THE “BRIGHTENING” WAY TALK SERIES – The Yajna Discourses
of Santosha Adi Da (1995-1996) An
excerpt from, A Mastered Life – A Gathering
“Consideration” with Adi Da Samraj Sugar Bowl Ski Resort,
California – December 29, 1995. Beezone note: This excerpt was shortened by many
paragraphs from the original talk (link to original below).
The purpose of this editorial liberty was to focus on the
topic of ‘hearing’ that was so eloquently elaborated in this
talk by Heart Master Adi Da Samraj.
Hearing is No Small
Matter AVATARA ADI DA: Yes, if you really feel that knot,
you don’t want to feel it. Hm? But it is the ground of your
ordinary life. You try to distract yourself from it
constantly, through seeking and self-indulgence and whatnot.
But if you really find out about yourself, find this knot,
find what your real experience is, then you won’t want to
put up with that. It will oblige you to do sadhana, to feel
constantly more and more beyond it. DEVOTEE: Beloved, I feel this. I feel this need to
go beyond that, what this illusion is, very strongly now.
It’s something that You Gave me this year. AVATARA ADI DA: Tcha. DEVOTEE: I feel that it’s such a profound vision
to see life as an illusion. The Beauty of What is other than
that, you know, is just Shining more and more to me. AVATARA ADI DA: Mm-hm. But to Realize It you must
utterly relinquish your self-position. So that doesn’t make
life a negative. That just means that that’s what life is
about. Life is inherently, by Law, sadhana, God-wardness,
going beyond separate self. Generally, people don’t seem to know anything about that.
So by Grace you may become aware of it, and no longer be
willing to be distracted by your cover-up, to keep yourself
somehow or other unaware of it and becoming very, then,
superficial, peripheral, in your mind, your body, your
feelings. But all the time you’re motivated by it. you’re
always seeking something or other. You even forget what the
hell you’re seeking. Or in one moment or other it’s this,
that, or the other particular thing, but always avoiding the
knowledge, the discovery, of your own action that is
producing all of that. So it is a Grace to find it out. But it is not in itself
Graceful. In other words, it’s not a mere pleasure to find
this knot, you see, if, having found It out, you must do
sadhana. Otherwise, well, maybe you’ll forget a little bit
again by getting very superficial, but you’ll give up the
opportunity to deal with it. DEVOTEE: Beloved, I feel that everything in the
world is about that. That is all it’s about, is avoiding
that. AVATARA ADI DA: Avoiding this knowledge of this
knot. The whole worlds avoiding this knowledge of the
knot. DEVOTEE: Everything that I’ve done, even in Your
Company and the practice that You’ve Given us, I’ve had to
come to see that everything I do, everything I do,
everything I do, … AVATARA ADI DA: Mm. DEVOTEE: … is intentionally keeping me from
feeling that and going beyond that. AVATARA ADI DA: Well, truly, you’re only willing
to feel that knot that motivates you when you
simultaneously, Gracefully, discover What Transcends it and
are given a Wisdom that communicates itself to you so that
you know how to go beyond it. In other words, individuals
will automatically dissociate from this depth unless they
can somehow come to terms with it through the Graceful
discovery of What Transcends it and the finding of Wisdom to
deal with it. So when all those things coincide, and all of a sudden
you find you’re able to feel this thing that motivates you,
this knot, this disturbance, because you know that there’s
something you can do about it, then there is the What to
Realize that’s beyond it. But still the sadhana is a matter of actually dealing
with this dis-ease. In other words, the religious life, this
Way in particular, is not about consolation merely and
distraction and so forth, in the conventional sense, or
ego-supporting sense. The process, moment to moment, goes
beyond the self-contraction, particularly as hearing
awakens, that’s when there is most profound understanding,
knowing of this self-contraction, and that it is your own
activity. But even the sadhana from the beginning is about
going beyond this knot and not avoiding it through
conventional-mindedness and consolation and such. So the actual process is to stay in place, in this place
of separate self, surrendering to Me, to the point of
self-forgetting Communion with Me, true going beyond it.
It’s that from the beginning, not merely after hearing. Even
from the beginning it is so. But you have to understand that
that’s what the sadhana is about, or you will miss the point
and think the religious life is about consolation or mere
behavior and so forth. You are to stand in that position of that knot, feeling
your own dis-ease, motivation. DEVOTEE : it’s so painful just to feel that,
though. AVATARA ADI DA: But it’s there anyway.
[DEVOTEE: Yeah.] So you must embrace this Way and
actually go beyond it. But that means you have to endure it over the period of
your sadhana. There’s not only the fundamental knot itself .
There are all of it’s reflections in the body-mind,
tendencies of one kind or another, and so on. You have to
endure the purification of these things by standing in the
knot-position, sensitive to all the limitations of your
disposition, and surrender to Me to the point of forgetting
it, relinquishing it, keeping the faculties all focused in
Me, in this Communion Only then do you make this knot
obsolete. You initially go through a process of purification where
the resultant knots, the different kinds of behaviors,
attitudes, and so forth, that bind you appear. These must be
purified through the initial stages of sadhana, even up to
the “Perfect Practice”. So the initial sadhana is purifying,
and it’s necessarily, then, a matter of being in touch with
this knot in life-difficulties and so on, all tendencies
that would make life difficult. Instead of dramatizing them,
maintain the discipline of this Way and practice this
Communion every moment. It’s not a something that can be
forgotten. It’s not merely a thought. It’s a noticing that
you never forget. It’s a noticing even beyond the mind. Now, you can notice it, of course, for a moment, if I
Call you to. [Beloved Adi Da’s Voice becomes quiet.] I mean,
isn’t it true, right now? No matter what is arising, you are
the Witness of it? [Quiet assent from devotees.] Sadhana is tapas. You must be in the place of the knot,
sensitive to the limitations in your own disposition, but in
every moment – instead of dramatizing that – disciplining
it, surrendering it to Me, entering into Communion with Me
by forgetting the content that is simply the garbage result
of not living in Truth in the past. So it has to be made
obsolete. All the modifications of the fundamental Reality
must be purified and transcended. What there is to Realize
is the Unconditional Reality, the Reality that is Always
Already the case, even now. Now you are preoccupied with the modifications of that
Reality, that Divine Reality, distracted by them and
dissociated from the fundamental Reality by this very knot.
As soon as you relax into your fundamental feeling, you feel
a knot there. You don’t simply feel the inherent Love-Bliss
of Reality – but you do feel It, Flowing through it, but
you’re experiencing this knot in the midst of It. To Realize
the Divine Self-Condition, you have to go beyond that
knot. If your development in this Way is slow, it’s because
you’re stepping outside the process. It’s not that the
process itself is retarded. This is why the hearing matter is so profound and
fundamental to this Way. It’s the foundation of the process
that must develop, because it’s about finding the self-knot,
the self-contraction, finding it as your own activity,
feeling it’s disturbed, ill-at-ease characteristic but also
even in every moment of such sensitivity enjoying the
capability to feel beyond it in this Communion with Me. So hearing is the first great step beyond the initiation
of Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga. In other words, the first
dimension of the process is concentrated in the awakening of
hearing, because you must enjoy and suffer this capability
to stand in the egoic position and feel beyond it. If you
don’t do that, then if you faked your way on to level 2 and
then beyond and so forth, you’d simply be involved in a kind
of evolutionary or developmental ego-game. Whereas the Way
of the Heart is about the transcendence of egoity. AVATARA ADI DA: Hearing is what allows that unique
process. It has some features to it for which you can find
analogies in the Great Tradition, but fundamentally it is
utterly unique. In My Company, (people have) all kinds of experiences. So
devotees commonly report experiences, even as beginners,
that are in the domain of the advanced stages of life and
the Witness-Position, and so on. These experiences should
inspire you and give you a sense of what this Way is all
about and so forth. DEVOTEE: Yes. AVATARA ADI DA: But you still have to do the
sadhana. The sadhana is staying in touch with your own very
action in this moment and going beyond it, forgetting it in
Communion with Me. If you just look for
experiences-so-called Spiritual experiences, psychic
experiences, or blisses in the body, whatever – you’re
becoming superficial again. Those experiences may come or
go, but to look for them, to avoid the sadhana of staying in
place where that knot is and feeling beyond it is to waste
the opportunity of this Way. So experiences may come and go. Devotees have
experiences, certainly, and basically they serve to inspire
you. that’s about it. The sadhana is just the same thing
every moment. It’s not boring. It’s the fundamental living
event. But you must persist, moment by moment by moment. To
be renounced in this Way is to be in the disposition of
going beyond the self-contraction. But it’s also to be in
the disposition of renouncing attachment to or search for
conditional experiences. In other words, you persist in the
fundamental sadhana rather than pursue such things. Experiences, as I Say, come about spontaneously, but
they’re not themselves the sadhana and they’re not something
to cling to or to pursue or try to repeat and so on. So you
must persist in the sadhana. Of course, that means you have
to know what this sadhana is. So it’s no small matter to hear Me. You are apparently dissociated from Me, from this Very
Condition. The self-knot, the self-contraction, is how
you’re doing that. You are doing it. This is what you must
discover, and this is what hearing is about. By entering
into Communion with Me from that position, moment to moment,
going beyond that knot, you enter into the real process of
the Way of the Heart, Which is about Realizing the Condition
that everybody already knows is True-Light itself,
Love-Bliss itself, Consciousness itself, the One Infinitely
Conscious Buzz that you are experiencing right now! But, of course, in the midst of it, you are dissociating
from it also, so you feel this knot of contraction. But you
also feel this Pervasive Presence when you feel the Depth
also, in any moment that you are truly sensitive,
anyway. So the process is about Realizing the Condition That Is,
Realizing My Very Person, by going beyond the self-knot,
utterly. And at first there is a lot of sequence of
purification, as I Said, going beyond distraction by mere
modifications. And then there’s entering into the profound
Depth of the Self-Radiant Consciousness in the “Perfect
Practice”. The ordinary human disposition is attached to
two-sidedness. On the one hand there is pleasure and pursued
pleasurable states. On the other hand there is negativity
and a kind of lightlessness, or darkness. And you’re
attached to a body-mind that is mortal, and that makes it
more negative in the balance than positive. And so you’re always, by tendency, literally
un-en-lightened, not lighted, not “Bright”, not Radiant.
you’re contracted, not Radiant. Radiance, however, is the
inherent Nature of Reality. So the sadhana is – I’ve used
many metaphors, like “living in My Kiln”-through Communion
with Me, self-forgetting Communion with Me, to Reside in My
Self-Radiant Position. It is to be Radiant, rather than
self-contracted. Every moment of Communion with Me is
this. With hearing it becomes more profound, and seeing. But it
is a “Bright” course of identifying with My inherently
Radiant Condition, and thereby being Radiant, becoming
Radiant, being Radiant yourself rather than contracted. All
of the dark, negative, egoic “self-possessed”, mortal, and
so forth lightlessness in you must become Radiant instead.
The Way is literally the Way of becoming En-Lightened,
becoming Perfectly Identified with “Brightness”. Me. So it is a matter of constantly becoming Radiant instead
of contracted. On Melrose Avenue when I first began to
Instruct devotees, I would often use this gesture of closing
the fist and then opening the fist. [Beloved Adi Da makes the Gesture with His right hand
held at the center of His chest.] Everybody intuitively
felt what that meant. They knew it’s got something to do
with energy and all that, too, you know. They felt all that
in My Company. But what does that mean? You can either be contracted and
therefore dark and dissociated from the Divine
Self-Condition, or you can be Radiant, not only open but
Radiating. Hm? And the more you do this sadhana, the more
obvious the Disposition of Radiance becomes. Even the
“conscious process” becomes a non-verbal feeling beyond
contraction. You can do it in every moment relative to
everything. Instead of being darkened by the tendencies, you
can feel beyond the self-contraction and all the
tendencies. So those who do this sadhana seriously, for real, become
“Brighter” and “Brighter”, literally. It is Light. It can
even be seen. By some it can be felt. So through this
process of purification, you don’t just get thinner and
thinner and more and more ascetical. You get Fuller and
Fuller, “Brighter” and “Brighter”. Hm? This is how devotees
should understand it. They always think in terms of getting
disciplined and dried up, so they always want to use
something or other to feel good. But, no, this Way is a
“Brightening” Way. It is not about self-contraction. It is
quite the opposite. It’s not about pleasurelessness, but it
is about Happiness itself, Which is greater than ordinary
pleasure but allows for it also. DEVOTEE: There’s an Irish saying, Beloved,
describing a very happy person, he was so happy he was like
a cat milking the sun. AVATARA ADI DA: Milking the sun? Ah, Tcha. that’s
good. DEVOTEE: Beloved, I felt there was a tacit moment
of recognition and a change in what You just Said, where we
tend to feel good about ourselves and maybe have a good
feeling and so then imagine that’s hearing. AVATARA ADI DA: Mm-hm. DEVOTEE: And then when You asked us to feel our
anxiety, to feel the anxiety there … AVATARA ADI DA: Mm. DEVOTEE: And right then it snapped into something
entirely different, which was just no bullshit. AVATARA ADI DA: Mm. DEVOTEE: And it’s not this, you know, ideal that’s
going on but this actual total recognition, conscious
recognition, of the contraction and of Your total Radiance
and the Energy that You Are. And I could feel that when I
recognized that, that it was just a matter of always
surrendering into that. Whenever this is felt … AVATARA ADI DA: Mm. DEVOTEE: … surrendering into that, and then it
more and more becomes that. AVATARA ADI DA: And not surrendering merely
superficially. DEVOTEE: It’s not superficial at all. AVATARA ADI DA: Surrendering from that very place
of the knot. And that’s the unique hearing capability. Hm?
Now, before that capability truly awakens, as I Said, you
can make use of self-understanding as I’ve Communicated it
to you and various aspects of the sadhana, and be purified
of some aspects of the behavioral and emotional and mental
aspects of your life, and feel good about that – and should,
of course. It’s positive. But it’s not hearing. It’s not
itself the sign of hearing. Hearing is this fundamental
responsibility. You see? DEVOTEE: Beloved, this is the most unique
difference between Your Teaching and all traditional
teachings of all time. AVATARA ADI DA: Tcha. DEVOTEE: In that those traditions generally are
about our always experiencing this not feeling good. AVATARA ADI DA: The traditions are based on the
self-contraction. They’re based on a search generated by
that. DEVOTEE: The great path of return. AVATARA ADI DA: I’ve Communicated to you the
uniqueness of this Way from the very beginning, but your
grasping of it is slow. All experiencing, and all thinking
for that matter, all conditionality, is a development of the
self-contraction. It’s a development from a place of anxious
dissociativeness, the ego, wanting to expand it’s sphere to
feel better and better. And ultimately what will it discover
in it’s own utter dissolution? The Divine Condition is to be
discovered. But It is simply Reality from the beginning. So the Way of the Heart is not about that developmental
course but about the direct process, in every moment, of
Realizing the Divine Self-Condition, going beyond egoity and
Realizing That. that’s what this Communion with Me is about
from the beginning, then-the direct gesture of going beyond
the ego-knot rather than just surrendering with and as the
body-mind, founded on the ego, to have experiences. Hearing is simply the establishment, on the basis of all
the foundation practice, the establishment of this
capability, most direct, with fullest comprehension, fullest
responsibility, so that you can do that sadhana, of going
beyond the self-knot, under all the circumstances that may
arise in the developing stages of life. They will not then
become ego-reinforcing. They will not be deluding. They will
simply be purified, like all other tendencies, and you’ll
move on to the “Perfect Practice”. So I’m always trying to find more ways to put it to you.
And so you have this Literature now that is very full, and I
hope it is fully Communicative. [Devotees praise
Beloved’s Source-Texts.] Additionally, conversations
still continue from time to time. DEVOTEE: Like tonight. AVATARA ADI DA: Like tonight, yes. if you’re
claiming to have heard Me, stand in the position of the
self-knot and right there – that’s your action, you see? –
feel beyond it in Communion with Me through
self-surrendering, self-forgetting practice? Are you doing
that, or not? DEVOTEE: Beloved in this moment in this whole
conversation You’ve sensitized me more deeply to the
self-contraction, and also to You, more profoundly in this
moment. AVATARA ADI DA: Yes, but then again, why haven’t
so many of you who have been in My Company for a good long
while, and that’s basically all here, why haven’t you heard
Me yet?…and you’re also telling Me You’ve heard Me, it’s
not very believable, you see. DEVOTEE: You can tell shit from shinola,
Beloved. AVATARA ADI DA: Yes. You must discriminate. So
that’s the first thing I look for in devotees. Sadhana in this Way of Brightening is about being about
going beyond the self-contraction. In other words, there’s a
constant “Brightening” or change in the disposition from
self-contraction to Radiance. The more limitations you place on this practice of going
beyond the self-knot, the more distracted you are by other
things and so on, the more you delay the course and the more
you oblige yourself to endure dis-ease. Sometimes without
noticing it so much, because you desensitize yourselves. You
simply will not go beyond this inherently uncomfortable,
painful sensation of existence that’s at the root of
everything you do and think. And you’ll move inward. It’s
traditionally been called many things, including the state
of sin, which means to miss the mark. You’ve become
dissociated from the Inherently Radiant “Bright”, the
Blissful Divine Self-Condition, and became a seeker instead,
you see, instead of a Realizer. So to practice this Way, you have to do the work of going
beyond the ego-knot itself . It is a Graceful process
because it’s done in the form of Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga. It
is a “Brightening” process, a sort of Radiating process, not
merely a cutting away or a cold process, emptying merely. It
is the Way of Fullness, of “Brightness”, of the “Bright”
itself . But to live it, you Can’t just dance around with
conventional religiosity. You must enter into real Communion
with Me at the root of the knot. And you must do this
consistently. And you Can’t do it if you take vacations from
the whole round of disciplines I’ve Given you that covers
everything. And you Can’t do it without practicing true
Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga moment to moment. AVATARA ADI DA: The ancient texts are called
“Upanishadas”, or some of the ancient texts, a group of them
are. It means “at the foot of”. Well, what does that mean?
it’s to be established in the discipline at the Feet of the
Master and to listen, and hear and see, and Realize. So if
there is an occasion such as this, or any occasion of
consideration with Me under any circumstances, you should
use it rightly, use it to your, advantage. So let this consideration serve real hearing in you. And
whatever correction you have to make in your practice, let
it serve your absolute commitment to doing so. End of Part One. Go to part
two.
The Complete Brightening
Heart Series – Index
Beezone White and Orange
Project*
is a study method based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
Blue
& Brown Books books. The
Blue & Brown Books of Wittgenstein’s were dictated as a
set of notes to his student in 1934-1935. Beezone uses a number of formats for assembling a
project. One is to present a short piece directly from Adi
Da. Then Beezone will write down the highlighted points from
said paragraph and/or a group of like paragraphs. The second format is ‘thematic’. Beezone will take a
‘theme’ of Adi Da’s teaching and go through various talks
and essays and write down a sentence or two related to that
theme or topic. Lastly is a compilation or remix. This is a blend of the
two other methods. In this style Beezone will take a number
of talks and essays based on a theme. Beezone will then use
the ‘cut-up’ method. The cut-up technique is an aleatory
literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged
to create a new text. This method can be traced to at least
the Dadaists of the 1920s, but was popularized in the late
1950s and early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs, and
has since been used in a wide variety of contexts. Beezone This is project is not to be confused with: Humble One-Liners DEVOTEE: It is like the left and right (or the
world of opposites)…..Life is suffering, and then there is
God. ADI DA SAMRAJ: That is one way of putting it, in your
humble one-liner fashion. Humble one-liners are sufficient for most people to
generate in them a sense of feeling consoled. They are like
teddy bears. So a lot of people reduce the religious life to something
like one-liners that they pull out to snuggle with. But how
can one settle for that couple of sentences worth of
comprehension as the attitude of ones existence? It is a
profound matter. The only way to save yourselves from the destiny of
religious one-linerism is to constantly and directly study
my teaching, read the great traditions, study them. Stay in
the process of this great “consideration”, instead of just
sitting around and ‘smoking the pipe”, rapping out dharma
and consoling yourselves with your teddy bear
knowledge…”
