The Primary Sensation – Adi Da Samraj

ADI DA SAMRAJ: In every moment when you are motivated to seek, the root of the motivation is a sensation. That root-sensation is the self-contraction. It is the avoidance of relationship. If you examine that root-sensation and feel it, you can effectively practice the “conscious process” and “conductivity”, and feel beyond it. That practice eliminates the search.

Therefore, there are two aspects to your practice in My Company. There is the primary process I have just Described to you. And, secondary to it, the there is all the proper discipline you must apply to your habit of seeking and the circumstances of your life.

The core of the primary process is self-understanding, or the awareness of the sensation that is characteristic of every moment and that motivates every kind of seeking and that makes the moment complicated, stressful, and difficult. Even in pleasurable moments, the sensation is there.

You tend to allow both the pleasure of the pleasurable moments and the pain or the difficulty of the painful or difficult moments to override your awareness of this consistent sensation, which arises previous to both pleasure and pain, or stress. It is this sensation that must be located, or observed, and felt beyond. And observing the self-contraction at its root is the core of the self-transcending process.

Instead of truly, consistently, moment by moment observing and feeling beyond this knot, however, you tend to ride in the periphery of your search, in the emotions associated with it, and in the objects, others, ideas, whatever, that you are pursuing or to which you are attached. Therefore, you are only dramatizing. Instead of locating the primary sensation and dealing with it and feeling beyond it, you remain embedded in these peripheral activities, which are only the results of the sensation, the original knot, which can be observed directly in any moment, in every moment. The core of self understanding is to locate and surrender that motivating sensation, not to be wandering in the reactions, the desires, the search itself, the objects, and the others, and becoming more and more complicated and dramatic as a result. Steadiness of practice of the Way of the Heart requires the capability of feeling the primary sensation of the self contraction and feeling beyond it.

The period of adapting to the practice of locating the primary sensation and feeling beyond it should not take a long period of time. There are, of course, things to be examined, things to be disciplined, so that inevitably as a practical matter it takes some time. Yet even after years and years and years of practice in My Company, you all are not showing many signs of being responsible for the search, of even beginning to deal with this primary sensation and feeling beyond it. You are only talking all the time about your obliviousness to the primary sensation that is motivating it all.

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Excerpts on self-Contraction from Adi Da’s talks 2004-2007