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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.