DRIFTED IN THE DEEPER LAND – Talks on Relinquishing the Superficiality of Mortal Existence and Falling by Grace in the Divine Depth That Is Reality Itself. By The Ruchira Buddha, Avatar Adi Da Samraj. Only edition: 1997. – Borrow the book
Chapter Five, December 5, 1996
Oblige the Body-Mind to Be Intelligently Guided
pp. 77-85
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: True hearing, or most fundamental self-understanding, is responsible at the point of the self-contraction itself. Its not like you describe it as you feel the self-contraction somewhere in your body, or whatever, as if its somewhere “off there in the body-mind” kind of thing. Hearing, most fundamental self-understanding, is associated with being in the position of the self-contraction itself. You are doing it. Its not merely happening to you, its not somewhere else—you are in the position of it. Its this discovery of this primitive action that is constantly taking place, moment to moment, that is true hearing. And it is a profound and unique discovery. It clarifies the whole matter of seeking and is a basis for transcending the errors in the further developing stages of life. Its the means at the center, or the means at the depth, the heart-means.
This hearing capability is profoundly important. It is a matter of being able to present the body-mind in this Yogic manner of Ruchira Buddha Bhakti. The hearing exercise is the ability to unlock the depth, to unlock the self-contraction, so that egoity is not the basis for the Spiritual process, because egoic limitations can be gone beyond directly.
You must live not only in-depth, but, in due course, you must live in the Spiritual Domain of Reality, the Spiritual Depth of Reality—ultimately, in the Transcendental Depth, and, most ultimately, in the Divine Depth, the Infinitely Expanded, Boundless Depth.16 Everything else is self-contraction, which makes you a seeker, or someone dis-eased, disturbed.
The people who decide this depth and the Ultimate Realization in that Domain is important then vow to that, and do all that’s required to conform their lives to it, as a process, and, Ultimately, as a Realization. Its not a matter of “stepping outside of the world”, so-called. It can be done in a more secluded circumstance, in a renunciate community, whatever, that is secluded. But that’s not necessary. Generally speaking, its not to be the case. But, rather, it is to embrace the practice, the Way, the culture of this depth, and all the disciplines that that requires moment to moment, and in your circumstance of life and service and so on.
To accept life as an in-depth process and not merely a superficial functional one is a way of describing, or characterizing, the sadhana of the Way of the Heart.
JAMES STEINBERG: Beloved, You say “in-depth”, and the other night You were using the word “profundity”. It feels to me that You are referring directly to the process in relationship to You.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, Ruchira Buddha Bhakti Yoga. That elaborated via the forms of the “conscious process” and “conductivity”, as they are in your case. But always implementing the four-part fundamental Yoga.
JAMES: Well, Beloved, as each level of the four faculties is surrendered, it seems that that is the location that the gesture of resort to You is made.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, you can see how, if you put your attention on any of the faculties, they seem like something different than the other faculties—after youve worked on that one, you have to cover one of the others. that’s not the Yoga I am talking about. It is a practice in which you effectively make use of, or exercise, all of those faculties simultaneously in the simple process of responsive feeling-Contemplation of Me.
In any moment, all four of the faculties are to be exercised simultaneously in response to Me. It is not a matter of working on any one. If you are working on any one of these faculties, you are not practicing the surrender and forgetting of it. And you are not practicing the surrender and forgetting of anything if you are trying not to remember it. On occasion I have said, “Dont think of a white gorilla. You can think of anything for the next five minutes, but you cant think of a white gorilla.” You would find it impossible.
So it is not a matter of not doing something in an intentional way, in that sense, but of responding to Me and entering into that most profoundly, all the faculties moved, surrendered, forgotten, in this feeling-Contemplation. It is a process of entering into depth. And functional, practical, relational, and cultural discipline of the body-mind is an ongoing process under all kinds of circumstances throughout each day. This is the way your activity is reflected to yourself, such that you generate self-understanding in the process of this self-surrendering devotion.
This process otherwise conforms the body-mind to a law or an integrity that you can feel when you are established in this depth-feeling-position, no longer in conflict. Then you can feel what the integrity of the body-mind is all about, what its structure is, what its basis is, and so forth. There are the most profound moments of this exercise, and in all the other moments of whatever you are up to, you must bring the principles from that depth-Yoga into the circumstance of life, moment to moment.
Of course, to do this, you have to have some significant maturity. You can learn about it, you can do it to some degree, you can become educated about it and so forth, but at some point all the faculties of the body-mind have to become obvious to you as being your responsibility. And discriminative intelligence exercised through the will has to become clear to you as being fundamental to your life, instead of you just being sort of jiggly meat, patterns of thought and sensation and amusement.
This is principal human education—to bring people to that point, serve people in their coming from infancy and growing up, until they are all rightly equipped along these lines and know it is their responsibility, create even a kind of ceremony or acknowledgement of it, if you like, make a culturally formal rite of passage out of it.
JAMES: In the Way of the Heart, would that generally be age twenty-one where one would achieve that kind of responsibility for will and discriminative intelligence?
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, it is not that that person is without it even earlier on. It is a faculty that can be exercised. It generally doesn’t enter much into the picture for a while. The mother and father take it on and then gradually are supposed to relax it, giving the developing individual the ability to functionally be responsible in that sphere and so on.
So discriminative intelligence can be, and should be, exercised early on. But it must be associated with all aspects of the human first-three-stages-of-life characteristics, the capability for a responsible discipline of the body-mind based on having located the way of depth-existence.
When you were children, your parents had the role of discriminative intelligence—all that that must do for your safety and well-being and right upbringing and right education, all the rest of it. Youre not supposed to exercise this particular faculty. Youre not expected to exercise it profoundly. Youre supposed to grow in other ways. As a child, youre supposed to be a dependent, and allow these kind of faculties to be exercised by the parents. But, in due course, its supposed to be passed on to you. Its now your responsibility, now that youve been served relative to it.
But if that isnt done, fully acknowledged, straightforward, in a social order—instead of the chaos of the way things are, generally speaking, at the present—theres no real cultural understanding of this process.
Its a split, you see. If youre not really given permission to then take on this faculty and really “consider” the matters of Truth and all the rest, and what you can do, then at some point youre going to start doing something like it, or youre going to start getting hip to something about it, but youre going to be having a secret life about it—your secret world of mind-development, your secret interests, fantasies and notions about this, that, and the other thing, reading that you do about this, that, and the other thing, and imaginings about it, or would-be about it, or hope someday to do it—all that kind of interior life and so on. But then when youre having so-called “intelligent” conversations with people, all of a sudden youre that intelligent guy. [laughter] You know? Very serious, very alert, very discriminating, and so forth. But that’s not the guy you just say “howdy” to on the street or meet in the daily-life circumstances, other than in this really serious, “we agree now this is a serious moment of conversation” kind of circumstance of life.
This is quite typical, as a matter of fact, of how people develop these days. They never feel they really have a right to not be a child anymore, and to fully exercise their discriminative intelligence and really get down to the Truth matter and so many matters altogether. And not just to exercise the mind, but connect it to the will.
In other words, the fundamental purpose of this is life-examination, life-review, examination of whatever matters for which you might be responsible, or experience, in daily life. Youre supposed to be able to examine things intelligently, but then, having come to a conclusion about it, you should simply make the decision to do such and such. To not be able to do that is a great impediment. that’s the sign of somebody who has not developed a connection between the exercise of intelligence, intelligent-mindedness, and the will—which then associates with bodily fulfillment of intention. He or she doesn’t really do much of that. Such a person just sort of goes with the flow relative to their habitual outer-life. That person doesn’t feel free to really get down to figuring things out altogether. So intelligent life never gets connected with the world, never gets connected with making life-changes. If you lack that, you are intelligent enough when matters are discussed with you seriously, but theres no evidence of it whatsoever in your life otherwise, other than in conversation with you. Im not speaking about anybody here in particular. Its just true of human beings.
JAMES: Beloved, is it the connection between the will and the discriminative intelligence that is lacking, or is it just the will?
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: The connection between them. Intelligence making decisions based on review of things, and exercising that intention based on that “consideration” is the will to having it be such and such. Its a clear, straightforward intention. It doesn’t have to be bombastic at all, but just clear, straightforward. You “consider”, you decide, you change. that’s it.
ANTONINA RANDAZZO: Isnt that because theres a strong heart-motive to actually do that? And when your heart really speaks, you are moved by that?
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, certainly in the profundities of religious life. But generally speaking, this must be the case in the world, under all circumstances, exercised by anyone at all. Discriminative intelligence with a will is just a mechanism that has to be made effective. Its required of a relatively independent, functioning adult life. It has to be able to be freely exercised. Its got to be able to be profoundly exercised. People need to find profound association in their lives, not just be content with superficiality, conventionality, social-personality appearances, and so forth. Nothing great.
MICHAEL: Beloved, it seems that for intelligence to really be discriminative intelligence, it would be founded in something deeper than a particle of the mind or body. It seems like You Attract us from the beginning.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Its a heart-attraction. Its an event in the heart, an opening, a heart-opening. Yes. Spontaneous. So it is a feeling-matter. That means it is also an energy-matter. Its a sensitivity at a subtler feeling and energy level, that’s not especially verbal altogether, but which also has things you could verbalize about, as people do, of course.
BETH KANTOR: Beloved, You have spoken about how tangible the feeling of You is. I could feel some kind of progression over this past year—the feeling of You becoming more and more tangible, without any doubt.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm. that’s good.
BETH: And something about it reminds me of the very first time I ever saw You. It wasnt face to face, it was in the film, A Difficult Man. It was the first time in my life I ever had the feeling of no doubt. And I knew that You were My Master.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm. Tcha.
BETH: It changed my life. I literally felt I had been looking for You my whole life. And I felt I recognized You instantly. But since then I have doubted it at times.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: [chuckles slightly] that’s an example of what I was talking about here earlier, about how your feeling and discriminative intelligence “considers” a matter, comes to a conclusion, and that’s that, but theres not necessarily any connection between that and changing what you do. The will connecting this intelligent and feeling disposition to the rest of the body-mind, doesn’t happen.
So what do you do, then?
BETH: Well, I can feel when one is applying discriminative intelligence and the will then it seems like the Gift of self-understanding would come of that.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, well, all that is, in other words, is consenting to live intelligently and based on your feeling-sense of Reality and so forth, allowing yourself to be responsive.
Yes, you can seek and seek and seek and seek, and then, instead of seeking, youve found it—found whatever it is, or come to whatever the resolution is—and then you dont do anything further with it. You dont allow it to be transformative. that’s another mode of seeking. So, if you “consider” it, what is the point of turning your finding into another form of seeking? Whats there to resist about the profound process of being transformed?
So you must, with an intelligent will, oblige the body-mind to live the pattern, the design, that you, in your best understanding, intend for it. Because if you do not do this actively, the body-mind will simply persist in habitual patterns and reactions to events, and become more and more the effect of all of that, wound up in all of that, without any depth at all.
The self-contraction isnt happening to you, and things dont just “come over you”—someone was suggesting that. This is the common language people use about these things because they dont presume a culture of responsibility for these processes.
Fear is self-contraction. Fear is the primal mood of it, the mood that’s inherent in self-contraction. Fear is not just the twisting of some muscles in your body. It is the primal act of differentiation, separation. Vulnerability, therefore, is inherent in the gesture.
So, then you get profoundly interested in yourself. Western civilization in particular, for about the last 500 years or so, has been more and more generating a society, a culture, and so forth, based on the human animal as an individual entity. Everything focused on that one, and yet no great depth. Theres been more and more a focus on this fleshy manifested mortal consciousness, as a separate individual, all-the-while-competing kind of personality.
So people quite naturally think about themselves, are very concerned about themselves, and so forth. Its an age in which to do such a thing—as if that which is to be discovered is within you, that you yourself (as this separate entity, personality, and so forth) have in you a depth that is you yourself as a separate entity, but that is completely all things required.
But That Which is to be Realized is not within you. It is That within Which everything you call “you” is arising. It is the Source. It is in the Perfectly Subjective Position, the Self-Position. But that doesn’t mean that It is a self, or that it is this independent, separate person that youre concerned about. You must be given up from your own position into the Source.
I am Calling you to Realize Me, which is to Realize My own Nature, Condition, State, Person. That is not merely “in” you. Its a matter of the surrender and transcendence of this separate self and this gesture of separation. It is the Realization of that Self-Condition That is True of all and All, of every thing, every one—this One Condition.