Heart Conversion Talk Series – Adi Da Samraj – Duty,Tolerance and self-Transcendence

DEVOTEE: Sri Gurudev, I feel such gratitude to You for making Yourself available to be with us. I feel the incomparable Grace that You, the Sat-Guru, are willing to gather with us and have this “consideration” with us. I feel such a profound need for all Your Gifts.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Fine. That is all safe enough to say. Now get down to it. If you only make speeches like this, you are not going to handle any business here at all. I just presume that you feel this way.

DEVOTEE: I realize that I need to go beyond my self-protectiveness in relationship with You. The very first time I ever spoke with You, in the Manner of Flowers in 1977, You asked me about my emotional-sexual history. I was known in the community at that time as being a pretty reserved person, and to be speaking with You about the intimate content of my life was quite out of character for me. But when You looked at me, all I could feel was that You saw me as I really am and not as the limitations that I presume. I felt completely free to confess the limitations that I assume because I knew that they were nothing to You. I could feel that You are here to release me from being bound by my own diversions.

SRI DA AVABHASA: It has been fifteen years since that conversation.

DEVOTEE: Yes, fifteen years.

SRI DA AVABHASA: And you are still in the same situation?

DEVOTEE: There is some sense in which it is true that I am still in the same situation, but there is also more than that. You have said that Your devotees are not liberated by stages, but directly, through feeling-Contemplation of You. I feel that I am not altogether in the same situation because I am Yours much more than I was then.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Tcha.

DEVOTEE: I feel that every opportunity to be with You that You Offer Your devotees is a profound Grace. I also feel that in this unique circumstance in Your direct Company, it is our obligation to be Your coins, to participate with You for the sake of all Your devotees. I thank You for this entire period of gathering. I want to thank You on behalf of all devotees for all this time in which You are gathering with us.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Tcha.

And so? Now that you are here, what do you have to deal with?

DEVOTEE: What I am most in touch with is how much I need You, and how I must make use of all the ways You have Given to us to Commune with You.

SRI DA AVABHASA: You are just not going to get into it, is that it? [Laughter.] What is it?

DEVOTEE: I very much appreciate . . .

SRI DA AVABHASA: I mean, what is it? What is the problem?

DEVOTEE: It is difficult to speak about it in Your Company, Sri Gurudev.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Why?

DEVOTEE: All the problems seem to be obliterated when I sit with You.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Then I will leave and come back later.

DEVOTEES: NO!

DEVOTEE: In Your Company, there are no questions.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Why do your so-called problems not seem equally absurd when you are not in My physical Company?

DEVOTEE: I just do not have the same humor outside Your physical Company.

SRI DA AVABHASA: You are supposed to have the same Heart-Master. You are supposed to be living alone with Me at all times. You are supposed to be practicing self-surrendering, self-forgetting devotional Contemplation of Me always.

DEVOTEE: I have felt more than ever that I am purposed to go through this process in Your Company, rather than fulfilling my particular karmas. Since You have Given those of us who live at Sri Love-Anandashram the discipline of fasting our intimate relationships for a period, I have observed more about myself. On the one hand, we fast our relationships with our intimates most of the time, but then, when we gather with You, You Give us the opportunity to associate with our intimates. Because of this, I have hadd the opportunity see both sides of my approach to intimate relationship. Strangely enough, this has magnified my awareness of my karmic addiction to the emotional-sexual search. I feel that attachment more strongly, almost to the point of feeling afraid of Your Call to renunciation.

SRI DA AVABHASA: As My devotee, you are supposed to be doing a very specific saddhana relative to seeking, are you not? That is what the listening-hearing process is all about. You are supposed to be going through the process of that saddhana, part of which involves self-observation. In the course of that practice, you must deal with the self-contraction that is the root of seeking, rather than simply seeking and running after your preferred objects.

DEVOTEE: I yearn for that place where I will feel the end of duality, the end of being the self-contraction, the end of the motivation that underlies all of my motions away, rather than staying in place. I feel the frustration of not being at that summary place.

SRI DA AVABHASA: What have you not observed about this matter?

DEVOTEE: Sri Gurudev, in the moments of pleasurable involvement such as I feel when I engage in my relationship with my intimate partner (during the times when that is permitted), I feel that I am not fully observant of the fact that the self-contraction is at the base of that search for pleasure. In the past, in my puritanical mode, I would notice that I was being distracted and I would try to suppress myself, becoming idealistic about what practice looks like. I do not feel that approach is an option anymore. But I notice that I still have not reached the point of noticing that the self-contraction is what is underlying my seeking.

SRI DA AVABHASA: You are describing yourself as someone who seeks pleasure and avoids pain. You are saying that in a circumstance of pleasure, whatever it may be, sexual or something else for that matter, you do not observe yourself. You are not sensitive to your own activity of self-contraction. In that circumstance, you do not really do saddhana—you just indulge in the pleasurable distraction.

DEVOTEE: It seems to me that I do practice more intensely during the painful, difficult times.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Because you do not want them. But you want the pleasurable ones. Are pleasurable experiences satisfying?

DEVOTEE: I can feel that there is something about pleasurable experiences that is painful as well. The pain associated with pleasurable moments feels to me something like being an animal in heat.

SRI DA AVABHASA: If you were not something like an animal in heat, you would not be having sex, would you?

DEVOTEE: No. It is a vital urge.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Is desiring sexual contact painful?

DEVOTEE: There is something about that that I have noticed.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Is satisfying that desire pleasurable? Is fulfilling the desire pleasurable? What does the satisfaction involve—relief from the pain?

DEVOTEE: Yes.

SRI DA AVABHASA: The satisfaction you achieve is relief from the stress and the pain of desiring. So are you really satisfying yourself with your pleasures or are you just engaging in another form of escape from pain?

DEVOTEE: I do feel a temporary release.

SRI DA AVABHASA: This is how you use pleasure, to escape the pain of desire?

DEVOTEE: Yes.

SRI DA AVABHASA: So you are not somebody who seeks pleasure and avoids pain—you are somebody who avoids pain. You seek to escape pain. That is the one thing you are doing. Is that it?

DEVOTEE: Yes, I think that is more characteristic of me as a person.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Are you ever not seeking to avoid pain or escape it? Are you ever not doing that? Are you just acutely sensitive to pain and always trying to escape it?

DEVOTEE: I am acutely sensitive to it.

SRI DA AVABHASA: So when you are consorting with your intimate partner, it is not merely that you are enjoying your partner and what you do with your partner. You are using that opportunity to escape your own pain. The principal relation is your own pain.

DEVOTEE: I think that it is true of me that I am someone who is just devoted to avoiding pain. Some people are more devoted to having pleasure.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Are you sure?

DEVOTEE: It seems to me that perhaps more “vital” types are more this way.

SRI DA AVABHASA: You do not know—perhaps they are trying to escape their own pain as well. Sexual desire is not pleasurable. Release from sexual desire is what is pleasurable. The pleasure is the momentary release from the pain of the desire. This is why, in the usual sexual engagement, people pursue orgasm. The whole reason for the sexual occasion itself, is the pain, the stress of your own desire. You cannot be liberated from that merely by touching one another and saying sweet things. You have to have an explosive release from the knot of your own suffering. The orgasm is the technique you use together to relieve yourselves from the pain you separately suffer. That is why you got together. So the origin of the relationship, the origin of any moment of contact, sexual pleasure or whatever it may be, is the pain that you are acutely sensitive to and the effort you are making to be released of it.

Pain is the motive behind pleasure. That is how the self-contraction can be observed in moments of pleasure, then. In the circumstance of pleasure, observe the pain behind it and the effort to be relieved from that pain. address this, observe this. Notice this and you discover that it is your own activity. That activity is perpetual. It is not only present in the form of sex desire, it is constantly enacted. That activity is universally enacted in the body-mind through every function, every circumstance, every relation, every moment. You are manufacturing the same stressful pain all the time. That pain is the knot of your own activity, of the self-contraction.

When you become sensitive to this fact, which underlies all your other activities, then you can address it directly in every moment, in the context of every function, every circumstance, every relation. This becomes your saddhana, then—addressing this contraction, feeling beyond it rather than engaging in the repetitive rituals of the search to escape this knot without addressing it. Merely to indulge in some desire is not to eliminate the self-contraction. Merely indulging in desire is to relieve the sensations associated with that desire for a moment. But then the desire reappears. It constantly reappears—as sexual desire or in some other form. In every moment, you are dealing with the same stress, the same knot, the same sensation, the same difficulty, the same motivator—which you will discover is your activity of contraction, separation, dissociation, avoidance of relationship. That is the motivator behind all activity in the usual man or woman. This is what you must discover.

You must develop that understanding to the point of most fundamental responsibility for your own activity, which is what I call “hearing”. In the listening phase of your saddhana in the Way of the Heart, you are “considering” My Instruction, “considering” My Communication to you in all the forms that relate to your observation of this activity of self-contraction, this activity that is behind all of your motives, all of your desires, all of your activities. That contraction is always present. It is the motivator behind all your activities.

When you think you are involved in pleasure, you are really only involved in another moment in the ceremony of dealing with the stress of your self-contraction. Pleasure is not perpetual. Pain is perpetual. The stress of self-contraction is not pleasurable. Pleasure is only a moment. You seek pleasure because, in the moment of pleasure, you are relieved of the stress of the self-contraction. But pleasure does not perpetuate itself. The pain is restored instantly. Somehow or other, you tend to become addicted to every thing that you have ever found that can give you momentary release from the stress of self-contraction. If the source of your pleasure is not always instantly available to you, then you involve yourself in various rituals of seeking for it. You are addicted to all of these things that can, at least for a moment, relieve you of the sensation of your own stress and self-contraction.

Your life is filled with rituals that are bound to the search to be released from this stress. Your moments of release are just moments, brief, not lasting. The more you indulge in whatever you feel gives you this relief, the more your ability to released by that indulgence decreases. This is true of anything you have ever felt afforded you such a moment of relief, anything you have indulged in for the sake of that relief.

As with any addiction, at first the experience that makes you an addict gives you the sensation of release. You then crave that experience again. You repeat the indulgence. But the more times you repeat it, the less you are able to be released by it. This is true of any addiction—it is obviously true of the grossest of addictions, such as drug addiction and alcohol addiction, for instance. But it is also true of any addiction, whatever it may be. The more you do it, the less you feel relieved by whatever it is that you have been indulging in. So it is with this emotional-sexual matter. Like any other addiction, the more you indulge yourself in it, the less you are being relieved in any sense and the more you are occupied with the indulgence itself, and with attachments, obligations, demands from others, on and on. All this just to occasionally indulge in the ritual of momentary release.

Over time, your emotional-sexual addiction is less and less able to even give you that sensation of release. After a while, you are stuck with the rituals and the “others” that you involved in those rituals—and the release itself is less and less intense. The whole matter is much less interesting, and yet you have all of these entanglements. It was supposed to be a ritual of release, but it is nothing but an addicts bondage. In this emotional-sexual area, for instance, people are always looking for some way or other to get out of their relationship, get a new one, change something about whatever they may be doing with one another, and so on, whatever their particular strategy may be. You are always working on your addiction. You are always working to get a better “hit”, a better quality “other”, whatever your game for improving your chances of getting a “hit” may be. In the midst of it, you are just an addict.

You think that because you have relinquished grosser addictions, addictions that are not generally socially acceptable, that you are not an addict. Because you are involved in socially acceptable addictions, you think that you are not an addict, that you are a normal person. What is called “normal” is just the commonly accepted way of being an addict. It is still the same business. There are ways of handling emotional-sexual activity that are socially acceptable. Emotional-sexual seeking is just a way to be an addict that is commonly agreed to be socially acceptable. But that does not make it any less of an addiction. Functioning as an ego, the longer you are involved in an intimate relationship, the less interesting it is, the less anything you are doing in that relationship relieves you. In fact, the relationship itself tends to become more and more a burden, a source of stress, an intrusion, an obligation, and so on. You have noticed this, right?

DEVOTEES: Yes.

SRI DA AVABHASA: The reason you may not be so sensitive to the self-contraction, or the pain that is motivating you, in moments of pleasure is that, in that moment, you are totally preoccupied with getting relief from your stress. You are totally involved with your search, with your method for seeking relief. You do not want anything to do with having to be very disciplined at that moment. You do not want to have to introduce sila, the process of self-understanding, and all the rest of it. You do not want to deny yourself the release. To you, in that moment, to be denied the moment of release is a “downer”. When you are getting it on, it is a “downer” to get serious. [To the devotee who was speaking] You are talking like an addict and telling Me that you do not understand anything about it. You are telling Me that you just feel good when you do it and that is it, flat.

DEVOTEE: No, that is not true, Sri Gurudev.

SRI DA AVABHASA: It sounds to Me like I am not being too exaggerated in My description of you. Everybody here heard what you said. Am I close to describing what is going on here?

DEVOTEES: Yes.

SRI DA AVABHASA: You are just talking like an addict, irrationally, egoically “self-possessed” (or self absorbed), possessed by your own seeking. Even after all these years, you are still doing the same thing and giving Me the same sadd old story—just like a true addict.

DEVOTEE: I do not know how to say this to You. I am a true addict, but I do feel the suffering of it.

SRI DA AVABHASA: What sort of circumstances do people involved in socially unacceptable addictions wind up in? If it possibly can, the social order takes steps to stop addicts from continuing to indulge in their addictions. If that is the case in the common order, then in a culture such as this, the culture of the Way of the Heart, which is a religious culture that has come together on the basis of an agreement to practice the Way of the Heart and on the understanding that the culture is to serve every members Divine Self-Realization, must take steps in relation to the observable addictions in each individual. Notice the addiction, the egoic “self-possession”, the dramatization, all the rest of it. Bring it to one anothers attention. Establish agreements that interfere with the indulgence of the addict. Establish yamas and niyamas that require you to purify yourself, that require you to understand what you are up to. There are a number of things like that that you must do. Perhaps you will even totally abandon the object of your addiction. An alcoholic in the common social order, for instance, is usually addmonished to completely relinquish all use of alcohol.

I have “considered” this emotional-sexual matter with My devotees for decaddes now. I have “considered” it with you in every possible fashion. I have been totally direct with you about it. I have looked at it from every angle. And now, more than two decaddes later, you are still bringing me the same report. I must conclude that I am dealing with addicts. I am not dealing with rational people who “considered” the matter with Me intelligently, seriously—people who could examine it, understand it, drop what is badd about it, embrace what may be right from some point of view, and get on with their lives. You have not done that. You continue to function as addicts. You never get the understanding. You never change your act.

What is the reason, then, for the discipline I have Called you who live here at Sri Love-Anandashram to embrace? What is the purpose of the discipline I have Called all My devotees to embrace? What is the purpose of it? That purpose is Me dealing directly with you as addicts, as egos. You must, at least with the amount of self-understanding you do have, be willing to embrace a discipline relative to your addiction—there are no two ways about it. Relative to this emotional-sexual matter, I am not dealing with great Yogis and Yoginis. I am dealing with very ordinary, ego-based addicts. That is why I Call you to embrace discipline relative to your emotional-sexual life, as well as to every other area of life.

Have you readd My Wisdom-Teaching? I think I have covered it all there. The practice of the Way of the Heart involves conservative discipline, devotional practice, a whole life of service and meditation, specific discipline relative to every function, every relation, every circumstance, every life-possibility. The purpose of that discipline is to conserve your involvement in all of the entanglements of your addictive life in order to enable you to move beyond the bondage of the first three stages of life and enter into this true sphere of this saddhana.

There are more potential addictions along the way. In every one of the first six stages of life, there are objects, states, experiences, and so forth, that you may seek in order to release yourself from the stress of self-contraction. There are addictions, forms of seeking, that are dealt with in various ways in the addvanced and the ultimate stages of life. But at the beginning, primarily I must address your ordinary life-preoccupations, or addictions. And I have covered it all in My Wisdom-Teaching.

DEVOTEE: The primary addiction that I feel is the addiction to the illusion of mind.

SRI DA AVABHASA: A body of pleasure to replace the pain. You serve the same illusory purpose with the mind—idealizing life, idealizing behavior, superimposing some idealistic notion or other on what you do and on what others do. You idealize what life is in order to somehow make life, which is itself self-contraction, into some absolute release or pleasure. You try to make life itself a Divine Condition. There is only one Divine Condition, and It is not conditional existence or any of the potential conditional states. No potential conditional state is the Divine Condition in and of itself. But to function idealistically with the mind is to try to manipulate and otherwise interpret conditional matters and states, to make them appear to be Divine in order to justify your addiction to them.

The bodys search for pleasure and the minds idealization of conditional states—it is all the same activity. To understand that it is all this activity of the self-contraction is hearing. True hearing is when you know that all of it is your search, when you are no longer involved in the objects of that search but are dealing directly with the self-contraction itself. True hearing is not a metaphysical matter, or an idea merely. It is this summary comprehension. In that comprehension, you are addressing the one thing that is your own contraction. You are dealing with the self-contraction moment by moment, regardless of what arises—because whatever arises, you are still always only engaged in the same activity. Knowing this is true hearing. Exercising the capability to stand free of the self-contraction based on this knowing is the capability of true hearing. This is the necessary foundation for practice in the addvanced and the ultimate stages of life in the Way of the Heart. Without the capability of true hearing, you would enter into the addvanced and the ultimate stages of life as an oblivious addict.

Talk to any addict in the midst of his or her addiction. In that situation, the individual shows no clarity, no willingness to take on discipline. addicts tend to be liars, manipulators. They avoid everything you say, or they go along with you and say, “Yes, yes, yes,” but then they go and do it some more. You know something about how addicts function in terms of “gross” addictions. It is the same with everybody. Before Most Perfect self-transcendence, even before real responsibility for this self-contraction, everybody is an addict just like everybody who is involved in “gross” addictions. The world is a gigantic asylum of addicts.

DEVOTEE: In Your Wisdom-Teaching, You have Written about the various functions that discipline serves in the listening phase of the Way of the Heart, and then in the hearing and the seeing phases.

SRI DA AVABHASA: In the listening phase of the Way of the Heart, self-discipline serves the function of reflecting you to yourself. In other words, in the listening phase, you have not understood yourself yet. Therefore, in the beginning discipline is not an expression of most fundamental self-understanding. There may be some understanding there, but the principal function of the discipline is to reflect you to yourself, to give you the means to observe yourself. Self-discipline does this not merely in the moment of pleasure but moment by moment, even when there is only the search and not much of a sense of pleasurable release from it.

That is the purpose of the disciplines in the listening phase of practice. In the hearing phase and beyond, discipline is an expression or an extension of your self-understanding, which is most fundamental.

In the listening phase of the Way of the Heart, you are in My Company for some time as I adddress you relative to these matters. I address you either directly, verbally as I am doing now, or through your study of My Wisdom-Teaching—which is Me again. But if the listening phase goes on for too long, I must Call you to a greater discipline, because this listening process is supposed to become consequential to the point of true hearing, and it is supposed to do so directly, as quickly as possible, in a finite period of time. If I find you going on and on and on, taking years and decaddes, then I know you are avoiding what is necessary. It is absolutely so. If you are so much of an addict that you cannot deal with your impediments to the God-Realizing process in a simple, ordinary circumstance, then you must discipline yourself further. The “grossest” addict cannot afford to have anything to do with his or her objects of seeking. The ordinary addict can perhaps have something to do with some of it, if there is the right discipline, the right understanding. But you can never have anything to do with the search and have it be right. The search is always the same thing. You can have something to do with ordinary relations, friendships, intimacies perhaps, and so on. You can have meals every day. But as My true devotee, you must transcend the search.

Retain what is ordinary, retain what you can be responsible for as a true devotee of Mine. Totally abandon what you must abandon. And what is that? That is anything that you cannot deal with responsibly as My devotee. If you go on for ten, twenty years talking emotional-sexual addict to Me, you must take some steps. What do you think?

DEVOTEE: I feel a little gun-shy about this, Sri Gurudev.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Of what exactly?

DEVOTEE: Of taking dramatic steps, because . . .

SRI DA AVABHASA: Because you are an addict?

DEVOTEE: Because of my addiction to idealism.

SRI DA AVABHASA: What is idealistic about being disciplined?

DEVOTEE: I have always felt that the disciplines that You have Given me have greatly served me. But on the other hand, I see my addiction to idealism. You have said that it is not the intimacies themselves that are binding, it is what you do in them that is binding.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Intimacies themselves can very well be binding. That is why some people wind up being celibate renunciates. Those who make that choice perceive that there is not one thing that they can do with their intimacies that is not binding. For them, the whole thing is binding. Of course, some among those who make this choice may not have any great impulse to emotional-sexual intimacy to begin with. They discard it without having to deal with very much. Others may come to making such a choice eventually, because they see that it does not make a difference what they do with it—it is still wrong, it is still binding, it is still the search. They see that their emotional-sexual involvement is still an alternative to the saddhana itself.

You are realizing nothing. You are just entangling yourself more and more, distracting yourself more and more, and there is nothing coming of it. Intimacies can be binding. Intimacies can also continue, but in either case, there must be self-understanding, truly as My devotee, with right discipline. Then your emotional-sexual intimacy may not be an impediment, or at least it may not be a significant impediment. As I have told you, if you are going to enter seriously into this “consideration” of your emotional-sexual life, you must enter into it freely, aware that it may very well turn out that you should embrace a greater discipline, even celibacy itself. If that is what the observation comes down to, then you must be willing to do that.

DEVOTEE: I see that the only way one can embrace a Yogic sexual saddhana is from that free disposition of not holding on to intimacy for any kind of conventional purpose.

SRI DA AVABHASA: But you are holding on to it for conventional purposes. Where is the Yoga in that? Where is the good in it? Where is the freedom? Where is the responsibility for self-understanding, the addvancement in practice? You are always arranging and rearranging your intimate life, and you never get down to any growth in saddhana. It is just on and on and on and it never stops. You are not practicing the saddhana I have Given to you relative to intimacy, so nothing ever comes of it.

DEVOTEE: Sri Gurudev, You have also described the Yoga of necessity in Your Wisdom-Teaching—or the Yoga of embracing those aspects of life that one needs to embrace to establish equanimity.

SRI DA AVABHASA: What is right and necessary is to be discovered in each case. Apparently, you all seem to think that you have far more necessities than I think you do.

 

d DEVOTEE: Sri Gurudev, You have spoken about the circle we draw around ourselves in our intimacies.

SRI DA AVABHASA: When your practice is true, you break the circle and you have nothing more to do with it—nothing. In that case, there are no circles. There are no contracts between intimates in My Company. You have your solemn and most profound obligations in relation to Me. Your intimacies are agreements, madde with Me, that serve the purpose of Perfectly self-transcending God-Realization. If that is not the case, they should not exist. You must be willing to discipline these intimacies based on My Instruction.

You do not need patronizing consolation games in your intimacies. Love is a sacrifice. Love, if it is to be real, is not what is called “love” out in the world. That is attachment, entering into intimacy for the sake of helping some other to be consoled and to survive. True love is a sacrifice. It is an extension of your devotion to Me. It is a willingness to help another to Realize God in My Company. And nothing else should enter into it. Nothing else, whatsoever. All the cute nonsense you indulge in in your intimacies must be abandoned. The only thing you should do in these intimacies is fulfill My Instructions. This gives strength to men and it gives strength to women. It frees you of dependency, and stupidity and the need for consolation. Each of you has your relationship to Me. Each of you has your devotional life, your God-Realizing life. That is what you have—and that is all you have. Everything else, including your intimacies, is merely a Yogic circumstance that will enable you to further to transcend yourself and to fulfill My addmonitions more completely. I expect you to drop anything else you are doing like the plague. That is what you all must discuss with one another, and with your intimates. This is My addmonition.

What are you doing in these relations that does not measure up to My addmonition? That is what you must discuss with one another. Make new agreements. When you meet in your devotional groups, you make a confession, your friends reflect you back to yourself, and then you are to take on yamas and niyamas and be obliged thereafter to fulfill the discipline. This is the kind of conversation you must have with your intimates. This is why I suggest that sometimes you have devotional groups to which your intimates can come, so that you can “consider” your intimacy with one another, so that you can confess whatever limitations may exist in your intimacies, so that you can “consider” how your intimacies may or may not fall short of My addmonition. Then, on that basis, make new agreements and be held accountable by the culture of My devotees.

Your intimate relations are for the sake of transcending yourself, not fulfilling yourself. Understand this. It is so. Anything you are doing in your intimacies that is about fulfilling yourself or consoling yourself you must drop. You must observe yamas and niyamas and be held accountable by the culture relative to every single fraction of your intimate life. This is My addmonition to you. When you get together to handle business, this is what you are to be doing. Whatever falls short of My addmonition in your intimacies, say it to one another, discuss it, make agreements, have somebody write it down, and be held accountable from that moment on. No more nonsense!

 

DEVOTEE: I want to thank You for Your Gift of feeling-Contemplation of You. I feel that the great Gifts You have Given me allow me to forget myself and remember You.

SRI DA AVABHASA: You are Given that Grace even as a woman. There is no “even” about it in My View, but in the circumstance of the tradditions, women were not given the Dharma directly. Women were expected to marry and, in some social sense, the womans husband was her “guru”. The men, the husbands, all went to Gurus or to the temple, whatever it may have been. They got the Dharma there and applied some behavioral aspect of what they learned to their wives. Women did not get the Dharma directly. Women got some behavioral obligations. They were kept out of the temples. They did not get to go to the Gurus. They did not get to do saddhana in any full sense. But I address everyone, male and female.

What does that mean then? Men and women must surrender to Me. You women, then, have to stop relating to your men as your “guru”. The traddition of intimacy is about making husbands, or the men, in some sense, into “gurus”. A woman gets involved with a man and she is dissociated from everything. She makes that relationship into a thing in itself, dissociates herself from the great possibility of saddhana, and just becomes somebody baddly born, in effect, an “untouchable” who cannot go into the sacred places, who cannot make the great gestures of saddhana, and who does not really care about it. She is just there to nuzzle up with her boyfriend and observe her household duties and satisfactions and all the rest of it.

Men, likewise, instigate that in women. Men suggest that somehow or other this is right. They suggest that this is how they want women to relate to them. This is an accurate criticism of men: Men do not want their women to be free. They do not want women to have direct access to the Guru and to the process of real saddhana. Men want women to be attached to them, as if the male were a world in and of himself. Men instigate this orientation in women, or they allow it, and the women very much get into it. The social circumstance of intimacy functions exactly that way.

In My Company, women are called directly to the full process of saddhana. You must understand the implications of that. You must abandon the traddition of making your intimate male friend your “guru”. You have a direct relationship to Me, and you can have no other “guru”. Likewise, your man can have no other “guru”. I am your only Guru. You live alone with Me.

If it is right, you may be involved in intimacies, but you must do it as My devotee. You must observe true discipline there, and do not entangle yourself in an egoic, worldly manner. A profound change must occur in the actual life-behavior of women and in the disposition of men. This is so, and the community of My devotees has not yet understood this. You have assumed various disciplines, such as the “architecture of living”, and so on. But you still do not have a basic comprehension of the change that must take place. Everybody is still wandering in this householder mode—this tradditional mode of living, in which women are, in effect, consenting to something that most women these days do not want to do anymore, or so it seems. They say they do not want to, anyway. So why not do something different? Why live like household wives? Why are you involved in this romantic fealty to the male “other” in your intimacy? Why are you attaching yourself to sex and sexual intimacies in an egoically “self-possessed” and self-destructive manner? Be a free devotee of Mine. Show that sign. Then your “consideration” of how you must live with your male intimate will change and you will relate to one another in an entirely different fashion. You will not live in the tradditional manner, in what is said to be the worldly norm. You will not live in that fashion anymore.

 

DEVOTEE: Sri Gurudev, when I left Sri Love-Anandashram several months ago, I was a celibate renunciate. I chose that after fifteen years of living in an intimate relationship and being totally fearful of being on my own. You were with me every single step of the way. You Guided me. You took care of me. There was no need to find anything else because You madde Yourself so present in my life.

SRI DA AVABHASA: When a woman finds her Heart-Husband, she does not need another husband.

DEVOTEE: You can do it with anybody. It has nothing to do with me. It is all You—all You.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Perhaps a male friend is appropriate, if I Bless it, for the sake of saddhana and for no other purpose. You are now involved in an intimacy again and you continue to have obligations toward Me. Each of My devotees is similarly obliged in relationship to Me. Men, women—all are single with Me. All are here to embrace My Instruction. Live My Instruction out with your intimates. Make a Yoga out of your application to My Instruction. Do it and do it right, as I Require you to.

It is not that you are looking for the ultimate partner who can go with you to God-Realization. You want to be with somebody who will play your aberrated game with you, even without saying a word about it. That is, you seek one another out in your intimate relationships. You are asking, “Who will do my thing with me?” You keep looking for the face, the headd, the words, the one who will do that dumb thing with you. More often than not, that is exactly why intimate relations occur. You find somebody who is willing to enter into an agreement, in most cases a tacit agreement, even without the words of agreement, to play your game with you. You make a silent agreement to bind one another, without saying so.

A man will not realize his strength until he knows he does not depend on women, or any one woman. You men should live your relationship to Me. This is what makes you manly. If you have a relationship to any woman, it must be a manly relationship, full of the law of My Instruction. Otherwise, you become aberrated and dissociated from Me.

Can you women deal with the fact that you are not owned? As My devotees, I expect that to be your disposition. You are not owned. Women, you must be aware that you are not owned, that you are not obliged in the householder sense. You are not in the slightest bit owned. You are free, independent (in the right sense), One-on-one with Me. You are My devotee. You are not owned by virtue of being in an intimacy. I am talking for real here. The men sitting by your side have to cut the link. You are Mine, as they are, and that is the end of it. The psychology of not being owned is a discipline that My female devotees must embrace with true understanding and fullest demonstration. Do not consent to be owned. Men, do not let your women friends be owned by you. Women, stop being stupid. From now on, no man is going to replace your intelligence. I do not replace your intelligence. I Give you intelligence.

Are you capable of an intimacy without the psychology of being owned in any way? Are you capable of assuming your right independence so that when I or anyone else has a discussion with you, you are just you? The fact that you have an intimacy with someone does not color you, qualify you, or eliminate what you must deal with in any way whatsoever.

It said tradditionally that only those who could become renunciates in the tradditional absolutist celibate renunciate sense hadd the possibility of becoming God-Realized to any degree. In My Company, all beings have the possibility of Divine Self-Realization, if they are willing to embrace this discipline and this response. And women are among those who have been bound by the tradditional prescriptions. In this century, women all over the world are becoming sensitive to their bondage. They have begun to become sensitive to the things they make out of their emotional-sexual contracts, and so forth, and they have started to rebel. I expect you to take your need to shake off this bondage seriously. I am not suggesting that you need to become lesbians, (although some make may an appropriate homosexual choice for other reasons) in order to deal with this particular form of bondage. I am not suggesting any kind of angularity at all. Just as men have presumed their independence to whatever degree they have, you women must also do so—whether you are involved in intimate relations or not. You are individuals in direct relationship to Me, living the Divine life without impediment. You do not get access to the God-Realizing process through your boyfriend—you get it directly from Me. Do not support in one another the psychology that says that women are owned objects, dependent little creatures with less than absolute rights and direct access to the Divine. This is what I mean by handling business dramatically and for real.

I am your Heart-Husband. When a woman is Husbanded in the true sense, she does not enter into the contracts of aberration and fealty with anyone. You must establish your intimacies on an entirely different basis than is done in the world and than is done tradditionally. That is how women will be liberated—not only in the ultimate sense but in the human sense, socially, by refusing these contracts of dependence and incapability. Do not look for those things from men anymore. Be Husbanded by Me.

The other night, I spoke to you about a Sikh Realizer of a certain degree who lived in India very recently, and how he dealt with the fact that he was a married man, and with the fact that he hadd children. If you asked him how he did the saddhana, how he got to Realize, how he kept it all straight, he said, “Because I know my duty. I do my duty in relation to my intimates and nothing else. Nothing else whatsoever. I am not a fool. I am not an ego. I do not act casually in relation to any of those relations or circumstances or presumed social obligations. I manifest my duty to my wife. I provide a certain service to her. I do this and that. I do not have to have sex with her. I just observe my duty.”

In India, they give you straight messages about duty. In the West, you do not get such straight messages. It is all rather ambiguous. Everybody is supposed to be equal, free, not bound by duty. When the state is madde secular, everything gets secular. When the state is not religious, somehow everybody is not supposed to be religious. But that is not the true principle even of the secular state. The principle of the secular state is tolerance. The reason for a secular state is that you do not suppress anyone in their moral and religious obligations and impulses. But when a state gets secular somehow, strangely, it is presumed that everyone must get secularized and religion must disappear. Therefore duties, obligations, the impulse to God-Realization, the experiment with life that is about self-overcoming and self-transcendence, are forgotten. This is the error, or potential problem, in a secular or democratic state.

Duty was always very much specified in the religious cultures of the East. Likewise, in the West, duty must be specified. Secular obligations must be rounded out, madde specific, and not allowed to overwhelm your entire life. Social obligations are fine. They make order, they help everyone to survive. But social obligations are not all there is. You cannot totally secularize life, and you cannot secularize the state to the point that the religious life becomes inappropriate. As I have said, the fundamental purpose of making the state secular is that, in that case, the state does not associate itself with any one particular religious view. In other words, it is supposed to be about tolerance, including religious tolerance. Duties, then, are to be established within sacred community. Duty is still supposed to prevail. The state should have no right to interfere with the impulse to God-Realization. Life should always be an experiment in that sacred context. The secularization of the state should not reduce everybody to some little unit intended to fulfill secular purposes imagined by politicians. That is not the purpose of life. Democracy is supposed to be about freedom, about the pursuit of happiness. Without that, democracy is nonsense. It is another form of command.

Therefore, duty should be understood. It should be understood that social relations are about duty and they are appropriate, but they are not the whole of life. Insteadd of indulging in social relations as if they are the be-all and end-all, insteadd of acting as though they are all that life is, you should observe your duty. Manifest your right attention to the matters that you must, but do not be totally aberrated by it. Do not renounce your Guru, do not renounce your Way of life, do not become stupid in the face of your ordinary obligations. That is not your duty. That is not what life is about. East or West, you should know what the social obligations are for real and not tighten them up so much up that you have no freedom to engage in the experiment of life, in real saddhana. Do not allow social obligations to be piled on social obligations so that you are so limited you cannot do saddhana anymore, so that you cannot do anything but be a slave for secular purposes anymore. It is important for you to understand your rights and your real obligations and to fulfill them. When the time comes, you can even renounce those—if you become a true renunciate.

Tradditionally, such renunciation has also been allowed. It just required a certain announcement—and then you were set apart. Then certain social duties that belonged to you are no longer yours. That should also be allowed. But does this traddition still exist? Less and less and less. The acknowledgement of the greater purpose is shrinking. This is the sign of the Kali Yuga. If it goes on as it has been, eventually you will not even be able to go into a private place in your own house to pray. Life will be so secularized and equalized, by demand, that nobody will be able to do anything but be a slave of the state.

This is not democracy. I am not criticizing democracy itself. It is, perhaps, the best arrangement among responsible people. But democracy can associate itself with a suppressive materialistic point of view to the degree that there really is no more freedom and it is not even democracy anymore. Insteadd, democracy must support the responsibility and the greatest impulses in people.

At the present time, all over the Earth, there are small factions, ethnic groups, a little difference in color, a little difference in religion, a little difference in traddition, everybody demanding their right to be separate. People are dividing themselves off, blocks wide, streets wide. Soon it would seem that every human being on Earth will demand that he or she be acknowledged as an independent state. People are murdering one another because of the proliferation of this egoic principle all over the Earth. There is no tolerance in that—no love in it, no agreements, no cooperation. It is the ego magnified politically all over the Earth. That is the circumstance everybody is in in this moment, and it is a profound danger for everyone. You must become sensitized to it. Listen to the news a little bit. Understand what is happening around you.

You must, as individuals and as the community of My devotees, magnify the impulse toward tolerance and the requirement that people be sane and not opposed to one another. Having a particular traddition is no justification for killing people. Who should justify that? People are dying by the thousands every week all over the world. The motive of egoity, separativeness, and violence toward all “others” is overwhelming the entire Earth. All humankind is in political turmoil. The balance of nature all over the Earth is being destroyed by political motivations that will not take seriously the fact that you have to do things to protect the circumstance in which everyone lives. Things are not getting better and they are not right. You must be My devotees for real and expand the disposition of cooperation and demand that tolerance and cooperation be the discipline, the disposition, of everyone on Earth.

Weaponry, non-cooperation, delineating your block, your little neighborhood, your nation, and so forth, in total opposition with everyone else—that is the circumstance on Earth today. It is egoity gone wild. You think you are being rather mild about it because all you propose is to make a little circle with your intimate friends, but that is the principle that is making the politics of the whole Earth. I Call you to self-transcendence, cooperation, benign, compassionate awareness of other human beings and their stresses and their anger. This is what you must manifest. Mark My Words! You have always seen Me do so. You must also do so.

All over the world there is separation and death—the dramatization of egoity madde collective, madde political. Understand that this is what is happening around you all over the Earth. It is not only being manifested politically and socially, it is being manifested in the whole atmosphere of the Earth—in the hole in the ozone layer, in the possible rising of the tides, storms, natural destructiveness everywhere. That is the story all over the Earth, babies. Watch the news as a discipline—I do everyday. That is the situation in which you really live. What is it about? The same thing you have been defending here tonight in your gentler manner—the right to be egos, to be egoically “self-possessed”, self-indulgent, doing your thing as you will, avoiding the law, refusing cooperation, avoiding compassion, in the name of what?

You are going to die sometime. You think that you are not going to make a difference. What you do does make a difference. Only people such as you can make the difference, by rising up and refusing the impulse to non-cooperation, by manifesting the principles in your religion in relation to all other religions, by manifesting the principle of compassion, cooperation, love. Manifest that in your personal life everyday, or you are supporting the destructiveness that is going on all over the world. You are alive at a critical time in this Kali Yuga. I asking too much?

DEVOTEES: NO!

SRI DA AVABHASA: Assume great discipline here for the sake of Divine Self-Realization. Stop looking for the loopholes in My Argument or My Law. Do not ever manifest intolerance in your speech or life. You must exhibit tolerance, compassion, love, freedom from egoic “self-possession” in your life, in your speech, in all your acts. This is not a moralistic matter. It is necessary even for survival. The planet itself is an organism that we must cooperate with or there is no survival possible here.

DEVOTEE: We have to be extremely sensitive.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Do so. As My devotees, you have particular obligations that are potentially about great saddhana. Nonetheless, you must manifest this disposition in the world altogether and with one another. All My devotees in all the communities around the world must voice, manifest, and demonstrate this point of view, this devotion, this acceptance of the law, this tolerance.

My principal Communication about the Great Traddition is called The Basket of Tolerance. There is not a word in it of separateness, of hatred, of non-allowance of people and their tradditions. If people want to choose Me, fine. If they want to choose something different, fine. Everyone should really choose his or her traddition. Because those tradditions, if you understand their right principle, are about cooperation, tolerance, about living with one another, not about drawing the lines around.

DEVOTEE: Sri Gurudev, our community is Blessed. We are Blessed by the Divine.

SRI DA AVABHASA: That is right. You must manifest that sign. You must understand the time you are in. It is not as it was in the eighties, the seventies, the sixties, or the fifties. This is a very, very, dark and difficult time. And people are being murdered by the thousands every week. Give Me ten thousand in the general community and maybe that can be the beginning of a difference. That is why I keep objecting to the impotence of your missionary work. Where is the Free Daist movement? You have the Great Revelation. Do not come to the world hat in hand. Do not come back to Me all hat and no cattle. Keep your hat on. Get a great gathering of cattle. Go out there with great strength to make this mission in My Company, because I am serious and for real.

The horror on Earth must change, or you will not even get a chance at Divine Self-Realization—not you and not your future generations. You have been wasting My Lifetime, and you are going to waste the future beyond My Lifetime as well if you do not get straight. There are ground obligations, and they are about tolerance, and compassion, and cooperation. You do not take Me seriously about this. You are full of your intimate self-indulgence.

How much cooperative community is there among My devotees? Minuscule, hardly anything. You do not take Me seriously. The only thing you accommodate is a little bit of cultural activity. Where is the real cooperative community? Where are all the things that the cooperative community of My devotees should be manifesting? Where is it? I have been waiting more than two decaddes for you to wake up. It is time you understood this. I have dealt with all your aberrations. I have submitted to it all to Help you out. I am in no such mood anymore. The relinquishment of My Teaching Work occurred seven years ago. My Divine Emergence is ongoing, even though you do not notice it.

You all must get serious and stop your nonsense. You must stop sizing yourselves up in your intimate rooms and get down to what is required for humanity to stop destroying itself. You must stop destroying the possibility of God-Realization in each one of you. It is time to become serious people and stop throwing your life away just for a tinkle, a tune, a little amusement, a little orgasm.

The exoteric motive to defend your little colony is overwhelming the Earth. But the source and center of all religious tradditions is the esoteric part, the philosophy that transcends limitation, that requires the transcendence of egoity to one degree or another, that requires cooperation and the elimination of hatred and sizing one another up, that demonstrates the willingness to engage in a collective of cooperation acknowledging differences, requiring all to embrace one another, to allow one another, to be compassionate with one another. That is the origin of democracy and it is the root of social wisdom of all tradditions. Where is that demonstration? Where is it in you here? Have you no greater wisdom, no other awareness in My Company, than this stupid impulse to satisfy yourself bodily and avoid My Instruction, avoid living the ecstatic discipline in My Company? Wake up!

When do you become serious people—serious about the Way of the Heart and its ultimate and esoteric requirements, serious about its foundation, including its exoteric requirements, its social requirements? When do you ever get serious? When do you stop acting like a bunch of fools going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, hearing a little bit of addmonition, hearing about how other people got a little bit straight because they were so aberrated they would have killed themselves otherwise? When do you ever straighten out and take Me seriously? I am here! When do I ever see the sign in you of the Free Daist movement, the great mission in My Company, the cooperative communities fully embraced, fully lived? When do you people ever get serious and fulfill your obligations in the world, your obligations with one another? You do not have to be an idealist to do this. You just have to be My devotee.