Chapter 11: Beyond Doubt
The Urgency of the Teaching
A talk by Da Free John (Adi Da Samarj)
DA FREE JOHN: If you want to learn about Truth when Truth has become corrupted, then go to an Adept. Go to one who has Realized the Truth. Go to one who has already fulfilled the process completely. If you live in a moment in time when there is no Enlightened Tradition, when all the cults are corrupt, you can be certain that somewhere on Earth an Adept is alive. Such a person appears under exactly those conditions, when Truth is no longer visible in the cults, and when religions have become so corrupted by history and fetishism that they are about to become extinct.
The religious traditions in our time are about to be smothered by a mechanistic, political, and scientific world view, only because the cults are in doubt. They have held on to their fetishes so tenaciously that they have lost their association with the Living God. They do not even know the Living God anymore. Most people who belong to conventional churches, religions, and spiritual societies have no unqualified connection with the Living Reality. There is no true devotion in them, and, therefore, no Realization. Their association with God is only words and hopefulness. Therefore, they do not represent a living force in the world. They have nothing to offer that is Alive. Only the Adepts, who are God-Realized, through whom the living Power of God manifests, can make a difference in human time. Such individuals are the instruments for the acculturation of humanity.
Periodically, such individuals must appear, and they must be influential. There is a notion that Adepts should be hiding in caves in the wilderness. This is not true. If the Adepts do not speak, the only voice that will be heard is that of ordinary people who are not God-Realized. The Adepts are the Sources of spiritual life. Such individuals must therefore enter into the stream of society, to purify the culture and reestablish the process of God-Realization. If they do not speak and become influential, there is no hope at all for humanity.
We exist in a moment in time when the cults are universally corrupted. Thus, it is a time for Adepts and true devotees to reappear if there is to be any hope for the future of human beings. We are about to be swallowed up in anti-cultism, anti-Godism, anti-religion, anti-spirituality. The impetus or force behind this movement against the true culture of Man, which is a God-Realizing culture, is largely the reaction to cultism. The cults, which should be a means for establishing people in a right relationship to the Living God, have become frozen in their idolatry, fixed in their association with their historical peculiarities and limitations, and they do not represent a window to the Living God anymore. They represent a piece of mind frozen in the form of words and imagery and histories of all kinds.
Intelligent people cannot find God in such a mass of idiocy, so quite naturally they look for satisfaction elsewhere. Thus, people are preoccupied with all kinds of political and scientific idealism, as if politics and scientific and technological progress were the Way of Truth. They are absolutely not the Way of Truth. They never have been the Way of Truth. They are no more the Way of Truth than sex or any other satisfaction or fulfillment of function. None of that is the Way of Truth at all. It is the ordinary impulse of the ego, glamorizing itself by great enterprises.
If this trend toward political and scientific obsession is to be broken, some light must be brought to the whole affair of spiritual and religious understanding. The conventional, exoteric cults must be purified. They must give up their primacy. Their legitimacy must come into doubt. Then the Teaching of Adepts, the Sources of Truth, will again become available, and the Living Reality will again become obvious, obliging human beings to a different way of life than the ego proposes.
If not, the world will be overwhelmed. It is almost inevitable now that it will be overwhelmed in any case. The world, even the Realm of Nature as a whole, is founded on a righteous Principle. Therefore, the world will be purified, without a doubt. The Force of the Divine pervades everything, and, therefore, It also purifies everything in one way or another. If human beings, while they have the benign capacity to enter into God-Communion, will not do so, but instead create a corrupt culture, a subhuman order, then the purification will not occur within the ordinary and benign course of natural processes. It is then no longer a matter of some Adepts saying a holy word or speaking the Truth whereupon everybody changes his or her approach to life. It would be good if as many as possible could hear the universal Teaching of Truth and respond to it. But if the Teaching alone is not sufficient, then great upheavals necessarily occur. That is how the righteous Law works. It is not just that we pay our dues for past activity. A righteous Principle is positively at work, constantly to purify and to reestablish order.
Thus, there are periods of great negative upheaval in the world, including natural disasters, wars, and conflicts of all kinds. On the one hand, during these periods, the world pays its dues for failing to live by the Law. On the other hand, these times of upheaval are the evidence of a continuous process of purification. They are themselves a demonstration of the Law. At the end of these periods, the Law is reestablished in righteousness.
It is very likely that we are entering into such a time of upheaval, because of the extent of the failure of human culture. There is simply no light abroad in the world today. There is nothing but corruption, nothing but the failure to accept the Way of God. There is absolutely no sign of the Way of Truth, except in rare instances of individuals and small groups of people. The Truth is essentially hidden and secondary. There is a long history of corruption in every area of human life, and the entire social structure of the world is devoted to subhuman ends and forms of self-indulgence. There are no signs of an imminent Golden Age in the disposition or condition of humanity at large. Rather, the signs are of the necessity for a great purification, a great reestablishment of order, a righteous readjustment of the whole world.
“The
perfect among the sages is identical with Me. There is
absolutely no difference between us”
Tripura
Rahasya,
Chap
XX, 128-133