If
you will continue to observe it, you will discover that
you are not merely chronically limited in feeling, or
un-Happy, but you are doing that. You do not have to
be limited in your feeling, but you are just doing that.
If you don't want to be un-Happy, then don't do that
anymore! Don't appeal to the universe to cure you, or
say the universe is evil, or get involved in all kinds
of counter-efforts in psyche and mind and emotion and
body and socially to make yourself Happy. If you are
already un-Happy, you cannot get Happy by any of that.
And if you really do not want to be un-Happy anymore,
you must observe yourself and stop being un-Happy, stop
doing what is un-Happiness. And what is un-Happiness,
fundamentally, but the limitation on Feeling?
AVATAR
ADI DA SAMRAJ: People sometimes notice about themselves
that they do not feel good, they do not feel strong, they do
not find themselves free to be emotionally expressive or sympathetic,
and they try all kinds of methods to cure themselves of this.
They may try to develop
a counter-emotion. If they are depressive types, they try to
be very jolly and outgoing. If they are not sympathetic with
people, they try to get really interested and really put out
energy and "love-vibrations", make "love-stares"
at everybody, and constantly tell people how much they love
them.
Or they may use psychiatric
methods to get themselves to be more emotional. They may review
their past, trying to locate memories that cause them to be
emotionally rigid, or memories that are a kind of wound that
is preventing them from being emotional. Or they may watch their
dreams to see if they can find some keys in their dreaming that
will unlock their emotional power.
Or they may try to become
religious. They may read a lot about religion. They may go to
religious organizations and try to believe something great about
reality that will make them able to feel more strongly, feel
more openly, just feel happy and not resistive and contracted.
Or they may try to fall
in love all the time —
again and again and again. They
may indulge themselves sexually and become very promiscuous.
They may try to make a lot of friends. They may look to be loved.
They may indulge themselves
physically, creating a sense of feeling-pleasure about themselves
by being full of food, never empty, never not eating, never
not sexing. They may talk compulsively, they may think compulsively,
as a way of generating an energy in themselves to counter their
feeling of depression and emptiness.
They may make themselves
very helpful to people by engaging in humanitarian works, social
motivations, "do-good-erism". They might want to teach
people, to go out and tell people where it's at in order to
confirm to themselves that there is something true they can
feel good about.
And so on
—
and on and
on and on. In other words, everybody
—
not just
a few people who cannot be expressive emotionally, but
everybody
—
is doing
something to cure what he or she regards to be a disease of
emotion. And yet the reasons for being emotionally retarded,
emotionally dissociative, or emotionally disturbed are not eliminated
through all the things that people are doing. Anyone can in
some moment perhaps feel a little better, but people fail in
the ultimate sense
—
they
do not become finally, simply Happy.
Whatever you are doing,
then
—
social,
physical, mental, psychic, or emotional
—
is
a dramatization of an emotional disease, or what I would rather
call a "disease of feeling". By "feeling"
I do not mean merely emotion, in the sense that you could engage
in a counter-effort to your obstructed emotionality or obstructed
feeling by becoming more and more emotional. By "feeling"
I mean the Feeling of Being, which cannot be compartmented into
that neurological portion of ourselves in which we acknowledge
emotion, but which is really an occupation of the entire personality.
The total body-mind is
established in this Feeling. Feeling is as much a part of mind
as it is of emotion. It is just as much a physical matter, or
a social matter. It is equally a psychic or psychological matter.
It is a Spiritual
matter. Every aspect of the
being Is, or is established in, the Feeling of Being. Therefore,
even though what I call "feeling" is obviously related
to what you acknowledge to be emotion, it is not a feeling that
can be compartmented, separated from mind or body, located in
a portion of the brain or the anatomy of the chest. Every part
of the being
—
every
aspect of the body-mind-psyche, thinking mind, emotion, body,
your relational or social life, and so forth
—
is
a limit on the Feeling of Being, a dramatization of self-contraction.
And, therefore, to recover the Feeling of Being, or to be unobstructed
in this Feeling, you must not become more emotional merely,
by developing the emotional aspect of yourself. Rather, the
entire body-mind must submit to Be That, to Feel That, and without
obstruction.
The Spiritual Process
involves the liberation of energy and attention
—
from
bondage, from contraction, from limitation. And limited or obstructed
energy and attention are both signed by the same phenomenon
—
the
limitation of the Feeling of Being. Whatever arises, you do
not Feel completely, you do not Feel freely, you do not Feel
simply. You are limited in your feeling relative to everything,
absolutely everything. And so your fundamental disease, even
though it is unnecessary and therefore could be called "imaginary",
is a limitation on Feeling.
But rather than just
feeling diseased emotionally (and perhaps altogether), and trying
to overwhelm your limitation with some other effort, some palliative
or medication or regimen whereby you hope to relieve yourself,
you must first simply and profoundly observe your own characteristic
limitations. And you are helped to observe your characteristic
limitations through My Argument, through My
Play. This is
what I do
—
although
that is not all that I do. One Who is Awakened beyond the disease
of Being helps other people to Realize the True or Divine Condition.
But to Realize the Divine
Condition you must go through a process of self-transcendence.
That process begins with considering My Argument relative to
the self-contraction, the limit on Feeling. And how do you consider
My Argument? Not merely by thinking philosophically, but by
observing yourself no matter what you are doing, even while
thinking philosophically.
My Work helps you to
become sensitive to yourself altogether, and to enter into a
profound incident of self-awareness in which you will observe
not merely that you are diseased or un-Happy, and not merely
that you are emotionally disturbed, or in any other way disturbed,
or even in every way disturbed
—
but
that you
are doing that. You
are being
un-Happy. You yourself are the
action that is your neurosis, your limitation. It is not merely
something that is happening to the body-mind, or that happened
sometime or other in the past, or that is somewhere in the organs
of the body or in the brain. It is nowhere in time or space
outside yourself. You are the very party, the very process,
that is the limitation creating the phenomena you notice and
acknowledge to be your un-Happiness.
And so your un-Happiness
is not a disease at all. Disease is like a sore foot. It is
down there, on the foot. A foot is something you treat objectively.
Your own un-Happiness is not a disease. That is another reason
I call it an "imaginary disease", because it is not
a disease in any case. It is an action. It is something that
you are doing. Pinching yourself is not a disease. But if you
do not notice that you are pinching yourself, then the pinch
gradually becomes chronic, even prolonged, pain. You react to
it in various ways, and your whole style of life begins to change
around it. You could call that pain a "disease", then.
But the action of pinching yourself is not a disease. It is
just an action. If you noticed you are doing it, you could stop
it and all the symptoms would disappear as well.
Even without great insight,
people can acknowledge that they are suffering, that they are
uncomfortable, that they are un-Happy. Certainly in private
conversation they will confess it, even though they are doing
all kinds of things to make themselves feel better all the time.
That is why people think so much, that is why they emote so
much, that is why they desire so much, that is why they do so
much, and that is also why they suffer so much. The search to
release suffering is itself a form of suffering. It is not the
solution to suffering. You must do more than notice that you
are suffering and strive to eliminate it. That is only minimally
intelligent and ultimately fruitless.
That "more"
that you must do is something that I am trying to illustrate
in this picture of you pinching yourself. You must observe yourself
more profoundly, much more thoroughly, than merely to acknowledge
that you do not feel so good, or that you are generally unhappy,
or complicated, or obstructed. You must observe yourself thoroughly
and moment to moment in every detail, and truly, and directly,
and altogether, not merely by thinking about yourself. Merely
observe yourself in every sense, altogether, including your
tendency to be thinking and mulling over everything.
Observe yourself until
you get beyond the mere acknowledgement that you do not feel
so good and beyond the tendency to try to feel better. Observe
that this not feeling good is something you are doing. It is
not something that is happening to you. Un-Happiness is not
the inherent condition of cosmic Nature, or of the body-mind,
or of manifest existence. It is something added
to conditional existence. It
is a reaction to all of that. A person who has been pinching
himself or herself for a long time, and who finds out that that
is what he or she is doing, stops doing it. Understanding is
like that
—
it
relieves you of the concept of disease and the effort to solve
a problem. It puts you in a different position altogether, the
position of responsibility for a primitive mechanism that you
are animating and that you do not have to animate. There must
be this understanding, or the discovery that what you acknowledge
to be disease, un-Happiness, obstruction, and so forth, is simply
something that you are doing to yourself, something that you
are fully responsible for, something that is without necessity,
something that you are adding to conditional existence
—
something
that you are animating, in fact, instead of simply Being, truly
and fully.
And if there is this
understanding, if you stop pinching yourself, if you simply
Stand Prior to this gesture of un-Happiness, then you are in
a position to contact, to "Locate", to be aware of,
to be intimate with, and then to be submitted to the Condition
in Which you truly exist, in Which you always already exist,
in Which all of cosmic Nature exists, in Which all beings exist.
And having "Located" That, you can practice the Way
of Adidam. Practice of the Way of Adidam is primarily submission
to that Divine Condition, through My Agency. Practice makes
use of this capability for insight. It makes use of all kinds
of disciplines that serve your equanimity, or that release energy
and attention from habitual tendencies that simply dramatize
un-Happiness. But primarily practice is submission to the Divine
Condition of Being by surrendering
the faculties of your body-mind to Me. Primarily, then,
practice of the Way of Adidam is Feeling without obstruction.
In every moment a different
circumstance arises, and therefore in every moment you tend
to limit feeling in a different fashion. In a moment of desire,
you limit feeling to what is desirable, to what you are seeking
to attain, to the sensations and activities associated with
desire and its fulfillment. In a moment of thinking, you exercise
the limitation of feeling by limiting attention to the conceptual
categories of thought. In a moment of emotional reaction you
limit feeling to the emotional force of reactivity
—
fear,
sorrow, anger, what is called "love" in the conventions
of gesturing to one another socially. Every object, every condition,
that arises mechanically suggests or calls into being a different
kind of limitation on Feeling. And you typically become that
limitation. No matter what arises, you take on that limitation.
And because you chronically take on a limitation in every moment,
over time you begin to get the sense that you are un-Happy,
that you are obstructed. And your search to become Happy becomes
intensified.
Some people keep looking
for something more, something else, something in the conventional
round, some solution that still may hold out to them the possibility
of being completely free and happy. But some people eventually
get the Lesson of life, or
perhaps, by coming into the Company of a Spiritual Master, through
consideration they may come to the conclusion finally that they
are chronically un-Happy
—
and
not because manifest existence is un-Happy. They discover eventually
that they are un-Happy because they are being un-Happy, and
for no other reason whatsoever. Those who get the Lesson of
life, at least to some degree, may then go and find a Spiritual
Master. Others may at least become frustrated enough that they
begin to look for a Spiritual Master, and eventually they may
get this Lesson in the Spiritual Master's Company.
In any case, you must
get this Lesson, or make this discovery, if you are going to
enter into the stream of Spiritual life. And what you must discover,
once you get this Lesson, and once you find a Source
of Spiritual Transmission, is that you
are precisely that which you
are suffering. You are not merely being it as an entity who
is suffering, but you are active
as that suffering. This action
is primarily a limitation on Feeling. And this limitation on
Feeling may be observed in relation to everything, absolutely
everything, in the moment of any kind of functional activity
and in any circumstance, any relationship, any incident.
Even now, if you observe
yourself, you are not Feeling without obstruction. You are feeling
the limit that is apparent. Isn't it obvious to you that you
are feeling short, not Feeling fully, but feeling a limit based
on whatever you are noticing, or however it impresses you, or
however you are interpreting it in this moment? You will notice,
if you observe yourself, that even now
—
in
a circumstance that you presumably regard to be pleasant, happy,
not troubled, with no heavy threats
—
even
in this circumstance you are feeling short. You are feeling
un-Happy, in fact
—
not
un-Happy in the sense that you are in some kind of negative
emotional state, but what I suggest that you observe is that
you are not infinitely Happy, not Feeling without obstruction.
If you are not Feeling without obstruction, you are feeling
short, or contracting upon the force of Feeling, the force of
Being, and you are, therefore, being actively un-Happy. This
limit on Feeling that you all have been noticing during this
consideration is what I am pointing to with such language as
"Narcissus", the
"self-contraction", "un-Happiness", and
so on.
That fundamental limit
that you can observe in your own case in any moment is a limitation
on Feeling, an obstruction of Feeling, which is demonstrated
in every form of your functional life. This limit on Feeling
that you can observe in any moment, if you will grant attention
to it through our consideration, is otherwise demonstrated as
all kinds of habits of mind, states of the psyche, tendencies
toward emotional reactivity, tendencies of desire, habits and
rituals in relation to other people, self-indulgence, seeking
of every kind, and personality games. All of that is built on
this one specimen, this one incident, this one state, which
is continuous. And that chronic state of un-Happiness is transferred
to the whole world.
You all know that in
the world of psychiatry, people speak of transference. Patients
of psychiatrists typically project onto their psychiatrist feelings,
emotional reactions, and patterns that they otherwise tend to
live out with individuals in their private lives
—
such
as parents
—
and
in effect they make the psychiatrist the same person that they
are reacting to in their daily living.
In the common world also
there is a primary form of transference that everyone engages
in. You do not have to be a patient of a psychiatrist to be
doing it. All people transfer, or superimpose upon others and
upon the whole world, the disease they are suffering. That disease
colors the whole world, colors
relationships, causes people to act and feel and think in various
ways in relation to others. The infantile personality who develops
the Oedipal conflict is actually transferring to (or projecting
upon) the parents an emotional state, a feeling-state of limitation,
and the child is interpreting what is taking place between the
parents as a literal betrayal of him or her. Generally, at any
rate, the parents are just living out their lives together and
loving this little child, but the child thinks that the parents
are involved in some horrible betrayal. And the sense of betrayal
is so profound that it affects the child for the rest of his
or her life.
That is an example of
transference. But so is everything else that people do. Everyone
transfers upon the world, superimposes upon the world and all
relations, a state for which they themselves are responsible,
a state that originates in themselves, not in the world. You
could say, then, that the classical Buddhist interpretation
of conditional reality or the conditional universe is a form
of transference: "Life is suffering. Existence is suffering."
How did existence get to be suffering? How did manifest existence
—
the
whole universe
—
get
to be suffering? As if the Buddhist had actually examined everything
and come to this conclusion! Even if such a Buddhist has examined
a great deal, he or she is always looking at all that through
the color of his or her own disease, and transferring that disease
to the world. And he or she starts operating on the world itself,
or the apparently objective phenomena of the body-mind, struggling
to eliminate the phenomena of the world as if they were themselves
some sort of evil.
The notion of sin in
the Judeo-Christian tradition is a similar example of transference,
whereby human unhappiness becomes associated with the idea of
an objective historical cause: It is Adam and Eve, and what
they did in the Garden with God! Or by birth, because of your
character, because of the great universal Fall, you are objectively
caused to be a sinner. Therefore, you must be objectively caused
to get to Heaven, or to be happy, or to be Spiritually alive.
Therefore, God Incarnate must come down and get murdered and
go through a ritual that, objectively, makes it unnecessary
for you to be guilty, whereas previously you were necessarily
guilty.
You all engage in this
rather primitive effort of transference because you are not
responsible for yourselves. Having made this act of transference,
everything you do, then
—
everything
you do religiously, philosophically, and so forth
—
is
something that you must transcend. You must transcend your religions
and your philosophies, insofar as all of that is merely an extension
of your own irresponsible suffering, and in general it all is.
There clearly are moments in the
Great Tradition
—
great
individuals, great evidence here and there
—
that
truly are about the transcendence of conditional existence,
and about Divine Self-Realization. But then there is all the
rest of it
—
just
as you could say that the picture of human history has great
moments and great individuals, but then there is all the rest
of it. And most of it is "all the rest of it". And
most of religion is "all the rest of it". Most of
the Great Tradition is "all the rest of it", the product
of human irresponsibility, egoity, or un-Happiness, It is made
out of the same state that you, in this very homely, ordinary
moment, acknowledge to be the case: obstructed feeling.
If you will continue
to observe it, you will discover that you are not merely chronically
limited in feeling, or un-Happy, but you are doing
that. You do not have to be
limited in your feeling, but you are just doing that. If you
don't want to be un-Happy, then don't
do that anymore! Don't
appeal to the universe to cure you, or say the universe is evil,
or get involved in all kinds of counter-efforts in psyche and
mind and emotion and body and socially to make yourself Happy.
If you are already un-Happy, you cannot get Happy by any of
that. And if you really do not want to be un-Happy anymore,
you must observe yourself and stop being un-Happy, stop doing
what is un-Happiness. And what is un-Happiness, fundamentally,
but the limitation on Feeling?
You notice that, habitually,
whatever arises, you feel in relation to it either appropriately
or inappropriately. If you see a gorilla chasing you, the appropriate
emotional response is to be afraid
—
and
also to run, hopefully. And the inappropriate response is to
laugh and start telling the gorilla stories about your childhood.
If a person goes to a funeral, the appropriate response is to
weep or feel sorrowful and be somber, and an inappropriate response,
at least from the conventional point of view, is to laugh and
do a tap dance, in effect to deny the fact of death. What I
am suggesting is that appropriate response, or what one might
call "appropriate affect", at best is only a logical
style of limited emotion relative to some apparent fact. It
is not Feeling without limit. It is the limitation of Feeling,
even though it is appropriate. And, likewise, inappropriate
emotional responses are limitations on Feeling, clearly. In
other words, no matter what arises, whether you tend to react
appropriately or inappropriately from a conventional point of
view, you always present yourself as a limit on Feeling. And
this, as you might gather, from My "Point of View"
is inappropriate! [Laughter.]
In other words, you must
do more than feel afraid when it is appropriate to be afraid,
and sorrowful when it is appropriate to be sorrowful, and gleeful
when it is appropriate to be gleeful. You must Feel completely,
without obstruction, in which case you will not merely be afraid,
or angry, or sorrowful. You will feel anger, sorrow, fear, and
that which is causing or suggesting to you to be angry, sorrowful,
fearful. And by being completely free to feel these feelings,
you will not merely dramatize these feelings, although you might
tend also to continue to dramatize them to some degree, but
you will simply feel.
The feeling of the appropriate
emotion will become Feeling Itself. Eventually, it will become
Feeling simply, or Feeling without obstruction.
Remarkably enough, the
reason you are so disturbed about the facts of life that might
make you fearful, sorrowful, and angry is that whenever something
arises that you might appropriately be angry, fearful, or sorrowful
about, you do not feel
it completely. You limit your
feeling of even these reactions. And you certainly limit your
feeling of the circumstance, or the condition, that is arising.
You are always exhibiting the evidence of limited feeling, obstructed
feeling. If feeling becomes limitless, if you do not contract,
then feeling becomes Being Itself
—
no
reaction, no contraction, Feeling without limit. That Feeling
goes beyond fear, sorrow, anger, and conventional happiness
and loving attitudes.
What is It? It is Love-Bliss.
It is the Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Force of Being, without
the slightest obstruction. It is Divine Enlightenment. It Divinely
Transfigures the body-mind and becomes a Power, a Great Power,
and
—
because
now you are looking at manifestation through this color, this
"one flavor", this Free Force or Free Energy
—
It
even allows you to interpret everything differently. Now you
will not be saying that manifest existence is evil or suffering
or sinful, or that others are unloving, that we are mortal,
that we are going to die, that it is a terrible life, and so
forth. Instead, you will regard all of manifest existence to
be pervaded by Love-Bliss. Not merely Bliss coming at you from
every direction, but Love-Bliss, Self-Existing and Self-Radiant,
Radiating from every direction in the Place where you Stand,
as you, and everywhere, altogether. It has no center, it has
no bounds, it has no limits. It is Free Energy. And, in the
midst of Free Energy, you are Free as attention, not limited,
not obstructed in your attention.
When attention is without
limit, it is Divine Consciousness Itself, just Consciousness.
When energy is without limit, it is Free Force, Love-Bliss.
When there is no limit on energy and attention, there is only
Self-Radiant Being, without limit
—
and
even the whole world becomes obviously That. And you, in the
form of the manifest personality, become someone who is active
as the Divinely Transfiguring Power that is Inherent in the
realm of conditional Nature and that Transcends it also.
My
Play —
The
"Play" to which Avatar Adi Da Samraj refers includes
the many forms of Teaching Theatre that He generated during His
Teaching years, before 1986.
Consideration
—
In the Way of Adidam, "consideration"
is comparable to the ancient Yogic term "samyama":
most rigorous, exhaustive concentration of all the force of
one's energy and attention upon any topic, subject, object,
or person, until its very essence becomes absolutely clear.
Then one may proceed to make thoroughly intelligent and auspicious
decisions about how to relate to the object of one's "consideration".
In true "consideration", one is willing to sacrifice
all preconceptions for the sake of Truth, and to change one's
entire life on the basis of what is eventually revealed.
The
Lesson of life —
The "Lesson of life"
as Revealed by Avatar
Adi Da Samraj
is that "you cannot become
Happy, you can only
Be
Happy." In other words,
ultimate Happiness cannot be achieved through seeking, but one
can be. Happy through feeling the inherent Happiness of Being.
Source
of Spiritual Transmission —
Avatar Adi Da Samraj
has said that all Realizers, as well as those who are less evolved,
by nature spontaneously transmit what they are. But the Transmission
of the Fully Enlightened Realizer is the Transmission of "the
Heart Itself"
—
the Love-Bliss that is Prior
to the body-mind and the separate and separative self.
Narcissus
—
Narcissus
is the self-lover of Greek mythology. For Avatar
Adi Da Samraj,
"Narcissus" is a key symbol of Man
in his un-Enlightened condition, enamored of his own self-image
and limited self-consciousness. In The
Knee of Listening,
Adi Da Samraj
summarized His insight into Narcissus:
He
is the ancient one visible in the Greek "myth", who
was the universally adored child of the gods, who rejected the
loved-one and every form of love and relationship, who was finally
condemned to the contemplation of his own image, until he suffered
the fact of eternal separation and died in infinite solitude. The
Great Tradition
—
"The
Great Tradition" is Avatar
Adi Da Samraj's
term for mankind's total inheritance of cultural, religious,
magical, mystical, Spiritual, Transcendental, and Divine paths
and philosophies.