No Guru Within – Adi Da Samraj


There is No Within

“The Myth of Within”

Guru Day 1973


The Myth of Within

 

Creativity is the action. When one understands, lives humor, His freedom, his prior freedom and enjoyment. But this humor of understanding is also the root of action, true action, creative life. It’s not just a release from life. It’s not just a liberation from life. It’s the very core and basis of true life and true life is always creative.

A free man, a happy man, is creative. He generates new conditions. He transforms what is old without function. He makes everything function. He brings everything into a position where it has some appropriate activity to perform.

He does this within himself. Every aspect of himself becomes functional, useful, active. So his humor is also the basis of his action whereas the seeker who just desires liberation feels that his life difficult as it is will always be that and he can at least hope for some sort of blissful inner happiness.

True inner happiness is free, perfectly free, radically free and so has the capacity for life. Action is where we are suffering. The core of difficulties is an action that we are performing. It is a process, not a thing. So the fundamental transformation is apparent, obvious at the level of activity.

We think because all of these traditional ideas about spiritual life that spirituality has got something to do within. The book that I’m working on now, I’ve thought of calling it, “The Myth of Within.”

Because the only reason we go about this trying to free the one within is based on this dilemma, There is no such one. So to generate spiritual life for the purpose of inwardness effecting upon one’s inner life is a false principle, one that we easily tend to because of our traditional notions of spiritual life.

The true form of spiritual life is not one in which we are simply turning within and trying to do something for the one within and soul or whatever but one in which we understand our present activity and that present activity creates this implied inner one as well as all the forms of confusion, suffering, deathful life.

So if this activity that is continually moment to moment being generated is understood. In that moment there is no one within and no dilemma without so that understanding is the instrument where an ego and suffering are undone. When this understanding recurs, true process is generated.

And the selfless fullness of one who lives in God becomes one’s condition and it is not different from one’s activity. When this understanding takes place, there is also created life and creative life is essentially the restoration of function. It is the healing of action. So one who understands becomes true, humorous and creative.

He is moved. He is already moving. He is a process, not a thing, not a separate one. He can’t find the separate one and he can’t find that one even. Perfect understanding is not a form of concentration in which we somehow pinpoint our self-nature or somehow pinpoint God. We can’t concentrate on God any more than you can concentrate on yourself truly.

Like we imagine in this religious and spiritual search that we generate in dilemma that the self is somehow within the true self, soul or whatever and that God can be somehow contacted by directing our attention to some specific way.

If one who understands finds those separate selves and no separate God, God is our condition. He is neither within nor without. So, this estatic humor, this selfless humor, is the very condition of one who understands. So what is he going to do? How is he going to sit and find God within himself. He has only action. He is pointless, mindless, and yet from without everybody sees him as a very functional, happy, not disordered person fundamentally.

But his life is not based on particularities, points, things, places. So his humor in his creativity cannot be separated. One does not create the other. They are the qualities of his condition.

So this understanding is the same as true God union, true self-realization. Traditionally we might think that realization of self is kind of way within way without outside form of contemplation, but the true realization of self is the realization that there is no self, not the finding of one but it is also not dismal, void, because when the principle of self is undone, God is realized so we are not lost in voidness we are eternally found in Divinity.