Beezone edit and adaptation from 1973 talk
True
Sincerity
Adi Da Samraj
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.