Ritual of Dependence

“We’re not really dependent on anyone or anything. We’re engaging in a ritual of dependence and making our happiness depend on various relations.

Happiness is inherent in the self position or in our real condition of life. When we begin to notice this, this is the beginning of renunciation. This is the beginning of the expression of true understanding. It doesn’t dissociate us from relations, it simply associates us with a higher principle.

If we depend on relations for this feeling of happiness, that feeling will always be corrupted, threatened and so forth, and will always be associated with the mechanism of dependence. And likewise we’ll always be moved to get independent because we don’t like the feeling that happiness is dependent on someone else, something else, some condition, some object, some circumstance. So we don’t really settle, even in these dependencies. We rebel against them, even. Therefore we become dissociated in relations that we depend on. We corrupt our own happiness in a circumstance in which we do have the option to be happy.

We make our happiness depend on relations and therefore are always suffering in the context of relationship – suffering dependence, manufacturing independence, corrupting relationships, going from object to object, relationship to relationship – struggling all our lives in a circumstance in which we ritually make happiness depend on relationships. And then also struggle with that very fact, resist that very ritual…

Being dependent on relations and conditions, you only feel free to magnify that happiness under certain conditions. So people feel a kind of modest state of well-being, or pleasure, at best, in the ordinary moments of existence. But it’s really clouded over by doubt and dis-ease,  unhappiness, threat, fear, anxiety, physical, emotional, mental reactivity and all the rest of it.

It’s only in the million dollar moments – great occasions, great successes, great meetings, great newness and so forth – that you give yourself the liberality to fully feel happy, to be expanded, to be magnified without containment, without limitation, without contraction. These moments pass and the rest of your life is spent seeking a similar moment.

Wisdom is to observe the mechanics of that whole affair: of, basically, unhappiness, in which happiness is an occasional incident within the framework of ritualized relatedness. And to observe the mechanics, and to understand them and to be able to penetrate them to the point of understanding their law, their source condition, is the essence of the beginnings of the spiritual process.

Find the virtue in the self position, prior to a ritualized dependency. This is the beginning of the spiritual process. Until it begins there isn’t any spiritual process, you see.”

-excerpts from the talk Ritual of Sorrow, by Adi Da, 1983