The answer lies in full joyful surrender before death. Adi Da Samraj’s “easy death” is a willing, conscious giving back of life. You surrender not because there is nothing left in the end and you are obliterated and extinguished anyway, but because there is nothing to keep and the law that has given you life in the beginning requires surrender at its end. In this way, death becomes a necessary experience, “a radical fast,” Adi Da Samraj calls it, since it purifies us of our elemental aspect, our gross self.
Death is the transformation of the knower… Death is a process in which the knower is transformed, and all previous or conditional knowing is scrambled or confounded… To ‘consider’ death is fruitless, since the knower is what is changed by death.”‡
Traditional Approaches to Death and the Dual Sensitivity That Transcends Them
But we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead. [2Cor. 1:9] And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. [Rev. 21:4]
The following quotations are from the Qur’an on the same subject: Every soul will taste death and you will be paid in full only on the Day of Resurrection. Whoever is kept away from the Fire and admitted to the Garden will have triumphed. The present world is only an illusory pleasure. [The Family of Imran (3).185] [I]t is He who gives life and death; the alternation of night and day depends on Him; will you not use your minds? [The Believers (23).80] Look, then, at the imprints of God’s mercy, how He restores the earth to life after death: this same God is the one who will return people to life after death—He has power over all things. [The Byzantines (30).50]
(Scriptural voices: Christian and Islamic views on death)
The second human approach to death is to escape from the patterns of suffering evident in human existence.
The most intensive practitioners of such religions desire to escape bondage to this perpetual and helpless sequence through devotional and mystical union with the Divine, asceticism, and/or extreme inversion away from what is perceived as the illusory world. These traditions are more apt to “purify” or eliminate the body after death—via fire or exposure—than to memorialize bodily remains.
Meditating on all [these] disadvantages of samsāra, you should develop renunciation or the state of mind that wishes to be completely free of all suffering. This is the Hinayāna motivation and with it an understanding of Voidness brings you Liberation. [From the commentary, by Beru Khyentze Rinpoche, to The Mahamudra: Eliminating the Darkness of Ignorance, by the Ninth Karmapa, Wang-ch’ug dor-je, trans. by Alexander Berzin (Dharamsala: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1978), 23 and 29–30.]
For True Liberation, there must be both the full acknowledgement of mortality and the recognition of the impulse to Perfect and Eternal Happiness. I Say to you: Always remember that this world (and conditional existence altogether) is not paradise, that this is “mortality-land”, that every one and every thing passes, and that True Happiness is not about (and does not require) the perfecting or eternalizing of this condition (or of any condition at all), and that True Happiness is not (Itself) a matter of staying here, or clinging to here, or leaving here (or of going, or staying, or leaving any “where” at all). I also Say to you: Always be devotionally responsive from the heart—and (thus) always remember that your inherent (and inherently great) heart-disposition wants and needs (and cannot—in any moment, or even now—be satisfied with anything less than) Infinite, Absolute, True, Eternal Happiness (or Most Perfect Divine Self-Realization).
(True Happiness beyond clinging or escaping)
I Say to you: Always remember that this world (and conditional existence altogether) is not paradise, that this is “mortality-land”, that every one and every thing passes, and that True Happiness is not about (and does not require) the perfecting or eternalizing of this condition (or of any condition at all), and that True Happiness is not (Itself) a matter of staying here, or clinging to here, or leaving here (or of going, or staying, or leaving any “where” at all). I also Say to you: Always be devotionally responsive from the heart—and (thus) always remember that your inherent (and inherently great) heart-disposition wants and needs (and cannot—in any moment, or even now—be satisfied with anything less than) Infinite, Absolute, True, Eternal Happiness (or Most Perfect Divine Self-Realization).
A presumption exists today that an individual can be “enlightened” or “go to heaven” on the basis of what he or she does during the death process. This is not true. A wide range of destinies are possible after death. A superior destiny, even to the degree of Divine Self-Realization, requires profound Spiritual practice throughout one’s lifetime, and even throughout many lifetimes.
There is no unique technique to use in the death process. You cannot go any further after death than your karma dictates or than your lifetime of Spiritual practice makes possible. —April 9, 13, and 17, 1991
However, even though this tendency exists, people do not remain in the Light. Their attention inevitably returns to conditional states.
What actually occurs after death, however, they do not know—because the after-death experience is created by one’s karmic tendencies, and it is only affected by real Spiritual practice. Mind, or its absence, determines where you will go.
He calls this presumption the “self-contraction”, and much of His Teaching is devoted to a root-understanding of this constant act. As a result of this presumption of separateness, we inherently behave like people who are dying.
(Self-contraction: the ego’s continuous enactment of death)
Refusing to be responsible, being oblivious in life, not wanting to deal with anything, sort of blasé—that is denial. Getting angry, reactive—this is the second stage of the process of dying.
The self-contraction ultimately kills you bodily. All the while you are alive, you are dramatizing this psychology, this process of moving to the point of death. Whatever the cause of your death, you have invested your entire life in this contraction and its results. —“The Understanding That Overcomes Suffering” (Part
It is not through self-effort, or any techniques of somehow “slaying” the ego. The ego cannot be relinquished through its own endeavors.
But, if you simply Wake Up from the dream, then (because the waking state is already free of the “awful” that appears in dreams) you are already free of the implications of the billions upon billions of deaths that can be dreamed.
His Way is based on the understanding of the present activity that causes suffering, and an attraction to Him, recognized as the living Agent of the Deathless Reality.
(Ego-death and the breakthrough to real understanding)
allow Myself to Feel mortality completely, without the slightest reserve. I allow the Body to weep, to be sundered, to be undone, to be heart-broken by utter Sympathy with conditional existence. To do so is to pass beyond Sympathy by magnifying Feeling Itself. The heart must be broken to find What Is, Beyond the conditional limit of the heart. Thus, this great sorrow becomes Joy. This Heart-Feeling is the Ultimate Intensity. But you do not pass to Joy without the breaking of the heart, without the breaking of the knot that separates you.
Death is utterly acceptable to consciousness and life. There has been endless time of numberless deaths, but neither consciousness nor life has ceased to arise.
The Heart Is Real understanding. The Heart Is Real Consciousness and Real Life. The Heart Is What Merely and Only Is, but Which Is also Appearing In and Behind the conditions of mortal life and its death.
There Is Only the Constant Knowledge and Enjoyment of the Heart, moment to moment, through the instant of all conditions of appearance and disappearance. Of This I Am Perfectly Certain. I Am That.
As human beings, we generally have two strategies relative to death: Either we want to remain ignorant of it or else we are hopeful about what will occur afterwards.
(Consciousness undying: what remains when the knower changes)
no matter where one goes or where one is, one is always the same fundamental Consciousness.
What is Consciousness (in Its living form, and altogether)? What must occur within It for It to remain as It is (untouched and Free and Blissful) even while, in Its living form, It already bears the certainty (or the tacit knowledge) of death?
felt a tremendous connection to the living world, and saw that the absence of one I loved did not amount to the destruction of love, of living consciousness, of life-energy, of “Bright” Fullness, or of Heart-Joy. I saw that I was alive!
In the hours of waiting for death I was not Awake as the “Bright”, the Full Presence of my Being. I was separate from the “Bright”, and saw all Love and Light and Freedom of Being as utterly above, apart from me and this world.
Fear of death is anxiety (or emotional recoil) experienced in anticipation of the event.
(The death process: surrender or interference)
If you do not surrender in cooperation with the death process, then you will tend to interfere with the ultimate event of release and separation from the body and the world—which, like sleep, is intended to refresh and strengthen the phenomenal being in preparation for a rebirth (or resumed embodiment).
(In that case, attention does not pass freely to the crown of the head and beyond, but it becomes locked in dreamlike associations with memories, vital associations, and various aspects of experience in this passing body and world.)
As the seeker, as “Narcissus”,4 the eternally recurring mortal, you tend to think that death is fundamentally a physical event. Because you tend to be frightened, you like to think that death stands over against your psyche.
In Truth, however, death is not merely a physical event but a psycho-physical event, in which not only the body dies but the psyche also.
Only when your resistance to that profound transformation breaks down can you allow its fullness to be enacted. Then you realize ecstasy, with ever greater profundity, while still alive in the midst of the endless unfolding of existence.
(Allowing death: fluid cosmos and conditional immortality)
If you are intelligent, you allow it while alive. In that case, you have no ultimate fear of transforming events.
Then you see how unfixed and fluid this world is, how unfixed and fluid the vast, infinite cosmos is. You see that the conditional realm is fluid, shapeless, and unreasonable. Then every world becomes the Real-God-World, because you are constantly Communing with the Divine Person, Reality, and Truth there.
There are great dimensions, great cosmic possibilities, into which you may drift and enjoy a kind of mortality that seems immortal. There are worlds where longevity is intensified almost to the point of immortality, but not to literal immortality. Even those worlds are declining and passing through cycles. There is no fixed condition—any “where” within the cosmic domain. There is no immortal condition other than the Eternal Divine Self-Condition (and Source-Condition) of all-and-All.
Investigation of the possibilities of existence can only ultimately confound you. Such investigation is a kind of suffering. It even serves you as suffering does, bringing you (at last) to yield to the Divine.
Death seems important to the mind because the mind’s fundamental function is to defend the ego. The mind is a hedge around the sense of separate existence. As such, the mind is always set against desire. The mind and desire are two opposing principles. Desire is always moving you toward a formless, even Transcendental, condition, always moving you toward union, toward concentration on what is outside yourself, toward attention in something beyond the knot of the self-contraction.
(Mind and desire as opposing forces around the ego)
Both movements assume the ego, or the separate and separative self. Desire wants to remove it, and mind wants to reinforce it and make it immortal.
The Truth is in understanding the underlying principle in this adventure of life, which is the constant enactment of conflict.
That process makes everything, from lunch to death, something new, something known in Truth, no longer a matter of concern. It makes the vast cosmic process no longer a matter of concern. The entire profound philosophical mulling over of death is appropriate only for the seeker, who is still bound to the dramatization of the adventure of “Narcissus”.
Therefore, it is better to understand the mind than to create philosophy with it. There is a deeper personality than the bodily personality that identifies with the conceptual and verbal mind. That deeper personality is what passes beyond this life—not your philosophy and all your ideas and experiences.
To be Divinely Enlightened is not to be involved in (or concerned with) the fixing of future events, either for oneself or for any others. To be Divinely Enlightened is, instead, to be involved only with the unfolding process of Divine Self-Realization, instantly. It is to be always involved with the process of life as a Divinely Conscious event in this moment—and now in this moment, and now in this moment, and now in this moment. I always see the smithereens of the worlds and Know them to be illusory modifications of the Divine Source-Condition—not merely “things” in space.
(Death made workable: understanding over philosophy)
Only Real God Is. Only the Paradox Survives.
“Consider” this: You are conscious in this moment. If I look at you and call your name, it is the body-mind-self that assumes I am talking to it. But it is not the body-mind-self who is actually here. There is only One Identity here. There appear to be individual conventions of separate selves, but they are phenomenal constructs superimposed on the Divine Being.
Every feature of your temporary ego-identity is (itself) constructed out of a universal Field of Self-Existing Consciousness and Self-Radiant Spirit-Energy.
Thus, you will remain fascinated by death, even to the point of being relatively self-destructive—because (in some sense) you want to find out about it, even though you fear
However, it is not the mystery of death that you must penetrate in order to be free of fear. Rather, you must transcend this concoction of ego-stress and self-contraction while alive.
(Divine Communion as the release of death-fear)
Then both your present existence and all its future changes-and-dying will be allowed very simply and naturally—much like going to sleep at night. You will not merely have gained some consoling knowledge about death. Fear does not result from the lack of such knowledge.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Reality, Truth, or the Very Divine is not afraid of death. Therefore, if you Commune with the Divine Person—if you are really intimate with the Divine Person in this present moment—then the body-mind’s reactivity to death relaxes.
The persona that is constructed upon the basis of identifying with the body-mind, contracting as the body-mind, is not in tune with the Divine Freedom and Purpose. And, so, this persona is afraid. There is the Divine Self-Condition, and there is the body-mind in all the mechanics of cosmic Nature—and, then, there is this persona, this ego-“I”, which is totally out of sync with both the body-mind and the Divine Self-Condition.
mind, because the body-mind does not want to live forever. You want to live forever. The persona wants to live forever.
Revealed and Given, is not the Way to get in sync with the body-mind. Rather, the Way of Adidam is the Way to get in sync with the Divine Being (or Reality Itself). To do so will also cause the persona (or the reactive ego) to integrate with the body in equanimity—the sattvic condition that expresses heart-Communion with the Divine Self-Condition.
(Darshan with Lance: transmission at the threshold of death)
You feel death is an ending, a loss, a threat. Such a disposition only expresses dissociation from Real God.
In this manner, you prepare yourself for death, but you also live aligned to Me.
Therefore, the primary initiation that leads to human maturity is the confrontation with mortal fear. Only when the ultimate frustration that is death has been fully “considered” and felt and understood as a process can the individual live without self-protective and self-destructive fears.
Become aware that you do not live, but that you are Lived by the Divine Person.
When the human being exists in Unity with That upon Which it ultimately depends, then it forgets itself, it Contemplates only That, and it is constantly Nurtured and Sublimed by That. But, when the human being exists in presumed independence and separation from That upon Which all beings inherently depend, then it only contemplates itself, it is not conscious of That, and it automatically withdraws into a separative and self-destructive mode.
If you forget yourself—all the content and concerns of the body-mind and its world—you will Intuit the Divine Being.
“Feel Me Infinitely Above and Shoot Straight to Me Like an Arrow”
LANCE: The more you surrender your own subjectivity to Him, the less bound you are by all the variations, the physical pain and depression, the frustration that you can’t do anything.
When I’m feeling Him most intensely I feel very happy, ridiculously so, like I have a bubble in my heart that just wants to laugh all the time. It is feeling happy without any reason. I mean, I have no reason to feel happy and yet I feel happy—sublime, really. I also feel very free but not in an ordinary way. I don’t necessarily feel good [Lance smiles ruefully, casting his eyes down toward his body] either. It is more profound. I’m feeling beyond that. It is almost as if the “me”, or the “I” of “me” is just a thought and not the reality. He is the Reality and He is arising as everything. Happiness is the Reality. Turning your attention to Him is not so much a relief but a rejoicing. It is remembrance of the Eternal.
and He is beaming this huge smile. His eyes are incredibly wide, and He looks around at everyone individually.
(Devotee testimonials: love and light at the moment of grace)
As soon as His hand touches Lance, there is this amazing column of Light. It was almost visible, but I could definitely feel it. It felt like Lance was ascending up this column and Beloved Adi Da’s Descending Force was coming down. The love between them was just overwhelming. I could see the tears of Compassion in Beloved Adi Da’s eyes, and the force of His Transmission was so intense His hand was shaking a bit on top of Lance’s head.
Beloved Adi Da is so vastly Present. His head seems to have grown to an impossible size. His eyes are so broad they almost seem to be working independently of one another, taking in everyone and everything.
Later, Lance said that as soon as Avatar Adi Da touched his head he was enveloped in Light and overcome in a mindless, blissful swoon. He felt he was in a column of Light with immeasurable power. He said that he felt he could die now: He had never expected to see Avatar Adi Da again, and the Grace he had just received was incalculable. It was obvious to both Lance and Arthur that a great emotional and Spiritual healing was taking place for Lance.
LANCE: When He brushed my cheek with His hand, I never felt love like that before—absolutely perfect, unlimited, unconditional love without any qualification. Nothing else could ever be so gracious.
was like He entered me and brushed me out. “You can go now, I am taking over.” [Lance laughs.] I felt free—free in an ecstatic way. That sense has stayed with me. He removed a lot that was in the way of feeling Him.
LANCE: Everybody was amazed, because no one had seen a frog up there in years. All of a sudden you could feel Beloved Adi Da so intensely. His Presence was palpable, and people went wild with ecstasy. Most had no idea why.
My Adi Da, Thank You so, so much! You are Absolute Love-Bliss. You have said, “Everything has already died. This is the other world.” This is what I felt today with Your Darshan. I felt so Free in Bliss and so in love with You. When you pressed the center of my forehead, I felt perfectly penetrated, like a hole. I don’t even know who I am, nor do I care. I am so happy to see You. You are so Sublime and so Beautiful.
The whole world should be bowing at Your Feet. So much happened that I couldn’t put it all into words, and yet nothing was going on. Just You! You are the only One, It is true there is Only You! Your tears on my legs felt like the light of diamonds, and they penetrated every cell in my body with “Brightness”. I am so happy to be here. I’ll do what I can to serve You by bringing devotees to You.
In death, everything below the crown of the head disappears, so there is no more “head-to-toe” about it—there is just everything above the crown of the head. It is possible for practice to become so profound that, at times, there is no physical awareness, but only an awareness of everything above and beyond the body and an awareness of the Fullness of the Total Sphere of My Spiritual Form, without any particular physical pattern.
The practice is about no more un-Happiness.
(Death as psycho-physical, not merely physical, event)
You have no philosophical problem with sleep, and yet you seem to have a philosophical problem with death. And it is not because of what you know about death—it is because of what you think happens to life when you die.
Why should you fear death any more than you fear sleep? Why are you so afraid of the loss of objects? Why are you afraid of the Very Condition you are in?
As long as we presume to be a “me”, distinct from “you” and all “others”, looking out through the eyes of a body, there is no answer to fear. We are choosing the position of inherent fear.
Reality Itself is inherently and always Fearless.
There is nothing you can do about it, except whatever it is that utterly transcends the root-presumption that is the cause of it. Is there an understanding and a Realization of existence that is free of the root-conditions that you are experiencing fearfully? I am Telling you there is. —August 13, 2004
deep sleep a kind of “poor man’s enlightenment”—
The Love-Blissful, Unthreatened Current of the “Bright”
(Adi Da’s ordeal: the discovery beyond ego-death)
Avatar Adi Da allowed the experience of fear and death to overwhelm Him, passing through it into a new understanding of death, and a profoundly transformed state.
I allowed the death to happen, and I “saw” it happen. It was not that an organic death occurred, but even organic death ceased to be a “concern”. There was a spontaneous, utter release of identification with the body, the mind, the emotions of the separate person, and the self-contracting (or reactive and separative) act that is the “ego” (or the presumed person). When that moment of crisis had passed, I felt a marvelous relief, or, rather, simply, a marvelous Freedom. The death had occurred, but I had observed it! I remained untouched by it. The body and the mind and the egoic personality had died (or been utterly released as a concern and an identity), but I remained as essential and unqualified Awareness (and purely That, but also Freely Aware of the physical body and its natural environment).
I Knew Reality, tacitly and directly. There was an Infinite Bliss of Being, an untouched, unborn Sublimity, without separation, without individuation, without a thing from which to be separated. There was only Reality Itself, the incomparable Nature and constant Existence that underlies (and observes, and Knows) the entire adventure of life. And that Same and Very Reality was also revealed as the unqualified living condition of the totality of conditionally manifested existence.
The Love-Blissful, unthreatened Current of the “Bright” emanated Freely and unqualifiedly from my heart, and not a pulse of It was limited by my otherwise conditional existence or the existence of the world.
Suffering, seeking, self-indulgence, the seeker’s Spirituality, and all the rest were founded in the same primary motivation and error. It was the avoidance of relationship. That was it! That was the chronic and continuous source and characteristic of all egoic activity. Indeed, the ego was revealed to be only an activity, not an “entity”. The “entity”, the separate “person” (or ego-“I”), was revealed to be only an illusion, a mere presumption in mind and feeling, resulting from the self-contraction, the egoic reaction, the single egoic act of the total body-mind.
Thus, human beings are forever suffering, seeking, indulging themselves, and manipulating their lives for the sake of some unknown goal in eternity.
It was the source of separation and un-love, the source of doubt and un-Reality, of qualification and loss. But, in fact, there is only relationship, only love, only unqualified relatedness, only the unqualified living condition of Reality.
This demonstration of ego-death proves the primacy of a different reality than we ordinarily presume. If we relinquish our presumption of separativeness, we are inherently free of fear and anxiety—because we are identified with That Which is not separate, individual, or mortal. Avatar Adi Da’s Life is proof that the true Spiritual process is to freely relinquish the limits of the dying, separate self in the Freedom and Happiness of Reality, the Inherent and Prior Condition.
The ego-“I” is the body-mind in its superficial state. It is the persona that is projected on the body-mind. The ego-“I” is always struggling to survive. The struggle to survive is its primary characteristic.
The body (itself) is programmed to die. It intends to allow death. It wants to allow death. It does not just die by accident. Death does not “happen to it”. Death is built into it from the beginning, as it is in the flowers. Everything has death built into it. The superficial ego-“I”, the persona, does not want to die. The superficial ego-“I” is afraid of death. But, at the Spiritual depth, the being is not afraid of death—in fact, it intends to participate in death and wants to participate in it, but not suicidally. It intends to participate in death by going through a cycle in which it (ultimately) dies. It definitely intends to allow this. It has no fear of allowing it to happen, wants to allow it to happen, prefers to allow it to happen (in its right time).
(Persona vs body vs Divine: who is out of sync)
You are a psychological self-image that does not “time itself” very well either with conditional reality or with Unconditional Reality. The one you call “I” is an illusory character, and it is totally “out of sync” with both cosmic Nature and the Divine Reality. That one you call “I” is wishing there would be no death, creating super-cultures that pursue survival, dominance over cosmic Nature, and immortality. Human civilization is basically the collective game of such imaginary personas.
When you dissociate from Reality (both conditional and Unconditional), you become locked into the dissociated character that is this “I”—Narcissus, the imaginary persona. Bodies are not philosophizing about death. Only these personas are philosophizing about it. Bodies intend to allow death. They intend to exist only for a certain span, for a certain mechanical purpose, and then they intend to be recycled. They have not the slightest concern about it. Nor
When you go to sleep at night, you are not concerned about the body. There is no thought about the body at all. Therefore, you do not inherently require this body. It is only in a certain “moment” in cosmic Nature that you cling to it and struggle in relationship to it.
The Divine Source-Condition is like sleep in that It is not attached to the body or to cosmic Nature. It is Indifferent to all of that. But the Divine Source-Condition is unlike sleep in that it is not unconscious. The Divine Source-Condition Is Fully Conscious—yet, It has no sense of separation.
DEVOTEE: Beloved Adi Da, You have said that we should be able to give ourselves up to death with the same pleasure with which we give ourselves up to sleep.
death is necessary, you should be able to die gracefully even if you are not old.
You should be able to enter into the Samadhi of simply abandoning the functional conditions with which you are ordinarily (though fitfully) associated. Thus, your meditative feeling-Contemplation of Me must develop to the point that you can sit down and “die” (as the ego-“I”)—sit down and relax all dependence on body and mind, all feeling of fixed and necessary association with psycho-physical states, relations, environments. Just relax beyond them and let them all fall away.
Once you are comfortably related to the process of abandoning physical and mental states, then you have transcended much of what you fear about death—because that fear is related to the inability to surrender the body.
In meditation, however, you should be able to pass beyond that point without losing consciousness—at least in moments, such that you can observe the mechanism of the loss of bodily consciousness. Precisely that happens in death, and nothing else.
Ultimately, in meditation, you can go beyond all the psycho-physical states of the nervous system altogether. To do that at least once changes something in your understanding forever, because you have already “died”, in the fullest sense: You have passed out of the body-mind, and that passing has not diminished your existence.
(Meditation as rehearsal: passing through the body-mind)
While you live in this realm of changes, however, you are tending to be uptight and contracted—because you are forgetting to turn to Me and to surrender the body-mind. Therefore, you must unlearn this contraction by turning to Me instead.
It is not holding on. It is not defining one’s existence. It is to be at rest in That Which Is Always Already the Case. Until you give yourself up to that Destiny in My Avataric Divine Company, you must see that this life is temporary, changing, and unnecessary. Then allow existence to be Sublimed by your moment to moment resort to Me. Allow it to change, to pass away, to do whatever is its term to do.
Get Up from Bed and Drop Dead!
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: The true purpose of your life has nothing to do with the realm of conditional appearances, which has its own cycle of past and present and future. Nothing that arises to attract you (in this great universe in which you are appearing) is your real business. All that arises is dying anyway—being transformed out of the realm of appearances.
You are all like astronauts—your entire lifetime is associated with preparation for the launch! This life is just a transition to another place.
There is pleasure associated with dying—but, like excrement, death is virtually taboo in the common world. You are not supposed to enjoy it. Spiritually Awakened beings, however, know this pleasure.
Get up from bed and drop dead! Realize the Ecstasy of heart-Communion with Me—to the point of transcending death.
You feel negative about existence because of this sense of limitation.
Enjoy no other disposition than the ecstasy of devotion to Me and service to Me.
Any state other than direct, heart-felt surrender to Me is an unending torment, leading more and more to profound despair. Therefore, as My devotee, simply surrender the self-contraction by turning to Me.
Paul in the New Testament: “I die daily.”10 It is to give yourself up simply, to give yourself up to Real God, to the point of ego-death—without negative connotations, but in the most positive sense.
My recommendation that you drop dead every day is an amusement, but I am talking about ecstasy.
You must feel death as ecstasy and be free of your fear of it. The business of your life must become ecstatic surrender to Me through the most life-positive association with Me.
(Drop dead daily: ego-death as ecstasy, not loss)
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: If you are not afraid of death yet, do not be concerned—you will be!
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Threat of extinction. Yes. Loss of objects, loss of the ability to experience, loss of existence altogether. DEVOTEE: Yes. AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Such things are just words used to describe something very fundamental—but, simply stated, it certainly sounds like fear of death, wouldn’t you say?
If you cannot identify yourself in those presumed memories, then you cannot claim them to be real. Without the continuity of the individual self, they are just suggestive mind-forms. They could be total fantasy. They could even be images of someone else’s lifetime!
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Obviously, it is not dependent on this body, because this body was not present in the past lifetime. But perhaps there is a more subtle aspect of the body-mind (also tacitly identified as the individual self) which survives death and then becomes re-associated with phenomenal conditions of bodily existence upon rebirth.
Now, you may not be able to remember a past life as casually as you remember yesterday.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Obviously, fear is a fundamental obstruction to memory, even memory of the present lifetime. You do not feel comfortable with reliving a moment of great pain and suffering. A superficial level of memory is available to you to help you remember difficult times, but to remember them fully requires a different commitment.
In both meditation and hypnosis, one must become more and more capable of associating with the unconscious and transcending the ordinary waking state (in which one tends to be fixed and limited in one’s attention). Therefore, until you can comfortably enter into the domain of the unconscious, you will not be able to move with the mind into a broader field of space and time than the one experienced in your present self-confinement. In general, you do not read other people’s minds, you do not see the future. Rather, your attention is confined to the fixed, gross self.
(Fear as frozen attention: past lives and psychic memory)
The traumatic implication of human existence itself is the only reason that you do not presently possess these psychic abilities. Your attention and mind and being are fixed into rigid self-contraction.
Therefore, although the Influence of the Divine Spiritual Reality is Always Already Effective in your life, you are not (in general) aware of It. You cannot participate in the Perfect Consciousness of Divine Being—nor in various levels of the super-conscious—because your attention is frozen in the waking state, in the limitations of self-contraction. Therefore, you cannot radiate (or expand) into the full field of mind. Thus, you fail to participate in the larger field of conscious existence, because you are locked into this self-knot—a “braindom” of limited consciousness. Consequently, you not only lack profound memory of past lives, but you also have no significant intuition of your future in this lifetime.
But, because of the ego-contraction, attention is limited—and your mind, emotion, body, breath, and relations are all negatively controlled. Your destiny remains this fixed and limited affair that is apparently not Illumined, even though it is structured within Illumination.
Thus, through the process that restores you to the memories of past lives, you begin to transcend the context in which past lives make sense.
To become so Awakened does not necessarily mean that reincarnations cease, but (rather) that the principle that determines reincarnation as a negative event has been overcome. You may still be able to recollect past lives, but (ultimately) the presumption that creates such lives as an automaticity is dissolved. For My Divinely Enlightened devotee, any future lifetimes will be determined by a greater Principle than the unconsciousness of conventional being.
Reincarnation, then, describes the connectedness between lifetimes that establishes conscious existence as continuous rather than episodic (or appearing only when a body arises and disappearing when a body dies). Reincarnation is a subject of very sophisticated knowledge, something you are capable of understanding only in an advanced state of consciousness. Thus, there is no reason for ordinary people to walk around with beliefs about reincarnation.
Then it will again be maintained as a cultural presumption—not just a curious artifact from ancient days, when people were involved in the processes by which reincarnation became obvious to them. From the “Point of View” of Consciousness Itself, however, there is no sense of identity with a personality that is limited by a body. Rather, the individual consciousness (or apparently separate being) is Realized to be a transparent (or merely apparent), and un-necessary, and inherently non-binding modification of Divine Being Itself.
For My Divinely Enlightened devotee, the mind no longer generates the constant chatter that reflects and reinforces the limited self-sense. For such a one, the mind’s content could even belong to other people and other dimensions of time and space. To examine past lifetimes from the “Point of View” of Divinely Enlightened mind, one would have to presume that one was incarnate as every other being that had ever existed!
You can understand reincarnation only when you have Awakened to the Infinite Paradox of Real Existence.
Likewise, there are individual beings, all the relations of those beings, and the infinity of the phenomena of the world—but, on the other hand, there is nothing but Unqualified Fullness. There is multiplicity, and there is the Oneness of Fullness That Is No-Thingness.
Therefore, the final descriptions of your existence are full of paradoxes. Ultimately, you must become speechless.
The Mystery of a Human Birth A Talk by Avatar Adi Da Samraj
“This Maya cannot be comprehended”—this conditional appearance cannot be figured out in its totality. It cannot be perceived in its entirety from any limited point of view. But you want to figure it out and make all this into some kind of intellectual matter. You want to make it into a package of some kind that limits you to your own mind. You cannot truly understand any of this great “Consideration” from the point of view of limitation. You can participate in it meaningfully, but you cannot comprehend it, or tie it down, or come up with a final description of it. It is utterly impossible. The cosmos is multitudinously infinite. It is beyond mental comprehension. It is beyond mind.
(Reincarnation: the deeper personality and karmic continuity)
Divine Self-Realization is not just about the transcending of your present thinking-thinking-thinking. It is about the transcending of mind altogether.
DEVOTEE: Beloved Adi Da, You have said that all beings that have ever existed are still alive now. AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: In one form or another, in one place or another within the Cosmic Mandala.
It is very difficult (and, ultimately, impossible) to talk about such matters, or make sense out of them, from the point of view of the gross brain-mind.
me. I now became a complete convert to the idea that Swami Vivekananda was the Deeper Personality Vehicle of Beloved Adi Da. The more convinced I became of this correspondence and the more I studied Swami Vivekananda and his disciples, the more I began to live in the world of Swami Vivekananda.
During this time, I felt as if I were literally walking on air. I was in a cloud of enthusiasm, constantly making connections between the 1980s and the 1890s. I was as much in the cold Himalayan foothills with Swami Vivekananda as in the summer heat of the California coastal range.
was like a 500-pound food addict who has decided to spend only $25 instead of $30 on his afternoon snack!
Dear James, What is the difference between fanciful egoic identification with a character in past time and fanciful egoic identification with a character in present time? Do not resort to the mind, but to understanding. The thinking mind does not know the past, the present, or the future. Who the ego was or is or will be may become evident if the deep psyche or unthinking mind reveals it, but even that unthinking mind is only the ego, the self-contraction, and all its personas are merely the ponded images of “Narcissus”. Therefore, do not resort to the mind or psyche, but understand the self-contraction. Transcend illusions, motives, self-imagery, and all conceits. Be energized by insight into motion, and cease to be motivated by the machine of egoic self. Thus, transcend the self-contraction and intuit the True Self-Condition, directly and intuitively. Love, Da The words carried a tremendous Transmission of Beloved Adi Da’s Blessing and Love, and I instantly began to awaken from my dream of the psyche. Only as I began to emerge from my psychic universe did I realize how far I had actually gone. I saw that my Beloved Guru had spared me years—perhaps lifetimes!—of fascination with the deep psyche and reincarnation. I felt myself descending to the ground again—it was actually a physical sensation of descent. I was restored to my real practice of the Way of Adidam—which was difficult, but real.
Every human personality, Avatar Adi Da has explained, is composed of a gross (or physical) vehicle (the body, derived from one’s parents) and a subtle vehicle (the deeper mechanism of the ego that moves from life to life). In order to be born, Adi Da Samraj required a subtle vehicle attuned to the task of bringing true Spirituality to the modern West.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: “Deeper personality” is a term I use to indicate everything that is called the “subtle dimension” of the conditional being and also what is called the “causal dimension” of the conditional being. The deeper personality exists prior to the physical. It is not unconscious—it is functioning, conscious, but the body and its grossly-oriented brain have no awareness of it. You do not think its thoughts. You do not have its memories. You do not remember previous incarnations, usually. Nevertheless, this deeper personality is appearing. Its destiny is being manifested through the present-time incarnation. Its tendencies are being shown there.
This is what most people call “I”. That “I” is not a reincarnate. “I” has no memories of past lives, because “I” has not had any past lives—only parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents. But the deeper personality has had previous incarnations. The physical personality is not ordinarily aware of the dimension of the personality that has past lives, but that dimension (nevertheless) manifests in the physical realm in the form of tendencies.
Sadhana is not some fantasy or some option that maybe is true or maybe not, maybe some people like doing it and other people do not. It is a much more profound matter than that. It is the profound matter. It is what existence is about. The world propagandizes itself, diverts everyone (through the mechanism of attention), guides everyone in the direction of self-fulfillment—as if the purpose of existence were to become attached to the conditions that are appearing.
Its purpose is to be surrendered to That Which Is Always Already the Case.
If you do not live this surrender, this process of ego-transcendence, then you are binding yourself—in this lifetime, and beyond it. Thus limited to the consciousness of a gross personality, you do not understand what you are doing. You do not understand the consequences of your own actions. You have lost the thread of tradition and the ancient experience. You do not know what you are creating for yourself as a result of your actions in this lifetime. You are frittering your lives away with Western and “Westernized” karmas—and you do not understand the results of doing that, in this life and after it. You spend your life puzzling away whether or not God exists, whether or not there is any survival of death. And, all the while, Real God does Exist, and there is survival of death.
While you are alive, you make mind—and, after you die, mind makes you.
That is why you wonder whether you survive death—because you are not aware of the greater part. When you die, the waking consciousness falls off, the physical falls off—and what was unconscious before (which is outside the grossly-oriented brain) is now who you are and where you are. It is a place. It is the mind-realm. This is what follows life. Death is by no means simply a doorway to heaven. What is on your mind now, when you lose physical attention? What kinds of thoughts do you have, what kinds of dreams do you have, what kinds of fears do you have? Whatever they are, they will make your experience after death. While you are alive, you have physical concentration and a brain that locks you away from the so-called unconscious. You have an opportunity while alive to purify yourself, but what is to be purified is outside the brain. You think it does not even exist—so you just indulge yourself in physical life, as if the physical exists for its own sake.
(No entity passes from life to life: only the conditional process)
Conditional existence is an opportunity for Realization, but most people do not understand that this is so. The body-based mind (or the gross personality) is ruling the world, creating world-culture, creating everyone’s destiny. Therefore, the Realization I am Offering as an opportunity to you, and to everyone in general, may not make sense to most people. They have lost the tradition, lost the experience.
There Is No Entity That Passes from Lifetime to Lifetime
Thus, After bodily death, conditional self-Consciousness Is Progressively Re-Collected Via The Spontaneous (but Habit-caused) Motions Of attention. After the gross body Is Relinquished (In The death-Process), Many Patterns Of psyche (or mind) and form (or body) arise and pass away (in a sequence of various planes of experience), until the re-attainment of a more or less fixed embodiment (or “reincarnation”, or re-birth, as a conditionally Manifested psycho-physical personality) in one of the planes Of The Cosmic Mandala (Possibly Even in the same plane and general locale as in the previous lifetime).
Remembering Occurs Spontaneously—In dreams, or In reveries, or In Meditation. However, most people Claim Never To Have So Remembered. The Reason For This Is That There Is No entity that Passes From lifetime To lifetime. What Proceeds From lifetime To lifetime Is The conditional Process Itself—Not a Fixed (or Eternal) “personal” entity (or An Independent and Separate individual Consciousness). The present lifetime (or the Apparent present personal entity, which is Only the Apparent and conditional body-mind) is the effect of what came before it. The past lifetimes (or All The Cycles Of conditional embodiment) Are Effective As causes for what Follows them.
The True and Only (and Inherently egoless) Conscious Light Is Always Already Existing Transcendentally (or Most Priorly). It Is (Itself) Never an entity (or a conditional, Separate, Independent, and Migrating self, or individual Consciousness). The True and Only (and Inherently egoless) Conscious Light Does Not Move From lifetime To lifetime.
If past moments in the present lifetime Are To Be Remembered, The Only Requirement Is That attention Pass Through The Relatively Superficial (or Surface) Strata Of The Chain Of Recent Memory. However, If past lifetimes Are To Be Remembered, attention Must Migrate Through The deep psychic Core Of The Memory Chain. And This Does Not Tend To Occur (or To Be Noticed), Unless an individual Is Disposed (and, Perhaps, Even Intentionally Oriented) Toward Such psychic Exploration.
Therefore, Memory Of past lifetimes Will Not Necessarily Characterize Your experience in the present lifetime, but Your experience in the present lifetime Will (and Does) Necessarily Reflect (or Express) The Remaining (or Effective) Tendencies Of all past lifetimes (and causes) that preceded (or Effectively caused) the present lifetime. Every birth (or re-birth) Is A Plunge Into material (or Otherwise conditional) ignorance (With Coincident Loss, or Forgetting, Of Divine Ignorance—or Inherent Divine Freedom—Itself).
In Order To Serve In Bodily (Human) Form, Even I Was Required, By My Own Choice, To Relinquish My Own Eternally Free Condition, and (Thus, By Submission To Identification With My Own conditional Body-Mind and Circumstance) To Forget Myself—Until, By Means Of My Own Unique Avataric Ordeal Of Divine Self-Remembering, I Should Re-Awaken To Myself, and Even (At Last) “Emerge” Most Perfectly (As Myself).
The True and Only (and Inherently egoless) Conscious Light Cannot Be Destroyed—but, Once The True and Only (and Inherently egoless) Conscious Light Is (Apparently) Modified conditionally (or Once A conditional Motion Is Established), The Process Of Modification Will Tend To Continue (Indefinitely), Until The Tendency Toward conditional Modification Is (Itself) Transcended and Outshined In The True and Only (and Inherently egoless) Conscious Light (Itself).
but It Can Be Apparently Modified (or Apparently Converted and Changed Into conditional forms). And, Once That Spirit-Energy (or The Inherent Radiance, or Spirit-Force, Of The Fundamental Reality) Is Apparently Modified, Its conditional forms Can Change, or Else Dissolve Into other forms, or Even (If My Avatarically Self-Transmitted Divine Spiritual Grace and Your Devotional and Spiritual Practice Of The Only-By-Me Revealed and Given Way Of The Heart Coincide)
To Change or Dissolve. So It Is (every “where”) Within The Cosmic Domain—and So It Is With (and Within) Your Own body-mind. Because All Of This Is So, conditional Existence Obliges You To Observe, Endure, Most Fundamentally Understand,31 and Really Transcend Every Kind Of Change and Dissolution (Including The Blows Of Apparent loss and death).
I. The Divine Self-“Emergence” From Adi Da and Adidam by Carolyn Lee
As He said, “I allowed all to be exactly what they are.”
Suddenly, one of the devotees supporting His body felt the life-force shoot through Him. His arms flung out in an arc, and His body straightened. His face contorted into a wound of Love and tears began to flow from His eyes.
There He “Wandered” in the manner of a Sannyasin, fiercely free of all worldly ties. To merely behold Him was to be drawn into His Samadhi. His Body had become perfectly transparent to His Divine State. Human beings could now, through devotional contemplation of Him, receive the Transmission of the “Bright” as never before.
The deeper personality is what you call the “reincarnate”, or the “reincarnating personality”. It is also, like the gross being, a karmic entity, a product of cosmic exchanges. It has a karmic destiny. Just as the body has a karmic destiny by virtue of its lineage, the deeper personality has a karmic destiny by virtue of its lineage. In the birth of any individual, the deeper personality becomes conjoined with a gross personality. But the deeper personality functions outside the brain, appears in the form of tendencies and destinies added to the gross personality.
(Avataric descent and the fire that burns karmas)
The Sign of Divine Indifference, and also an advanced form of the Sign of Divine Transformation, has been more and more magnified since My Avataric Divine Self-“Emergence” such that the vehicles are no longer in play. They are no longer becoming the likeness of others in Submission to others.
This is why “Samadhi sites”,36 so-called, are created for Realizers in various traditions. Since ancient times it has been understood that the process of Realization is itself a kind of fire that burns out impurities, releases karmas, removes the obstacles to Realizing What Is Inherently So, or always already the case. In the case of the Realizer, it is presumed that the fire has been allowed to burn everything. In some traditions, when an ordinary individual dies, his or her friends honor what the lifetime was supposed to be about by burning the body and offering prayers of release to continue that fire. But the Realizer’s body is, in effect, already ash, vibhuti, Prasad,37 even while alive.
The Incarnate Realizer, the Divine Self Incarnate, Submitting vehicles to the point of naked, most direct association with living beings, and the devotee, surrendering all these vehicles to the One Prior to all karma, and, yet (paradoxically), Incarnate (or Present).
This Despair manifested as a kind of swooning collapse, bodily and emotionally. There was an Utter Relinquishment of the Body-Mind, a kind of Giving the Body-Mind Up to death.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: The vulgarization of human life is something that must be changed—and among the things that must be changed is the kind of treatment the dead generally receive, even the kind of treatment the sick receive from medical people whose sole purpose is to keep the individual alive. Only on some level is that purpose laudable and right.
There is a between-lifetimes period which is like sleep and dreams, and which is mind-made.
They like to have the bodies planted out there so they can use them as sacred images, fret over them, and feel they still have a connection to them. They do not want to let them go.
Human beings live like knowers, striving toward absolute information—but death is a perfect insult that frustrates all knowing. The death of an other convicts one of one’s own death, and makes one wonder. But no ultimate knowledge comes from this wondering. Death is the frustration of knowledge.
Be certain of no knowledge. Be the sacrifice of all conditions in every moment—and (thus) abide in Communion with the Eternal Truth (Wherein the root of your independence is eternally hidden, and your common Identity is Always Already Revealed).
The feeling of sorrow does not really take into account the one who has died, except as someone from whom you have become separated.
(Realization as the only liberation from loss)
The Dreaded Gom-Boo is a real disease in the sense that you experience it and are animated in it every day of your life—but it is imaginary (or unreal) in the sense that it is not necessary, not based in reality. It is just an automaticity. It has no necessity.
But people are so full of their rituals, so bound up by forces of habit and states of reactivity, that they are not free to enter the real Spiritual process—because they must attend to all their egoic rituals and serve their egoic priesthood. It is almost as if they were paid employees of cosmic Nature. Because people have all these obligations, they are (therefore) not free to practice Freedom and Truth.
Realization Is the Only Liberation from Loss A Talk by Avatar Adi Da Samraj
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: As far as the pain of loss goes, there is no answer to the pain of loss—except for Realization Itself.
Realization is the only Liberation from loss—just as It is the only Liberation from the circumstance in which loss is possible.
It is clinging to illusions that makes Realization impossible.
Seeking is always about pursuing something or other that will be satisfactory or consoling in the midst of an inherently mortal circumstance—in which it is, in fact, not possible to be altogether satisfied or consoled. It is not possible, except through illusions.
You are going to lose everyone, and everyone is going to lose you.
The experience of terrible loss, like any number of other experiences that are potential in life, is a wound that should move you to What Is Great, rather than fasten you to itself.
You will turn the faculties to Me—instead of turning them upon that memory-collection, with all of its contents (including the sorrow).
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: And then what? While you are alive in the bodily state, you like to secure yourself in various ways. You define your “territory” (so to speak), define your image and your association with it, try to create security of a kind. You define your awareness by all those things, and you act as if it is forever. In fact, however, basically none of those things pertain after death. There is conscious awareness, but the means you have (while alive) to define yourself and maintain your security are gone.
Therefore, you should, rather directly and simply—rather quickly, even—come to a point of certainty about survival of death. Such certainty allows you to practice for the sake of a greater purpose than merely improving the situation of this present body. Practice, yes, in the context of the body presently—the body must be surrendered.
Whereas those who are without self-understanding, without devotion, whose motion is isolation, self-contraction, a life that is not Godward and that is irresponsible relative to the Law (or the Great Matter, or the Very Divine), and even relative to cosmic laws—such apparent individuals suffer while alive, and will continue to suffer.
Do not fool yourself any longer that you can live for the sake of this bodily life. You must function in the context of what you are about altogether. You must purify your “house”, and surrender in heart-Communion with Me—rather than attempting to achieve security by holding on to things that will inevitably disappear.
here. If you had a better understanding of how things really work, you would see that you also expect things to be better after death and better next time—whether you think about it or not.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Spiritual life is about Realizing Perfect Love-Bliss-Happiness—greater Bliss than is realized through sex or any other conditional experience. Such Love-Bliss-Happiness may be Realized before, during, and after any conditional experience. If you Realize It, if you devote your life to the Realization of That, then That is your destiny—a life devoted to the Realization of That, a life of Communion with That.
Because of how things are, you must transcend these conditions—not merely struggle to fulfill yourself within them. You yourself are a condition among these conditions. All conditioning, all of mind, all presumed limitation on Love-Bliss-Happiness must be transcended.