From
‘Drifted in the Deeper Land’
Talks on Relinquishing the Superficiality of Mortal Existence and Falling by Grace into the
Divine Depth That Is Reality Itself
by
The Ruchira Buddha
Avatar Adi Da Samraj
You Can’t Expand “And”
The gathering of December 10 starts with devotee’s confession of a recent experience in which he tacitly felt that whatever he was perceiving was peripheral to his being, and that he rested in a place deeper than that. When Carl says that he had a sense of being “more free” as a result of that intuition, Adi Da Samraj initiates a “consideration” relative to whether or not Happiness is “more” of something.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: There are negative emotions. All negative emotions are contractions of feeling. And then there are what you would call positive emotions, and all those are expansions of feeling.
Happiness is obviously not the most contracted possible emotion, that’s really negative and dark. But neither is Happiness simply an expansion of an otherwise positive or expansive emotion (as you might imagine it to be). Because, if that were so, then Happiness would have to be completely expanded emotion-just that. And perhaps it would become as mad as the completely negative possibility of emotion is, in its depressed way.
Happiness, in other words, is not in the extreme. It is not out of balance. To be without limitation, it can’t be infinitely negative. That would be terrible. And being merely infinitely positive is like too much light, in a gleeful, mad sense. It is out of balance.
(1.4) So how can there be feeling without limitation that is not merely a play on one side of the coin? This is not merely a mental puzzle. It has to be Realized. It can’t merely be described. It is the root of emotion, central to emotion, at the core of it. It is not merely expansion. Ultimately, expansion still retains a sense of a point of definition. No matter how intensely felt the feeling of relatedness is, it is still the same thing. It is just a fundamental factor. Your feeling of separateness is like that-your feeling of otherness, of “difference”. They are basically always the same. They are not a something that changes once they are an element of something. It is just so.
Think of the meaning of the word “and”. Is there anything you can do to make it more intense?
[laughter]
Mm-hm. So it is just what it is. So what else is like that?
It is not merely one side of the coin done completely. It is not merely infinite expansion. It is not infinite contraction. You may think, “The self-contraction is, so the Truth is to expand, rather than to contract.” [laughter] And you go from [hunching over timidly] “me-me-me-me-me” to [sitting up straight, throwing His Head back and His arms out wide and singing at the top of His voice] “MMMEEE!!!!”
[laughter]
No, that is not the opposite of egoity, that is the magnification of egoity. You must make sure that this error is corrected in your case.
To feel beyond self-contraction is to feel beyond the point at which that factor is introduced. Because, like the word “and”, the self-contraction is just that. Once it’s there, it’s there. That’s that. It can’t be any more “it-er” than it is. It is always just exactly what it is.
To transcend the self-contraction, or the action that is self-contraction, does not mean simply to expand, or for “you” to expand rather than to contract. That is the self-contraction deciding to go beyond itself by expanding itself. No. At the point of the act itself, the very point itself, in the moment-to feel beyond that contraction, just that, is instant. It is not merely to expand, it is to be vanished of that contraction and therefore to not be introducing it anymore into the scheme of Reality. It is not to introduce another thing into the scheme of Reality which is the expansion of the separate point of view. That Which Is need not be expanded. It is Always Already the Case, in and as every case. Which means that It is all cases and transcends each and every one. The Realization of It, then, is a profound matter.
To be motivated and seeking all the time and so forth, and to become sensitized to the failure of that, the stress of it; then to practice this devotional Yoga, Communing with Me, surrendering and forgetting yourself, not merely expanding yourself in feeling response to Me; then to freely feel, discover, that the stress, this failed occupation of seeking, this motivation that you always feel is there all the time, is your own action, and you’re capable in every moment of locating and feeling beyond it in Communion with Me-this is a profound discovery.
Being thus profound is quite a different matter than what anybody does who picks up The Knee of Listening and just reads it on through. Anybody would get something about this matter of self-contraction out of that, and feelingly understand something about what it is I am talking about. But you won’t have heard Me when you put down the book, having finished reading it-even though you will have understood something, perhaps, that you value, that seems useful to you to be bringing into your view of life.
So, generally speaking, I presume all My devotees, even before they became formally associated with Me, must have read The Knee of Listening-and other of My Words about this matter of listening and hearing. And all have some sort of sense of it, therefore, even from the very beginning, just from reading it. But that is not it, even though you read and you think about it some and put a little two-and-two together about yourself and something about it feels right. Yes, but there is a big difference between that little bit of “consideration” you might bring to reading and talking about it, and the difference it can make for the kind of person I described to you a few minutes ago-who is really in the stress of seeking, is even coming to Me seeking and responding to Me and practicing the devotional Yoga and then, suddenly, really understands, gets to the root of this stressful constant motivation that leads to every other kind of thing by which he or she has exploited and abused himself or herself.
Coming to the end of their rope as seekers, then such people seriously “consider” My Word about seeking and about most fundamental self-understanding.
And because it is a profound level of feeling-requiring need to “consider” such a matter, then
(when there is a profound process) the entire person that goes into the “consideration” and comes out hearing has gone through a profound in-depth process, in feeling-Contemplation of Me, not really explainable.
So when self-understanding becomes most fundamental, as I have communicated to you, it is that only for somebody for whom this has been a most profound and in-depth “consideration” that is really at the edge of an acutely felt dilemma of life. I don’t mean merely a dilemma in practical terms, that requires you to handle business and so forth. I am talking about a core dilemma-just the un-resolved life, still going about seeking, stressed by that, feeling disturbed and full of accumulated life, and hanging out there, and having to be dealt with and so forth. And, then you discover you don’t even know what a single thing is. And you never thought about anything significantly your whole life-not very profoundly.
So everything about this matter of most fundamental self-understanding, or hearing, has to be a long-term and in-depth “consideration” to be true, because it involves all of the person, the totality of this egoic “I”-presumed entity.
So it is not just from a reading, even though all kinds of things may come together in a person’s life when they read The Knee of Listening or other forms of My Teaching, and they feel like they have gone through a profound conversion. Well, certainly, that is typical also. And there is a conversion in all kinds of ways that can be described in those terms. Their response to Me, and everything associated with that, is a kind of conversion.
It is a profound matter, then, to become My devotee, under vows to Me. But that is not hearing. That is not seeing. It is the beginnings of the process, and it is itself profound. Those beginnings are profound. But you all must understand there is a difference between whatever all came together when you read The Knee of Listening, when you first seriously “considered” My Word and your response to Me (whatever you can altogether positively say about it), and between hearing or seeing. I sometimes hear people who have not even really begun the foundation practice suggest that they are practicing in the context of the sixth stage of life in the Way of the Heart already, or who knows what. The absurdity of people in their self-mindedness, not surrendered yet and yet claiming to be already “Realized” in every respect. Those who do that are just being full of themselves. They are expanding. The “point” is expanding.
You must understand, ultimately, that That Which Is is not the “point” in the middle. On the other hand, It is not the sphere, however far (infinitely) away outside, because such would have a center. That Which Is has no center. It has no bounds.
Do you realize that you won’t be satisfied with anything whatsoever? You cannot be satisfied-you are seekers. But you can talk yourself into thinking, feeling lazy, and so forth, as if you are not a seeker, as if (instead) you are luxuriating in having a whole bunch of whatever it was you wanted.
When “considering” this matter of seeking, you start “considering” My Arguments relative to hearing on a basis other than seeking. You think you are not really seeking. You have found whatever describes you altogether as something you are complacent about. So, in fact, when you are
“considering” My Arguments, when you are practicing the devotional resort to Me moment to moment, the devotional Yoga, you are approaching it from the point of view of not seeking it.
You sometimes feel like you are sort of zoned out, indiscriminate, and desensitized, so you don’t think you are really seeking very intensely at the moment. It is sort of there, but you don’t really get down to it. It doesn’t have enough importance for you. You prefer to be complacent and desensitized and otherwise occupied and so forth. So the profound matter that is hearing, or the profound matter that is listening (which must precede hearing), just starts being engaged as sort of religion-business lingo without any kind of depth. And, instead of dealing with the matter of listening to the point of hearing, people start talking about their “case” instead, not really understanding in depth, right at the point of the root of seeking-not really understanding that most profoundly.
So you must not be desensitized to the fact that you are seeking, but rather, be very sensitive to it, in the form of everything you are doing and so forth, and feeling the stress of it, the discomfort, the dissatisfaction that is the root of all seeking. And, therefore, what you are projecting is to find Happiness somehow-pleasure, Happiness, whatever feeling you’ve got about what you are really looking for all the time.
Then Happiness becomes expansion, or seeking based on self-contraction. But Happiness is not that. Perhaps Happiness is something like the word “and”. You can’t intensify it. It can’t be “and-er” than “and”. It’s just “and”.
“And”. You can’t intensify it.
Happiness is something you are trying to feel toward based on expanding past your present contraction and bad feeling. So it feels like an expanded positive. It is what there is now (that is a limitation and contraction) made positive and then expanded infinitely. Well, that becomes your notion of Happiness. It’s the seeker’s notion of Happiness. Whereas everything expanded, everything gone yangish, becomes madness. Everything yangish absolute is crazy. And yinnish absolute is dark nothingness. So they are both out of balance.
Happiness cannot be what the seeker is looking toward, because he doesn’t understand himself or herself. Both the yang and the yin are diversions from, or a play off of, a center that is indefinable and in some sense cannot be magnified-like the word “and”. It always already is exactly what it is. It is Happiness Itself. Happiness Itself is not about expanding or magnifying anything in this ultimate sense. It is not about that. It may be meaningful to use such words sometimes, relative to the process of this sadhana, but, ultimately, you must understand it is not about that.
Everything is self-contraction. Even expanding is self-contraction because it is something initiated from a state that is already contracted. So no matter what you do, expand or contract, you are still doing it on the same point, the same definition.
DEVOTEE: In the effort to be expanded is a feeling of stress and contraction.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, that point is already there. The point of the tightness that motivates you is already there. Sometimes you want to expand. Sometimes you can’t help yourself, you’ve got to be contracted. But it is still the self-contraction at its root. Both of those are seeking. The down is seeking a certain way, and the up is seeking another way. But the contraction is already at the root of both of them. They play off of it. But both directions have their liabilities. And so it is always this play of regaining balance-and plays off of balance, and relative balance, and relative imbalance-relative to all the kinds of pair systems, or degrees of subtlety you can find relative to composite conditional reality.
If the sushumna24 was about expanding, then there would be no ida-pingali25 surrounding it. If the core were expanding, then how could there be the Arrow?26 So it is something more profound than merely expanding. The transcendence of self-contraction is more profound than merely deciding to expand rather than contract, because in either case, you are engaged in a doing that is the self-contraction. To decide to expand is a decision from the point of view of contraction. To feel contracted is just to intensify an already established feeling of separateness.
So it is the core action, the root action-that is behind every motivation, every motivated moment, every gesture of seeking-that must be located. This is a profound discovery, when this is understood-not just entered into in a dark sense, but to get to the point where you are not just talking about something, breezing about it with a lot of words, or feeling it off in your body somewhere. “I felt the self-contraction in my right leg,” you know, that kind of stuff, all that sensation stuff.
No, to realize it subjectively-in other words, to be in that position-is understanding. And not merely to be it, but to locate it, and simultaneously understand it (so that there is both the locating of it subjectively, and the understanding of it in place)-this becomes the capability to do just that in every moment. Every moment there is the feeling of seeking, but in every moment, you can understand and feel beyond the self-contraction, because that is why you are seeking. That is why there is this core stress in any moment. You can always feel beyond it, once there is this most fundamental self-understanding.
So you can always do this transcendence-of-self-contraction work at any moment, and therefore in any stage of practice from that point. It is not about expanding. It is about vanishing the point of contraction-which, of course, you will only completely do when there is the Realization that characterizes the seventh stage of life.
So the practice is one in depth, then-not a shallow, “I am contracted, so I will expand now.” No, it is to understand, to vanish the very point of contraction. That is the essence of self-surrender and self-forgetting. So hearing is the most profound competence of self-surrender and self-forgetting, such that it becomes directly self-transcending. Always, in every moment, the point of view of self-contraction, ego-“I”, or separateness, is felt beyond.
Most fundamental self-understanding, or hearing, undermines, immediately, and at the root, the entire basis for the complex life of seeking. And this requires a transformation of life altogether. But it is also, then, a work, a means you have in your continued practice of Ruchira Buddha Bhakti Yoga, a means you have for going beyond the self-contraction, and all of the further stages of the process of the Way.
Most fundamental self-understanding, or hearing, is a fundamental means, then, that you bring to the Spiritually responsible stages, because the Spiritually responsible stages in the Way of the Heart are about ego-transcending practice that goes beyond the errors of the stages themselves. It is ego-transcending because it involves the constant exercise of hearing, the “conscious process”, in that form. So it is the exercise of the “conscious process”, as hearing, combined with all these secondary and supportive exercises that are the total practice of “conductivity”. This is the Pleasure Dome principle. It is a Yoga. It is Yoga.
So hearing is exercised in the Spiritual stages in this Way, and it is not merely a matter of assuming the self-contracted point of view of a body and feeling energies. It is a non-egoic process. Seeing is non-egoic. In other words, it is hearing-based. The seeing Yoga is associated with the
“conscious process” of hearing, exercised moment to moment. The self-contraction, in other words, is directly gone beyond, vanished, heart-vanished, moment to moment.
So it is not a seeker’s Spiritual practice. And it is not merely evolutionary or developmental in the sense of expanding the ego-“I”, expanding its knowledge, experience, or mobility (even in planes beyond the physical). That is all part of the psycho-biography of the ego. All of the first six stages of life are the psycho-biography of the ego.
But it is an in-depth matter, not merely something you can think and talk about. The Way of the
Heart is a “practicing-school”27 Way, but not merely in the sense that there are disciplines required. That is so, but also in the sense that it is an in-depth, real process, not merely a superficial one that you talk about with others (or to yourself ), and think about and read about-that sort of comfortable (more or less) being entertained by the religious life. No, it’s a serious, in-depth process, constantly-not just talked about. And, therefore, all the disciplines associated with that pattern of sadhana are required.
The Way of the Heart must be done seriously, and not superficially. It is an in-depth, real process that is Happiness Itself.
Summary
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ:
All negative emotions are contractions of feeling.
Positive emotions, and all those are expansions of feeling.
Happiness, in other words, is not in the extreme. It is not out of balance.
It is not merely one side of the coin done completely. It is not merely infinite expansion. It is not infinite contraction.
You must make sure that this error is corrected in your case.
To feel beyond self-contraction is to feel beyond the point at which that factor is introduced.
To transcend the self-contraction, or the action that is self-contraction, does not mean simply to expand, or for “you” to expand rather than to contract.
It is not merely to expand, it is to be vanished of that contraction and therefore to not be introducing it anymore into the scheme of Reality.
The Realization of It, then, is a profound matter.
To practice this devotional Yoga, Communing with Me, surrendering and forgetting yourself,
This failed occupation of seeking, this motivation that you always feel is there all the time, is your own action,
This is a profound discovery.
Being thus profound is quite a different matter than what anybody does who picks up The Knee of Listening and just reads it on through…. you won’t have heard Me when you put down the book.
Coming to the end of their rope as seekers, then such people seriously “consider” My Word about seeking and about most fundamental self-understanding.
And because it is a profound level of feeling-requiring need to “consider” such a matter,
So when self-understanding becomes most fundamental, as I have communicated to you…is really at the edge of an acutely felt dilemma of life.
So everything about this matter of most fundamental self-understanding, or hearing, has to be a long-term and in-depth “consideration” to be true, because it involves all of the person, the totality of this egoic “I”-presumed entity.
It is a profound matter, then, to become My devotee,
But you all must understand there is a difference between whatever all came together when you read The Knee of Listening, when you first seriously “considered” My Word and your response to Me (whatever you can altogether positively say about it), and between hearing or seeing.
That Which Is has no center. It has no bounds.
the profound matter that is hearing, or the profound matter that is listening (which must precede hearing), just starts being engaged as sort of religion-business lingo without any kind of depth.
So you must not be desensitized to the fact that you are seeking, but rather, be very sensitive to it,
Happiness becomes expansion, or seeking based on self-contraction. But Happiness is not that.
Happiness is something you are trying to feel toward based on expanding past your present contraction and bad feeling. It’s the seeker’s notion of Happiness.
Happiness cannot be what the seeker is looking toward,
It always already is exactly what it is.
It is Happiness Itself.
Happiness Itself is not about expanding or magnifying anything in this ultimate sense.
you must understand it is not about that.
Everything is self-contraction. Even expanding is self-contraction because it is something initiated from a state that is already contracted.
DEVOTEE: In the effort to be expanded is a feeling of stress and contraction.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, that point is already there. The point of the tightness that motivates you is already there.
Sometimes you want to expand. Sometimes you can’t help yourself, you’ve got to be contracted. But it is still the self-contraction at its root.
But the contraction is already at the root of both of them. They play off of it. But both directions have their liabilities.
To feel contracted is just to intensify an already established feeling of separateness.
It is the core action, the root action-that is behind every motivation, every motivated moment, every gesture of seeking-that must be located.
This is a profound discovery
to realize it subjectively-in other words, to be in that position-is understanding. And not merely to be it, but to locate it, and simultaneously understand it (so that there is both the locating of it subjectively, and the understanding of it in place)-this becomes the capability to do just that in every moment.
So you can always do this transcendence-of-self-contraction work at any moment, and therefore in any stage of practice from that point. It is not about expanding. It is about vanishing the point of contraction-which, of course, you will only completely do when there is the Realization that characterizes the seventh stage of life.
Most fundamental self-understanding, or hearing, undermines, immediately, and at the root, the entire basis for the complex life of seeking. And this requires a transformation of life altogether.
Most fundamental self-understanding, or hearing, is a fundamental means, then, that you bring to the Spiritually responsible stages.
It is a Yoga. It is Yoga.
So hearing is exercised in the Spiritual stages in this Way.
The seeing Yoga is associated with the “conscious process” of hearing, exercised moment to moment.
it is not merely evolutionary or developmental in the sense of expanding the ego-“I”, expanding its knowledge, experience, or mobility (even in planes beyond the physical). That is all part of the psycho-biography of the ego. All of the first six stages of life are the psycho-biography of the ego.
The Way of the Heart must be done seriously, and not superficially. It is an in-depth, real process that is Happiness Itself.