The Zone of Profundity
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Samadhi 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.