Action and Consciousness

Whatever you appear to do, your activity is always an extension of your apparent self.

Whatever you do to another, you necessarily do to your apparent self.

You cannot directly cause an inward effect on another.

You can directly cause an inward effect only on your apparent self.

Whatever effect you may appear to have on another, the other must consent to actually do to himself or herself.

Likewise, no other can directly cause an inward effect in you except to the degree that you consent to do it to your apparent self.

Therefore, at the heart, you are not a doer, nor one to whom anything is done but you Are only the Inherently Perfect Witness, and only the Very Self-Condition of apparent actions.

Realize This.

Realize the Source-Condition of your apparent individual self and Be Set Free from all appearances of egoic action.

Transcending Victim Consciousness

MARCH 23, 1995

DEVOTEE: In spite of conscious effort to do otherwise, we find we’ve ended up with our parents, and duplicating the type of pattern that our parents themselves manifested. In particular, Beloved, I have lived my life not being terribly mindful that someone who felt deeply was controlling my life for me. I haven’t particularly minded that because I have lived in the mind, and being safely tucked away there I didn’t need to feel as much. It was brought to me with great clarity and intelligence that my parents had a similar controlling relationship in their life. And I have allowed my intimate partner to set the emotional tone for the relationship.

AVATARA ADI DA: Of course, one’s history is useful to examine and be frank about and see how patterns developed and were stimulated and so on. But that’s not the essence of hearing. The notion of being the victim and so on is based on the idea that your suffering is caused from without. To understand this is the essence of hearing. One’s fundamental suffering is not caused from without. Yes, there can be pain, difficulty, bad circumstances, on and on, but your life of disturbance, of pain, and so forth is not caused from without. It is due to your own reaction, your own reaction to conditions of existence.

That reaction is the self-contraction, egoity itself. Egoity is not caused from without. Egoity is your own act. This is what must be understood. One’s seeking, one’s disturbance, one’s dissatisfaction,-on and on, is one’s own activity. To understand this is to be free from the victim consciousness, or the whole notion that one’s fundamental difficulty is somehow caused by others or the conditions of existence, the conditions of manifested existence.

This is the essence of hearing, then. The transcendence of the victim strategy is the essence of hearing. The transcendence of the notion that your suffering is caused from without is the essence of hearing. This is most fundamental. The transcendence of the notion of being victimized by life is hearing, or another way of describing what hearing is about, you see. This is why hearing is the foundation of this Way. This Way is not a self-based developmental process, you see. It is a self-transcending process that even transcends all of the potential developmental stages of life. This is one of the unique aspects of the Way I have Revealed to you-and it must not be bypassed. One can enter into a developmental process, even Spiritually, and even in My Company, but that’s not the Way of the Heart. It’s just part of the human potential, that’s all. And it’s not enough-and is, in any case, part of the psycho-biography of the ego, unless there’s true hearing, the true capability for self-transcendence.

So the victim notion, the victim self-image, the sense that one’s suffering is caused, is the illusion that must be transcended. It’s not just one among the things that you should have observed and understood, but didn’t, you see. It’s the thing to understand-the most fundamental thing. It is the foundation discovery of one who practices as My devotee. And, on its basis; .all the rest of the Way develops,

Ultimately, then, you see, it doesn’t even make any difference what your parents were like, what you experienced in your childhood about any matter whatsoever. It’s useful to examine, but it hasn’t caused your life of suffering. Your life of suffering is your own activity. And you use events, happenings, experiences, to justify your own egoity – or in other words, the habit of self-contraction.

When you understand yourself most fundamentally, then you do not dramatize the habit of self-contraction. You do not dramatize egoity. Instead, you directly transcend it moment to moment.

To truly understand yourself and to be helpful to others, you’ve got to get out of this Western psychiatric mode of thinking that looks at causes rather than egoic self. It looks for excuses for being an ego. There are none. It is now, and always has been, your own activity. It’s your own choice in the face of the conditions of existence. And it winds you into a habit that binds you in the midst of conditions, all conditions. Right life is purposed to Ultimate Realization, Ultimate Liberation. Therefore, it’s not about developing the egoic self, enlarging the egoic self, evolving the egoic self, All those are conditional processes and searches, possibilities among conditions, They are all self-referring. The separate self referred to, the ego, the self-contraction, is what must be understood and transcended. The habit of egoity must be transcended. The results of egoity must be transcended. The conditions in which egoity arises must be transcended. All of conditional existence must be transcended.

Conditional existence is inherently unsatisfactory. When one understands this, instead of seeking, then, one transcends the seeker. And that is the fundamental process of this Way-and fundamental to its uniqueness.

That Which is to be Realized is not among conditions, not among causes and effects. It is not caused, cannot be caused, cannot be Realized as an effective action. It is There Where there is no self-contraction. It is inherently and always already There. But to Realize It, all the forms of self-contraction must be transcended. All bondage to seeking, all bondage to conditions, must be passed beyond.

Even the process of energies in the body-mind, natural energies, Spiritual Force, all of this must be transcended. They are not Liberating in the Ultimate sense. For one who hears, the Spiritual process is part of the means of Ultimate self-transcendence, and not part of a process of self-development. That Which is to be Realized is Prior to conditions. That Which is Prior to conditions is not obvious until the self-contraction is transcended. And the self-contraction is reaction to conditions. It is the reaction that takes the form of separateness, the illusion of separateness, and the life of separativeness. Separateness is the foundation pain, and it is self-caused.

If you are truly serious in My Company, this is what you come to understand. So analysis of causes has minimal use. It’s a part of examining how you did this, your own reaction, the self-contraction, the act of separateness, the act of casting yourself into the illusion of separateness, of separation, of independence, isolation, unwholeness in the Ultimate sense.

In the process of Realization there’s a tour through the mechanisms of the body-mind, and the phenomena associated with those mechanisms. It covers all-all aspects of

conditional existence ultimately. And then the heart-root is found. Some here speak of sometimes feeling something in the right side of the heart. They feel My Presence there. They feel a Current there. They feel some kind of tension there, and so on. That’s not it. I remember Saying last night to some who were sitting around Me, about some people describing this experience on the right side of the heart. I Said it is not energy. It’s Consciousness Itself, you see. The Realization at the root is a Realization of Consciousness Itself, not merely the feeling of energy in the right side of your physical heart, you see. It is the last place-in fact the first place-the last to be found but the original place of the self-contraction, taking the form of attention, the feeling of relatedness.

Prior to the self-contraction is the Feeling of Being-Prior to all relatedness, all illusions of separateness, and all illusions of caused suffering. Suffering is entirely your own action. The body-mind can suffer in difficult conditions, and there is pain. And one feels natural sympathy for others in pain. But the domain of pain is not the domain of Liberation. It is not the domain of Truth. It is just the domain of suffering. And to deal with it, you must transcend your own act and not merely uncover all the memories in which you were caused to suffer in the body-mind. That’s “Narcissus”, you see.

So this Way is altogether about transcending victim-consciousness, then. It is to cease to be victimized by the universe. It is to transcend the illusion that you are victimized by the universe, trapped in the universe, trapped in the body-mind and so on.

You can’t do anything about what happened in the past. You can only do something about your own reaction. So in all viewing of the past, all examination of the past, what you’re really there to do is find out about your own reaction, and how it took the form of various patterns and so forth. But ultimately it is always the same thing-self-contraction, movement into separateness, reacting to conditions, and then seeking in the midst of conditions for a solution of one kind or another, rather than simply transcending the self-contraction itself.

This Way is therefore not about seeking solutions based on the self-contraction, but directly, instead, directly transcending the self-contraction and moving beyond the search in the midst of conditions, transcending that search in Divine Communion, Ultimately Divine Self Realization.

DEVOTEE: Thank You Beloved. This is clarifying for me.

AVATARA ADI DA: The human dramatization must be gone beyond. And one who is My devotee has means to do so. You can be having difficulties, fine-they shouldn’t be dismissed in some glib fashion-but you have got to get down to work about it and exercise intelligence, and response to Me altogether. When a person is willing to do that, then he or she can begin to deal with the difficulty. When someone is not willing to do it, then he or she is just dramatizing on you, even. A lot of people just want somebody to lay their number onto, you see. That’s everybody, at one point or another. But that is not fruitful-not beyond a point, anyway. Then the very one who is claiming to be a victim winds up victimizing others, you see.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, Your devotees have great strength, and I praise them for it. The compassionate gesture that You Call us to in relation to each other is reflected in Your own Play with devotees. And the Leela of Your Strength and Your holding us all to what You have Done is the guiding light in any of these matters where people are experiencing temporary difficulties.

AVATARA ADI DA: You are all experiencing permanent difficulties. [Laughter.] And I am here to Show you the Way out of it. And I know what I am talking about. And I know what I’m Doing. So-use it, then. Get down to it. It involves a different course than the ego would take, and that worldly people take. So you have to know what that course is and apply it-this devotion, and all that entails. And that is it. Hm?

The rest is dramatization, Narcissus at the pond. See, Narcissus thinks the one he is looking at and adoring is somebody else. Narcissus doesn’t think he is looking at himself. He finds that out, he wakes up. Now he thinks he is looking at something else. So you all look at your pain, your disturbance, your seeking, and so forth, and you look at all the causes, all the rest of it, you see-you are looking at something else, not at yourself. You have to find out that have a secret in all of that. Your own reaction is the secret in all of that. And then deal with that directly, in this devotion.

There is a lot of purification to go through in all of that, certainly. But it is by persisting in that devotion, truly self-surrendering, self-forgetting, moment to moment, all faculties given, you see, that really done, that Yoga really done, with all the disciplines it requires, and persisting in it. Those who do, have a Leela to tell others-that it works, you see. And that is what serves.

And abandoning that particular discipline, that Way, you see, and just getting involved in dramatization, illusions, looking at all the causes, the “blame-game”, all the rest of it, you see, is the dramatization of egoity, and it doesn’t work. You can all tell that story, too.

Egoity is bondage, and it makes bondage, and it goes on and on. It doesn’t come to an end. I have told you all also, again and again, apply the religious means. This is a religious Way of life. Don’t get into the psychiatric, self-help game and all the other variations on worldliness and pretend that you are still doing this Way, or serving people in this Way, you see. To serve them you simply serve them with the religious means, not a lot of clever revisions of it made of other disciplines or worldly disciplines, and ego-games and so on, you see. Purely use the religious means.

“Reality consideration” groups are not psychiatric T-groups, therapy groups, self-help groups, in that sense. That is not what it is about. I have observed people using it that way over the years. And I have had to correct devotees about this on numerous occasions. That is not what it is about. It is a responsible discipline applied by people who really are My present-time devotees, using, or practicing, all the means of this Way. They make their confessions there, get it out of the inside and make it known, others reflect them back to themselves-all for the purpose of observing the self-contraction, seeing it for real in every context of life, until you really get the point, are really responsible for it. That is hearing.

Play another game, conventional therapy game or whatever, you see, you have already established a different principle, not the principle of this Way, not the vow. That is not the context anymore. It is some poor ego suffering this or that, claiming to suffer this or that, dramatizing it, wanting to invade your life through sympathetic ploys and so on, bypass the means of this Way and magnify their own suffering in the minds and hearts and lives of the other people. It is not useful. It doesn’t work.

So always “consider” matters in the context of this devotion, this Way-its principles, its means. In that context, listen to what people have to say, reflect them back to themselves, you see. Don’t be there to be their victim, either. They hate victim, good. You don’t like it either. So you are not going to be the victim there, you see. That is it. Flat. Be straight. You see?

Every victim is also a maker of victims. What they blame everyone else for is also what they do. I am not speaking cynically when I say this. I’m talking about what self-knowledge requires, you see. Self-knowledge is not merely information about the egoic self. Self-knowledge is an ability to transcend egoic self. All mere information is babble. It has little or no use-modest use at best. As an accumulator of information, you certainly must know what I am talking about.

DEVOTEE: Yes, Beloved. Less so in the past two years than in other previous years.

AVATARA ADI DA: That’s good you are getting better and better every day. [Laughs.] Less of that victimer-than-thou attitude. [Laughs.]