Tag: Adi Da

“It’s not the divine that must be found”

“It’s not the divine that must be found, it’s the things you’re deluding yourself with that must be released.”

“It’s not about being a fan of the Absolute.”

–Adi Da Samraj

me4

“Real meditation…is not a pious attempt to quiet your little thoughts”

“Meditation is not something that takes place in the dilemma. Real meditation is not a method to get rid of your suffering. It is not perpetual preoccupation with your own thoughts, the content of your life, in order to get free of them, to get aside from them, make them be quiet. The you who does all that is itself the dilemma. It knows nothing. It is itself the suffering. It is itself obsession with the endless stream of its own thoughts. Therefore, the attempts by such a one to do something about his “mind,” to make it quiet, to make it see visions, whatever, are within the form of this original motivating dilemma. Such strategies are expressions of his separate life, attempts to fortify and save his separate life, which is already an illusion.

Real meditation arises only in Satsang, only under conditions of Truth, already lived. There is force in such meditation. Real meditation is an intense fire. It is a marvelous intelligence, a brilliance, a genius, a living force. It is not a pious attempt to quiet your little thoughts. It blasts the hell out of these thoughts! From the point of view of the Self, the Truth, the Real, there is no concern for all these thoughts, all of these dilemmas, all of this mediocrity of suffering. It is nothing.

When Satsang lives as the principle of your life, and Truth becomes the form of your meditation, it consumes thought. It is a presence under which thoughts cannot survive. It is an intelligence that needs only to look at some obstruction for it to dissolve. This is the process that comes awake in Satsang, not some method, some remedy. The whole point of view of dis-ease is false. Spiritual life is not a cure. Spiritual life is the life of Truth, Satsang. One who is looking for a cure is obsessed with his disease.”

– Adi Da, The Method of the Siddhas

“Satsang literally means true or right relationship. It is commonly used to refer to the practice of spending time in the company of holy or wise persons”  –The Method of the Siddhas

That rather hallucinated enclosure…

“You have never comprehended or experienced the space you are actually living in. You have only been living in that rather hallucinated enclosure made by your own egoic act and its consequences.”

– Adi Da Samraj

 

20130505_174301

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

The root sign of egoity

“Fear is the primal sign of self-contraction, the root sign of egoity… All clinging to objects of any kind intensifies first your anxiety and then your fear. Fear is the first artifact of your egoity.”

–Adi Da

“Fear is only the reflection of the holding on”

“Fear is only our reading…the mood reflected in our contraction, our recoil from infinity, our attempts to survive, our narcissism. If instead of holding on – to mind and emotion and body and relations and the world itself – we release it all, there is no fear whatsoever.

Fear is only the reflection of the holding on.”

–Adi Da, The Religion of the Whole Body, 1977

“You need not become convinced of anything except that you are suffering a contracted state of existence.”

Adi Da Samraj:

“You must trust the process of your own life, whether it is to go mad, to become ill, to work, to succeed, or to die. Be free of fear. Surrender to the Person of God, the actual Living God. Trust the Divine altogether. Give yourself up emotionally to God. Do it to the point that the physically based fear of death vanishes on the basis of trust alone…

Allow life to be the theatre of God, in which what seems to be appropriate and necessary in your case will be accomplished spontaneously. Allow all of life to be Gods business. Whatever arises, high or low, such a life will simply be surrendering to the point of happiness, giving up to God completely…

You do not really need to know all the technicalities of yoga and the cosmic subtleties of the higher planes of the phenomenal worlds. You need not know anything. You need not become convinced of anything except that you are suffering a contracted state of existence. Feel the force of that contraction, its emotional force, its physical force. Feel the quality of contraction and realize that it is your own action. Realize that you can exist in a totally different condition merely by recognizing your own separative activity and transcending it in each moment.”

The Wound of Love, by Adi Da

Adi Da on love and fear:

Love Does Not Fail For You When You Are Rejected or Betrayed or Apparently Not Loved. Love Fails For You When You Reject, Betray, and Do Not Love… Therefore, The Most Direct Way To Know Love in every moment is To Be Love in every moment.

–

The emotional (or emotional-sexual) Career Of egoity Tends To Manifest As A Chronic Complaint That Always Says, By Countless Means, “You Do Not Love me.” This Abusive Complaint Is, Itself, The Means Whereby the egoic individual Constantly Enforces his or her Chronic Wanting Need To Reject, Avoid, or Fail To Love others. Indeed, This Complaint Is More Than A Complaint. It Is A self-Image (The Heart-Sick or self-Pitying and Precious Idea That “I” Is Rejected) and An Angry Act Of Retaliation (Whereby others Are Punished For Not Sufficiently Adoring, pleasurizing, and Immortalizing the Precious ego-“I”).

–

Fear is the self-Contraction. The self-Contraction (or the ego-“I”) is The Root-Action (or Primal Mood) That Is Fear. Therefore, All Of The self-Preserving, self-Glorifying, and other-Punishing Efforts Of the ego-“I” (or the self-Contracted body-mind) Only Preserve, Glorify, and Intensify Fear Itself.

–
Fear, the ego-“I”, Un-Love, or The Total Ritual Of self-Contraction Must Be Understood and Transcended. All Of Fear, egoity, self-Contraction, or Un-Love Is Only Suffering. It Is Only Destructive. And It Is Entirely Un-Necessary.

From ‘The Wound of Love’ by Adi Da in The Dawn Horse Testament of the Ruchira Avatar.  See full text here.

Stress

I got interested in this teaching because I was stressed, and distressed.

I appreciated all the comforts, privileges and pleasures I had in my life, but I could never shake the underlying sensation of dissatisfaction.  (I also felt guilty for feeling dissatisfied, because I had the comforts and privileges.)  I tried to talk myself out of the dissatisfaction.  I worked jobs in social services.  Nothing seemed to help.  I have a serious case of The Dreaded Gom-Boo.

Some may say that stress is just a part of life, that it is wise to just accept it and treat the symptoms – with humor, philosophy, religion, alcohol, etc.  For me, ignoring the haunting dissatisfaction (or temporarily covering it up) has never worked.  I want to get to the bottom of it.

When I discovered this teaching, I learned that I do not have to continue living with stress.

I learned that it is extremely important to focus my attention precisely on the sensation of dissatisfaction, not to avoid it.  It was important to get serious about examining it.

I learned that there are people, even people living now, in modern times and situations, who are free of suffering.  And they are not sitting around enjoying their own personal contentment.  Pain continues to arise in others, so they are busy teaching.  It’s like in action movies, when the heroes fall in love – they do not, will not, stop to enjoy the honeymoon.  They have more people to save, more villains to defeat, and they just keep going, hardly missing a beat, in love and fighting the good fight.

This is a great talk, recently posted on James Wood’s website, that addresses the importance of witnessing the stressful self-contraction without judgment.


The Dreaded Gom-Boo

In the last post, I talked about meditation as medicine.  Yesterday a friend handed me a copy of:  The Dreaded Gom-Boo or The Imaginary Disease that Religion Seeks to Cure. A Collection of Essays and Talks on the “Direct” Process of Enlightenment by Da Free John.

This material is really fantastic, as is all of Adi Da’s work.  I’ll quote some of what really struck me here.

From  Chapter 2, Tell me True – Have You Got the Gom-Boo? by Da Free John

“We start out naively seeking to know and to experience as a way of becoming expansive and happy and ultimately fulfilled.  But our search does not become Happiness.  The more we know and experience, the less happy we are as a general tendency,  because we are qualifying the presumption of Being the more we experience, the more we know, the more we observe in the conventional sense, the more we analyze and see how we are functioning and how Nature works.  Thus, people come to a point of weakness and despair, a feeling of bondage, as a result of the egoic elaboration of their possibilities, and they approach the Sources of Truth, communicated through religious and spiritual culture, as if seeking a cure for this dilemma, this Dreaded Gom-Boo, that is the basis of traditional religious culture.

In truth, the religious or spiritual process has nothing at all do to with the Dreaded Gom-Boo or its cure. It has nothing to do with the disease you want to make the premise of the spiritual process. The first thing you must do when you truly become involved in the process associated with Truth is to understand, and, immediately, directly, presently, to transcend the disease that you seek otherwise to cure. The pursuit of the cure of the disease is the same activity as the one whereby you first acquired the disease. It is a version of the disease, something you do because you are diseased. It is not another process than disease. At most it involves a different relationship to the disease. Whereas previously you unwittingly did everything that compounded the disease, now you want to do everything to get rid of it. The search for the cure is still another way of being diseased. It is not the Way of Truth. It is not the Way that I Teach. It is not true religion or true spirituality. True religion, true spirituality, is the process that takes place when you are already well, when you are in your Native position, when you are established in Truth, Happiness or Reality.

The spiritual process is to understand how you contracted this disease, understand the mechanics of your presuming it always in this present moment so that in every present moment you will be established in the Free Position, the Position of Happiness, Truth, or the presumption of Being. The spiritual process, then becomes the magnification of non-disease, prior Happiness, the prior presumption.”

Da Free John. The Dreaded Gom-Boo. (1983). The Johannine Daist Communion. pp. 44-45