The Myth of God and the Reality of the Divine
Adi Da Samraj, July 28, 2004
And to be face to face with Me, to meet demands I have relative to a particular service is something that’s very uncomfortable, and should be, and that’s what it means to have a Master, and most people don’t want to tolerate it. So they don’t put themselves in that position. So we have basically a lot of staff here that hardly has anything to do with Me at all. I basically live in an isolation chamber over across the way from here.
So you see, to really be in my Company, most directly, serving Me and accountable to Me face to face, all the time, would be a circumstance that it seems hardly anybody is able to tolerate. Masters of any degree are generally almost impossible to be around. It’s incredibly difficult. You all have imaginings about it all, you see. Rudi and Baba Muktananda, for instance, were impossible characters. But I wasn’t one of those who avoided them. And if you do true sadhana, you don’t have to avoid your Master and you can make use of proximity and immediacy and the opportunity to serve the Master regularly. And you can take every mountain of shit the Master can dish out and Masters can dish out infinite amounts of shit. That’s part of the job.
Masters really have to wail on their devotees. As you see. It’s necessary, unless people just really are not serious, in which case just keep the formalities, you see. But if someone is serious they’ve got to be able to survive what it takes to be face to face with an impossible, virtually patternless personality whose demands are absolute and whose tolerance for bullshit is zero. [Beloved Chuckles]
Everybody has these ideas from reading and childhood fantasies about religion, and so forth–just as you have about the Divine. You think the Divine is your personal slave or something. And you make up all kinds of myths, or believe all kinds of myths. And your prayers all take the form of, “Oh, Big One, will you give me everything I want? I’m smiling real big, so you ought to do it.” [Laughter]. You see?
You think the Divine is a Good-Luck God and you think that’s what Spiritual Masters are, that they’re just supposed to be smiling, lovey‑dovey kind of guys.
I had to review a video last evening for the Basket of Tolerance about Meher Baba. So it’s all this promotion of absurdities. And the movies that they use are always him walking around kissing everybody, kissing their feet and kissing them on the cheek and all that. So everybody expects‑‑well, it’s not that it never happens. I’ve kissed people. It’s simply it’s just part of the illusion that people have of the way it’s supposed to be. That’s what they think God is and the whole God idea being sold by Meher Baba is this idea, you see, of the kind of God who gives you nothing, but he loves you. The God who’s going to pulverize you, who’s going to eat you alive, who is going to destroy you, who’s going to suck the life out of you, who’s going to kill you in any moment, who is like Mother Guppy ready to eat you at a moment’s notice, but he loves you. Really, it’s just love, love, love. He goes on and on‑‑I’m not going to do any miracles, but I’m going to love you. You know what I mean? [Beloved kisses the air several times] What the hell kind of bullshit is that? [Beloved Laughs]
Do you see anything about the universe that corresponds to that? It’s bullshit. Well, don’t say you heard it here.[Laughter]
But you live in a fantasy about the Divine. There isn’t any God. It’s a myth. “Uh‑oh.” [Laughter] There is only reality. And reality is ultimately Divine. But that’s all there is–is the Divine, you see. So there’s none of this separated out God‑Santa Claus Good-Luck Deity, rub his belly and get a fortune cookie and so on, you see, and everything’s going to turn out all right. No. It’s not. You were born to a guppy that’s going to eat your ass. So whatever there is that’s God about all of this, it’s a lot different than you think! [Beloved Laughs]
But your mind is full of ideas about God, or generally speaking about people, their minds are filled with ideas about God that are about a kind of Santa Claus. And that’s just mythology. That’s just part of the goods of society. It’s part of the lie that keeps people fastened to this world and hopeful about utopia and so on. So if you want to deal with Real God‑‑this is no cause for despair. I’m not saying there is no Divinity. Despair is not appropriate, but there is a Way of life that is based on the Reality of the Divine as opposed to the myth of God. And your relationship to Me is about the ordeal and process of Realizing Real God, the Divine Reality, the Divine Self‑Condition.
And what’s between you and that is your self–and that’s what makes it an ordeal and that’s why I am called “Master” and not “pal”. And must be all kinds of things, but Indifferent is one of them–not lacking compassion but Indifferent to illusions and people’s will to continue in them.