ADI DA SAMRAJS DIVINE WORK AT QUANDRAMAMA SHIKHARA:
Klik-Klak: The Pattern Patterning
A Gathering “Consideration” with Beloved Adi Da Samraj at Free Standing Man, Quandramama Shikhara, January 31, 1996
The gatherings that began at the Mountain Of Attention Sanctuary continued when Adi Da Samraj arrived at Quandramama Shikhara. He gathered with those devotees who had travelled with Him from California, and a small group of devotees from Hawaii. The gatherings were held at Free Standing Man, His Residence at Quandramama. Beloved sat on a futon couch, surrounded by the Quandra Mai.
Night blended into day, and hour after hour the Divine Lord Granted His direct and spontaneous Word to those gathered with Him. He sat cross-legged, His Body sometimes rocking slightly as He Spoke, drawing all present into the Sphere of His Samyama.
Though He had begun to develop the “consideration” of klik-klak and the pattern patterning on previous nights, it was on the night of January 31st that He elaborated it fully. This gathering is printed here almost in its entirety. In His Masterful unravelling, Adi Da conveys the nature of conditional existence and the Truth of His Divine Revelation, entirely beyond the realm of all appearances.
SECTION VII
The “consideration” that I have been having for several weeks with a few is the Way of the Heart. All of this profundity – that is what it is. Not “Ugly Church, Incorporated”. [laughter]
DEVOTEE: That is what You meant by “new”, “new religion”.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. In some sense, I am generating a new religion here, because, even during My Lifetime, with everything straight out Given to you, you were turning it into something else. Not that that fact was remarkable – you know, that is how you all do it in the tooth of klik-klak.
DEVOTEE: The Laughing Mama entered.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. Laughing Man Institute. Well, that is the guy on George C. Tilyous amusement park.
DEVOTEE: Thats right.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: You just used a picture of Me laughing for the logo of the Laughing Man Institute. I don’t know if that suggested klik-klak – did it?
DEVOTEE: No, it was just about Your “Crazy” Wisdom.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: But that’s “Laughing Man”, in fact. Those smiling people on TV I’m talking to you about when I was a boy. That was klik-klak.
You could still do the Laughing Man Institute, meaning klik-klak. Not that we are promoting klik-klak, but it’s “That’s what we are going to be telling you about in here” kind of a thing, you see, “we are going to cover this and deal with this business here, right off the bat” kind of thing.
You know, this, just like the secrets that have to be revealed at the end of The Mummery, is one of the secrets of the world. One of the most profound secrets of the world – also, in and of itself, profoundly negative. That is why people get disheartened when they read scientific discourse. Because, yes, this does seem to be true, something about this is true.
“But is there nothing else?”
[in a matter-of-fact tone] “No, absolutely not, this is all there is.”
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” [laughter]
How these scientists just rap: [in a low, matter-of-fact tone] “Everything is just material or bizarre”, however they say it. They are the people on TV I saw as a boy. Smiling such that it looked like they had great understanding, had answered all questions, were living the Divine Life, all that. And nothing of the kind was true.
DEVOTEE: A mummery.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. So these guys are like salesmen. They can’t wait to tell you one more reason why there is nothing but plastic.
DEVOTEE: My Lord, You’ve mentioned it now several times in the last few days – the smiling people on TV.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. You all know what I am referring to when I say that, right?
DEVOTEES: Yes. Oh, yes.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: The particular thing I told you about from when I was a boy.
DEVOTEE: Like Quiz Show .
ADI DA SAMRAJ: So, to be very clear about it, I am talking about a particular kind of program that I just have a generalized memory of. There was the one host who was on TV over and over again in the area where I watched TV (we only got it when I was around 10).
So there was this omnipresent television host. Even at night, when there was almost nothing on but wrestling, this guy announced the wrestling at ringside. I even saw him one time. My father took me to see wrestling, and you could see him over on the other side blah-blah-blah-ing. But then he’d be on everything else, too. He was like a kind of TV deity of a kind. He was the host of everything. And so that is the kind of the quality he had with my limited experiencing of TV, then. But he was on all kinds of things, including a morning program, which, now that I am thinking about it, “considering” it, I think that is what I am referring to.
And I would just sit there just amazed, really, at what I was seeing. [laughter] Because – it really wasn’t there was any mystery to Me, like I had to wait until I grew up to find this out – I knew about klik-klak. I could see, these people are not like Me, either. This was another noticing, like I noticed about My mother and father, and on and on. Here’s another noticing, here it is on TV. And this is My first experience of seeing people being like this.
See, My parents are just a couple of people walking down the street, arguing or whatever, daily “blah-blah-blah”. These are people on TV, these are the stars. These are something like the heads of the world, or something. They are the happiest people in the world, the best people in the world to be on TV – otherwise somebody else would be on there. [laughter]
Anyway, TV human is right there, all of a sudden, out of the blue. I had never seen anything like it before. And it was just remarkable to Me. Of course, I saw it elsewhere, too, but, you know, TV is a whole other frame in which to even see it. I was just looking at total bullshit ! [laughter] At ten or twelve, whatever year it was, it was a vision of life in toto – “That was the world, folks!” [Adi Da laughs.]
That was a grand confirmation of a certain kind, tacitly – that people could even do the whole thing, they are up in big-time now, they don’t have the usual problems to deal with, they have something else, whatever it is, but this is as good as it gets. And they are doing the same thing as your mother and father in the kitchen. It is just that they are selling it. They don’t know what a single thing is . “Bright”? You know, they don’t want to hear anything about the “Bright”? “What in the world you talkin about, Frank? [Adi Da laughs.] Just wait for Jesus, and go to school, and be good! Be nice to your mom!” [laughter]
So I saw that they were bullshitting.
DEVOTEE: Beloved, it was just occurring to me, just now as You were talking about all that, that in my early childhood, definitely until the time I met You, I always had the assumption that I didnt know what I was talking about.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Until what age?
PATRICIA: Until I met You. So I was relatively quiet around people, because I always thought if I said anything they would know I didnt know what I was talking about. [laughter]
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Is that about anything at all?
DEVOTEE: I think that was. I wasnt totally sure about a lot of things.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: And you must have thought then that other people did generally know about the things that you didnt know anything about.
DEVOTEE: I was hoping they did, but I was suspicious.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, I found out that nobody was like Me. [Adi Da chuckles.] So, in other words, watching how the pattern is patterning and so forth, I located My own Position in this context.
But what we began to address at the beginning of this is this whole matter of Siddhis operating from the pattern position. Tha’ts the position toward which you are gesturing, but always from the physical position on toward it, because it’s not known to you, you don’t know what it is. If you were to get just to the pattern level, there’s a possibility of confusions and illusions in that same context because you’re reaching ego-based, from the gross position, toward it. That Which is the Truth is beyond the pattern anyway. So in all your gesturing toward, left to your self-“guruing” for as many lifetimes as it took, you’d get to klik-klak-land. [Adi Da laughs.]
DEVOTEE: I was thinking, when You were describing that TV personality, Lord . . .
ADI DA SAMRAJ: For Me, he was the perfect image of klik-klak.
DEVOTEE: Yes.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, he is certainly not as a human being individually, but having seen him as being the one that was on the screen as I noticed this, he is, therefore, the best image to fill it out, fill out that archetype, fill out the picture of it. You know? Or one of the good ones. He is like George C. Tilyous clown face. Go on.
DEVOTEER: Beloved, I was feeling how TV is the modern icon of klik-klak.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, there are a lot of images everywhere, put in the public face constantly, that have that klik-klak quality. Even gets more so as the style of visualization becomes more computerized. Computer-made everything is very klik-klakkish, because it is empty of anything but plastic “considerations”. It is even made of these little klik-klakky things, you see! [laughter]
You want your world in “high resolution”. You dont want to see those little klik-klakky things lined up there, you know? They look beautiful on the surface. You don’t want to see this room klik-klakky. You want to keep it Pleasure Dome-ish. Your brain takes care of a lot of that for you, by controlling how it appears for you. But if you could see it in it’s origin, at the actual place where you become associated with perception, it is just klik-klak. It is the temple of klik-klak.
You see how good klik-klak is to you? [laughter] He gives you a brain, a body there, that smoooooothes off the edges of that klik-klak, gives you high resolution human lifetimes. Very high percentage of the time. See what a good Uncle Klik-Klak that klik-klak is? So you must really be in a very nice place that loves you. [laughter]
You may remember, some nights back, we were talking about how, in the future, the community might make Murtis in a unique fashion – by using evidence of one kind or another, something usable with future technology, to make virtually real forms of whatever, such that they could make a virtually real Murti of Me somehow. But based fully on, during My physical Lifetime, information somehow that makes it completely, virtually real.
So we talked about that as a way to make a Murti in a truly sacred place set aside for great Puja and such, you see – not something to hang on your mirror in your automobile. But it tends rather immediately to become klik-klakkish even to do it just in one position in a Hall with all sacred association focused there. It still tends to be klik-klakkish a bit.
I think, feeling it now, this might be one of the reasons why, in the aesthetic of India, they paint temples and the images in them so gaudily. Perhaps it is klik-klakkish, or perhaps it is a way to avoid being klik-klakkish, since there is something inherently klik-klakkish about a stone figure, whatever it is. And so something about the klik-klakkishness of it is exaggerated-these bright colors, and so forth. Somehow the exaggerating of it slightly serves to keep it sacred at the same time, perhaps.
But any kind of a Murti form, apart from this Form of it, any replica beyond My bodily Form here, is klik-klakkish somehow, potentially. Because it is a duplicate. Wherever there is a duplicate, there is a slight shift. Any more duplicates, something gets changed about it. And then that change gets official. And then it gets klik-klakked. It becomes a sequence of changes rather than sameness after all.
So only the thing itself, so to speak, is whatever that is altogether. As soon as you get into replicas, you get klik-klakkish inherently. And therefore to make a super-technical Murti – not just a photograph, something more complicated – is even more klik-klakkish, inherently, for plastic reasons, because of the exploitation of that.
There must be great artfulness in it. The closest impression, the most direct impression, is the best Murti, or first replica, which should be the standard, then. Photographs work well as a servant of the manner people perceived in this time. Anything else has got a little klik-klak in it inherently, and we’d have to be very artful, then, to keep it from becoming that, to keep it from becoming a mummery.
Why do you think I call it The Mummery ? The mummery is life. Something like that is going to be said at the end of each performance of The Mummery . Life is a mummery unless you make it not so. Life is klik-klak, unless you magnify the heart-principle.
DEVOTEE: Beloved, I was thinking about the impressions of Your Body that we have made in plaster. Even though they are more solid in a certain way, because they are a direct impression of Your actual physical Form, there is a certain way in which that breaks the klik-klakkishness of an otherwise gross material form.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. Some have chosen, in making a sculpture, sculpted objects, to leave a lot of signs of the sculpturalness of it in their working – the slightly unfinished dab here and there and so forth – for that reason, to get out of the klik-klakkish surface quality that it would tend to get as soon as it is cast. They usually work in a softer material when making the mold, in other words, and then it is eventually made into a bronze. Metal is even more klik-klakkish than clay. So they leave all these impressions all over it of something organic, something touched by the human hand, and all that. It becomes part of the aesthetic in it, especially in a time like this where things are more and more machine-like.
In the classic Greek era, 5th century B.C., the aesthetic was super-clean. Very often, at any rate, this is the style of the aesthetic there. But it wasn’t a “de-humanizing” world, so to speak, as you would say in comparison to the modern era. These people were out in the country, in clean air, and people would go to these places – these temples and whatnot – the people would have some kind of means and so forth. So their world was hands-on enough that, when they made sculpture, they could develop an aesthetic that was so refined it made even the human body look like it was Divine somehow – it is plastic, so Divine as might be imagined from some point of view of some aesthetic notion. In that case, it was very physical, very much showing the features, the physicality of figures, not generalizing them like Mickey and Minnie Mouse legs and such. They were very much defining the physicality, the musculature and so forth. A lot of the nude, then, especially, is shown, but in a very refined way. Like Raphael is very refined in painting. All kinds of aesthetic.
Then, as the modern era begins, I was thinking of sculptors like Rodin, for instance. In Rodin we see this very tactile surface rather than a refined classical one. It is because, perhaps, something was in danger of being lost and had to be especially emphasized. It was losing touch. He tried to be touch – impressive on whatever he was showing you. You didn‘t see any objects, any person, without seeing Rodins hands all over it somehow. It was a kind of affirmation of tactility, of touch, that particular sense. But you can see that in many sculptors before. Any sculptor has to do that. But in this case it was done in a mode that shows the hand that worked, rather than the hand being so clever that it can actually duplicate something that looks like a human leg. You’ve got a human leg, yes, in all respects it is clearly that. But it has all kinds of impression of Rodins touch all over it.
So there is a lot of that in certain aspects of the modern period of art. And not in other periods, especially. It didn’t seem that they were concerned about losing touch. They wanted to magnify, perhaps, something else – something about sight, something about this, that, and the other thing. They didn’t like being held down to earth, to “touch”, in the earth sense. Somehow that wasn’t their thing to affirm. They wanted to gesture beyond that, somehow.
So Rodins is, in some sense, a rather gross aesthetic. An interesting one, nonetheless. But that is its sign. It is far away from Raphael in some sense, or Phidias, the sculptor at the time of the Parthenon.
I once said something, in a history class sometime, that was really surprising to people there, but to Me seemed perfectly obvious. We were, in effect, supposed to do samyama – or at least I did anyway – on the Parthenon, the Greek temple remnant. “Parthenon” means “the place of the temple of the virgin, or Athena”, right?
DEVOTEES: Yes.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: A Greek Devi-figure, you see. And you all must have seen pictures, or maybe you have even been to the site. You know something about the Parthenon visually, right? There are huge pillars and massive essentially white marble. Very massive – that is what impresses you when you go there, how huge it is compared to your own physical size trying to move about in it.
But what was this place for? It was a temple. It was made to house, therefore, a murti-form, a deity-figure. And there was a gigantic one in there – made of gold, or covered in gold, whatever. There is historical record that confirms it’s existence. So that is what was there, this gigantic gold female deity-figure, Shakti-figure, Quandra-figure, Devi-figure, Ma-figure – but huge. And that’s Her house. Everything is huge: Huge pillars, huge walls, huge surfaces.
So anyway, they are describing all of this even in the circumstance of the history class “consideration”. And they go on in a lot of detail, in all kinds of endless thiss and thats, slides and pictures, and talk and reading, and on and on. And it comes to the temple, showing the approach up to it, and the steps to the place, that you have to walk up to get into the temple, are bigger than a person can step up on. And the professor is saying that nobody has come up with a satisfactory explanation for this yet. [laughter]
I already suggested to you what it is. What could be more obvious? This is Her house, you see. So the steps are for Her “convenience”, so to speak. It is in Her scale, in other words. She is the Queen. You don’t get your steps to Her doorway! You get Her steps to Her doorway, and She lets you in. I mean, the whole form of the building clearly indicates why those steps are bigger than human beings naturally step. And you particularly feel this if you are on the site. I’ve been there. And you really physically feel how much bigger they are than would be comfortable for human beings to use as the steps of approach to this place. It is an initial reminder of the deity. It humbles you, and puts you in Her scale so you feel where you are at. It seems to Me a straightforward architectural device. Seemed to be some mystery, however, still, to people at that time.
Why would it become unclear? All of a sudden, because you are at the entrance to the temple, it is supposed to be your territory?
DEVOTEES: No.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: [Laughs] It didn’t even occur to him that these are the steps of the deity – which is the most obvious thing to say that it is at first. If somebody proves it had some other purpose, too, fine. But I don’t see why there would be any mystery about it. This would be an obvious thing to say first. And when I mentioned it, it seemed to Me like he was completely surprised and it was so obvious, but that he really didn’t want to acknowledge that I had said it. [laughter] And maybe he, if the opinion has changed, got credit for it somehow along the line. I don’t know. But he was kind of trying to make nothing of it, while at the same time what I was saying was perfectly obvious, as if it was a slide on the screen right in front of our eyes right at that moment. [Adi Da laughs.] But that was just what felt to Me an obvious remark.
Well, what were we talking about?
DEVOTEE: The difference of modern art, trying to keep the human in art by making the viewer aware of the artists themselves.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, I wouldn’t say modern art tries to keep the human in the art, exactly. But there is a struggle in it, which you can see in Rodin. He was rather early on in this industrial-revolution modernization of everything – and lasted well into it, actually, as well. He was showing something about the tension that existed then. Everything was becoming slick everywhere else – slick as steam engines or whatever. Slick, smooth sculptural surface seemed to suggest “everything is getting machine-made” kind of feeling, “loss of touch” kind of thing in the world in general. So, “gotta leave your mark in this place” where you are doing your hands-on touch work.
The trend he was suggesting a tension about has continued. And modernism in general is not so much a matter of keeping the human in it – as you might suspect anyway, if that were said to be it’s purpose. It is very much also a reflection of a klik-klak world. Just a direct reflection of it, made decorative. Sometimes not even much of an attempt to make it decorative. Even better to give you the Polaroid in art form.
So much of modern art, then, or modernism altogether in any form, is this klik-klak vision. Instead of showing a mountain, it’s klik-klak: it’s an I-beam sticking out at a slight angle, bent slightly at the tip. I may have seen something like that, I don’t know. But that is a typical kind of modernist, and might then be titled “Mountain”. A steel I-beam-at lets say a 10 degree angle from vertical, or a little slightly more-going up let us say 12 feet, and then bends at a rather sharp angle for another couple of feet and then stops. And the whole thing is, let us say, painted red like the San Francisco Golden Gate bridge. Sitting on the floor at a museum. Bit of modern art there. And the title is “Mountain”.
Well, what about what you would call a real mountain, then, over there? Relative to that, this art-form is klik-klak, in some sense, maybe. It is not just, as might be done in the Japanese tradition, a single stroke and it somehow suggests everything about mountain. It is that, plus I-beam construction from making buildings downtown and all of that. Nothing tactile about it even at all. Not Rodinish at all, in that sense. Anti-Rodinish. But it is like somebody took that quick brushstroke of the Japanese calligrapher and then tried to duplicate it with a bit of steel I-beam. You’ve got to klik-klak it, because you can’t do steel I-beam like you do spontaneous brush stroke. And the making of forms like that is very typical of modernism.
Discourse – Klik-Klak: The Pattern Patterning
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