The enterprise of freeing up energy and attention need not take
place solely in the individual sphere. Like-impulsed spiritual
practitioners —
whom Avatar Adi Da Samraj refers to as “good company” —
can cooperate, and live together and work together in a cooperative
fashion that creatively frees up time, energy, attention and money:
Imagine
how much stress you could release from your life if you agreed
to live simply, to reduce the costs of life, and to cooperate
with one another. This cooperation is the true politics to which
I call My devotees. When will you abandon your castle and live
in common with others? All of a sudden, you will have excess money,
excess time, excess energy, more time for [Spiritual practice],
less money wasted in consoling yourself with the ordinary life.
You can use your resources to develop your cooperative life and
the circumstances and the facilities you share with others. That
is what I actually Call you to do! Live on the basis of truly
right principles of living, and live very happily, very productively,
and have full time for all the practices of the Way of Adidam.
Just give up your diversions and stop trying to blend in with
the herd of the common world. Embrace the principles that enable
you to handle all your life-business while living in this world
of stress.
Avatar
Adi Da Samraj, I Give You The Gift Of One Another
Again,
like all the disciplines, the discipline of cooperative community
cuts into an addictive habit: that
of living separately as “householders” in our separate family
“castles”, and thus avoiding making ourselves vulnerable to
the influence of and agreements with others that is a necessary
part of such a cooperative arrangement. But again, like all
the other disciplines, once the adaptation has been made to
this new habit, great energy and attention are released for
the Greater Purpose.
Energy
and attention are not only bound at the individual level. The
nature of the government or State in which we live, the news
and politics of the times, and the actual state of the world,
all bind our attention, generally in a very negative way. The
establishment of local cooperative communities is the beginning
of a process which, when, carried out on a global scale, begins
to relieve world tensions and relieve everyone of the anxiety
that comes from the fear of global threat or annihilation:
Fundamentally,
there is only bad “news” in the ordinary, ego-based, un-Enlightened,
chaotic world. Instead of waiting for . . . whatever it is that
you wait for all the time — you must, yourself, become involved
in intimate, cooperative community with other human beings.
In a responsible, mutually dependent, cooperative, tolerant,
peaceful, and intimate relationship with other human beings,
you must create and protect the basics of a truly human culture
and of a truly intimate daily human society. … The principal
characteristics that stand at the root of any civilization are
those of cooperative, human-scale community itself. …those characteristics
are … cooperation, interrelatedness, interdependence, non-competitiveness,
true (or positive, rather than merely insipid) harmlessness,
and positive (or ego-transcending, and other-serving, rather
than merely self-negating) self-sacrifice.