Getting Out of Your Underwear Neurosis – Adi Da Samraj

DEVOTEE: In spite of conscious effort to do
otherwise, we find we’ve ended up with our parents, and
duplicating the type of pattern that our parents themselves
manifested. In particular, Beloved, I have lived my life not
being terribly mindful that someone who felt deeply was
controlling my life for me. I haven’t particularly minded
that because I have lived in the mind, and being safely
tucked away there I didn’t need to feel as much. It was
brought to me with great clarity and intelligence that my
parents had a similar controlling relationship in their
life. And I have allowed my intimate partner to set the
emotional tone for the relationship.

AVATARA ADI DA: Of course, one’s history is useful
to examine and be frank about and see how patterns developed
and were stimulated and so on. But that’s not the essence of
hearing. The notion of being the victim and so on is based
on the idea that your suffering is caused from without. To
understand this is the essence of hearing. One’s fundamental
suffering is not caused from without. Yes, there can be
pain, difficulty, bad circumstances, on and on, but your
life of disturbance, of pain, and so forth is not caused
from without. It is due to your own reaction, your own
reaction to conditions of existence.

That reaction is the self-contraction, egoity itself.
Egoity is not caused from without. Egoity is your own act.
This is what must be understood. One’s seeking, one’s
disturbance, one’s dissatisfaction,-on and on, is one’s own
activity. To understand this is to be free from the victim
consciousness, or the whole notion that one’s fundamental
difficulty is somehow caused by others or the conditions of
existence, the conditions of manifested existence.

This is the essence of hearing, then. The transcendence
of the victim strategy is the essence of hearing. The
transcendence of the notion that your suffering is caused
from without is the essence of hearing. This is most
fundamental. The transcendence of the notion of being
victimized by life is hearing, or another way of describing
what hearing is about, you see. This is why hearing is the
foundation of this Way. This Way is not a self-based
developmental process, you see. It is a self-transcending
process that even transcends all of the potential
developmental stages of life. This is one of the unique
aspects of the Way I have Revealed to you-and it must not be
bypassed. One can enter into a developmental process, even
Spiritually, and even in My Company, but that’s not the Way
of the Heart. It’s just part of the human potential, that’s
all. And it’s not enough-and is, in any case, part of the
psycho-biography of the ego, unless there’s true hearing,
the true capability for self-transcendence.

So the victim notion, the victim self-image, the sense
that one’s suffering is caused, is the illusion that must be
transcended. It’s not just one among the things that you
should have observed and understood, but didn’t, you see.
It’s the thing to understand-the most fundamental thing. It
is the foundation discovery of one who practices as My
devotee. And, on its basis; .all the rest of the Way
develops,

Ultimately, then, you see, it doesn’t even make any
difference what your parents were like, what you experienced
in your childhood about any matter whatsoever. It’s useful to
examine, but it hasn’t caused your life of suffering. Your
life of suffering is your own activity. And you use events,
happenings, experiences, to justify your own egoity – or in
other words, the habit of self-contraction.

When you understand yourself most fundamentally, then you
do not dramatize the habit of self-contraction. You do not
dramatize egoity. Instead, you directly transcend it moment
to moment.

To truly understand yourself and to be helpful to others,
you’ve got to get out of this Western psychiatric mode of
thinking that looks at causes rather than egoic self. It
looks for excuses for being an ego. There are none. It is
now, and always has been, your own activity. It’s your own
choice in the face of the conditions of existence. And it
winds you into a habit that binds you in the midst of
conditions, all conditions. Right life is purposed to
Ultimate Realization, Ultimate Liberation. Therefore, it’s
not about developing the egoic self, enlarging the egoic
self, evolving the egoic self, All those are conditional
processes and searches, possibilities among conditions, They
are all self-referring. The separate self referred to, the
ego, the self-contraction, is what must be understood and
transcended. The habit of egoity must be transcended. The
results of egoity must be transcended. The conditions in
which egoity arises must be transcended. All of conditional
existence must be transcended.

Conditional existence is inherently unsatisfactory. When
one understands this, instead of seeking, then, one
transcends the seeker. And that is the fundamental process
of this Way-and fundamental to its uniqueness.

That Which is to be Realized is not among conditions, not
among causes and effects. It is not caused, cannot be
caused, cannot be Realized as an effective action. It is
There Where there is no self-contraction. It is inherently
and always already There. But to Realize It, all the forms
of self-contraction must be transcended. All bondage to
seeking, all bondage to conditions, must be passed
beyond.

Even the process of energies in the body-mind, natural
energies, Spiritual Force, all of this must be transcended.
They are not Liberating in the Ultimate sense. For one who
hears, the Spiritual process is part of the means of
Ultimate self-transcendence, and not part of a process of
self-development. That Which is to be Realized is Prior to
conditions. That Which is Prior to conditions is not obvious
until the self-contraction is transcended. And the
self-contraction is reaction to conditions. It is the
reaction that takes the form of separateness, the illusion
of separateness, and the life of separativeness.
Separateness is the foundation pain, and it is
self-caused.

If you are truly serious in My Company, this is what you
come to understand. So analysis of causes has minimal use.
It’s a part of examining how you did this, your own
reaction, the self-contraction, the act of separateness, the
act of casting yourself into the illusion of separateness,
of separation, of independence, isolation, unwholeness in
the Ultimate sense.

In the process of Realization there’s a tour through the
mechanisms of the body-mind, and the phenomena associated
with those mechanisms. It covers all-all aspects of

conditional existence ultimately. And then the heart-root
is found. Some here speak of sometimes feeling something in
the right side of the heart. They feel My Presence there.
They feel a Current there. They feel some kind of tension
there, and so on. That’s not it. I remember Saying last
night to some who were sitting around Me, about some people
describing this experience on the right side of the heart. I
Said it is not energy. It’s Consciousness Itself, you see.
The Realization at the root is a Realization of
Consciousness Itself, not merely the feeling of energy in
the right side of your physical heart, you see. It is the
last place-in fact the first place-the last to be found but
the original place of the self-contraction, taking the form
of attention, the feeling of relatedness.

Prior to the self-contraction is the Feeling of
Being-Prior to all relatedness, all illusions of
separateness, and all illusions of caused suffering.
Suffering is entirely your own action. The body-mind can
suffer in difficult conditions, and there is pain. And one
feels natural sympathy for others in pain. But the domain of
pain is not the domain of Liberation. It is not the domain
of Truth. It is just the domain of suffering. And to deal
with it, you must transcend your own act and not merely
uncover all the memories in which you were caused to suffer
in the body-mind. That’s “Narcissus”, you see.

So this Way is altogether about transcending
victim-consciousness, then. It is to cease to be victimized
by the universe. It is to transcend the illusion that you
are victimized by the universe, trapped in the universe,
trapped in the body-mind and so on.

You can’t do anything about what happened in the past.
You can only do something about your own reaction. So in all
viewing of the past, all examination of the past, what
you’re really there to do is find out about your own
reaction, and how it took the form of various patterns and
so forth. But ultimately it is always the same
thing-self-contraction, movement into separateness, reacting
to conditions, and then seeking in the midst of conditions
for a solution of one kind or another, rather than simply
transcending the self-contraction itself.

This Way is therefore not about seeking solutions based
on the self-contraction, but directly, instead, directly
transcending the self-contraction and moving beyond the
search in the midst of conditions, transcending that search
in Divine Communion, Ultimately Divine Self Realization.

DEVOTEE: Thank You Beloved. This is clarifying for
me.

AVATARA ADI DA: The human dramatization must be gone
beyond. And one who is My devotee has means to do so. You
can be having difficulties, fine-they shouldn’t be dismissed
in some glib fashion-but you have got to get down to work
about it and exercise intelligence, and response to Me
altogether. When a person is willing to do that, then he or
she can begin to deal with the difficulty. When someone is
not willing to do it, then he or she is just dramatizing on
you, even. A lot of people just want somebody to lay their
number onto, you see. That’s everybody, at one point or
another. But that is not fruitful-not beyond a point,
anyway. Then the very one who is claiming to be a victim
winds up victimizing others, you see.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, Your devotees have great strength, and
I praise them for it. The compassionate gesture that You
Call us to in relation to each other is reflected in Your
own Play with devotees. And the Leela of Your Strength and
Your holding us all to what You have Done is the guiding
light in any of these matters where people are experiencing
temporary difficulties.

AVATARA ADI DA: You are all experiencing permanent
difficulties. [Laughter.] And I am here to Show you
the Way out of it. And I know what I am talking about. And I
know what I’m Doing. So-use it, then. Get down to it. It
involves a different course than the ego would take, and
that worldly people take. So you have to know what that
course is and apply it-this devotion, and all that entails.
And that is it. Hm?

The rest is dramatization, Narcissus at the pond. See,
Narcissus thinks the one he is looking at and adoring is
somebody else. Narcissus doesn’t think he is looking at
himself. He finds that out, he wakes up. Now he thinks he is
looking at something else. So you all look at your pain,
your disturbance, your seeking, and so forth, and you look
at all the causes, all the rest of it, you see-you are
looking at something else, not at yourself. You have to find
out that have a secret in all of that. Your own reaction is
the secret in all of that. And then deal with that directly,
in this devotion.

There is a lot of purification to go through in all of
that, certainly. But it is by persisting in that devotion,
truly self-surrendering, self-forgetting, moment to moment,
all faculties given, you see, that really done, that Yoga
really done, with all the disciplines it requires, and
persisting in it. Those who do, have a Leela to tell
others-that it works, you see. And that is what serves.

And abandoning that particular discipline, that Way, you
see, and just getting involved in dramatization, illusions,
looking at all the causes, the “blame-game”, all the rest of
it, you see, is the dramatization of egoity, and it doesn’t
work. You can all tell that story, too.

Egoity is bondage, and it makes bondage, and it goes on
and on. It doesn’t come to an end. I have told you all also,
again and again, apply the religious means. This is a
religious Way of life. Don’t get into the psychiatric,
self-help game and all the other variations on worldliness
and pretend that you are still doing this Way, or serving
people in this Way, you see. To serve them you simply serve
them with the religious means, not a lot of clever revisions
of it made of other disciplines or worldly disciplines, and
ego-games and so on, you see. Purely use the religious
means.

“Reality consideration” groups are not psychiatric
T-groups, therapy groups, self-help groups, in that sense.
That is not what it is about. I have observed people using
it that way over the years. And I have had to correct
devotees about this on numerous occasions. That is not what
it is about. It is a responsible discipline applied by
people who really are My present-time devotees, using, or
practicing, all the means of this Way. They make their
confessions there, get it out of the inside and make it
known, others reflect them back to themselves-all for the
purpose of observing the self-contraction, seeing it for
real in every context of life, until you really get the
point, are really responsible for it. That is hearing.

Play another game, conventional therapy game or whatever,
you see, you have already established a different principle,
not the principle of this Way, not the vow. That is not the
context anymore. It is some poor ego suffering this or that,
claiming to suffer this or that, dramatizing it, wanting to
invade your life through sympathetic ploys and so on, bypass
the means of this Way and magnify their own suffering in the
minds and hearts and lives of the other people. It is not
useful. It doesn’t work.

So always “consider” matters in the context of this
devotion, this Way-its principles, its means. In that
context, listen to what people have to say, reflect them
back to themselves, you see. Don’t be there to be their
victim, either. They hate victim, good. You don’t like it
either. So you are not going to be the victim there, you
see. That is it. Flat. Be straight. You see?

Every victim is also a maker of victims. What they blame
everyone else for is also what they do. I am not speaking
cynically when I say this. I’m talking about what
self-knowledge requires, you see. Self-knowledge is not
merely information about the egoic self. Self-knowledge is
an ability to transcend egoic self. All mere information is
babble. It has little or no use-modest use at best. As an
accumulator of information, you certainly must know what I
am talking about.

DEVOTEE: Yes, Beloved. Less so in the past two years than
in other previous years.

AVATARA ADI DA: That’s good you are getting better and
better every day. [Laughs.] Less of that
victimer-than-thou attitude. [Laughs.]