The following remix study is taken from many essays and talks from Adi Da Samraj covering over 30 years of his teaching demonstration. It is ‘woven’ together by Beezone to make this study a compressive and accurate reflection of Adi Da’s word on this subject.
This style of presentation is called the ‘White and Orange Books” project and is based on two elements. One is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown books. The Blue & Brown Books of Wittgenstein’s were dictated as a set of notes to his student in 1934-1935. The other is a ‘remix’ of his talks and essays.
Edited and
adapted by Beezone from three
sources:
The
Great Bird That Flies to the
Heart
– 1982
Make the Body a Yoga-Body – 1995
Will Find Its Way to the Heart
Entrance into the Spiritual stages of life begins with natural bodily force, natural energies. The spiritual Way depends first of all on establishing the receptive and descended personality as a functional vehicle of the Living Reality. This is the principle of the first three stages of life.
You must be able receive the Living Force in the body, then, in the Spiritual stages, as a secondary and supportive matter allow the Force of My Presence to Purify the body-mind. The receiving of the Living Force will Purify, Infuse and Expand your sense of Being. This is a Yogic process that is sometimes called an alchemical process. It deals with the traditional elements of conditional manifestation, earth, water, fire, air, ether, infinite space beyond that.
By practicing this Yoga from the beginning, you equip and prepare yourself to do Spiritual Yoga. In the beginning is seems like it is a different energy. When you begin you are relatively undisciplined. You may have some insights, an intutiion as to what a spiritual understanding entails but it’s fragmented, immature. All the while you waver, you have a busy mind and a busy life. Your body is not particulary healthy and neither is your life in general very pleasant. There are all kinds of obstacles and you are disturbed at a basic level. But once you begin to be responsibile and take responsibility this yoga becomes more profound. A subtler energy manifests, a more refined subtler process begins.
In the Spiritual stages it is not merely a matter of natural body or mental energy being worked with and conducted. It is about the Living Force of Presence being conducted.
This process of Reception and conductivity is traditionally called not only a Yogic process, but an alchemical process. That is another word given for it. It is an infusion of the body-mind with Spirit-Energy. If the body-mind is given up to the Living Current, it begins to transforms the sublimed elements and releases the point of view from grossness of just the body. You begin to be released from limited identification with the body to ultimate profundity of identification with the Source. This release of identification with the body also leads to release of identification with all conditional states of existence – gross, subtle, causal.
Preparation
Even though I can tell you about the advanced stages of this Way you cannot really practice them unless the Spirit carries you into them. The Spirit will not carry you into them unless you provide a vehicle for It. You must prepare yourself, give the Garuda Bird (The Spirit Bird) to Vishnu (The Self). You must give birth to this Bird. You must let It break out of the egg, the shell of ego. You must fly with the Spirit-Current, the full Egg, the full Circle. It must descend and ascend. Then It cracks to Its root, the Bird flies to the heart, and the Transcendental State of Being, Vishnu, the Divine Being, is Realized. But not otherwise, and not before then.
I at times use traditional stories and myths to describe this process, but this process is not a myth nor is it a story. It is a fact. It is expressed through myths in the traditions, but it is a yogic or spiritual fact. And it is Realized through the process that I communicate and Transmit to you. That process is founded on self-understanding and the exercise of this mechanism whereby you break through the shell, undo the knots, allow the Current to resonate in this full Circle and then to move into the heart and find the Self truly.
self-contraction, the physical self-contraction.”
I have told you many stories about the Mighty Atom, you must condition the body to be a vehicle of this exercise of conductivity. You cannot merely engage it as a mental exercise and let your body go to pot, but you must maintain a right physical discipline so that the body can enjoy its natural capacity to be full of Life, to conduct It, receive It, and demonstrate Its Virtue.
The first three stages of life are not a hellish domain into which we should not have been born to begin with. They are stages for preparing the vehicle of descent so that it can conduct the Living Force. They prepare us with a will, free of limitations of mind, to concentrate this Force, receive It from above the head, concentrate It in the body, let It pass through a full feeling vehicle with no impediment, a body that is healthy and fully able to function in all kinds of ways.
To do this you must observe and be aware of how you are using energy and attention. How you tend to dissipate your stress and seek for release. How you confuse and delude yourself by seeking pleasure and release. You must found (not find) yourself in real self-understanding through consideration of my Argument and develop this practice so that the Life-Current or Energy is set free. Energy and Attention will be set free from the objects associated with that Current, descending and ascending, and can then pass to its Source.
You must become emotionally free of all kinds of reactions, self-imagery, ideals about how things are supposed to turn out, reactions to life, disappointment, frustration. You must be free of the whole force of emotional contraction in the heart region, which is the emotional region of the body…you must also be free in the head. You must be free of thoughts, you must be free of contractions in the head, the brain, the face. And you must be free of vital or physical contractions.
The mechanism in the frontal line is conditioned by the habits of egoity over a lifetime, even over many lifetimes. It is itself a form of self-contraction, and it is therefore not simply available to receive this Baptism or Force. You must understand your impediments to receiving the Spirit-Baptism, found yourself in self-understanding of the mental self-contraction, the emotional self-contraction, the physical self-contraction.
You must understand the self-contraction in terms of the mind, in terms of emotion, your psychology, your complexes, your neuroses, your social attitudes, your chronic physical tendencies.
The receiving or inbreathing of the Living Current is not merely the simple matter of inhaling while putting attention in the Divine via the Name or any technique. It is a part of it but the technical exercises I’ve given you must be engaged as real practice over time, based on real self-understanding, real self-observation, and real self-knowing, so that you develop the equipment or the capacity to conduct the Force in the frontal line. This capacity improves over time.
Desent and Ascent
This process of ascent or release is entirely dependent on the process of descent or receptivity. How much you release through exhalation along the spinal line depends on how much you receive via the frontal line. We must enjoy the capacity to be free of limits or modifications on that Force. We must conduct It in a full Circle, so that attention is free, so that Energy is free to Locate stably, and stably Abide in, the Transcendental Condition that is the Source of Nature. To do this you cannot merely exercise the Spirit-Force as a methid. You must understand yourself. You must be responsible for the knots, mental, emotional, and physical.
You do not altogether represent a great deal of Spirit-Force. You are a five-watt bulb! You cannot use the Spirit-Force if you are full of knots. You cannot just be good at receiving life. When the full Circle is established, then you are Resonant, you are infinitely Radiant, you are without qualification, you neither go up nor down. You must develop this mechanism.
In this process you must be emotionally free of all kinds of reactions, self-imagery, ideals about how things are supposed to turn out, reactions to life, disappointment, frustration. You must be free of the whole force of emotional contraction in the heart region, which is the emotional region of the body, as you must also be free in the head. You must be free of thoughts, you must be free of contractions in the head, the brain, the face. And you must be free of vital or physical contractions. You must keep the body healthy
This Alchemical and Spiritual process is not a matter of some piddling inhalation, nor is it a matter of big, muscular breath. It is a matter of learning how to be responsible for the contractions in the frontal line. These contractions of the frontal line are based in mental, emotional, psychological, psychic, and physical reactions to all kinds of relationships and circumstances and conditions. To inbreathe the Living Force frontally, therefore, requires you not merely to contact the Energy and feel It a little bit and breathe It down, but to deal with the mechanism of contraction in the frontal line.
What I’m talking about is a process and a discipline. It is about a practice. It is a practice because energy and attention will become conditioned again, it is conditioned, and you will forget and return to your ordinary occupations. You will forget about, think it’s too much or settle for a certain level of adaptation and take a vacation, settle.
I can have these talks with you over and over again. You can respond initially with all the gusto you’ve got, respond to Me and the Argument, take up the Perfect Practice. But you cannot truly practice the Way until you have entered into the domain of the Spirit-Force through self-understanding.
The practice must occupy your entire life. You must devote your entire life to it. You must be devoted completely to it. Otherwise, being only superficially associated with it, you may perhaps realize a better life by virtue of your coming into my Company, but you will not fulfill the Way in your lifetime. Instead you will devote the Virtue of this Way, the Spiritual Transmission Awakened in my Company, to the ordinary purposes of your living, and fundamentally It will only grant Energy to the same thing you are already doing. Therefore, to the degree you are suffering, your suffering will be intensified. To the degree you are successful, your successes will be intensified. But you will never merely be successful. You will also become exaggerated and bastardize the Virtue that is given to you.
Self-understanding prepares you for My Spirit-Baptism. Without Spirit-Baptism there is no Spiritual life. Therefore, you who are so egoically “self-possessed” must understand that the essence of My Wisdom-Teaching is My Heart-Transmission. My Spiritual Transmission Intoxicates you, but if you have not first understood yourself most fundamentally, you cannot use It. You will shut It down. Therefore, you are not prepared for true Spiritual practice until you have first used My Teaching Revelation to the point of most fundamental self-understanding. Then you can receive My Spiritual Baptism, and you will practice Communion with this Transmitted Sublimity from moment to moment. That is the Way of Adidam. Then you will change your entire life.
You must observe how you bring yourself back from the Divine. You do not go with the Spirit. You do not throw away your body, your life, and your emotion in God. This is what you must do whenever you Commune with Me, whether I am physically Present or not. Whenever you Commune with Me, you get a piece, a sniff, a taste, of God. But your body-mind shuts it down, “Narcissus” shuts it down, you live out your dilemma, and so you must “consider” My Wisdom-Teaching some more.
But if you will truly prepare yourself by “considering” and truly using My Argument, not as a doctrine but as a means for understanding yourself most fundamentally, then you have begun to establish the foundation in which you can Commune with Me Spiritually. Then Communion with Me will be a profoundly Intoxicating motion that lifts you up and sublimes your being, not only on occasion, but every day, because I Transmit the Spirit to you all the time.
edited and adapted by Beezone from two talks by Adi Da
The Great Bird That Flies to the Heart – 1982
Make the Body a Yoga-Body – 1995
Baptism of Immortal Happiness – 1982
also see:
Study Guide – The Conscious Process