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(edited by Beezone) Insight, Self Observation and Self Understanding Part 1 (Part II) To say "You must follow your own inclinations" is just a
truism because that is what everybody does anyway. And so it
is with those who first begin to consider this teaching or
this way of life. At first they're basically doing whatever
they like. And there's no point in my telling them to not do
so or to try and give them one thing to do or tell them to
get spiritual. Instead of moving by inclination as they ordinarily do,
they should consider the teaching and reflect on it and
observe themselves in that context. A person will follow his
or her own inclinations, and 'this person' is the ego, the
self-delusion that is motivating all of these motions or
inclinations. It's the ego then that must be found out. If you
basically do what you like and if it turns out that
spiritual possibility is one of the things that you like
doing then that becomes part of your inclination. But if you
study the teaching and reflect on it while following your
inclination the teaching will lead you, step by step, to
observe and understand yourself. Once you begin to observe
and understand yourself, then you will choose to do
something that has a different kind of significance. You
will start being motivated by a disposition that works on
transcending egoity and then one who enjoys that new
disposition, one who knows something about egoity and is not
really blindly motivated by it. Over the years of my teaching work I was constantly
confronted by people who basically wanted to do whatever
they wanted to do and they of course were free to do that.
In the beginning I didn't have to give them the freedom, in
the early years of our community I constantly brought up the
consideration of this teaching to them or consideration of
the ego and reflected it back to themselves. Over time,
individuals would begin to observe and understand something
about this self-generated search, this ego game and
eventually began to freely assume a variety of disciplines.
But all along they were still doing what they wanted to do
but based on some beginnings of understanding, just the
beginnings. The Way as a whole then in some sense is following the
inclinations and the ego. Ego is the obstacle and the
binding force in it but if you carry on your ordinary life
in the context of the teaching, you will naturally go
through a variety of changes and your understanding of your
motives and actions will begin to change. Following your own
inclinations and study will naturally develop the spiritual
process by stages. But there isn't a right affirmation or admonition one can
give to beginners that says, something in the form of
indulge yourself. "I see that you're a rather self-indulgent
person so the right thing to do is to go ahead and indulge
yourself", no. That's not what anyone is saying truly.
There's a teaching in the context of spiritual life. People
will indulge themselves and that is a fact. Someone who has developed some genuine self-understanding
will no longer be doing whatever he or she wants to do in a
really casual sense, casually self-indulgent sense. There
will still be some self-indulgence no doubt but another
disposition will be growing in the context of all that. Such
an individual will begin to make use of certain kinds of
disciplines but they will be strong in the use of
disciplines to reflect himself or herself back to himself or
herself. There of course will be weaker times when the
inclination to follow the ego's will be indulged, that is
quite natural and should be understood as that. In the earlier days of our community there were periods
of time when people would maintain the disciplines rather
strict and rigid form. And then there would be periods when
accessories were used on an open free basis. That pattern
reflected the earliest kind of listening or self
observation. There was some beginnings of understanding and
how to make right use of discipline, but on the other hand
there was still the ego and its ordinary tendencies. There's a time in the earliest consideration of the
spiritual possibility when people do indulge themselves and
then later they begin to make use of a little discipline
alternating with their self-indulgence and eventually they
begin to be quite a bit less self-indulgent and more simply
disciplined. The truth of the matter then is when people
become really involved in the spiritual process having
understood something about themselves basically that they do
live a disciplined life and in doing so they are not doing
somebody else's thing. They're not doing something other than what they want to
do you see. They have simply grown in the spiritual context
of the spiritual process. Having done so they quite
naturally develop disciplines in their lives. A variety of
different disciplines then develop stage by stage as that
individual moves by this growing inclination which is
self-transcending in nature rather than self-fulfilling or
self-indulgent really. The truth is that everybody follows his or her own path,
direction or whatever in the context of spiritual life even
though they may have a master, spiritual guide, tradition,
teaching or disciplines that they make use of. Do you
understand what I'm saying? I'm not saying indulge the ego's
tendencies. I'm saying observe your self and understand the
nature of the ego. So the sheerest beginning listening level of course
wouldn't be even useful to say take on a whole bunch of
disciplines and beliefs. You're going to do whatever you're
gong to do anyway. So listen. Consider the matter first you
see. But to someone who is a true beginner in the sense of
having understood to some significant degree, disciplines
are inevitably associated with the enlightening way and more
and more so as the maturity develops. On the one hand there
is a motivation in all individuals who do not have much
self-understanding to be rather self-indulgent, to relieve
stress and have a good time and stimulate themselves
pleasurably and so on. That's a motivation people are
typically involved in a worldly context or in the context of
the first three stages of life. There's also another dimension, there is an inclination
manifested by individuals and humans collectively in the
world that sometimes it seems strangely interested in
preventing people from indulging themselves or pleasuring
themselves in a variety of ways. Most people have
encountered both of these motives not only in themselves but
in others, the motive toward self-indulgence and the motive
to prevent yourself or others from indulging themselves. It's hard to say which is the strongest motive, but you
can't say that any individual is simply interested in
self-indulgence. In any kind of an admonition to do whatever
you like you'd see the opposite tendency just as much.
Because it is ego-based, it self-defeating as well as
self-motivated. For every gesture toward self-indulgence,
there is an equal and opposite gesture toward the prevention
of that. Whatever you do to prevent it, to prevent yourself
from indulging, others seem to be very interested in
preventing you from indulging yourself. When you're a little too uptight you'll want get all the
rowdy input. Others want you to get hip, come to life and
indulge yourself. Both of these motives are always in
operation. Sometimes you suffer from the one side. Sometimes
you suffer from the other side. so which side is it on? Is it on the side of
self-indulgence or is it on the side of suppression of
self-indulgence? It's both. And whichever side is the
ascendant or dominant at the moment depends on how strong
the opposite inclination is. If there is too much
self-indulgence then you get the suppressive side, too much
apparent pleasure and so on. And too much apparent
suppression and then you get the opposite. The world in general today seems to be very much
interested in indulging itself somehow. There's a lot of
that kind of liberal development of human possibilities
going on. On the other hand, at the same time there is even
in the recent last decade, increase of a kind of puritanical
edge to the world politically and socially who want to stop
that from happening. So there's a kind of equalizing tendency of a kind to
prevent it from becoming too much of one or the other and
that's true but on the other hand it's also a conflict
that's being expressed. There's no singleness. There are
these two motives in opposition to one another, one rising,
the other falling and they keep exchanging positions and try
to balance one another up and it never becomes one
thing. The ego never becomes one thing. Egoity is a dynamic.
Egoity is conflict. It is self-moving and it is
self-defeating. This is what must be observed at the beginning level of
practice. Everything you can observe about yourself in one
moment you will observe in another moment quite the opposite
tendency. So it's not that through the process of self-observation
you discover one thing about yourself. You don't merely
discover through a real process of self-observation that
what you really want is God realization. That's not the
discovery at all. You may become want to become free to
realize the Divine. But that is not it. You don't have just
one desire, you have a many desires and they're all in
pairs, all in conflict with one another and you're not one
thing at all. You're everything and all opposites. The real process of self-observation shows that you are
very complex phenomena. You see the inherent conflict, the
non-singleness, the multiplicity, the chaos that you are and
see what that is. See what is chaos itself. What is this
always paired infinitely multiplied gesture. What does that
amount to? Hearing is an awakening that comes in the summary of
self-observation, not in some moment of seeing some thing
about yourself. When you've seen the totality of it and see
what the totality is, what it is, not what one portion of it
is, when you see that it is self-contraction, when it is
thoroughly understood in all of its opposites as being just
the self-contraction and that is your own action, something
that you are adding to reality in every moment, then bondage
to that script is released and you awaken to that in which
all of this has been arising and which it is happening, that
to which all that is being added. That is Hearing. Hearing
is a summary observation not the witnessing of some
action. So that which is realized and not insight. True awakening
is the divine possibility you realize. The possibility of
spiritual life not by finding out one thing about yourself
or magnifying one principle desire in yourself but by
transcending all these desires, the whole complex of your
dynamic egoity. You haven't heard until it is the chief such
of summary form. If you want to be religious, you connect with some sort
of motive in yourself that you call religious. Short of
self-understanding, the only thing you can do about that is
become idealistic. You start magnifying one aspect of your
desiring and trying to make that the dominant force in your
life. So if you can somehow slip through the loopholes, you
become a devotee as an idealist then you see. You will be
affirming all kinds of positive motives that you would call
religious or spiritual, all kinds of virtuous inclinations
relative to the disciplines of life and so on. But you won't
be practicing them as a true devotee if you have not heard,
if you have not understood this dynamic self, this
self-contraction. It is itself one thing but it is
manifested as not only multiplicity but pairs,
oppositions. As an idealist you may say you are committed to this
particular intimate relationship you are involved in. You
hold very firm to that and all discussions about the matter
constantly present yourself as somebody who is happy in this
relationship loving and satisfied in it. There's no motive
elsewhere and so forth. But if you're an idealist, that
won't be true. You will be either secretly or periodically,
overtly even, manifesting opposite sides. So you as an
idealist may be committed to an intimate relationship but
your idealism is weak because it is founded on egoity
therefore you will inevitably show signs of promiscuity,
unlove, dissatisfaction, reactivity and so on in such a
relationship. You will continue to phase with your devotion
and your failure of devotion. You may at times be idealistically or even righteously
disciplined relative to diet and and other disciplines but
other times you just have to have add a little sugar, a
little coffee or a few cigarettes and beer, some pork chops,
whatever. You will be constantly moving between lunch
righteousness and self-indulgence. And if you manage to be
idealistic long enough to confine yourself to the
idealistically defined performance, you will still be
suffering the opposite in yourself in terms of an internal
conflict you see. The more idealistic you are, the more
internalized your conflict is. The weaker you are as an
idealist, the more overt your failures will be. So it's that kind of pattern that has an inward design
that must be transcended through hearing. The practice of
the disciplines of level three is a different matter than
would be if you were an egoic idealist. At level three
truly, there must not be any conflict about this intimate
commitment perhaps that you may have or this dietary
discipline or any other discipline. There's no conflict
anymore. There's no struggle any longer you see, not because
you're an idealist but because you've understood yourself
and are no longer functioning on the basis of self-generated
motives in the egoic sense. But functioning in communion and
real sensitivity to that in which the self-contraction is
arising or to that which it is being added to. The divine disposition has awakened and it involves a
profound transformation of life. It then begins to show
signs, quite naturally, that others may interpret to be
rather idealistic. In other words, you may be able to live a
life that others would say is very positive, something
desirable from a rather idealistic point of view although
you will not be practicing it from that point of view. Now those of you who are here in Hermitage practicing at
level one are a relatively well-balanced group of people.
Your lives are in some basic sense in order. You don't seem
to have very exaggerated motivations to break out of the
pattern of discipline you are living. But we've also observed and you've observed about
yourselves, is that you are living in a rather idealistic
fashion. You're not showing these signs of balance because
of profound self-understanding. It's rather more like your
style. It's just your way the same as people in the world do
it. On the other hand, you have all of these signs of
conflict in yourselves and each one of you in fact has
expressed that at one time or another at these gatherings
even though in general your behavior is generally what you
would call balanced behavior and not very exaggerated. On
the other hand, when queried about it, you have expressed a
conflict, motivations toward something that is quite the
opposite of what you are generally tending to do, and that
is the the characteristic of the idealistic ego. You are tending to suffer this ego dynamic rather
inwardly. You are suffering from a variety of inclinations,
many of which are different than what you tend to do in your
daily behavior but you are not, you don't feel it is a good
idea perhaps to dramatize some of those inclinations. Some
said you just feel them. You confess them every now and
then. Nothing really changes about it however. You're still
there. So even though you are perhaps outwardly not tending
to be very dramatic, very two-sided in terms of your actual
behaviors, you are nonetheless rather two-sided in yourself
and that is what you must observe. You are not only applying
disciplines in your lives and considering the teaching. You
are observing yourself. You don't have to be very
exaggerated to observe this two-sidedness in yourself and
this rather complex infinitely multiplied desiring kind of
inclination. That is what you must observe then. This process of observation is not an idealistic activity
however. As I've said before, it's not that you're observing
yourself to finally find out somewhere deep down there is a
single absolute clarifying motivation that we call
spiritual. It's not there. There isn't any such motivation.
There may be a motivation there to be spiritual but it is
coupled with an opposite motivation. The real spiritual
energy you must see is beyond that conflict, the real
spiritual gesture, the true spiritual energy is prior to
egoity, prior to the opposites, prior to conflict. The real
spiritual act is prior to, is an energy that is prior to the
motivation to do the opposite. So only then can you practice
the spiritual way as devotees and realize that prior energy.
You will no longer in conflict. It stands prior to the ego.
Resorting to that then is to transcend oneself. Whereas if
you simply desire the spiritual act, you're not transcending
yourself in that desire. In fact you're countering another
desire in yourself. You may even be trying somehow to
suppress that alternative desire and make it disappear or
purify yourself of it by emphasizing a virtuous motive. You may think that you have some real spiritual
inclinations in your life you see. If you observe yourself,
you'll find out that's really what that's all about. You'll
see that its opposite is also there and that your motives to
be spiritual are motives in conflict with other motives that
you are not so comfortable with. I think many people have in the past somehow gotten into
the devotee stages because they were of this more balanced
type outwardly and were otherwise also idealistic in their
orientation to spiritual life. And this was a kind of egoic
arrangement that the community was not sensitive enough
to. This community if it's going to develop its true cultural
integrity has got to be sensitive to these different styles
of egoity. This community has to sensitize itself to all the kinds
of types or styles through which egoity gets expressed and
understand thoroughly what the listening and hearing process
is really all about and establish cultural integrity on that
basis. Over time people develop a facility, a verbal facility
whether they are the exaggerated type or the balanced type.
It's one of the things to which the community has not been
very sensitive to, 'talking' the teaching. It's not an
expression of true self-understanding. You feel if you can
read the teaching that you feel it is expressing the truth
and you duplicate it by reflection it your own mind. You
think it's your understanding and your intelligence but it's
not. This understanding is the mind, it's just something you
are reflecting. The mind is a reflector you see. It just
follows it and talks it back. It hasn't changed anything.
It's not really you yet you see. That's not what I mean by
listening to the teaching, just absorbing its language and
concepts and images and so forth. That's not what studying
the teaching is really all about. To study the teaching and listen is to allow it to
develop, to serve the process of self-observation in you for
real. You can seem to be observing yourself to some degree
or watching yourself reflecting yourself to yourself and
getting descriptions of yourself. "I see this and that and
the other thing about myself. I'm so grateful for the
difficulty I have had this month because I saw a lot of
that." That's self-description and people over time accumulate a
lot of that. They not only accumulate the lingo of the
teaching and are sort of proud of it. They accumulate
sequences of self-description which sometimes are coded in
the language of insight. Because really they're just images,
just pictures of how you tend to operate. To know how you tend to operate in a variety of ways is
not to understand yourself. It's not to hear at any rate in
the fullest sense you see. It may be insight, sight into
yourself, a kind of self-awareness. That's fine. There's
nothing wrong with developing that. But it is not hearing
and it's not self-understanding in the fully consequential
sense. It's just the kind of thing that naturally comes with
listening. Hearing is something else altogether. Hearing
undercuts all the dualities, undercuts the whole guy. You
are no longer an idealist if you've truly heard. You're a realist in some, we can use that term in some
special sense in that your practice is based on reality,
real self-observation, real self-understanding and then real
spiritual communion and so on, not merely something you
project from your own self-based, self-contracted mind
feeling experience and so on. To be a realist is apply yourself to something that
inherently transcends you. You are in conflict as long as
you are identifying one-half of a pair of opposites. A
problem is two sides in opposition to one another and it is
a problem for you as long as long as you are identifying
with one-half. It may be a different half in alternative
moments but you're in conflict because you are always trying
to exclusively propel yourself with one-half of some motive
or other, or you make the other, you struggle with the
other-half or let the other side become latent somehow it
comes out and you're being that half. You must realize a condition in which you are aware of
yourself totally and you can't identify with either half
therefore because both sides of every possible problem or
conflict are within your view and you are aware of them
being part of this self, both sides you see. You can't be
either one. So then you see it as a whole. And seeing it as
a whole not gesturing in either direction you see. That's a
kind of still point in which you can understand it as a
whole, not just see it as the whole, or observe it as a
whole but understand it as a whole, what it is, that it is
self-contraction, that It is self-generated, that it is an
arbitrary identification.
a talk by Adi Da Samraj
May 2, 1987
Beginning of Listening and Hearing
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