be oblivious to the pain, but apart from that, there is just
the pain itself. But what makes pain hurt? It is like
receiving the poison of bad company. Pain is bad company.
Pain in the foot is bad company. How can it be pain, the
body showing all the signs of its being painful, and yet not
hurt? Ramana Maharshi9 used to groan in bed with
his cancerous arm. When asked about his suffering, he would
say, “It is the body’s pain. So much the worse for it!” And
yet he groaned. But it was the body groaning. He knew the
difference. He stood in the Transcendental Position, the
inherently Free Position. The pain was just as painful. He
had no defense against it. In some way maybe you could say
it was more painful, more intense, for him than for others.
On the other hand, it did not hurt. In other words, it did
not become self-contraction. It did not become obliviousness
to the Divine Bliss. It was just pain, not hurt. It did not
implicate him. That is the difference between
Realization and non-Realization. You may imagine that in a
state of Realization one no longer feels pain, and so you
like to abstract me and imagine that even though a lot of
bullshit is being laid on my head, I am totally indifferent
and existing in some sort of sublime elsewhere. In some
ultimate sense that may be true, but in another sense it is
also true that I am suffering it most profoundly, have even
less defense against it than you do. Even previous to the perfection of
Realization, the discipline is still to be good company,
live in good company and be good company. If you are good
company, then you can associate at times with bad company
and you will not inherit the poison. You will not become bad
company as a result. The fundamental discipline I
communicate to you, and that has been communicated in the
Great Tradition since the most ancient days, is to spend
your time in good company and be good company. You cannot
even spend your time in good company if you are not good
company. It is not fruitful, you see. The principle
admonition, therefore, is to be good company. Being good company is not to be
always gleefully grinning and blissing out. “Oh, my leg just
fell off! Oh, golly!” No. There are grimaces, expressions of
pain, but nonetheless not un-Happiness, not non-Realization,
not divorce from the Spiritual Reality, not “I don’t think I
want to practice anymore,” not all of a sudden “I’m a case”
or “I’m an ego and I just discovered that all I ever wanted
to do was be an ego” – not that kind of garbage with which
people interrupt this community from time to time. That is
even subhuman, not merely sub-Spiritual. PRACTITIONER: You gave a wonderful
talk last year that was extremely helpful to me, about not
having to put on a smiling face all the time, and about
forgiving your enemies. You said forgiveness was really just
forgetting. ADI DA SAMRAJ: Right. Simply
forget the offense. If you do not forgive another, you will
be poisoned by him or her. You are poisoned by what you do
not forgive or forget. If you cannot make the grand gesture
of forgiveness, you can at least make the gesture of
indifference, going into good company, going on with your
practice. You can forget about it. But if you absorb it, if
you mull over it, if you think about it day and night, if
you change your way of life because of it, then you are
poisoned. Forgiveness is in some sense a survival technique.
Do not eat poison. If you do not forgive your
aggressors, if you do not let them go and do not relinquish
your reaction, then you will inherit or duplicate the
disturbance. You must observe this about yourself and come
to a real understanding about it. Just don’t do it anymore.
You will be happy consistently if you will learn this
lesson. If you stop trying to be happy and realize that
Happiness is a matter of What you are inherently, then you
will stop struggling with your various relations in order to
gain happiness. And you will likewise stop struggling with
others, as if overwhelming them or changing their mind would
make you happy. It will not. You can forgive your enemy, you
can release the poisoning influence, you can do that sort of
thing right now, anytime. It does not change a damn thing
about the presumed enemy or antagonist, but it changes you,
restores your wholeness, your integrity. Turn your attention
to the Great Matter. There are always enemies anyway, or
pain-in-the-ass people or poisoned people. You cannot
eliminate them. I cannot eliminate them. Nobody can. I can
serve an awakening beyond them, but I cannot wash them. I
cannot eat enough poison or absorb enough karma from people
to change things that much. I have absorbed and inherited a
great deal from people, and transformed it in myself, and
therefore transformed them, but nonetheless I cannot do it
to the degree of purifying the entire world through this
body in this lifetime. No way. I am therefore not here to eat the
poisons of others. I am not here to be thrown into the
world, made a cult figure, and given a bunch of crap to
absorb. I am not here to be your scapegoat. Understand the
law of good company, the law of integrity, the law of
Happiness, and know, therefore, that it is not your business
to make me or anybody else the target of that nonsense. It
is not your business to bother anybody. Find your own
integrity, your own Happiness in this Way, and express that,
through forgiveness, well-being, radiant expression, in your
conversation. And with some, particularly your most intimate
friends, you sometimes must talk about a little bit of
poison floating here and there, get a little assistance here
and there, but you do not become a non-practitioner in the
process if you have integrity, nor do you ever become
profoundly poisoned either. The principle of good company is the
Way of the Heart in its most fundamental sense. It covers
everything, really, if you understand it. The Way is
fundamentally good company and being good company, and that
principle covers every stage of the Spiritual Process. This
is why the fundamental dimension of the Spiritual Process is
Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga, not ego dependence on another
personality, but participation in the Divine Process of
Transmission, or Happiness itself. If you participate in
Happiness, you duplicate it. You are attracted by it beyond
yourself, stage by stage, into the ultimate dimension of the
Samadhi of the Realizer. Satsang is inevitably, then, the
Great Law, the Great Principle, the Great Gift, the great
communication of the Great Tradition. And it is also my most
fundamental communication to you. The communication of
Satsang is what I am here to do with people. I am not here
to Teach or to suffer people, but to be Good Company for
those who are prepared. And those who are prepared are
prepared in the sense that they are themselves good
company. Simplify your life. Associate with
the world and with worldly people to the degree you have the
capacity to do so, and stay straight. Occupy yourself most
fundamentally with the Spiritual Process, and do not busy
yourself so much that you do not even have time for the
Spiritual Process. You do not owe the world your agreement
to be poisoned and destroyed. You do not owe anybody that.
Do not degrade yourself, therefore. Do not submit yourself
to the world or to anyone to that degree. Stand Free. Be
good company. Imbibe good company. And continue to grow.
That is what you should do. Serve others to the degree you
can, but learn how to be free of their poisons. Learn how
not to duplicate their bad company. Know your limits, and
avoid bad company to the degree you need to, until you are
strong enough that you can face anyone and not inherit the
poison. During my entire life, I have never
really been “out there” in the world, as you might say. I
have certainly been in the world, but I have lived more or
less privately all my life, in general lived in a little
room somewhere, never in magnificent accommodations. I lived
outside of worldly domains and seriously engaged the real
ordeal, the real process-not in a monastic setting
generally, typically in the world in some sense, but in
relative privacy. I never had a career I wanted to pursue or
any of that sort of thing. I found a variety of simple ways
to maintain my ordinary life, and just remained occupied
with what was fundamentally important. I have never avoided
the company of worldly people, but my daily life has
generally been rather private. When I associated with ordinary
people, it was an experiment really, part of my sadhana, a
deliberate intention to reflect the ordinariness in myself,
to find out about myself, to continue my own Work, to
continue to grow, to overcome myself. But I was fit to do
that, knew that I was, and so did it. My Teaching Work likewise was an
association with the most aggressive kind of worldliness,
constantly, year after year after year. The worst of
everything in people was dramatized on my person. And I
endured it because I could, because I was free to do it, and
would not be destroyed by it. I certainly suffered it and
still do, but I was not destroyed by it, my Realization was
not eliminated. I could be Good Company in bad company, and
basically that is what I have been obliged to do all my
life. What I am suggesting to you is that I would like to be
Good Company in good company now. But I have been Good
Company in bad company since I was born, and even during all
the years of my Teaching Work. Even you who call yourselves
practitioners are still to some significant degree being bad
company for me. I had hoped that by now you would begin to
show some integrity and balance in my Company. Now that I
have retired from my Teaching Work, people are supposed to
be good company for me. Even in the gatherings of the last
several weeks, you see, you have each in your turn been bad
company for me and for one another. But you also see that in
these couple of weeks much of that bad company has been
purified. PRACTITIONER: By Your Good
Company. ADI DA SAMRAJ: By my Good
Company, yes. (Laughter.) Well, that is good and it works,
but on the other hand I do not like having to do that
anymore. I have given you enough that you ought to be able
to straighten yourself out as a precondition for coming into
my physical Company. All practitioners should be good
company for me and for one another, and anyone who comes
into the sphere of the Communion should be basically good
company-balanced, human, honorable, serious. That much
should be expected. PRACTITIONER: When You said that You
were Good Company to people where we are, I was thinking You
were in the worst place in the United States that anyone
could be for bad company, and that is New York. ADI DA SAMRAJ: I was also in
California. (Laughter.) I was everywhere else, too. But I
grew up on Long Island and spent my early adult life in New
York City. That is about as bad as it gets, yes. Last year I went to New York City
with a whole crowd of people and walked through the streets
where I spent my youth and early adult life. All through my
late teens and twenties I spent most of my time in New York.
I took them to the temples of my ordeal and showed them the
little Bowery joints and crummy streets I lived on, and the
kind of characters wandering around that I lived with,
associated with, and struggled with. That is what sadhana
requires dealing with your own nature as bad company and
with the bad company of others. In other words, sadhana is
an ordeal. It is not a self-congratulatory heaven of
meditation. You must deal with the conditional
limitations of your own life and with life in general. It is
not merely in this grosser level that you encounter
limitations and disturbances and antagonism. If your
attention rises to spheres above this visibility, you will
find out that there are antagonists and self-poisoned beings
there, too, and that these domains or dimensions are also
limited. Much of my early life and sadhana
was developed in New York City, which you can say in some
sense is one of the worst places in the world to do sadhana,
if you think of sadhana as something that is supposed to
take place in a more or less ideal environment. You all even
think the community of practitioners is supposed to be an
ideal environment. In principle, it is supposed to genuinely
serve and exemplify the Spiritual Process. But on the other
hand, there are difficulties you must struggle with
creatively. There is no point in being fussy about the
Communion. This Communion is not ideal, but it
is better than where I did my sadhana! I did my sadhana
under the grossest kinds of circumstances, with the grossest
kinds of people you can imagine. None of you are obliged to
do your sadhana in such a circumstance. PRACTITIONER: I’ll never forget the
time we drove by the Bowery and saw the alleyway where You
had Your chair, the sofa You used to sit on … ADI DA SAMRAJ: It was an
armchair, not a sofa, stuffed with straw. Straw stuck out of
the holes in the arms and the seat. And the springs in the
cushions stuck out all over the place and poked holes in my
ass and my back. And because it rained in the winter the
chair was always wet through and through. It was always
raining when I was out there, so I used to throw something
over my body if I could, or otherwise I just lay in it,
freezing in the cold. I lived under many other
circumstances, too, very often just as bad. You cannot live this life in the
world as it is now without struggling with bad company.
Sometimes you just flat have to do it. There must be the
warrior in you. But the true warrior is totally in balance.
Look at the great warrior consciousness communicated in
various traditions, the samurai of Japan, for example. Such
a person is not an aggressive, angry, out-of-balance person
who just wants to kick ass! Such a person is totally
balanced, calm, graceful even, able to make a cut right
through in one utterly compassionate blow, without being
poisoned, without being limited by the
antagonist. In the Communion there still exists
a buttoned-down, poisoned, limiting quality to some degree.
The truly free disposition that should characterize this
Communion is yet to be realized. The weaknesses still shown
in practitioners individually and collectively must be
clarified or there is no Satsang. It is one thing to feel
that Satsang has been suppressed or eliminated and we must
regenerate it. But you must go through the process that is
necessary to regenerate it. You must handle business first.
You must clear the deck. You must prepare people and
establish the Communion on a right basis. You must do what
is necessary to make room for my Good Company. You cannot
compromise. You must meet the mark. 1. 2. 3. Sri Ramakrishna
(1836-1886) was one of the greatest ecstatics of all time He
was a paramount worshipper of the Divine Mother in the form
of Kali, and he spent his life as the head priest of the
Kali Temple at Dakshineswar near Calcutta. 4. Swami Ramdas
(1884-1963) was a saint of South India who practiced the
“japa”, or constant heartfelt repetition, of the Divine Name
“Ram”, happily accepting every circumstance of his life as a
Gift of God. He attained an extraordinary degree of mystical
Communion solely through this practice. 5. “Bad company” is anyone
who is dramatizing the self-contraction at a given moment.
Bad company thus refers to an activity that individuals
dramatize, rather than to any innate
characteristics. 6. 7. For a more expanded
discussion of the Lesson of life, see The Bodily Location of
Happiness, pp. 95-109 (especially pp. 96-97). 8. The
Shivapuri Baba (1826-1963)-the name by which Sri
Govindananda Bharati was generally known-was a modern Indian
saint best known for a 35-year world pilgrimage he undertook
at the age of 50, during which he spoke with dozens of
monarchs, heads of state, and cultural leaders. His long and
inspiring life is chronicled in the book Long Pilgrimage:
The Life and Teaching of the Shivapuri Baba by John G.
Bennett, published by The Dawn Horse Press. 9. Sri Ramana Maharshi
(1879-1950) was the greatest modern sage of southern India
and a Divinely Realized exponent of the ultimate Teachings
of Advaita Vedanta. A brief biographical sketch of Ramana
Maharshi is given on page 742 of The Dawn Horse Testament
(first edition).