Heart Conversion Talk Series – Adi Da Samraj – The Beatitude of Perfect Surrender to Me


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HEART CONVERSION TALK SERIES

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HEART CONVERSION TALK SERIES

Volume 1, Number 12

DISCOURSE 2 

The Beatitude of Perfect Surrender to Me

A Discourse Given by Sri Da Avabhasa on February 10, 1993

A MAN: I love You, my Lord.

SRI DA AVABHASA: [Sri Gurudev hugs and kisses the man.] That is the most directly devotional act you have ever done in My Companynot just the hug and the kiss but the feeling and the sounds that accompanied it. I Love you. Never forget this or act otherwise.

DEVOTEE: I understand, my Lord. I love You.

SRI DA AVABHASA: And so is there some question?

DEVOTEE: Yes, Sri Gurudev. One of the conditions I have is to always be sensitive to the effect I have on other people.

SRI DA AVABHASA: The culture has discussed this with you?

DEVOTEE: Yes. It has been a very useful discipline for me to have, my Lord. You have given me the arms of understanding relative to many matters reactivity and desiring, feeling reactivity as the self-contraction and being able to move beyond it. But what I notice, and it happens primarily in a relational context where I will be talking with somebody and not be sensitive to them, I will not be animating love with them . . .

SRI DA AVABHASA: That! Just that. Obviously that is it. Your animating love with them ought to be required not just noticing your effect on other people but maintaining the discipline of your devotion to Me and expressing it in feeling love-relationship with others. That is a better way of putting it, I think. Yes, do not drop your observing your effect on others, but this is more fundamental.

DEVOTEE: Thank You, my Lord. Just after your conversation last night I practiced this discipline more today, and it allowed me to notice more readily when I was contracting and becoming righteous or angular with other people. I feel it is the key area I need to incarnate so that I do not notice the effects downstream.

SRI DA AVABHASA: There will be nothing to notice downstream if you love Me all the while, if you keep yourself as My devotee, always hugging Me as you just did, emanating those sounds, those feelings. Be always in that disposition. Bring that, then, to all your friends, to all your relations, to everyone you meet, with no compromise. You will not have to worry about “downstream” if you are feeling Me. Nothing can come downstream for you or anyone else except the Beloved, if you stay true with Me.

DEVOTEE: This is a very useful conversation, my Lord. Thank You very much.

SRI DA AVABHASA: What about all this mind, then, and solidity?

DEVOTEE: Well, it all comes, as You said, when I am not present, loving, feeling my devotion to You, talking about my devotion to You.

SRI DA AVABHASA: The mind is interesting the whole body is interesting, but the mind is interesting, especially in “solid” types, who are always thinking, always under the stress of thinking, trying to explain, trying to come to some understanding, some insight, some explanation, something they can communicate. This mind business is interesting stuff, because the mind presumes it is capable of something that it is not in the slightest capable of. The mind presumes it is capable of everything, because it can embrace, communicate, believe in, associate with, a symbol for anything and everything.

There is only one thing of direct experience in the mind. It is the self-contraction, the ego-“I”, the sense of separateness. Everything else the mind does is either a conversation with itself or a symbolic representation of something that is beyond itself.

There is no thing in the mind apple, God. There is no “apple” achieved by the mind, nor God. You can think about God, say “God”, say things philosophically about the Divine, about Realization and so forth. It is never Realization. It is never God. You can say “apple, apple, apple, apple”. It is never an apple! You can say “apple” and think “apple”, but it is never an actual apple. You can say “God” and think “God”, but it is never actually God.

The mind is filled with representations, and not one of them is what it represents. What it represents is always beyond the mind. The mind is always chattering through representations. Everything it represents is outside itself or beyond itself. And otherwise all the mind is, is the chattering of the ego-“I”. The separate “I”-notion is the only direct experience of the mind, perpetually. This is the only thing the mind experiences this one experience of separateness, separate ego-“I”. Every symbol, every conversation inwardly or outwardly expressed, is just the babble of that separate feeling, through representations seeming to associate with things that are utterly beyond itself.

The mind is self-contraction, a rehearsal of self-contraction, a ceremony, a ritual, of self-contraction. The only experience of the mind is the sense of separate self. Every word in the mind represents something that is entirely outside itself and cannot be achieved unless the mind relaxes and the thing itself is entered into.

There are only two things the mind does apart from this constant of the self-contraction: the awareness of separateness and the representation of what is outside itself, chanting to itself like Narcissus whispering to himself while hanging over the pond, [Sri Gurudev whispers] “Oh, my beloved, you are so beautiful. I think about you all the time. I look at you constantly. I cannot look at anything else. I cannot think of anything else. You are mine, my beloved.” And it is only him! It is either chatting to itself or making up words or images to represent something outside itself. The only experience of the mind is itself, its sense of separateness.

DEVOTEE: It is true, my Lord. It usually comes in the form of an insight, and I will really be attached to that insight or feeling that I did something that really . . .

SRI DA AVABHASA: It is the mind experiencing yourself. The mind is stress, stress manifested at the level of what we call “mind” or “cognition”. The same experience is generated emotionally as all your reactions, to this, that, and the other thing, to which the sense of separateness is fundamental all the while. And as bodily conception, bodily sensation, it is always self-placed.

The sense of separation is always generated, experienced. It is the only experience. Everything physical, emotional, and mental is one experience separateness, ego-“I”, “I”, “I”, “I”. There are mental representations of what is outside the mind. There are emotional representations of what is outside feeling. And there are physical sensations of what is outside the body. Yet it is one experience, constantly perpetuated, of separateness. If you are “vital”, it is physically based. If you are “peculiar”, it is emotionally based. If you are “solid”, it is mentally based. Whether “vital”, “peculiar”, or “solid”, everyone has this one experience self-contraction, the sense of separateness perpetually re-enacted, constantly rehearsed, dramatized, all the time dealing with representations only, the figments of its own contraction. You must find yourself out. This is so.

Each one of you is most characteristically “vital”, “peculiar”, or “solid”. Some are very, very classically one or the other. In others the distinctions are a little bit muddy, but generally one of the three strategies is more dominant than the other. In any case, there is only one experience, whether it is classic or complicated: the separate “I” sense, the sense of separateness manifesting illusions, representations, conversations with itself. It is madness, absolute madness, utterly without God. It is Narcissus at the pond, looking at himself and not knowing that it is him.

When you come to this understanding, by Grace, with all Help Given to you, your intelligence exercised, then you can break the spell, you can move up from the pond. It is just your reflection, you see. You open up and feel beyond, without the self-contracted forms of mind, emotion, and body. All that is felt beyond. The immense mystery of WhatIs cannot be comprehended because you do not know what even a single thing is.

Just to be so open to self-transcendence is to be continuous with Me, continuous with the Divine Self-Condition. It is not to know what anything is merely, especially from the beginningthere is nothing absolute about anything that is arising but it is rather to be continuous with it, to be open to it and therefore able to be expanded, able to be experiencing the Revelation of What Is. More and more by stages, by growth, the Revelation becomes most profound.

To begin with, what must become true is your continuity with What Is, not your command over It but your continuity with It by transcendence of this contraction.

Therefore, whether you are “solid” and mentally possessed, or “peculiar” and emotionally possessed, or “vital” and physically possessed, all you are doing is meditating on the separate self sense and “oinking” out representations, conversations with yourself. And all the while everything that is, is outside of it. That is why it is self-contraction. The apple is something else, not what is in your mind. Even if the apple is in your belly, how close can you get to it, you being who you are?

ANOTHER DEVOTEE: When I went through the difficult week that I told you about when all the things that I was letting go of kept very forcefully coming up for me . . .

SRI DA AVABHASA: Your children and so on?

DEVOTEE: Yes, and objects and whatnot. I was able to stand back and observe it, and the temptation of the mind was always grabbing and grabbing me and wanting and wanting. It was rather like observing another person, a silly childish person who was not really me. It was the ego, this automatic thing, and I could feel that it was just the power of the mind. I did not really get sucked into it, but I could see the meaning of the saying in the Bible, “Satan, get thee behind me.” 

SRI DA AVABHASA: In some sense the greatest power of all, the greatest Grace of all, therefore, is unqualified pain. As long as you have an option, some way to slip and slide out of your dilemma, your difficulty, your egoic “self-possession”, you will tend to take the way out or otherwise just be confused. All of you must have had some moments in your life when the pain, the confusion, the forcefulness, of the intrusion of the difficulty of life was so profound you could not figure anything out about it, you could not make an emotional gesture to escape, you could not do anything physically about it, you could not do anything socially about it, or anything else. It was so confusing, so overwhelming, so profound, it was not even that you could surrender but surrender was inevitable. You nakedly felt beyond yourself, relieved of your apparently independent self, the egoic self eliminated by that most profound intrusion.

DEVOTEE: It was as if the contracted self was another person, like an entity all its own.

SRI DA AVABHASA: A kind of idol sitting there, which you can resort to when pain is not absolute. When pain is absolute, that little idol, that dump there, cannot be resorted to. No gesture can be made by it.

And then there is a kind of beatitude, not necessarily Divine Enlightenment every time such a thing occurs, but a kind of beatitude, continuous with What Is. In such a moment, you must be given up to What Is, whatever It Is, and there is no choice about it.

DEVOTEE: But there is a great freedom in realizing that you are able to do that.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Well, but you are all the time fearing death and great pain and the most dreadful of consequences. If any of those things did happen, a beatitude would be inevitable. But there is a great lesson in pain. In pain, you can allow that very same condition of beatitude to coincide with your ordinary life. You can allow it. It can become the greatest principle of Yoga, the greatest principle of sadhana. You will allow, even embrace, great discipline, great devotion, great service, great meditation, great heat, great tapas, knowing that in such circumstances there is always beatitude, because no choice is available to you.

The great Realizers know this secret. I know it. If you can come to the point of allowing such complete and total surrender, so that you never avoid it, so that in fact it becomes the condition of existence, then life is beatitude, existence is beatitude.

There is a secret in such surrender that is most fundamental to sadhana in the Way of the Heart. Allow yourself to be cooked, to be burned alive, to avoid nothing. To be, in this moment, in such a place where surrender is not even your only choice, where it is only inevitable this is the secret of most effective sadhana. It is the secret of renunciation. It is why renunciation is the secret of Realization, bereft of all means, all strategies, only There, without resorts of the egoic kind, in Place with the One Who Is,only devotion and not by choice. There is no choice. Giving yourself no choice whatsoever is the greatest principle of sadhana.

Be God-made, God-born, with God allowed, God Existing, and with no alternatives this is the great Secret. The greatest Realizers, the greatest renunciates, all know this Secret. This is why they do what they do. But if you are only mediocre, always trying to avoid the great Imposition of Reality Itself, then you always have an option, some way to slip or slide to the right or left, always some way to desensitize yourself to the great Condition, not to mention all conditions. To become so humbled, so ground up, that there cannot be anything but Divine Enlightenment, this is the Secret. Mark My Words!

You are all maintaining options that is what I am telling you. You always have an option. Even suggesting to yourself “I would choose always the option of surrender and devotion” still gives you room. You should give yourself no room devotion absolute, imposed upon to the absolute degree so that no gesture even can or even need be made, but only God Is. That is the Secret.

 

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