Mind as Separate Self – Atma Nadi Shakti Yoga and Klick Klack a Beezone Study of Adi Da Samraj ‘s Teaching Word


 

Beezone Study
Adapted and edited from various talks and writings of Adi Da Samraj

 

The Separate “self” Does Not Exist – Except in Mind
Atma Nadi Shakti Yoga

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“The individual separate self, sense or ego is a reflection…which is mind or the differentiating power, realized by experience…”
Invisible Man – Adi Da Samraj 1975

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 “Realization is the realization of that which is already prior to thinking”
Adi Da Samraj – 2004

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“The Self or Real Consciousness does not think. The thinker, the thoughts and all objects of reference are utterly apart from the causal action of the Real, the Heart”

unpublished notes, Franklin Jones (Adi Da Samraj) 1971

 

The Error Inherent in Mind

There is a natural feeling that there is a thread in one’s life connecting time with some identity call “I” or me. This “I” or me, which is given a name at birth is associated with a body and later on more identified with mind, an interior identity.

I recently asked an 82 year old woman how old she felt. She responded by saying, “I feel 25!” Now, obviously she was not talking about her body, but about her mind. When someone examines this identity of “I” one realizes quickly it is not the body they they are referring to because the body changes. In other words, the sense of a continuous “I”, this sense of a personal identity is not based on the body being something that continued through time. Nor does the remembered “Me”, of the mind remain the same. The mind changes like the body as the personality signs change. But yet, there is still this sense of sameness, a continuing ‘somebody’ traveling through time. Is this the soul?

 

“The sense of a continuous “you” is not based on the body being something that continued through time. Nor does the remembered “you” remain the same. It changes like the body personality sign changes. And yet there is this sense of sameness, same person.”
Adi Da Samraj, 1995

 

The only “you”, “I” or “me” that is constant, constant in all the states is the “I” that is trying to have a sense of identity. This sense of “I” looking for a continuousness or fixed person in the memories, concepts, photographs; this whole history, apparent history, that keeps examining – in this changing history, this thing, this body-mind that keeps changing. We affirm this sense of sameness while all the time being unable to ‘locate’ or ‘identify’ it.

You appear to be thinking – but that thinking is not actually being done by you (as you Really Are). You are not the thinking mind. Rather, you are simply the formless and actionless mere Witness of whatever is arising. The Witness-Consciousness does not-and, indeed, cannot-think. That Which Is the mere Witness cannot make a thought.

“There is no mind. Mind is a myth. There is language-which is programmed by brains, and which, in turn, programs brains. However, there is no tangible existence to “mind” itself-absolutely none. Nevertheless, human beings identify with the “mind” as “self”, and (thereby) invent destiny for themselves, and even project that “self”-imagined destiny into an idea of time and space beyond the present physical lifetime.

Mind is an interior projection of a language-program that, in its imaginative elaboration of itself, conceives of purposes and ideas (in the realm of illusion) for which there are no corresponding physical data. Human beings are all living in a “virtual world” of mind. Human beings are, characteristically, egoically “self”-identified with a “robot”, an artificial intelligence.

Real Intelligence is tacit (or intrinsically wordless) living existence. Where there is such tacit living existence, a Realizer (of Reality) can be recognized, and you are immediately able to devote yourself to a Realizer as Master-because such a relationship does not, fundamentally, require any words.”

Aletheon, Adi Da Samraj – The Ancient Walk-About Way

 

Where is it then, this thread?

When we investigate our identity further we see we are not associated with a something at all – not in the case of your own so-called body, your “own” mind, or anything else or anyone else. What you observe is a constantly shifting pattern, that is very complex, very paradoxical, in terms of how it all fits altogether into a constant, independent identity.

 

“Bodies are the reflections of the distant past. They have no present significance. They must be transcended before we can Realize the Present“.
Enlightenment of the Whole Body

 

If we could see with at least some spaciousness a view beyond our local body position, the presumed body-mind identification, we would observe a lot of patterns and these patterns ultimately have the pattern of a grid. This grid is the mechanism of mind, a fracturing of light, which is the mechanism for the perception of conditional existence. This is the inherent nature of mind.

“The truth-treasure whose principle is the self-nature of Mind, has no selfhood (nairatmyam), stands above all reasoning, and is free from impurities; it points to the knowledge attained in one’s inmost self; Lord, show me here the way leading to the Truth.” (Lankavatara Sutra)

“…by Grace, with all Help Given to you, your intelligence exercised, then you can break the spell, you can move up from the pond. It is just your reflection, you see. You open up and feel beyond, without the self-contracted forms of mind, emotion, and body. All that is felt beyond”. (Adi Da Samraj).

Mind is pattern moving and shifting, always changing. Mind appears filled with characteristic of replication, reproduction, repetition. And yet not repetition in the sense that its sameness forever, but a paradoxical, complexly self-replicating process of patterning in which sameness is paradoxically never achieved. Mind is change not sameness, or put another way; Mind is time.

Organisms use memory for survival purposes that serve the ever flowing pattern of changes and the participation in the those changes. But we think memories are about us in some “me-ness” sense that is perpetual and ongoing through time we fall into the illusion, believing what we ‘sense’ is ‘real’. The nature of the the mind, the body or of the world, all of ‘this’ is continually changing – shift, shift, shift, replicating, continuing, changing in an ever cascading flood of experience.

So where is this ever changing flow of experience is the presumption of continuity, this thread of sameness, then? It is Consciousness, Awareness. It is the witness, the free witness of attention. Feeling-Awareness and Consciousness have no relation to time. Consciousness neither begins nor ends. It is prior to phenomenon and is constant. It has no content, it has no “itself”, no object, no center, no bounds. It is not in the context or the content of the body-mind, or of objects. It is coincident and at the same time prior to all that arises.

Consciousness has no patterns. But you, as mind, as the thinker, the feeler has a sense that there is a constant “I” identified, experiencing these changes. This sense of “I” is not any different at the time of birth or at ten years old than it is now. You believe and act as if there there is a ‘I’ that is a “you” doing life, identifying with an ever constant sense of body-mind, world and life.

 

The inner organ (mind) which in itself is but a modification (vritti) identifying itself with the reflection of Consciousness imagines (various) ideas in the dream. And the same inner organ (identifying itself with the body) imagines objects external to itself in the waking state with respect to the sense-organs. (Verse 11)
Svetasvatara Upanishad

 

This sense of “I” or self is a reflective mechanism of the mind itself. Added to this is attention or the focus of mind, ‘the laser beam of attention’. There is this mechanism of attention which lies as if it were in a grid. It never moves and becomes the center of ‘the world’. It can appear at any point in the grid, but it cannot go from place to place. It is the point of association with the grid. It is a reflection of mind.

The reflection is “Narcissus” or the illusion of self. Through the gaze of attention, “I” or identity of mind, superimposes its own characteristic on reflective nature of existence. The reflection becomes interesting, threatening, desirable. But you don’t realize that it is your own mind reflected back, you don’t know that it is you, you think it’s an other. You don’t know or notice that the pattern – which you are regarding to be full of desirability, being, and so forth-is just changing illusion, patterns of mind. And you are superimposing a feeling of your own nature on it.

“All that arises within it arises as experience, as an interpreted reflection and limitation of the whole. All of its impressions and memories serve it only in functional and conventional terms. If you try to read the Nature and Condition of things through that experiential point of view, you will be misled. Experience is always a form of exclusion and limitation”.
Garbage and The Goddess

 

The separate “self” does not exist – except in mind and is only a mental illusion. The illusion of mind as separate “self” has no Reality-characteristics. Therefore, separate “self” is a lie and a negatively-destined pattern of life.

Realization of Truth or Reality is an intrinsically egoless matter. It is the realization of the state that is the Divine not realization of a superior, developed, or “evolved” mind-state. Realization of Truth of Reality has nothing to do with “self”-identity, or ego-“I” or anything that can be “accumulated” or “achieved” in the states of waking, dreaming, and sleeping.

The ego-“I” mind reflexively refers everything back to itself and transforms everything into the ego’s own pattern. The ego-“I” mind is a pattern-driven machine of illusion and bondage – in the midst of the Intrinsically egoless Domain of Reality Itself.
(edited and adapted from Atma Nadi Shakti Yoga)

 

” But if you observe, examine, the body, the body-mind, all conditions, you find no such fixed identity, fixed anything, fixed person in the form of anything psycho-physical-never. It is nowhere. There is never any “object” so-called, any complex of objects, any pattern in time and space. You find no permanence, just “klik-klak”, just shift-replication and shift-and many different kinds of apparent timings and so forth. How it appears, how you judge it and so forth, depends on point of view, or how it seems from some point of view.”

Adi Da Samraj


Where is the Mind?

The human mind is a facsimile machine. This “machine” merely replicates language-forms in the illusion of mind. The “machine” feeds language into the computer of the illusion of mind with which people identify themselves. That illusion is who they mean when they refer to themselves-the body-mind-complex, the mortal bio-form associated with the “artificial intelligence” of talk, of space-and-time “point of view”, of ego-“I” constructs, of language, of language-based brain, and (altogether) of ego-based and brain-based psycho-physical ideas and perceptual memories.

You do not “have” all of your words in mind right now. Where are they? The only words of which you are aware at any moment are the words you are thinking or speaking at that moment. Where are the rest of your words? You never think or speak all of your words at once. You never have them in mind all at once. You are not the mind. Where is the mind?

The mind has no substantial existence. The mind is simply stored as language-bits (or patterns of language and remembered perceptions) in the brain. When a particular brain dies, other replicating machines carry on the language-mind-continuing it from one generation to the next.

Where is the “God” in that? Where is the Divine in that? Where is the Truth in that? Where is the Reality in that? Where is the Realization in that? The Great Process is not in any such artificial, conditional, and insubstantial replicating cycle. When people are “thinking” or “talking” about “religion”, they think that “religion” is about some kind of survival of mind, or even some kind of survival of body-mind-“self” somewhere. Such a notion is merely a mind-based illusion. It is a “self”-idea, a mere and insubstantial “self”-reflection, the illusion of a substantial and separately existing “ego”, reflected in the Mirror That Is Reality Itself. Because of a facsimile made of words-only some of which, in any moment, arise from the brain and enter the field of conditional awareness-there is the ego-presumption, or the separate-“I”-presumption, of an infinitely self-replicating, eternal “self”-mind.

There is no such thing as eternal mind. That notion is an absolute illusion. The mind is as mortal as the hardware, as mortal as the bodily machine. When the machine stops working, the mind likewise stops working. The only mind that exists afterward is the mind carried by the other replicating machines.1 So what is there after death? The same thing as there is before birth-Reality Itself, the Divine Self-Nature, Self-Condition, and Self-State only. After death-as, also, during the physical lifetime-anything and everything of mind persists only non-personally, as pattern patterning, without intrinsic “self”-consciousness.

If you were truly aware of mind, you would not want it to go on. It is a terrible, horrific source of bondage. It is a dreadful trap. Human beings are not only trapped in the mortality of their physical bodies, they are trapped in the absurdity of mind.

More…. The Ancient Walk-About Way


Transcendence of the Mind Is Enlightenment of the Whole Body

The mind is not out of control. The problem is that thought, which is a superficial reflection of the body-mind as a whole, appears to be independent of the body. We think that thought is the mind. But the mind is actually beyond conception. The mind is simply motives, or unspoken desires, produced by past associations. The mind is directly manifested only as the body itself. Therefore, the body is the past. The past cannot be controlled. The mind cannot ultimately or finally be controlled. The mind survives while trying to control itself, functioning through thought, as if independent of the body, and as if independent of the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness. Therefore, the independent mind must be constantly transcended, or else there is no Realization beyond desire and the results of desire, or bodily existence as mind. But if the mind is transcended, then the Living Consciousness is Revealed, and all conditions of existence, high and low, are transparent in that Consciousness, while they are also clearly and presently perceived, prior to thought (which is present and chronic differentiation from the Absolute).

The mind, or desire, seems to cause physical or bodily action. But in fact the body is not other than the mind. Action is not caused by mind. Action is itself mind. It is only thought that seems to be separate from the body and to cause action. But thought is only a superficially differentiated part of mind, or the body-mind as a whole.

Because of the relentless continuation of thought and desire, the constant repetition of similar experiences and the chronic conflict between desires seem to be eternally caused, or necessary forever. Therefore, blaming the independent mind, we seek to control it. But this effort fails to dissolve the mind, since the body remains. Therefore, we seek to control the actions of the body. But the motives of the mind remain hidden behind all our self-control.

Truly, body and mind are simultaneous with one another, and equally coincident with the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness. The body is only mind, and the mind is not other than the body. To play one against the other is frustrating, and fruitless, and an illusion founded in thinking, or disembodied mind. Therefore, at last, it becomes clear that the Way is not self-control any more than it is self-indulgence. Such efforts are forever founded in the conflict or separation between body and mind. The Way is total self-transcendence, or the Present and Ecstatic Surrender of the whole and entire body-mind into the Condition in which all of it is arising.

The self is not transcended in the control of body or mind. The self is transcended only in intuitive surrender of the body-mind as a whole into the Radiance of the Transcendental Divine. The self, or body-mind, is transcended only in Ecstasy, wherein the entire body-mind is entered into God-Communion. The body-mind must be constantly yielded into present God-Communion, wherein body and mind are simultaneously surrendered into Transcendental Consciousness and Radiant Life, or Love. The body-mind as a whole must be surrendered into Radiant Consciousness, or the All-Pervading life, which is the Condition of Love.

If this is done moment to moment, via every function of the body-mind, in all relations, under all circumstances, and through every action, then the self is constantly transcended, the mind is constantly transcended, the body and all its conditions are constantly transcended. Then the strategy of self-indulgence and the strategy of self-control are both equally dissolved in a natural economy of existence, and mere existence is always transcended in Ecstasy, prior to thought, prior to desire, and prior to the body.

If thought and desire are stilled, the mind appears to have been transcended. But such is the illusion of mystics and yogis. The mind is transcended only if the body is made transparent in Consciousness. Therefore, if the true mind Dissolves in Radiance, even the body is Enlightened. And true Enlightenment is bodily Enlightenment.

When mind is transcended in Transcendental Consciousness, the past is Dissolved in Bliss. In that instant, the body is mindless, free of the past. Indeed, when the body is free of mind, the body is not created. Therefore, the body also Realizes the Radiance that is prior to self-definition and self-division, or the differentiation of the mind, wherein thought, inwardness, or subjectivity stands over against the body. The body becomes Transfigured in that Ecstasy. And then the body, in the same instant in which the last trace of self-differentiating mind is transcended in Consciousness, also Dissolves in the Radiant Bliss or Love wherein desire and thought and mind and self first appeared. The body is first and last.

Enlightenment of the Whole Body – Adi Da Samraj – 1977


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“The Conscious Light of Being Itself is not “doing” anything whatsoever. The body-mind-complex is a “play” on Reality Itself, a “seeming” that is full of self-“caused” characteristics. That Which Is the Mere Witness-Consciousness does not have a body, and is not a body-mind-“self’. In Truth, there are no forms or modifications or limitations. You-or the mind of “self’-illusion-only presume them. The forms, modifications, and limitations you presume are, in and of themselves, non-existent-although they seem to exist. In Reality, they are nothing but transparent (or merely apparent), and non-necessary, and intrinsically non-binding modifications of the Divine Self-Nature, Self-Condition, and Self-State-Reality Itself, Which Is Always Already The Case. When you are Established in That, by That, As That-by virtue of My Transcendental Spiritual Divine Blessing-Invasion, That Turns you about and “inside” out and “outside” in, and Vanishes ego-“I” in My Sight-then you Awaken from your false presumptions. You are simply misinterpreting what you are seeing in the Mirror That Is Reality Itself. You do not know what you are looking at, “Narcissus”. You think it is an “other”-but the “other” is only you” .

Aletheon – Adi Da Samraj


PERFECT KNOWLEDGE IS PERFECT FREEDOM FROM ALL ILLUSIONS OF MIND

In general, people do not understand that they are (literally) living in an egoic illusion of mind.

In the ancient setting, people were involved in the illusory mind of the dream-state. They were not involved in anything extraordinary relative to verbal sophistication and conceptual mind. They lived in a very straightforward sensory context, from day to day, in the waking state—but the dream-mind was the form of mind in which they were principally (or most deeply) involved, and to which they reached for help, and consolation, and wisdom. If you examine the most ancient (and, even now, traditional) literature, you will see that it is the literature of people who took the dream-mind to be the senior reality—the reality that (in their understanding) indicated their real, true, and ultimate destiny. And that dream-mind, or dream-“world”, was populated with the “deities”, archetypes, symbols, and whole systems of myth that became the resource of ancient (and, even now, traditional) “religion”.

In modern civilization and societies, the mind that is binding people is the waking-state mind—the complex perceptual-conceptual thinking and remembering mind that originates in the waking state. In the modern era, there is, generally speaking, no longer a great deal of depth-sensitivity to the dream-state, and little postulating of a separate metaphysical existence for the dream-“world” and the dream-“self”. Characteristically, people of the modern (and rather secularized, or de-sacralized) era presume there is no reality to “other worlds”—because people of the modern era no longer think of the dream-mind as an alternative (or metaphysically, separately, and independently existing) reality.

During their waking hours, people of the modern era typically presume they are “in” the only “real world”—which, to them, means the physical “world”. In actuality, however, such people are merely in the waking-state mind—not in the Real (or non-mental) “world”, not in the “world” As “it” Is (Prior to mind), and, indeed, not “in” any thing at all that is not merely the perceptual-conceptual mind itself. Therefore, being “in” and of mind-only, they do not recognize the apparent perceptual-conceptual “world” As “it” Is.

In the modern era, people have a weak dream-mind but a strong perceptual-conceptual (or waking-state) mind. The waking-state mind is the illusory mind of the modern human being. The waking-state mind—rather than the dream-mind—is the mind in which the modern human being is trapped. However, the waking-state mind is, itself, a kind of dream-mind—because, like any form of mind, the waking-state mind is a perceptual-conceptual structure, patterned by the brain, and “experienced” entirely and exclusively within the limits and confines of its own patterns and states.

Even every moment of perception is memory-only. The psycho-physical (and “point-of-view”-bound) apparatus of perception naturally introduces a time-lapse (or registering-and-recording interlude), to enable the brain and nervous system to “capture” the any moment of physical (or total psycho-physical) perception.

Every moment of conceptual activity (or conventional human “knowing”) is subordinate to all memory-based perceptual activity—because all conceptual activity is subsequent to inherently “late” perceptions, and always only as an exercise of the totally memory-based brain-body (or generalized psycho-physical) formulations of pre-recorded “experience” (or even imagination and illusion).

Adi Da Samraj – Aletheon


Why isn’t that which is prior to thinking always already obvious?

“Anything in the mind or of the mind is not true. So all of your pursuit of answers or states of mind or content for your thinking is fruitless, but what are you going to do about it? Well, first of all you don’t believe this. That’s why you continue in the search that is moment-to-moment thinking without end. You don’t even necessarily notice that your thinking IS a matter of seeking. You think there’s SOME kinds of thinking that may be said to be motivated by a search, but you don’t think that thinking is seeking and yet it is ALWAYS seeking. It is itself seeking, so if the Way is not seeking nor can the Truth be realized by seeking, then thinking has nothing to do with it and you should just forget about thinking from now on, but you can’t do that, can you? You’re already thinking even though I just told you that. Don’t be thinking anymore. [laughter]. You see, you’re already thinking. Just to be told that you think, you have to think to get the words I just uttered. So the receiver of those words is the thinking and it’s not going to stop because it hears the words.

But in fact it is true that it has nothing to do with thinking and thinking cannot achieve it. All thinking is seeking, all thinking is self-contraction, realization is not about quieting the mind or the effort of doing that. It’s not about stopping thinking. It’s not about the fact of no thinking. Realization is the realization of that which is already prior to thinking. Already there is no thinking. Thinking comes after the already which isn’t a something that happens and so what does talking have to do with it? How can it possibly illuminate the process? So it is given, yes served by words as I must, but it is given wordlessly except that you can’t accept the conveyance of the wordless means. You have to keep being explained to.

Why isn’t that which is prior to thinking always already obvious? Why is some procedure necessary, some explanation? Why isn’t it just Self-Evident? It IS. You just don’t think it’s so. And it’s not merely that you just don’t think it’s so, your thinking is why it isn’t so. So there IS something about all this thinking and breathing and walking and sensing and reacting and emoting and all this body-mind business which is what you refer to BY reference and it’s an activity in terms of all of that body-mind that IS what the “I” is, what the ego-“I” is, the contraction of the body-mind such that tacitly there is the perpetual sense of separateness and of difference, a sense of relatedness. Where there’s a sense of separateness or difference. There is inherently a sense of relatedness or that from which there is separation. You have both dimensions. They are the tacit foundation of all egoity, all thinking, but it’s not sufficient to just say this and explain it or point it out. It must be realized to be so.

Hearing is a profound necessary dimension of the process of this Way. The process is devotional and spiritual in nature, not philosophically determined, not caused by thoughts, not caused by words of instruction or explanation, so My Words to you are guidance which you must embrace based on your tacit recognition of Me, of My State of Person, but that’s the means, that turning to Me, recognized, that turns the faculties from the contracted inwardness or egoic self-reference and person in the egoic sense and this becomes surrender in communion with Me such that you are able to receive My direct Spiritual Transmission of this Very State and it’s not that you are to become philosophically convinced of the argument and that that philosophical conviction becomes the method or the realization. So these discourses have use.”

Adi Da Samraj – October 2004


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