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Adi Da Articles

Bubba: ....... Human beings suffer this life of changes which is obviously mortal. Everything changes, everything disappears. So everyone acquires a desire to find something that doesn't change and that does not disappear. Everyone wants some state of other that will relieve them of the burden of all of this change and disappearance, this mortality and all the troubles in the meantime. But as I said paradoxically they are moved to find (changeless happiness) that. On the other hand, they also like all of these things that exist in this moment and that ultimately change and disappear. So they have to great desires. One is to find an absolute, changeless permanent happiness. And the other is to find pleasure, happiness in all the things that change. And as a result a curious technique has arisen which combines both of these desires. It's the technique of trying to find what is absolute, changeless, perfect happiness through and in the form of all the things that change and disappear (laughter).

This is exactly what you do, you see. You're all probably able to identify with this technique in terms of your ordinary daily life and the gross human affair. And mainly because you don't have much experience in the subtle mystical magical realm of things you imagine, based on hearing and so forth, base on rumors you've heard, reports of others that even though it seems pretty certain that you can't find ultimate absolute changeless happiness in the world, but maybe. It's not absolutely certain that this isn't possible. Even though that my be so you're certainly going to be able to find it if you turn within and go up and become involved in spiritual reality, spiritual phenomena, subtle, psychic things that are not bodily, not gross not subject to mortality. This is also a presumption that you must be familiar with. It's at least one of the principal motivations in your case, most likely, to take up a spiritual way of life. And without clearly understanding perhaps this Teaching, my communication you may think that you will satisfy this strategy in my Company, that that's what this Way of life is about. But it is not.

What we may find within by inverting attention is not more absolute, changeless and immortal than anything we may find without by extroverting our attention. It is all changing, not only is it all changing, what we find by turning within is not something without, something in the infinity of the universes. It's our brain. The ancient technique of inverting attention to get away from the gross phenomena is imagined to be a way of association with something supercosmic beyond one's body. But in fact, it is a way of associating with one's own mind, principally one's own brain, one's own nervous system. Automoticities that are in other parts of the brain than the parts we're usually familiar with the language part of the brain, sensory part of the brain and so forth. So in our religious persuasion, our spiritual persuasion, when we're yogic and mystics, and so forth, we put our attention in one or another function of the familiar body-mind ...the breath, the life current, certain kinds of thoughts, speech itself, visions perhaps, hearing, tasting, smelling, archetypes, cultic objects, mystical words and so forth we put our attention on one or another of these things which lead us to concentrate on one functional part of the body. And by concentrating on that functional process of the body-being to the point of absorption we follow the lines of the nervous system back to the brain, start having relatively involuntary experiences arise...shakings of the body, dreamlike phenomena, involuntary emissions of the brain, you see, flashes of light, sounds, you see a whole bunch of that stuff for a while and when all that goes away and we become stupefied. For instance, if you focus on the process of sight you will be lead through the structures of the brain to the terminal of the upper rear of the head of the brain terminal from which sigh originates and at that point you'll stop seeing anything. Your basically will have also withdrawn attention from the currents of the body and you will be basically aware of nothing whatsoever and yet somehow conscious because you're still embodied, still alive and without objects. You will feel all the great unity "this is god." And people for thousands of years have been doing just this. This is what the yogis do. When you finally are successful at doing this spiritual thing what you are motivated to do, this is what happens. It is called nirvakalpa samadhi.

On the way when you have sort of trance absorptions and spurious emissions of the brain, flashes, images and so forth, this is called savakalpa samadhi. Samadhi with form. Nirvakalpa samadhi without form. So you see what is turns out to be the case is that you can't escape this body-mind by inverting attention. It's the ancient dogma though that you can and it's fitted to the naive presumption that's stated in the ancient formula: "as above, so below; as below so above." So it's presumed that if you can enter into subtle awareness, subtler awareness of your own of your own body, that these correspond to the subtle dimensions of the cosmos. It's a purely naive presumption.

It's magical presumption. It's not true in experience. Fundamentally what we experience by inverting ourselves upon the nervous system are all the potentials of our own body-mind that belongs to the nervous system and the brain. And yes we do see something about the subtler physics of things but we don't see anything other than ourselves fundamentally. There is no escape there. It is just as fruitless a technique for finding what is absolute, unqualified, perfect, and unchanging as the extroverted tendencies, interests, and desiring and so forth of daily life that ordinary people are involved in.

There is an ultimately nihilistic tendency or result in this process of inversion. And in the process of extroversion then there's a kind of ultimately eternalistic search. The extroverted being exploits all of the patterns of the gross realm and wants the things that are desirable to be attained and wants them to stay forever, wants to be fulfilled on the basis of functions themselves, wants functional fulfillment to be absolute fulfillment's, wants to create utopia, immortality, unchanging relationships.

But you see the world never does come to an end it never does stop changing. Never. So the urge to find what is changeless in the form of this endless changing pattern that is arising within and without is frustrated. And this is the spiritual discovery. This is the moment of awakening, this discovery. This is the way into Sahaj samadhi and the Way of Truth. Until there is the realization that happiness, Truth, God, Reality, eternal blissfulness cannot be found on the basis of the exploitation of any kind of experience, internal and inverted, external and extroverted, when there is that discovery then we are in the true double-bind of existence. Neither within nor without is hopeful, promising, ultimately liberating. All of our problems come to an end. It's not life within is toward God and without toward the devil. It is all the same. It's all ultimately frustration of the will and need to exist fully and blissfully as happiness.

So paradoxically in the moment of perfect frustration of the search for happiness, perfect frustration that there is awakening to the principle that is happiness. And it corresponds to this understanding that neither the inversion nor extroversion of attention, neither internal nor external experience, ever realized what is transcendental, happiness, perfect, enjoyment but only temporary modifications, permutations of one's own mortal psycho-physical condition. So the Way becomes not the satisfaction of internal or external desires, not the fulfillment of this structure, high and low, but the sacrifice of all of it. The Way of Truth is not the exploitation of the internal life nor the exploitation of the external life but the sacrifice or surrender, perfect sacrifice or surrender of one's independent body-mind.

The internal exploitation of life is a gesture toward everything that we consider to be mind leading toward the annihilation of ordinary awareness. And the external exploitation, the extroverted exploitation of experience is in the direction of everything we call the 'body' and its pattern of relations. It's a gesture toward eternal changes, existence as something changing, perfect eternal body, eternal world, eternal relationships, and of course it is frustrated.

The Way of Truth is the sacrifice of body-mind, the sacrifice of this entire independent illusion that we're struggling to glamorize and make survive. But is is a unique process, not like the strategic inversion or the strategic extroversion. It's not self-manipulative. it is in fact the sacrifice of self, the whole body-mind.

There are two stages in this affair. And these two stages essentially describe the whole process of this radical Way of Ignorance. The first stage which comes through the process of the disciplines and so forth, through practice, is the simple direct realization that "I" is not within. "I" is not some subtler or eternal soul-like part. "I" is not mind over against body. "I" is simply the body-mind as a whole. The whole thing, a single presentation of existence.

The second is stage is yielding, the sacrifice of that whole body-mind or "I" into its Condition. The Radiance, the unqualified Ignorance that is intuited to be the Condition of one's self, of one's entire body-mind, and all conditions. This second aspect of the process is developed in more and more profound ways through the stages of practice and through the stages of ultimate human structural development which appear in these stages of practice. In its origin it's through the hearing of this argument one engages in the process of sacrifice through love in one's ordinary relationships. It's not a matter of meditation esoteric inwardness and so forth, but of a moral transformation of life and a presumption of responsibility for one's ordinary functional life. That is not the end of it, of course, that the beginnings of the practice nor could we describe the practice of devotees to be an eternal social work, eternal household politics. It's the ordinary level of its origins that's all. Ultimately this sacrifice is made in the form of perfect radical intuition of the condition of everything in every moment.

So there is a progress, functional progress in this sacrifice of the whole body "I", the body-mind through the stages which is more and more esoteric which includes more and more of the subtler aspects of the body-mind over time. This sacrifice is not a kind of suicide you see. Suicide is a gesture made at one's self. There is no self-destructive motive in this sacrifice. It is the yielding of the self through love, through functional participation, relaxation of the knot, the contraction of consciousness. In the Way of Radical Intuition in the seventh stage of life in Sahaj Samadhi, this radical perfect intuition is a process in which even the cells are liberated into their Condition, their prior Condition, even the cells of the brain, even this nervous system, even this flesh body, even the whole world all its relations, even this fleshy body, even the whole world, all its relations. It is all relieved of its solidity. It has become transparent and ultimately dissolves. So not by the internal or external exploitation of this body-mind but by the sacrifice of the whole affair of this body-mind through perfect intuition, communion, sacrifice in the truest and ultimately most perfectly esoteric sense. We are literally translated into the bliss or radiance which is eternal and which pervades all existence. That Reality is not at the root of the nervous system nor at the end of the world in time. It is Present. When we realize it we vanish. We are dissolved in it. You become what you meditate on. As long as you persist in the meditation of your parts, you continue to appear in that form. When the gesture of existence becomes this sacrifice, the intuitive sacrifice or yielding of all of these conditions and you are glorified, transformed.

In this Way or Process all of the functions of the body-mind become ordinary. They no longer have the burden of infinity placed on them. Once can live an ordinary life without inherent frustration, recoil. One can engage with humor in the play of human relationships.

You guys about to turn this over? You see, it's in the traditional solution, the inverted path of life that one becomes strategically ascetic, trying to cut off the grosser or body part and entering into the subtler or mental part, mental and super mental. but in the disposition of our Way, the Way of Truth, there isn't any strategic orientation or disorientation relative to any of the parts of this body-being, body-mind. So one can continue to live an ordinary life but one must transform it, make it an expression of this sacrifice, an expression of the Law rather than an expression of the need to be fulfilled in the perfect Presence by something that is limited, changing, ultimately frustrating.

So we enter as sacrifice into our ordinary human relations and this is the higher form of asceticism, the true form of it. This process of the Way of Divine Ignorance depends on real understanding, literal adaptation in the case of each of you. So you must enter into the structural development of your entire human capacity. So there are moments in the process in which you are turned upon the traditional objects, yogic objects, the internal, the subtler objects and so forth in order to learn the sacrifice there. These things are not made an end in themselves. They are a moment in the lesson whereby we come to make this sacrifice perfectly.

The only trouble with all of this is that I really do not think you're interested in it. I don't think you're interested in it, but the kind of interest I'm talking about is the kind of interest that makes you do it. This is my frustration. Because I am prepared to enter into relationship with you exactly as I have described it to you. And the process is exactly as I've described it to you. And there is spiritual power in this Company, this relationship that can quicken it, make it realizable in this lifetime.

But you bring so many liabilities, so much disinclination toward it, so much to go within and so forth, which you're not even willing fully to perform. So much of it also, so much of the reason for people being here is based on a temporary frustration, a temporary disinclination toward the things of their ordinary, life. But as the discipline goes on and they realize that it's still the same demand they all of a sudden say, "oh it wasn't so bad, you know." And they find some way within this discipline here, within this community to devotees to live the usual life, or they leave it and go live the usual life.

Day after day it's like arguing with people who do not have any interest in doing this, even though people are here ostensibly to do it. Then the way it turns out is that fundamentally I don't have anybody to live the process with. I have people willing to have me discuss it with them, and there are people who are willing to entertain certain common, garden variety aspects of this Way of Life, at least for periods of time, but this great affair that I'm describing, you see, is absolutely uncommon, just hardly happened to anyone. Happened in the case of anyone. Hardly ever in the whole history of the world.

What I'm describing to you all is a process that belongs to the further evolution of humanity. At best it belongs to thousands, millions, billions of years in the future for the race. This is why is is frustrating. I've realized why it is frustrating to me because I'm talking to people who are in a moment in the evolution of existence that has nothing whatever to do with the ultimate Truth of existence, that's only in the, infancy, still in the slime, still dependent, still wanting consolations in the realm of changes, still violent, still self-possessed. So don't imagine for a moment that it is an easy matter, that you can just listen to this and you're in Sahaj Samadhi. It is the work of evolution itself, the work of the universe itself, it's the obligation, the law of eternal existence that we are considering and that our relationship generates and regenerates. You cannot do it casually. You can't respond casually. You can't be committed casually to your ordinary destiny. You must become changed.  

Your growth toward even ordinary preparation to begin this path is very slow, and it seems like some are getting closer to it, because according to the progression of courses, some people are, taking the sexuality course, you see. But the sexuality course is ...like how many strokes can you put on a ruler between one inch and two inches? ...Infinity! The course ....(or any progression)... can take you from here to there to the end of time. It's not really like you're getting closer it just seems that way. In the real dimension in which I am testing you and preparing you is not about all of this glory. It's about money, food and sex. It's about a flesh body, and it's eating, and it's sulk, and it's sexual need to enjoy the nervous system spasm regularly and all of that..in which you are not even full of will and intelligence. You are not able to see what's happening, make a judgment and change. You're just entering into that possibility, the third stage of life. My task is to stay here with you and persist in making the absolute demand, while at the same time serving you at this....at the level of your response, which is subhuman and only approaching the ordinary human level. You must be able to observe and inspect your practice, and transform it, or the actual spiritual process that I'm describing will never be something that you truly begin.

I feel sometimes like a man who's come here in a spaceship through time, from the end of the universe, to people who are near the beginning of it. It's frustrating adventure, kind of amusing to. And it's difficult to survive the frustration. My inclination very often is to get back in my ship and get the hell out of here. And there are times when I do this to some relative degree by becoming secluded for a time.

There have been individuals who have served the spiritual way in some form or other in human time in the past, who have become to frustrated they quit. In other words they stopped struggling to regenerate or quicken the evolutionary impulse in people. They stopped working for people and went into seclusion or disappeared. ......the last bit of karma is to teach. It's the last bit of hopefulness before dissolution. The realization that inversion and extroversion are equally fruitless attempts at happiness, because in both cases there is simply the exploitation of what changes and what disappears. But all of it amounts only to contraction...avoidance, separation, and self-possession. Because it's only the realization of that frustration that will awaken you. It is not awakening to some permanent end phenomenon of the psyche, its awakening to the process of sacrifice. ...So the relationship between you and I you see is a kind of warfare, between our independent frustrations. I If you will not awaken through this insight, then I am prevented from engaging the process in you. If you will awaken through this insight, then the process is alive in our relationship, and there is a connection that can come to life that is the medium of your transformation in this company. Some absolutely extraordinary and profound and uncommon matter, this whole affair. And you're not inherently interested in it. You can't be casual or naive in your involvement with it. You'll be associated with this way only through this insight, this frustration that awakens the body mind through its singleness, its incarnation, in which it may sacrifice itself through love, and through transcendental insight into infinity, the condition intuited to be one's condition altogether, which is ignorance, which is radiance, which is unqualified, which is not nameable, and which is not existing as some independent reality that we may contemplate within or without. It is realizable only in the paradox of our existence.

And we don't meet it at last, we are dissolved in it, as it. That is Bhava Samadhi, and it is a different kind of destiny altogether than we can consider in our present form. Well, does anybody have, any questions? Because of your social, cultural stage of adaptation, you tend to be fixed in the verbal part of the brain. You don't just have to be a solid type to have this be true of you. The locus of intelligence, not just what you do altogether, but your intelligence is essential a verbal intelligence. It's about these concepts and so forth, that we are all sharing in this moment. Because of this, you tend to relate to the teaching in verbal form, and you consider it to the point of getting a verbal insight, and then that's it. Then you go around the rest of the day, having this verbal insight... it's kind of s nice thing to have, and it makes you feel s little better and so forth. And you act basically like you've always tended to act. It doesn't become an instrument for the communication to the whole body through all the other parts of the brain and the nervous system,. to all the other functions of the body of s new kind of orientation. Well, you see, this must become the structure of practice. Yes, there is s kind of listening, kind of verbal attention, kind of understanding that must arise but it's not an end in itself. It will only tend to become that because of your social habit. The intelligence, the insight that awakens through listening to the teaching, through reading it, through engaging in study groups and so forth must be immediately brought to functions, to all the functions... of this body mind. You must change your act in every moment of hearing. This is the most difficult thing. This is the next moment of your evolution. You're not comfortable with it altogether you see. It requires s certain discipline to take verbal understanding and make moral physical changes in your way of relating to others, your disposition in the world altogether, your energization of human possibility. So it's in this cross over' that the fundamental difficulty of this discipline arises. Bringing it from verbal understanding to action... from inwardness to incarnation, to incident. Understand this and don't forget it. Cause whenever you meet, whenever you consider the teaching, this is your obligation, you see, to change your act. Never forget that that's what you're supposed to do, and never forget to do it. Cause otherwise you will not make this understanding s principle for adaptation, 'for change, for transformation, and for continued growth.

Now your growth is arrested at the level of the lower functions of life ... intend to be meditating on them, falling back on them, in trouble with them, you find the sufficient and so forth. There are all kinds of other structures in this body mind that you're not awakened to yet, you haven't grown into yet. You frustrate that growth through certain kind of fixed ritualistic behaviors, and states of mind. And you will only continue this growth if you can change your act on the basis of this understanding. And if you will change your act in the very basic ways, at the level of the lower life, then you will begin to awaken to the dimension of the whole body being itself, which is not localized in some brain center and so forth. It's the heart, not simply some organ or place in the body. The heart is simply a symbol for the whole body, the quality, the intelligence of the whole body.... when it is not associated with any specific part, any specific function or state. So if you will listen with this verbal mind, and change your act on the basis of insight, you will go through these original preparations, after which you'll come to me for this spiritual process. And when you do come to me, to sit with me, to live this way of life, this mutual commitment, you won't be localized in-the verbal mind anymore. Yes, you will think, you see. The verbal mind will still be there to be addressed. It will have its function. But fundamentally you present yourself whole bodily, with feeling, as a sacrifice, as- love, prior to thinking and activities of all kinds. You see, it's in that whole body mood, or gesture that you are a sacrifice. And only then. And it's only when you are a sacrifice then I can meet you and be of use to you in the spiritual sense. Then our relationship becomes spiritual, you see. Until then, my service to you is basically at the level of the verbal mind, and the functions below the heart, the vital life, endless discussions of sexuality and emotion and diet, and work, and ordinary daily activities, and household politics, you see, and verbal argumentation. So you must make use of the considerations at this stage and change your act literally, and move into this whole body disposition, this. free loving, sacrificial disposition, so that the spiritual process may begin, which is a matter of Communion between us, whole bodily, at a level that transcends specific functions, orientations. And that is the principle of sacrifice, the principle of Communion.

That is the instrument of your transformation in my company. Everything else that may consider, or become associated with, or acquire in my company belongs to the lower ordinary level of thing,, not to spiritual life. It's at best an instrument to move you in your feeling and your understanding towards spiritual life. But basically my involvement with people for years is ... has not been spiritual in the truest sense you see. It's simply a goad to the spiritual. It's all been a play between us to move you toward this relationship in its true form. But your learning belongs to the lower evolutionary stages, and not to the spiritual principle, not stately, not simply, not truly. So basically my work to now is... to been to serve to bring people through the first three stages of life, when they can be responsible, intelligently responsible for the lower functions of life, and be moved beyond the verbal mind and ordinary subjectivism to the psychic or whole body position. That's when we meet in the Communion Hall, that's when our spiritual relationship begins. Once that begins, then there is a whole other dimension of growth that appears, structural responsibilities and so forth. And it leads us to certain yogic experience and so forth, passing along the lines of the nervous system as always, you see, to the brain centers, all that stuff, you see. Then after all of that is done, which will also take a long period of time, just like everything we've already done, you see, and you are free of all of that internal and psychic and higher spiritual so-called stuff, as well as all of the dilemma of your ordinary obsessiveness, outwardly, and you rest in the disposition of the heart in the truest sense, then real spiritual life begins. The way of

Radical Intuition, the fourth stage of practice, the seventh stage of life. I don't know if I will have the company of such devotees in this life time. I don't know for certain if there will be any sitting with me in the Communion Hall truly. I hope there will be, and I hope there will be some living with me in the ultimate or true stage of spiritual life, who are conscious in this process wherein we are translated, dissolved, which body and mind, the whole affair is thrown to infinity. And all ordinary destinies are dissolved.