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The Understanding That Sets the
Heart Free
by Avatar Adi Da
Samraj
Human beings characteristically believe that their
suffering is caused from without, and they feel themselves to be the victims of suffering.
Your experience as an apparently individual psycho-physical
being can certainly involve pain, difficulty, and
unfortunate circumstances – but your fundamental suffering
is never, under any circumstances, caused from without. Your
fundamental suffering is caused by your own
reaction to
the conditions of manifested existence.
The self-contraction is the act of separation. The
self-contraction is the act of casting yourself into the
illusion of separateness, independence, isolation, and un-Wholeness. The self-contraction is
your reaction to conditional existence. This reaction is
egoity itself, and it is always your own activity. This is
what must be understood: All your seeking, all your
disturbance, and all your dissatisfaction are your own
activity. To understand this is to be free of
“victim-consciousness”, or the notion that your fundamental
difficulty is somehow caused by others or by the conditions
of manifested existence. To understand this is the essence
of the true hearing of Me.
Therefore, true hearing of Me is a matter of transcending the notion
that your suffering is caused from without, or the notion
that you are being “victimized” by life. True hearing of Me
is a matter
of transcending the “victim strategy” altogether. And true
hearing of Me is the
foundation of the total practice of
the only by-Me Revealed and Given Way of Adidam.
If you truly examine your own life of reaction, you will
observe that, by tendency, you use events,
happenings, and experiences to justify your own egoity. But, in truth, there
are no excuses for being an ego. Egoity is not caused from
without. Egoity is now
your own activity. Egoity is your own choice in the face of
the conditions of manifested existence. And the persistent
choice to be an ego winds you into a habit that binds you in
the midst of all conditions.
Right life is purposed to Most Ultimate Liberation from
egoity, or Most Ultimate Realization of That Which Stands
Prior to the ego.
Therefore, right life is not a matter of “developing” the
individual self, or “enlarging” the individual self, or “evolving” the individual self. All such efforts relative to the
individual self are conditional processes and
searches, or temporary and
unsatisfactory possibilities among the manifold conditions of
conditionally manifested existence. All such efforts are, by
their very nature, self-referring. And the egoic self
referred to is
precisely what must be observed, understood, and
transcended. Your own egoity must be observed, understood, and
transcended. The results of your own egoity must be observed, understood, and
transcended. The conditions in which your own egoity arises must be observed,
understood, and transcended. Altogether, all of conditional
existence must be transcended. When you
understand that conditional existence is
inherently unsatisfactory, then you no longer seek – but
you transcend the seeker. Such transcendence, made
possible only by devotional recognition of Me and
devotional response to Me, is fundamental to the Process of
the only-by-Me Revealed and Given Way of Adidam.
When you, thus, understand yourself, then you do not
dramatize egoity, but
you directly transcend egoity, whatever the conditions of the moment.
This “radical” capability is the true hearing of Me.
True hearing of Me is a unique Gift, Given to My
fully practicing devotees who rightly and truly embrace the
ordeal of listening to Me. True hearing of Me is the
first great realization of My real devotee, and the basis on
which the entire advanced and ultimate
Process of the Way of Adidam develops. Thus,
the Way of Adidam is not an ego-based developmental
process, but an ego-transcending Process that goes beyond even all of the first six stages of
life in the Transcendental, Inherently Spiritual, and Truly
Divine Self-Realization of the only-by-Me Revealed and Given
seventh stage of life.
That Which is to be Realized is not
among conditions, and not among causes and effects. It is
not caused, It cannot be caused, and It cannot be Realized
as the effect of any cause. That Which is
to be Realized Is Inherently and Always Already The Case
whenever there is no self-contraction.
Therefore, in order to Most Perfectly Realize Real God, or
Truth, or Reality, all forms of self-contraction, all forms
of seeking, and all bondage to conditions must be transcended. Even all energy-processes in the body-mind,
whether of natural bodily energy or of Spirit-Energy,
must be transcended. No energy process is Liberating in the
most ultimate sense. Without the Grace of
the true hearing of Me, the developmental process is merely part of the human potential. But, for one who hears Me, the
entire developmental process, including its Spiritually
Awakened stages, is part of the means of real self-transcendence-not
part of a process of self-development. That Which is to be Realized is Prior to conditions-and That
Which is Prior to conditions is not obvious until the
self-contraction is transcended. This reaction to conditions
takes the form of the illusion of separateness and the life
of separativeness. Separateness is the foundation pain, and
it is self-caused.
Prior to self-contraction, Prior to all illusions of
separateness, all illusions of relatedness, and all
illusions of caused suffering, is the Feeling of Being.
Suffering is entirely your own action. The body-mind can
experience pain in difficult conditions, but the domain of
pain is not the Domain of Liberation, or the Domain of
Truth. In order to deal with pain, you must do much more
than merely “getting in touch” with your history of
suffering and identifying its
seeming causes. Preoccupation with your suffering and its
causes is nothing more than the fascinated gaze of
Narcissus, enamored of his own reflection. No matter how
much you dwell on it or investigate it, you cannot change
what happened in the past. The only thing you can
change is your own reaction to what happened in the past.
And, whatever your patterns of reaction are,
they are nothing but manifestations of the
fundamental process of egoity-self-contraction, movement
into separateness, reaction to conditions, and seeking in the midst of conditions. Rather than perpetuating
this useless cycle of suffering, you must transcend the
self-contraction itself, in the face of all suffering – actual or potential, past or present or future.
Every living being is experiencing permanent difficulty.
I Am here to Show you the Way out of difficulty. I Know what
that Way requires, and it is the responsibility of My
devotee to follow the Way I have Revealed and Given.
This Way involves a different course than the ego would
take. My devotee must know what that course is, and make it
his or her life. Devotion to Me is what that course entails.
When you truly practice ego-surrendering, ego-forgetting,
and ego-transcending Devotion to Me, all
reaction to the conditions of life is vanished.
Whatever is not ego-surrendering, ego-forgetting, and
ego-transcending Devotion to Me is the dramatization of
Narcissus at the pond. Narcissus imagines that the one he is
looking at and adoring is someone else. Narcissus does not
notice that he is looking at himself. Just so, when you look
at your “things”, your disturbance, and your seeking – you
presume you are looking at something else, not at yourself.
When Narcissus finds out that he is looking at himself, then
he wakes up. To find this out about yourself is to hear
Me.
Egoity is bondage. And egoity makes bondage. This bondage
continues on and on, never coming to an end-until you
understand yourself most fundamentally, by truly hearing Me.
By persisting in truly ego-surrendering, ego-forgetting, and
ego-transcending Devotion to Me, you are
spontaneously Granted the Gift of the true hearing of Me, or
true self-knowledge.
Therefore, to fully practice the Way of Adidam is to
transcend the illusion that you are “victimized” by the
universe and trapped in the body-mind. This transcendence is
the true hearing of Me. The only-by-Me Revealed and Given
Way of Adidam is not a matter of seeking any particular
conditions on the basis of the self-contraction. The
only-by-Me Revealed and Given Way of Adidam is a matter of
directly observing, understanding, and transcending the self
contraction, in the midst of
conditions, by always entering into Communion with Me.
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