Point of View
Adi Da Samraj
November 6, 2004
Personal existence is taking place in the circumstance of non-personal or ego-less Reality. And so personal existence, in the limited or egoic sense, is an illusion, just as the room as you perceive it is an illusion. It’s not real knowledge of the room. It’s an illusion about the room. And the room in which I am sitting here, bodily, didn’t fall out of the sky. This room was made by human beings. They actually built it, and yet no-one has ever seen the room!
[Laughter] How is it possible that the room wouldn’t even exist if human beings didn’t make it, and yet no human being can see it? Well, how can they build it if they can’t see it?
It’s a convention of appearance, you see. They weren’t knowing or thinking of the room as it really Is. They were knowing and thinking and even MAKING the room through the application of conventions of mind and perception. And so they made a room without knowing it in Ultimate terms. It’s been naively made by … as a kind of spontaneous action such as Bart was describing to Me. You don’t really know what you have done. You didn’t Ultimately comprehend it in doing it, any more that you comprehend anything Ultimately when you say “I”, or reach for the table-salt, you see. You don’t know it in Ultimate terms and yet it only takes place in a context of absolute paradox, Absoluteness Itself, Indefinable, Unknowable Reality, not reducible to concepts. It is not known or presumed by you and yet you can reach for the salt. It is remarkable. And you can say “Pass me the salt please”, and it appears someone opposite you politely, perhaps, whatever, [Laughter] hands you or passes you the salt! It’s all so banal, and very conventional, and no one thinks about it, generally speaking.
It’s not thought of in terms of the circumstance, the Ultimate circumstance in which it’s actually happening. That isn’t comprehended, and yet the action takes place. It is taking place in the circumstance of Infinity or Absoluteness, Divine Reality, Perfectly Subjective, Self-Bright. But that’s not noticed. And that’s remarkable. It isn’t noticed. It’s not known. It’s just the passing of the salt, you see. That’s it. Yes?
DEVOTEE: But it’s a paradox that You can … You also can Bless this place, you know, this structure that humans have built that is, you know, it doesn’t exist except in conditionality. And people may come to those places and receive Your Blessing even beyond Your Physical Life-time.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, because I will be there!
[Delighted laughter] Not because I will be absent, but because I will be there. I have Told you so and it will be so.
DEVOTEE: Yes.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Of course you must do Me the service and you must preserve the places I’ve Indicated. You must preserve so that I can Remain Effective through specific locations I have Indicated, and by means I have Indicated for you to preserve, including My Teaching Word and so on.
DEVOTEE: So Beloved, do these places exist in other realms or subtle realms as well, so that other beings in those places can come and worship You?
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: There are beings now in THIS space that are not physically manifested who are listening to this discourse.
DEVOTEE: Da!
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: And that means the spaces in which they are wandering, as you all wander in these spaces, this space, you see, are perfectly co-incident with this, and co-incident with Me here. There is no elsewhere. All the elsewheres are co-incident. The room is not defined. It is supposed as a matter of convention to be as you perceive it. My Room, that I Say is My Room, is without limitation, all-inclusive. There is no separation, no difference. Therefore, effectively, there are no other worlds, other places. All coincides in My Person and View. All is simultaneous and all seeming is a convention. Reality is undifferentiated. This is the Divine Domain. This is MY Room. You just don’t notice it. You think it is this room and yet you can’t even see the room!
[Laughter]
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: You refer to yourself every time you say a sentence because that’s how sentences are supposed to be constructed, and yet you have no experience of that self that you keep referring to. You don’t experience it any more than you experience the room. You can experience your self, so called, from the point of view of the moment, or what could be called the “late time” of every perception and thought. It’s the “late time” because it’s after when it occurred. But it’s called “the present” because it seems to be happening now. But you are in the Transcendental or Divine Position and the mechanics of conditional experience are all wrapped up with space-time and location, point of view and so on, and this creates illusions about the universe as well as self, and has you wondering about things based on this construct.
It’s just … just as much a metaphor or myth … mythic construction to be thinking as you are, based on what science has … what scientists have developed as a description based on theory and experiments and so forth up to this date. But you’re not actually experiencing the world on the basis of that analysis. You have a picture of it somehow though. It looks different than the picture people had of the universe two thousand years ago, when they could say, and seem to be speaking perfectly reasonable, that a man went up into the air, disappeared behind the clouds but presumably kept on ascending through the layers of the crystal firmament until he got to heaven and sat down in a chair next to the creator of the universe.
[Laughter]
That sounded to be a perfectly reasonable description two thousand years ago, because it was based on the picture of the universe that was the convention of the time. And some people still think it must be a polaroid of what happened. They don’t get it. It’s a myth. It’s the language of an epoch long past. And it never did describe a reality. It pictured a philosophy.
DEVOTEE: They didn’t have Your Wisdom, Beloved.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: But they also didn’t have the scientifically based knowledge that gives everybody a different picture of the universe now. So you function, people today, generally speaking anyway, function on the basis of a picture of the universe inherited from scientific discourse, but you don’t understand – this is just as much a myth as the myth of the earth being a flat place, infinitely extended, and over which there is a firmament of layers of crystal from which the stars are hanging, and above all of those layers there is heaven or the place of God.
That’s actually how people thought the universe was built – then – and of course now everybody says [Beloved imitates a gruff self-satisfied man] “Ha ha ha ha ha! Those naive ancients, you see, what do they know?” and, right, what did they know? They didn’t know anything about it, you see. So they made it up? Yeah, they made it up. And so did YOU, you see.
[Laughter]
You have a picture of the universe. You have a room you’re sitting in that you even … there are people here and people otherwise listening to Me right now who participated in MAKING this building – I did too, you see, and designing it and so forth. And others did the physical construction work. And yet none of them sees the room as it is. None of them knows themselves, which they keep pointing to and referring to, and nobody knows the universe which they are picturing. So you are operating mythically through habits of mind, conventions of mind. You don’t live in the real universe, supposedly being described by science, and science is only, as a discipline, gone up to however far it’s gone, in this moment, and knowing about anything. And it’s also a particular discipline that can only know about things in a certain mode anyway. It’s not a method for knowing CERTAIN kinds of things because it is a method based on NATURAL observation and NATURAL proof. Well that excludes other kinds of knowledge, and it doesn’t make other kinds of knowledge false. To say that other kinds of knowledge is false, are false, is to be prejudiced about other kinds of knowledge, or other modes of experiencing. The presumed knowledge based on scientific method is a construct based on point of view.
That’s the same basis on which moment-to-moment ordinary experience as an ego is based on. The scientific method is ego-based, an ego-based method of knowing. It serves the purposes of egos. It serves the purpose of point of view. It is a picture of the universe from the perspective of point of view. The point of view can be moved around to different locations and so forth, but all of its language of description is point-of-view based. It’s not based on knowledge from the so-called perspective of all possible points of view, or that transcends point of view. So it’s not any more a perfect knowledge of Reality than the ancients presumed in their picture of flat earth with crystal domes on top of it, with stars hanging from rods.
So it is an ego-based, or what could genuinely be called a very primitive, state of knowledge. It’s just enough knowledge to destroy the world.
DEVOTEE: Yes.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: But it’s not enough knowledge to be Enlightened about Reality. It falls far short of that. So it’s used for power. It’s the method of fear. When it comes down to it, science is a search for control over the dangerous universe, and it serves the purpose of protecting or giving power to mortals, or to beings that are bound in time and space and to point of view, and who don’t even know themselves or even what so much as a single thing Is. So it’s very presumptuous knowledge. It’s very self-protective, and fearful, and it is even a kind of knowledge possessed by the powerful, that winds up frightening everyone.
So what is the good of this knowledge, you see? It’s the same as having an elaborate and powerful egoic existence. What is the good of it? Is such a being happy? Does such a being do good,? Just to have a lot of mechanical, worldly power and wealth and so forth–is that a good achievement? Is the collective powerfulness and knowingness of mankind making mankind happy and producing a Unity of existence in which people are thriving, at least within the limits of mortality, in some positive manner? Or is it becoming more and more a deadly, competitive place, in which knowledge, in the scientific sense, is the method of power and destruction?
DEVOTEE: It’s a dangerous intoxication, Beloved.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. It is… well, as it’s said “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Inversely it’s also said “Powerlessness corrupts and absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely”. You can’t win as an ego. Egoic society … ego-based society can’t win. Ego-based knowledge isn’t a winner. That doesn’t mean that there’s no use in it. It has all kinds of uses, potentially, practical and positive, also negative, it has both sides, all sides. In summary, it has all the virtues and limitations of egoity itself. And it is, whether taking the form of power or powerlessness, still bondage, or an exercise in the circumstance of bondage and illusion. It has nothing to do with Happiness or Realization of Reality, Ultimately. And so it’s not enough. At best it has a subordinate use in the midst of human existence and should be subordinate, not merely to conventional religiosity, but to the exercise of genuine Wisdom and self-transcending Communion with Reality Itself. Egoity, whether you make a lifetime out of it or an entire culture out of it, becomes a dreadful destiny.
DEVOTEE: That’s why You’re here, Beloved, to purify all of that, to bring us beyond that dreadful destiny.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, I’m doing it in a time and place that’s looking more and more like the time and place of the neighborhood wars, unfortunately.