There’s No Escape, There’s Only Realization – Section 6

AVATARA ADI DA: Well, you got any more consideration left in you? There is nothing left to this consideration?

[In a scary voice] We could talk about fear.

DEVOTEE: That’s kind of what I was feeling.

DEVOTEE: I was just feeling earlier when You were talking about making the choice of fear or making the choice of the Teaching, I just felt that fear so much, like You have been describing. Fear is what we try to get out of, but yet we keep choosing to stay in that place. And it was just really nerve racking.

AVATARA ADI DA: Yes. Fear isn’t any fun, and yet its the ground of everything you do. And you’re always trying to escape it. And you’re always seeking release. So if you really don’t want to be afraid, you have to get serious with Me here.

DEVOTEE: But even that scares me, you know.

AVATARA ADI DA: Like what?

DEVOTEE: That fear.

AVATARA ADI DA: Fear scares you.

DEVOTEE: Well, I mean, like [Laughter.] somehow what You’re saying puts fear in me.

AVATARA ADI DA: Well, good. What about that?

DEVOTEE: Well, I mean, you know, it just-its just the fear of letting go of the separate self, you know, thinking that “if I let that go, then what else is there?” Now I know You’re describing What’s there. I understand that, sure. But there’s still a certain part in me that is still, I guess, fearful to do what is necessary.

AVATARA ADI DA: Well, that’s kind of stupid, isn’t it?

DEVOTEE: That makes no sense. I know.

AVATARA ADI DA: It doesn’t make any sense to Me at all. [Laughter.]

DEVOTEE: I know.

AVATARA ADI DA: Doesn’t sound like a good way to do it.

DEVOTEE: No, no its not.

AVATARA ADI DA: You don’t have enough respect for your fundamental fear. You think its just a piece of you or just an experience hanging out there, you can get rid of it or ignore it, you know. And its not so. You have to find out your fear is you. But its also your own act. And you don’t have to do it. You don’t have to be it. So there is nothing frightening about that process-just the opposite. Its not merely giving up self, like going into darkness. Its about forgetting yourself in Communion with Me. Its a loss of egoity, not a loss of self. Its Realization of Self, the Self-Condition, the Root-Condition, the Source-Condition. Its egoity that is lost, the pain of self-contraction and the bewilderment that comes from it.

DEVOTEE: This reminds me of that line from Lawrence of Arabia , Beloved, that You always quote that’s so amusing, “The trick is not minding that it hurts.”

AVATARA ADI DA: That’s not true. Its not enough, anyway. That’s the way you like to look at things, you see.

DEVOTEE: Well, I was also thinking . . .

AVATARA ADI DA: It hurts, but there’s some great Truth that still exists. You just proposed it again, this downer kind of attitude you have that somehow or other you have to be committed to suffering. It must be given up. You must really not like suffering. Its not a matter of merely being immune to it. You must really not like it. You must really not like being afraid, not like being mortal and all the possible difficulties that come with that. You have to really not like it. You have desensitized yourself to discriminating about these things with all kinds of propaganda and self-indulgence, and forgotten that you really don’t like all of that pain at all . But its your own pain, self-created, by self-contraction. And that’s how you fail to participate in Reality, in Truth, the Divine. That makes you dark and troubled and a seeker, and you feel stuck in some bewildering trap.

This maya cannot be comprehended, but it can be transcended. So you must allow all your energies to be Husbanded, Gurued, Mastered, and be directed to a truly free life of Realization, but maintaining all the necessary responsibilities that belong to that at its foundation, not chaotic, not directed by a separative disposition, but rightly aligned, established at Source-all that instead. You must be conformed to right relatedness and to true structure and to Ultimate Reality.

You all must know that Reality exists, that I’m here. You experience it sitting here with Me. Its proven in your own experience by sitting with Me here this evening. Its not merely an argument in verbal form. But you’re always arguing with yourselves, as if you don’t have a greater impulse and a greater experience. You feel obliged to be conventional, to play Johnny Carson, the guy who doesn’t know how to do anything, you know.

DEVOTEE: Yeah, why is that?

AVATARA ADI DA: In order to interview his guests and let them show themselves off. So he pretends to know nothing, be inept at everything. But strangely enough, he’s exemplifying what everybody is doing. There are no guests. Everybody is Johnny Carson, deciding that you’re supposed to make life out of not knowing how to do anything and not understand anything, no great Realization, ordinary Joe and Betty, you know, not making profound use of life, of discrimination, of possibility.

So to take up the religious life for real, you see, is to turn about from mere convention, or the common way its supposed to be, and to enter into a most profound process of life. But you wont necessarily be congratulated by it in your common associations, ordinary associations. Its within the community of devotees where that disposition is supported. Here and there maybe you find somebody sympathetic every now and then that you meet otherwise. So you serve one another by serving this orientation in one another. You don’t serve one another merely by being adjacent to one another, or involved in some community in the merely social sense. You don’t just belong to a community. You belong to a religious community, and not merely a religious community in the conventional sense, here only to do good works and so on, but here to Realize and do it for real, no gimmicks and no bullshit, just the real practice. Prove it. That’s how Ill get an LRO and an institution, culture, community, and mission that does its job.

If one is not at all inclined to put up with fear, why would one do anything but live a life of Contemplation and Realization? Whatever you were apparently doing, it wouldn’t be an “else” than that profundity. If you’re not interested in settling for fear, then you must embrace Samadhi as the orientation of your living. But its about Radiance, transcending self-contraction, therefore transcending fear. To not be afraid, you have to be identified with That Which Is inherently Fearless. If you’re identified with what passes, you’re afraid inherently, because you cant hold onto it, you cant perpetuate it, you cant depend on anything. To identify with any condition or conditional state, you identify with fear. Contract, and you identify with fear. You make fear, you are fear.

So to be free of fear, you cant just do some psychological or mental trick with yourself. That’s an exercise of what dies. To be free of fear you must Realize the Divine Self-Condition and conform the entire body-mind to It through the Power of Divine Recognition.

The body’s a poor little thing. Its an animal. Its very wary and frightened. It can relax sometimes, too, but its always aware of its vulnerable situation. You inherit that feeling, all of that, when you identify with the body. So you must make the body a sacrifice in the Divine, in the Contemplative sense, not in the sense of religious martyrdom but in the sense of Divine Communion. You must orient the entire body-mind to Divine Communion. It is Love, Radiance, Blissful. It is not that the body is a negative merely. It is nothing but That-Divine Reality-not separate from It in the slightest. But in the Realization of That, it is Outshined.

So you must make positive use of the body, and not engage in the reaction to it, play games with it. But you must make positive use of it in this Divine Alignment, Which is ultimately a Sacrifice of the body-mind, but in the Realization sense. In every moment in which you truly give yourself up In that fashion, you are Happy.

Don’t you know?

You all confessed a little earlier that you wouldn’t have it be otherwise. Happiness is your will. You would have it be so. And you don’t have any inclinations superior to that, though they may override it sometimes, egoically “self-possessed” this and that.

Happiness is not a characteristic of anything you are looking at in the conventional sense. In other words, all of your experiencing’s, doings, thinking’s, and so forth are not about Happiness. Although you pursue happiness through these exercises, it never turns out to be so because every resolution and every attainment passes. Passing happiness is not what’s fundamentally interesting to you. What you’re moved to is true Happiness, unqualified Happiness. That’s the heart-aspiration to the ultimate Condition. Its already feeling It.

I was in Bombay with Baba Muktananda in 1969. The room was filled with these well-fed, well-dressed, generally Hindus, all cleanly dressed in their finest. And this man came wandering in off the street. He had nothing on but some sort of a rag that was sort of hanging around his lower body somehow. He was rather filthy. He was incredibly emaciated. You could see he had been spending years just sitting, because his backside and his legs were flattened, and the muscles weren’t working quite well there. And, as is the tradition, he was offered something, some fruit or something. Basically there was a lot of laughing and so forth from all these clean, middle-class types, upper middle-class types, or various signs, at any rate, of their feeling uncomfortable about it and wanting to get him out of there as quickly as possible.

But Baba asked him what he wanted. And he said he wanted to be in Samadhi, that’s it. [Laughs quietly.] He wasn’t interested in anything else. And truly he was one of the most serious people there. He was a little used up and nutty, crazy like some get in their independent pursuit of such a thing, but he was really serious about it, about this great purpose. He hadn’t quite gotten there yet, but he knew it was not about sitting around being a body-mind and doing the usual thing with it. He knew that damn well. So he just crawled off into the jungle to sit around in there and try and get out of it. But he wasn’t being successful at it in that independent way. He really wanted to find out how to do it. He was really serious about it. He didn’t want to be associated with the body-mind. He really didn’t like it.

That’s one way of getting serious. Its not necessary for it to be that way. Maybe in some cases here and there, but essentially its not necessary for it to be that way. Once you get the thread of seriousness and find what its really all about, you needn’t go off in the jungle necessarily. You have to discipline the life, but you can remain in relatively ordinary circumstances and be just as serious as that man. You could. In fact, that’s what I’m calling you to do. You cant play a trick with it and try and get rid of the body like that man, though. It doesn’t work that way. You have to submit it. You have to be conformed to mastery and to Divine Initiation.

Its not enough to presume that you’ll be reborn here, or that you will go some other place or dimension and so on. Its not enough to presume that. Nor is it enough to experience that, if the experience were to occur. Its not consoling to the quick. Its not enough to be consoled. Its not sufficient for one just to be consoled. What you really require is that freedom from fear, Happiness Itself, Divine Self-Realization. And you cant play a trick to do it, some mechanical trick. Its about submitting beyond, to Me.

Hm? Don’t you know?

To be conformed to Me, your life is restructured lawfully. Its more interesting than you can imagine.

Well, do any of you have any questions about all of this?

Do you all know what this is all about and how to do it?

DEVOTEES: Yes.

AVATARA ADI DA: And why to do it, [pause]

Well? Anything at all? Does that mean “no”? Are they done?

DEVOTEE: It feels like it.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, You’re the Perfect Demonstration of that State, as I see You now, the Perfect Demonstration.

AVATARA ADI DA: Tcha.