Beezone Edit
Three Talks of Adi Da Samraj
talking to his devotees combined and edited.
February – December
1993
Be Surrendered to the
Degree of Beatitude
Devotee: I love You my
Lord.
Sri Gurudev: (Sri
Gurudev hugs and kisses devotee). That is the most
directly devotional act you have ever done in My Company.
Not just the hug and the kiss, but the feeling and the
sounds that accompanied it. I Love you, Never forget or act
otherwise.
To the degree you will not allow it
you are not simplified, you are not full of Grace, beatitude
does not characterize your face. Your are not murdered, not
wounded absolutely. Struggling to survive. You have that
hard face, that surviving look, and you are moving about to
accomplish it. There are some moments in life, obviously
there is the moment in death, in which you get this Grace
with the possible knowledge, though some may escape it or
forget about it. But it is the Secret, to be so vulnerable
that you are not performing your own act anymore. It is the
secret of life to be so given up, in life, not merely
fearing death because that is required of you then. But in
life, to be so given up, so surrendered. This is the secret
of Beatitude, the secret of Enlightenment.
Devotee: Beloved Sri Gurudev,
You put a book on The Basket of Tolerance called The Dark
Night of the Soul by John of the Cross, and he talks about
it not just a catharsis, not necessarily as a single event,
but as surrender.
Sri Gurudev: Surrender not
done, surrender accomplished by God. You have no option, all
your options over, so imposed upon that you are dead! That
is prapati, that is God-Realization, that is true surrender,
that is self forgetting. It is not merely crisis moments
that may provoke it or make it necessary – death and other
difficult moments you see. You are in that very moment now
but you have developed through this self-contraction means
to avoid it, to desensitize yourself to the imposition, the
force of this very moment. The force of My Company, the
force altogether of existence in this moment.
You all know who is doing the really
important work in life among ordinary human beings. It is
the people who are dying. They are on the edge of having to
deal with everything which has to be dealt with and they
have no options.
Our good friend Barry passed on from
here a couple of weeks ago after a long period of his
suffering. You know very well that that is where he really
did his work. You know very well that in that circumstance
you will do that work. Well sometimes death comes suddenly.
You never know whether you can do it as a process very much.
But in your feeling before it occurs, comes up for you, you
know that there is at least one time when you have to deal
with everything, when you know you will come to the point
where you have no options, no strategies that apply. The
whole mass of it will be so overwhelming, so complex the
maya cannot be figured out, and surrender will be
accomplished, not merely dying by you. Accomplished
utterly.
But it is not enough to do it on
your death bed, you see. That can be purifying. It is a
necessity you know will be imposed upon you, As I have said
to you all, you are dying while alive. Your life is about
dying. You are enduring the psychology of beings and have
heard they are going to die and are spending your life going
through the mass of rounds of anger, denial, bargaining,
depression, acceptance — every complex that could be
described out it, you see. You are living a death process
while alive, but you are not really accomplishing it, you
are not really dealing with it altogether. You are dealing
with it piece meal and you are all the time coming up with
strategies to avoid your sensitivity to it, to avoid the
imposition of 1t, and that is your whole life, that is the
search. Because the surrender is not accomplished the
self-contraction remains in tact. It is all reactivity,
desire, seeking, objects, others, drama! You allow your
entire life to become just that when you could, not just on
your death bed but now, in every moment of life, be so
submitted as one in a terminal state and go beyond all those
illusions, all those strategies you see.
Be surrendered to the degree of
Beatitude, beyond your own effort, now! To take on the
religious life in My company, to do sadhana in My Company is
about that. There are not so many accomplishing it most
profoundly yet, but you are guided by it, you are focused in
it. You are given means to enhance that potential more and
more profoundly. But that is what it is about, you see, That
is what Enlightenment is! Not some glorious, smiling,
healthy self image you see. But that absolute murdered ego
surrender. The great Divine Imposition accepted without
qualification. That is what your life in. My company is
about, that is what the Way of the Heart is about, that is
what your devotion to Me is about, And all the time I am
enhancing your capability, working to enhance your
capability for just this event.
Devotee: I feel in my own
case I am constantly trying to console myself and avoid
exactly what You are talking about,
Sri Gurudev: You know you are
being killed.
Devotee: I do not know
that,
Sri Gurudev: You do know that
you are being killed, everything is killing you. You are
going to die, there are no two ways about it. Andrea: I do
not feel it.
Sri Gurudev: But you know it
do you not?
Devotee: Not
really.
Sri Gurudev: You do not know
that this is true?
Devotee: Intellectually I
know it.
Sri Gurudev: Well that is
enough. You know it, but you do not want to feel it, you do
not want to live as if it is so, you are trying to avoid it,
you are trying to survive in the face of this great
imposition that you know is so. That is it, that is
Narcissus, that is a reason for it. That is the cause of the
dreadful egoic life. And of course you are trying to
immunize yourself in every possible fashion — physically,
emotionally, mentally, socially, functionally, practically,
relationally, in every possible fashion you are trying to
immunize yourself against this imposition that you know,
absolutely, the best you can do is avoid it maybe for a
little while. You are avoiding the very fundamental nature
of existence by trying to survive. It is paradoxical but it
is true.
All the dead wake up, all the living
can. The thing you think is an evil is a great source of
Beatitude. Not the common every day evil, not negativity
merely in the normal context, but the great one, the great
matter, the great event. The snuffing out of all your
survival efforts, all your self-possession, all your
separateness, the utter dissolution of it beyond any
capability on your part toward it. This is what you are
avoiding. This is Narcissus, this is the
self-contraction.
Devotee: Sri Gurudev,
You say it is the source of Beatitude because we have no
option but surrender?
Sri Gurudev: It is not even
an option, is what I am saying. It is simply the Grace of
Reality.
Devotee: You talk about
conditional existence is a great force, As You were speaking
I was feeling how I am pressed in from all sides by this
place,
Sri Gurudev: I remember
reading some book many years ago, somebody was asked “What
is God?” Pressure. You feel pressured, imposed upon,
intruded upon, it threatens your survival separately, your
separateness. It threatens it. You are all the time
threatened by it, you are all the time under stress. There
is that imposition and your refusal to allow it. Your
refusal to allow it is the self-contraction. That is why you
must find it out, so that you will come to the point genius
of allowance. It is the most fundamental capability you
have, this allowance. But you rehearse your entire life as a
dramatization of the avoidance of it. So that is why it is
said that all life is suffering. That is why it becomes
suffering, you see. In any moment, to the quick, it can be
Beatitude, but it is suffering because of this
contraction.
SRI DA AVABHASA: (You all
want things to work) out to be perfect. Have utopia, or
maybe you could have what has been called the “Kingdom of
God” Sort of fall on your head. You think religion should
not require this great exercise from you, but you inn your
“self-possessed”, suffering state must magically be served
and relieved and kissed, you see. And that’s not how it
works.
I mentioned to you several weeks ago
about how the Tibetan tradition, a few fundamental
communications made, even to the common people, you see. And
the most fundamental communication made is that everything
changes and everyone dies. There’s no permanence, and
everyone’s mortal, everything you see arising in the natural
domain is changing, passing, nothing’s permanent, everything
passes, everyone dies, that means you. That’s among the
principal, most fundamental communications made in that
tradition, and also made in many other
traditions.
They then communicate to them, there
is a dharma, a way, beyond suffering. But that doesn’t make
any sense. That’s not the principal communication, you see?
It’s the principal in the sense of being the greater
communication, but the communication you got to get straight
with first is that conditional existence is suffering,
passing, changing, impermanent, mortal. And what are the
Tibetans called to do then? To accept that firmly,
fundamentally, in their daily moment to moment
consciousness, and never relinquish it.
You all, in your disposition, you
see, not governed by such imperatives, want to maintain a
state of existence bereft of that understanding. And to do
so, you out yourself off, not only from conditional nature,
but from the Divine. So you’re wandering in some strange
soup of changes, but trying to maintain a self-pleasurized
state, immune. You’re like zombies. You’re asleep. You’re
not experiencing reality, conditional or unconditional.
You’re in a dream, an illusion, “Narcissus”, possessed by a
misinterpretation of reality, a state desensitized to
reality. You’re possessed by an illusion — not merely an
illusion in the form of a thought–it occurs in that farm
too, you see–but an illusion of experience, an illusion of
presumption all over the body-mind. You’ve desensitized
yourself to reality. You are actively doing s0 by divorcing
yourself from intelligence and wandering in a subjective
state of relative pleasure as much as you can manage it, you
see. That’s your situation at the pond, that ordinary state
of self-pleasure which you are always serving, always trying
to maintain.
Devotee: [Inaudible]
to feel the constant stress of just what this place really
is about.
SRI DA AVABHASA: But then
it’s just stress,
Devotee: Yeah, It’s not
intelligent[ence!]
SRI DA AVABHASA: Not a
conclusion, not intelligence.
Devotee: That’s
right.
SRI DA AVABHASA: Not knowing
conditional existence for what it is, but knowing the Divine
is also, or the Ultimate Conditional is also, and making a
life on that basis, exercising yourself intelligently toward
Divine Realization, So all you get is the stress of
conditional reality, but not any real understanding of it
such that you can change your way of life,
Devotee: Da!
SRI DA AVABHASA: You are
absolutely dependent on the One who is this Source of this
horror you have made. You have every right to be anxious and
fearful, being separate from God. You are making your own
destiny instead of submitting to the One Who Is, and being
purified and having a better, or even ultimate, destiny made
by Grace. If you simply understood your position and
functioned on that basis, you see, everything would be
clarified.
Devotee: I feel very grateful
for tonight’s consideration that You have Given us, because
I can bring the will to that. I couldn’t do it bringing the
will to trying to sort through my own body-mind,
SRI DA AVABHASA: Mmm hmm,
That is exactly so, and that is what I have been telling you
foe twenty-two years. Nearly twenty-two. Just that.
Narcissus is unillumined, uninformed, self-possessed, and
can’t work it out. You must respond to Me, turn up from the
pond, exercise yourself in this devotion to Me, and that is
the Way.
That is the traditional way also,
that is the secret of the entire Great Tradition of mankind.
It has always been so. It is the essential content of all
the traditions, although they get diverted from it and so
forth, get complicated and tend to move toward the
lower-based or the ego-matter, so there is lots of that too.
But this is the fundamental truth, the Great Truth, the
Great Secret. And you can see it in the traditions
everywhere, variously displayed. And it is a useful exercise
to examine the traditions and see that it is so. It is part
of your study. But it is not itself the way, to just be
studying the traditions and making equations or seeing
likenesses and talking it and quoting from the Great
Tradition in your lectures and remarks and writings, you
see. Then you make it non-useful to the degree that that is
the only exercise you are up to, you see, it is lust another
useful sign or intrusion, see it proven there too, you see.
It is a supportive exercise. If you make it into a thing in
and of itself, and try to somehow find the way just in the
traditions and the literature and the history.
The way itself, as a whole and
totally, and in its ultimate demonstration is in the Great
Traditions. You can find there, by considering My Word, you
will find there, if you examine it, this key is there, this
essential Truth is there. It is the foundation of the entire
tradition of mankind, although most forget it or don’t take
it all that seriously, or don’t know how, really, to become
involved in it.
That being the case, then also in
the traditional setting, people lust use books, metaphors,
myths, and so forth, to some how dummy up this process. It
doesn’t work that way. There must be the direct revelation,
not the myth of the Realizer, but the Realizer in Person.
And the Way given by the Word emanating from that One who is
Samadhi itself.
So that way is suggested
metaphorically, and piecemeal, and here and there, to one
degree or another, manifested in the Great Tradition, is
here manifested whole in My own Person, and given its full,
right, non-mythological, true, real basis,
Devotee: Yes, Da.
SRI DA AVABHASA: It should be
a simple matter for all, then, for all beings, all mankind,
for all beings altogether, a simple matter to redress the
wrongs of this now dark age. It requires this conversion one
by one.
Devotee: Well, I have also
noticed in studying the Great Tradition that there is a
disposition of surrender, but often it is not, so much of
the time it is not to the fullness of God, it is not what
You have Given us, or shown us.
SRI DA AVABHASA: It is turned
to various purposes, generally egoic. The essential Yoga,
Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga is also there. But then arguments
laid on top of it, and everything to bow to or make
compromises about relative to ordinary ego-based people in
order to accommodate them in the general fold of religion.
And, after awhile, no Realizers present, what is left! Just
a call to believe in Santa Claus, you see, and behave in a
positive social manner.