Transcend Meaning and Live with Me
A Talk, by
SRI ADI DA SAMRAJ
August 20, 1983
ADI DA: It is not common to regard the body as an experience or a state that has different meanings in different circumstances or periods of our lives. When we refer to the body, we tend to refer to it as a thing, as merely this substantial fleshiness, not as meaning. Of course, that fleshiness is a characteristic of this meaningful condition that we call the body. But our experience of bodily existence is conditioned by meaning.
In other words, our relationship to the body is not merely based upon our experience of it as a sensuous, physical fact. Our relationship to the body is based on our sense of its meaning, and the body acquires meaning based on many different experiences. That is, many kinds of experiences color our sense of its meaning, although certain primary relationships in our lives determine, above all, the meaning of the body.
In fact, in manifest terms, the body most fundamentally means the universe, nature, the cosmic fact. The body is really another designation for manifest existence itself. That is its largest meaning. However, we do not respond to that cosmic fact very well. Our relationship to the universe, to manifest existence, is made ambiguous by its meaningfulness. Only when we are fully awakened to our true Condition are we able to deal with manifest existence directly and rightly. When we Recognize the body and the universe, or all manifest forms, as the Transcendental Self-Condition Itself, then we are in right relationship to manifest existence and in that case we transcend meaning. Until then our relationship to the body and to the universe is conditioned by meaning. Therefore, in some sense, meaning limits our capacity to know and rightly respond to manifest existence.
We experience certain primary relationships in the course of our living that condition our sense of that universal fact. Our relationships with our parents, for example, greatly interfere with our sense of bodily existence and our sense of Nature or the Cosmos, because these relationships add the dimension of meaning to our awareness of conditional existence. Meaning conditions and limits our bodily awareness and our sense of manifest existence.
Examine the significance of parents
The meanings associated with mother and father and all the experiences you had with them in childhood may carry over in various ways into adult life, but those meanings are generated in childhood. Perhaps you do not regard your parents as meaning. When you think of your parents you may simply think of that one who was your mother or that one who was your father. In other words, just as you do not think of the body in terms of its meaning, likewise you generally do not tend to think of your mother and father as forces that mean something unique and significant. But in fact, their primary force is that of meaning.
To capsulize it, the mother means nurturing. She is a supportive force. That is the role, at any rate, that the mother is expected, even by the infant and the child, to perform. The father is a different force, another meaning. The father is, or means, challenge—something quite the opposite of the mother.
We grow by association with these two forces of meaning, these two energies. If the parents fulfill their archetypal roles in balance with one another and in a fashion appropriate to us as a male or as a female, they serve our growth and optimize our potential to become a relatively balanced adult ego. But if one or the other or both of the parents do not fulfill their archetypal role, if they do it badly, or if they exchange roles so that the mother is the challenger and the father is a nurturer, then the forces of meaning in infancy and childhood create complications. Our experience of these individuals, these forces, tends to make us neurotic adults.
Any one of you could be used as an example of how the meanings in childhood, when out of balance, become a disturbance in adult life. In other words, parents are not just individuals affecting you as an individual, they are meanings, forces. Each one of you has been complicated by the meanings in your childhood experience. To some degree the meaning of parents was, indeed, the product of their characteristics, their tendencies, their limitations, their virtues, and so on. At another level, those meanings are self-generated. They are your interpretation. In any case, these meanings have great force in your life, and they are internalized in the body-mind.
As an adult you are still dealing with these meanings, which relate not only to the complexes of childhood experience, but to the life process, the cycle of the body-mind. Your sense of existence altogether is conditioned and limited by the archetypes of your childhood. Whatever the state of those meanings at the present time, your obligation as a spiritual practitioner is to overcome their limitations. Your sense of reality, in other words, insofar as it is limited and conditioned by your early life experience, must be transformed through present involvement with Reality as It Is.
“You are still living with your parents.
Your actual blood relations are still in your life, whether they are alive or dead”
By tendency you are acting as you acted when you were a child. You are tending to be emotionally what you were when you were a child. You are still living with your parents. Your actual blood relations are still in your life, whether they are alive or dead. Beyond those specific relationships, and much more importantly, in fact, you carry your parents with you as forces of meaning, as limitations on energy. These meanings condition your sense of existence, and they limit your capacity for spiritual practice.
To the degree that you are tending to be depressed, to feel doubt, to be weak, and so on—to that degree you are dramatizing an experience or a presumption of not being nurtured when you were an infant. Your connection to the Universal Force is weak. In your darkest moments it may even seem to you that there is no such connection. The eternal, All-Pervading, nurturing Force of Reality, in other words, is something you are not connected with because of your infantile or early life experiences and the mind you built up in that circumstance.
“The myth of Narcissus is associated with the drama between Narcissus and his parents, you see. He fled from his parents, his childhood, the meanings of his life experience, into a wilderness, into a place far removed from all of that. He fled within.”
What sustains you should be firmly established for you. For the child to grow up relatively free of encumbrances, he or she must develop a sense of being sustained. Not merely food itself, but the relationship you have to the sources of food is important. That relationship is your relationship to energy, your relationship to the sustaining Force of Life, and it has been limited and conditioned by your sense of your mother. Therefore, your relationship to that which is motherlike, the descending Current of Life, which supports the body, is weakened. If you were not very well nurtured it is difficult to feel the Living Force of existence. It may even seem to you to be absent. You may be a “solid” type, who never has any “spiritual experiences,” who doesn’t have a sense of the Spirit. This is the kind of character who was not sustained as an infant but was merely challenged.
Equally present is another aspect of the Universal Force, and that is its challenging aspect. The universe brings you into manifest existence, gives birth to you, and it sustains you, but it also challenges you and eventually kills you. If these two forces are not in balance, if you do not grasp the nature of Reality, then you suffer. If you are merely challenged and not at all sustained, you are in real trouble. In that case, you tend to be obsessed with the fear of death. That fear may not take the form of a totally debilitating anxiety, but it is generally present in people as a constant, subtle, low-grade preoccupation with the fact of death.
What is the root of that anxiety? It is the absence of the mother, the weakness of the mother-force, and it is carried over into adult life as the inability to locate that which is the Mother ultimately, the sustaining Force of the universe. You must connect with that Living Force to practice the spiritual Way of life. But your ability to connect with It, your ability to receive My Transmission, your ability to “see,” 1 is limited and conditioned by the meanings associated with your infancy and childhood.
Whether you are male or female, you are sustained by the mother and challenged by the father. If sustenance is lacking, you do not feel connected to That Which sustains, and you do not feel positive about existence. Then the father force, the challenge of life, is simply overwhelming, and you become a self-protective, anxious personality.
It is significant that in our society, which is based on unillumined conventions, nearly everyone has a weak mother and a weak father. Some of us had stronger parents than others—we felt nurtured by the mother and not merely aggressively challenged by the father, but drawn out by the father into creative participation in life. Some people have a better experience than others in the universe of meanings in childhood, and they tend to be more effective adults—not Enlightened, but more effective and happy in the ordinary sense.
But most people do not have such an experience. And hardly anyone has Enlightened parents—I do not know of anyone who has. But not only are your parents not Enlightened, they are neurotics like you—unhappy, badly parented people who are bereft of spiritual culture, of a true adult culture that connects them to the great Forces of the universe, and the great nature of Transcendental Being, Divinity Alive.
Every one of you can point to your mother and acknowledge that you were not sustained, that even in your infancy or early childhood you felt anxious about being alive. And every one of you can point to your father as somebody who was either too much of a challenge or did not draw you out enough, even seemed to be trying to snuff you out. Thus, every one of us tends to be neurotic in a very similar way, and every one of us must, generally as adults, but more importantly as spiritual practitioners, understand and transcend the limiting forces of meaning associated with our childhood. Now those meanings are limiting your ability to be responsible for and transcend yourself as a self-contracting mechanism. They are limiting your ability to connect with the Divine as the Living, Present Reality. Already feeling unsustained, you cannot find that Force transmitted to you through the Agency of the Spiritual Master and evidenced in the universe. You are too neurotic to connect with It, even though you are face to face with It, you see.
You must find a Transmitter, you must find the Spiritual Master, find the Agency of Transmission. This is as important as having an actual mother and an actual father, even though the Spiritual Master is not a parent. But even if you do find such a Source, you must overcome the tendencies in yourself that make it impossible for you to use that Source, to connect with It and become a practitioner. And you will not become a true practitioner until you can observe and understand and go beyond the neuroses associated with your infantile and childhood experiences.
You must overcome this sulk that appears whenever you are not being jollied by life. All the million-dollar moments in life are a kind of sustaining force, but when you are not having an exceptional experience, when you are not being stimulated and enlivened by life circumstances, you tend to get depressed. This depression may be deep or merely low-grade. Most people are experiencing a low-grade depression all the time.
You think that you are practicing, and yet when I look at you I see rather depressed people. You are not as critically depressed, perhaps, as some people, but nonetheless you are chronically depressed people, people who are not feeling sustained or connected to the Life Source.
It is not important at this moment what your mother was like. You do not have to go home to your mother. It is important, of course, to know about what your mother was like and how that affected you, and how your present depressive tendencies are directly related to your experience of her. But what is truly important is the Living Mother, the Transcendental Mother, the Divine as Mother-in other words, the Divine as Sustainer, the Divine as Living Force that can be inbreathed, which grants Life to the body-mind, which is Full of Bliss, which is Bliss, which is Happiness Itself, which purifies, balances, enlivens, is Radiant in the body-mind and in the universe, and which is fundamental to the meaning of manifest existence.
You do not tend to exhibit the evidence of people connected to such a Source. In fact, you tend to demonstrate a personality that is separated from that Source. The reason can be seen in your childhood and therefore in your subconscious, your deep psyche, your emotional psyche. Your tendency to be very sensitive to, and very aware of, the challenging aspect of Nature only intensifies your tendency to depression and reinforces the mechanism you have developed to protect yourself as a person who is not sustained and is too much challenged.
What is that mechanism? It is the ego, the self-contraction. The myth of Narcissus is associated with the drama between Narcissus and his parents, you see. He fled from his parents, his childhood, the meanings of his life experience, into a wilderness, into a place far removed from all of that. He fled within.
You flee within through contraction, through inversion, through dissociative emotion, in order to protect yourself, and then you focus your attention on your own self-sense and the products of it—the thoughts, the tendencies, the reactions, the self-imagery, and everything associated with self-possession. You are all fleeing from your parents—not just your blood relations, but the meanings in your own body-mind—and yet you do not escape. You imagine yourself to be escaping somehow because you are withdrawn. But your withdrawal can never be so far within or away that you actually escape these meanings, because the meanings are in you. They are you, you see.
The result is that you live the destiny of the ego, and you tend to be depressed. Feeling too much challenged, you are troubled, afraid of death, emotionally dissociative, mentally aberrated, obsessed with motives of control and escape, loveless, and disconnected from the Bliss-Force of existence. You do not, on your own, make that connection again. You must find a Transmitter, you must find the Adept.
But, in that Company, you are not only sustained, you are also challenged. You are obliged to become responsible for the mechanism of your own withdrawal, your own withholding. You are obliged to go through a trial, a hard school, in which you must overcome these meanings from which you are trying to flee. In My Company you are not allowed to indulge in this flight. You must observe yourself and become responsible for the mechanism of withdrawal. You are also nurtured and sustained. You are attracted by and drawn into the Living Force of Transmission, so that you come to the point of being able to locate it moment to moment and submit to it whole bodily.
The egoic neurosis also contains negative views about That with which it must connect. Since you are possessed by a notion that you have not been sustained, you tend to have a negative view of sustenance. You have a negative view of woman, and you have a negative view of Nature. You doubt that it is really sustaining you. You tend to believe that it is merely out to kill you. The fact that everybody dies is final proof to you that the message of the universe is dark. This is the sinner’s vision. There is only God, but the sinner views God as the Devil. The sinner sees the same reality that the ecstatic sees, but he interprets it negatively, as a threat, as a dark message.
Previously we have discussed the meaning of the body as the parent of the opposite sex. 2 For the female, her body is, or means her father, and for the male, his body means his mother. But, at the more infantile level that has nothing to do with the sexual character, everyone, male or female, views the body as the mother, as that which should be sustaining. Our sense of not having been sustained or our negative view of that which sustains, is then projected on the body. We feel betrayed by the body.
Thus, we do not merely do what is necessary to support the body, to keep it balanced and in good health. We have another, secret, self-destructive motive to betray and kill the body, which is part of the psychology associated with the feeling that we are not sustained.
For everyone, then, the body is the mother, and we feel betrayed by it, so we have an ambiguous view of bodily existence. On the one hand we want to live. On the other hand we tend to destroy ourselves. The body is also the parent of the opposite sex, and we relate to the body as we do to the parent of the opposite sex. Therefore, all the ambiguities of our sexual character, all the Oedipal meanings, and so forth, are likewise part of the body.
On another level of meaning, “I” is the body. The ego is the body. And the ego is ambiguous. It is self-contraction, but it does not wholly want to admit this fact. It plays two roles. On the one hand, it wants to be the body, wants to enjoy itself bodily. But on the other hand, the body is associated with a great deal of pain, stress demands, death, and so on. Thus, on one level “I” knows it is the body and wants to be the body. On another level, “I” does not want to be the body and even indulges in philosophies that indicate that it is not the body at all.
These three levels of meaning—the complication relative to the mother force, the complication related to our sexual development in which the body means the parent of the opposite sex, and the complicated ambiguity associated with identification with the body as “I”—are perhaps the most important levels of meaning in terms of their power to disturb and limit our existence. The spiritual process, then, may be understood as a process wherein we transcend these meanings and their incredible complication of bodily existence.
The body is not merely the flesh substance, the elemental form. It is all of these meanings, which exist simultaneously. Different compartments in our psyche, our mind, and our consciousness are related to each of these meanings. Various motives exist. Outer motives are structured into the superficial social personality. Inner motives, conscious motives, subconscious motives, and unconscious motives all exist in us. The entire personality, you see, is being manipulated by meaning, and the meanings associated with the three levels we have just discussed are most important. All of these are the basis of the complex of Narcissus.
We must transcend these forces and reconnect in the present moment with the Living Divine. We must transcend the self-contraction and be submitted to that which is not only sustaining us but is also challenging the body-mind and obliging us to creative participation in the universe. To be sustained, you see, is not sufficient. You must find the Divine as sustaining Force, as Bliss received in the frontal line. But, if that were all there were, you would go to sleep. Merely to receive would kill you. Another primary dimension must also be discovered. But we cannot discover or deal with that dimension unless we know we are sustained established in Bliss, or spiritual Happiness:
That other dimension, represented by the father, is the challenging force. From the point of view of the ego, it appears to be a deadly force-hard knocks and finally death. But when we awaken spiritually, we recognize this challenging force in a different sense, no longer as the Devil, but as that dimension of the Divine that is drawing us into creative participation in the World-Process, the Process of the Mandala, and that kind of spiritual participation that ultimately Transfigures and Transforms the entire universe, the entire cosmos, and ultimately Translates all beings into the Divine Domain.
Both of these dimensions of the Transmitted Divine must be found. They are granted to you by Grace, just as life is granted to you by Grace. They are granted to you, in other words, without activity on your part. You were simply born through the agency of your parents. Likewise, a spiritual awakening is given by Grace. It is not about merit, and it is not self-based. It is granted by the Divine through Agency. But if you are to connect with it, be God-born, you must overcome all of the complications of meaning associated with your birth. When you have significantly overcome these complications, then the Confession of Enlightenment associated with the seventh stage of life becomes true in your case.
This does not mean, however, that the process of living comes to an end. You are simply equipped in the highest sense for this process. The life of being sustained and nurtured, of being priorly established in Bliss, continues. So does the life of being challenged creatively obliged. And it is in the setting of the seventh stage of life that that obligation is met with the highest and freest impulse. Therefore, we are most effective and we demonstrate the Spiritual Reality most profoundly in the seventh stage of life.
It is important, then, for you to know about the various strata of your personality, your emotional being, your psyche, and so on, through natural self-observation. But it is also profoundly important to enter into the sphere of Grace, the Company of the Adept, the Company of Spiritual Agency. By these means enter directly and in every moment into the Divine Condition, the Divine World-not the Devil’s realm, not the realm of Narcissus, not the negative realm of infantile egoity, but the world that is obvious when the motives of self-contraction are transcended and you are linked with That Which sustains and challenges and is Life, Truth, the Divine.
I look for the evidence of ecstasy in your daily living, your moment-to-moment expression. I will not see this evidence if you will not observe yourself profoundly and become responsible for the tendencies of the body-mind. These tendencies are all associated with meaning, with mind forces, and most fundamentally with the force of feeling, which has become complicated by confrontation with the circumstances of embodiment.
You are physically, emotionally, and mentally or psychically self-contracted, self-possessed, dissociative, tending to be depressed. You are tending to have the sinner’s view of Reality. You think maybe when you’re dead you’re dead, and that’s it. You are very sensitive to all the challenges of life, even to the point of overestimating them as negative influences and becoming rather incapable of dealing with the creative demands.
Thus, you do not use, nor do you exhibit the evidence of, the Divine, the Spiritual Reality, the Company of the Spiritual Master. As I once heard Swami Muktananda say to his devotees, “You don’t have enough Shakti.” What is missing is this higher energy, this Bliss Force. You are trying to feel nurtured, but the only bliss you are feeling is a little trickle somewhere around your navel, and you are trying to feel good about that. But if you are connected with the Living Force as It is, Its Bliss is intense and pervasive. To grant attention to It is to be Happy.
To practice conductivity in our Way, you must not merely notice the knots and try to open them up. Of course you must open them up, but the principle whereby these knots become opened is not egoic effort. You must find the Living Force, Which is Bliss, Which is Happiness, Which sustains, Which is full and grants fullness. You must simply Locate That. You must stop being busy with the mind, but it is not a matter of stopping the mind. The essence of mind is attention. Therefore, use the mind as attention and grant attention to the Living Force. Rather than try to stop thinking, let the brain rest in the Living Force. Put your attention in the Blissful Reality.
You must not have such a neurotic complex that you cannot let yourself be sustained, you see. You must be able to submit to Bliss. You must be able to find the Living Force and rest in it. You will notice knots associated with reactive emotions, but you cannot merely try to stomp on them. You can observe and understand them. You must practice the conscious process. But the leading principle is to grant attention to and feel the Living Current. In other words, you must not try to stop feeling something that is negative, but you must simply grant feeling to That Which is inherently pleasurable, That Which is Distracting. Be Distracted, be in love with That Which you cannot help but love.
This is also true physically. You must not merely struggle to open up your muscles and stop feeling uptight. Find this Current. Be located in It bodily. Be sustained and filled by It. Feel It bodily and like It.
Because you do not locate and enjoy this Current, you are suffering and you are knotted. Because you do not know the Living Reality, you are contracting. Know the Living Reality and you will not contract. This is a very simple principle.
Thus, the leading principle of the spiritual process is to locate the Living Condition, the Divine. Be distracted by It. Grant feeling to It.
Feel It. Find It bodily. Relax into It. Grant attention to It, rather than let attention be shattered in the forms of mind, self-possessed thinking, and so on.
Be nurtured and sustained and filled, and then you will be able to participate in the manifest realm, the creative process that is the manifestation of Living Bliss, the Force of Reality. You will not only bring that Force into the body and submit the body and your whole life to It. That Force also has a return circuit. It returns to the brain core and beyond the head. It ultimately finds Its locus, via the heart, in the Transcendental Condition.
Thus, every aspect of the spiritual process develops through natural submission to That Which is Delight, That Which is Love, That Which is Bliss, That Which is Full. You must relocate That. You must find God through Agency, and you must understand and overcome yourself in order to submit to That, to know That, to contemplate That, and to commune with That. This is the spiritual process. We could say that the spiritual process is a matter of overcoming your parents and your childhood. To overcome your egoity is to overcome your childhood, to move out of the sphere of limited association with that which sustains and challenges, and to move into the universal and Transcendental Domain of That Which Sustains and Challenges.
To conduct the Living Force is not a matter of trying not to do something or of trying to break through some impediment or relax some knot. Fundamentally, conductivity is Remembrance, Communion, a natural process of granting feeling, attention, and body to That Which is inherently Blissful. You must find That Which is inherently Blissful by Grace, through the Agency of the Divine, and in that Company you must observe and understand yourself so that the body-mind becomes amenable to your disposition to practice.
Because you must be free to be Distracted, a hard school is associated with this Way, one that involves the process of observing, understanding, and preparing yourself for submission. The degree to which you can actually submit is the degree to which you can practice. Practice Is submission to Happiness, to Bliss, the Living Current, the Force of Being, the real Consciousness that transcends the separateness of the inward mind, the interior self, the separate being.
STUDENT: Beloved, You described a person who was not nurtured by the mother. Is there a similar description for the person who had difficulty with the father’s overt challenge?
ADI DA: The mother is primary. One who is not nurtured inevitably feels too much challenged. His neurosis is primarily evidence of this lack of sustenance, this disconnection from the Universal Force. But it is also an expression of confrontation with challenge. Thus, the description of the failure to be nurtured also applies to being too much challenged. Both produce the tendency to depression, the tendency to feel overwhelmed and so on.
The mother is primary and the father is secondary. If you are well sustained, then you can deal with challenge, the forces of life that demand self-transcendence, sacrifice, and so on. In other words, you would only be oversensitive to the father if you were already feeling the absence of the mother force.
STUDENT: Master, it seems that just as a tree can be killed by too much water, a mother who is overprotective and does not allow any mistakes or creativity can put you to sleep.
ADI DA: Right. I was referring to that possibility when I said that if only the mother force existed you would die. The challenge must also exist. You must break away from the mother—not from the sustaining power, but only from the stifling, protective force. You must also find the father.
This is also why it is very important for children to grow up in a larger social domain and not be isolated with their parents, or even with one parent because of a divorce or death in the family. It is very important for children to live in a larger social world, associated with a number of adults. Such a circumstance compensates for the limitations of the parents and helps to normalize children by giving them the fullest experience of the nurturing and challenging forces in their optimum form.
Thus, community is important. Parents are important, of course, but in a community the many adults and other children provide a large sphere of influence. Of course, merely to provide a large sphere of influence is not enough. Those influences must be good influences. In a spiritual community those influences are optimized. Children are given access to people who are involved in the life of Wisdom and real Practice, people who transcend their own neuroses, appreciate children’s spiritual needs, and who will bring children up in the sphere of the Divine and not merely in the sphere of parental meanings. Such people connect children to the Universal Forces that are represented through parents, so that children can naturally choose the spiritual Way of life when they become adults.
Of course, none of you grew up in such a world. Instead you have been growing up in that world since you came into My Company. So, in some sense, your childhood had to be reduplicated in a better form in order for you to outgrow it.
STUDENT: Master, I feel that Your Influence has brought the harmony of those two functions into my life. Your Realization has radiated both the nurturing love and the challenge to be responsible. Your description of these two aspects provides a way of understanding how You have Worked with Your devotees over the years and why You have had to Work that way.
ADI DA: Yes, in male fashion, I challenge you, criticize you, provoke you, draw you out, make demands. But also, in the female fashion, I sustain you, nurture you, and put you in touch with Bliss, with Happiness, with what Sustains. So, in some sense I am a hermaphrodite, both mother and father.
Although the right relationship to me is not that of a child to a parent, nonetheless people do tend to relate to me as a father, or even as a mother. They indulge in a dependent relationship or a dissident adolescent game with me. People use me not only as a male parent, but even as a female parent. And I must help you grow up.
When you grow up, and I am no longer mommy and daddy, then you can start to live with Me as I Am. When I am no longer your parent, then you begin to discover our true relationship. But I will not cease to be your parent until you are responsible for these meanings and tendencies of the body-mind. In other words, as long as you are an irresponsible ego, you are tending to relate to me, in adolescent or childish or infantile fashion, as your parent. This creates many complications in my life as well as yours.
Unfortunately, this is how it happens, and I cannot merely be a professional wise man or a local pastor who communicates ideals while we live in utopian fashion with one another. Our relationship with one another is alive and it is a difficult confrontation. It is difficult for me, just as it is difficult for you. It is a struggle with tendencies of limitation. The history of My Work is constant evidence of this fact. I am not simply “Grandpa celibate layin, the Truth on ye,” you see. Our struggle has been a wild, difficult game. A kind of warfare has existed between us, because the mechanics of your egoity are aggressive, real, lingering, present. The ego is very crafty—a kind of genius, in fact.
STUDENT: Beloved, over the years You have often described the tendency in us toward the childish or adolescent relationship to You. I see how we relate childishly to You as the nurturing force.
ADI DA: Yes. I am That, but you must not use Me as a child uses the nurturing force. You must relate to Me as a devotee who is a man or woman. But to do that you must grow up, and thus I must struggle with you until then.
STUDENT: Master, I remember Your telling us once that You are like the queen bee of the hive and Your body is the Prasad.
ADI DA: Yes. I have pointed out to you that in our gatherings I create incidents that are an excuse for us to be together. I have indicated to you again and again that the most important thing that is happening is simply that you are with Me.
You might not have noticed the real principle, you see. You think our conversation is the point. No. It is important, but the basic principle is our being together, so that you feel sustained, you come into contact with the Living Spirit. That is the primary reason for my association with devotees.
I still associate with all devotees that way. I simply do not bring myself bodily into the institutional community. I remain in Hermitage, but I am accessible to devotees through Agency and through the spiritual process. Devotees give Me their attention, and I am available to them. Distance has no effect whatsoever on the process of Transmission.
All devotees are involved with the principle of reconnecting with That Which Sustains, reconnecting with Bliss, while they give Me their attention, by becoming distracted and enchanted. All devotees are involved in this process. You understand, based on our conversation, why this principle of Satsang is important, then, why it is the basis of spiritual life. You must be reconnected with That from Which you are disconnected. That is the primary reason the relationship to the Adept is essential to the spiritual process. That is why I describe the spiritual process primarily as a relationship and not as a regime of disciplines, exercises, and so forth. Even the process of giving attention to My Argument, thinking about it, and observing yourself is not the primary principle. The primary principle is Satsang.