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Beezone adaptation and edit from original talk by Adi Da (see below) Old Patterns, New Responsibilities The purpose in considering your whole history is to see how that demand for attention, your need for love, the acquisition of knowledge and the love of power and fame are all coming from the same disposition. It comes from pattern that already exists, it doesn't originate in any specific relationship. That is the value of being able to trace your history. By trying to manipulate your present situation either internally or externally is not the solution because the problem doesn't arise in the present, the problem is simply the continuation of habits, patterns of memory. Your present situation is only a reflection of patterns repeated from incidences of the past, frozen moments in time, repeating themselves over and over again. So it wouldn't make any difference how you or anyone else or how the situation could change and so forth. Your basic life pattern would still be the same. You are fundamentally in a reactive state in which you've existed since before you can remember, you are always already presuming separation, the absence of attention, having to struggle to get attention, having to struggle to get into a pleasurable state. You struggled and connived and so forth as a little kid. You enact a ritual of either being angry, sorrowful and resentful. You're unhappy and pissed off. You look for replacements, temporary satisfactions but they never seem to be enough. They may be satisfactory for a period of time but they are not 'scratching the deeper itch', the deeper 'gnawing' that seems to show itself cyclically. As long as you are presuming that you are in principle separated from loving attention, you can never get in touch with it, even when you become intimate with it, because it is not the same as being in connection, it's a temporary acquisition. The acquiring of it occurs within a situation in which you are inherently separated. When you are an infant there is survival value in the recoil or reaction to life, and all of the manipulative games you created had something to do with reality, but when you get to this stage of your life, the conditions that created this assumption to begin with no longer exist. And instead of it being factual that you are rejected, not getting attention, not being loved, and so forth, it winds up that that is what you are all about. It's natural to develop this separative ego, the self-possessed strategy, in your early years. Its development coincided with incidents that affected you mentally and emotionally emotionally, and which seem themselves to be a kind of betrayal but it would have occurred in any case weather you had negative events to react to or not. It's a dangerous creative process for the child to become differentiated and be an individual. If you have negative factors in your life, within which to develop your functional independence, it can look as if are a little delinquent or crazy. So there are two sides here: one is the situation in your childhood or your infancy in which you were cut off too soon or whatever. And then there is also just the natural course of the human being's differentiating himself or herself egoically. But you are living these patterns in the present. They are memories in the form of tendencies. You're living them in the present and getting lessons about them. Sometimes easy and sometimes not so easy. You should pay attention to what life is telling you. The mere willful attempt to not do it is not sufficient, because you can't account for all of the aspects of your behavior and feeling and thinking that are versions of this ritual. It will happen in any case. And it will happen particularly mightily when your guard is down. So you can't make a decision not to do it, independent of inspection and responsibility for the pattern that you're involved in because it's not in the present that this situation exists. The situation that you are struggling with emotionally doesn't exist in the present. It's memory, it's old adaptation, it's tendency. Not particularly memory of incidents, but of the reactions, the patterns of adaptation that you developed relative to incidents that bind you. That's what you all must realize; the incidents in the past don't have any significance in themselves, it's the patterns of adaptation that you created relative to them. Those are what you've got to be responsible for. The incidents are already gone, they don't have any force except by association. You're not suffering the incidents of the past, nor are you suffering the incidents of the present. You are suffering from the patterns of adaptation, the habits that are tending to persist. They are very ordinary and you cannot do them once you've inspected your life and see the pattern. Everyone has done the same old thing their whole life; you do it every day. You've done it in every new situation. Every time a new level of experience or whatever appears, you just adapt it to this pattern. You've always been doing the same thing fundamentally, the same little scheme or script, the same emotional habit. So it's not overwhelmingly complicated; it's just that it is tending to persist. It's not by manipulating yourself in the present that you are free of it, it's by seeing this history and this pattern that is present in the form of tendency, and being free on the basis of that inspection to adapt to a new condition in the present through the whole discipline of your spiritual life, the Communion that it represents. There isn't anything complex about you or anybody else in the whole world. Everybody has done the same thing; on the basis of the vulnerability in the infantile situation when they were moving into incarnation, everyone developed a reactive pattern and presumption that essentially amounted to not being responsible for love, or feeling-attention, and through various games always looking for it to come to them. Everybody in the whole world is doing that; that is all anybody is doing unless they are understanding it, being responsible for it and entering into the eternal incident that is spiritually communicated to them in this moment. That is the only way you can do something different than everybody else in the world is doing. And there is no magical release from the past, there is only responsibility for it. Once you become responsible for it and adapt to the eternal incident in the moment, then the past starts becoming obsolete because you are adapting in a new way. The reason it hasn't changed yet, even though you've thought about your life for years, is that you haven't adapted differently. more: Become Responsible (original talk) The Spoiled Child Seven Stages of Life I Call you to Go Beyond the "Oedipal" Sufferings of Childhood You Are Not the One Who Gets Loved Monthly Archives October 2009 - November 2009 - December 2009 - January 2010 - February 2010 - March 2010    back to Daily Reading

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