“The story of human beings is a search to “understand”, a noble enough effort but is it also built upon the exercise of an uninspected egoity. This “exercise” or “method” is to get any “object” it contacts or touches under control…and then to enclose or surround and without fully understanding the consequences, destroy that “object” or “other”…by limiting it to the confines and enslavement’s of the enclosure…, and (thereby) systematically controls the “…object” for their use and limits its breathing-space of life and motion.”
“I might as well be talking to the neighbors in Franklin Square. That’s not it. And you’re keeping it this way because you don’t deal with the Five Issues, and you don’t manifest a core culture of serious people.”
Adi Da Samraj
“Presumably My devotees, really doing the sadhana, certainly become more and more charismatic, I would say, something like that, more energized characters. Not necessarily in the vital sense, but curiously energized, a lot of free energy, which shows itself in how you are, what you do, how people are influenced by you, whatever. It’s at first a natural phenomenon. Wherever there is energy loosened up, to flow in the faculties of the personality, there’s more strength of quality.”
Adi Da Samraj, 1996
“(The) core of My Authority (has been given to the Ruchira Sannyasin Order in trust where it) will sit and be extended in perpetuity.”
“But it will be your responsibility to…”
Adi Da Samraj – 2005
“During my last two visits to India it had become painfully evident that the institution known as the Ashram which had grown around him during the past few years, and over which his… indifference to the world rendered him temperamentally disinclined to exercise the slightest control, could only greatly hinder and not help (me)… so I had no alternative but to bid it an abrupt and final farewell.
(Paul Brunton, Hidden Teaching, p. 18)
There comes a time when you find yourself at a crossroads.
by Beezone
“All concerns are a sign of the same thing. Every concern is self-watching, self-meditation rather than simply living the Condition of Satsang in which all things are realized in Truth. And it doesn’t make any difference what the particular concern is. It may seem like a very righteous and realistic one. But concern itself is the sign of Narcissus.”
If you took the statement above from Adi Da literally there would be no actions to perform, since all concerns for action are Narcissus – the self-contraction. That is a literal reading and interpretation. This kind of literal interpretation of Adi Da statement, that ‘concern’ is Narcissus, would leave the reader in a state of passivity or inaction.
To understand the error of taking Adi Da’s words literally – without discrimination – is the child’s passive approach in dealing with life and it’s demand for action.
The following are main points and questions derived from a talk Adi Da Samraj gave (see below for title and date) which, I believe, is a good ‘exercise’ for some who have this ‘passive’ or ‘childlike’ approach to spirituality.
I believe it would be instructive for many who are ‘concerned’ about Adidam and it’s present level of development to review this ‘old’ talk and consider its points and questions and see how it measures up to ‘this moment’.
read original talk given in May of 1981
Adi Da Samraj: The entire Work of my Teaching developed spontaneously. I simply did my Spiritual Work with the people who came to me and who were right in front of me at the time. I was never a businessman. I taught, and an institution was necessary, but it was always created in response to the Teaching Revelation and the circumstance of the time. I was never in business.
Key Points:
1. Adidam was created in response to the Teaching Revelation in the circumstance of the time it was formed.
2. It is a new time.
The world of religion is basically a failed world. This is why I struggled for so many years to guarantee, for the sake of the world, not just the survival but the integrity of the institution. Unlike Maharshi, I did have an interest in providing a medium for real Transmission in the world. I worked to purify the institution and to teach it how to purify itself from the self-corrupting influences that are always arising, so that the institution would be able to deal with this tendency to become corrupt. I stayed with that Work for a significant period of time, so that the institution could be an effective Transmitter of the Truth in the world.
Key Points and Questions:
1. Is Adidam a Real Transmission in the world?
2. Is Adidam purify itself from the self-currupting influences that are always arising?
3. Is Adidam able to deal with self-currupting influences? If so, how?
The institution should refuse to be reduced to a dull, low energy, hyped, worldly communication. We must be more than an institution. We must be committed to a lively, vigorous, intelligent, sophisticated, stable, cool, and Enlightened communication of the Way of Truth. Some games should simply never be played. Some games you only suffer profoundly until you drop them. Therefore, do not begin them. Simply refuse to function in certain ways. Look at other religious organizations, you can see something in all of them that reveals how they have compromised themselves. Some things should just never be done.
Key Points:
1. Is Adidam dull, low energy, hyped, worldly (or maladapted) and dysfunctional?
2. Is Adidam a vigorous, intelligent, sophisticated, stable, cool and Enlightened means of communication (to the world)?
The Spiritual Master should be known for maintaining a commitment to authenticity, to a true and free communication of the Teaching of Truth, and to the Way of life that necessarily follows. Likewise the institution should be so known. It is in this principle that we can see the struggle. In our attempts to grow and make peace, you make compromises, and bit by bit you stray from the center. You then find conflict between what you are trying to do and what you are supposed to be. We should not do anything that we could not do and still practice the Way at the same time. Have some class.
Key Points:
1. Is Adidam an authentic, true and free communicator of the Teaching of Truth?
2. Does Adidam stray from the ‘center’ and fall in on itself?
There is a scene in the movie Roots of an organizational fund-raiser, a black man, a school teacher. He is a good symbol from which the institution can learn. Some white women come to see this man, patrons of the school in which he teaches. They ask him to sing a song for them, and after he sings the song, he says to another black man that he would tap dance in whiteface on the steps of the White House for the sake of the school. Such is what institutional people become.
Ours must be a higher communication than that. You must realize that we are more than an institution trying to survive. You must do more than merely survive. You must make the institution function as an actual Transmitter of this Wisdom Teaching. Only then will you know what to do. In other words, you must realize that the institution is a shell for the Transmission of the Teaching of Truth in the world. If you forget that, if you do not understand that, then we are reduced to being an institution only. But if you can keep your attention on the fact that you are a process of Transmission, you will not compromise the Way I have Revealed to you. If you are not aware of your function, and if you are not functioning from a high Spiritual point of view, you will inevitably compromise the Way.
Key Points:
1. Is Adidam creating a ‘higher communication’?
2. Is Adidam in a ‘survival’ mode? or in a ‘transmitting role’?
3. Is Adidam just an ‘institution’ playing only with itself?
4. What is the ‘higher spiritual function’ of Adidam and is it fulfilling it?
The institution is not a limiting principle, nor is the fact that we are a unique culture that serves the Transmission of Truth in the world. We have tended to think that being an institution limits our Spiritual practice and that having to communicate the Teaching of Truth limits our effectiveness as an institution. But that is not true. The truth that we are more than an institution is an admonition to keep Spiritual life alive at the center and also to grow as an institution. You will see that if you will only persist in Spiritual practice, the institution will be effective. It is only because you are struggling to be merely an institution without understanding our real purpose that you continually fail.
Key Points:
1. Adidam is not a unique culture that serves the Transmission of Truth.
2. Is Adidam keeping Spiritual life alive at the center and growing out from there?
3. Adidam will not grow if it is only an institution without a living center radiating out.
Other institutions are at war with each other. Their teachers are trying to dominate one another, and their members are prima donnas. They will do anything to seem bigger than everyone else. When the primary concern is the institution, then the institution, and not the Way of Truth, becomes the focus. This institution, however, is only a mechanism for what we are trying to do, which is to support the Spiritual Transmission of this Wisdom-Teaching.
Key Points:
1. Is Adidam filled with ‘prima donnas’, special ones chosen or ‘called’?
2. Is Adidam a mechanism for Truth, Spiritual Transmission and providing Wisdom-Teaching to the world?
I always Worked with the fullest intent to communicate the Truth, and I never compromised It. You can tell people that I did not go out in the world. I stayed in the “pits” with the people who were responding. My commitment was always to the Way. I was never interested in anything else, and I was committed only to the communication of Truth. Because of that commitment, many things have happened, and you have grown to some extent, but now it is the cultural responsibility of devotees to fulfill their obligation in the Transmission of this Teaching Revelation. Some things are plain old bullshit, and you must know what they are. Such integrity must characterize the institution.
Key Points:
1. Do devotees responsibility to communicate the Truth, live the Truth and transmit it?
2. Does Adidam have integrity? If so, how does it know?
Is it difficult? Yes, it is difficult, there is no doubt about it, but some things have to be done, should be done, must be done, can be done, and to create this institution as a Transmitter of the Wisdom-Teaching is one of them! You must constantly be serving something higher than yourself, higher than just the institution, which tends to become the ego of the group. You must serve and expand beyond yourself. Each individual must do that, and collectively you must stand beyond our institutional life, our institutional self. How will you do that? By remembering the Source. You and I must maintain our connection.
It is because of the lack of practice in people that they become dissociated and in doubt, wonder what is the right thing to do, and have no energy for defending and supporting What is their Source. If they would only contact That-and they cannot make the right judgments until they do contact It-then the problems created by lack of practice would come to an end. There will always be creative matters to deal with, but they will know how to deal with them appropriately and they will live as devotees.
Key Points:
1. Lack of practice is the source of defense, low energy and lack of growth.
There are two approaches to the Spiritual Teacher. There are formalities, niceties, things you must do and say when you approach an institutional representative. This is one form of response, the approach that is popular, exoteric, and traditionally made available. The other is the approach exemplified by the man who came to Bodhidharma. There were no roads and no games. Bodhidharma just dealt with what was in front of him, and his response to the devotee made the Way a living Teaching, a living Process.
My approach is this second one. It is the Adept’s approach, not the lineage approach. It is the Source of Teaching, the circumstance in which true Teaching is generated. I refused to accept the conventional role. Can you not see the difference between the conventional role of institutional figures and the unconventional role of a free Adept? This Way is the Adept’s Process. It is a non-institutional Process. And our institution is the bearer of this kind of Teaching.
Key Points:
1. Is Adidam presently a bearer, Source of Reality-Teaching and generator of The Adept?
Devotees must do real samyama, rather than opt for the traditions in a way that shows a weakness on their part to understand the Adept. You can read all kinds of traditional literature, but you must understand the actual living process or else you will fail to communicate it in Truth. Everyone must practice the art of Agency of Spiritual Transmission, and devotees must become serious about it. Let those who practice with depth and power and strength and faith come forth, and let them communicate the living Teaching, the Living Reality. Let them practice the Way and thus in every moment be an Agency of Transmission. Let them help others make this adaptation to the Living Reality. This is their service!
Key Points:
1. Does Adidam fully understand the living quality of the process? If so, where are the signs?
2. Do devotees transmit Spiritual Transmission? With Power and Strength?
One of the things such devotees will discover is that there is a remarkable level of noninterest in the Truth. This fact changes institutions in the wrong direction. It is like opening a store in Honolulu with the idea of selling the most exquisitely crafted gifts from the Pacific, the finest items. Suppose you go to the Pacific islands and you locate the finest articles and you make your contacts and you come back and you open your store – and there are no sales. A few years later you are selling junk like everybody else, to survive, because the masses will buy only certain kinds of common art. Only the rare few want the finest. Well – you must therefore open up the right kind of store, a different kind of store, and you must cater to the rare few. You must simply persist without compromise until you find a way to sell what you value.
Key Points:
1. Is Adidam selling only ‘rare’ jewels poor people can’t buy? Is Adidam preserving the jewels and locking them away?
2. How is Adidam (successfully) persisting in ‘selling’ their ‘wares’?
It is the same with religions. The first barrier is that the Truth is not what people want. Look at what is sold on TV on Sunday morning, and then look at the rest of the week. That is what people want, at least what people in numbers want. It has nothing to do with the Truth! But you cannot allow this observation to change your own commitment. You must find ways to function as a bearer of the Truth without having to become another version of what sells cheaply.
Key Points:
1. People do not want the Truth (“You can’t handle the truth!”).
2. How have you ‘sold’ or been the ‘bearer of the Truth’ in the world? How have you grown?
I found out a long time ago that people are not interested. But I had a sense of humor, and you must also develop a sense of humor. Instead of collapsing every time you run up against opposition, have a sense of humor. I kept my commitment. I was not compromised by mediocrity. And whose mediocrity was I confronted with? Your mediocrity! But you were changed by my commitment.
Key Points:
1. Do you have a sense of humor or have you lost it? Are you just a business or in a creative adventure, continually fueled by your practice and commitment?
The institution must therefore serve people who bother to approach this Way, and serve them in a true fashion. People do come – lots of people have come and they must be rightly served. They must be served at their level of interest and through their capacity to respond. You should not be corrupted by the tendencies of ordinary people. What you confront in the public is very real, but you should not be corrupted or compromised by it. You yourselves should stay real, and you must at the same time artfully succeed. You will not artfully succeed unless you practice the Way. That is why I have told you that practice is more than what you do in the Communion Hall in the morning and evening. Practice is what you do in life! You must practice there. To be effective you must transcend your subjectivity with all the energy that you tend to withhold. You must be alive. You must be functioning at a high level of energy. To be effective in that way, you must transcend your reactivity and mediocrity.
Key Points:
1. Does Adidam serve people interested in the teaching ‘at their level of interest’? If so, how?
2. Adidam will not succeed unless their are practicing devotees.
3. Is Adidam a transmitter and a transcender?
Many institutions have failed when they became confused and compromised by the realities of ordinary people. And now that we are getting our shot at it, what will we do?
Our staff must understand what it is in them that causes them to weaken and fail. The failures of the institution in the past have occurred because the people in charge were not able to transcend these qualities in themselves. Something in their tendencies causes them to betray their own Help. They are psychologically tending to be weak because of a weak commitment to the Way and a lack of awareness about the world and its processes. They must transcend their lack of knowledge, their naiveté, and their dramatization of the adolescent’s need to control everything.
Key Points:
1. Does Adidam understand what is causing their weakness and failures? How have they identified their weakness and what are it’s strategies for strengthening them?
2. Are there people in Adidam who can change the patterns that have created the low energy and weakness of it’s present state?
It is not that they should retire into a cave. They should serve in their functions by growing up and living like devotees. There are many, many forms of service in the institution, and the small group at the top must not try to do everything. To do so is to keep a stranglehold on the institution. To do so is a sign of craving for power and authority. It is a false motivation, and it must be transcended. To make this Work grow, devotees must pass the Prasad. They must grant people their energy. They must stop killing life and holding on to information.
Key Points:
1. Has Adidam retired to a ‘cave’ and turned in on itself?
2. Is there a ‘strangle hold’ on Adidam at the top?
3. Are there persons at the ‘top’ who are in it for power, authority and control?
4. People at the top must allow creative energy to flow and grant people autonomy.
5. Do people in Adidam, ‘Give it all away’.
I gave it all away. I created it, and I gave it all away. There is enough there for thousands of people. But devotees do not understand what has been given to them. They must come to that understanding. They must be manly, and they must take this Prasad as a Gift. They must know that the Teaching Revelation has been given to many, and that I am in Communion with countless people who have not yet been notified.
Key Points:
1. Does Adidam have a manly and womanly presence in the world?
2. Do the men and women in Adidam give the Gift which they have received?
It is the institution’s responsibility to notify those people, to help them practice, and to encourage them to serve the institution. Devotees have inherited a great estate. They do not yet know that they are millionaires. The institution must therefore notify them. People are always coming to the Sanctuary and being surprised by the Presence there. They always say that they want to come back. Why aren’t thousands of people coming there constantly as a Source of refuge? And why aren’t they telling their friends about it?
Key Points:
1. Why aren’t the thousands of people who have felt the Presence returning?
The institution must be vigorous and expansive. People must be communicated to. People are dying and suffering even though there is religion and everything else out there, but most of religion and everything else are fake, a compromise. They do not serve and help people truly. My intention has been to establish an institution that is a Transmitter of the Greatness of this Way, and to see it be wholly and vigorously alive and dealing with things that other religions do not want to think about yet, but that must be addressed.
Key Points:
1. Is Adidam vigorous and expansive?
2. Is Adidam communicating with people, groups and other institutions? Other religious organizations? Is Adidam being invited or inviting others to their events?
The institution must help many people become involved with all the unique areas of this Teaching. Practitioners must stop interfering with the Process that is working in them, and they must become the inheritors of what they have been given. They should be the happy inheritors of this Way of life. When I see devotees, I want to notice how they have expanded their wealth.
Key Points:
1. How is Adidam presently interfering with the process of it’s own growth?
2. Where is the ‘expanded wealth’ in the faces (and pockets) of devotees?
I have given you an immense fortune. Go beyond your neurosis. Get involved with many more people. Be creative with your wealth. You have been given so much. It seems impossible to fail when you have been given so much, but you will fail if you do not recognize what you have been given.
Key Points:
1. Adidam will fail if it does not recognize what it have been given and return give it out, “Give It All Away”.
I Gave It All Away
a talk by Heart-Master Da Love-Ananda
May 22,1981
Adi Da Samraj – 2004
Watch video of Adi Da Samraj
November 10, 2004
“I can not agree be what you intend or want me to be”
Below are only the questions.
Main Points and Main Questions (all points and questions are Adi Da’s*)
1. Adidam was created in response to the Teaching Revelation in the circumstance of the time it was formed.
2. It is a new time for Adidam or the ‘same old’ time?
3. Is Adidam a real Transmission of Spiritual energy in the world?
4. Does Adidam purify itself from the self-corrupting influences that are always arising within it? if so, how?
5. Is Adidam able to deal with it’s own self-currupting influences?
6. Is Adidam filled with dull, low energy, hyped, maladapted worldly ‘spiritual’ seekers?
7. Is Adidam a vigorous, intelligent, sophisticated, stable, cool and Enlightened means of communication of Spiritual Truth in the world?
8. Is Adidam an authentic, true and free communicator of the Teaching of Truth in the world?
9. Has Adidam stayed from its ‘center’?
10. Is Adidam creating a ‘higher communication’ to the world? If so, how?
11. Is Adidam in a ‘survival’ mode of existence? or is Adidam in a growing (thriving) and transmitting mode of existence?
12. Is Adidam just an ‘institution’ playing only with itself?
13. What is the ‘higher spiritual function’ of the Adidam? and are they fulfilling it?
14. Adidam is not a unique culture that serves the Transmission of Truth.
15. Is Adidam keeping Spiritual life alive at the center and growing out from there?
16. Adidam will not grow if it is only an institution without a living center radiating out.
17. Is Adidam filled with ‘prima donnas’, special ones chosen or ‘called’?
18. Is Adidam a mechanism for Truth, Spiritual Transmission and providing Wisdom-Teaching to the world?
19. Devotees responsibility to communicate the Truth, live the Truth and transmit it.
20. Does Adidam have integrity?
21. Lack of practice is the source of defense, low energy and lack of growth.
22. Is Adidam presently a bearer, Source of Reality-Teaching and generator of The Adept?
23. Does Adidam fully understand the living quality of the process? If so, where are the signs?
24. Do devotees transmit Spiritual Transmission? With Power and Strength?
25. Is Adidam selling only ‘rare’ jewels poor people can’t buy? Is Adidam preserving the jewels and locking them away?
26. How is Adidam (successfully) persisting in ‘selling’ their ‘wares’?
27. People do not want the Truth (“you can’t handle the truth!”)
28. How have you ‘sold’ or been the ‘bearer of the Truth’ in the world? How have you grown?
29. Do you have a sense of humor or have you lost it? Are you just a business or in a creative adventure, fueled by your practice and commitment?
30. Does Adidam serve people interested in the teaching ‘at their level of interest’? If so, how?
31. Adidam will not succeed unless there are practicing devotees.
32. Is Adidam a transmitter and a transcender?
33. Does Adidam understand what is causing their weakness and failures?
34. Are their people in Adidam who can change the patterns that have created the low energy and weakness of it’s present state?
35. Has Adidam retired to a ‘cave’ and turned in on itself?
36. Is there a ‘strangle hold’ on Adidam at the top?
37. Are there persons at the ‘top’ who are in it for power, authority and control?
38. People at the top must allow creative energy to flow and grant people autonomy.
39. Give it all away.
40. Does Adidam have a manly and womanly presence in the world?
41. Do the men and women in Adidam give the Gift, which they have received?
42. Why aren’t the thousands of people who have felt the Presence returning?
43. Is Adidam vigorous and expansive?
44. Is Adidam communicating with people, groups and other institutions? Other religious organizations? Is Adidam being invited or inviting others to their events?
45. How is Adidam presently interfering with the process of it’s own growth?
46. Where is the ‘expanded wealth’ in the faces (and pockets) of devotees?
47. Adidam will fail if it does not recognize what it have been given and then give it out.
*Some questions and points were modified, but, in all honesty and best ability, kept to it’s original intent.
Aletheon – The Ancient Walk-About Way
More:
Crazy Wisdom Magazine – March/April 1987, Vol 6. No2
(Adidam) is now at a crossroads. In order for the institution and the Community to remain authentic while continuing to grow, devotees must step forward to assume responsibility both for their individual practice and for the culture of practice as a whole. We can no longer afford to be irresponsible or unresponsive. Like the sons in the biblical parable, we have been given a Great Inheritance. Now we must discover the lawful way to accept it, to share it, and to preserve it.
The opportunity represented by the Way of the Heart in the face of the suffering of the world is immeasurably great and real. Each person whose heart has been touched by the Teaching Revelation of the True Heart-Master must make a choice in life as a result of this encounter with Truth. Let us not take for granted the great Gifts offered by Heart-Master Da. Let us not indulge in doubt of what has been Revealed to our hearts. Let us not fail to recognize the descent of Divine Grace occurring through the Incarnation of the Adept. Let us not turn from the Divine Lover who longs only for our embrace. May the Great Work continue through the Agency of devotees. May it flourish and prosper for all time.
This question comes from a dialogue a long time devotee of Adi Da had in the early part of this century. With over 25 years of experience in close contact with Adi Da this particular devotee did not seem to show signs of being a mature devotee. Part of the consideration of this persons practice follows:
Adi Da: You’re in a stalemate, you see. Do you have to get more serious? More humorous? What? Something much more profound, and dramatic would have to happen for you to grow beyond your current wheel-spinning state. Your playing the game of ego, or egoity and you have not found your self out. One thing you could do if you have any interest in breaking through this at all, is to address the conditional reality of your life much more directly and seriously. And on the other hand address the unconditional reality more directly, at least through the great report of mankind, the confession of your own study, the signs are there. The Great Signs have appeared for your to investigate. You can address these two dimensions, conditional and unconditional, more more seriously and directly.
I thought it would be interesting to put this persons dialogue with Adi Da into a more ‘collective’ dialogue with the large ‘person’ of Adidam and see if there is any parallels. You can make your own decisions as to whether is does or does not. For me there are parallels.
Adi Da Samraj 2004
“You have inherited all kinds of things, all kinds of presumptions, in an immense and complicated psychological pattern and life-pattern. You are dramatizing it in your emotional sexual life and everywhere else, too. You are not here just to act out that dramatization. You are here to be washed by your right and real and consistent and serious participation in My Company. If you are here to do otherwise, to be mediocre and cling to Me just to receive love and make a cult around Me, I am not interested. Doing that has nothing to do with Me, nothing to do with My Word, nothing to do with the Truth, nothing to do with sadhana.”
Adi Da Samraj – Listen Deep In My Heart Itself – 1994
“When people are “thinking” or “talking” about “religion”, they think that “religion” is about some kind of survival of mind, or even some kind of survival of body-mind-“self” somewhere. Such a notion is merely a mind-based illusion. It is a “self”-idea, a mere and insubstantial “self”-reflection, the illusion of a substantial and separately existing “ego”, reflected in the Mirror That Is Reality Itself. Because of a facsimile made of words-only some of which, in any moment, arise from the brain and enter the field of conditional awareness-there is the ego-presumption, or the separate-“I”-presumption, of an infinitely self-replicating, eternal “self”-mind.
There is no such thing as eternal mind. That notion is an absolute illusion. The mind is as mortal as the hardware, as mortal as the bodily machine. When the machine stops working, the mind likewise stops working. The only mind that exists afterward is the mind carried by the other replicating machines.1 So what is there after death? The same thing as there is before birth-Reality Itself, the Divine Self-Nature, Self-Condition, and Self-State only. After death-as, also, during the physical lifetime-anything and everything of mind persists only non-personally, as pattern patterning, without intrinsic “self”-consciousness.
If you were truly aware of mind, you would not want it to go on. It is a terrible, horrific source of bondage. It is a dreadful trap. Human beings are not only trapped in the mortality of their physical bodies, they are trapped in the absurdity of mind.
Realization is Beyond mind. Realization has no mind. I Am That. In My Divine Avataric Incarnation here, I have no inherent association with mind. I am not thinking now. The words are being uttered because of the conjunction of This Body with the human-born circumstance. There is a mind-process in the brain of This Body, but I am not sitting in that mind. I Am Always Already Beyond and Prior to body, mind, and ego-“self”. I, Myself, have nothing to do with mind. This Body, being Uniquely Born, Speaks the Uniqueness That It Speaks, because It is wholly Conformed to Me. But I am not the mind. I am not body, and I am not mind, and I am not ego-“I”.”
Aletheon – Adi Da Samraj – The Ancient Walk-About Way
Watch video of Adi Da Samraj (2004) talk about the ‘Prayer of Changes’, ‘The Barefoot’ Mission and how they relate to integrating Adidam (Adi Da) out and into the world.
More:
Originally published in Crazy Wisdom magazine, Vol 1, No 3, June 1982.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Because the basic work that I do with people is not noticed by them very well, I must keep reminding them of it. My Teaching Work is not something that I do every now and then when I gather people for instruction, but it is constant. In one fashion or another my influence in people’s lives is always interrupting the conventional or karmic motion of the self. I am not motivated to give you, the karmic or manifest self, something to be interested in, to give you visions or extraordinary experiences that pleasurize the manifest self. If visions arise in my company, they arise not to pleasurize but rather to stop the flow of the grosser self. They are possible moments of Awakening. I Teach a Way that enables you to make use of my spiritual Influence, as well as all the ordinary moments of life, as a process of Awakening and transcendence, until attention is perfectly free to directly and intuitively Realize the Condition of existence, or That in which all of manifest conditional existence is arising.
Particularly because you are Westerners, you have a sort of dogged interest in perpetuating the egoic state in every moment. The psycho-physical personality is tenaciously reinforced in the state of consciousness to which you have become habituated. No other influences have interrupted the flow of egoity in your acculturation as Westerners. Westerners do not have time for Enlightenment. They generally think of Enlightenment as they think of all the goods of the ego and the pleasures of the manifest self. They view Enlightenment as a big pleasure, one of the delights of the manifest being. For the Westerner, Enlightenment is built upon the conditional self, pursued by the conditional self, and conceived as a state or object of the conditional self, whereas in fact Enlightenment has nothing to do with the conditional self. No “one” is Enlightened. In Enlightenment there is no individuality, no separate person, no separate anything. The manifest conditions of existence may continue to arise, but they are utterly recognizable, they have no binding power, they are tacitly recognized to be merely apparent or unnecessary.
Ramana Maharshi is a teacher to whom I frequently point as an example of the sixth to seventh stage Adept. You all know the story about how he suddenly became Enlightened when he was about seventeen years old. Even he remarked that people should understand that Enlightenment happened in his case because of preparation in previous lifetimes. Thus, from his early years, his lifetime as Ramana Maharshi is regarded as an Enlightened lifetime, but an Enlightened lifetime that was the result of extensive preparation nonetheless.
Just so, there must be preparation in everyone’s case and an intense orientation toward Realization. Perhaps the Enlightenment of most people takes many lifetimes-how can we account for it? Fundamentally you must understand the Way as a person who is already born or incarnated egoically. You must be turned about, you must be converted, and you must enter into the stream of preparation. You must use attention and body and mind in a different fashion if you are going to realize Wisdom and Awaken to the Truth that transcends egoity. Without understanding the Spiritual Master, valuing such Awakening, and entering into the stream of practice, there is no such thing as Enlightenment, and. Enlightenment will not be true of you. There is no Enlightenment, no Awakening, without fierce practice.
You must practice fiercely, not because what is to be Realized is not already your Condition, but because through lifetimes of repetition you have reinforced mechanical states of attention. Because you have bound the consciousness and energy of being to the conventions of conditional existence, there is no residual attention to enable consciousness to stand apart from manifestation sufficiently to realize its own Status. Rather, consciousness is wasted in the repetition of states of attention that are fixed in the process of conditional existence. Spiritual practice must therefore be so fierce as to provide the basis for a natural Awakening so that we may release attention from the bond of conditional states.
In the process of practice, the Spiritual Master serves you in all kinds of ways, one of which is to stop the mind through verbal Teaching, through gestures, through Transmission of Spiritual energy. Through the Spiritual Master flow all kinds of instructional means that are encountered by people who respond to the Spiritual Master and the Teaching, who are practicing daily, who will use the spiritual Influence and not merely notice some parts of it here and there and every now and then while otherwise basically oblivious to it. Devotees are supposed to be those who have attention available for the Spiritual Master and the spiritual process, which is the process of transcending conditional existence, transcending the body-mind-self, transcending attention. If you are not oriented or inclined to transcendence, then of course no amount of help in that direction will be of much use to you.
These little satori’s of the momentary stopping of the mind are not of any ultimate significance either. Much is made of them at the popular level of the Zen tradition. On some level Zen is a kind of “pop” Buddhism. Its satori’s are for the common people who are very busy in their minds. The highest form of Zen is that which is applied by people who devote their entire life to its practice. For such people satori’s are not sufficient. They are drawn to go beyond the moments of the stopping of the mind and glimpses of the space of Consciousness to Realize the Transcendental Condition of existence. Just so, you must also realize more than moments of experience, moments in which the mind stops, moments of meditation.
I know how fierce the mechanics of the body-mind are. I have had to deal with them all my life. Even though I possessed the capacity for Enlightenment at birth, my life became a fierce spiritual practice based on a spontaneous but profound commitment to Realization. Such commitment is absolutely essential for spiritual practice, which cannot fulfill itself without such commitment and which likewise must be fierce and profound.
You cannot be forced to practice, nor can your practice be guaranteed. What there is of Awakening in your case depends on your commitment. You must really practice. You cannot mechanically repeat yourself. If you are basically inclined to ordinary consolations and fulfillment’s, hopeful of being happy in this world, then when you feel so fulfilled, you step out of the stream of the spiritual process. You have bought and signed for consolation on the dotted line. If self-fulfillment is not sufficient for you, however, then you keep going. You persevere in the practice and you move on to the higher stages.
Some may seem to move more quickly to the higher stages of practice. The fact that they seem to have more talent and natural ability for it is probably a reflection, not only perhaps of their commitment during this life, but primarily of their preparation in previous lifetimes. They too will reach their cutoff point, the point where they will tend to stop, the point where practice tends to be sufficient for them or where further effort is too frustrating and too offensive. Everybody reaches the point where he or she tends to withdraw from the stream of practice. Most people reach that point even before they begin the practice. Either they are never moved to find anything greater than ordinary ego-fulfillment in the world, or they are just “fans” of spiritual life. They like the books, but they basically resist and even resent the interference represented by a Spiritual Master and a Teaching and the idea of practice.
The world is not organized around Enlightenment Wisdom, which is struggling to survive in our time, even though paperback books about spirituality and so-called spiritual teachers are springing up everywhere. The Enlightenment or Wisdom Tradition is struggling to survive. Spiritual life is mocked everywhere, and the culture of materialism is dominant. The politics of egos, with its materialistic force, is in charge in this world and it always has been. The motive to Enlightenment has always been rare. Although the motive to God-Realization has traditionally been a cultural premise and many people have responded to it in one form or another, more so in the Orient than in the West, even so, the spiritual cultures have tended to rise and fall, or become weak or conventional, or be reduced to at most a fourth to fifth stage esotericism, and the practitioners within those cultures have tended by and large to be ordinary people.
Only those who have accepted the discipline of religious or spiritual renunciation sufficiently to release attention from the bond of the mechanics of ego or body-mind can practice the conscious process in its radical form. The radical process of spiritual practice can be described to people, and I have written a great deal about the radical form of the conscious process. It need not be kept secret particularly, but it cannot be practiced fruitfully by an individual in whom attention is not fundamentally free. One cannot simply communicate to people in general a sixth stage teaching, for instance, such as the teaching of Advaita Vedanta or the mindfulness discipline of original Buddhism, and expect that everybody will therefore be able to practice it. Most people must engage preliminary or supportive practices. Most people should approach the radical Way through the lesser stages of life, because one cannot practice the advanced levels without an increase of available energy and attention.
To realize profoundly the mysticism of the fifth stage of life, for instance, you must demonstrate a great deal of free energy. Energy cannot be locked up in the vulgarities of the physical, outer-directed personality. Only free energy floating in the brain permits the subtle phenomena to arise. Likewise, you must realize free attention to invert beyond the outer-directed mechanics in order to focus in the phenomena of brain and higher psyche. Just as the fifth stage is an advance over the lesser stages, likewise the sixth stage is an advance beyond the fifth, requiring attention free even of the subtle bond of energies and mechanics.
Thus, this radical practice that I communicate based on the seventh stage disposition is not something that people can rightly, truly, fully, and fruitfully practice without preparation, without available energy and attention. Therefore, I have also communicated the forms of spiritual practice that basically represent the preparation for the most radical practice, preparation that releases energy and attention for the conscious process, which is the fundamental process I consider. That process in consciousness cannot really be engaged until there is free attention, because in that process attention itself is encountered and transcended. If you cannot enter into the consideration of naked attention itself, the fundamental mechanics of the being, then you cannot practice in the radical sense. Most people cannot. The attention of most people is wandering in the conditions of the body-mind and is not free to inspect and transcend itself.
Therefore, I have engaged this ten-year display of Teaching Work, and I have written this literature and related to people in many different ways, in a tremendous struggle with people who are basically disinclined to the very process I am considering with them by virtue of the fact that on the one hand they are Westerners and on the other hand they are mechanical beings or egos. Such a struggle with egos is inevitable wherever the Teaching and a Teacher appear. But it is particularly disheartening to spend a decade at it and not have at least some mature practitioners who are sufficiently committed and prepared to practice in the radical sense. Such freedom for the radical process is not easy to find. It never has been easy to find in any cultural setting, yet it seems that there are remarkable impediments in the West. Still, because of the change in our time – worldwide communication, political changes, suppression of the Orient through political, social, materialistic, and technological movements because of all that the technological twentieth century has created, it is necessary that the Dharma appear in the West, which is also the source of the materialistic movement that is overcoming the world. That a Spiritual Master be born in this setting and do this work is therefore necessary. In a few more decades there may not be any such thing as the Orient anymore. There will basically be a worldwide culture, and the esoteric and transcendentalist cultures will perhaps fundamentally have been suppressed in the part of the world we call the Orient.
Then the Teaching must take hold elsewhere. Orientals themselves are moving all over the world. The traditional homes of esoteric and transcendentalist schools or movements are being overwhelmed by the materialistic politics of our time. The Tibetans were suppressed by the Chinese, Communism is taking over in Southeast Asia, and materialistic social movements are overcoming India. The break in the Transmission must be mended, and the Teaching is appearing in the West through my Work. But my Work is obviously immensely difficult and not a very rewarding task, if we can use the word “rewarding” in discussing the work of Spiritual Teaching.
You should see in yourself your mechanical disinclination to the very thing that is brought to you every day of your life. Not so much through an intentional will, but via the mechanics of your own born personality, you find one way or another to by-pass the Divine Influence and the obligation to practice in every moment of your life. This sidestepping of responsibility is Narcissus, the self-contraction. To break the cycle and even glimpse the transcendental circumstance of the ego requires great intelligence and fierce commitment. The Siddhi or perfect fulfillment of that process is rare and remarkable, but you are given all the arms for it, all the Help for it, all the Teaching necessary for it. How well you will use the opportunity is to be seen.
“Celebrate My Good Company”
Excerpt from A Talk Given by Sri Da Avabhasa May 3, 1991
In this conversation with you all, I am basically addressing your failures of practice. Your practice is failing not because you are egos. The whole world is made up of egos. Egos are the ones who do religion. There are religious organizations all over the world, many with large number of members and succeeding in various kinds of ways. You all are failing! Utterly and in every way.
Your failure has nothing to do with egoity in itself. You all have come to some kind of collective agreement to fail, to resist, to make this process collapse. You must come to a new agreement with one another. Eliminate the neurotic agreement that you all have been working on, and this depressed point of view, this resistive point of view, this devotionless point of view.
You must make a different agreement, altogether. Make a culture of expectation and inspiration for real. Make a gathering of practitioners of the Way of the Heart who are truly My devotees and not some strange bunch of abusive keepers. I suggest that you do it in the form of this great practice, and as a true community of My devotees.
I told you even in the earliest years that the Way of the Heart was a life of celebration. And it is so. You all have been refusing to celebrate My Company and refusing to celebrate in My Company for years. You have become a total bore. You know Me – I only like celebration. I do not like ceremonies. I do not like boredom. I do not like people being lifeless around Me.
Therefore, whenever I have been with you over all these years, we have always celebrated in one fashion or another. And I expect you to continue to do so. Those forms of celebration were, for you, not really celebration, because they were not productive in relation to all we “considered”.
Now I have Given you a Way of life that can be utterly celebrated, that is only about celebration, if you would understand what I am talking about and enter into this relationship with Me rightly, and really do it. It is not boring. It is not depressed. It is not mechanical, mediocre, conventionally pious, puritanical, or obnoxious in any way. The Way of the Heart is a self-transcending and really God-Realizing Way of life, fulfilled by Grace.
You cannot fulfill your Mission if you cannot celebrate Me. There is no Mission if you do not celebrate Me. You cannot happily make community with one another, you will not effectively do all the things necessary, if you do not celebrate Me. You will not administer or manage or do any form of cultural service rightly if you do not celebrate Me. You are not celebrating if you continue to exploit and abuse and oppress Me. And you are not celebrating if you do not change My Circumstance and set it right. You are not celebrating if you do not handle your business with the Free Daist Communion and the Free Daist Community Organization and make this Mission and this community succeed. These are the ways whereby I will know that you are celebrating, when you make these positive changes.