This Liberating Impulse

February 1, 1985 from Easy Death

	While you live in conditional form, you make mind, you create the psyche, through associations, repetitions, reinforcement. When you die and the body drops off, mind makes you. After death, you live in the world of mind as you have created it while alive. . . . If you merely use up your life, indulging mind as it already is, as you accumulated it while alive, then the after-death states will be conventional, mediocre, relatively unpleasant, perhaps dreadfully unpleasant, until another embodiment. If you use your life for the sake of transcendence and change mind, purify mind, release yourself from its limits, move into a higher consciousness, a higher mind, and, as My devotee, move even beyond mind to the point of complete Divine Enlightenment and relinquishment of conditional existence, Divine Translation is the Destiny you will Realize.

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Spiritual life is about Realizing utter Love-Bliss, greater Bliss than is realized through sex or any other conditional experience. Such Love-Bliss is available before, during, and after any conditional experience. If you Realize It, if you devote your life to the Realization of That, then That is what you get — a life devoted to the Realization of That, a life of Communion with That. Then you will link your present life with What is Prior to this life, whereas if you devote yourself to the human conditions of existence for their own sake, you do not link yourself to What is Prior to this life. You link yourself to the same thing again. You perpetuate it, through reincarnation or simply through repetition in one form or another after death.

I have pointed out to you on a number of occasions that while you live in conditional form, you make mind, you create the psyche, through associations, repetitions, reinforcement. When you die and the body drops off, mind makes you. After death, you live in the world of mind as you have created it while alive. The after-death states have been called "bardos", or "planes". Really, all such concepts are simply descriptions of how the mind operates dissociated from physical embodiment. You will spontaneously, through no will of your own, enter into realms of mind after death that correspond to your state of mind — not just your thinking mind but your subconscious and unconscious mind, the whole force of your tendency toward objects and con ditional states. The realms with which you will be associated will be changing. There is a possibility of spending experiential time in such places. They are much like the realms you visit in dreams, but you will feel you are really there and not merely dreaming.

Mind makes association with realms that seem pleasurable, and after death you may pass in and out of these realms. But if you observe how desperate, egoically "self-possessed", depressed, craving, and dissatisfied you are generally, you will appreciate more profoundly what is likely after death and into what kinds of mind-realms you may be drawn. There are hells, purgatories, dark passages that seem to go on for vast periods of time, even until they exhaust themselves and you pass out of them as you pass from one dream to the next.

It is said traditionally that a human birth is extraordinary, auspicious if it is rightly used, and should not be wasted. This is because the human form has the potential to be associated with the full range of conditional experience — gross, subtle, and causal — and is also not merely a mind-realm as the after-death states are, although it is such a realm ultimately. But, experientially, as a human being you are not merely living in the mind condition. You are living in the bodily condition. To be able to exercise yourself bodily, functionally, relationally, puts you in a position to indulge mind, but also to change it, to transcend it. To be embodied is to have a unique relationship to mind, which will then affect the after-death states when the body is thrown off.

If you merely use up your life, indulging mind as it already is, as you accumulated it while alive, then the after-death states will be conventional, mediocre, relatively unpleasant, perhaps dreadfully unpleasant, until another embodiment. If you use your life for the sake of transcendence and change mind, purify mind, release yourself from its limits, move into a higher consciousness, a higher mind, and, as My devotee, move even beyond mind to the point of complete Divine Enlightenment and relinquishment of conditional existence, Divine Translation is the Destiny you will Realize. But even if you do not fulfill the course of self-transcending practice to that ultimate degree, after death you will at least be associated with the ascended realms, the higher frame of mind, rather than the hells, the purgatories, the lesser states, where people rattle against one another like they do here.

Time in those hellish realms is even longer, but it does exhaust itself eventually, so that there is new embodiment in a form such as this or something that fulfills its characteristics in a similar fashion, thus giving you the opportunity to transcend the mind but in a more profoundly purified condition. Re-embodiment is then associated with a capability to link up with the Spiritual Process in its advanced stages.

What you are doing in this lifetime links up with all future time. If it is not utterly real to you yet that there is such time after death, then practice self-transcendence in the context of the realities that are obvious to you, and that practice is sufficient. Whether you know about what passes after death or not, you still can observe what is going on with you now, observe the self-contraction and its consequences, and come to the point of being moved to transcend it. You need not believe in the afterlife to do all of that. You can still receive My tangible Spiritual Heart-Transmission and enter into the life of Spiritual devotion to Me, whether or not you have any real sense of the afterlife. You can still enter the entire Spiritual Process in My Blessing Company. And all the same reasons for entering into it still exist, whether you know there is an afterlife or not.

I have just Described to you the process that works after death, and at some point you will have real experience of it. You will very likely in the course of your practice of the Way of Adidam come into contact with subtle experiences that confirm the survival of death and the existence of subtle realms, or mind-realms, and that show you something about how it all works. Even if you do not have much experience of it, if you enter truly into Divine Communion with Me, the Spiritual Process will self-authenticate Eternity and prove to the heart that this embodiment is not the end of existence, or even its purpose. Existence is purposed toward Love-Blissfulness, Freedom, and Divine Happiness.

While you live in bodily form, therefore, it is good for you to become dis-eased. It is good to feel dissatisfied and to seek beyond the conditional, ordinary, conventional apparatus of life, until you come into contact with Wisdom. Through that contact, the search itself will be transcended. Until then, the search is useful. It is the motive of dissatisfaction. Although it is the pursuit of satisfaction, it also contains the element of dissatisfaction. Seeking thus leads toward many things, including all kinds of self-fulfillment. It also leads to contact with religion and Spiritual life. But when you enter into My Sphere, into the Sphere of this Divine possibility, then you enter into the Sphere of "consideration" that will undo the search and its root, which is self-contraction, or egoity.

You can enter into this process without any beliefs or presumptions about an afterlife. But I must simply, among other things, Tell you what that is all about, since it is real and it is My experience. What happens after death is directly associated with what happens while you are alive. It is not that you merely live and then the body falls off and you drift into the eternal sublimity. And it is not that you merely live an ordinary life, struggling however you choose to live, and then go to heaven.

Death is simply the falling off of the physical vehicle. That is all that it is. Everything else continues, unless all the vehicles, all the aspects of the conditional self, are released through Divine Self-Realization. In the typical case, the ordinary human case, death is simply the abandonment of the physical. Everything else that you are as mind, psyche, personality, and desires continues, but without the anchor of embodiment. You do not wake up in your physical bed and your physical room, with your physical associations. The anchor drops off, and you drift into the bardos, the realms of mind. Where you drift is determined, therefore, by your mind, your state of mind altogether, what you have reinforced through your life-action.

The conditional cosmos is structured in such a way that, in spite of all errors and egoity, all beings will ultimately be purified. But if you know that even though this is so, you still might have to go through billions upon billions of lifetimes under all kinds of dreadful conditions, including spending uncountable spaces of time in hells of suffering, then there is no consolation in the knowledge that everyone will ultimately be Liberated. Therefore, you must know how you can cooperate with the Liberating Divine Principle so that you are not reinforcing egoically "self-possessed", disturbed, painful conditions of existence, but are rather advancing toward and entering into more and more of the profundity of Perfectly self-transcending God-Realization and the Ultimate Destiny of life in the Divine Self-Domain. This is what you must devote yourself to, what you will devote yourself to if you understand, if you hear Me and see Me ⁵ and Awaken Spiritually through My tangible Spiritual Baptism. Then your life must become cooperation with that Liberating Force.

That Divine Force will not only involve you in changing your action while you are alive so that you live a better life and are happier in your relations. All such changes are temporary. Fundamentally, what that Divine Force does is to Liberate you from mind. And all of this is mind, even this [He says, touching His Body]. Physical embodiment is mind. It simply carries with it the illusion that you are mind interiorly. But, in fact, you are physically present, physically active, and can therefore change mind, release mind, purify mind, transcend mind. This is true. This is how the Liberating Principle works within the realm of cosmic Nature. It gives you the opportunity to transcend that which is cosmic Nature, which is mind.

All of conditional existence is nothing but mind, constantly being modified, affected, changed, caused by apparently discrete entities. It is a vast, unfathomable complex of planes and beings, tendencies, experiences, realms within realms, imaginary realms that are just as real as real realms — there is nothing that is unreal, because it is all mind.

You are in bondage to mind. You are in bondage to objects. Not understanding your egoic self and the Great Reality, you are tending to presume this quality of mind you are experiencing by virtue of human birth, and you are trying to fulfill the ego, release it, or bring it into a state of total enjoyment. This search is a false principle. It is something you can struggle to fulfill, and you cannot even fulfill it completely. At any rate, in such pursuit you do not involve yourself in the principle of self-transcendence.

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. Conditioning, mind, all limitation of Divine Love-Bliss, must be transcended. This understanding and the encounter with the Living Divine Adept make the Spiritual Process possible. Therefore, when you come to hear Me and see Me, then you must become involved in the process of self-transcendence, or, in other words, the process of mind-transcendence. Ultimately, to go beyond mind altogether is to be Divinely Translated.

What you build up subjectively while you are bodily existing becomes your experience after death. What you purify and transcend while physically existing will not be your experience after death. What you make your object while alive will continue to be your object after death. Desires not fulfilled or transcended are your mind after death. Complexes, fears, obsessions are your mind after death. Thus, the Spiritual Process really is the purification and transcendence of mind, which is the same thing as the purification and transcendence of conditional self, or conditional existence altogether.

The very best situation to be in at the point of death is utter mindlessness. I do not mean you should have an empty head at the moment of death. I mean you should be utterly purified of the self-contraction, the mental tendency, such that you are only involved in the Free Condition of Divine Love-Bliss. The best situation, the best condition to be in at the point of death, is the Divinely Self-Realized Condition of the seventh stage of life. Generally, that Condition points toward Divine Translation at death.

To be literally living in earlier stages than the Divinely Enlightened Condition at the point of death in general indicates what your destiny will be after death. Your stage of life is a very basic indicator. Most people do not go beyond a complicated, stressful, un-Happy involvement in the conditions associated with the first three stages of life. Such individuals do not go to heaven. They pass into experiential realms immediately associated with this material frame, as in dreams, now without the anchor of the body, appearing to spend all kinds of time in lesser conditional realms, often very unpleasant, literally what could be called "hells". Those who pass into the ascended stages of life — the "advanced" fourth stage and the fifth stage — will pass into the subtler realms of the Cosmic Mandala, temporarily enjoying a somewhat more blissful experience until mind exhausts itself.

Mind, you see, is a kind of generative force. When forms are established in it, it produces experience until it wears down. All experiences within the Cosmic Mandala are, therefore, temporary, but some are much more difficult than others. Those in the outer range of the Cosmic Mandala are the more difficult. Beings there live a short time. There is more struggle, more threat there. The realms closer to the center of the Cosmic Mandala are associated with more glamorized conditions, beautiful spaces, and so forth, but the urge of conditionally manifested beings is likewise not ultimately fulfilled there. The urge to Complete Freedom, or Divine Self-Realization, is not fulfilled in those realms, and they also are temporary experiences.

Beings do sadhana in those realms. They practice the disposition of God-Communion, and they are not merely there to fulfill the pleasurable possibilities associated with their realm. At least this is so in the higher realms. In the lesser realms, where ordinary people living in this world might pass after death, conditional beings are not any more occupied with the motive to Most Perfectly self-Transcending God-Realization than they are here. The lesser subtle realms are the same kind of place as this realm basically, although individuals are somewhat more tenuously associated with experience there. Experience is more plastic in some way, and individuals there experience something like the dreamer's involvement.

Conditional beings are aware of having rather unusual abilities even in these lesser realms. They can pass in and out of places and circumstances and move about by an act of will, but all the time they still move within the lesser frame. The more profoundly aggrieved, gross, negative characters do not even wander in the middle-class streets of the after-world. They settle into dark places and sinister scenes. They struggle, unable to get out for long periods of time, as you would in a nightmare — but they do not have the body in bed to wake up to. The mind free-wheels on its own, as if they were stuck in a room watching a television program and did not have the ability to turn off the television set — but in this case they are actually in the program.

DEVOTEE: Beloved Adi Da, do they stay there until the experience runs out?

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. And it runs out eventually. Such realms are usually described as hells where individuals are caught for thousands of years. Imagine yourself sitting in a box for ten thousand years! Such descriptions are in some sense metaphoric, but nonetheless they contain some truth, because time does appear to be real in these places.

Often religion is preached in this world through representations of the afterlife, threatening you with fire and brimstone on the one hand if you do not get straight, and offering you the pie-a-la-mode heaven on the other hand if you believe and behave. But, as I indicated to you, if it is not real to you that the afterlife exists or what it is all about, to try to threaten or attract you with these stories has no significant effect on you. I am simply Telling you about the afterlife because it is My experience and I want to account for it all. It will also be your experience at one time or another. It already is the experience of many people. There is, therefore, no reason why I should not Speak of it.

But I am not giving you a heaven-and-hell speech here. You need no belief system to involve yourself in the Spiritual Way of life. Therefore, I confront you about what is real to you, what is your experience. I point to the search, the self-contraction. I Call you into relationship with Me to receive My Spirit-Baptism. The Spiritual Process does not depend on systems of belief. It is true that at death you do not just disappear into unconsciousness, fall asleep, and forget everything, Mind goes on, and mind controls you, and you no longer have the anchor of the body. If it is not real to you that the process of mind continues after death, still the separate and separative self and how it works is real to you now, and the Spiritual Process is real to you if you have experienced My Spiritual Heart-Transmission in My Company.

In any case, the Spiritual Process is about self-transcendence, or transcendence of mind, transcendence of the psychology of attention. Whatever the structure of reality is in your view, the process of your existence is controlled by the mechanism of attention, the psychology of the self-contraction, and the degree to which you have transcended attention. Life is mind. Life makes mind. Life suffers mind. And life can be the transcendence of mind. Life as a process of the transcendence of mind, or the psychology of attention, is Spiritual practice. A life devoted to self-indulgence without God-Communion, without self-understanding, without self-transcendence, is suffering.

Even those devoted to Most Perfectly self-transcending God-Realization suffer, but they suffer in the peripheral vehicles of the conditional self. In Communion with Me, you contact the inherent Love-Blissfulness of existence, and those aspects of your existence that are conditional, in which you are suffering, or even experiencing pleasure, become literally peripheral. You can enjoy that Fullness, then, even prior to Divine Enlightenment. It is simply that in the passage between the sixth stage of life and the seventh stage of life, the Fullness of Divine Self-Realization becomes permanent, no longer conditionally Realized.

Even so, the conditional periphery remains, but one's involvement with it changes. In the context of phenomenal conditions, one can be effective in Liberating or Blessing others. Even in the seventh stage of life, however, there is a struggle, as you see in My case. There is no end to the struggle with conditional existence. I could have bypassed some of it by simply not Teaching. But I had no choice in this matter — fortunately or unfortunately, fortunately for you perhaps — because Divine Re-Awakening in My case was not associated merely with Divine Self-Realization in the sense that I could have dropped out and disappeared. It was associated with the spontaneous appearance of the Siddhis of My Teaching Work.

I have no attachment to this world for its own sake. My involvement with this world is simply for the sake of Liberating others. I am the Manifestation of that Principle in cosmic Nature Which is Liberating. I do not otherwise have any impulse to be associated with conditional existence, but I am bound to it nonetheless, because of this Liberating Impulse.

My devotees who enter into the seventh stage of life will participate in that Liberating Impulse in various ways, but their struggle will not be like My own, because they will not have the Siddhis that are uniquely associated with My Birth. Even so, they must carry on their Blessed existence under the real circumstances of conditional life with other people.

This Effort that Works through Me will not go on forever. It has its logic, its course, its structure. Its results depend on its reception. My Impulse is Complete for the Divine Self-Realization of others and the establishment of the Way of Adidam. But whether the Way of Adidam will be established or not depends on its reception. It could be rejected. It could be made into garbage. All the time there exists a tendency to reject it and make it into garbage, as with everything else that appears in the conditional realms, where everything is tending to be destroyed.

You may live relatively long. Already many of you have lived long lives compared to how long most people have lived in this world. Even so, in every moment of your existence there is the possibility of dying, the possibility of becoming diseased, the possibility of loss, the possibility of disconnection from others, the possibility of suffering. Your conditional existence has been threatened from the moment you were born. Threats are always arising, in you and outside you.

Everything that appears in the conditional world is tending to be destroyed, tending to come to an end, because it does not just appear on its own. It appears in conjunction with many other entities, motions, tendencies, programs, plans, disturbances. Every life, every impulse is associated with a creative effort to accomplish and to survive. That effort characterizes Me and My Work. You have seen what a difficult struggle it has been for Me to keep My Work going during all these years. It is not just difficult at this moment. It has always been difficult. The tendency has always existed to destroy it and bring it to an end, as well as to simply not use it.

If this Impulse is going to have effect, if it is to survive through and beyond My Time of human existence, you must make it survive. You must use it. You must practice it. You must become rightly aligned to Me. You must fulfill it. You must advocate it. You must make your gathering strong — not just you in this room but all those associated with Me, all those who will read or listen to this Talk someday.

This talk is from Avatar Adi Da Samraj, from Easy Death

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The Siddhis of Avatar Adi Da Samraj's Teaching Work — Avatar Adi Da Samraj has indicated that, following His Divine Re-Awakening in 1970 and until the end of His Teaching Work in 1986, certain Siddhis (Spiritual powers) manifested in Him that enabled Him to do His Teaching Work, the primary one being the capability to Perfectly identify with others, assume their karmas and their conditions, reflect them to themselves, and meditate them. Describing the Siddhis of His Teaching Work in 1982, He said:

I submit My Self to devotees to the degree of becoming them, to the degree of taking on the condition in which they exist, and I Teach in that circumstance.

I enter into this body in order to be just like you and to "consider" this body-mind with you, to animate it with you, to be exactly that and to transcend exactly that. This is My unique way of Working. There are some precedents for it traditionally, but it is basically a unique way of Working necessitated by this particular time and place. (September 15, 1982)

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