The Brightening Way Talk Series – Adi Da Samraj – There’s No Escape, There’s Only Realization

AVATARA ADI DA: Well, you got any more consideration left
in you? There is nothing left to this consideration?

[In a scary voice] We could talk about fear.

DEVOTEE: That’s kind of what
I was feeling.

DEVOTEE: I was just feeling earlier when You were talking
about making the choice of fear or making the choice of the
Teaching, I just felt that fear so much, like You have been
describing. Fear is what we try to get out of, but yet we
keep choosing to stay in that place. And it was just really
nerve racking.

AVATARA ADI DA: Yes. Fear isn’t
any fun, and yet its the ground of everything you do. And
you’re always trying to escape
it. And you’re always seeking
release. So if you really don’t
want to be afraid, you have to get serious with Me here.

DEVOTEE: But even that scares me, you know.

AVATARA ADI DA: Like what?

DEVOTEE: That fear.

AVATARA ADI DA: Fear scares you.

DEVOTEE: Well, I mean, like [Laughter.] somehow
what You’re saying puts fear in
me.

AVATARA ADI DA: Well, good. What about that?

DEVOTEE: Well, I mean, you know, it just-its just the
fear of letting go of the separate self, you know, thinking
that “if I let that go, then what else is there?” Now I know
You’re describing What’s
there. I understand that, sure. But there’s
still a certain part in me that is still, I guess, fearful
to do what is necessary.

AVATARA ADI DA: Well, that’s
kind of stupid, isn’t it?

DEVOTEE: That makes no sense. I know.

AVATARA ADI DA: It doesn’t
make any sense to Me at all. [Laughter.]

DEVOTEE: I know.

AVATARA ADI DA: Doesn’t sound
like a good way to do it.

DEVOTEE: No, no its not.

AVATARA ADI DA: You don’t
have enough respect for your fundamental fear. You think its
just a piece of you or just an experience hanging out there,
you can get rid of it or ignore it, you know. And its not
so. You have to find out your fear is you. But its also your
own act. And you don’t have to
do it. You don’t have to be it.
So there is nothing frightening about that process-just the
opposite. Its not merely giving up self, like going into
darkness. Its about forgetting yourself in Communion with
Me. Its a loss of egoity, not a loss of self. Its
Realization of Self, the Self-Condition, the Root-Condition,
the Source-Condition. Its egoity that is lost, the pain of
self-contraction and the bewilderment that comes from
it.

DEVOTEE: This reminds me of that line from Lawrence of
Arabia , Beloved, that You always quote that’s
so amusing, “The trick is not minding that it hurts.”

AVATARA ADI DA: That’s not
true. Its not enough, anyway. That’s
the way you like to look at things, you see.

DEVOTEE: Well, I was also thinking . . .

AVATARA ADI DA: It hurts, but there’s
some great Truth that still exists. You just proposed it
again, this downer kind of attitude you have that somehow or
other you have to be committed to suffering. It must be
given up. You must really not like suffering. Its not a
matter of merely being immune to it. You must really not
like it. You must really not like being afraid, not like
being mortal and all the possible difficulties that come
with that. You have to really not like it. You have
desensitized yourself to discriminating about these things
with all kinds of propaganda and self-indulgence, and
forgotten that you really don’t
like all of that pain at all . But its your own pain,
self-created, by self-contraction. And that’s
how you fail to participate in Reality, in Truth, the
Divine. That makes you dark and troubled and a seeker, and
you feel stuck in some bewildering trap.

This maya cannot be comprehended, but it can be
transcended. So you must allow all your energies to be
Husbanded, Gurued, Mastered, and be directed to a truly free
life of Realization, but maintaining all the necessary
responsibilities that belong to that at its foundation, not
chaotic, not directed by a separative disposition, but
rightly aligned, established at Source-all that instead. You
must be conformed to right relatedness and to true structure
and to Ultimate Reality.

You all must know that Reality exists, that I’m
here. You experience it sitting here with Me. Its proven in
your own experience by sitting with Me here this evening.
Its not merely an argument in verbal form. But you’re
always arguing with yourselves, as if you don’t
have a greater impulse and a greater experience. You feel
obliged to be conventional, to play Johnny Carson, the guy
who doesn’t know how to do
anything, you know.

DEVOTEE: Yeah, why is that?

AVATARA ADI DA: In order to interview his guests and let
them show themselves off. So he pretends to know nothing, be
inept at everything. But strangely enough, he’s
exemplifying what everybody is doing. There are no guests.
Everybody is Johnny Carson, deciding that you’re
supposed to make life out of not knowing how to do anything
and not understand anything, no great Realization, ordinary
Joe and Betty, you know, not making profound use of life, of
discrimination, of possibility.

So to take up the religious life for real, you see, is to
turn about from mere convention, or the common way its
supposed to be, and to enter into a most profound process of
life. But you wont necessarily be congratulated by it in
your common associations, ordinary associations. Its within
the community of devotees where that disposition is
supported. Here and there maybe you find somebody
sympathetic every now and then that you meet otherwise. So
you serve one another by serving this orientation in one
another. You don’t serve one
another merely by being adjacent to one another, or involved
in some community in the merely social sense. You
don’t just belong to a
community. You belong to a religious community, and not
merely a religious community in the conventional sense, here
only to do good works and so on, but here to Realize and do
it for real, no gimmicks and no bullshit, just the real
practice. Prove it. That’s how
Ill get an LRO and an institution, culture, community, and
mission that does its job.

If one is not at all inclined to put up with fear, why
would one do anything but live a life of Contemplation and
Realization? Whatever you were apparently doing, it
wouldn’t be an “else” than that
profundity. If you’re not
interested in settling for fear, then you must embrace
Samadhi as the orientation of your living. But its about
Radiance, transcending self-contraction, therefore
transcending fear. To not be afraid, you have to be
identified with That Which Is inherently Fearless. If
you’re identified with what
passes, you’re afraid
inherently, because you cant hold onto it, you cant
perpetuate it, you cant depend on anything. To identify with
any condition or conditional state, you identify with fear.
Contract, and you identify with fear. You make fear, you are
fear.

So to be free of fear, you cant just do some
psychological or mental trick with yourself. That’s
an exercise of what dies. To be free of fear you must
Realize the Divine Self-Condition and conform the entire
body-mind to It through the Power of Divine Recognition.

The body’s a poor little
thing. Its an animal. Its very wary and frightened. It can
relax sometimes, too, but its always aware of its vulnerable
situation. You inherit that feeling, all of that, when you
identify with the body. So you must make the body a
sacrifice in the Divine, in the Contemplative sense, not in
the sense of religious martyrdom but in the sense of Divine
Communion. You must orient the entire body-mind to Divine
Communion. It is Love, Radiance, Blissful. It is not that
the body is a negative merely. It is nothing but That-Divine
Reality-not separate from It in the slightest. But in the
Realization of That, it is Outshined.

So you must make positive use of the body, and not engage
in the reaction to it, play games with it. But you must make
positive use of it in this Divine Alignment, Which is
ultimately a Sacrifice of the body-mind, but in the
Realization sense. In every moment in which you truly give
yourself up In that fashion, you are Happy.

Don’t you know?

You all confessed a little earlier that you wouldn’t
have it be otherwise. Happiness is your will. You would have
it be so. And you don’t have any
inclinations superior to that, though they may override it
sometimes, egoically “self-possessed” this and that.

Happiness is not a characteristic of anything you are
looking at in the conventional sense. In other words, all of
your experiencing’s, doings,
thinking’s, and so forth are not
about Happiness. Although you pursue happiness through these
exercises, it never turns out to be so because every
resolution and every attainment passes. Passing happiness is
not what’s fundamentally
interesting to you. What you’re
moved to is true Happiness, unqualified Happiness.
That’s the heart-aspiration to
the ultimate Condition. Its already feeling It.

I was in Bombay with Baba Muktananda in 1969. The room
was filled with these well-fed, well-dressed, generally
Hindus, all cleanly dressed in their finest. And this man
came wandering in off the street. He had nothing on but some
sort of a rag that was sort of hanging around his lower body
somehow. He was rather filthy. He was incredibly emaciated.
You could see he had been spending years just sitting,
because his backside and his legs were flattened, and the
muscles weren’t working quite
well there. And, as is the tradition, he was offered
something, some fruit or something. Basically there was a
lot of laughing and so forth from all these clean,
middle-class types, upper middle-class types, or various
signs, at any rate, of their feeling uncomfortable about it
and wanting to get him out of there as quickly as
possible.

But Baba asked him what he wanted. And he said he wanted
to be in Samadhi, that’s it.
[Laughs quietly.] He wasn’t
interested in anything else. And truly he was one of the
most serious people there. He was a little used up and
nutty, crazy like some get in their independent pursuit of
such a thing, but he was really serious about it, about this
great purpose. He hadn’t quite
gotten there yet, but he knew it was not about sitting
around being a body-mind and doing the usual thing with it.
He knew that damn well. So he just crawled off into the
jungle to sit around in there and try and get out of it. But
he wasn’t being successful at it
in that independent way. He really wanted to find out how to
do it. He was really serious about it. He didn’t
want to be associated with the body-mind. He really
didn’t like it.

That’s one way of getting
serious. Its not necessary for it to be that way. Maybe in
some cases here and there, but essentially its not necessary
for it to be that way. Once you get the thread of
seriousness and find what its really all about, you
needn’t go off in the jungle
necessarily. You have to discipline the life, but you can
remain in relatively ordinary circumstances and be just as
serious as that man. You could. In fact, that’s
what I’m calling you to do. You
cant play a trick with it and try and get rid of the body
like that man, though. It doesn’t
work that way. You have to submit it. You have to be
conformed to mastery and to Divine Initiation.

Its not enough to presume that you’ll
be reborn here, or that you will go some other place or
dimension and so on. Its not enough to presume that. Nor is
it enough to experience that, if the experience were to
occur. Its not consoling to the quick. Its not enough to be
consoled. Its not sufficient for one just to be consoled.
What you really require is that freedom from fear, Happiness
Itself, Divine Self-Realization. And you cant play a trick
to do it, some mechanical trick. Its about submitting
beyond, to Me.

Hm? Don’t you know?

To be conformed to Me, your life is restructured
lawfully. Its more interesting than you can imagine.

Well, do any of you have any questions about all of
this?

Do you all know what this is all about and how to do
it?

DEVOTEES: Yes.

AVATARA ADI DA: And why to do it, [pause]

Well? Anything at all? Does that mean “no”? Are they
done?

DEVOTEE: It feels like it.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, You’re the
Perfect Demonstration of that State, as I see You now, the
Perfect Demonstration.

AVATARA ADI DA: Tcha.