Editors notes: The following is a Beezone study of a talk Adi Da gave to his students on April 8, 1993. The talk was turned into a teaching booklet (cover above) for his students to read and study. The booklet focused on a key term in the over all teachings of Adi Da “Listening” which is a technical term. For a full study of this term you can go to Beezone’s Study on Listening.
All words are those of Adi Da Samraj and have not been edited or adapted. All materials here are excerpted from his original talk, Listen to Me.
Satsang and Understanding
ADI DA SAMRAJ: There has never been another seventh stage Adept. There has never been another true seventh stage Wisdom-Teaching. There has never been another seventh stage Realization, true and full. The principle of ego-transcendence has never been understood, and transcendence of the self-contraction has never been made the basis for the God-Realizing process before.
There are many things that I could say about the reasons why there has been no such Revelation previous to My own, but a fundamental reason is that there has been no true understanding of egoity, and the principle of egoity has always been the basis of religion, even esoteric religion. The search, egoity, separateness, the separative motive, the self-contraction itself, has been fundamental to both religious exotericism and religious esotericism, as well as ordinary life. Obviously this is the key matter.
This understanding is the key to the Way of the Heart. It is fundamental. If you do not have this understanding, if you do not truly engage it and demonstrate it, you turn the Way of the Heart into an extension of the great search. You make the Way of the Heart into another form of conventional religiosity.
DEVOTEE: Self-understanding by itself might have some effect, but it is clear to me that outside the context of Satsang with You the practice of self-understanding cannot go far.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: If there were no such Satsang, where would you ever find out about self-understanding? Satsang with Me is fundamental to the process of self understanding. Apart from your relationship to Me, what you may call “self understanding” is just another intellectual matter.
DEVOTEE: The relationship to You and the Great Work that You do brings self understanding to life. You make it alive.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: It is in the context of Satsang with Me that you get the Word of Truth. You never would have heard it anywhere else. It is in the context of Satsang with Me that the Way of the Heart is lived. The Way of the Heart is not merely a mass of ideas – both self-understanding and Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga are essential.
DEVOTEE: Last night, through the Gift of Your Heart-Transmission, I felt the root of the self-contraction in the heart on the right. I could feel how I am creating the feeling of relatedness, that it is the result of something I am doing, and I could feel that action as egoity. In that simple understanding, in the simple observation of my own activity, through Your Transmission, I spontaneously felt tremendously relieved of it.
This felt very much like the moment of hearing, and I felt why You have said that the entire process of the Way of the Heart is a progressive development of the process of hearing.
Experience
ADI DA SAMRAJ: My Spiritual Heart-Transmission is the Transmission of Non Separateness! In The Love-Ananda Gita I Speak of the Wisdom of Non-Separateness. My Spiritual Heart-Transmission is Non-Separateness Itself. In general, My devotees tend to register My Transmission in terms of self-bound experiences. In that case, they are not really getting My Transmission. They register My Transmission only in the form of energies or this or that vision. These are just your possibilities, experiences experienced by you, a seeker, an apparent individual, perpetually active as self contraction. Such is not the fullest reception of My Spiritual Heart-Transmission. It is not fullest Communion with Me. It is not true self-understanding, demonstrated.
Responsibility
You must find out about yourself. Not only are you always seeking, but you are involved in the perpetual action of self-contraction. The self-contraction is a devastating act, a self-deluding act, most profound. That act makes existence what is traditionally called “samsara”.
You are living an illusion because of this act. You are only imagining that you are in the real world. You are not aware of reality. You are perceiving an illusion. The world as you perceive it is an illusion. Everything you think about it, everything you pursue, is an illusion. Your perception is based on a self-deluding act. You are self contracted.
The self-contraction is most profound. It is controlling your life, and you are unaware of it. You are not yet responsible for it. Becoming responsible for the self contraction is what the listening-hearing process in My Company is about. Transcending the self-contraction is the most profound matter, and yet you want to chat with Me about all kinds of Spiritual things. You want to involve Me in what you think Spiritual life is. In your egoity, you trivialize the listening-hearing process. You make little of it. You seem to want almost nothing to do with it. You just want to get on with your seeking, to get your little bit of good feeling. All of that is the expression of your non-seriousness.
Actively Separating
DEVOTEE: I am sitting in this self-conscious self-meditation and stress that I can clearly feel, and You are sitting in front of me.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: And you are not responding, because you are actively separating yourself from it. You are not only experiencing your own stress, you are doing it. This is what you must find out. You cannot truly respond to Me because you are doing this [He makes a fist of His hand]–contraction–creating a stress that is making you be self-based and separate.
DEVOTEE: I am doing this as I am Enquiring of this feeling, but I’m not going to …
ADI DA SAMRAJ: The feeling is not going to do anything. You must Enquire of yourself, if your practice is to be true self-Enquiry. True self-Enquiry, real self-Enquiry in the Way of the Heart, requires self-understanding to begin with. You can ask the question associated with it, [Speaking rapidly] “Avoiding relationship, avoiding relationship, avoiding relationship, avoiding relationship?” You can even sing it to yourself [in a sing-song voice] “Avoiding relationship, avoiding relationship, avoiding relationship, avoiding relationship?” [Imitating a crooner] “A-void-ing re-lation-ship!” [Laughter.] You can make a mantra out of it to avoid the sensation. In fact, this is how you all work.
DEVOTEE: I think we all know the difference between the two, Lord.
ANOTHER DEVOTEE: No, we don’t!
DEVOTEE: I think we do.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: You are stressful. Right now, even under these best of circumstances, you are just disturbed and seeking for a way out of your disturbance and therefore relating to Me falsely, wrongly. You are doing this [Making a fist of His hand]–contraction–and addressing Me, approaching Me, looking in My direction, perhaps trying some practice or another while you are sitting here, because of this thing you are doing, the stress of it. That is what is motivating everything you do, everything you say, everything you feel, everything you notice.
DEVOTEE: You are absolutely right.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: If it is so under these circumstances, where it could not really get any better in the general human sense, then how much more is it magnified in the more difficult circumstances of life, the more grossly disturbing, disappointing, painful circumstances of life? Of course, then you push the “God-Slave button”. When you get overwhelmed by the stress and the pain of it, all of a sudden you want your Infinite Floating-Deity Slave, your Teddy-Bear-in-space, to come down and give you what you want. And all of a sudden you are a religionist.
There is no such God. It is your own pain talking, inventing God, reinventing God, redefining God, bastardizing God. Then you really pull down the God falsely. Now you are relatively at ease, but you are still doing it. If you cannot feel good in this moment, when can you feel good? How is it possible to feel good if you cannot feel good now? Maybe you feel peripherally okay, but apart from that you feel disturbed, essentially in pain, essentially under stress. You feel a subtle but almost profound frustration or dis-ease even in this circumstance.
The circumstance does not account for it. Nothing about the circumstance is producing it. YOU ARE! It is what you do! Nobody else is doing it. The environment is not doing it. I am not doing it. The circumstance is not doing it–nobody else, nothing else, just you.
Justification
DEVOTEE: It is so automatic, Sri Gurudev, that it is hard to see it.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: NO, IT IS NOT! It is eminently easy. It is as clear as the nose on My face.
DEVOTEE: Well, the identification of …
ADI DA SAMRAJ: You are blapping to Me in your pain. That is why you are saying what you are saying right now! That is why it seems to make sense to you. You are under stress. You are dis-eased, frustrated, blunted, separate, threatened–for your very existence! Just to be here is to be under threat. You could drop dead right now. Suddenly the most excruciating pain could come over you! Somebody could run into the room and say that something immensely terrible is happening to everyone! But even if that does not happen, even though you are not anticipating it, you have accounted for it in your stress. You are doing it, right now!
DEVOTEE: Sri Gurudev, I came here tonight prepared to ask You how I could quicken the process of self-understanding …
ADI DA SAMRAJ: That is a boring question. I have answered it so many times!
DEVOTEE: Your Divine Power is blasting me, Helping me feel how much stress and frustration I feel. All over my body I feel a great contraction and anxiety.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: And I Am the Radiant Force of Non-Separateness Itself! Yet you are sitting there feeling that! You cannot bridge those few feet across the room.
DEVOTEE: No, I cannot.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Even though I Am over there where you are as well, you cannot get with it.
DEVOTEE: No, I can’t.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: You think that all you have to do is to be here and bathe in the Blessedness and you will be all right. That is not enough.
ANOTHER DEVOTEE: We are shrinking from it at the same time we are seeking it.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: At the same time you are in My Company you are separated from My Company, you are dramatizing the act of self-contraction right now! Therefore, merely to be in My Company is not enough. How often has it been regretfully said in the traditions that even though people were given access to Realizers of one degree or another, allowed to be in the Company of the Realizers, serving them all the time, most of those people got nothing–or very little. Why is it so, then? Since My Radiant Presence Is sufficient, and since all you have to do is come into It, why do you not feel altogether good? Why are you not sublimed to the Perfect Degree right now?
Of course such sudden Realization is eminently possible, but the reason it is not happening is that you are engaged in a particular act right now, here in My Company, as you are at all other times. You are enforcing that action constantly and making a life out of it. Therefore, you are doing it right now, and you are also feeling it and all its results and all its imposition on you. You are likewise ready to go out and dramatize it some more when we break up for the evening. Even though you are in My Company, you do not have the arms.
DEVOTEE: Sri Gurudev, I feel the small thimble that I hold up.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: More poetry.
DEVOTEE: I am a very bodily based …
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Talk to Me right now, then.
DEVOTEE: I an a very bodily based character.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: That is not right now. That is an assessment.
DEVOTEE: I feel Your Transmission right now in the front of my body, and I feel that I am willing to be satisfied with that limit, just feeling You here.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: You want to stay here, just as you are, self-contracted, and receive some consoling sensation because I am here. You have that much of a trick going for you.
Understanding
Moving beyond it is about self-understanding. You cannot just practice tricks of what you think is Ishta-Guru Bhakti and have that be the Way of the Heart. The Way of the Heart requires true Ishta-Guru Bhakti and true self understanding. Both must appear. Both must be demonstrated. But you tend to bypass one or the other. Either you are exaggeratedly weak in devotion, or you are exaggeratedly weak in self-understanding, and sometimes, or in the general case, you are weak in both.
You cannot be one or the other, and you cannot fail to be both, obviously. Right practice in My Company requires self-understanding.
DEVOTEE: That is what I must develop–self-understanding.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Along with sensitivity. You must have sensitivity to the pain of your own approach to Me. And you must deal with it in order to Commune with Me truly, in order to respond to Me truly. Regardless of what you people have on your minds, this is not a difficult matter. It is not difficult at all. I can only state it plainly because it is so simple. It is not a complicated matter. It is eminently possible for you to understand this, to grasp this point, as I said when I first began to Teach. This is what I told everyone the very first night.
Why didn’t I Give fifty thousand other lectures before I said it? Because anyone can understand in any moment, that is why. You can deal with it now. In any moment you can grasp this Argument. It does not require the genius of an Einstein. It does not require an education! It is a very simple, ordinary, human matter that can be grasped by the very simplest observation of yourself. But you are still nodding at Me and glaring at Me as if you do not get it. You are just practicing self-contraction now, just seeking now, and ready to get up when we break up for the evening and go do it some more with everything else that you do.
Coming to this gathering is a kind of coming to the Communion Hall. All other life-matters are set aside. You are just gathering with Me and “considering” things with Me. But as soon as you get up from here, you are ready to go do your thing again, with all the complications that you build into your ordinary life here. How many faculties, how many functions, are being animated by you? Basically you are just here without other obligations, presenting yourself intelligently to Me. You are here to “consider” this very simple matter, and nothing else is intervening. You have no other obligations. You are not doing anything with the body except taking a piss break every now and then. Apart from that, you are not doing anything bodily. You have no bodily obligations and no social obligations. The men sit to one side, and the women sit to the other. Therefore, there are no social interactions going on at the moment, no phones calls, nothing intervening, just as when you go to the Communion Hall every day.
Yet here you are, acting as if you are oblivious to what I am saying.
DEVOTEE: Sri Gurudev, I am feeling tonight as You are talking that all the things I have done in my practice that I thought were counter-egoic activities were not. I am feeling that most fundamental self-understanding must be in place before I can even really engage in looking at it.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: How can you engage in anything counter-egoic if you do not understand egoity? You may be doing things to work against the results of egoity and to try to feel a little better, but to be practicing Truth, to be practicing truly counter-egoic activity, you must understand the ego, you must be in the place of understanding it.
You are already in that place! You are doing this act! What is so remarkable is that you cannot grasp this fact.
Listening
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Are you all aware of your stress now? You are doing it–right now. You are pinching yourself. You are doing this, whole bodily, altogether. You are doing this contraction. The stress you say you are feeling is the result of what you are doing. It is not a result of anything going on in the room or in your life at the moment. It is a result of this act that you are engaging without inspecting it.
Inspect it! Feel the sensation of it, and see that you are doing it. If you truly see that you are doing it, you will let it go.
DEVOTEE: Sri Gurudev, I was feeling that right then, right now, feeling the self contraction as I am. I began to feel that I am doing that, and the activity began to dissolve.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: See it further. You are doing it right now, the fundamental sensation of dis-ease that will otherwise make you do this or that or the other thing in your life, that would otherwise even make you talk to Me now, blink the next blink, make the next turn to the right or left. That stress makes you do all that.
Investigate it. It can only be investigated in feeling. Talking about it is not the investigation of it for real–not directly. It must simply be felt, entered into, in a feeling investigation, a feeling examination just of the fact of it, the sensation of it. Feel it. Enter into it in that manner. And see that you yourself are doing the knot. [Pause.]
The more you feel that you yourself are doing it, the more it relaxes. And then you begin to feel Me. You are, as it relaxes, directly surrendered, truly forgetting yourself, entering into the field of Non-Separation, Which is My Very Nature, Condition, Sign, Demonstration, Transmission.
That disposition, that investigation that I just Called you to, is listening. That is what it is to listen to Me. There are many other aspects of your practice of listening in My Company, but this is fundamentally what it is. Feel into that knot of stress. Feel into it and account for it. See it as your own action. Regard Me in that moment, in every moment. Then the surrender comes, the self-forgetting comes, the feeling of relatedness arises spontaneously, the native sense of Non-Separateness is felt.
Is anybody getting any of that?
DEVOTEES: [Ecstatically] Yes!
ADI DA SAMRAJ: It is just a matter of making a deeper accounting, a direct accounting, for the stress that is motivating your acts, instead of surrendering yourself to the desire, the reactivity, the seeking, the objects, the others. Listen to Me. Register this sensation of stress, this fundamental disturbance. Enter into it most profoundly. In doing so, you will discover the stress to be your own action, and in that mere discovery–not by some other effort but in that mere discovery–the opening begins. Then you respond to Me, then you can feel Me, and in that feeling of Me you are surrendered, you are forgetting yourself.
This is the simple mode of the practice. It encompasses both self-understanding and Ishta-Guru Bhakti. It requires just such depth of listening, just such tacit examination, in any moment. From that depth, all the elaboration of the practice can be understood, embraced, and animated. But you must be in exactly the disposition that I have just Called you to. You must be in that disposition, moment by moment, not in your reacting, desiring, seeking, concentrating on objects and others–not that–but just the mode of examining the inherent stress that is behind all that. In the examining of it, it unfolds, and then you are My devotee. Then you can exercise the “conscious process”, “conductivity”, self-discipline, service, meditation. That devotion to Me, that depth of devotion made by self-understanding, is true devotion to Me.
And you see how quiet it is. When you feel and need less, that is devotion to Me. Not AAAA-AAHHHHHH! ! [He screams wildly.] AAAAA-AAHHHHHHH! Gave you a jolt, did I? [Laughter.]
[To one of the men] You were writing all the time everyone else was examining this matter.
DEVOTEE: It is my tendency.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: This is how you do it. Forget tendency–I Called you to “consider” this matter, just in the form I Called you to. If you had anything to write, you could have written it later. You have to keep the mind occupied–that is your search. You are exercising the search in this rather gentle manner. Writing some things down may seem totally innocuous and all right. But that is how you remain preoccupied with the stress of the search. [Sri Gurudev pretends to write feverishly.] Dzdzdzdzdzdzdzd, dzdzdzdz, dzdzdzdz–writing it down nervously, trying to keep the mind going, still that stress is making it happen. And then on some other day you will read it and talk it, stressed all the while, instead of realizing this very quiet depth of examination, of “consideration”.
And if that is the place of self-understanding, that is also the place of devotion to Me.
In your moments of real devotion to Me, if you have moments of kirtan, moments of moving ecstasy, fine! Be demonstrative in your devotion to Me–fine–but on the basis of this in-depth examination, which is necessarily quiet, not seeking, truly examining yourself, examining the fundamental stress that is motivating everything in you. That is the place of true devotion. If there is any devotional activity that is physically more moved and loud, it should be based on the heart-matter of your devotion to Me, truly done.
This is why the “consideration” of self-understanding and Ishta-Guru Bhakti can be meditative, why it can be done in the Communion Hall, which is a quiet place where nobody says a word, nobody makes a movement basically, except a few nervous physical movements or otherwise kriyas. Even your moving life must be this profound. Whatever you are doing, this depth must be registered in you. That is the moment to moment practice.
But you are always busy all the time, and you never get to the point of in-depth examination of the stress that is the self-contraction. If you did, don’t you see that the mode of your living would change by your living in this depth of examination, this depth of devotion to Me, rather than in your superficiality? It would change everything. And so it should!
That is actually what I am Calling you to do! Actually to do that! Then you will see the difference it makes to listen to Me deeply and account for the self-contraction in depth. Just to be doing it grants equanimity to you even bodily, grants equanimity to your speech, your actions, your feelings, because you are registering this depth-point and going beyond it and feeling Me.
“In my Retirement from ..Teaching, the principle form of your association with me, if you come into my personal sphere, is that which is developed in my Company when I am simply established in my native Mode, my natural Disposition. But what would your disposition in turn if you were likewise purposed in my Company? You would not require me to reflect you to yourself, to engage in the Teaching mode. You would have to value some other Influence to mine to approach me. You would have to value the likeness in yourself of my own natural Disposition. You would have to value things like equanimity, quietness, the mind’s relaxing, the whole body-mind’s relaxing from its seeking, its distress, its various motivations. You would have to value this Disposition and what it serves in you relative to the whole of your practice”
Adi Da Samraj – The Guru Tradition, August 3, 1987
This is the context of practice of the Way of the Heart, not merely outer observances. This is what it means to listen Me: to be examining this point of contraction in depth, to feel it, and by its unfolding to feel Me. That is self understanding and devotion to Me. Both fundamental elements of the Way of the Heart are accounted for in the same instant. That is what it is to practice the Way of the Heart moment to moment, then.
Do you all have some sense of what I am talking about?
Did you feel the unfolding of that knot during this period of our “consideration”? Is there anyone who did not?
DEVOTEE: I didn’t.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Who else? So–we should talk to you, then, full of problems.
DEVOTEE: I just did not feel the unfolding of the knot. I felt the crunch, and I still feel it now.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes! But entering into it deeply was the “consideration”. You are just at the periphery, at the reaction, and being motivated by it. That is your habit, your nervousness, your preoccupation.
So you did not enter into it so profoundly. If it was such a grand and difficult matter, how come nobody else failed to feel it? The others did. In some significant sense you did not. This does not mean that it is greatly difficult. It just means you did not enter into it, being a rather agitated, egoically “self-possessed” character in a rather stark and rigid manner. You did not simply feel it, investigate it feelingly. You just stood here in the nervousness of the stress itself rather than entering into it deeply. You are experiencing the peripheral emotions, the peripheral mind-forms, the periphery of the stress rather than entering deeply into it.
You must enter into it deeply. Whether you experienced it in that few moments or not is really beside the point. At least you understand what I am talking about.
DEVOTEE: I do, I absolutely do.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: And whatever you must do to bring yourself to enter into your own egoic “self-possession” in depth, that is what you must do. Until then, you will still be yammering about all the things you want to do out here and around–be the golden boy, sexy with everybody, selling big candy–just the stress itself registered by the search rather than the depth of the stress itself. When you enter into it deeply, you are discovering in that deepening that it is your own act, and the mere discovery of it is the relaxation of it. That is what you must find out. Try it out.
You all do not believe it is okay to lose interest in what is going on in life, in your life and in the lives of others around you and in the whole world. You think it is not okay. To lose interest to what is ordinarily going on is the secret of renunciation. To renounce is not okay from the worldly point of view, but from the point of view of those truly involved in the religious life and the matter of Truth itself it is not only okay–it is necessary.
You always think you must find another reason to be enthusiastic about garbage. Those who are most serious and who understand see garbage all around, not only in their own case but in everybody else’s case and in all the usual things that are being done. Ordinary life is just garbage, a harrowing affair of suffering and illusions, going absolutely nowhere but on to death! You are afraid to look at yourself, look at those around you, look at the world, listen to the news, and get the point.
The daily news has been going on since I was born. And it has always been-always!–the garbage of eminently stupid people hawking on one another. And not just the daily news but the daily everything that everybody is doing.
That is why there are so many comedians in the world trying to entertain everybody. Their basic message is that life is garbage as it is being lived, that everybody is a fool, and it is better to laugh at it because laughing at it gives you a little moment of consolation and relief. That is the point of all the joking. The whole thing is a kind of terrible comedy!
Do you see the principle? You like to hear jokes because they give you a moment of relief. That is why you allow professional comedians. And you tell jokes to one another or make moments of amusement with one another. This is part of the device of ordinary life. It is not wrong in the sense that you should be moralistically negative about it. Just understand what you are doing. Enter into it deeply.
You do not have to be hopeful about existence. You must get serious and become involved in the Truth, which is what life is really for. Truth is what is necessary. Therefore, the renunciate attitude toward life not only as you are living it but as everybody is living it is essential.
Getting that message awakens the heart altogether. It makes you compassionate. It does not make you a negative character among others. It makes you a positive one, but not just someone “oinking” out the worldly message or the worldly pursuit. It makes you someone who is a renunciate, whose life is God-ward, going to Truth, going to Ultimate Realization.
It does not take a genius to know that the whole world is bullshit. But you all do not get it. You are still like the salesman–you can always think of a circumstance in which you might be fulfilled. You never get the point! You do not get the point about DEVOTEE: I have been noticing, Sri Gurudev, that more and more this has been occurring. As I talked to You some nights ago about Your Enquiry of us …
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Oh? Some nights ago?
DEVOTEE: About how effective it is.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: That is good.
DEVOTEE: I am afraid even to speak from this place because I keep wanting to get back inside and get my thoughts together …
ADI DA SAMRAJ: You ought to blast the hell out of these thoughts, as I once said. To be continuous is to be thoughtless. It is to live in the Great Swoon of Faith, of Absoluteness, of Continuity, of Non-Separation. Then who would be concerned about even death?
But you want to “oink” right back. Therefore, you must make this “consideration” continuous. It is not a moment, not a one-liner, not last week or the day before or an hour ago or ten minutes ago or three seconds ago. It is right now! The “consideration” must be continued. In every moment you must enter into the depth of examination to which I Called you a little while ago. Otherwise you fly to the periphery, you are dramatizing, you are avoiding the stress of this knot, this dis-ease, that is motivating your life.
You must be serious about this dis-ease that is motivating your life. Enter fully into it. When you enter fully into it, the fingers let go of the pinch, the knot dissolves, and you respond to Me. Then there is really self-surrender, really self-forgetting, because of My Attractiveness. That is devotion to Me. It must be done just that seriously, just that profoundly, in every moment. Otherwise you yank back into the contraction and fly to the periphery, and you are dramatizing with mind, emotion, and body in every circumstance, and you are working over every relation with your seeking madness.
Just because the way you do it is more or less socially acceptable, you think it is all right. It is not all right, not from the point of view of Truth, not from the point of view of Divine Communion–not at all.
DEVOTEE: Master, I can see why You Say that true hearing is actually a kind of Samadhi. The self-contraction is so relieved that the point of view changes and everything is different.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: That is the Contemplation of Non-Separateness, or unqualified relatedness. It is not the end of the Way of the Heart. It is the foundation of it. It is very much in the likeness of the end of the Way of the Heart, actually, but it is just not yet the end. You must do the sadhana from that point of view, and to do the sadhana from that point of view you must be serious and involved in the depth of this “consideration” moment by moment.
Self-understanding and devotion at depth–this is what you must do every moment. You are not to slam back and on to the periphery. You must be more serious than that.
You are basically trying to feel good. Why would one want to get into union with feeling good if one were not already feeling bad? You must understand that Natively you always already feel good. But not the way you are doing it. You are not in the Native Position. You are in the position of the self-contraction. If you would Stand Prior to it and feel beyond it, you would always already feel good in the most profound heart-sense. It would not make any great difference how the rest of the body-mind felt, because the body-mind is part of the conditional world and always subject to negative changes and disintegration and death. But when you are in the heart-place, you are Awake. You always already feel good. Always! Already!
Key Points
* * * * * *
“I am not here to tell you bad news. This is not a time to respond in fear. Fear and separation are what is creating this time. I am Here to Wake you up to the insanity of the present world situation.
I am here in the midst of the beginning of a terrible time, this grossness, to give everyone the option to bring an end to this madness. Either you will listen to me, hear me, change, or you will not. This is the opportunity for all mankind. It is so. Without a true response, what is to come is terrible.
It has gone too far. The suffering in this world is too great. This world of beings cannot afford neglect anymore. It is time you to stand firm. Stop deluding yourself, stop being mediocre, stop finding the loopholes in my Word. You do not have much more time of comfort. The world is closing in in its results. No one is superior to the Great Power. No one.”
Listening is considering this argument and applying it to your life.
“Attending to My Argument is called the listening process, but you are seeking instead. You are not presently listening to My Argument, then, are you? You are not listening to Me, not examining yourself according to My Word and fashioning your practice on the basis of this “consideration”. Instead, you are carrying on with your oblivious search nonsense and pretending that that is the practice. What do your search and your feeling of fear have to do with self-Enquiry”?
HEART CONVERSION TALK SERIES, Volume 1, Number 2, Religious Realism – Perpetual “reality consideration”
“Feel into that knot of stress. Feel into it and account for it. See it as your own action. Regard Me in that moment, in every moment. And then you begin to feel Me. Then the surrender comes, the self forgetting comes, the native sense of Non-Separateness is felt. This is actually what I am Calling you to do! Actually to do that. Just to be doing it grants equanimity to you, even bodily, grants equanimity to your speech, your actions, your feelings, because you are registering this depth-point and going beyond it and feeling Me. This is the context of practice of the Way of the Heart, not merely outer observances. This is what it means to listen to Me: to be examining this point of contraction in depth, to feel it, and by its unfolding to feel Me. This is not the end of the Way of the Heart. It is the foundation of it. Self-understanding and devotion at depth – this is what you must do in every moment. This is what it is to practice the Way of the Heart.”
Adi Da Samraj: April 8, 1993 – The Place Where Sadhana Begins
“At first (in the Listening course of The Only-By-Me Revealed and Given Reality-Way of Adidam), the individual becomes tacitly aware of his or her habits of seeking, desiring, doubting, believing, manipulating, betraying, and always returning to the same distress and want. In that tacit “self”-awareness, it is self evident that all of that seeking is being motivated by a constant feeling of distress, which is the result of “self”-contraction in the face of all relations and conditions.”
“The preliminary “Perfect Knowledge” Listening-practice is not a “something” to be exercised in and of itself (independent of the devotional relationship to Me). My devotees must understand: The preliminary “Perfect Knowledge” Listening-practice can be rightly (and fruitfully) exercised only in the context of the (necessarily, formally acknowledged) devotional relationship to Me.”
“Right and true Listening to Me is not the search to mentally (or verbally) understand (or, altogether, to merely conditionally and egoically “know”) Me by reading, and thinking about, and talking about, and, altogether (by egoic and conditionally-projected means), “objectifying” My Divinely Avatarically Self-Revealing Leelas and My Divinely Avatarically Self-Revealing Reality-Word-but, rather, right and true Listening to Me is the intrinsically ego-forgetting, ego-surrendering, and ego transcending devotional practice and process of silent (and prior to verbal thinking) heart-Listening (or heart-intelligent whole bodily receptivity) to the Telling of My Divine Avatarically Self-Revealing Leelas and the Recitation of My Divinely Avatarically Self-Revealing Reality-Word.
Right and true Listening to Me is tacit (silent and pre-verbal) heart-attentiveness to the Intrinsic and Non-“objective” Silence of My Divinely Avatarically Reality-Revealing Self-Nature, Self-Condition, and Self-State-As I Am (Thus, and As Such) Self-Communicated and Self-Revealed by the Acausal Self-Transmission of My egolessly Self-Revealing Divine Avataric Leelas and My egolessly Self-Revealing Divine Avataric Reality-Word.”
Beezone White and Orange Project* is a study method based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Blue & Brown Books books. The Blue & Brown Books of Wittgenstein’s were dictated as a set of notes to his student in 1934-1935.
Beezone uses a number of formats for assembling a project. One is to present a short piece directly from Adi Da. Then Beezone will write down the highlighted points from said paragraph and/or a group of like paragraphs.
The second format is ‘thematic’. Beezone will take a ‘theme’ of Adi Da’s teaching and go through various talks and essays and write down a sentence or two related to that theme or topic.
Lastly is a compilation or remix. This is a blend of the two other methods. In this style Beezone will take a number of talks and essays based on a theme. Beezone will then use the ‘cut-up’ method. The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. This method can be traced to at least the Dadaists of the 1920s, but was popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs, and has since been used in a wide variety of contexts.
Beezone
This is project is not to be confused with:
Humble One-Liners
DEVOTEE: It is like the left and right (or the world of opposites)…..Life is suffering, and then there is God.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: That is one way of putting it, in your humble one-liner fashion.
Humble one-liners are sufficient for most people to generate in them a sense of feeling consoled. They are like teddy bears.
So a lot of people reduce the religious life to something like one-liners that they pull out to snuggle with. But how can one settle for that couple of sentences worth of comprehension as the attitude of ones existence? It is a profound matter.
The only way to save yourselves from the destiny of religious one-linerism is to constantly and directly study my teaching, read the great traditions, study them. Stay in the process of this great “consideration”, instead of just sitting around and ‘smoking the pipe”, rapping out dharma and consoling yourselves with your teddy bear knowledge…”