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 VIII
DEVOTEE: Beloved, You have talked about how science is kind of the religion of klik-klak.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. Klik-klakism. Scientific klik-klakism. [laughter]
DEVOTEE: The priests of that religion continually like to suggest that by practicing that religion some cathartic event will eventually happen, or something.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: You should study nuclear physics next. [Adi Da laughs.]
DEVOTEE: Sometimes they even seem to be getting into the domain that is rightly just the domain of the Adepts. Like this last few months, the big thing in the scientific community has been they finally feel like they are going to discover whether there is just one universe or many universes. I remember when I read that article, I just felt, well, that’s only a question an Adept can truly even talk about, really.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: I actually discussed the matter at some length at Naitauba earlier last year in response to a devotee. This man asked Me about this and I responded at such length, I exhausted all of My interest in talking about it. [laughter] But I definitely did this conversation.
If I was walking down the street, in the city somewhere, by My Self – if that could remarkably be occurring, and it certainly has occurred in the past – if I was walking down the street there and saw an elderly woman seeming somewhat confused about where she was going or where she was located, in terms of trying to find someplace somewhere in the city, and she, in her whirling around distress, sees Me – just happened to be walking by there – and asks Me, “Where am I?” [laughter] . . .
DEVOTEE: Got a minute?
ADI DA SAMRAJ: . . . and I took that totally seriously and devoted My Self utterly to satisfy everything required – not merely to say something to her, but for her to be utterly answered to the point of Realizing everything in the answer by My Response, even if it had to continue from then forever! [laughter]
DEVOTEES: Wow!
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Just to answer Ritch’s question, all that I would have to get into, plus cover everything that was said that evening last year – I couldn’t do that, because I don’t give lectures. I have to do the whole thing sort of from scratch. I do all “considerations” straight on.
So just “consider” what would have to be “considered” for Me to answer Ritch’s suggested question there. If I just really did that, it would be as I suggested with the elderly lady on the street. It is an invitation to klikity-klak – that kind of vague “I am not even ready yet to use one tenth of one percent of what You would really tell me if I asked You this.” [laughter] It was well-intended. So what if I took him seriously about it?
DEVOTEE: Beloved, I just wanted to bring up that it was remarkable that scientists feel that this is a proper domain for themselves.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. But they might be looking at patterns, and maybe something is suggestive about some kind of patterns they are looking at. As I have said to you, as even shown to you here, in the “consideration” of photographs – not here but when we used to meet in the other room and you could see them laid out on the bed there. You could see these likenesses and so forth. Yet they, at a physical level, they are totally different people. Not totally, there is this pattern still. There is just this pattern patterning – many paradoxical levels, everything is happening simultaneously. You can be anywhere you like, but you can’t get there from anywhere rules, all that kind of stuff.
Of course, there are infinities upon infinities of infinite numbers of infinities of worlds. And, of course, there is only one world. There is only klik-klak, and it is all one. And because of klik-klak, there are potential variations, or patternings within the pattern that is patterning, they can become so various, there is no end to possibilities. As soon as there is torque, there is everything. You can’t have torque and only get what you want. Torque makes everything. Torque makes klik-klak.
Discrimination, heart-disposition – faculties that reflect the Beyond Disposition and that ultimately are used to serve the Realization of the Beyond Position – are means for this going beyond klik-klak. Pleasure-Dome creativity or manifestation ultimately becomes the base, or asana, of, so to speak, “moving” into the Perfect Disposition.
…Relative to your question then, you can see – just by referring to this pattern patterning that I have been making reference to and pointing at aspects of all along, and that you have observed in that context -it is self-evident that it is one, and it is also everything, every possibility. Hm?
Isn’t that self-evident, in the nature of the klik-klak I have been describing to you?
DEVOTEE: Yes.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: It is just klik-klak. That is all one. But there are infinite possibilities in space-time and this paradox of pattern that has no ultimate rule, but “replicate, shift, change”, in varying intervals.
W hat were you contending?
DEVOTEE: Well, I was just trying to feel the paradox of there being many universes and then only one.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Oh, it is absolutely a paradox. But you can see, based on what sense you must have of this klik-klak by now, how that would allow for both, simultaneously. After all, you show an immense paradox yourself at any moment! [laughter] These two birds we have been “considering” – what could be more paradoxical than that? That is the ultimate paradox. Hm? So, that indefinable plastic principle, the characteristic of which is change, can, on the one hand, looked at as a whole, be said to be one. But in any context within it, it can be felt to be anything different at all.
So if you want an infinite number of universes, “You got it!” klik-klak says. “You want one, you got it! However many you want – twenty-four, or whatever you like.” It is perfectly amenable, this “Plastic Man” – in that sense, perfectly amenable. That is why he is always smiling in his icon. I don’t mean smiling the smile of heart. I mean the heartless smile that doesn’t give a shit.
He is like a salesman. Or like the TV host as he appeared to be through that TV conjunction when I was watching as a boy. It is that that was klik-klak to Me. Empty of wisdom, knowledge, certainty – all the things that would have to be there to justify looking like that mask. Empty of it and the mask is still there – that is klik-klak.
So at the same time materialists want to tell you that there is nothing but material, they want you to keep smiling! It is part of a sales job, it looks like. “Certainly not going to leave you with that, folks! Here comes the good news. You’ll love it! HA-HA! Come on in, folks. [Adi Da laughs.] Come into totally material klik-klak world and be amused.”
Look at all those children in the Disney Pinocchio movie-turned into donkey’s in that amusement park. You never know what is going to happen to you in there, on the human pool table! [laughter]
DEVOTEE: Beloved, something about klik-klak could almost be used as a form of the “conscious process”.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: In what form?
DEVOTEE: Well, since weve been “considering” this whole thing, it’s so much a part of me now that I’ll think “klik-klak”, and it is immediate remembrance that “I’m back” if I submit to that.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: You are suggesting that there be some sort of a pondering question or a form of enquiry about this that I add to The Dawn Horse Testament ?! [laughter]
DEVOTEE: Yes, in a sense.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: I’ll just toss one of those suckers right in there! [laughter]
I mean, there are any number of “considerations” I have, and have had, with devotees that could be put in the form of some kind of a question that would be useful for somebody to ponder. And it is there, in fact, to ponder in your study of My Word, if you do it constantly and with fullness and detail. There are all kinds of ponderings, “considerations”, enquiries, pointers to locate the Witness – all kinds of things, over and over again.
That does not mean that every time there was something of interest perhaps not quite exactly covered by them now in the Book, that it ought to be added to a list of optional questions.
So we can’t just have these arbitrary exceptions. But if you can propose to Me some sort of a whopper made of My own Word, that I feel is so consequential I cannot let it go dry in the midst of a thick book of Talks – all alone unnoticed, and not done in neon – I’ll have editorial working on it within the next five minutes. [laughter] I’ll have them show Me the place where it would go along with the other Questions, and any other reference mentioned and so forth. They can pick it all out of the computer so they can show it to Me. And I’ll absorb My Self in it for months on end – or however many days or weeks – just to munch out every detail that could be in the slightest bit affected, or that perhaps suggesting something of this, that, or the other thing be magnified some other place.
Do you realize what an immense pattern The Dawn Horse Testament is?
And so, what is the question that you suggest be added?
DEVOTEE: Well, actually, I was just asking You, Beloved, if You felt . . .
ADI DA SAMRAJ: What is the question precisely?
DEVOTEE: Could it be used as part of the conscious practice?
ADI DA SAMRAJ: You mean made a regularly used something as an alternative to one of the Ten Questions? Or do you mean a sometimes “consideration”, because you study My Word regularly and this is, as I am now Revealing to you and no one has ever done before, going to be studied and part of the cultural language and “consideration” – and in that sense becomes everyones practice.
But if you are saying instead of one of those Ten Questions, should you do a klik-klak question, what are you suggesting? What do you think the purpose of the pondering that is given in The Dawn Horse Testament is? Is it to ask every question that would relate in any way to some kind of relaxed meditative kind of state?
What is the purpose of those particular kind of questions, then? In other words, there must be some sort of rule going on there, it couldn’t be just Ten Questions – of all the questions you could ask! Ten?! [Adi Da laughs] You’ve got a lot more questions than that!
So there must be some sort of rule operative there, you see. Because not only am I not a fool – I am a graduate of Columbia! [laughter] So, you can be sure I have “considered” the matter rather fully, in deciding on ten, and just didn’t get to ten and couldn’t think up any more. [Adi Da laughs.]
You understand, you have to look at all of this along the lines of it being really a Divine Revelation – that there is some great something or other behind the choice of those ten questions, just as they are. And just as I am the One who is Revealing even this klik-klak matter to you now, I am the One who placed those questions there.
The point of telling you about this klik-klak was not in order for Me to have to rewrite any of the Source-Texts. [laughter] These weeks of “consideration” are the esotericism within the esotericism. It is the re-establishment of the esotericism of this Way, in the midst of a now somewhat downtown developed form of the Way that appears as it does because it is accommodating everything associated with entering into the domain of the public. It has an institutionalized, exoteric characteristic that has been patterned on there. And yet it is this same Way.
The time has come now. That level of it is patterning along, and has great work to do, but even then within that context I have to show you what the esotericism is, because it can become, if not klik-klak, or mummery, at least mediocre and superficial. There needed to be a Revelation within the Revelation.
So this is what this period is – even adding on to what was supposed to have been the “Completion Year” [1995]. Yes, the Completion relative to all of that, within which now I am speaking in terms that reveal the esoteric depth of all of that – so that it can be used to righten everything that is established, and be the pattern in which everything else is “considered”.
Study My Word about everything about klik-klak and so forth – in other words, this Revelation-within-Revelation time – and that will be the context in which you notice this “pondering” about klik-klak. If it stands out in your disposition or your mind, having “considered” it there, then it just comes up as often as it comes up, but it is not to replace your formal obligations otherwise. You can’t just get sort of experimental about your fundamental discipline. No.
If you don’t know what any thing is, you are in klik-klak-land in the moment in which you are aware of that.
DEVOTEE: Beloved, You just said, “If you don’t know what any thing is”, and I thought You were going to finish “don’t ask”.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: [chuckling] You can’t afford it.
DEVOTEE: Beloved, You take care of Your devotees perfectly by not allowing them to make these errors. You are constantly caring for us, aligning us perfectly to Truth. It’s the sign of Your Love.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. Why should that surprise you?
DEVOTEE: It shouldn’t.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Absolutely. [pause]
Somebody had to Be Love. Nobody else wanted the job. [Devotees murmur.] [as if at an interview] Just making a living, doing what I love best – Loving. [laughter] “Tune in tomorrow for-Hello, Mom! [laughs superficially] See you tomorrow everybody – har, har, har!” Brought to you by your “less work for Mom” retail shop.
When My father would go to do sales work on people, his general mode would be really happy to be there -you know what I am talking about? And then hed play all the roles-like Raymond plays lots of roles in The Mummery -plays all of the male roles, along the way, somehow. But the basic thing is to be the TV personality, klik-klak, somehow. Wear the mask of the smiling man, who is there to allow you to do anything . That is the face of klik-klak. Thats the face of the salesman, or the eternally smiling TV host. But when My father wasnt “on the job”, so to speak, he wasnt like that. In fact, that seemed to be the principal disturbance of his life. He was always so incredibly invested in the salesman klik-klak that he had no reason to be smiling when he came home. [Adi Da laughs.] He was generally disturbed there. He was all [in a “salesman” voice] “Right in here, howdy, folks!” And suddenly he was a grim angry guy shaping an ear in smoke. Hustled by his own intention into living a life pretending to be klik-klak himself.
Its not just a face. It is a lot of energy in that face. You look at that smiling clown face at Coney Island, it is radiating. You can feel it – just “shining” out there. And yet it is dark, there is something empty. It is not a heart-smile. It’s the smile of “Whatever you want to do, I’m your man!” It’s like a hustler or a pimps face – or a whorehouse madames face maybe, also, in a womans manner. Perhaps even a whores face. But the male figure seems to suggest this very well. Yang face. Its a pimps face.
It is a radiant face. It is not merely a look or a mask. It has this quality of really pressing out there, really yang. Not attractive, yin, feminine kind of style, but very yang, radiant, empty of the feminine somehow.
But it is supposed to be a happy, smiling face. A sort of “Come on kids, come on here, and do everything you’ve ever thought of ever doing, that you ever wanted to do – eat anything, jump up and down, do anything you want.” It is like that scene in Pinnochio where they turn into donkeys, jackasses – stupid, in other words. That is what that is supposed to be about. The message of the Disney film is you turn into jack-asses, you are stupid, if you do this – just give yourself up self-indulgently, to the “you can come in here and do anything here” look on klik-klaks face. There’s a klik-klak kind of character that leads to that boys island thing, right?
DEVOTEE: Yes.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: So why do people put that face on? It is always to sell you something. To make something seem attractive to you, but in the manner of a “giving you what you want” kind of look. Rather than someone who loves you gives you a gift. It is not the face of somebody who loves you giving you a gift, that toothy-town clown grin. You know the kind of face I am talking about there?
DEVOTEES: Yes.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: But it resembles it somehow at the same time. So when somebody is trying to sell you something, they put this face on. They’re putting it on, but it is resembling something that you would find congenial. It is a “welcome to pleasure” kind of “no holds barred” and “no judgements made” kind of face. “We’ve got all the plastic you need, here. How many worlds do you want? However many worlds do you insist there have to be? You got it!”
Whatever your “consideration” is, it doesn’t make any damn bit of difference to the klik-klak. Just move into the pattern, and you can have any pursuit you like, any presumption you like. It doesnt mean you can have any destiny you like, necessarily. But you can have your destiny be structured along the lines of any search or any presumption you like-it works perfectly well anywhere in klik-klak. So it does not discriminate between the right presumption and all the other ones which are wrong. It allows for any. All the wrong ones are just as real in klik-klak as the only real one. But there is no “one” in klik-klak anyway. All you have to do is resemble it, and it can be the Absolute Truth.
But what is the Absolute Truth? What is happening? This is the profound “consideration” – not just trying to bullshit yourself into a feeling of consolation. No. Really getting down to what it is all about, to the rock-bottom, no-bullshit level of everything. That’s the Way of the Heart. If you really want to know what it is all about, thats what this “consideration” has been all about.
What else is there to “consider”?
DEVOTEE: Earlier this evening we were talking a lot about scientific materialism, scientific klik-klakism . . .
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. Scien-klikik.
DEVOTEE: Beloved, it seems like people commonly come to a point where they recognize that they don’t know what any thing is, or they have this intuition or some kind of feeling that everything is just klik-klakking. They just look at the television and realize that is bullshit.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm.
DEVOTEE: And it seems like the common strategy, or technique, or the only place to go once you’ve had that realization, tends to be inside.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: The orientation tends to go inward, you are saying?
DEVOTEE: Yes. The orientation tends to go inward when noticing that everything outward, everything objective is klik-klac.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: That is becoming “yin”. The reaction becomes withdrawal. To be in the “in” position and withdrawing inward is “yinnish”. This is regarded to be a fault among males in traditional societies. They are given, in the male education line, all kinds of training so that they won’t do that, so they won’t recoil from the world and become what is regarded to be effeminate.
On the other hand, women are supposed to do that, the view is, you see. They are not supposed to be “up to the world, not recoil no matter what happens”. That is not supposed to be what they do at all. Therefore, they have to be in a protected circumstance, in some sense. They have to be in the Pleasure Dome in order to flourish. And the males do the training to be always ready to do the “protective no matter what arises” kind of confrontation. And the women are supposed to preserve something else which is valued, by not being required to do that adaptation.
What were we talking about otherwise?
DEVOTEE: My Lord, You have been talking about the Pleasure Dome and Islam. Would You like to see the Pleasure Dome of Sufi saints? It is on the cover of this book from the library. [William comes forward to show Adi Da the book.] I thought the descriptions were quite amusing. It is not a great example of some of the more extraordinary Islamic architecture – but it has the dome in it and so forth.
[Adi Da Samraj and William spend a few minutes having some conversation about the specific pictures in the book.]
ADI DA SAMRAJ: There is this basic notion here of an exterior wall that controls access and entry, and just entering into it is made much of. It is a sacred place. There is this basic wall around, it looks like a garden inside here, perhaps gardens elsewhere, a dome in the center suggesting that there is something of great value deep within this, but it is not immediately accessible. It is protected. All these kinds of qualities stand out in this kind of architecture-Mogul architecture, Islamic architecture generally.
But they dont have a lot of humor about this “one and many” stuff. [NOTE: Adi Da had told a story about a debate He had with His Columbia professor about why there was “one”, why there couldnt be “two” or “three”.]
DEVOTEE: They don’t account for the many.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, this “one in the exclusive sense” disposition in it, as in Judaism, excludes certain presumptions from happening. So there is an intolerance relative to this “one versus many” kind of question relative to the Divine, or the approaches to the Divine, and so on.
When it comes down to it, who would affirm more than one, anyway? Apart from maybe that professor at Columbia who wanted to just talk about it as an intellectual question. But ultimately what would a monotheistic religion have, if it was all really seriously “considered”, what would it have to complain about about an apparently polytheistic religion? It would be evident that its about the same thing. Hinduism is not affirming many, Hinduism is affirming one . There is a language for affirming it, and a way of suggesting how the approach is made, how the approach may be served, how that Pleasure Dome may be served in another particular kind of way. But it is about the same thing.
The general disposition in orthodox Islam seems to be rather opposed to that kind of acceptance of any kind of pluralistic notion at all – whether it is three in Christianity, or countless in Hinduism. It is just fundamentally different kind of doctrine. But what it came to, in the Mogul period in India, where Islam came into the setting of what was generally Hinduism before, there was some contacts, even in the court where there were these gatherings of the wise of all kinds, the learned. At times there was genuine disappearance of the feeling of difference relative to all of that, a great tolerance, then, for varieties of all kinds relative to the matter of religion, and That Which religion is purposed to Realize. There were “considerations” of that kind. So Islam in India in that context certainly showed some sort of a sign of even a kind of synthesis with Hinduism. It is reflected in the architecture, also, at some sort of level where the patterns were coinciding rather harmoniously in some respects-not altogether, of course.
So the pattern does allow for complete tolerance for the view that there is absolutely only one world, and absolutely whatever any other number you’d like to say, including infinite. The way the pattern is allows, paradoxically, for all of them not only to be affirmed, but to be true, real. They can be actually experienced, and be actual or real to the reality of conditional reality. In other words, it is not merely a fabrication that denies some aspect of reality, in a conditional sense, but something that applies altogether to it – as factual as a physical thing. Just as factual as that infinite number, and only one, or any number.
DEVOTEE: In about five years, some scientists, based on a measurement, are going to make their own proclamation on whether there is one universe or many universes. [laughter]
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, there was also some group of Nobel Prize-winning scientists in the 70’s or the 60’s, that they mentioned in Trivial Pursuit games that I’ve played as having given the final word on the fact that astrology has nothing to do with anything. That was not based on them, or a whole mass of other scientists, actually entering into an examination of what that is as a totality. Astrology is one of the principal ancient disciplines and presumptions, and is seen everywhere. It is still practiced seriously, way beyond your daily newspapers. And is certainly worth more than an anathema without examination, beyond that casual glance. They objected when all the popes and bishops, or whoever, all the cardinals lined up and said that Galileo was wrong. For the same reason it is objectionable when they make pronouncements without having studied it and given evidence and accounted for everything, all the aspects altogether. They just want to say that it is false. They dont want to take the time to prove whether it is or not, in all respects, false. They are busy telling everybody that the common religious view is false.
So they are always insisting on saying that. It is like a TV host smilingly saying, “Oh, astrology is bullshit, and 25 billion Nobel Prize-winners can’t be wrong about that!” Not a single one of them knows a thing about it! Except that it is the religion-like competitor.
DEVOTEE: A friend of mine (we both studied astrology in college together) wrote a letter – he had more energy for it – to send to a lot of the Nobel Prize-winners there.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Oh, you know about this particular anathematization of astrology?
DEVOTEE: Oh yeah. Because I used to study it.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Oh, good. What do you know about it, then?
DEVOTEE: Well, the university that I was going to had some of these Nobel Prize-winning types . . .
ADI DA SAMRAJ: How did I happen to bring this up, then, to Ritch in particular? [laughter] You see how the pattern coincided there? I go on blapping about this, and you turn out to have some very direct personal awareness of this-which for Me was just a card in a Trivial Pursuit game. [laughter]
DEVOTEE: You mentioned this when I was down in Fiji.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: And here I’ve mentioned it again. And no reason to do so, because you didn’t respond last time. [laughter] Well, it is obviously a form of the pattern revealing itself to you. There was some kind of psychic cross-over between inside and outside, or time and space-thing there that seemed to be revealing itself as having happened. It just came up out of the blue and it had something to do with you. So something about the pattern just showed itself to you.
But you were going to pass right by it and not notice that it has significance that that is so.
Go on.
DEVOTEE: Well, the other thing, in terms of astrology, two nights ago in a gathering You had mentioned how the pattern patterning shows itself in all sorts of forms. I felt that astrology is just the patterning itself, showing forms related to what you are seeing there.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, as I was saying earlier, once you understand what pattern is all about, and what the pattern patterning is all about, you don’t have to go anywhere else in the pattern to know that. It is the same everywhere. So you can take a somehow local presumed pattern appearance, and – if it is large enough, or whatever it takes to be in the field of something else that you might be “considering” – you can say something about the other by looking at the pattern of this one.
I mean, if I could bring this matter up-this card and so forth, and it has something to do with you-you see how that is clearly suggesting a connection, and foreknowing implications, all that kind of business? You have this experience just as you are about to tell Me something about astrology. You just had this experience, before you say your first sentence about astrology, of seeing this coincidence and this whole reference coming up to begin with. If you can see that that is so, anything can be true about astrology! Hm? And why would it be untrue all of a sudden? It is just an observed pattern, and things can be said about that pattern itself. But it is a pattern in relation to another pattern that can also be observed.
And if you see something in one pattern, and then look to see if you see something corresponding, and you do that enough times, it is like acupuncture. That is all part of the whole system that produced acupuncture, in fact. Acupuncture is part of astrology, and on and on. It is noticing patterns, correspondences, by long-term observations and sometimes fortuitous or accidental (or whatever it may be) circumstances – just keep noting the pattern, and over a long period of time an actual pattern is observed. A pattern of correspondences that could justify something like the I-Ching , or astrology, otherwise.
Having observed a pattern that makes it somehow reasonable, although not (in the conventional sense) rational, to say that when you throw these coins down and count them up in the kind of numbers we show here, you are seeing a resemblance of the present moment that is necessarily meaningful – such observation of pattern, as is done with the I-Ching (or astrology) is part of that same culture – in this case, the traditional culture of China – that you like when it comes to something like acupuncture, which can at least seem to fit reasonably well with the Western scientific materialist point of view. But what about everything else in Chinese culture that went along with acupuncture?! Are you just going to toss it all out?
Acupuncture came out of that same whole milieu as astrology – astrology perhaps even being senior to it in some sense. Acupuncture is based on showing a design of correspondences that relate to the physical body. Astrology is doing exactly the same procedure to find out its “acupuncture points in the sky”, so to speak, to generate patterns that are useful tools for looking at the ground plan “below” it, so to speak – the total world, big picture things – anything, really. There is nothing unreasonable about it at all. It is a profound system based on the observation of patterns – simply, patterns correspond to one another. And if you see something in a small one, there are correspondences in the big one. So it is just about noting very much in detail how that works out – not merely for the sake of prediction, but for the sake of, in the process, noticing this design, more observing and noting of the pattern that is patterning, with clarity about everything.
When it gets down to the kind of stuff you see in the daily newspaper astrology columns – well, I havent seen any in a long time, but any I ever saw in the past were just some little ditty there – that is not astrology. You think that is what the emperors did when they called for the astrologer? No, they really meant business. They didn’t call for Amy Dogwoods latest prediction. Whoever she is – is there an “Amy Dogwood”? I dont know. [laughter]
DEVOTEES: There probably is.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: True astrology is an immense measuring accomplishment that persists in having relevance if you are interested in looking at those kind of patterns. Not absoluteness, though. And to know what it is all about and be able to use it properly takes a lot of knowledge and all kinds of other things. The ones who do it best are those who can function from the pattern level, or close to it.
It is just another way of looking at patterns, really-not to predict what is going to happen to your Aunt Minnie, or whoever, or to you. It is not really about prediction. It is a kind of getting cured by noticing that there are correspondences, that there are patterns. You throw coins, and the numbers stuck up just this way. And yes, those words do relate to this somehow. It is about noticing that that is so, not that “Oh, this means then that I should go on a vacation to the moon!” [laughter] No. It is noticing that there is a correspondence. That is the remarkable thing.
Notice that there is a pattern, in other words, and it can take the form of some structure in your present moment of experience of the pattern. Or it can take a form in some coins that you happened to throw out on the floor at that moment. They are different at the physical level, but they are the same pattern at another level. And you can look at the coins, and following a system relative to numbers, see your own pattern in another picture form, somehow. And that is remarkable. How did it get that way?
It just is that way. And it is not arbitrary. There are all kinds of complex and centuries – long observation procedures behind it. Real labor-intensive, very much like a lot of current-day science is practiced relative to some things. Like astronomy is now – long-term, night after night, year after year after year, plotting, getting data. The people who developed these systems weren’t fools. They were up to some very serious observing and just seeing if there are correspondences.
Of course, they were looking just at one position in klik-klak. So it is not a means of absolute Truth, but it is a way of looking at patterning – that there are patterns, there are correspondences, there are likenesses. And for the pattern that is patterning, likenesses are enough. In some sense, it doesn’t care if it is a real cookie, or “cookie” in your mind. If it is in your mind, it will be a real cookie somehow. And for there to be a real cookie there, it had to be on your mind first.
The pattern doesn’t care. It functions in all levels simultaneously. So if you are seeking to figure it out, and then think the knowledge will be Ultimate Happiness, there is absolutely no way to do it. That is not the way of Ultimate Happiness. At the end of that is just klik-klak. Truly, in the pattern patterning, all paths, all roads lead to klik-klak.
DEVOTEE: Right!
ADI DA SAMRAJ: And it is not that they all take the same amount of time, either. Some go very quickly. Some can take an immense long time. Some can take all of time – and still not have begun it.
DEVOTEE: Beloved, that is why I found it useful to have astrology done by a person who knows Your Teaching already, because that person can decipher the patterns more according to Your Pattern.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, good. I never look at this sort of thing My Self. I don’t read books, either, generally speaking. But for the sake of archival record, this is done regularly, with all kinds of astrological measuring. I dont look at it My Self. It may be an interesting measure for you all to have there as a record against things after they’ve happened. Whatever you may use it for.
But it doesnt have a function for Me at all of prediction. I already know what pattern is all about, so I don’t need any more lessons. For Me, it is nothing but another form of patterning, klik-klak. As prediction it is a kind of klik-klak inherently. And therefore if it is not used in a profound manner and right disposition, then it is a way of klik-klakking yourself like any other kind of search for cure, or heaven.
An inherent function of Consciousness Itself is its capacity to ignore utterly. So why do you think Consciousness-land is concerned about you? Tell them what the lady said.
DEVOTEE: The Laughing Mama says, “Your objections to any thing dont mean shit.”
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, that holds for Consciousness Itself, then. It is not founded on concern for the body-mind, for klik-klak, and so on. What makes you think Consciousness is going to take care of you while you take your trip to klik-klak-land and try to use It as your identification card? It is just a trick you are playing, exploiting the congeniality of Love-Bliss Itself. But it is not in the position to be concerned about you as you step through the hole in the egg, take on the form of attention and wheel through klik-klak, as Pleasure Dome-ish as you can make it.
Consciousness is not there boo-hooing behind like your mommy, and full of caring and concern for your continuation as a presumed ego on the other side of the egg-hole. You know, that tiny little egg with the hole in the end of it exists as just a tiny little thing in the midst of the Infinite Space of Consciousness. Yes. Well, there is far more “out Here” than there is there, and yet what is in there is infinite beyond counting. Klik-klak-a world in itself, infinite numbers of worlds in itself. All it is, is possibility. That within which klik-klak appears is a speck, such that it can even be ignored. It is vaster yet, beyond even mentioning the word “counting”. There is no measure there, whatsoever.
So Consciousness, or the other bird there, is not concerned about the fruit-eating bird. And if the fruit-eating bird gets eaten by the cat, he will have gotten no help from that Witness-bird – not cruelty, just another place entirely. So you imagine somehow that Consciousness is reeking with concern, and well all be all right inside the egg of infinity. But no. This holds as well for Consciousness Itself, when you are inside the world of klik-klak . . .
DEVOTEE: The Laughing Mama says, . . .
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Consciousness says, so to speak . . .
DEVOTEE: Consciousness says, “Your objections to any thing dont mean shit!” You are between a rock and a hard place.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yep. You look on either side, nobody gives a shit. [laughter] It is only in the heartcore of it all – not out there in the anywhere – that there is anything like that. That is the Domain of the Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Divine Self-Condition, Perfectly Subjective.
DEVOTEE: Beloved, it is interesting to “consider”, in this line “Your objections to any thing dont mean shit”, the word “objections”. Because You mentioned earlier tonight how Consciousness superimposes this sense of permanence on klikity-klak.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Lets try and stick to the one reference – “klik-klak” – so we always know what we are meaning. Sometimes people vary it, and I want to make sure that we have a sense of what is the standard one. “Klik-klak” is better. Klikity-klak. Klik-klak. “Clickety-clack” is a sound used for the sounds of hooves or whatever sometimes.
“Klik-klak” is a term which I am using to somehow give you a symbol for the sound that is there in the whirring core, the replicate-shift-change cycle that is constantly happening. That cycle literally makes a sound like “klik-klak”. I remember saying something like that, observing and trying to feel the sound as I might say it to you.
I have said “klik-klak”. And it seems to say it somehow.
Discourse – Klik-Klak: The Pattern Patterning
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