The Law That Grants the Heart Strength – Adi Da Samraj

editors note: The context of this excerpt is from a question to Adi Da in the context of his liturgy ‘The Mummery’.

The Mummery – A Parable Of The Divine True Love

The heart-breaking story of Raymond Darling’s growth to manhood and his search to be reunited with his beloved (Quandra). The Mummery is Avatar Adi Da’s telling of His own Life-Story in the language of parable, including His unflinching portrayal of how the unconverted ego makes religion (and life altogether) into a meaningless mummery. A work of astonishing poetry and deeply evocative archetypes.

   

Your Frustation at Finding Happiness is Moving You – Rightly So

As it says in the Great Tradition, even a little bit of the Law casts out great fear. Just a little bit of understanding already relieves some of the stress on the heart. So this birth leads to death. That’s a tragedy and something dreadful from the egoic point of view. It’s otherwise, however, part of a Graceful process. If you get My Revelation and get understanding, it is the Grace of Quandra submitting to appear to be dead, forcing you therefore, and thereby, to look more profoundly. It’s your frustration at finding Happiness here that is moving you to find It truly. That’s Quandra volunteering to die.

Your dissatisfaction that makes you crave and seek, even wanting to become an addict of one kind or another, has a seed of rightness in it’s origin. You are noticing that you are unhappy, unsatisfied. You become wise in this Way when you realize that you cannot be satisfied. But for great wisdom to be manifested in you, you have to allow yourself to become serious. You have to refuse the fools course, which is simply to seek and to be addicted and so forth. You have to feel this circumstance here, not just glance at it and be superficial and amused and so forth, but truly feel it. And feel Me here. Feel the nature of conditions as they are and feel That Which Is to be Realized. This sensitivity is sobering and straightening and also expansive.

This Situation of This World Has Always Been the Same

The entire world is groaning presently in the midst of a terrible darkness. Every thing and every one is oppressed. And yet it’s always been so. There are all the reasons that seem to be the reasons why it is so now. But it’s always so. It has always been so. There’s no point in being nostalgic for the suffering that you could have had in a previous lifetime. [laughter] A kind of “designer suffering”, not as bad as the present suffering.

It just occurred to Me, something interesting: There seem to be endless movies and programs and such about World War II in the theaters, and on television, and so forth, now-but fifty years later. I was a child during World War II and growing up during it and just after it was over and so forth. The fact that people could feel nostalgic about that time is amazing! It has something to do with it forming into memory for those who were alive at that time, but also it has to do with generations born since who didn’t have the experience. It’s like an adventure story to them or something, I guess.

But the world was groaning then just as it is now. People were just as much fools then as now. Then, and so in the generation before that, and all the generations before that. It’s the nature of mortality, conditional existence itself, the waking state itself. It’s not that there is some unique, historically caused stress at the present time and when you get your utopian act together everything is going to be fine. There are certainly things to be done, for compassionate reasons, but that doesn’t mean utopia is about to happen.

I was reviewing a documentary for The Basket of Tolerance with a nun called Sister Wendy Beckett. Has anybody seen her programs about art? She was saying something about art, ancient art and so forth-she made one interesting comment which was true enough. She was saying (to paraphrase it) that art is about reflecting conditions of human experience, and that the style, the mode, of that changes over time, but it doesn’t get any better. It’s always about the same thing.

This Dark and Groaning Time

So it is with human life, human history, human experiencing, conditional existence altogether in it’s waking form. It’s constantly changing and there are all kinds of changes in style and mode and politics and all the rest of it. But it doesn’t get any better. It doesn’t get any worse either in fundamental terms. it’s not evolving in this sense.

And, therefore, all the generations of mankind have been caught in the same situation and entered into the same “considerations”. So this dark and groaning time has it’s own characteristics. And those characteristics have made a conjunction that, in fact, has made My Appearance here possible. On the other hand, I’m addressing conditions and an experience that have always been so. Now there are many signs that even the entire world, the earth itself, could be destroyed or made uninhabitable. But how different is that from some hundreds or thousands of years ago when people thought the limit of the world was the tree at the outer edge of the village and that village was threatened? For them , it was the confrontation with the end of the existing world. This confrontation, this dilemma has always been the case.

And so now, as in all generations past, you are called, not only by Me, but by all the signs in your experiencing, to become profoundly serious, profoundly deep, moved profoundly, moved to Realize What is Great. Committed only to Happiness Itself and to be fitted with such great intelligence that you can discriminate between real Happiness and experiential consolation.

Everyone Has to Make a Living

As My devotee, you’ll be doing the same doings that human beings do. That doesn’t change. Your mode of doing it is made hopefully lawful and right, but it’s the same sphere of doings. As we were discussing last week even, renunciates still have to make a living, and so forth. The human process is still engaged. And as My devotee, you’re not called to be a drab, “naive realist” Buddhist. [laughter] This sadhana should release energy and attention. Free it up.

But this Way is not about living for conditions in this world – either those that are present or any in the future. It is about understanding and going beyond and functioning freely in the midst of conditional arising – free in the wisdom sense. Not merely doing as you are by tendency inclined to do, but doing all those doings that are about Freedom Itself and the Realization of What is Great.

That’s the nature of Raymond Darling then, and his adventure in that “Mummery” world. Raymond there at Saint and Ear does not, at this moment, look to Me a lot different than My own situation here in the Body and this gathering here. And so I call you to change it, and not be a mummery anymore, but be made authentic, serious – start feeling Me here as those in The Mummery book could have become if they had taken Raymond seriously, instead of persisting in their fools drama, indifferent to him.

Why do you think I call you to attend this “Mummery” puja every year? Many reasons, of course, but, not only to attend it, to perform it for one another, participate in it as a performed puja. Among the many reasons for that is obviously-I hope obvious to you-so that you’ll see yourselves reflected in it, see how your religion business is not very unlike Saint and Ear. It’s not it, therefore. So this is part of what it has to do with listening to Me then, you see. Listen to Me about this and don’t be irresponsible. Make a true Sangha. Don’t be a mummery. And be serious with Me and get on with it. [brief silence]

If you allow yourself to become serious about the nature of this world and it’s limitations, but with that allow yourself to become profoundly responsive to Me, profoundly serious about this great practice-just to enter into it is a little bit of the Law that will keep you from being disheartened by this life.

DEVOTEES: Da. Thank You, Beloved.

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: And that is the first victory – the heart-strength, you see. And when you cannot be defeated, when you have that heart-strength and you cannot be disheartened, then you have the strength to enter into the great profundities of the Way.

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