The following are a variety of talks and published essays over many years by Adi Da Samraj
Human awakening is the product of a inherent biological urge. This process of awkening is inherent in the psycho-biological structures of every human being.
Unfortunately awakening, spirituality and religion are associated with archaic belief systems, and illusions of mystical flight from the world and therefore tend to remain at an infantile and adolescent level of understanding.
The future possibilities of the awakening of ‘Man’ lies in the biological structures of the human body-mind itself. And that evolutionary mechanism is present in every human being. It is only more consciously activated or served in more awakened individuals, but it is present in everyone, and it may be awakened in anyone through self-critical insight and higher disciplines of the body-mind.
The higher evolutionary mechanisms in the nervous system and brain have yet to be studied and understood from a modern scientific point of view, and thus the future evolutionary and higher religious culture of Man has yet to receive its scientific justification in the popular mind. Humanity in general is now in a period of transition from the childish cultism of archaic religion and the adolescent exclusivism of scientific materialism to the future age of higher and evolutionary-religious and spiritual culture.
The human individual is natively or structurally disposed to grow beyond his present limits of understanding. This wisdom is not a new invention of my own. It has been the basic presumption behind esoteric societies all over the world for countless centuries.
Adi Da Samraj
More >>>
To create a human sanctuary for higher adaptation of the human species is a primal human urge. We inherently desire a human and natural environment in which we can live without the chronic production of stress chemistry. We know, deeply, psychically, that we cannot realize that transformation until we can create a culture in which people can live without degenerative stress. Thus, sanctuary, or spiritual community, is the motive in humans that contain the genetic secret of the next stage in human evolution.
We presently live under stress, in a subhuman culture whose populace is completely confused even in the most elemental levels of existence. We are all involved in an animal-like struggle for survival without much intelligence. Such a circumstance tends to stimulate a chemical profusion in the body that enables it to function and survive under stress, but that chemical design does not allow the higher psychic and subtle centers of the body-mind to awaken. On the contrary, this stress chemistry triggers the degenerative processes of aging as well as all other forms of bodily degeneration, and this same stress chemistry is generally empty of the profound genetic signals that can trigger the higher evolutionary functions of Man.
Until we have created a human order that is fundamentally free of mutual threat, it will not be common for people to live in a truly awakened and peaceful state, not only of mind, but of body (or the total body-mind). The evolutionary mechanism of the bodily being is programmed to awaken its next higher centers of function only when the chronic problems of its lower functional centers have been solved and when the being can live without chronically creating degenerative stress chemistry.
The body-mind must receive the signals that the stressful world has been overcome, that we need not fear, that we presently have a peaceful human society, not a society full of bombs and benighted craziness. You can perhaps make yourself more comfortable by becoming free of some of the anxiety of your ordinary daily life, but you cannot thus become so peaceful that the right hemisphere of the brain and the higher evolutionary mechanisms of the body-mind as a whole are stimulated. To enter into your higher human destiny, you must be altogether “cured” in your deep psychic heart.
Certainly, we would like the quality of our existence to be different. But people in general are not yet moving toward anything significantly different. Thus, the would-be human world is yet a lower-adapted, subhuman world. Perhaps some people are more highly evolved-people who can live an apparently moral, ecstatic, or spiritually devoted life but they are not common. Most people are fixed in their adaptation to living under stress, and they do not know enough to create human and spiritual sanctuary for themselves.
How, then, will you come to that point of feeling totally without anxiety, without fear, without any of the ordinary mortal consciousness in the midst of your daily life? How will you transcend that fear? You cannot until you overcome the lower evolutionary dimension of the body-mind, which is oriented to a life of physical distress and the struggle to survive bodily, including the stress of feeling that you are mortal, that perhaps when you die you are just plain dead. Until you enjoy a greater consciousness, you can never be certain about the matter of your death.
more >>>
Have you had any experience that is totally sufficient? Do you like the experience you have, your experience altogether? Are you just coping? Isn’t it a way of dealing with a situation that is not sufficient? Every moment of it. It seems to you that there is nothing absolute you can do about it right now, nothing absolute you can do to be free of existence as mere coping and struggling with a state that is not completely satisfactory. And this is what I’m saying. There is a Way, but I am talking about the difference between what is truly available to you in any moment and what you are experiencing.
In general, individuals cope with their given situation of existence. They do not even believe there is a sufficient state of existence to be Realized. Therefore, they seek, they make all kinds of arrangements, they cope. They do not even live the spiritual life, in general, certainly not even a true religious life. Instead, they are only coping and trying to make the best of life. No “best” comes of it, but they have no greater point of view.
Human beings are not experiencing Reality. They are experiencing a state of existence that they think they cannot do anything about in any absolute sense, and, therefore, they are coping with it. This is what human beings do. They establish their life, including philosophy, on the limited condition of existence that they suffer. They do not think there is anything absolute to be done about it, so they do what everybody does.
Therefore, in everything they do, people are just coping with their suffering, living as the self-contraction and seeking on its basis, all because they are not experiencing Reality, God, or Truth. They are not aware of Reality, God, or Truth. Instead, they are aware of their given situation, the apparent condition, which is a limit and frightening and poor, yet they have no sense that there is anything absolute they can do about it, and they do all the ordinary things people do.
Even if people get a whiff of something extraordinary to do in order to Realize What is Extraordinary, or Truly Real, the force of their own contraction tends to intervene, and they enter into the process in a mediocre, piecemeal fashion, still holding on to all their routines of coping.
If you are sensitive and of course you tend not to be very sensitive, because you are doing all kinds of things to desensitize yourself, but you can come to the point of real sensitivity-you can find out what you are doing that is preventing the Realization of Reality.
The human form exists in Reality. How could there be any argument about this? Everything exists in Reality. Whatever Reality Is, It Is, Already. If you examine yourself with great sensitivity, you find that you are not simply and merely existing in Reality. You are doing something. This is why Reality is not Obvious to you. If you were not doing that thing, Reality would simply be Obvious to you. You must find out what you are doing, and transcend it.
more >>>
The “News and Information” media of popular culture do not often invite the public to the exercise of discriminating intelligence. On the contrary, the popular media thrive on hype, propagandized states of emotion and mind, and nondiscriminating responses to every kind of advertised goods, persuasions, and results.
Until the media that inform the masses of humanity begin to invite the individual to exercise discriminating intelligence in all matters, and until human beings in general become founded in the higher Wisdom-Culture and the intimate politics of authentic human existence, there can be no true wondering about the madness we inherit in the daily News.
Indeed, the hypocritical media reaction of surprise (and sometimes disgust) in the face of all the kinds of fascinating and bizarre news in the world is even the product of a kind of competitive rivalry. The Cult of the News would be senior and superior to any phenomenon about which it reports. (From the popular point of view, the “Messiah,” or the “Messenger” is always senior to the Message.) Everyone in the world is in the cult game, including the media the themselves. Everyone wishes to be glamorous and right and the center of attention.
The News is one of the principal forms of modern popular entertainment. The Messenger is glamorized by the superior entertainment value of every kind of Message. Therefore, the News exploits the vulgarity of subhuman events and bastardizes the achievements of superior men and women. Then why should there be any wondering if immature people follow false cults, false leaders, false ideologies, and destructive causes? To be enthusiastic and also false is the hypocritical core of the “American Way.” Indeed, Western culture as a whole was founded on religious lies, political exploitation, and manipulative propaganda of every kind. And these means are yet to be overcome.
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ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mind is not merely in the brain and less than the brain. Mind is the circumstance of consciousness in its association with objects of all kinds. Mind is universal, infinite in extent. And if we put ourselves into a position to explore the roots of experiencing, we are going to enter into a realm of mind in which we realize mind to be greater than mere daily thinking and social consciousness.
Those who take up the discipline of yogic mysticism learn in the process to become responsible for the tendencies of mind and attention that cause certain experiences to arise, or cause attention to gravitate toward one or another kind of phenomenon, or cause limiting interpretations to be superimposed on experience. Through the science of yogic mysticism, living beings can enter into a pure perception of the mechanism of our existence.
But mind is greater than we conceive mind to be from the purely physical point of view. What you are seeing at the present moment is actually a vision. You are having a vision at this moment. You know that you are seeing, but you do not generally acknowledge or presume that you are having a vision. Rather, you are identified with a physically embodied state in this gross environment, and you see and hear on that basis. Thus, you are not generally in a position to understand the nature of your own experiencing.
It is more or less common knowledge, at the present time, that you are not merely seeing what is external in this room. Your seeing is, in fact, an electronic apparition, developed in the nervous system of the brain. You have no direct connection to the gross object, or objects, that you are seeming to view at the present time. In other words, you are having a vision. You are not merely seeing a gross environment, but you are having a vision of a gross environment.
Because of the tendency to be identified with the body, and also because of all the taboos associated with conventional consciousness in this world, people do not investigate, or thoroughly explore and consider, the status of their own experience in any moment.
more:
Transcending The Cosmic Mandala
It is not that only those who are in the seventh stage are enlightened. Those who are in the previous stages of practice are at times entered into the disposition of enlightenment and at other times they are not. They phase in that Realization, and their realization of the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness is not Absolute. It is covered over by one or another aspect of experiential consciousness. Only in the seventh stage of life is there absolutely nothing between the devotee and the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness, not even a thought, because the devotee is that Consciousness. Thoughts and other phenomena arise as modifications of That.
Previous to the seventh stage, you see, the individual is more or less identified with the self, or the body-mind, in one or another of its dimensions, perhaps in all of its dimensions. He or she is looking to break through into that Consciousness, that Absolute Reality. Many people who have broken through to a slightly less superficial dimension of consciousness think they are enlightened, but enlightenment is only true when it is perfect, when it has penetrated all of the possibilities of consciousness, all of the possibilities of the body. The devotee must learn to surrender, not only to the great affair of the existing universe, but to his consciousness. All things are riding, not simply on energies, but on consciousness. He must surrender bodily into the current, or energy, of the infinite affair of existence and all the universes, and he must also surrender into the Consciousness.
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The Three Disturbances (adapted)
The chronic disturbances of people separate us from living a truly illuminated and happy life.
These disturbances relate to the three primary functional dimensions of the human individual – the physical, the emotional, and the mental.
The chronic disturbances of the physical being are reactive contractions, or recoil from life, in the form of disease and general ill health, pain, toxemia, enervation, and obsessive desire for the consolations of food, sex, company, and the objective goods of human existence.
The chronic disturbances of the emotional being are reactive contractions, or recoil from love, in the form of fear, shame, sorrow, guilt, anger, jealousy, and so forth.
The chronic disturbances of the mental being are reactive contractions, or recoil from a prior presumption of our true nature, recoil from reality, recoil into doubt, deluded thinking, obsessive mentalizing, and all the consolations of knowledge in relation to experience.
Therefore, the way of truly understanding ones true nature is a matter of responsibility for all of the chronic disturbances, so that there may not be the slightest difference between us and that condition that is reality and truth.
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Human awakening is the product of a inherent biological urge. This process of awkening is inherent in the psycho-biological structures of every human being.
Unfortunately awakening, spirituality and religion are associated with archaic belief systems, and illusions of mystical flight from the world and therefore tend to remain at an infantile and adolescent level of understanding.
The future possibilities of the awakening of ‘Man’ lies in the biological structures of the human body-mind itself. And that evolutionary mechanism is present in every human being. It is only more consciously activated or served in more awakened individuals, but it is present in everyone, and it may be awakened in anyone through self-critical insight and higher disciplines of the body-mind.
The higher evolutionary mechanisms in the nervous system and brain have yet to be studied and understood from a modern scientific point of view, and thus the future evolutionary and higher religious culture of Man has yet to receive its scientific justification in the popular mind. Humanity in general is now in a period of transition from the childish cultism of archaic religion and the adolescent exclusivism of scientific materialism to the future age of higher and evolutionary-religious and spiritual culture.
The human individual is natively or structurally disposed to grow beyond his present limits of understanding. This wisdom is not a new invention of my own. It has been the basic presumption behind esoteric societies all over the world for countless centuries.
Adi Da Samraj
More >>>
To create a human sanctuary for higher adaptation of the human species is a primal human urge. We inherently desire a human and natural environment in which we can live without the chronic production of stress chemistry. We know, deeply, psychically, that we cannot realize that transformation until we can create a culture in which people can live without degenerative stress. Thus, sanctuary, or spiritual community, is the motive in humans that contain the genetic secret of the next stage in human evolution.
We presently live under stress, in a subhuman culture whose populace is completely confused even in the most elemental levels of existence. We are all involved in an animal-like struggle for survival without much intelligence. Such a circumstance tends to stimulate a chemical profusion in the body that enables it to function and survive under stress, but that chemical design does not allow the higher psychic and subtle centers of the body-mind to awaken. On the contrary, this stress chemistry triggers the degenerative processes of aging as well as all other forms of bodily degeneration, and this same stress chemistry is generally empty of the profound genetic signals that can trigger the higher evolutionary functions of Man.
Until we have created a human order that is fundamentally free of mutual threat, it will not be common for people to live in a truly awakened and peaceful state, not only of mind, but of body (or the total body-mind). The evolutionary mechanism of the bodily being is programmed to awaken its next higher centers of function only when the chronic problems of its lower functional centers have been solved and when the being can live without chronically creating degenerative stress chemistry.
The body-mind must receive the signals that the stressful world has been overcome, that we need not fear, that we presently have a peaceful human society, not a society full of bombs and benighted craziness. You can perhaps make yourself more comfortable by becoming free of some of the anxiety of your ordinary daily life, but you cannot thus become so peaceful that the right hemisphere of the brain and the higher evolutionary mechanisms of the body-mind as a whole are stimulated. To enter into your higher human destiny, you must be altogether “cured” in your deep psychic heart.
Certainly, we would like the quality of our existence to be different. But people in general are not yet moving toward anything significantly different. Thus, the would-be human world is yet a lower-adapted, subhuman world. Perhaps some people are more highly evolved-people who can live an apparently moral, ecstatic, or spiritually devoted life but they are not common. Most people are fixed in their adaptation to living under stress, and they do not know enough to create human and spiritual sanctuary for themselves.
How, then, will you come to that point of feeling totally without anxiety, without fear, without any of the ordinary mortal consciousness in the midst of your daily life? How will you transcend that fear? You cannot until you overcome the lower evolutionary dimension of the body-mind, which is oriented to a life of physical distress and the struggle to survive bodily, including the stress of feeling that you are mortal, that perhaps when you die you are just plain dead. Until you enjoy a greater consciousness, you can never be certain about the matter of your death.
more >>>
Have you had any experience that is totally sufficient. Do you like the experience you have, your experience altogether? Are you just coping? Isn’t it a way of dealing with a situation that is not sufficient? Every moment of it. It seems to you that there is nothing absolute you can do about it right now, nothing absolute you can do to be free of existence as mere coping and struggling with a state that is not completely satisfactory.
And this is what I’m saying. There is a Way, but I am talking about the difference between what is truly available to you in any moment and what you are experiencing.
In general, individuals cope with their given situation of existence. They do not even believe there is a sufficient state of existence to be Realized. Therefore, they seek, they make all kinds of arrangements, they cope. They do not even live the spiritual life, in general, certainly not even a true religious life. Instead, they are only coping and trying to make the best of life. No “best” comes of it, but they have no greater point of view.
Human beings are not experiencing Reality. They are experiencing a state of existence that they think they cannot do anything about in any absolute sense, and, therefore, they are coping with it. This is what human beings do. They establish their life, including philosophy, on the limited condition of existence that they suffer. They do not think there is anything absolute to be done about it, so they do what everybody does.
Therefore, in everything they do, people are just coping with their suffering, living as the self-contraction and seeking on its basis, all because they are not experiencing Reality, God, or Truth. They are not aware of Reality, God, or Truth. Instead, they are aware of their given situation, the apparent condition, which is a limit and frightening and poor, yet they have no sense that there is anything absolute they can do about it, and they do all the ordinary things people do.
Even if people get a whiff of something extraordinary to do in order to Realize What is Extraordinary, or Truly Real, the force of their own contraction tends to intervene, and they enter into the process in a mediocre, piecemeal fashion, still holding on to all their routines of coping.
If you are sensitive and of course you tend not to be very sensitive, because you are doing all kinds of things to desensitize yourself, but you can come to the point of real sensitivity-you can find out what you are doing that is preventing the Realization of Reality.
The human form exists in Reality. How could there be any argument about this? Everything exists in Reality. Whatever Reality Is, It Is, Already. If you examine yourself with great sensitivity, you find that you are not simply and merely existing in Reality. You are doing something. This is why Reality is not Obvious to you. If you were not doing that thing, Reality would simply be Obvious to you. You must find out what you are doing, and transcend it.
more >>>
The “News and Information” media of popular culture do not often invite the public to the exercise of discriminating intelligence. On the contrary, the popular media thrive on hype, propagandized states of emotion and mind, and nondiscriminating responses to every kind of advertised goods, persuasions, and results.
Until the media that inform the masses of humanity begin to invite the individual to exercise discriminating intelligence in all matters, and until human beings in general become founded in the higher Wisdom-Culture and the intimate politics of authentic human existence, there can be no true wondering about the madness we inherit in the daily News.
Indeed, the hypocritical media reaction of surprise (and sometimes disgust) in the face of all the kinds of fascinating and bizarre news in the world is even the product of a kind of competitive rivalry. The Cult of the News would be senior and superior to any phenomenon about which it reports. (From the popular point of view, the “Messiah,” or the “Messenger” is always senior to the Message.) Everyone in the world is in the cult game, including the media the themselves. Everyone wishes to be glamorous and right and the center of attention.
The News is one of the principal forms of modern popular entertainment. The Messenger is glamorized by the superior entertainment value of every kind of Message. Therefore, the News exploits the vulgarity of subhuman events and bastardizes the achievements of superior men and women. Then why should there be any wondering if immature people follow false cults, false leaders, false ideologies, and destructive causes? To be enthusiastic and also false is the hypocritical core of the “American Way.” Indeed, Western culture as a whole was founded on religious lies, political exploitation, and manipulative propaganda of every kind. And these means are yet to be overcome.
more >>>
It is not that only those who are in the seventh stage are enlightened. Those who are in the previous stages of practice are at times entered into the disposition of enlightenment and at other times they are not. They phase in that Realization, and their realization of the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness is not Absolute. It is covered over by one or another aspect of experiential consciousness. Only in the seventh stage of life is there absolutely nothing between the devotee and the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness, not even a thought, because the devotee is that Consciousness. Thoughts and other phenomena arise as modifications of That.
Previous to the seventh stage, you see, the individual is more or less identified with the self, or the body-mind, in one or another of its dimensions, perhaps in all of its dimensions. He or she is looking to break through into that Consciousness, that Absolute Reality. Many people who have broken through to a slightly less superficial dimension of consciousness think they are enlightened, but enlightenment is only true when it is perfect, when it has penetrated all of the possibilities of consciousness, all of the possibilities of the body. The devotee must learn to surrender, not only to the great affair of the existing universe, but to his consciousness. All things are riding, not simply on energies, but on consciousness. He must surrender bodily into the current, or energy, of the infinite affair of existence and all the universes, and he must also surrender into the Consciousness.
more >>>
Adi Da (Bubba Free John) – 1977
“Because of today’s fast communication, because there are more and more books about spirituality and more and more people traveling and talking about spiritual matters, it is easy to imagine that some great spiritual event is occurring. But people are just considering spiritual ideas. Most people who are involved with so-called spirituality are involved in superficial ways, as they would be with conventional church beliefs.
What people describe as the great spiritual age today is just a turning toward subjective matters and subjective illusions. Such a view was fostered in this country by the drug culture of the 60’s, which turned people into the subjective order. But that way is just as filled with illusions as any conventional life. It is the dimension of mind just as outward obsessions are also mind. Mind is the thing that we suffer, including the ego, which is a part of mind. Therefore, turning to the subjective order is not spiritual.
Certainly the so-called spiritual cultures arising in this country have some feeling for a fuller life. They represent a sympathy with an aspect of the body-being that Western life has tended to exclude. The subjective or emotional aspect of the being is being emphasized again, and so for that reason spiritual movements in this country look toward the East. But the subjective being is not the Truth any more than the active or objective being. Thus most people are just arbitrarily and superficially taking on Eastern religious customs in the name of spirituality.
True spirituality is a moral and spiritual transformation. And the practice of real or spiritual life begins to make a difference when people who are living conventional lives are no longer addicted to the worldly game. Not that they become otherworldly and separate from the world entirely, but they no longer live as a manifestation of conventional consciousness and interests.”
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The usual man or woman begins to include spirituality as a possibility within his or her search through the medium of his or her experience. They may start to meditate or begin reading uplifting religious and spiritual literature. This is fine, but this has nothing to do with Spiritual life.
(Bubba Free John) Adi Da Samraj – 1977
“The best thing to do, then, is to be uncomfortable. That is the one thing you do not want, though. Bottom line, nobody wants to be uncomfortable. Everybody wants to be comfortable. You do not want to use your greatest virtue, which is the virtue of discomfort and the capacity to transcend the spell. Instead of doing that you try to maintain a level of consolation and involvement with all this so that you will not feel uncomfortable.
You cannot avoid that discomfort. It is essential to your conditional life. You must find it, locate it, and really use it. That is the best thing to do. Do not be angry and sorrowful and guilty and fearful. Rather, be uncomfortable in other words not satisfied and not satisfiable in the framework of ordinary living so you will practice. You will have the will to practice transcendence, and you will do it in your daily life and in meditation. But you will not have any energy and attention for that practice if you are not uncomfortable, if you are not dissatisfied. You will tend to settle for the dissatisfaction in the form of neurotic emotion, which is not a sufficient basis for practice.”
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Taboo against the Superior Man – Love of the Armed Form (The) superior Man is present in this world only in the case of the rare individual, rather than in the form of the human world as a whole. And such an uncommon individual is regarded suspiciously by all.
The Place Where Sadhana Begins – unpublished – You may want to forestall this observation…”
Transcend Meaning – “Some people have a better experience than others in the universe of meanings in childhood, and they tend to be more effective adultsnot Enlightened, but more effective and happy in the ordinary sense.”
The Heart is the Hole in the Donut – 1976 – How did I get involved in this anyway…”.
Thursday, October 16, 2009
“Do you all know what an immense burden it is to carry on an existence from day to day. There’s something about it this promising, it implies, waking up and being somebody implies a destiny of some sort that has pleasure associated with it. The fulfillment of an idea has a pleasure associated with it. And that’s all that a born existence is. You happen to feel identified with this body, and psyche and so forth. And it carries with it the implication of pleasures, consolations, enjoyments, fulfillment’s. And that is what binds you to it. But you don’t consider the inherent suffering also which appears one-to-one, face-to-face with all of the consolations of the same birth. Hum? When you begin to become aware of the entire field of possibility, and experience of your born existence. That’s when you begin to realize the inherent suffering of birth. Of mere existence in form. Until that time you begin to, you think in base terms of your god-created life, or you know, your universe, mother-nature created life, however you describe it. You think of it in essentially positive terms, against odds. But when you truly see the nature of your life. What your experience is, in any moment. Then you begin to be released from your attachment to the fulfillment of existence. And it’s then that you may begin to do sadhana.”
more:
The Heart Is the Hole in the Donut
June 23, 1976 – A Talk, by Bubba Free John (Adi Da Samraj)
The Mood of the Heart – 1971 – unpublished notes.zone’s Daily Readin
Monday, October 19, 2009
The Mood of the Heart
“I do not call men or women to my form, for I am not present as any form or power. There is no name or light that is my form or the way to me. Whether these be found within or without. I call men to understanding and even if thousands surround the body through which you hear this, only those who understand have come to me. Therefore, understand, which is to comprehend the source, logic and effect of all your paths. Understand and thus be come involved in the utter bliss that I am, even that which stands as the consciousness of your life.
Holy sound is the silent vibrance or potency of the Heart. The real light or force of all forms, upon which all forms appear is the consciousness that is the Heart. This is the Truth. One who understands is the Heart. He knows that which cannot be spoken or heard, that which is bliss without name or form.
The Heart is the master of the outer and the inner, the high and the low, the empty and the full. Therefore, it does not require the abandonment of anything, no exclusive form of life, neither spiritual life not any form of embodiment or appearance, but it requires or enforces the real consciousness of whatever appears. The Heart is utterly free of all striving, all exclusive directions, all motives, all demands. It uses all that appears according to its free and creative intelligence, yet is never acts on anything outside itself since everything is contained within it. Therefore, it is unmoved and only blissful as unqualified conscious existence. This is the mood of the Heart and the secret life of the man or woman of understanding.”
Unpublished, 1971
Franklin Jones – Adi Da Samraj
Beezone
Water and Narcissus
Hard Earth and Stone at my Foot
“I resist and take flight from the material and life condition. The crux of the spiritual life for me now is to see and embrace this mode of reality. The material realm is relentless in its lawfulness. It is all cause and effect. I am always seeking a magic by which to overcome the laws of physics. But the matter forms are there and hard, dragging me into the necessary acceptance of their reality. To now I have tended to anxiety, impatience, self-pity and despair, striving after forms of immunity and passivity and superiority. I have opposed the law and thus failed to transcend and master it. Thus also I oppose the creative, endlessly active life forms. The intrusion of life around me make my passive artifice impossible. But when I accept these forms and their laws as necessary reality, then I am peaceful. The effort of work required of me to live and create and remain in relationship is a labor I am grateful to maintain. And the noise and process that shatters the aesthetic heaven of my household is acceptable, being a reasonable expression of life in the condition of material existence. Thus, being at one with these laws, I am firm and untroubled. I master and transcend each material problem, and I become alive and in motion, exceeding the barriers of aesthetic space, in a mood with all creative life. Thus the hard earth and stone at my foot and had teach me. And thus the children teach me. It is unreasonable to seek peace, for this aesthetic pursuit in fact seeks to undermine and thward the foundations of life and materiality. It is necessary to be already peaceful, one with the law, and thus to create in the world of this law.”
Water and Narcissus, 1969 – unpublished
Franklin Jones (Adi Da Samraj)
Note:
The period Adi Da (Franklin Jones) was writing the book Water and Narcissus was from 1967 to early 1970. He completed it while living in New York.
Tightness and Doubt – 1969 – Water and Narcissus
October 2009 – November 2009 – December 2009 – January 2010 – February 2010
Adi Da – 1982
The best thing to do, then, is to be uncomfortable. That is the one thing you do not want, though. Bottom line, nobody wants to be uncomfortable. Everybody wants to be comfortable. You do not want to use your greatest virtue, which is the virtue of discomfort and the capacity to transcend the spell. Instead of doing that you try to maintain a level of consolation and involvement with all this hardware and software so that you will not feel uncomfortable.
You cannot avoid that discomfort. It is essential to your conditional life. You must find it, locate it, and really use it. That is the best thing to do. Do not be angry and sorrowful and guilty and fearful. Rather, be uncomfortable in other words not satisfied and not satisfiable in the framework of ordinary living, and you will find me, you will hear me, you will practice. You will have the will to practice transcendence, and you will do it in your daily life and in meditation. But you will not have any energy and attention for that practice if you are not uncomfortable, if you are not dissatisfied. You will tend to settle for the dissatisfaction in the form of neurotic emotion, which is not a sufficient basis for practice.
At least this is the way it seems to me, but you know how Crazy I am! All I can tell you is the way it seems to me. The real import of all of this is not whether or not there is some order underneath it all, evil or good, whether there is some conspiracy or some creative cause. The real importance to be observed is the non-necessity of this experience and, from the conventional point of view, the binding power of this non-necessary experience. The real import of life is not to discover its hidden secrets, the secrets of its working, but to transcend it, to break its spell altogether.
Even though, as people in the world, we work to generally serve the well-being of others in this confinement and even to find out some of the secret workings behind it, even though we may do all of that as an ordinary matter, the fundamental motion of our proceedings, our energy, our consciousness, our attention should be founded in our essential discomfort and our will to transcendence. Therefore, whatever we may be doing, if we understand, we will be renunciates and practice Samadhi moment to moment and not be fools. Above all we will not be fools to ourselves. Whatever conspirators there may be elsewhere, we fool ourselves by becoming overserious about our apparition.
So, it is appropriate to have had this discussion on an evening on which we have all gathered together to watch TV!
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November 2009
from an unpublished talk
WHAT IS ITS ESSENCE – 1974
Bubba Free John (Adi Da Samraj)
AUDIENCE: We’re talking about the realization that would be true if we would only commune with you. No doubt you’ve said it a thousand times before.
ADI DA: or at least that many times.
AUDIENCE: What is the essence at least in terms of what does it really mean, the essence.
ADI DI: Its essence is not what it means. Its essence is the action. You are presently obsessed with your logic and the destiny that you conceive from your present born point of view. It has its own gesture. It has all of its own impulses, all outlines subjectively. It has its whole future outlined in desire and it would do if it were dramatized, incarnated, all the things that bypass this consideration, but if you will hear me, then your attention will be liberated from destiny, from time and space.
That doesn’t mean that you will not see tendencies and see your present life and so forth, it will continue and it will be the discipline of your existence. On the other hand, your attention will remain with me and it will not be confused by destinies, by desires, by thoughts. It will be fixed. It will be absolute. It will be full of love. It will be heartfelt without logic, without thinking, without desiring. It will be pure attention and that attention is communion.
Wherever your attention lies without confusion, that is what you realize. If you will give me your attention through true hearing, if you will be gravitated toward me in every moment so that all of your desiring, even your inevitability becomes superficial and all of that quality that arises from moment to moment will be truly superficial. Its impact will be lost. It won’t create incarnation. It will create heat only.
It will be frustrated in its goal and you will meditate on the fire and that fire will be your attention to me so that your attention from hour to hour will become more fiery, more intense, more loving, more sacrificial, more absurd, less and less the character that you are born to be and live and die but you see there must come into your case a sympathy more profound than your inevitability, a sympathy more profound than your logic.
Your logic, your presumption will remain, as artifacts of your subjectivity but your attention will stay with me. It will stay with me at every moment. When we are present with one another in our born forms, your natural emotional sympathy will stay with me.
We will love one another absolutely and when we are not in one another’s sight, we will recollect one another in love, sometimes in thought also, but in love and sympathy. In feeling attention we will stay with one another and so my meditation will be your meditation because you are with me.
You commune with me. It has nothing to do with whether I live or die once you realize your attachment to me.
November 4
“The Urgency of the Teaching” From Scientific Proof of the Existence of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House!
Also in The Whole Body of Enlighenment – Chapter 4
Beyond Doubt
Intelligent people cannot find God in such a mass of idiocy, so quite naturally they look for satisfaction elsewhere. Thus, people are preoccupied with all kinds of political and scientific idealism, as if politics and scientific and technological progress were the Way of Truth. They are absolutely not the Way of Truth. They never have been the Way of Truth. They are no more the Way of Truth than sex or any other satisfaction or fulfillment of function. None of that is the Way of Truth at all. It is the ordinary impulse of the ego, glamorizing itself by great enterprises.
If this trend toward political and scientific obsession is to be broken, some light must be brought to the whole affair of spiritual and religious understanding….If not, the world will be overwhelmed. It is almost inevitable now that it will be overwhelmed in any case. The world, even the Realm of Nature as a whole, is founded on a righteous Principle. Therefore, the world will be purified, without a doubt. The Force of the Divine pervades everything, and, therefore, It also purifies everything in one way or another. If human beings, while they have the benign capacity to enter into God-Communion, will not do so, but instead create a corrupt culture, a subhuman order, then the purification will not occur within the ordinary and benign course of natural processes…then great upheavals necessarily occur. That is how the righteous Law works. It is not just that we pay our dues for past activity. A righteous Principle is positively at work, constantly to purify and to reestablish order.
Thus, there are periods of great negative upheaval in the world, including natural disasters, wars, and conflicts of all kinds. On the one hand, during these periods, the world pays its dues for failing to live by the Law. On the other hand, these times of upheaval are the evidence of a continuous process of purification. They are themselves a demonstration of the Law. At the end of these periods, the Law is reestablished in righteousness.
It is very likely that we are entering into such a time of upheaval, because of the extent of the failure of human culture. There is simply no light abroad in the world today. There is nothing but corruption, nothing but the failure to accept the Way of God. There is absolutely no sign of the Way of Truth, except in rare instances of individuals and small groups of people. The Truth is essentially hidden and secondary. There is a long history of corruption in every area of human life, and the entire social structure of the world is devoted to subhuman ends and forms of self-indulgence. There are no signs of an imminent Golden Age in the disposition or condition of humanity at large. Rather, the signs are of the necessity for a great purification, a great reestablishment of order, a righteous readjustment of the whole world.
read more:
“The Urgency of the Teaching” From Scientific Proof of the Existence of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House!
Vision Mound Magazine – 1979
“You must find the ways to overcome the stresses, to transform the chemistry of the body literally, so that you can live long and without stress, both chemical and social, or cultural. Such a life is not possible for a group of people until they create sanctuary with one another, a mutually protected, stable, basically unthreatened way of life.
“We are threatened!” is the message of the news. It reminds us of our situation. The program of the news is all about people who are threatening one another, either with terrible violence or with just social nastiness, the exploiting of one another. Loveless society is basically the idea that we constantly reinforce in one another. We teach each other and we pass on to our children all the techniques for living as a stressful personality that reinforce the negative content of social interaction. We believe bodily, stressfully, that our life cannot, even should not, be long, that it is not good to be alive in the body, that we are supposed to go elsewhere. We have all these ideas that are Life-negative in bodily terms, but the ultimate way of Enlightenment is to become Life-positive in bodily terms, which is just the reverse of what we are tending to do. Human beings are living way down at the bottom of their evolutionary potential. Nevertheless, if you can personally, and with a few others, grasp the higher realities of the mechanisms in which you live, then you can practice a Way of life that stimulates those factors. You must have sanctuary, a relatively protected world, to do that because you must live in a way that is not compatible with the way other people want to live. So you must eliminate stress, bodily. Under stress, in fear, mortally self-conscious, we are poisoning ourselves with our own chemistry. All those negative reactions are actually setting up signals for the body so that it will function as an animal strives to survive.”
The Primal Urge to Santuary – 1979
VISION MOUND
Vision Mound (Vol. 02, No. 10) – May – June 1979
Are There More Fish in the Ocean on a Sunny Day, or on a Cloudy Day?
A talk by Bubba Free John
SPIRITUAL MASTER: The realm of possibility is infinite. There are endless conceivable and inconceivable realms of experience or embodiment that you could be involved in at the present time. But you are consciously involved only in this human one. You are involved in this human embodiment because you have desires, or tendencies of attention, that lead you toward this kind of experience. In the past you have had similar experiences, and you desired them, and you became more and more involved in this kind of possibility. You feel identified with this kind of life. Even so, it is still mysterious and unpleasant, and ultimately it does not fulfill itself. You are caught in a cycle of appearance and change and disappearance, because you have desires that lead you into the realm of experience. Indeed, you, the independent self or body-mind, are those desires, those tendencies of attention.
The dull human being, the desirer, who is merely here, trying to make the best, or the worst, of it, continues to be entangled in this affair of embodiment because he lives according to his desires. He lives as if being born in this form were necessary, as if this body had been born directly out of the forehead of God!. But his birth is his responsibility. His tendencies in consciousness are the motives of his embodiment. Just so, your own experience, good or bad, is strictly determined by your psychic association, your tendency of desire.
You are here because you like vital contacts, such as sex and food, and you even like something of the violence or the “gamble” of vital life. On the other hand, you do not like other aspects of it all. You are not here because you desire to be murdered, or to go crazy, or to be eaten. But because you desire positive experiences, you are necessarily also threatened by negative experiences. Yes, you desire a vital, elemental, human bodily state in which to have vital contacts. But, on the other hand, in the realm wherein human bodily life is possible, just that kind of body dies, just that kind of body suffers, just that kind of body craves, just that kind of body can fail to be fulfilled, just that kind of body is frustrated, just that kind of body becomes involved in a huge social chaos of people who have no responsibility for their embodiment, no awareness that they are ultimately responsible for this embodiment, who cannot account for this realm and our existence in it.
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…”
Drugs and Entheogens
To take a drug does not yield any great capacity for recognition. Neither does conventional meditation or the shocks of life.
If your entire attention is reduced, or expanded, to the perception of a radiant spot or a great field of light, you can realize the experience to be not fundamentally different from the ordinary experience of the waking state in which you are seeing others and environments. In The Knee of Listening I have described this recognition or realization in my own case. I experienced all kinds of great yogic phenomena, but always there came the tacit recognition that having a subtle, mystical vision was not fundamentally different from perceiving in the ordinary way. Nothing different happened in meditation from what happened in ordinary awareness. The features of the phenomenal appearance changed, but the fundamental pattern or structure of awareness of phenomena was the same in the abstract and subtle states of awareness as in the gross states of awareness. Nothing was changed fundamentally by changing the features of the objects of awareness.
This recognition made it tacitly clear that Realization has nothing whatever to do with the changes of experience that can be attained by any means. God-Realization is the recognition of the habit of association with phenomena. In the course of my own spiritual practice, therefore, this disposition of recognition became primary and ultimately consequential, and all the other media or means of attaining experiences became unimportant.
Thus, in the history of my Teaching Work with people I have constantly criticized that disposition in us that is fascinated with the possibility of an alternative reality or the possibility of subtle or abstract phenomena. Nevertheless, in the Way that I Teach, we do not prevent such phenomena. In fact, in the devotional and meditative exercises that we engage, all kinds of gross or subtle or abstract phenomena may arise. All of you can report such experiences.
The spiritual process is not a means for attaining those experiences, but it is the process that can, that must, go on in the midst of those experiences. If now, presently, the experience arising is essentially the pattern of gross awareness, or gross phenomenal existence, you must recognize that. If now you are having a vision of a subtle being or subtle environments, the Spiritual Master in a form of light, heavenly worlds, gods, goddesses, you must recognize that. If now you are seeing white light, yellow light, blue light, a spot, a field of light, radiance, you must recognize that. To recognize all phenomena, all experience, is the Teaching.
We must recognize that whatever is arising, even this moment of gross perception, is a non-binding modification of the Radiant Transcendental Reality, what is called the Buddha Nature, or Nirvana, or Brahman, or Parabrahman, or Very God, or the Ultimate Divine, or the Truth. Whatever the name given to the Ultimate Realization, it is That which must be Realized on the basis of the recognition of whatever is arising. Therefore, it is not necessary to achieve an alternative reality or an alternative state of experience in order to be Happy or to realize the Truth. Rather, Happiness or the realization of Truth is a matter of recognizing whatever happens to be arising.
“Everybody thinks that God is taking care of everything”
Everybody thinks that God is taking care of everything. There is no such God. God Transcends everything. God is to be Realized. God is not your parent. What is arising arises only as a dynamic of opposites, a dynamic of creation and destruction. The Realm of Nature is a dynamic of opposites that creates and destroys everything. If you want to protect and preserve, then you must create a way to do it. What you do not preserve is destroyed. You must therefore take care of what you want to preserve. Eventually, it will be destroyed anyway, whatever care you take care to preserve it. Everything that is created gets destroyed almost immediately. Everything that arises gets destroyed. God is That in Which everything is arising, Transcending everything.
The more profoundly you Realize That Which Transcends everything, the more you have the ability to achieve a balance in this dynamic, so that you develop equanimity, or a certain capacity to preserve what arises conditionally. You therefore develop the ability to generate sattvic or balanced forms, forms that will persist in a balanced state for significant periods of time. Such an ability is uncommon in Nature. It is the direct reflection of resonance with the Divine.
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The first truly human or humanizing stage of development is for us to transcend our dissociative emotional reaction to the inherent limitations of the body-mind and its experiences. It is only on the basis of a body-mind that is free of the conception and motivation of existence as a dilemma that the actual Realization of Truth can be founded. It is not the problem-solving exercise of mind or psyche that Realizes the Truth, but only the relaxed openness or tacit suspension of mind, psyche, or attention itself permits that Realization. It is not the strategic exercise of the body, or the total body-mind, that Realizes the Truth of the body-mind, but only the relaxed openness or tacit suspension of all contraction, all knowledge (or “knowing about”), and all self-possession permits that Realization.
Therefore, the human individual must grow into an understanding of himself, such that the reactive programs of knowing and acting are transcended in a tacit Realization of the Transcendental Condition in which the body-mind is arising, floating, changing, and passing away. The actual or Realized Truth is not itself an answer to the emotional dilemma of our existence, since we must transcend that dilemma as a precondition for Realizing the Truth. And the Truth is not an escape from the limited mortality of the body-mind, since neither mind (or psyche) nor body is made immortal by the Realization of the Truth.
The “Truth” that we seek (and sometimes claim to find) on the basis of our trouble is an invention of our own. The “Truth” that is proposed as an “answer” to the conceived dilemma of existence and that seems to represent an escape from the mortal limitations of the body-mind is itself nothing more than a state of the body-mind.
The actual Truth of our existence is simply the case. It is not an answer to a question. Indeed, any question (or emotional dilemma) must be an obstruction to the Realization (or clear and direct intuition) of what is always already the case. A disturbed and strategically active state of mind and body cannot discover the very Condition or Truth of the body-mind.
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March 2010
March 11
(Bubba Free John) Adi Da Samraj – 1977
“The best thing to do, then, is to be uncomfortable. That is the one thing you do not want, though. Bottom line, nobody wants to be uncomfortable. Everybody wants to be comfortable. You do not want to use your greatest virtue, which is the virtue of discomfort and the capacity to transcend the spell. Instead of doing that you try to maintain a level of consolation and involvement with all this so that you will not feel uncomfortable.
You cannot avoid that discomfort. It is essential to your conditional life. You must find it, locate it, and really use it. That is the best thing to do. Do not be angry and sorrowful and guilty and fearful. Rather, be uncomfortable in other words not satisfied and not satisfiable in the framework of ordinary living so you will practice. You will have the will to practice transcendence, and you will do it in your daily life and in meditation. But you will not have any energy and attention for that practice if you are not uncomfortable, if you are not dissatisfied. You will tend to settle for the dissatisfaction in the form of neurotic emotion, which is not a sufficient basis for practice.”
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February 2010
February 20
Adi Da Samraj talking to a group of devotees – December 4, 1992. Adapted and edited by Beezone
“You must get serious about your own suffering and the suffering of all other beings, and about the stupidity of all movements on Earth, whatever they are called – political, economic, religious. Whatever they are called, they are utter stupidity. There is no siddhi in them, no blessing, no unique capability invested in the world. There is Only This One who is here to do that. There is no other. The World is One. Either you will understand This, or you will not.
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.
Accept no separation between us, nor between you and any another. None! Do not “oink” yourself into separation and stupid oblivion. Embrace what is True, Right and Real, practice love, tolerance and Truth. Do so diligently, consistently, with great intensity. This is My Admonition to you, and it is all I can Give you. If you want to ignore the truth of this time and the Great Opportunity you are obligated Respond to, the burdensome Yuga that is coming upon mankind will be visited upon you and all, and its consequences will be absolutely terrible. Listen to the prophecies of the ancient ones. The ones who have had their hearts planted on this earth. You will not hear this in the commercials on TV or the bulletin boards on the highway. They will tell you to continue to consume, continue to indulge yourself in your appetites for satisfaction and adventure. This is not a joke, this is the time you are in and you must respond in a different way than you are presently committed to.”
Adi Da Samraj – December 4, 1992 – Adapted and edited by Beezone
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February 12
“What is popularized, hyped, and commonly believed to be religion, spirituality, or meditation is invariably a form of self-meditation, self-glorification, and self-survival. Such subhuman games are sold to masses of people via an appeal to naive and neurotic needs for certainty, hope, fascination, superiority, a positive self-image, and egoic immunity from fear and death. Thus, religion, spirituality, and meditation become diluted, reduced to the worldly or self-preserving levels of less than human interest. The typical follower is childish, ultimately irresponsible, self-involved, amoral, experientially undeveloped, weak and out of balance in the dimensions of action, feeling, and thought, and irrationally attached to the enclosures of cult and belief.”
Adi Da Samraj – The Enlightenment of the Whole Body – 1978
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February 6
“If you believe that you are just dead when you die, you will cease to love, and love is sufficient wisdom.
I, like many others, have seen that we are not just the body. I am certain that you will survive. But I don’t want you to just believe that. I want you to intuit the Reality of your Condition, which is Love.
We are human beings, awakened to this mortal condition, subject to all of these influences. No information shouts itself out of the clouds. Our awareness for the most part is in everything that is below the heart.
How should you create your life? Create it on the basis of what you can be associated with, what you can understand, what you can Realize through Love. That is my fundamental communication.
That is a great gesture, a manly gesture, a womanly gesture. Since you are unable to love absolutely, you must respond to this Teaching below the heart, at the level of your experience, in your loving, your real human relations. Actually, that is enough, because it involves you in the midst of experience with a gesture that is Free, that overcomes the complication of mortality.
My business is to enter into friendly relations. You are all very beautiful to me. I love my men and women friends. It is not consoling, but I like it. So if you commit yourself to this Way in a most enthusiastic fashion, you may Realize a Destiny that I cannot possibly enjoy. Because I am coming back here. I cannot leave this place. I cannot stay away from here for an hour. I am always incarnate.”
Da Free John, December 25, 1977
Beezone edit and adaptation
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February 1
“You can practice Communion only by transcending fear, by actual, literal, heartfelt surrender beyond all fear of death and madness into the Transcendental Reality. To do this you do not have to die or become mad, but your fear must be surrendered in love, in ecstasy. You must simply renounce your fear, give up the luxury of it, and presume surrender as your attitude under all conditions. When that attitude becomes true of you, you realize that fear is not inherent in the act and the moment of emotional surrender. Therefore, abide in surrender perfectly and you will not be involved with fear, madness, or death in the conventional forms that we fear and try to avoid.
Heartfelt release of fear is the secret of passing through the spiritual process without going mad. To the degree that you are full of fear, you limit your experience – and if experience is forced upon you, then you have no ability while fearful to view it sanely, to relax and surrender within it. You cannot surrender by relaxing and trying to feel better. You can surrender only by giving yourself up, relaxing your self-hold, surrendering your mind altogether…”
Adi Da Samraj – Compulsory Dancing, 1980
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January 2010
January 19
Fundamental to the discipline of love is letting go. You are practicing attachment and using it as an excuse to immunize yourself. The discipline of love requires letting people go. I do not mean letting them disappear. I mean giving them their life, giving them your feeling rather than withholding it, allowing them to grow, supporting their growth, supporting their free process of life.
You are not practicing the discipline of love. You are indulging in your own egoic “self-possession” and fear and reluctance and resistance, and you are immunizing yourself. What people usually call love is attachment, whereas real love is a great discipline and it requires great self-understanding, great self-discipline.
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Adi Da Samraj – 1993
January 15
You should also understand that I am not here to fight with you for any cause whatsoever. Whatever you choose, you are completely free to choose, and that is all there is to that.
All I represent here is an offering. I know how difficult it is to accept it and to live it. And I know exactly what I am doing and what I have to do in the case of every person. I have known exactly what to do with people who come in the condition that you all do, without the purification or clarity that a mature individual would represent in a spiritual culture.
The karmas that must be relieved in the case of individuals who come in this condition are of the grossest and most resistive kind. So they are not just plucked off like a pimple on your cheek. It is difficult for you and for me, and it has always been difficult.
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Adi Da Samraj – 1976
January 10
Adapted and edited – Beezone
Adi Da Samraj – May 25, 1992
Realization is not about someone realizing union with someone, or with anything. If there is any effort along those lines, it has nothing to do with Realization. It is precisely this effort that must be understood and transcended. When there is no such effort, no pursuit of union, then there is Realization.
This does not mean that you can instantaneously argue yourself out of this motive. I am telling you that any process of such “consideration” must be a process of self-observation and self-understanding. You must come to the point where the motive to union itself is thoroughly understood and ceases to control your existence which requires the process of sadhana.
You would like to by-pass this understanding. You tend to superimpose the model of seeking, or non-seeking on your sadhana and then superimpose it on all relations and all functions, all aspects of life and think you’re already enlightened.
I said many times before you must observe and understand this effort in the context of each stage of life. There are many varieties of this, some gross and some more subtle, depending on your stage of life. You cannot merely choose to bypass any stage. You must adapted to each stage and see what you’re up to and understand it. The ego is very slippery.
You must understand this process very directly in a participatory manner. You cannot merely by “considering” my instruction assume the asana of the Realization of the seventh stage of life. You must do the sadhana.
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“Everyone who has heard me even a little bit is enlightened with a small “e.””
January 2
The Law is Sacrifice, that is To Make Sacred
Beezone compliation and edit
There are two ways of life. There is one lived by the law of karma, or change itself, in confrontation with the solid world, the appearing world; or there is the way of living from the point of view of Truth or the actual, the real condition.
These are the two laws and they manifest in a variety of ways which bring forth other laws. Two other laws are (1) whatever you have not transcended, you must fulfill – whatever is set in motion tends to remain in motion and (2) whatever is not used tends to become obsolete
If you live by the first law you are trying to figure yourself out by becoming less than what you are and basically you are struggling with your self. If you relax into the second law, in equitableness of yourself, you will see the Spirit working, rather than a separate you that is somehow trying to figure things out. The first law creates people struggling, rejecting, resisting, offending and this then creates a situation where the spiritual process cannot take place – that is another expression the Law.
When the second law is not understood you will not become a sacrifice of the whole body mind. The heart has not come to rest and there is only a cramp, a contraction at the heart. This separate and separative consciousness is then obsessive, bewildered and only pursues fulfillment on the basis of what is apparently possible in the midst of this puny limitation we wake up to each day.
Understanding the second law does not mean things do not still arise and difficulties vanish. Since the life of most people is built on the idea that the Law of life is survival and existence is a stuggle for survival. Survival is then motivation, significance, meaning, and goal of life, either conscious or unconscious. Then the law of sacrifice is not fufulled and you become a sacrifice in any case, grudgingly, unconsciously. You will be eaten.
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Beezone edit and adaptation from 1973 talk (see link below)
True sincerity is a quality that is naturally alive in a person who understands himself.
Cultic forms of concentration of attention and absorption don’t produce this kind of self-knowledge. They distract a person. They are calculated to fascinate and distract you, to enforce your attention. There is one fundamental law involved in all forms of sadhana, the yogic law that you become the thing that you concentrate on. So all forms of sadhana done without self-understanding are ways of concentrating on what ultimately are supposed to be forms of the Divine-mantras, chants, the Guru’s form, what the Guru does outwardly, all the images and pictures – so that you become more and more absorbed and ecstatically distracted. As soon as the source of distraction is taken away, the individual falls back into the state he was in to begin with.
Whenever the genuine principle of the spiritual process is brought to bear, it is a dangerous affair. From social, traditional points of view, you lose the artifices that are native to these external approaches, both the so-called “spiritual” and the secular.
Creating an artificial environment essentially handles people’s disturbances, their neuroses, and their gross pride. They feel relatively at ease, and they walk around being soupy and spiritual all day, thinking they are doing sadhana. All they have done is remove the gross influences from their lives. But that’s the condition under which sadhana in fact begins. You must penetrate your core of ordinariness.
In true sadhana you are dealing simply and directly with your state, your atmosphere, your ordinariness. It is truly perceptive to see that in your actual state, your very presence, is disturbance, completely independent of qualities that condition you are obviously disturbed. But your very presence is that disturbance. You can see that there is no genuine rest in you, except a mediocre experience of no disturbance which comes from without or within. When those gross disturbances are removed, you begin to see that your actual state, your very presence, is disturbance, completely independent of qualities that may appear to you. It is always this contraction. You begin to see that. You see it in your ordinary moments of relative ease and happiness, not just in your neurotic highs and lows, but in this neutral state in which there is no peculiar event. When you begin to see it then, understanding has begun. But people buy out at that point. Instead of truly becoming perceptive and carrying on the real activity of consciousness, they just enjoy that neutral time until the next disturbance arises or the next high arises. The highs and the lows are too baroque, they are not fundamental, they are extraordinary. This ordinariness is an omnipresent quality against which all other qualities play. The secret of understanding is in recognizing that.
The self-contraction is taking place in, not only gross forms but in its most subtle form. If it were not, you would have no separate self sense. You wouldn’t hold onto mediocrity, which is itself a form of desire. The desire to be undisturbed manifests as mediocrity. Some people think that is being spiritual. But it is just being mediocre. People generally don’t have any tolerance for that mediocrity for long periods of time, so they always return to the highs and lows. They are both forms of distraction, of standing outside yourself. Even the lows, the disturbances, the aggravations, are forms of distraction, fascination with qualities. In fact, most people pursue those. As a respite from that, some turn to this mediocrity and think that it is spiritual. It is just a particular state. A capacity for this mediocre pleasantness, this moveless happiness without any great intensity.
QUESTIONER: Everyone just says, “Turn to the Guru, “Guru-kripa,”‘ but they don’t say why and they don’t understand. That’s the force of God coming through the Guru as a separate entity.
ADI DA: The true Guru is not some superman. He must always become nothing so that the Divine Siddhi becomes active. God’s Siddhi is perfect, absolute, so it is not by becoming a perfect superman with all kinds of overwhelming, fascinating qualities that a person awakens to the Divine activity. It is only when all that is undermined and no longer active in him that the Divine Siddhi appears spontaneously. The Guru, then, is a unique presence and a unique process.
Above all, he is unique by virtue of the fact that he can enter into a concrete, living relationship with people, and they likewise can enter into a concrete, living relationship with the Guru. He has a living, material form, and that makes it very tangible.
QUESTIONER: As the Guru sheds the physical body, is it the Divine Force that becomes alive in the disciples and other people who live in relationship to the Guru?
ADI DA: Sure. Then the devotees of such a one become the functional means for the presentation of that Force in the world. They have that living relationship with the Guru, who is now gone in his ordinary human form. Their relationship is unbroken, so the activity, the Divine Siddhi that was the Guru continues to manifest through them as a community.
It stands present in the community, not necessarily in the form of another individual who does this, or has the same responsibility. In some cases a Guru leaves behind a devotee who has the same function and extends it. But the purpose of all such Gurus, even if they do follow one after another, is to create a community in which the Siddhi is alive, in which it is the living presence, the living condition.
The only problem is that these communities tend to become not communities, but cults. They tend to be centered in the personality of a Guru, directed to that Guru as a form of fascination.
It is the community re-enacting the ritual of the ego that people all enact individually. So they never become a community, and they never turn outward and become functional and truly live this Siddhi. They remain inward directed, always concentrating on this one who is gone. I have told you that the Guru comes to manifest that Satsang that existed prior to his physical birth. People don’t relate to that. After the Guru’s death they try to relate to that Satsang that he apparently generated during his lifetime.
So they go around trying to remember what he looked like and carrying that whole cult of his personality, instead of truly living the Divine Satsang that he was here to communicate while he was alive.
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October 2009
Taboo against the Superior Man – Love of the Armed Form (The) superior Man is present in this world only in the case of the rare individual, rather than in the form of the human world as a whole. And such an uncommon individual is regarded suspiciously by all.
The Place Where Sadhana Begins – unpublished – You may want to forestall this observation…”
Transcend Meaning – “Some people have a better experience than others in the universe of meanings in childhood, and they tend to be more effective adultsnot Enlightened, but more effective and happy in the ordinary sense.”
The Heart is the Hole in the Donut – 1976 – How did I get involved in this anyway…”.
Thursday, October 16, 2009
“Do you all know what an immense burden it is to carry on an existence from day to day. There’s something about it this promising, it implies, waking up and being somebody implies a destiny of some sort that has pleasure associated with it. The fulfillment of an idea has a pleasure associated with it. And that’s all that a born existence is. You happen to feel identified with this body, and psyche and so forth. And it carries with it the implication of pleasures, consolations, enjoyments, fulfillment’s. And that is what binds you to it. But you don’t consider the inherent suffering also which appears one-to-one, face-to-face with all of the consolations of the same birth. Hum? When you begin to become aware of the entire field of possibility, and experience of your born existence. That’s when you begin to realize the inherent suffering of birth. Of mere existence in form. Until that time you begin to, you think in base terms of your god-created life, or you know, your universe, mother-nature created life, however you describe it. You think of it in essentially positive terms, against odds. But when you truly see the nature of your life. What your experience is, in any moment. Then you begin to be released from your attachment to the fulfillment of existence. And it’s then that you may begin to do sadhana.”
more:
The Heart Is the Hole in the Donut
June 23, 1976 – A Talk, by Bubba Free John (Adi Da Samraj)
The Mood of the Heart – 1971 – unpublished notes.zone’s Daily Readin
Monday, October 19, 2009
The Mood of the Heart
“I do not call men or women to my form, for I am not present as any form or power. There is no name or light that is my form or the way to me. Whether these be found within or without. I call men to understanding and even if thousands surround the body through which you hear this, only those who understand have come to me. Therefore, understand, which is to comprehend the source, logic and effect of all your paths. Understand and thus be come involved in the utter bliss that I am, even that which stands as the consciousness of your life.
Holy sound is the silent vibrance or potency of the Heart. The real light or force of all forms, upon which all forms appear is the consciousness that is the Heart. This is the Truth. One who understands is the Heart. He knows that which cannot be spoken or heard, that which is bliss without name or form.
The Heart is the master of the outer and the inner, the high and the low, the empty and the full. Therefore, it does not require the abandonment of anything, no exclusive form of life, neither spiritual life not any form of embodiment or appearance, but it requires or enforces the real consciousness of whatever appears. The Heart is utterly free of all striving, all exclusive directions, all motives, all demands. It uses all that appears according to its free and creative intelligence, yet is never acts on anything outside itself since everything is contained within it. Therefore, it is unmoved and only blissful as unqualified conscious existence. This is the mood of the Heart and the secret life of the man or woman of understanding.”
Unpublished, 1971
Franklin Jones – Adi Da Samraj
Beezone
Water and Narcissus
Hard Earth and Stone at my Foot
“I resist and take flight from the material and life condition. The crux of the spiritual life for me now is to see and embrace this mode of reality. The material realm is relentless in its lawfulness. It is all cause and effect. I am always seeking a magic by which to overcome the laws of physics. But the matter forms are there and hard, dragging me into the necessary acceptance of their reality. To now I have tended to anxiety, impatience, self-pity and despair, striving after forms of immunity and passivity and superiority. I have opposed the law and thus failed to transcend and master it. Thus also I oppose the creative, endlessly active life forms. The intrusion of life around me make my passive artifice impossible. But when I accept these forms and their laws as necessary reality, then I am peaceful. The effort of work required of me to live and create and remain in relationship is a labor I am grateful to maintain. And the noise and process that shatters the aesthetic heaven of my household is acceptable, being a reasonable expression of life in the condition of material existence. Thus, being at one with these laws, I am firm and untroubled. I master and transcend each material problem, and I become alive and in motion, exceeding the barriers of aesthetic space, in a mood with all creative life. Thus the hard earth and stone at my foot and had teach me. And thus the children teach me. It is unreasonable to seek peace, for this aesthetic pursuit in fact seeks to undermine and thward the foundations of life and materiality. It is necessary to be already peaceful, one with the law, and thus to create in the world of this law.”
Water and Narcissus, 1969 – unpublished
Franklin Jones (Adi Da Samraj)
Note:
The period Adi Da (Franklin Jones) was writing the book Water and Narcissus was from 1967 to early 1970. He completed it while living in New York.
Tightness and Doubt – 1969 – Water and Narcissus
March 2010
March 11
(Bubba Free John) Adi Da Samraj – 1977
“The best thing to do, then, is to be uncomfortable. That is the one thing you do not want, though. Bottom line, nobody wants to be uncomfortable. Everybody wants to be comfortable. You do not want to use your greatest virtue, which is the virtue of discomfort and the capacity to transcend the spell. Instead of doing that you try to maintain a level of consolation and involvement with all this so that you will not feel uncomfortable.
You cannot avoid that discomfort. It is essential to your conditional life. You must find it, locate it, and really use it. That is the best thing to do. Do not be angry and sorrowful and guilty and fearful. Rather, be uncomfortable in other words not satisfied and not satisfiable in the framework of ordinary living so you will practice. You will have the will to practice transcendence, and you will do it in your daily life and in meditation. But you will not have any energy and attention for that practice if you are not uncomfortable, if you are not dissatisfied. You will tend to settle for the dissatisfaction in the form of neurotic emotion, which is not a sufficient basis for practice.”
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Adi Da – 1982
The best thing to do, then, is to be uncomfortable. That is the one thing you do not want, though. Bottom line, nobody wants to be uncomfortable. Everybody wants to be comfortable. You do not want to use your greatest virtue, which is the virtue of discomfort and the capacity to transcend the spell. Instead of doing that you try to maintain a level of consolation and involvement with all this hardware and software so that you will not feel uncomfortable.
You cannot avoid that discomfort. It is essential to your conditional life. You must find it, locate it, and really use it. That is the best thing to do. Do not be angry and sorrowful and guilty and fearful. Rather, be uncomfortable in other words not satisfied and not satisfiable in the framework of ordinary living, and you will find me, you will hear me, you will practice. You will have the will to practice transcendence, and you will do it in your daily life and in meditation. But you will not have any energy and attention for that practice if you are not uncomfortable, if you are not dissatisfied. You will tend to settle for the dissatisfaction in the form of neurotic emotion, which is not a sufficient basis for practice.
At least this is the way it seems to me, but you know how Crazy I am! All I can tell you is the way it seems to me. The real import of all of this is not whether or not there is some order underneath it all, evil or good, whether there is some conspiracy or some creative cause. The real importance to be observed is the non-necessity of this experience and, from the conventional point of view, the binding power of this non-necessary experience. The real import of life is not to discover its hidden secrets, the secrets of its working, but to transcend it, to break its spell altogether.
Even though, as people in the world, we work to generally serve the well-being of others in this confinement and even to find out some of the secret workings behind it, even though we may do all of that as an ordinary matter, the fundamental motion of our proceedings, our energy, our consciousness, our attention should be founded in our essential discomfort and our will to transcendence. Therefore, whatever we may be doing, if we understand, we will be renunciates and practice Samadhi moment to moment and not be fools. Above all we will not be fools to ourselves. Whatever conspirators there may be elsewhere, we fool ourselves by becoming overserious about our apparition.
So, it is appropriate to have had this discussion on an evening on which we have all gathered together to watch TV!
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Beezone edit and adaptation from 1973 talk (see link below)
True sincerity is a quality that is naturally alive in a person who understands himself.
Cultic forms of concentration of attention and absorption don’t produce this kind of self-knowledge. They distract a person. They are calculated to fascinate and distract you, to enforce your attention. There is one fundamental law involved in all forms of sadhana, the yogic law that you become the thing that you concentrate on. So all forms of sadhana done without self-understanding are ways of concentrating on what ultimately are supposed to be forms of the Divine-mantras, chants, the Guru’s form, what the Guru does outwardly, all the images and pictures – so that you become more and more absorbed and ecstatically distracted. As soon as the source of distraction is taken away, the individual falls back into the state he was in to begin with.
Whenever the genuine principle of the spiritual process is brought to bear, it is a dangerous affair. From social, traditional points of view, you lose the artifices that are native to these external approaches, both the so-called “spiritual” and the secular.
Creating an artificial environment essentially handles people’s disturbances, their neuroses, and their gross pride. They feel relatively at ease, and they walk around being soupy and spiritual all day, thinking they are doing sadhana. All they have done is remove the gross influences from their lives. But that’s the condition under which sadhana in fact begins. You must penetrate your core of ordinariness.
In true sadhana you are dealing simply and directly with your state, your atmosphere, your ordinariness. It is truly perceptive to see that in your actual state, your very presence, is disturbance, completely independent of qualities that condition you are obviously disturbed. But your very presence is that disturbance. You can see that there is no genuine rest in you, except a mediocre experience of no disturbance which comes from without or within. When those gross disturbances are removed, you begin to see that your actual state, your very presence, is disturbance, completely independent of qualities that may appear to you. It is always this contraction. You begin to see that. You see it in your ordinary moments of relative ease and happiness, not just in your neurotic highs and lows, but in this neutral state in which there is no peculiar event. When you begin to see it then, understanding has begun. But people buy out at that point. Instead of truly becoming perceptive and carrying on the real activity of consciousness, they just enjoy that neutral time until the next disturbance arises or the next high arises. The highs and the lows are too baroque, they are not fundamental, they are extraordinary. This ordinariness is an omnipresent quality against which all other qualities play. The secret of understanding is in recognizing that.
The self-contraction is taking place in, not only gross forms but in its most subtle form. If it were not, you would have no separate self sense. You wouldn’t hold onto mediocrity, which is itself a form of desire. The desire to be undisturbed manifests as mediocrity. Some people think that is being spiritual. But it is just being mediocre. People generally don’t have any tolerance for that mediocrity for long periods of time, so they always return to the highs and lows. They are both forms of distraction, of standing outside yourself. Even the lows, the disturbances, the aggravations, are forms of distraction, fascination with qualities. In fact, most people pursue those. As a respite from that, some turn to this mediocrity and think that it is spiritual. It is just a particular state. A capacity for this mediocre pleasantness, this moveless happiness without any great intensity.
QUESTIONER: Everyone just says, “Turn to the Guru, “Guru-kripa,”‘ but they don’t say why and they don’t understand. That’s the force of God coming through the Guru as a separate entity.
ADI DA: The true Guru is not some superman. He must always become nothing so that the Divine Siddhi becomes active. God’s Siddhi is perfect, absolute, so it is not by becoming a perfect superman with all kinds of overwhelming, fascinating qualities that a person awakens to the Divine activity. It is only when all that is undermined and no longer active in him that the Divine Siddhi appears spontaneously. The Guru, then, is a unique presence and a unique process.
Above all, he is unique by virtue of the fact that he can enter into a concrete, living relationship with people, and they likewise can enter into a concrete, living relationship with the Guru. He has a living, material form, and that makes it very tangible.
QUESTIONER: As the Guru sheds the physical body, is it the Divine Force that becomes alive in the disciples and other people who live in relationship to the Guru?
ADI DA: Sure. Then the devotees of such a one become the functional means for the presentation of that Force in the world. They have that living relationship with the Guru, who is now gone in his ordinary human form. Their relationship is unbroken, so the activity, the Divine Siddhi that was the Guru continues to manifest through them as a community.
It stands present in the community, not necessarily in the form of another individual who does this, or has the same responsibility. In some cases a Guru leaves behind a devotee who has the same function and extends it. But the purpose of all such Gurus, even if they do follow one after another, is to create a community in which the Siddhi is alive, in which it is the living presence, the living condition.
The only problem is that these communities tend to become not communities, but cults. They tend to be centered in the personality of a Guru, directed to that Guru as a form of fascination.
It is the community re-enacting the ritual of the ego that people all enact individually. So they never become a community, and they never turn outward and become functional and truly live this Siddhi. They remain inward directed, always concentrating on this one who is gone. I have told you that the Guru comes to manifest that Satsang that existed prior to his physical birth. People don’t relate to that. After the Guru’s death they try to relate to that Satsang that he apparently generated during his lifetime.
So they go around trying to remember what he looked like and carrying that whole cult of his personality, instead of truly living the Divine Satsang that he was here to communicate while he was alive.
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November 2009
from an unpublished talk
WHAT IS ITS ESSENCE – 1974
Bubba Free John (Adi Da Samraj)
AUDIENCE: We’re talking about the realization that would be true if we would only commune with you. No doubt you’ve said it a thousand times before.
ADI DA: or at least that many times.
AUDIENCE: What is the essence at least in terms of what does it really mean, the essence.
ADI DI: Its essence is not what it means. Its essence is the action. You are presently obsessed with your logic and the destiny that you conceive from your present born point of view. It has its own gesture. It has all of its own impulses, all outlines subjectively. It has its whole future outlined in desire and it would do if it were dramatized, incarnated, all the things that bypass this consideration, but if you will hear me, then your attention will be liberated from destiny, from time and space.
That doesn’t mean that you will not see tendencies and see your present life and so forth, it will continue and it will be the discipline of your existence. On the other hand, your attention will remain with me and it will not be confused by destinies, by desires, by thoughts. It will be fixed. It will be absolute. It will be full of love. It will be heartfelt without logic, without thinking, without desiring. It will be pure attention and that attention is communion.
Wherever your attention lies without confusion, that is what you realize. If you will give me your attention through true hearing, if you will be gravitated toward me in every moment so that all of your desiring, even your inevitability becomes superficial and all of that quality that arises from moment to moment will be truly superficial. Its impact will be lost. It won’t create incarnation. It will create heat only.
It will be frustrated in its goal and you will meditate on the fire and that fire will be your attention to me so that your attention from hour to hour will become more fiery, more intense, more loving, more sacrificial, more absurd, less and less the character that you are born to be and live and die but you see there must come into your case a sympathy more profound than your inevitability, a sympathy more profound than your logic.
Your logic, your presumption will remain, as artifacts of your subjectivity but your attention will stay with me. It will stay with me at every moment. When we are present with one another in our born forms, your natural emotional sympathy will stay with me.
We will love one another absolutely and when we are not in one another’s sight, we will recollect one another in love, sometimes in thought also, but in love and sympathy. In feeling attention we will stay with one another and so my meditation will be your meditation because you are with me.
You commune with me. It has nothing to do with whether I live or die once you realize your attachment to me.
November 4
“The Urgency of the Teaching” From Scientific Proof of the Existence of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House!
Also in The Whole Body of Enlighenment – Chapter 4
Beyond Doubt
Intelligent people cannot find God in such a mass of idiocy, so quite naturally they look for satisfaction elsewhere. Thus, people are preoccupied with all kinds of political and scientific idealism, as if politics and scientific and technological progress were the Way of Truth. They are absolutely not the Way of Truth. They never have been the Way of Truth. They are no more the Way of Truth than sex or any other satisfaction or fulfillment of function. None of that is the Way of Truth at all. It is the ordinary impulse of the ego, glamorizing itself by great enterprises.
If this trend toward political and scientific obsession is to be broken, some light must be brought to the whole affair of spiritual and religious understanding….If not, the world will be overwhelmed. It is almost inevitable now that it will be overwhelmed in any case. The world, even the Realm of Nature as a whole, is founded on a righteous Principle. Therefore, the world will be purified, without a doubt. The Force of the Divine pervades everything, and, therefore, It also purifies everything in one way or another. If human beings, while they have the benign capacity to enter into God-Communion, will not do so, but instead create a corrupt culture, a subhuman order, then the purification will not occur within the ordinary and benign course of natural processes…then great upheavals necessarily occur. That is how the righteous Law works. It is not just that we pay our dues for past activity. A righteous Principle is positively at work, constantly to purify and to reestablish order.
Thus, there are periods of great negative upheaval in the world, including natural disasters, wars, and conflicts of all kinds. On the one hand, during these periods, the world pays its dues for failing to live by the Law. On the other hand, these times of upheaval are the evidence of a continuous process of purification. They are themselves a demonstration of the Law. At the end of these periods, the Law is reestablished in righteousness.
It is very likely that we are entering into such a time of upheaval, because of the extent of the failure of human culture. There is simply no light abroad in the world today. There is nothing but corruption, nothing but the failure to accept the Way of God. There is absolutely no sign of the Way of Truth, except in rare instances of individuals and small groups of people. The Truth is essentially hidden and secondary. There is a long history of corruption in every area of human life, and the entire social structure of the world is devoted to subhuman ends and forms of self-indulgence. There are no signs of an imminent Golden Age in the disposition or condition of humanity at large. Rather, the signs are of the necessity for a great purification, a great reestablishment of order, a righteous readjustment of the whole world.
read more:
“The Urgency of the Teaching” From Scientific Proof of the Existence of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House!
Vision Mound Magazine – 1979
“You must find the ways to overcome the stresses, to transform the chemistry of the body literally, so that you can live long and without stress, both chemical and social, or cultural. Such a life is not possible for a group of people until they create sanctuary with one another, a mutually protected, stable, basically unthreatened way of life.
“We are threatened!” is the message of the news. It reminds us of our situation. The program of the news is all about people who are threatening one another, either with terrible violence or with just social nastiness, the exploiting of one another. Loveless society is basically the idea that we constantly reinforce in one another. We teach each other and we pass on to our children all the techniques for living as a stressful personality that reinforce the negative content of social interaction. We believe bodily, stressfully, that our life cannot, even should not, be long, that it is not good to be alive in the body, that we are supposed to go elsewhere. We have all these ideas that are Life-negative in bodily terms, but the ultimate way of Enlightenment is to become Life-positive in bodily terms, which is just the reverse of what we are tending to do. Human beings are living way down at the bottom of their evolutionary potential. Nevertheless, if you can personally, and with a few others, grasp the higher realities of the mechanisms in which you live, then you can practice a Way of life that stimulates those factors. You must have sanctuary, a relatively protected world, to do that because you must live in a way that is not compatible with the way other people want to live. So you must eliminate stress, bodily. Under stress, in fear, mortally self-conscious, we are poisoning ourselves with our own chemistry. All those negative reactions are actually setting up signals for the body so that it will function as an animal strives to survive.”
The Primal Urge to Santuary – 1979
VISION MOUND
Vision Mound (Vol. 02, No. 10) – May – June 1979
Are There More Fish in the Ocean on a Sunny Day, or on a Cloudy Day?
A talk by Bubba Free John
SPIRITUAL MASTER: The realm of possibility is infinite. There are endless conceivable and inconceivable realms of experience or embodiment that you could be involved in at the present time. But you are consciously involved only in this human one. You are involved in this human embodiment because you have desires, or tendencies of attention, that lead you toward this kind of experience. In the past you have had similar experiences, and you desired them, and you became more and more involved in this kind of possibility. You feel identified with this kind of life. Even so, it is still mysterious and unpleasant, and ultimately it does not fulfill itself. You are caught in a cycle of appearance and change and disappearance, because you have desires that lead you into the realm of experience. Indeed, you, the independent self or body-mind, are those desires, those tendencies of attention.
The dull human being, the desirer, who is merely here, trying to make the best, or the worst, of it, continues to be entangled in this affair of embodiment because he lives according to his desires. He lives as if being born in this form were necessary, as if this body had been born directly out of the forehead of God!. But his birth is his responsibility. His tendencies in consciousness are the motives of his embodiment. Just so, your own experience, good or bad, is strictly determined by your psychic association, your tendency of desire.
You are here because you like vital contacts, such as sex and food, and you even like something of the violence or the “gamble” of vital life. On the other hand, you do not like other aspects of it all. You are not here because you desire to be murdered, or to go crazy, or to be eaten. But because you desire positive experiences, you are necessarily also threatened by negative experiences. Yes, you desire a vital, elemental, human bodily state in which to have vital contacts. But, on the other hand, in the realm wherein human bodily life is possible, just that kind of body dies, just that kind of body suffers, just that kind of body craves, just that kind of body can fail to be fulfilled, just that kind of body is frustrated, just that kind of body becomes involved in a huge social chaos of people who have no responsibility for their embodiment, no awareness that they are ultimately responsible for this embodiment, who cannot account for this realm and our existence in it.
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…”
Drugs and Entheogens
To take a drug does not yield any great capacity for recognition. Neither does conventional meditation or the shocks of life.
If your entire attention is reduced, or expanded, to the perception of a radiant spot or a great field of light, you can realize the experience to be not fundamentally different from the ordinary experience of the waking state in which you are seeing others and environments. In The Knee of Listening I have described this recognition or realization in my own case. I experienced all kinds of great yogic phenomena, but always there came the tacit recognition that having a subtle, mystical vision was not fundamentally different from perceiving in the ordinary way. Nothing different happened in meditation from what happened in ordinary awareness. The features of the phenomenal appearance changed, but the fundamental pattern or structure of awareness of phenomena was the same in the abstract and subtle states of awareness as in the gross states of awareness. Nothing was changed fundamentally by changing the features of the objects of awareness.
This recognition made it tacitly clear that Realization has nothing whatever to do with the changes of experience that can be attained by any means. God-Realization is the recognition of the habit of association with phenomena. In the course of my own spiritual practice, therefore, this disposition of recognition became primary and ultimately consequential, and all the other media or means of attaining experiences became unimportant.
Thus, in the history of my Teaching Work with people I have constantly criticized that disposition in us that is fascinated with the possibility of an alternative reality or the possibility of subtle or abstract phenomena. Nevertheless, in the Way that I Teach, we do not prevent such phenomena. In fact, in the devotional and meditative exercises that we engage, all kinds of gross or subtle or abstract phenomena may arise. All of you can report such experiences.
The spiritual process is not a means for attaining those experiences, but it is the process that can, that must, go on in the midst of those experiences. If now, presently, the experience arising is essentially the pattern of gross awareness, or gross phenomenal existence, you must recognize that. If now you are having a vision of a subtle being or subtle environments, the Spiritual Master in a form of light, heavenly worlds, gods, goddesses, you must recognize that. If now you are seeing white light, yellow light, blue light, a spot, a field of light, radiance, you must recognize that. To recognize all phenomena, all experience, is the Teaching.
We must recognize that whatever is arising, even this moment of gross perception, is a non-binding modification of the Radiant Transcendental Reality, what is called the Buddha Nature, or Nirvana, or Brahman, or Parabrahman, or Very God, or the Ultimate Divine, or the Truth. Whatever the name given to the Ultimate Realization, it is That which must be Realized on the basis of the recognition of whatever is arising. Therefore, it is not necessary to achieve an alternative reality or an alternative state of experience in order to be Happy or to realize the Truth. Rather, Happiness or the realization of Truth is a matter of recognizing whatever happens to be arising.
“Everybody thinks that God is taking care of everything”
Everybody thinks that God is taking care of everything. There is no such God. God Transcends everything. God is to be Realized. God is not your parent. What is arising arises only as a dynamic of opposites, a dynamic of creation and destruction. The Realm of Nature is a dynamic of opposites that creates and destroys everything. If you want to protect and preserve, then you must create a way to do it. What you do not preserve is destroyed. You must therefore take care of what you want to preserve. Eventually, it will be destroyed anyway, whatever care you take care to preserve it. Everything that is created gets destroyed almost immediately. Everything that arises gets destroyed. God is That in Which everything is arising, Transcending everything.
The more profoundly you Realize That Which Transcends everything, the more you have the ability to achieve a balance in this dynamic, so that you develop equanimity, or a certain capacity to preserve what arises conditionally. You therefore develop the ability to generate sattvic or balanced forms, forms that will persist in a balanced state for significant periods of time. Such an ability is uncommon in Nature. It is the direct reflection of resonance with the Divine.
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The first truly human or humanizing stage of development is for us to transcend our dissociative emotional reaction to the inherent limitations of the body-mind and its experiences. It is only on the basis of a body-mind that is free of the conception and motivation of existence as a dilemma that the actual Realization of Truth can be founded. It is not the problem-solving exercise of mind or psyche that Realizes the Truth, but only the relaxed openness or tacit suspension of mind, psyche, or attention itself permits that Realization. It is not the strategic exercise of the body, or the total body-mind, that Realizes the Truth of the body-mind, but only the relaxed openness or tacit suspension of all contraction, all knowledge (or “knowing about”), and all self-possession permits that Realization.
Therefore, the human individual must grow into an understanding of himself, such that the reactive programs of knowing and acting are transcended in a tacit Realization of the Transcendental Condition in which the body-mind is arising, floating, changing, and passing away. The actual or Realized Truth is not itself an answer to the emotional dilemma of our existence, since we must transcend that dilemma as a precondition for Realizing the Truth. And the Truth is not an escape from the limited mortality of the body-mind, since neither mind (or psyche) nor body is made immortal by the Realization of the Truth.
The “Truth” that we seek (and sometimes claim to find) on the basis of our trouble is an invention of our own. The “Truth” that is proposed as an “answer” to the conceived dilemma of existence and that seems to represent an escape from the mortal limitations of the body-mind is itself nothing more than a state of the body-mind.
The actual Truth of our existence is simply the case. It is not an answer to a question. Indeed, any question (or emotional dilemma) must be an obstruction to the Realization (or clear and direct intuition) of what is always already the case. A disturbed and strategically active state of mind and body cannot discover the very Condition or Truth of the body-mind.
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December 30
Human awakening is the product of a inherent biological urge. This process of awkening is inherent in the psycho-biological structures of every human being.
Unfortunately awakening, spirituality and religion are associated with archaic belief systems, and illusions of mystical flight from the world and therefore tend to remain at an infantile and adolescent level of understanding.
The future possibilities of the awakening of ‘Man’ lies in the biological structures of the human body-mind itself. And that evolutionary mechanism is present in every human being. It is only more consciously activated or served in more awakened individuals, but it is present in everyone, and it may be awakened in anyone through self-critical insight and higher disciplines of the body-mind.
The higher evolutionary mechanisms in the nervous system and brain have yet to be studied and understood from a modern scientific point of view, and thus the future evolutionary and higher religious culture of Man has yet to receive its scientific justification in the popular mind. Humanity in general is now in a period of transition from the childish cultism of archaic religion and the adolescent exclusivism of scientific materialism to the future age of higher and evolutionary-religious and spiritual culture.
The human individual is natively or structurally disposed to grow beyond his present limits of understanding. This wisdom is not a new invention of my own. It has been the basic presumption behind esoteric societies all over the world for countless centuries.
Adi Da Samraj
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December 28
To create a human sanctuary for higher adaptation of the human species is a primal human urge. We inherently desire a human and natural environment in which we can live without the chronic production of stress chemistry. We know, deeply, psychically, that we cannot realize that transformation until we can create a culture in which people can live without degenerative stress. Thus, sanctuary, or spiritual community, is the motive in humans that contain the genetic secret of the next stage in human evolution.
We presently live under stress, in a subhuman culture whose populace is completely confused even in the most elemental levels of existence. We are all involved in an animal-like struggle for survival without much intelligence. Such a circumstance tends to stimulate a chemical profusion in the body that enables it to function and survive under stress, but that chemical design does not allow the higher psychic and subtle centers of the body-mind to awaken. On the contrary, this stress chemistry triggers the degenerative processes of aging as well as all other forms of bodily degeneration, and this same stress chemistry is generally empty of the profound genetic signals that can trigger the higher evolutionary functions of Man.
Until we have created a human order that is fundamentally free of mutual threat, it will not be common for people to live in a truly awakened and peaceful state, not only of mind, but of body (or the total body-mind). The evolutionary mechanism of the bodily being is programmed to awaken its next higher centers of function only when the chronic problems of its lower functional centers have been solved and when the being can live without chronically creating degenerative stress chemistry.
The body-mind must receive the signals that the stressful world has been overcome, that we need not fear, that we presently have a peaceful human society, not a society full of bombs and benighted craziness. You can perhaps make yourself more comfortable by becoming free of some of the anxiety of your ordinary daily life, but you cannot thus become so peaceful that the right hemisphere of the brain and the higher evolutionary mechanisms of the body-mind as a whole are stimulated. To enter into your higher human destiny, you must be altogether “cured” in your deep psychic heart.
Certainly, we would like the quality of our existence to be different. But people in general are not yet moving toward anything significantly different. Thus, the would-be human world is yet a lower-adapted, subhuman world. Perhaps some people are more highly evolved-people who can live an apparently moral, ecstatic, or spiritually devoted life but they are not common. Most people are fixed in their adaptation to living under stress, and they do not know enough to create human and spiritual sanctuary for themselves.
How, then, will you come to that point of feeling totally without anxiety, without fear, without any of the ordinary mortal consciousness in the midst of your daily life? How will you transcend that fear? You cannot until you overcome the lower evolutionary dimension of the body-mind, which is oriented to a life of physical distress and the struggle to survive bodily, including the stress of feeling that you are mortal, that perhaps when you die you are just plain dead. Until you enjoy a greater consciousness, you can never be certain about the matter of your death.
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December 22
Have you had any experience that is totally sufficient?
Do you like the experience you have, your experience altogether?
Are you just coping?
Isn’t it a way of dealing with a situation that is not sufficient?
Every moment of it.
It seems to you that there is nothing absolute you can do about it right now, nothing absolute you can do to be free of existence as mere coping and struggling with a state that is not completely satisfactory.
And this is what I’m saying. There is a Way, but I am talking about the difference between what is truly available to you in any moment and what you are experiencing.
In general, individuals cope with their given situation of existence. They do not even believe there is a sufficient state of existence to be Realized. Therefore, they seek, they make all kinds of arrangements, they cope. They do not even live the spiritual life, in general, certainly not even a true religious life. Instead, they are only coping and trying to make the best of life. No “best” comes of it, but they have no greater point of view.
Human beings are not experiencing Reality. They are experiencing a state of existence that they think they cannot do anything about in any absolute sense, and, therefore, they are coping with it. This is what human beings do. They establish their life, including philosophy, on the limited condition of existence that they suffer. They do not think there is anything absolute to be done about it, so they do what everybody does.
Therefore, in everything they do, people are just coping with their suffering, living as the self-contraction and seeking on its basis, all because they are not experiencing Reality, God, or Truth. They are not aware of Reality, God, or Truth. Instead, they are aware of their given situation, the apparent condition, which is a limit and frightening and poor, yet they have no sense that there is anything absolute they can do about it, and they do all the ordinary things people do.
Even if people get a whiff of something extraordinary to do in order to Realize What is Extraordinary, or Truly Real, the force of their own contraction tends to intervene, and they enter into the process in a mediocre, piecemeal fashion, still holding on to all their routines of coping.
If you are sensitive and of course you tend not to be very sensitive, because you are doing all kinds of things to desensitize yourself, but you can come to the point of real sensitivity-you can find out what you are doing that is preventing the Realization of Reality.
The human form exists in Reality. How could there be any argument about this? Everything exists in Reality. Whatever Reality Is, It Is, Already. If you examine yourself with great sensitivity, you find that you are not simply and merely existing in Reality. You are doing something. This is why Reality is not Obvious to you. If you were not doing that thing, Reality would simply be Obvious to you. You must find out what you are doing, and transcend it.
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December 19
The “News and Information” media of popular culture do not often invite the public to the exercise of discriminating intelligence. On the contrary, the popular media thrive on hype, propagandized states of emotion and mind, and nondiscriminating responses to every kind of advertised goods, persuasions, and results.
Until the media that inform the masses of humanity begin to invite the individual to exercise discriminating intelligence in all matters, and until human beings in general become founded in the higher Wisdom-Culture and the intimate politics of authentic human existence, there can be no true wondering about the madness we inherit in the daily News.
Indeed, the hypocritical media reaction of surprise (and sometimes disgust) in the face of all the kinds of fascinating and bizarre news in the world is even the product of a kind of competitive rivalry. The Cult of the News would be senior and superior to any phenomenon about which it reports. (From the popular point of view, the “Messiah,” or the “Messenger” is always senior to the Message.) Everyone in the world is in the cult game, including the media the themselves. Everyone wishes to be glamorous and right and the center of attention.
The News is one of the principal forms of modern popular entertainment. The Messenger is glamorized by the superior entertainment value of every kind of Message. Therefore, the News exploits the vulgarity of subhuman events and bastardizes the achievements of superior men and women. Then why should there be any wondering if immature people follow false cults, false leaders, false ideologies, and destructive causes? To be enthusiastic and also false is the hypocritical core of the “American Way.” Indeed, Western culture as a whole was founded on religious lies, political exploitation, and manipulative propaganda of every kind. And these means are yet to be overcome.
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December 12
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mind is not merely in the brain and less than the brain. Mind is the circumstance of consciousness in its association with objects of all kinds. Mind is universal, infinite in extent. And if we put ourselves into a position to explore the roots of experiencing, we are going to enter into a realm of mind in which we realize mind to be greater than mere daily thinking and social consciousness.
Those who take up the discipline of yogic mysticism learn in the process to become responsible for the tendencies of mind and attention that cause certain experiences to arise, or cause attention to gravitate toward one or another kind of phenomenon, or cause limiting interpretations to be superimposed on experience. Through the science of yogic mysticism, living beings can enter into a pure perception of the mechanism of our existence.
But mind is greater than we conceive mind to be from the purely physical point of view. What you are seeing at the present moment is actually a vision. You are having a vision at this moment. You know that you are seeing, but you do not generally acknowledge or presume that you are having a vision. Rather, you are identified with a physically embodied state in this gross environment, and you see and hear on that basis. Thus, you are not generally in a position to understand the nature of your own experiencing.
It is more or less common knowledge, at the present time, that you are not merely seeing what is external in this room. Your seeing is, in fact, an electronic apparition, developed in the nervous system of the brain. You have no direct connection to the gross object, or objects, that you are seeming to view at the present time. In other words, you are having a vision. You are not merely seeing a gross environment, but you are having a vision of a gross environment.
Because of the tendency to be identified with the body, and also because of all the taboos associated with conventional consciousness in this world, people do not investigate, or thoroughly explore and consider, the status of their own experience in any moment.
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Transcending The Cosmic Mandala
December 9
It is not that only those who are in the seventh stage are enlightened. Those who are in the previous stages of practice are at times entered into the disposition of enlightenment and at other times they are not. They phase in that Realization, and their realization of the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness is not Absolute. It is covered over by one or another aspect of experiential consciousness. Only in the seventh stage of life is there absolutely nothing between the devotee and the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness, not even a thought, because the devotee is that Consciousness. Thoughts and other phenomena arise as modifications of That.
Previous to the seventh stage, you see, the individual is more or less identified with the self, or the body-mind, in one or another of its dimensions, perhaps in all of its dimensions. He or she is looking to break through into that Consciousness, that Absolute Reality. Many people who have broken through to a slightly less superficial dimension of consciousness think they are enlightened, but enlightenment is only true when it is perfect, when it has penetrated all of the possibilities of consciousness, all of the possibilities of the body. The devotee must learn to surrender, not only to the great affair of the existing universe, but to his consciousness. All things are riding, not simply on energies, but on consciousness. He must surrender bodily into the current, or energy, of the infinite affair of existence and all the universes, and he must also surrender into the Consciousness.
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December 2
The Three Disturbances (adapted)
The chronic disturbances of people separate us from living a truly illuminated and happy life.
These disturbances relate to the three primary functional dimensions of the human individual – the physical, the emotional, and the mental.
The chronic disturbances of the physical being are reactive contractions, or recoil from life, in the form of disease and general ill health, pain, toxemia, enervation, and obsessive desire for the consolations of food, sex, company, and the objective goods of human existence.
The chronic disturbances of the emotional being are reactive contractions, or recoil from love, in the form of fear, shame, sorrow, guilt, anger, jealousy, and so forth.
The chronic disturbances of the mental being are reactive contractions, or recoil from a prior presumption of our true nature, recoil from reality, recoil into doubt, deluded thinking, obsessive mentalizing, and all the consolations of knowledge in relation to experience.
Therefore, the way of truly understanding ones true nature is a matter of responsibility for all of the chronic disturbances, so that there may not be the slightest difference between us and that condition that is reality and truth.
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anuary 2010
January 19
Fundamental to the discipline of love is letting go. You are practicing attachment and using it as an excuse to immunize yourself. The discipline of love requires letting people go. I do not mean letting them disappear. I mean giving them their life, giving them your feeling rather than withholding it, allowing them to grow, supporting their growth, supporting their free process of life.
You are not practicing the discipline of love. You are indulging in your own egoic “self-possession” and fear and reluctance and resistance, and you are immunizing yourself. What people usually call love is attachment, whereas real love is a great discipline and it requires great self-understanding, great self-discipline.
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Adi Da Samraj – 1993
January 15
You should also understand that I am not here to fight with you for any cause whatsoever. Whatever you choose, you are completely free to choose, and that is all there is to that.
All I represent here is an offering. I know how difficult it is to accept it and to live it. And I know exactly what I am doing and what I have to do in the case of every person. I have known exactly what to do with people who come in the condition that you all do, without the purification or clarity that a mature individual would represent in a spiritual culture.
The karmas that must be relieved in the case of individuals who come in this condition are of the grossest and most resistive kind. So they are not just plucked off like a pimple on your cheek. It is difficult for you and for me, and it has always been difficult.
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Adi Da Samraj – 1976
January 10
Adapted and edited – Beezone
Adi Da Samraj – May 25, 1992
Realization is not about someone realizing union with someone, or with anything. If there is any effort along those lines, it has nothing to do with Realization. It is precisely this effort that must be understood and transcended. When there is no such effort, no pursuit of union, then there is Realization.
This does not mean that you can instantaneously argue yourself out of this motive. I am telling you that any process of such “consideration” must be a process of self-observation and self-understanding. You must come to the point where the motive to union itself is thoroughly understood and ceases to control your existence which requires the process of sadhana.
You would like to by-pass this understanding. You tend to superimpose the model of seeking, or non-seeking on your sadhana and then superimpose it on all relations and all functions, all aspects of life and think you’re already enlightened.
I said many times before you must observe and understand this effort in the context of each stage of life. There are many varieties of this, some gross and some more subtle, depending on your stage of life. You cannot merely choose to bypass any stage. You must adapted to each stage and see what you’re up to and understand it. The ego is very slippery.
You must understand this process very directly in a participatory manner. You cannot merely by “considering” my instruction assume the asana of the Realization of the seventh stage of life. You must do the sadhana.
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“Everyone who has heard me even a little bit is enlightened with a small “e.””
January 2
The Law is Sacrifice, that is To Make Sacred
Beezone compliation and edit
There are two ways of life. There is one lived by the law of karma, or change itself, in confrontation with the solid world, the appearing world; or there is the way of living from the point of view of Truth or the actual, the real condition.
These are the two laws and they manifest in a variety of ways which bring forth other laws. Two other laws are (1) whatever you have not transcended, you must fulfill – whatever is set in motion tends to remain in motion and (2) whatever is not used tends to become obsolete
If you live by the first law you are trying to figure yourself out by becoming less than what you are and basically you are struggling with your self. If you relax into the second law, in equitableness of yourself, you will see the Spirit working, rather than a separate you that is somehow trying to figure things out. The first law creates people struggling, rejecting, resisting, offending and this then creates a situation where the spiritual process cannot take place – that is another expression the Law.
When the second law is not understood you will not become a sacrifice of the whole body mind. The heart has not come to rest and there is only a cramp, a contraction at the heart. This separate and separative consciousness is then obsessive, bewildered and only pursues fulfillment on the basis of what is apparently possible in the midst of this puny limitation we wake up to each day.
Understanding the second law does not mean things do not still arise and difficulties vanish. Since the life of most people is built on the idea that the Law of life is survival and existence is a stuggle for survival. Survival is then motivation, significance, meaning, and goal of life, either conscious or unconscious. Then the law of sacrifice is not fufulled and you become a sacrifice in any case, grudgingly, unconsciously. You will be eaten.
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February 2010
February 20
Adi Da Samraj talking to a group of devotees – December 4, 1992. Adapted and edited by Beezone
“You must get serious about your own suffering and the suffering of all other beings, and about the stupidity of all movements on Earth, whatever they are called – political, economic, religious. Whatever they are called, they are utter stupidity. There is no siddhi in them, no blessing, no unique capability invested in the world. There is Only This One who is here to do that. There is no other. The World is One. Either you will understand This, or you will not.
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.
Accept no separation between us, nor between you and any another. None! Do not “oink” yourself into separation and stupid oblivion. Embrace what is True, Right and Real, practice love, tolerance and Truth. Do so diligently, consistently, with great intensity. This is My Admonition to you, and it is all I can Give you. If you want to ignore the truth of this time and the Great Opportunity you are obligated Respond to, the burdensome Yuga that is coming upon mankind will be visited upon you and all, and its consequences will be absolutely terrible. Listen to the prophecies of the ancient ones. The ones who have had their hearts planted on this earth. You will not hear this in the commercials on TV or the bulletin boards on the highway. They will tell you to continue to consume, continue to indulge yourself in your appetites for satisfaction and adventure. This is not a joke, this is the time you are in and you must respond in a different way than you are presently committed to.”
Adi Da Samraj – December 4, 1992 – Adapted and edited by Beezone
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February 12
“What is popularized, hyped, and commonly believed to be religion, spirituality, or meditation is invariably a form of self-meditation, self-glorification, and self-survival. Such subhuman games are sold to masses of people via an appeal to naive and neurotic needs for certainty, hope, fascination, superiority, a positive self-image, and egoic immunity from fear and death. Thus, religion, spirituality, and meditation become diluted, reduced to the worldly or self-preserving levels of less than human interest. The typical follower is childish, ultimately irresponsible, self-involved, amoral, experientially undeveloped, weak and out of balance in the dimensions of action, feeling, and thought, and irrationally attached to the enclosures of cult and belief.”
Adi Da Samraj – The Enlightenment of the Whole Body – 1978
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February 6
“If you believe that you are just dead when you die, you will cease to love, and love is sufficient wisdom.
I, like many others, have seen that we are not just the body. I am certain that you will survive. But I don’t want you to just believe that. I want you to intuit the Reality of your Condition, which is Love.
We are human beings, awakened to this mortal condition, subject to all of these influences. No information shouts itself out of the clouds. Our awareness for the most part is in everything that is below the heart.
How should you create your life? Create it on the basis of what you can be associated with, what you can understand, what you can Realize through Love. That is my fundamental communication.
That is a great gesture, a manly gesture, a womanly gesture. Since you are unable to love absolutely, you must respond to this Teaching below the heart, at the level of your experience, in your loving, your real human relations. Actually, that is enough, because it involves you in the midst of experience with a gesture that is Free, that overcomes the complication of mortality.
My business is to enter into friendly relations. You are all very beautiful to me. I love my men and women friends. It is not consoling, but I like it. So if you commit yourself to this Way in a most enthusiastic fashion, you may Realize a Destiny that I cannot possibly enjoy. Because I am coming back here. I cannot leave this place. I cannot stay away from here for an hour. I am always incarnate.”
Da Free John, December 25, 1977
Beezone edit and adaptation
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February 1
“You can practice Communion only by transcending fear, by actual, literal, heartfelt surrender beyond all fear of death and madness into the Transcendental Reality. To do this you do not have to die or become mad, but your fear must be surrendered in love, in ecstasy. You must simply renounce your fear, give up the luxury of it, and presume surrender as your attitude under all conditions. When that attitude becomes true of you, you realize that fear is not inherent in the act and the moment of emotional surrender. Therefore, abide in surrender perfectly and you will not be involved with fear, madness, or death in the conventional forms that we fear and try to avoid.
Heartfelt release of fear is the secret of passing through the spiritual process without going mad. To the degree that you are full of fear, you limit your experience – and if experience is forced upon you, then you have no ability while fearful to view it sanely, to relax and surrender within it. You cannot surrender by relaxing and trying to feel better. You can surrender only by giving yourself up, relaxing your self-hold, surrendering your mind altogether…”
Adi Da Samraj – Compulsory Dancing, 1980
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March 2010
March 26
Adi Da (Bubba Free John) – 1977
“Because of today’s fast communication, because there are more and more books about spirituality and more and more people traveling and talking about spiritual matters, it is easy to imagine that some great spiritual event is occurring. But people are just considering spiritual ideas. Most people who are involved with so-called spirituality are involved in superficial ways, as they would be with conventional church beliefs.
What people describe as the great spiritual age today is just a turning toward subjective matters and subjective illusions. Such a view was fostered in this country by the drug culture of the 60’s, which turned people into the subjective order. But that way is just as filled with illusions as any conventional life. It is the dimension of mind just as outward obsessions are also mind. Mind is the thing that we suffer, including the ego, which is a part of mind. Therefore, turning to the subjective order is not spiritual.
Certainly the so-called spiritual cultures arising in this country have some feeling for a fuller life. They represent a sympathy with an aspect of the body-being that Western life has tended to exclude. The subjective or emotional aspect of the being is being emphasized again, and so for that reason spiritual movements in this country look toward the East. But the subjective being is not the Truth any more than the active or objective being. Thus most people are just arbitrarily and superficially taking on Eastern religious customs in the name of spirituality.
True spirituality is a moral and spiritual transformation. And the practice of real or spiritual life begins to make a difference when people who are living conventional lives are no longer addicted to the worldly game. Not that they become otherworldly and separate from the world entirely, but they no longer live as a manifestation of conventional consciousness and interests.”
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March 17
The usual man or woman begins to include spirituality as a possibility within his or her search through the medium of his or her experience. They may start to meditate or begin reading uplifting religious and spiritual literature. This is fine, but this has nothing to do with Spiritual life.
March 11
(Bubba Free John) Adi Da Samraj – 1977
“The best thing to do, then, is to be uncomfortable. That is the one thing you do not want, though. Bottom line, nobody wants to be uncomfortable. Everybody wants to be comfortable. You do not want to use your greatest virtue, which is the virtue of discomfort and the capacity to transcend the spell. Instead of doing that you try to maintain a level of consolation and involvement with all this so that you will not feel uncomfortable.
You cannot avoid that discomfort. It is essential to your conditional life. You must find it, locate it, and really use it. That is the best thing to do. Do not be angry and sorrowful and guilty and fearful. Rather, be uncomfortable in other words not satisfied and not satisfiable in the framework of ordinary living so you will practice. You will have the will to practice transcendence, and you will do it in your daily life and in meditation. But you will not have any energy and attention for that practice if you are not uncomfortable, if you are not dissatisfied. You will tend to settle for the dissatisfaction in the form of neurotic emotion, which is not a sufficient basis for practice.”
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April 27
April 23
This is the late-time, the dark epoch, East and West. This is the long-prophesied time of the setting sun, the Western sun. This is the time of the decline of the mind and the culture of the rising sun, the Eastern sun.
Now the human world is in its “Western” and “Westernizing” phase. For centuries, there has been the slow motion toward this grotesque mockery of end-time, wherein all, now at the end of day, look forward only to their long-anticipated nightlife of lower and subhuman and always struggling occupations of body, emotion, and mind.
The “Western” time of Man is that epoch which is characterized by ambiguity relative to any kind of dependency, any kind of “authority”, or even any demand from without. The “Western” and “Westernizing” Man (male or female), including even all the “modern” and “modernizing” human world, is deeply set in rebellion. This dark time is thoroughly characterized by a reactive and adolescent, immature, egoic, and ego-bound, and ego-binding rebellion against all that is not the ego-“I”- and all that can be described as true “authority”, and all “authority-figures”, and even all “others”.
Adi Da Samraj
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April 10
Old Patterns, New Responsibilities
The purpose in considering your whole history is to see how that demand for attention, your need for love, the acquisition of knowledge and the love of power and fame are all coming from the same disposition. It comes from pattern that already exists, it doesn’t originate in any specific relationship. That is the value of being able to trace your history.
By trying to manipulate your present situation either internally or externally is not the solution because the problem doesn’t arise in the present, the problem is simply the continuation of habits, patterns of memory. Your present situation is only a reflection of patterns repeated from incidences of the past, frozen moments in time, repeating themselves over and over again. So it wouldn’t make any difference how you or anyone else or how the situation could change and so forth. Your basic life pattern would still be the same.
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April 1, 2010
When those who have lost faith in the exalted begin to suspect that things are not as they seem, they always assume that things must be worse than they seem, not better.
Westerners are always trying to surmount the negative psychological force, either through ego-effort or by means of imaginary association with a separate Absolute Other, Whose power they can consume irresponsiblyand, in all of that, faith and belief are reduced to the status of methods for overcoming psychological negativity.
Faith is the assumption of the Divine as the active Principle and Condition of your life rather than the little twenty watts, the field of ego in which you enclose yourself day to day.
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Beezone adaptation and edit from original talk by Adi Da (see below)
Old Patterns, New Responsibilities
The purpose in considering your whole history is to see how that demand for attention, your need for love, the acquisition of knowledge and the love of power and fame are all coming from the same disposition. It comes from pattern that already exists, it doesn’t originate in any specific relationship. That is the value of being able to trace your history.
By trying to manipulate your present situation either internally or externally is not the solution because the problem doesn’t arise in the present, the problem is simply the continuation of habits, patterns of memory. Your present situation is only a reflection of patterns repeated from incidences of the past, frozen moments in time, repeating themselves over and over again. So it wouldn’t make any difference how you or anyone else or how the situation could change and so forth. Your basic life pattern would still be the same.
You are fundamentally in a reactive state in which you’ve existed since before you can remember, you are always already presuming separation, the absence of attention, having to struggle to get attention, having to struggle to get into a pleasurable state. You struggled and connived and so forth as a little kid. You enact a ritual of either being angry, sorrowful and resentful. You’re unhappy and pissed off.
You look for replacements, temporary satisfactions but they never seem to be enough. They may be satisfactory for a period of time but they are not ‘scratching the deeper itch’, the deeper ‘gnawing’ that seems to show itself cyclically.
As long as you are presuming that you are in principle separated from loving attention, you can never get in touch with it, even when you become intimate with it, because it is not the same as being in connection, it’s a temporary acquisition. The acquiring of it occurs within a situation in which you are inherently separated.
When you are an infant there is survival value in the recoil or reaction to life, and all of the manipulative games you created had something to do with reality, but when you get to this stage of your life, the conditions that created this assumption to begin with no longer exist. And instead of it being factual that you are rejected, not getting attention, not being loved, and so forth, it winds up that that is what you are all about.
It’s natural to develop this separative ego, the self-possessed strategy, in your early years. Its development coincided with incidents that affected you mentally and emotionally emotionally, and which seem themselves to be a kind of betrayal but it would have occurred in any case weather you had negative events to react to or not.
It’s a dangerous creative process for the child to become differentiated and be an individual. If you have negative factors in your life, within which to develop your functional independence, it can look as if are a little delinquent or crazy. So there are two sides here: one is the situation in your childhood or your infancy in which you were cut off too soon or whatever. And then there is also just the natural course of the human being’s differentiating himself or herself egoically.
But you are living these patterns in the present. They are memories in the form of tendencies. You’re living them in the present and getting lessons about them. Sometimes easy and sometimes not so easy. You should pay attention to what life is telling you.
The mere willful attempt to not do it is not sufficient, because you can’t account for all of the aspects of your behavior and feeling and thinking that are versions of this ritual. It will happen in any case. And it will happen particularly mightily when your guard is down. So you can’t make a decision not to do it, independent of inspection and responsibility for the pattern that you’re involved in because it’s not in the present that this situation exists. The situation that you are struggling with emotionally doesn’t exist in the present. It’s memory, it’s old adaptation, it’s tendency. Not particularly memory of incidents, but of the reactions, the patterns of adaptation that you developed relative to incidents that bind you.
That’s what you all must realize; the incidents in the past don’t have any significance in themselves, it’s the patterns of adaptation that you created relative to them. Those are what you’ve got to be responsible for. The incidents are already gone, they don’t have any force except by association. You’re not suffering the incidents of the past, nor are you suffering the incidents of the present. You are suffering from the patterns of adaptation, the habits that are tending to persist. They are very ordinary and you cannot do them once you’ve inspected your life and see the pattern.
Everyone has done the same old thing their whole life; you do it every day. You’ve done it in every new situation. Every time a new level of experience or whatever appears, you just adapt it to this pattern. You’ve always been doing the same thing fundamentally, the same little scheme or script, the same emotional habit. So it’s not overwhelmingly complicated; it’s just that it is tending to persist. It’s not by manipulating yourself in the present that you are free of it, it’s by seeing this history and this pattern that is present in the form of tendency, and being free on the basis of that inspection to adapt to a new condition in the present through the whole discipline of your spiritual life, the Communion that it represents.
There isn’t anything complex about you or anybody else in the whole world. Everybody has done the same thing; on the basis of the vulnerability in the infantile situation when they were moving into incarnation, everyone developed a reactive pattern and presumption that essentially amounted to not being responsible for love, or feeling-attention, and through various games always looking for it to come to them. Everybody in the whole world is doing that; that is all anybody is doing unless they are understanding it, being responsible for it and entering into the eternal incident that is spiritually communicated to them in this moment.
That is the only way you can do something different than everybody else in the world is doing. And there is no magical release from the past, there is only responsibility for it. Once you become responsible for it and adapt to the eternal incident in the moment, then the past starts becoming obsolete because you are adapting in a new way. The reason it hasn’t changed yet, even though you’ve thought about your life for years, is that you haven’t adapted differently.
more:
Become Responsible (original talk)
I Call you to Go Beyond the “Oedipal” Sufferings of Childhood
You Are Not the One Who Gets Loved
“I am prone to a feeling of tightness, particularly in the heart and stomach, but also in other areas. It is anxiety or doubt of being or in being. Life and death, both principles are necessary and operative in me and all other particularities. Thus I can work to create good conditions is a failure with regard to reality itself. It is a desire to escape the death side and thus to flee from the dual nature of existence. In me it manifests as a will to paradise, to ecstasy in imagination, to distraction and fascination. It is the way without faith or peace.
This fear, anxiety and doubt seems necessary, for in fact all future conditions are indefinite. However, these perceptions are not created by the fact of indefiniteness but a desire to escape it. They want to create a kingdom of certainty, of absolute pleasure. Thus I pursue all forms of knowledge and fascinating experience. I am in endless thought, erotic imagination, etc. This is a failure to accept the death side as necessary and identical to the life process. It is a refusal to die any death. But when this flight is truly seen, then one can be free of fear, anxiety and doubt with regard to ones very being. Energy can be directed into the life enterprise itself because one sees that its dual aspect is necessary and that life, peace and freedom are to be realized only by a concentration within the awesome duality. Then formerly we found only death by fleeing death and embracing a phantom life, but now we will know life in growing degrees by embracing the certain principles of reality.”
Franklin Jones (Adi Da Samraj) 1969 – Water and Narcissus
Note:
Adi Da wrote the Water and Narcissus 1967-1969 and completed it in New York. At that time he had come back from India and was on his way to Los Angeles. This is prior to his realization at the Vedanta temple in 1970.
This selection covers basic areas of Adi Da teaching – vital shock, fear of death, dual aspect of life, doubt and the desire to create good world conditions.