(The ancient longing to know and live the Truth of existence)
a Divine response to the most ancient prayers and longings of human beings to know the Truth of existence and to live in conformity with that Truth.
Both seemed to me mere ideas, possible reactions to a more fundamental (if unconscious) fact. I sought Reality, to be Reality—What is, not what is asserted in the face of What is. —The Knee of Listening
(Surrendering to the shape of conflict until sudden revolution)
I observed this deep sensation of conflict and endlessly multiplied contradictions, such that I was surrendered to its very shape, as if to experience it perfectly and to be it. Then, quite suddenly, in a moment, I experienced a total revolution in my body-mind, and (altogether) in my humanly-born conscious awareness.
was by means of the breakthrough of the “Bright” Itself, in the midst of that stress of seeking, that the bondage to problem was transcended. It became inherently obvious that what is otherwise sought is That Which Is Always Already the Case. You cannot seek It. Seeking does not achieve It—because to seek It you must presume that It is not the case. So what was necessary, then, simply was to understand the search itself—not pursue it, but understand it. —January 5, 1996
Day after day, wherever He was, Avatar Adi Da would carry a clipboard and a pad of yellow paper, of the kind that could be cheaply bought in stationery stores. On these pages, He would write down all that occurred in His awareness. When He wandered alone on the beach below the remote cottage where He lived, He wrote down every thought and mind-form that arose with each step on the sand, and even His perception of the very action of stepping itself. He was placing His awareness under a powerful microscope, so that its inmost mechanics would stand out and its secret patterning would be revealed.
(The root of all seeking: the presumption of being separate)
No longer could there be any doubt about the origin of the impulse to seek. It stood out to Avatar Adi Da that the root of all seeking is the “self”-identity—the presumption of being a separate entity adrift in a threatening world.
happenings, rather than intuitions of major events. Thus, it was becoming evident to Him that the apparently internal and apparently external dimensions of experience are not really separate domains, but are part of one continuum of conscious awareness.
But Real God is simply the Shining, Conscious Being That Is your Nature at all times and under all circumstances.
The perpetual psycho-physical revolutions of My Life had drawn Me, by Means of the “Thumbs”, into a sense of the Perfect Presence. There was simply the sense of being in and of the Transcendental Spiritual Presence That was both Truth Itself and Reality Itself. It was a Perfectly Absorbing, Heartening, and Illuminating Force, That Contained Me, “Lived” Me, and Guided Me. —The Gnosticon
(The moment of recognition: pure Consciousness, no separation)
On September 9, 1970, as He sat alone in the temple, Avatar Adi Da fell into a state where He knew Himself only as pure Consciousness, without form. Then, pressing against Him with immense polarized force, He experienced the familiar Spiritual Presence that had been guiding Him, and which He felt to be the Energy, or Power, or Light of all conditionally manifested existence. In the midst of that utterly overwhelming process, all polarity, all separation, all difference resolved in an unspeakable singularity of Love-Bliss.
There is no “Other” Source. I simply sat there—and Knew What and Who I Am.… I Am the Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Reality Itself.
There, from April 1972, He began to give regular talks in the back room of the store, accepting all comers with open arms.
(The teaching as relationship, not method)
The posters in the window of the bookstore showed His picture, and simply said, “I offer not a method, but a relationship.” Avatar Adi Da was inviting people to the time-honored relationship of love and mutual sacrifice that exists between a Spiritually awakened Master and his or her disciple, or devotee.
There was a force and radiance in His company that seemed to rearrange the very cells of the body. People came back again and again just to be in the room with Him. And He began to explain that this was the relationship of which He spoke—an ecstatic participation in His State (and thus, in the “Bright” Itself) with all the faculties of the being. He did not even have to be physically present—the remembrance of Him, a devotionally surrendered turning to Him, moment to moment, would invoke Him constantly into the body and mind of the devotee.
The “I”, or ego, He said, does not, in fact, exist. It is an illusory presumption, but one that is universally shared, and creating the world of struggle and bewilderment that everyone suffers.
He would draw people to feel that we are literally making the “I” by “doing” a fist—by contracting awareness upon the locus of the body, and identifying with the perceiving body as “self” or “subject” in relation to all other presumed “selves” or “objects”. Summarizing all of this, Avatar Adi Da later wrote:
The ego-presumption, as Avatar Adi Da showed, is patterning the nervous system, the structure of perception, and the micro-energies of the body-mind. It cannot be undone by thinking, because thinking itself is governed by the same patterning!
You must Realize a right view of conditional existence. You Stand in the Position of Consciousness Itself, and everything that arises to Consciousness is a form of Free Energy. Just That. Even the most solid forms are just That, and this is obvious from the “Disposition” of Consciousness Itself—whereas from the “point of view” of the body-mind-complex, it is not even obvious what the Status of personal consciousness is, or the Status of any thing, or any state. It is just stuff, “thingness”. Apart from Divine Self-Realization, the Divine Status of anything is not intuited or presumed. In the Position of Consciousness Itself it is clear that there is only Consciousness in a Domain of Infinite Energy. All kinds of “things” are arising, but they are only modifications of the Energy of Consciousness. This is the Divine Vision I am Talking about, the Vision that makes all the difference. It is the Vision associated with Divine Enlightenment. —Avatar Adi Da Samraj July 9, 1983
Rather, He was saying it is necessary that the body-mind be drawn into a greater Field than the ego-field it is creating and perpetuating. This, He said, is His Function: to reveal the
In that Prior Field, the presumption of separateness, the “I”-“other” construct, dissolves like a mirage.
The body and mind of the human being goes where it is attracted.
Avatar Adi Da’s purpose was to develop a way of life for human beings, based on the living knowledge of Reality Itself, a Spiritual culture that would be new in the world, because it would be founded from the beginning in What Is—always revealed in the devotional relationship to Him—rather than in any search to attain What Is. He knew that this would be a profoundly difficult undertaking, but He had no mind about it, no foreknowledge of the outcome.
They were simply in His company, and wild things were happening! Some devotees shook, their bodies jerking and twisting, their mouths emitting strange sounds of yearning, laughter, weeping, hooting, and howling. Some were overwhelmed by visionary phenomena. Some were spontaneously moved into difficult Hatha Yoga poses which they could not have even attempted before. Some lay motionless, in an ecstatic state, oblivious of their surroundings. For some, the energy intensified in the head or the heart or the area of the navel until they felt they would explode, and then it suddenly released and rushed through the nervous system in intoxicating bliss. Others experienced a sense of unity with all of life and a peacefulness they had never known before.
(Experiences are not it: reality is prior to all seeking and attainment)
Was this enlightenment? No. Avatar Adi Da was always making the same lesson. The experiences, He said, sublime as they might be, are not the point. They are not “It”. In fact, they are deluding. This does not mean that they are to be suppressed. Rather, if such experiences arise, one just recognizes them as “garbage”—something to be thrown away, not hoarded or sought after! Reality Itself, or the Real Divine, is prior to all experience, external and internal. Reality Itself is the only perfect and searchless Satisfaction, not any of the “objects”, gross or subtle, that the separate “I” can attain by seeking. Thus, in every moment and circumstance during these dramatic months on the Mountain Of Attention, Avatar Adi Da was finding ways to turn His devotees to Him, to the “Bright” Itself, rather than to any of the experiences that might be triggered in the body-mind by His Transmission of the “Bright”.
The “God” they had been brought up to believe in was supposed to have created and to be actively sustaining all separate selves! The Transmission of Avatar Adi Da, as they were discovering, was a “Bright” Force of undifferentiated Being, which, by its very nature, undermines and obliterates the “self”-idea.
He was passionate to show His devotees that the virtue of this “radical” devotion is that it can (and must) be practiced under all conditions.
(The teacher as perfect mirror of the ego’s every pattern)
Even as He participated fully in the lives of His devotees, Avatar Adi Da was just the “Water Itself”, the pure Reflector of what the ego is, wants, and does—its anger, sorrow, fear, its punishing rituals of rejection and betrayal, its obliviousness, its banality, its lust for attention and adoration, its failure to love, its suffering in the face of loss and death. By all kinds of skillful means, Avatar Adi Da gave ample room for every devotee to play out his or her ego-patterning, and He—by the perfect remark, or shout, or silence, or gesture, or criticism, or demand—reflected back what the individual devotee, or the collective of devotees, was “up to”. His Compassion was fathomless. There was no end to His patience, His tenderness, His humor, nor His fierceness—His power to shock an individual into feeling how he or she was doing the ego, or contracting into the “fist” of “I”. He did not care what anyone’s particular qualities or characteristic ego-pattern might be. It was all the same to Him.
Why do you think so much? You seem to be unable to endure even a moment without another thought, without another “objective experience”, without something to console you, something to entertain you, something to stimulate yourself with, something to be hopeful about. That is the ego-game, the game of seeking—showing its signs of adaptation, of patterning.
Separateness—with all its effects—is an illusion. Non-separateness is the Truth, the Condition of Reality (Itself).… The only-by-Me Revealed and Given Reality-Way of Adidam is a profound (and most “radical”, or always “at-the-root”), and most creative (and beyond wonderful), and absolute (and, truly, Divine) Yoga. —The Seven Stages of Life How does one support the practice of “radical” devotion in the midst of all the forms and activities of human existence? The design of what Avatar Adi Da calls “right life” was the second element of the Reality-Way of Adidam that
He would laugh, and call a party! Alternatively, when devotees had begun to feel that all that was necessary was to stay in the room with Him and enjoy themselves, He would immediately restore the given life-disciplines, which He had first established in the early
The practice of the disciplines was always reflecting back to devotees their double-mindedness, arising as both an earnest, even puritanical, “must-fulfill-the-disciplines-because-it-is-expected” disposition, and a resistive, “try-to-get-away-with-the-minimum” disposition—or, more subtly, a “fudging-here-and-there-can’t-hurt” attitude. The actual content of mind was beside the point. It was getting the reflection that mattered, the stark revelation that such double-mindedness, oppositions, and contradictions are built into the “I”-“other” view of existence. It is a machine that never stops.
The actual content of mind was beside the point. It was getting the reflection that mattered, the stark revelation that such double-mindedness, oppositions, and contradictions are built into the “I”-“other” view of existence. It is a machine that never stops.
Many of the problems in the “world” have to do with double-mindedness, the “subject”-“object” division, the body-mind division, the spirit-flesh division, the “self”-and-“other” division. The dividedness of human consciousness is a fundamental problem, and source of problems.
The Reality-Way of Adidam is about no-problem, no-search, not-two. I have Addressed every kind of issue in human life, from the most mundane to the most profound, in terms of this principle of no-“problem”, no-seeking, not-two.
The “world” is in a state of utter bewilderment because of egoity. Egoity, “point of view”, separateness, “self”-contraction—such is the basis of human design in the mummery of the ordinary “world”. In that circumstance of ego-made awareness, people seek the Divine. They are moved to seek the Divine because the egoic life is the very form of suffering.
Thus, in the context of the search, the Divine is seen only through the “lens” of the human “problem”, and not As Is. If the Divine were seen As Is from the beginning, human life would already be established in a different condition and circumstance than that of egoity. The Divine Is Reality Itself.
(The Bright as omni-presence: not in time, simply here)
My Divine Secret Is This: I Am Eternally Present, and I Am Omni-Present. I am not, Myself, in time. I am not, Myself, of time. I Am Simply here—As I Am. I have been the Same from the beginning—and from Birth. I Am the “Bright”—here.