Discipline
(Latin) discipulus – student, learner, pupil,
disciple)
Adi Da Samraj,
1991
As
long as the ego-based pattern-conventions of conditionally
arising “experience” persist, there must be the
practice of The Reality-Way of Adidam and The Realization of
The Reality-Way of Adidam—both.
Those who outwardly seem to practice
the by-Me-Given disciplines of The Reality-Way of
Adidam—full of “self”-denial, meditation, and
“good acts”—but who do not Realize The
egoless, Transcendental, Inherently
Spiritual, and Self-Evidently Divine Consciousness, or
Conscious Light Itself, in every moment, are only emptying
themselves.
Those who constantly talk about The
Transcendental, Inherently Spiritual, and Self-Evidently
Divine Consciousness, or Conscious Light
Itself—indulging their minds in concepts of Emptiness,
Transparency, and Pure Space—but who do not practice
The Reality-Way of Adidam in
whole-bodily-recognitionresponsive devotional Communion with
Me in every moment, are only full of themselves.
In every moment, there must be the
practice of The Reality-Way of Adidam and The Realization of
The Reality-Way of Adidam—simultaneous, actual, and
true, as long as the ego-based pattern- conventions of
conditionally arising “experience”
persist.
Then there is only Self-Existing and
Self-Radiant Divine Conscious Light—without dilemma,
without egoic “self”, and without inherent
conditional circumstance, even in every moment of The Divine
Mystery of all conditionally apparent relations.
Aletheon – 2009
As long as the conventions of
experience persist, there must be the Way and the
Realization, both.
Those who seem to practice the Way,
full of self-denial, meditation, and good acts, but who do
not Realize the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness in
every moment, have only emptied themselves.
Those who constantly speak of the
Radiant Transcendental Consciousness, indulging their minds
in concepts of emptiness, transparency, and pure space, but
who do not practice the Way of self-transcending
Love-Communion in every moment, are only full of
themselves.
In every moment, there must be the
Way and the Realization, simultaneous, actual, and true, as
long as the conventions of experience persist.
Then there is only Radiant Fullness,
or Love, without dilemma, without self, and without inherent
circumstance, even in every moment of the Mystery of all
relations.
The Enlighenment of the Whole
Body – 1978
It is time to grow up! The Truth can
become obvious to human understanding, and the cultural
situation of humankind can become harmonious and benign. It
is a matter of entering into the yet hidden (or esoteric)
domain of awakened intelligence, “self”-restraint,
acceptance of life-positive disciplines of physical,
emotional, and mental activity, and conversion from the
separative and ego-possessed disposition to the truly
ecstatic moral and Spiritual disposition of ego-transcending
devotional Communion with the Divine Self-Nature,
Self-Condition, Source-Condition, and Self-State of all
beings and things. Only the life of Divine Communion permits
the child to grow into maturity. That Way of life is the
ego-transcending Way that is hidden within (or natively
built into) the psycho-physical structures of the human
being.
You have to grow up and make the
control dimension of life a fundamental part of your own
personality. You have to be able to function on another
level of self-understanding. You have to demonstrate the
quality of response, discipline and so on. You can’t
do that until you outgrow your childish and adolescent
disposition.
Right “religious” (or,
otherwise, esoteric) practice is founded on active
conversion of body and mind to the Divine Reality, and on
the acceptance of behavioral disciplines that (at the
very least) make the individual an outwardly benign (or
socially “self”-restrained) character.
Rightly conservative
“self”-discipline of the whole body is fundamental to
the practice of the only-by-Me Revealed and Given
Reality-Way of Adidam (or Adidam Ruchiradam). Indeed,
rightly conservative “self”-discipline has always
(traditionally) been acknowledged as fundamental to
Spiritual life. The responsibility for right conservative
“self”-discipline is inherent and inescapable in the
esoteric process of Realization.
You must be responsible for yourself
at the human level, and in a profoundly uncommon way. You
must live the discipline of ordinary life. You
yourself must be love under all ordinary, daily conditions.
You must make this change in your life. There is no way
whereby you can be relieved of this necessity—and
nobody else can do it for you.
True devotional Communion with a
True Realizer (coupled with a variety of disciplines
and practices, which should be associated with real
“self”-understanding)
Right-life discipline must
not be embraced for its own sake, in an ego-based and
strategic seeking-manner, but always by ego-surrendering,
ego-forgetting, and ego-transcending devotional
recognition-response to Me.
True “self”-restraint (or
the “self”-discipline of right life) is
necessary and good for those who would Realize Reality
Itself, or Truth Itself, or Real (Acausal) God—but
false “self”-restraint (generated by negative
views and expressed as search,
“self”-righteousness, and suppression of the
living and feeling heart) is itself the avoidance of Reality
Itself and Truth Itself (Which Is The Only Real Acausal
God).
Failed
“self”-understanding and failed (or, at best,
merely selective and partial,and, altogether, inadequate and
merely strategic) “self”-discipline. The
“self”-contraction rolls both forward and
backward, but always on itself.
Until there is the development of
significantly effective “self”-understanding
relative to the developmental problems (or yet unfinished
“business”) associated with the first three stages
of life, any one who aspires to develop a truly esoteric
practice (necessarily beginning in the context of the fourth
stage of life) will, characteristically, tend to relate to
such possible esoteric practice in either a childish or an
adolescent manner.
Any one whose developmental
disposition is yet relatively childish (or tending, in
general, to seek egoic security via the dramatization of the
role of emotionalistic dependency) will tend to relate to
esoteric possibilities via emotionalistic (or, otherwise,
merely enthusiastic) attachments, while otherwise (in
general) tending to be weak in both the responsible exercise
of discriminating intelligence and the likewise responsible
exercise of functional, practical, relational, and cultural
“self”-discipline.
The first three stages of
life—not informed or inspired by the Wisdom of the
fourth, the fifth, the sixth, or the seventh stage of
life—are (in themselves) characterized by the pursuit
of (body-based) “self”-fulfillment (even via
“self”-indulgence, or else via socially
established conventions of morality,
“self”-discipline, and rather materialistic
hope).
In the Reality-Way of Adidam (or
Adidam Ruchiradam), the forms of right-life
“self”-discipline are never about
dissociative introversion (or retreating “within”
the body-mind-”self”). Rather, in the only-by-Me
Revealed and Given Reality-Way of Adidam, the forms of
right-life “self”-discipline are about
Standing Prior to egoic “self”-identification with
the body-mind-complex. Indeed, the entire Reality-Way of
Adidam is about Standing Prior to egoic identification with
the psycho-physical “self”—not about using
the body-mind complex to eventually achieve a state in which
you, in one fashion or another, “eliminate” the
body-mind- ”self” through your practice, and
(thereby) achieve a presumed state of Realization.
The by-Me-Given foundation
disciplines of the Reality-Way of Adidam are not
ascetical. They are not at all a matter of dissociating from
the body-mind-“self” or of disconnecting the
body-mind-“self” from its environment of participation.
The by-Me-Given foundation
disciplines are entirely life-positive-and entirely a
matter of establishing the right (and necessary) equanimity
of the whole body (or the total psycho-physical complex of
the individual being) through disciplines of basic
right life (understood not in moralistic, or puritanical, or
merely behavioral terms, but understood in Spiritual,
Transcendental, and Divine terms). These by-Me-Given
foundation disciplines are, most fundamentally, a
matter of participating in devotional and (in due course)
Transcendental Spiritual Communion with Me, by bringing the
body-mind-“self” into the Condition (and Disposition) of
Utter Non-separation.
It is profoundly important that My
devotees understand that practice of the by-Me-Given
foundation disciplines of the Reality-Way of Adidam
is not a matter of being “good little boys and girls”. Right
practice of the by-Me-Given foundation disciplines of
the Reality-Way of Adidam is simply the living of right
life, through the establishment of participatory equanimity,
for the sake of devotional and (in due course)
Transcendental Spiritual Communion with Me (and, Ultimately,
Most Perfect Realization of Me)-not in the mode of a seeker,
but in the mode of a non-contracted participant.
In the Reality-Way of Adidam,
“self”-discipline is (or must be) a right, voluntary,
intelligent, and intentional practice. Also, in the
Reality-Way of Adidam, “self”-discipline is a
secondary (or supportive) responsive practice. That is to
say, in the Reality-Way of Adidam, the various forms of
by-Me-Given “self”-discipline are not proposed by Me
as “ideal behaviors” that must (ultimately) be functionally,
practically, and relationally (or, altogether, morally)
perfected.
You should assist this process of
Divine Communion through two natural disciplines, one
which is practical, based in ordinary action, and one which
is spiritual, based within the heart or boundless psyche
Sadhana is about breaking through
the usual life of tendency, breaking through the pattern of
destiny, not playing upon your desires, your inclinations,
your willfulness, your preferences. This consciousness, this
intelligence awakened through the Teaching through which you
came to me, must become the principle of your life from this
time. And all of the rest of it, every bit of it, flesh and
breath and belongings and husband, wife, children,
everything must come under the discipline of that
intelligence
The kind of responsibility required
of you as a new person in the Ashram is nothing! I hate to
tell you this! It is the least of it. I mean, how much
discipline is there really involved in the conditions
you have been given? Theyre all very ordinary. They amount
to just a simple, life-supporting, natural, ordinary,
pleasurable life. But even as ordinary or natural as that
life is, as lawful as it is, it is sufficient to be entirely
offensive to a subhuman life, a life in ignorance. These
simple conditions are enough to test and try every possible
kind of complex so-called human condition. The offenses are
there for everyone. And you notice how childish you are as
soon as you get a little offended. As soon as you cannot at
will do a few of the crazy things that you are used to
injecting into the routine of your life over a years time,
you get petulant, you get crazy
Now in some sense all of that is
amusing, and the dumber you are, the more likely you are to
be amused by it! But there is really nothing amusing about
it at all from my point of view. It has never been amusing
to me. This life as it is commonly lived is insane. It was
perfectly obvious to me that there was nothing to do but
sadhana. There was nothing else in life that was worth the
suffering. I havent become a pleasureless man, obviously, at
any point in my life. But I made life sadhana, and doing
that required great discipline and great humor
It is not a matter of taking on some
discipline or other and cutting it all out. It is a
matter of doing sadhana. So in the midst of all those
qualities arising in you, you must study the work, live
these conditions, literally serve individuals, and
continually return to the position of the Teaching. All of
that will act as an offense to your tendencies, and it will
produce real symptoms—emotional symptoms, physical
symptoms, psychological symptoms, all kinds of symptoms. At
the same time that these symptoms are arising, they are
themselves representations of self-reflection in
consciousness, so they serve the breakdown of the usual
trend of conscious life
ADI DA: Many people try to
discipline themselves and after a while they just
can’t do it any more. Sooner or later the pressure of
disciplining themselves gets to be too much and they just
drop it. They abandon the discipline and indulge
themselves once again.
Why is that? Because they haven’t
understood themselves. They are not out of sympathy with
what they are disciplining. discipline is really not
a matter of controlling something fundamentally. It’s a
matter of relinquishing something, letting it go,
disregarding it. So if you’re not out of sympathy with it,
if you won’t let it go, you can’t transcend it.
If you’re holding onto it at the
same time you are disciplining it, discipline will
have no effect other than to curve your behavior
temporarily.
Your life is a struggle against
being disciplined. In some basic sense it’s a struggle
against control. It’s a struggle against father force. It’s
a struggle against male others. It’s a struggle against
demands.
So if you agree for some reason to
discipline yourself, you are embracing that you are
psychologically exposed to embrace so the discipline
won’t be affected. It will control your behavior for a while
but it won’t be fundamentally affected because you are
unwilling to let go of what you are disciplining.
Primarily what you are trying to
discipline is this stressful reaction to being
disciplined. So discipline will remain nothing but a
struggle for you. So you must overcome this psychological
disposition, this reacting against control. You think of
control really as something that comes on you from without
even if you’re applying it to yourself, the control you
apply to yourself is being directed to yourself from a
peripheral aspect of your personality. It is a binding
affair.
Your deeper personality or that
element of your personality that you really identify with is
the one being controlled, not the one that’s controlling. So
you’re still reacting. You are reluctant to be controlled.
You really think it’s unnecessary. It’s something being
imposed on you from without, something that others require
and so forth because really you think you have some superior
point of view somehow that doesn’t require self-control.
You think you can be happy without
control. You in some sense think happiness is a matter of no
control. So you don ‘t really understand the reason for
these disciplines. For discipline to work for
you there must be real understanding. You must understand
the dynamics of ego.
The discipline must be
generated not really from a peripheral aspect of yourself
which you don’t really identify with but it must be
generated from your own position happily based on
self-understanding. The core of you must cease to be
sympathetic with what must be disciplined or transcended.
You must come to understand yourself
to the point where you are no longer sympathetic with being
an adolescent bereft of self-discipline, the
integrity of your own being. When you’re out of sympathy
with that adolescent aspect of your personality , then
discipline’s not going to be a big deal. It’s just the
business of practice.
Somewhere in the Bhagavad-Gita, I
believe there is a line there where I say something to the
effect that you cannot transcend what you will not let go.
This is true at the beginning as well as at the ultimate
stages, the sixth practicing stage, what is true all along.
You do not transcend what you will not let go. You will not
transcend what you are sympathetic with, fitfully identify
with. So you have to understand it in some basic sense
before discipline becomes a transcending process.
For somebody who is vastly
overweight, you will see he has to go on a diet. He may go
on a diet but that individual will always have difficulty
dieting until he or she just loses sympathy with eating all
the time.
If you’re identified all the time
with the process of stuffing yourself constantly, satisfying
yourself through food-taking, the dietary discipline
will always just be a peripheral effort that you may engage
in sometimes for secondary reasons but it will never be
truly effective. You lose a little weight and gain it back
again and so forth. You will always be struggling with the
matter of discipline itself.
Once you get that a person could
come to a point of just losing all sympathy with just
stuffing himself or herself and the fact of it alone not to
mention the effect of it, then the individual could observed
a dietary discipline but it wouldn’t be a matter of
struggling with himself or herself. The only struggle would
be simply observed.
You know the body goes through a
trial, the body does, to a dietary discipline but
it’s not a psychological struggle. It’s a psychological
struggle only if you’re identified with the thing you are
trying to discipline and when you’re not identified
with the thing you are trying to discipline, then it’s not a
psychological struggle.
The disciplines are there to
help you observe yourself….You must …come to the point
of understanding yourself sufficiently to fall out of
sympathy with this argument that is yourself.
The more you fall out of sympathy
with it, the more discipline will be a true
expression of your self-understanding. discipline
serves self-understanding. It serves self-observation and
self-understanding and to a degree must be an expression of
self-observation and a level of self-understanding so more
and more until there is true hearing.
You are involved in a reaction to
the father force. You don’t want to be told what to do.
The father is the control force, is
more of conscious mind force and the mother is more the
subliminal subconscious unconscious dimension of the
personality.
I’ve observed and those considering
this way in my company all these years in general, there’s a
resistance to the control force. That means the father, the
male character, and the obligation to be self-controlled.
You have to grow up and make the
control dimension of life a fundamental part of your own
personality. You have to be able to function on another
level of self-understanding. You have to demonstrate the
quality of response, discipline and so on. You can’t
do that until you outgrow your childish and adolescent
disposition.
You are suffering from your
unresolved egoic character problems that belong to your
childhood and adolescence and you remain rather at the
beginning, cycling back and forth, over and over again . You
cannot go beyond the beginning until you transcend the
limitation.
You will always fall back to it
until you have come to a most fundamental
self-understanding. In spite of yourself you are always
reacting to daddy or perhaps in some cases reacting to mommy
or both. Life for you is a struggle with exterior eyes to
grade others but really external representations of aspects
of your own personality.
It’s like the dichotomy between the
mind and heart that is mentioned so much traditionally. What
do those mean really?
They mean control force and the
nurturing force, the openness, the expansiveness some good
feeling, love feeling and so forth dimension of yourself and
the controlling discriminative disciplined intentional side
of yourself and they are in a dynamic play with one another.
It’s not a matter of one or the other being
chosen.
Both must be fully active and alive
in you but they cannot be as long as you are psychologically
incapable of it. The child is basically rather primitive and
psychologically incapable of interiorizing these two dynamic
dimensions of being: the child then grows by adaptation to
the point of realizing this dynamic in his self or herself.
So many things interfere…social
patterns, patterns of education, limitations in your parents
or childhood circumstance and on and on. All kinds of things
can interfere with your own psychological development so as
an adult in The Way of the Heart you have to deal with all
those things that may have interfered with that adaptation
and instead of forever struggling as if you are still home
with mommy and daddy. You must simply and freely as
responsible human beings realize these two great dimensions
in your own character and be responsible as such. Well this
requires self-observation as an adult listening to wisdom
and progressively disciplining yourself until you are whole.
The by-Me-Given foundation
disciplines of the Reality-Way of Adidam are not
ascetical. They are not at all a matter of dissociating from
the body-mind-“self” or of disconnecting the
body-mind-“self” from its environment of participation.
Rather, the by-Me-Given foundation disciplines are
entirely life-positive-and entirely a matter of establishing
the right (and necessary) equanimity of the whole body (or
the total psycho-physical complex of the individual being)
through disciplines of basic right life (understood
not in moralistic, or puritanical, or merely behavioral
terms, but understood in Spiritual, Transcendental, and
Divine terms). These by-Me-Given foundation
disciplines are, most fundamentally, a matter of
participating in devotional and (in due course)
Transcendental Spiritual Communion with Me, by bringing the
body-mind-“self” into the Condition (and Disposition) of
Utter Non-separation.
You must go through the process of
preparing yourself—in the manner I have
Described—for practice in the First Congregation of
Adidam Ruchiradam.
The fundamental nature of the
process in My Divine Avataric Company must be rightly
understood. Otherwise, My devotees tend to approach Me in a
conventional manner, seeking for various signs of a
psycho-physical nature—all of which are intrinsically
associated with the ego-bound developmental course
associated with the “great path of return” (or the
“map” of the first six stages of life).
No amount of being studied,
informed, or even scholarly about the Great Tradition of
humankind can prepare you for the Real Transcendental
Spiritual Process of the “Radical” Reality-Way of
Adidam Ruchiradam—even if you do practice devotion to
Me, and even if you do discipline the
body-mind-“self” in terms of right-life
practice.
I Freely Give My devotees The
“Bright” Conscious Light of My Own Avatarically
Self-Revealed Divine Person—by Means of Which
Blessing-Gift they Are Acausally Enabled to Demonstrate
Transcendentally Spiritually Self-“Bright” Divine
life. I Call for the searchless free devotion, the
intelligently discriminative “self”-understanding,
the rightly and freely living
“self”-discipline, and the full and freely
functional capability of My devotees. I do not Call My
devotees to resist or eliminate life, or to strategically
escape life, or to identify with the
“world”-excluding ego-centric impulse. I Call My
devotees to live a positively functional life.
I do not Call My devotees to
strategically separate themselves from the natural vitality
of life, or to suppress the participatory impulse naturally
associated with human existence. I Call for all the human
life-functions to be really and rightly “known”,
and to be really and rightly understood, and to be really
and rightly lived—and not reduced by (or to) the
inherently bewildered (and inherently “cultic”, or
“self-centered” and fearful) “point of
view” of the separate and separative ego-“I”.
For further study see:
Beezone White and Orange Project* is based on
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Blue & Brown Books books. The Blue
& Brown Books of Wittgenstein’s were dictated as a set
of notes to his student in 1934-1935.
Beezone will use three formats for assembling a project.
One is to present a short piece directly from Adi Da. Then
Beezone will write down the highlighted points from said
paragraph and/or a group of like paragraphs.
The second format is ‘thematic’. Beezone will take a
‘theme’ of Adi Da’s teaching and go through various talks
and essays and write down a sentence or two related to that
theme or topic.
Lastly is a compilation or remix. This is a blend of the
two other methods. In this style Beezone will take a number
of talks and essays based on a theme. Beezone will then use
the ‘cut-up’ method. The cut-up technique is an aleatory
literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged
to create a new text. This method can be traced to at least
the Dadaists of the 1920s, but was popularized in the late
1950s and early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs, and
has since been used in a wide variety of contexts.
Beezone White
and Orange Project