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The Zone of
Profundity
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ:
Samadhi3 is, truly understood, a state that is
prior to waking, dreaming, and sleeping.
In the waking state, you have the
feeling that there is body-based consciousness.
And then, when you go into a
dreaming state, you sort of leave body-consciousness and
come into another kind of picturing of existence. But in the
dream state you still feel you must be somehow interior to
that, behind that. You feel an impulse to get even deeper
yet.
Then there is sleep. It has fewer
“accessories” (in the form of perceptual and conceptual
phenomena), and ultimately no “accessories” whatsoever – no
lights, no visions, no objects-and yet, it’s not an unhappy
state at all.
But Samadhi is beyond all those
states. It is deeper than those, not merely something other
than those. It is what is deeper and more profound than they
are, not merely an alternative door to go into in the same
place.
The body-mind must be adapted to
this profundity. You must exercise the most discriminative
“consideration”. You must participate in the disposition of
becoming serious and profound. And you must handle your
life-business, putting it in order in the maximum sense,
such that there is fundamental order, predictability, and
yet, certainly, life in it. Handling your life-business is
important, so that you are not just having to live
participating in the pattern of anxiety and stress and
low-mindedness and grossness, mere fleshiness. It is not a
matter of dissociating from physical existence. It is a
matter of always being established in the profundity of
existence instead of just being locked into the pattern of
grossness. It’s a matter of always practicing the Yoga* of
the Way of the Heart in every moment, whatever the
circumstances.
All of that putting in order brings
appropriate control into the zone of your daily life. And
then there are also special occasions every daymeditational
times in the morning and evening. These are not merely
something you do, they are the zone of profundity embraced,
in and of itself, for a day-by-day predictable amount of
time and occasion.
3. The Sanskrit word
“Samadhi” traditionally denotes various exalted states that
appear in the context of esoteric meditation and
Realization: Avatar Adi Da Teaches that, in the Way of the
Heart, Samadhi is, even more simply and fundamentally, a
state of ego-transcendence in Communion with Him. Adi Da’s
devotee is in Samadhi in any moment of standing beyond the
separate self in devotional ecstasy.
The profundities of this Way are not
in the jiggliness of the waking state. Yes, there is Yoga
there. There is Dharma there. There is practice there, too,
yes.
Observe the non-humans4.
They move themselves, after handling life-business, as
economically as possible. In other words, they take as
little time and energy as possible, and they always spend
their set-apart time in a place where they feel physically
completely safe (perhaps that is around some others and
perhaps not), and they just abandon all outwardness of
attention and regard, all anxiety and so forth, and just
allow themselves to enter into a profound depth. And it is
not merely sleep.
4. In its widest sense,
Avatar Adi Da’s term “non-humans” includes everything that
is not human (including plants, trees, animals, walls,
rocks, and so on). However, Avatar Adi Da also uses the term
to refer specifically to animals November 29, 1996: The Zone
of Profundity
Of course, non-humans sleep, and
that can be observed as well. And you can at least notice
when they appear to be showing signs of dreaming. You have
perhaps seen dogs showing signs that they are having a bad
dream, twitching and yelping sometimes. You can imagine that
they might be dreaming then. It seems likely. And there is
their obvious waking-state attention.
But there is another zone of depth
that non-humans look to enter into. And they do this freely,
voluntarily. They don’t regard this to be dangerous or
threatening-to enter into this pleasurable, deep swoon into
the Source-Domain.
Every non-human knows that what they
do socially is not the most important thing about existence.
They know that it is not. So they exhibit a kind of (what
you might call) “natural” predisposition to Contemplate, to
feel beyond – even beyond waking, dreaming, and sleeping –
to a depth domain. The non-humans carry on the tradition of
going beyond in a very simple, straightforward manner. They
are working that out-and have been for a long time, so they
are quite good at it. Their pattern of natural understanding
is interrupted only when other forces intervene and
interrupt the pattern altogether. So you see what non-humans
become like in zoos that are not congenial to them and so
on.
Of course, human beings are
suffering from loss of habitat more and more as well. From a
physical point of view, looking at the natural zone of
earth, things are not very good because of all kinds of
political and other disturbances. Mankind already has a long
history of this kind of disorder, in moving more and more
toward a secular disposition and toward a disposition
without depth-chaotic, merely physical, or
gross-minded.
Feeling to the depth, to the Source,
is fundamental. This self-surrendering, self-forgetting Yoga
of devotional Contemplation of Me is simple and
straightforward. This is sacred means to maintain the zone
of the sacred, the zone of Contemplation, the zone of
association with the Source.
People are always saying it is
important to make a living. Yes, it is a responsibility. But
this zone of the sacred is the profound core of existence.
Just as you make sure that you handle your ordinary
life-business in the grossest sense, make sure that you
never minimize this profundityin the moment to moment sense,
but also in the setting-apart-the-time-and-place sense, as a
part of every day.
It is a process that is always
becoming more profound. Yes, it has its evidence in daily
life, but the profundity beyond attention to all of that
like the lizards when they go out on the limb – the depth
level of it, is beyond all those kinds of concerns. It is a
deepening and ever-deepening process.
The stages of life can be seen this
way, as passage from the waking state (the earlier stages of
life) into the dreaming state (the whole process of advanced
fourth stage of life and fifth stage of life) and then,
deeper than that, into the realm of sleeping (the sixth
stage of life). It is always deepening-waking to dreaming to
sleeping.
The entire Great Traditions is about
assuming different levels of presumption about that entire
course. But the profundity is as I am saying to you. It is
always deeper, always beyond. It is more and more profound,
and yet it is not self-involvement. In the Way of the Heart,
this devotional Yoga is your basic occupation, and you must
serve the possibility of this becoming truly more and more
profound. So you don’t want to waste a lot of your life in
trying to just bring some sort of order to (or, perhaps,
make an illusion of paradise out of) the more mundane
aspects of your existence. Yes, there is that to handle, but
then there is getting on with the deepening process, which
ultimately goes beyond waking, dreaming, and sleeping-goes
beyond the first three to four stages of life, goes beyond
the advanced fourth to fifth stages of life, goes beyond the
sixth stage of life, ultimately.
So the seventh stage of life is
fully the Domain that transcends the three states-waking,
dreaming, and sleeping-Recognizes and Inherently Transcends
all the conditional appearances. That is profound, and that
can’t even be described as “deepening”, but it ultimately
Outshines everything.
The seventh stage Awakening is
simply unobstructed God-Consciousness, or Divine
Consciousness.
It is beyond all of the disposition
of separateness or “difference”.
It is a Depth, the Zone of Reality,
in which the process is one of being given over into that
more and more profoundly.
In the Ultimate Demonstration of It,
there is no clinging to any aspects of the conditional
form-the bodily manifestation, and so forth. So it is an
Infinite, Self-Magnifying Swoon that is not a collapse. It
is neither deep nor high.
It is beyond explanation.
It is beyond waking, dreaming, and
sleeping.
It is beyond “turiya”, or the fourth
state.
It has no conditional references
whatsoever-for or against, with or absent from, conditional
arising.
If you are serious, you must
cultivate the demonstration of your seriousness. You must
set aside the sacred domain, the sacred portion altogether,
or you get profoundly out of balance, profoundly detached
from True Reality. You just get shuffled about and made
disorderly in all these arbitraries of gross pattern. It’s
like people who never sleep, never get enough rest – they
are just busy in whatever their business may be. It is a
characteristic habit of everyone.
You don’t see much Contemplating
going on. It is considered unusual to do such a thing. How
absurd that the Contemplative and sacred dimension of life
should be considered amusing and something to raise the brow
about and wonder about. “Is it really something to be done?
– that kind of sentiment. But it is not built into the
common world. Often in the past, and in all kinds of
cultures over the world, there has been a culture that is
“managed”, so to speak, by hierarchies of one kind or
another. So it is always there. All you have to do is be
born there and you are part of this sacred culture. But that
is not the way it is for you all. You did not appear in a
sacred culture, you appeared in a secular culture where the
sacred has been, you could say in some sense, eliminated. It
becomes more and more profoundly reduced.
So you all can be very helpful to
one another in getting life-business handled, and helping
one another do that, sharing and cooperating in various
ways, and, in all of that, create a circumstance in which
you can exercise your sacred intention fully from day to
day.
Otherwise, you lose your profundity,
become more and more not only ego-bound, but ego-bound in
the waking-state manner, just indiscriminate physicality,
with concerns relative to a physically based life, and more
and more stressfully that. You know, even in your daily
experience, that there is a level deeper than waking-that is
dreaming. And a level deeper than dreaming-that is sleeping.
You know at least that much. And maybe now you have a taste
of something deeper than that in your practice in relation
to Me.
The non-humans like to do it such
that they can minimize the time required to do survival
things-like getting food and shelter and whatnot. They like
to spend as little energy in that as possible, generally
speaking. They conserve themselves relative to this,
minimize it so that there is maximization of time set apart
from that.
Of course, there are some non-humans
– like bees, for instance – that don’t seem to be doing
that. They seem to be very much on the move. But there is
another element added to this unique structure, which is
about the structure of the hive and the patterns around it.
It is a kind of ecstatic dance, a unique interior in which
they have been fed with liquid, a nectarous substance, royal
jelly, that gives them energy in the sense of ecstatic
well-being.
You see, all that physical business
is not to be handled in some so profoundly simplified manner
that it is harsh. But don’t just exhaust yourself in the
development of the outward-directed life itself. Whatever
your circumstance is on any particular day, this sacred
space must always be located and used, otherwise the
conditions of the ordinary world are not knowledgeable about
anything very profound. They will take you on and you will
just become part of it.
So if you neglect that zone, you
allow yourself to be turned into the gross pattern only,
without discrimination. The general cult from the world
won’t give you this time, even this inclination – will talk
you out of it, in some sense, you could say. So you must not
permit that to happen. The common world has become something
like when animals or nonhumans are taken out of their
natural environments and put in confinements that are
obviously not congenial to them. You know what happens to
them. They demonstrate that nervous chaos in which there
isn’t that elegance of being set apart and utterly
calmed-not merely calmed in the feeling of the physical, but
calmed or entered into a depth beyond that. So that happens
in zoos.
Well, the same thing happens in the
secularized, citified world that you all are involved in. To
turn to a depth, to Contemplate the Source Condition Which
is Ultimately the Very Self-Condition, to Me, is perfectly
obvious. But I realize it is not obvious to you all even –
beyond a point, anyway. People in general do not seem to
even have any association with profundity. They just sort of
hope that everything is going to turn out okay. They try to
keep buzzing along – really a mess!
As I was saying earlier, it is not
the washing machine, it is what is coming out of the wall
(which makes the washing machine do all that stuff) that is
interesting. Well, nothing is sufficient as long as it is
conditionally based. This is not just a philosophical
proposition-“consider” your own experience. Whatever it is,
your experience is never finally enough. You can repeat it.
And, eventually, as you continue repeating it, it becomes a
bother, a disturbance, a form of bondage.
No matter how interesting (in the
phenomenal sense) the deepening process becomes, it is like
all other experience. Even that process is not It. So there
is the tacit knowledge that experience is not It.
Why should you, at any time, want to
have the depth of your feelingprofundity lessened or set
aside? Your impulse in My Company should be to magnify that
profundity-the heart not conditioned by the klik-klak7
variations all over, not patterned by the waking, dreaming,
and sleeping domains. But you have to magnify that
profundity intentionally, as a personal matter, and
participate with others cooperatively to serve the sacred
domain for everyone.
DEVOTEE: Beloved, washing machines
require six times as much energy to start up as they do in
running.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. And you
don’t want them to go off or shut down. You don’t want that
to happen to your washing machine! You are concerned about
that, very concerned, and it’s always there in the
background, always ready to pop up a little bit of anxiety,
or actual fear, a little uneasiness. There is always this
mortality-stress.
Well, you can make positive
conditions in life, but you can’t make utopia out of it.
Utopia is not enough in any case. No conditional arrangement
is satisfactory. Whatever is achieved is a kind of moment in
the hierarchy of achievement. There is the constant passing
beyond. It doesn’t mean that what you have been associated
with earlier disappears, it just gets integrated with a
process that is always more and more profound, and serves a
profound life. People should serve the profound life in one
another and not merely this outward-directed, social, TV-and
business-world kind of pattern. There is just no balance and
peace in that pattern, and not in the world in
general.
In any case, the human body persists
only within some range of a general reasonable expectation.
Then what? Where is it at? What has it been for? What are
you all about? The entire process should be associated with
a progressive profundity. Even, perhaps, in due course,
setting aside more and more time for sacred occupation, in
the “set apart” sense – this corresponding with getting
older, so that you are entering into a process of profundity
altogether, rather than fighting against it. But also, it is
not about yielding to negative possibilities. It is a
balance.
You see how difficult it is for
people to establish a balance in the world circumstance
anywhere at the present time? People are mad, like caged zoo
animals. That is just happening. There is no real political
and economic will to do anything about most of it. And
nobody knows how to get out of here alive. It is just
dreadful. It is actually a cultureless world-scene at the
present moment, the “late-time”, or “dark”
epoch.8
8. “The ‘late-time’, or
‘dark’ epoch” is a phrase that Avatar Adi Da uses to
describe the present era, which doubt of God and of anything
beyond mortal existence is more and more pervading the
entire world, and in which the separate and separative
ego-“I”, which is the root of all suffering and conflict, is
regarded to be the ultimate principle of life.
Therefore, the “Brightness” must
break through it. But not merely in the believer’s terms, in
the social religiosity terms of religion and such, but in
the ever-deepening terms of the sacred profundities of real
practice.
There is no other “consideration.”
in life that is of greater significance. It is the Core of
Existence, this dwelling in profundity. And if there were
right culture altogether in the world, there would be
integrity to this matter of the pattern of human life and so
on. That is lacking in the world, but it is certainly Given
to you in your relationship to Me. So that is how it must be
kept activated in everyone, through a truly accountable
culture that really honors and respects this fundamental
core of the practice.
How can you have a culture that
doesn’t value the sacred, that only values this
outward-directed, so called “materialistic” kind of
grossness that doesn’t account, for real, for the sacred
dimension of the Depth of Existence? And not just “When did
the ‘big bang’ begin?”, but to the, Depth that is Prior even
to material perception – the Depth of states, not merely the
depth of appearances.
Right culture includes what is
outside the gates and what is inside., There is the
household domain, the domain of the community, and so forth,
and all of its sacred places. And then there is what is
outside, where you have some exchange with people who are
doing whatever they are, doing, for whatever their reasons –
sometimes religious, sometimes not.
So you do some things out there, but
also every moment out there you are engaged in this sacred
profundity at the heart-level. So, fundamentally, you must
be obliged, or called, and expected – you, in all of your
service to one another – to understand this balance of
life.
Do you like the mortal aspect of
this experience you are having?
DEVOTEES: No!
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well,
then it is not enough. There is something about it that is
not enough, obviously. It is not deep enough, not profound
enough. You have dreamt better than this, thought better
than this! There could be a lot better than this. In fact,
you are not going to settle for anything less than better
than this. But then that means you have to commit yourself
to doing what you have to do to Realize what is better than
sheer gross patterning. That is the Pleasure Dome of this
accommodation of the sacred in your personal and collective
life in day to day terms-not digressing from the
fundamentals of it. It is always there, every
day.
That is what it is to be serious,
and this is how you enter into the consistent experiencing,
Realizing, of That Which is Sufficient Inherently, That
Which is Profound. If your only association with it is some
sort of emotionalism based on some words you use to
stimulate that emotionalism, there is no depth to it. You
have to live the Way in depth, through the practices that
are depthful, more and more. There is always beyond. Just
like the non-humans, you set aside time every day for this
‘Contemplation, this entering into depth. In the Way I Give
to you, I have accounted for all the aspects of it, all the
Secrets of it, and the Great Means that I Am, for the sake
of your Realization.
You’ll not be satisfied on any day
in the waking condition if you did not enter into the sphere
of profundity, beyond superficiality and fear, and so forth,
and touch the Depth more and more, the Prior Condition. To
have lost that taste in being mis-occupied for a day is a
great fault.
The depth in the set-aside time of
the waking state shows itself spontaneously in the dreaming
state, shows itself in depth and profundity perhaps there is
a depth of restfulness in the sleep state and so on. All
kinds of other things, too. There is no utopia anywhere in
the conditional signs, but they become more and more in
balance. The Pleasure Dome Law is to be comprehensive
relative to all aspects of life, giving you maximum time in
that zone, inside the wall of the gathering where the sacred
matter is honored by the practice of it, and the setting of
it apart, making it be holy. Never let it be undermined.
Never give it up.
There are the balanced pleasures of
life, as you are able. But there is also this fundamental
profundity which is at the root of it, the “radical”*
dimension of it. It makes that thing coming out of the wall
to the washing machine interesting. There is this domain of
perceived reality that is pervaded by, floating in, a sea of
energy. It is energy. But in the selfcontracted reaction,
this awareness is lost, this participation is lost, this
non-separation is lost. So that has to be re-introduced
through the culture of right understanding, right practice,
right community, and so on.
The relationship to Me is the Core
of this sacred practice.
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