Transcend the Self-Knot of Fear
July 28, 2004
DEVOTEE: Beloved, You Wrote a phrase recently which struck me very deeply. You Said that we all had karmas, both superficial and hell deep. In the last few years, I’ve experienced a number of traumatic incidents, some of which You know about.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: I experience numerous of them Myself. Have you got a minute?
What about it?
DEVOTEE: Beloved, I feel like always it’s my fear–I’ve always been a fearful character.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Hm?
DEVOTEE: I’ve always been a fearful character.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Well, who isn’t? It’s very reasonable. Anybody who is in this situation and is not afraid doesn’t have any awareness of what’s actually going on. What you do about it is another matter, but there is every reason to be afraid. And if you weren’t aware enough of the potential suffering in the states of conditional existence, then you wouldn’t be motivated to transcend them. So, as bizarre as it seems, there is a kind of grace in the sufferings that are imposed on us through experience.
But, so–you’ve been fearful by tendency.
DEVOTEE: Beloved, I feel these recent events have exaggerated and locked this fear further in my body in some way.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: You fear that?
DEVOTEE: Yes.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Fear is inherent in the body, in its separateness. The fear isn’t yours at all. The fear is in the self-contraction. It is its characteristic mood, its inherent emotion.
You could be feeling fear now, and yet there is nothing dramatic happening at the moment that would seem to justify being afraid. But if you somehow or other bring to mind the potential of life-difficulties in this moment, or remind yourself of traumatic experiences you’ve had by remembering them, and so on, you can be experiencing fear right now–without any apparent cause. It would be entirely, obviously, subjective.
But, nonetheless, it’s still the same thing. It is the mood of self-contraction, the mood that is inherent in self-contraction, in the presumption of separateness, in the presumption of identification with the body as the position of existence.
And if you presume it is the position of existence, then you start puzzling over: What do you do about this? Is there some way to escape this? There doesn’t appear to be any way to escape it, and so fear becomes a kind of fixed sensation. It becomes a chronic sensation, in fact, potentially–very disabling sometimes.
And so everyone has experiences of one kind or another–just the mere fact of being alive, and what had to occur in order for you to be alive (birthing and so on), plus all the experiences of a lifetime, affect, as you suggest, imbed fear in the body or the psycho-physical mechanism. And this is fundamental to the condition of everyone here, or every human being, or every living being. Although everyone is in a different disposition or sense of circumstance or state of mind in the present moment, nonetheless all are sitting in a situation, and everyone is in the midst of an activity–in fact, right now–that is generating fear.
Except, generally speaking, people use various psychological devices to keep it subliminal or to generate diversions, a kind of intoxication–or even literal intoxication by using intoxicating means. But diversions of life, experiential means to divert attention through generating intentionally, or otherwise by circumstance experiencing, different states of mind, of emotion, of body that desensitize you, at least temporarily, to the fundamental fear that is at the root of this bodily sense of separate existence.
And this is not, therefore, merely your characteristic. It is the actual state of everyone, and it is, therefore, something that is right there. Everyone is always sitting in it. And how much of your life you want to waste diverting yourself from it or consoling yourself and so forth, intoxicating yourself, is up to you.
But you can’t really get rid of it, because it’s inherent in the presumption of identification with the state of separateness and brevity, change and inevitable death. You can’t escape that, so you cannot escape fear. Unless something fundamental changes about your understanding and experiencing of existence itself, you cannot get rid of fear. There is no intoxication, no diversion, nothing that will desensitize you that is anything but temporary, and in the long run, very destructive of any kind of balance or well-being or clarity.
So rightly, if you consider the matter clearly, you have to address this fundamental matter. There is nothing you can do about it, except whatever it is that utterly transcends the root-presumption that is the cause of it. Is there an understanding and a Realization of existence that is free of the root-conditions that you are experiencing fearfully? And, of course, I am telling you there is.
There is also something about fear that has a practical value. Without it, you wouldn’t do what is necessary to protect the body under various natural circumstances that require an immediate reaction, for the sake of safety. You wouldn’t want to be so benumbed in the midst of daily life that you couldn’t react to something dangerous and get out of the way. So there is also something very practically useful about fear in its moment.
Cats are very sensuous. They are always walking around, rubbing themselves on things, purring away, and so forth. They look like they haven’t a care in the world. But just like that, if anything comes up that requires a reaction, or a mouse that they can enjoy tormenting, anything that requires a sudden reaction–which inevitably has a fearful characteristic in it, because it’s so much sudden energy and chemical change, and so forth–they are always ready. Zap, they do it. And then, in the next moment, they are perfectly calm again.
So this kind of capability for fear is certainly not something you would want to have tranquilized to the point where it’s no longer available to you, or you wouldn’t be able to function safely in the midst of ordinary things. That’s not a kind of fear that one would rightly want to get rid of, unless one is just an addict of some kind who wants to be totally dysfunctional.
But apart from that practical usefulness of fear, the fear you are describing is a kind of philosophically significant condition. It’s the noticing of the fundamental condition in which you are living.
The Way I have Given you all is the means for transcending just exactly that. It’s not a diversion, a way of being addicted to some manipulation of the body-mind that just makes you feel good at will by some technique or other. As long as things aren’t too bad, you can always sit down and meditate and relax. You have perhaps noticed one another. You think that’s bliss.
It’s no more bliss than an orgasm is bliss. It’s that kind of ‘bliss’, if you want to use the word for it. In other words, it’s a temporary state of pleasure in the body. It has nothing to do with transcending fear. It is simply an experiential diversion that covers it.
So the kind of self-manipulative games people play that have the look of meditation or religion about them are devices, techniques whereby people divert themselves from experiencing Reality–and reality in the conditional sense, and its inherent fearfulness, its inherent dangers, its inherent mortality.
So that kind of meditation isn’t worth squat. It’s nothing more than relaxation. It’s just another form of self-pleasuring. It’s a technique. And it’s temporary. And if this kind of, you know, ‘everything is just so sweet’, you know, and you suddenly were tapped on the shoulder by something with a mouth on it about this big, you are going to be immediately returned to your sensitivity to inherent fear.
So fine, there are states that are meditative that look like that. So I am not mocking them entirely. But, on the other hand, they have no ultimate significance whatsoever.
It is moment to moment Realization, moment to moment practice, moment to moment renunciation, moment to moment Realization–this is all that works. And nothing else does. All the rest is a diversion, a hoped-for pleasurable distraction.
So you have had some experiences fairly recently that were traumatic, and feel this has even created a kind of fear-reaction, built it into the body. And now you are afraid of it, too. You are afraid of being afraid of being afraid.
But it doesn’t make any difference whether you are afraid, or you are afraid of being afraid, or you are afraid of being afraid of being afraid, or you are afraid of being afraid of being afraid of being afraid, or on and on to the nth degree–it’s still the same thing. And you have to do the same thing about it. And why add a lot of imagination to it?
Fear is all the same. And it’s completely justified. You have every right to be afraid. You are in a position in which is it completely justified to be afraid, and there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be. So you should be quite happy about the fact that you are feeling quite normally. There is nothing wrong with you. You are completely well, My son.
But if you are seriously asking the question about fundamental fear itself, well, haven’t I addressed this?
DEVOTEE: Yes, Beloved.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: The Way I’ve Given you is My Address to that question that is the totality of your life. It’s not a bunch of myths or things for you to believe that are somehow supposed to make you feel that fear is unjustified and everything is just OK. No. Everything is really not OK. But that’s a fact only from the point of view you are presuming. And that is what must be examined and transcended–and not by merely thinking about it. You will think about it inevitably, but that’s not the Way.
The Way is exactly as I have Given It to you to practice, and that’s exactly what you should do about it–and do so moment to moment, in other words. Endeavor to be constantly doing this sadhana, and developing the real process of it, instead of remaining at the beginning of it forever, simply bound up not only in unsatisfactory states, but not even entering into the real process whereby they are understood and ultimately transcended by Spiritual means.
Sadhana proves itself. Do the sadhana consistently for real, instead of doing something else–which is like sitting around hallucinating your fear more and more, and wasting your time turning the faculties on themselves, instead of turning to Me and profoundly practicing. Instead of wasting your time doing what is unproductive about it, and trying to get rid of something you cannot get rid of, spend your time doing as I’ve Instructed. Embrace Me and enter into the process of Communion with Me whereby you will utterly transcend not just the feeling of fear, because it’s inevitable in this state here, but transcend the very state you are presuming to be in.
The sadhana of this Way–truly and most profoundly entered into, you see–enters you fully consciously into the Domain of Reality Itself, the Divine Domain of Reality that transcends conditionality and that activity which makes all illusions, including fear. As long as there is the self-contraction, presumption of separateness, there is fear. And there is no two ways about it. It’s inevitable. It’s inherent. So, transcend this.
The Way is the Way of transcending the self-knot, the self-contraction, which is not just something somewhere inside the body. It is the totality of the body-mind that is participating in this, and that is reflecting this act. This is what must be gone beyond.
This knot is fear. It is also separateness. It’s the feeling of ‘difference’. It’s the feeling of relatedness. It’s the presumption of being identical to the body, or the body-mind, limited by it, limited to it, limited by and to all of the ordinary appearances of conditional existence, all of which pass. And all of the grosser appearances of human existence, all of which are mortal.
The transcending of this is, in fact, something you enjoy in some rudimentary sense in sleep. You’re not here asleep–basically anyway–at the moment. You’re in the waking state, self-contracted as the body-mind. You’re asking Me this question from the point of view and position of feeling identical to the body and its potential, its memory, and so on. But when you are asleep, you don’t ask these questions and you don’t make these presumptions.
A few minutes ago, I was asked about the dream state condition. In that particular dream state condition, the person wasn’t feeling mortal or depressed or afraid, and didn’t have any problem about it. But then, in the waking state, all of a sudden it’s time to ask Me a question because of this. The waking state is habitually bound to the activity of egoity.
The dream state is a conditional state. It is filled with conditional appearances–positive and negative. Sometimes in the dream state, things feel very blissful and amusing, even in a very high sense. And at other times, of course, they can be very frightening, and so on.
The sleep state never feels any of those things. And yet it’s not awake in the absolute sense, otherwise. It is simply asleep to the binding conditions of the waking and dreaming states.
Divine Self-Realization is to be Awake to That Which is Prior not only to the waking and dreaming states, but to the sleeping state as well. But it is completely without bondage to any limiting condition inherently so. Just as in sleep, you are inherently not bothered by waking state conditions or memories, and you’re not bothered by dreams, nor diverted by them, so, in the Real State–the State That Is Always Already the Case, the Divine Self-Condition–there is no fear and nothing to be afraid of. There is no self-contraction. This is worth Realizing, don’t you think?
And apart from that Realization, fear is part of the condition you will inevitably experience. You can practice so that you maintain a fundamental equanimity and ability to function without transcending fear absolutely, so you should certainly be doing that as a foundation discipline, you see, instead of worshipping your fear.
But you must enter profoundly into the process of this sadhana in order to Realize That Condition, That Perfect Condition, That Inherently Perfect Condition, in Which there simply is no fear, no conditionality, no limiting force of embodiment, no rolling opposites, no opposing states of mind, only the Conscious Light of Divine, Inherently Divine, Love-Bliss, Freedom, the Unborn Condition–Which remarkably enough is also the Condition now.
But why isn’t it obvious–to you, to all here? It’s not merely because you are here. It’s because of something you are doing. This is simply a modification of That Which Is Always Already the Case. It’s only an apparent modification. It’s non-binding, it’s unnecessary, and does not affect the Ultimate Condition even now. It seems to, because of a disposition of mind, which you are addicted to in the waking state. And the entire body-mind, all of its faculties, are fixed in the patterning, based on that presumption–that act which is habitual and has patterned your life, controls your life, unless sadhana intervenes. Not the ‘sadhana’ of busy self-manipulation.
So what truly must intervene is My Very Person here. You must recognize Me, know that I am here, be moved to Me, and have something else to do then, than all of the nonsense of your suffering.
To be occupied with the Master is to not be occupied with ‘self’, self-contraction, its patterning. Even if, as I was asked the other evening, you have to go and work on the computer, or go and count the numbers for the month, or whatever–there’s nothing about that that you are going allow to disturb your turning to Me. There’s nothing about it that can disturb or limit your turning to Me–unless you allow it to.
So you must find out, first of all, that I am here and recognize Me, and you must be moved to turn to Me. And then you must, by turning to Me, learn the secret of turning to Me moment to moment. And thereby–receiving My constant Blessing Spiritually–you will come to the point wherein you are immersed in Me constantly and ultimately Realize Me absolutely. And that is the purpose of existence. And everything else is suffering.
So do the work necessary that you must do to be My servant, and be turned to Me with all your faculties, every moment of existence. And forget your fear–even as everybody else in this room has already forgotten your fear.
DEVOTEE: Beloved, You’re the only One I’ve ever met Who is completely Free of fear, and all courage I’ve felt has come from You.
May I tell You a miraculous incident related to You from several years ago, Beloved?
In Mindless Company [the meditation hall], I was on retreat here. And, in meditation, You appeared in front of Me in Your thousand-armed, thousand-headed Form.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: That one, yes.
DEVOTEE: You Said, “Look at Me.” And I was very full of fear.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: As usual.
DEVOTEE: And I couldn’t look at You, and then You kept Saying to Me, “Look at Me.” And this went on for some long time, I can’t remember, until eventually–I guess the feeling I had was I knew who was going to win, Beloved. And so I opened my eyes, and I didn’t see Your thousand-armed Form, I saw Your Murti and–
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: My two-armed Form.
DEVOTEE: Yes, Beloved. And I looked into Your Eyes on Your Murti, and You pulled all my mind of fear through my eyes into Your Eyes, and I physically leapt forward in ecstasy and began to kiss the ground around Your Chair, Beloved. And this is the state I want to be in, worshipping You in very moment, Beloved.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: It is interesting to compare what you just described in your own experience to the story in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna reveals his many-headed, many-armed, quite large form. And even though there was much Revelation in it and mysteries of the universe were Revealed thereby, Arjuna just was torn apart with fear, and he begged Krishna to just show him his two-armed form again–because 999 more is just too much.
So Krishna showed him that he was the same person, but with just two arms, more ordinary, more in the likeness of Arjuna himself in his naturalness. And he became absorbed in Krishna as his Master and liberated from the fear that came with seeing his Master in a condition of such immensity and force that he couldn’t tolerate the vision.
But it is a similar story that required in the end a similar solution. And that’s why I just brought two with Me this evening. How many of My arms you can tolerate depends on how many you can stand, which side of the Water you’re on. And whether you are looking at the reflections in the Water, or are Standing in a State of Non-‘different’ Communion and Identification with the Water.
Outside the Water, seeing reflections in the mind, everything seems to be a dilemma and very frightening, if you’re sensitive to how it all is. And there’s no place to hide from it. But in the Position of the Water Itself, That in Which everything is appearing otherwise as a mere reflection of apparent modification, there is no identification with separateness. There is no act of separation. There is no ‘difference’. There is no body, no mind, no conditional universe, no ‘thing’–not ‘nothingness’ in the sense of the absence of existence itself, but complete freedom from the force of limitations.
So there is no object that is perfectly consoling. There is only the transcending of the presumptions about point of view. Ultimately, that is the process, but it’s not merely a philosophical process. It is a devotional process, in relation to Me in all the forms whereby I may appear fundamentally in this, My Incarnation-Form, so that all of the conditions of self-contraction may be relinquished rather than held on to and intensified.
So the one experience you described is like experiences you’ve had over the last few years that you described as being traumatic. All of these experiences are in the past. They’re in the mind. You like the one in the hall. You don’t like the physical trauma ones. But, in fact, none of them exist right now.
So the Way is always in the present, the relationship to Me is always now. Not even in the now that is the presumed ‘now’ in time. As I’ve Told you, the ‘now’ in time that you presume is actually the past. The perception you’re having–wherever you are in this room now, and however you’re oriented, whatever is in your field of sensation, your visual perception, and so forth–all takes, yes, only a fraction of time, but it takes time for the perception to arise. It has to go through the mechanism of the body-mind. It has to go through a process in order to be perceived to be happening. So, by the time you actually perceive it to be happening, it’s already the past.
Like looking at the stars, what you’re actually seeing is something long past. You’re not seeing them now, or the present time experiencing you’re having of them is in the context of a very strangely organized conditional universe in which you’re actually looking at the past, or conditions as they were.
You can figure out different scientific ways of looking at the stars so that you see them in a different context of time, apparently. But all perceptions occur in the midst of conditional existence and in association with a conditional perceiver, the body-mind. And, therefore, there is no ‘now’ in the world of perception. There is only the past and the future. There never is a ‘now’. Never. You never experience now, ever, in your entire life. By the time you get to experience something, it’s already happened.
So where is ‘now’? It’s not a ‘when’. It doesn’t exist as a ‘when’, just as infinity doesn’t exist as a number. You cannot experience ‘now’, because the mechanism you have available for use to perceive it will take time to perceive it.
You’re always bound up in this mechanism, this time-bound mechanism that’s generating illusions and depends on your making presumptions that are illusions. And, so, you’re always seeking. And your seeking is never satisfied. You can be diverted momentarily, but you can never be satisfied. And you won’t stop seeking until you realize the fruitlessness of it–that it is not leading toward any ultimacy at all.
What is Ultimate cannot be Realized in time. It cannot be Realized in the context of the body-mind in time. And It isn’t, therefore, a condition of the body-mind.
Realization is not a brain condition. Divine Realization is not a brain state–although some want to reduce all kinds of things to just brain states. And a lot of things that are extraordinary are brain states. But Reality cannot be reduced to a brain state. And Ultimacy is not a brain state. And there is a process whereby the body-mind is transcended, wherein the brain is transcended, and there is entrance into the Divine Sphere, what I call the ‘Midnight Sun’. I Am That. This Body is the leftover of a Process in Which That Sphere was Entered, in the midst of a lifetime that’s apparent to others.
So the Paradox is that I am here to Tell you about It. Whereas, no one who might otherwise enter into It has ever returned, ever been able to stand, both heels imbedded in the earth, and be established in the Divine Sphere, in order to speak of it.
It is not in the brain. It is not dependent on the body-mind. It’s not in this world. It’s not in the universe. It’s not in any dimension of conditional existence whatsoever. It’s not even merely the light at the end of the tunnel. There’s a lot of conditionality about that. And there is a mechanism for it. I Described it after Lopez. Except most people pass through it and see all their relatives, and so on. But there was no mind in This Case. And the mechanism of it (the niches in the walls, the structure, the lights), the mechanism itself upon which all human experiences depend was revealed–not the illusions built upon them, not the karmic illusions, not the ego-illusions. There is a mechanism for bondage. It is the same mechanism that is associated with a process wherein all bondage is transcended.
I never returned at Lopez. I remain Established in the Divine Sphere. I Am the “Bright”, the ‘Midnight Sun’. I never left It. I am here under unique conditions, for the purpose of Revelation to others.
That Sphere is Untainted and Unconditional. It is the Divine Sphere, the Divine Condition. It is Self-“Bright”. It is Conscious Light. It’s not merely a blank awareness, just sort of feeling aware in an infinite darkness. It is beyond description.
And while Being That, Abiding As That, I am appearing just as you see, and in many other forms that you may see, and am able to verify to you the supernormal Realities of existence.
You must do the sadhana. You must accept My Grace. You must practice the Way of this relationship, and prove My Word to you. But My Utterance of it should–and is intended to–restore your hope and give you heart to do this work, this sadhana.
I am not a liar, would not lie to you. I am Speaking the Truth to you. I Assure you, you will find it out. You must prove it through your sadhana, but I Affirm and Confirm to you all the Divine Realities I just Described to you.
DEVOTEES: Thank You, Beloved.