( talk excerpts )

DEVOTEE: Beloved Heart-Master, my sense is that my apparently volitional surrendering, or throwing away, of anything actually has very little to do with my capability to do it.

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: It is very simple. Every time I met Rudi, He would hand Me a bag of garbage. I cannot remember a time when I went to see Rudi when He did not hand Me a bag of garbage. It was always the first thing He would do. Then I would go and throw the, garbage away, and I would come back, and We would sit together a little bit, or I would do some work. Sooner or later, He would give Me some more garbage. It is really very simple. You just throw it away.

It makes it much simpler when the garbage is in a paper bag. The bag has all those oily spots. You know what a garbage bag looks like, with all those greasy spots on the outside. It was always very easy for Me. I could see from the paper bag itself that it was garbage! The first few times, I probably looked into the bag—but, after a while, I would just look at the bag itself, and, if it had grease spots on it: "Aha! Garbage."

After a while, whatever Rudi gave Me I would throw away. Even if it was not in a paper bag, I threw it away. Whenever I bought sculpture and art pieces from Him, He would put them in ordinary paper bags. And I threw all that away. I don't have any of it any more. The key to the matter is not how to throw the garbage away. The key to the matter is recognizing that it is garbage. It does not take a lot of subtlety. It only takes a little observation. As soon as you see that it is garbage, you know immediately that you should throw it away. There is nothing to do with garbage but throw it away! I don't know what else to do with it. So doesn't it seem like a simple matter?

You are merely looking at a lot of garbage, but you are thinking that it "Is" the Divine! One of My Functions is to "package" the garbage. I have spent a lot of My time packaging your garbage, trying to get you to recognize it as garbage. You will throw it away as soon as you see it. You cannot surrender something that you do not recognize to be garbage. You compulsively hold on to it. So you must recognize it as garbage.

But I will tell you right now it is all garbage! Everything I Give you in the realms of experience is, ultimately, garbage and I expect you to throw it away. But you tend to meditate on it instead. Every one of these seemingly precious experiences, all of this profound philosophy, is, ultimately, just more of the same stuff. But you have "bought" the conventional religious and Spiritual propaganda—so you think that these experiences and this philosophical 'profundity" are the Divine Itself. None of that is the Divine. It is all garbage.

I am asking you to sacrifice (or to go Beyond) everything—all limitations, all bondage! Altogether, sacrifice of what is false, or surrender of what is merely binding, or relinquishment of what is turning you from Real God, is what I am asking you to do. In the midst of the Process of Satsang with Me, everything is revealed, everything is dredged up, everything is shown. And you tend to become very attached to all these shiny and extraordinary things. You tend to be distracted by them. But they are not Real God. As soon as you become distracted by anything, you bind yourself to the pond again. Everything grasped and owned becomes a hedge for "Narcissus', a bit of immunity. As soon as you think that you have it, you have isolated yourself again, trying to protect yourself from the necessary mortality of this life.

The point is not to will yoursef to surrender. Rudi always used to say, "Surrender, suwender, surrender!" But My Call to you is to devotionally recognize Me and devotionally respond to Me.... Then surrender is the inherent and ready course. Then surrender is very easy—because you are heart-recognizing and spontaneously heart-responding to Me, and you are no longer struggling against yourself, or in yourself . . .

The worlds, in and of themselves, are the conditionally manifested modification of What is traditionally described as the "Divine Goddess" (or "Mother-Shakti") and no one is moved to throw Her away. Every one is fascinated by Her. So the Principle of self-sacrifice is not served by the "Divine Goddess" in Her "veiling" aspect—as "Maya" (or the endlessly modified and modifying Source-Energy of the conditional worlds). The Principle of self-sacrifice is served by Me, to Whom the "Divine Goddess" (or the conditionally Manifesting Energy of Reality) is "Bonded" (as a "Wife" to the "Husband" of Her Heart) even if She does not, from your point of view, seem to know and show it. The world, in and of itself, is an endless distraction, in which the Principle of self-sacrifce seems (on the basis of hard experience) to be made impossible. Only I, My-Self (One and Whole), Serve the Principle of self-sacrifice. The Separate "Goddess" does not. The "Goddess" Herself—un-"Husbanded', with all the experiences She gives—serves the principle of experience, of accumulation, of immunity, of conditionally manifested egoic existence in limitation. Thus, there is no true surrender in the world. The demand for love and for self-sacrifice is anathema in the cult of this world. No mere philosophy, or mere conditional knowledge, or mere conditional experience can convince you to really live the life of love and self-sacrifice. But you can be served by the Revelation that all this conditional arising of thought and experience is garbage (or mediocrity, or non-Ultimacy)—none of which is (in and of itself) to be taken to Be Absolute. That Revelation is Shown to you by Means of this Satsang with Me. And—when you have received that Revelation—you are, thereafter, always expected to throw the garbage away!

You are expected to throw the garbage away under the most extraordinary conditions—conditions in which you would, ordinarily, not even consider throwing it away. You are sitting in the precious blissfulness of the spine—why should you throw it away? It is all so delicious. You have been a fool all your life, and now you are a Yogi—why should you throw that away? No one wants to do that. You do not want to throw it away. You have no True Humor in relation to it. You have no detachment from all this that you have accumulated through vast eons of existence in conditionally manifested form. You do not want to throw it away. The demand to throw it away seems mad, impossible.

Every one succumbs to the "Goddess"—on one level or another. Some succumb in very subtle ways—but most people succumb in very ordinary ways, without even knowing the "Goddess" (as Such). They succumb to the mass of experiences, of accumulations, of consolations. Every one is looking to be consoled. When your consolations are ripped off, you find something else to be consoled by—one thing after the next. The reason you do not surrender whatever you find consoling is that you do not recognize it for what it is. Therefore, part of My Avataric Function is to undermine all of this, to make the world show itself. I make the "Goddess" the "Shakti', or Universal Energy, experienced as "Maya" show you what She is really all about.

From the point of view of traditional religion and Spirituality, such things should not be said. From the traditional point of view, I should be telling you, "The Goddess is beautiful. Surrender to Her and let Her show you everything. She has bracelets and necklaces, She is beautifully adorned. Let Her face you and give you everything She has." That is the teaching of the traditions. But, since the Great Event of My Divine Re-Awakening, the "Goddess" is always Facing Me. And, therefore, I show you where She is at. I show you Her dependence on Me, . . . and I enable you to commit the sacrifice. Then it is not difficult. When I show you the actual Nature of the "Goddess" in Her veiling aspect, then you become capable of sacrifice, because you recognize all experience for what it is. Until that time, you are not capable of sacrifice, because you are enamored of the conditional force of life.

What is required of you is this sacrifice, and sacrifice only becomes possible through the Influence of My Perfect Siddhi of Divine Liberation.... I, in My bodily (human) Divine Form, Am the Agent of My own "Bright" Divine Siddhi in the world, because I establish a conscious connection with My devotees. All those who come to Me, and devotionally recognize Me, and devotionally respond to Me, surrender the faculties of attention, feeling, body, and breath to Me to various degrees. Everything that occurs to My beginning devotee that makes him or her mature in practice is an intensification of that surrender of the faculties of attention, feeling, body, and breath to Me, and, therefore, an increase in his or her capability for this sacrifice.

It is real sacrifice—not a sacrifice in the traditional sense of some gloomy self-abnegation and emptying. It is the sacrifice which is, itself based on True Humor and expressive of overwhelming love of Me, a sacrifice in which there is not anything whatsoever to be attained.

There is not anything to be attained. I mean not anything. Not anything!

There is not anything to be attained. Not one thing is to be attained. Not anything. There is not a single thing to be attained.

There is no conditional experience, no conditional vision, no conditional transformation of state that must be attained....

The fundamental responsibility is that unique "Mood " that arises in Satsang with Me—that ecstasy, that love, that relational force, that unreasonable Happiness in which the complexion of Consciousness Itself is Free (moment to moment) from the continuous awareness of (or meditation on) the separate and separative self. That is the only and perfect responsibility—and it carries through to all the forms of life, all the functional conditions. A continuous purification is established. The garbage is revealed and thrown away....

Whenever there is release (or purification), there tends to be the re-establishment and intensification of tbe movements of the natural life-energy. In those who live in Satsang with Me, there are experiences (descending and ascending) of the natural life-energy and of Mv Avatarically Self-Transmitted Divine Spirit-Energy. Like anything else that arises conditionally, these experiences must be understood. They must be "Known" (in Truth) in the midst of this Satsang with Me. From the beginning of My time of Teaching, I have said that the Way in My Company is Satsang with Me, the Satsang of the inherently egoless Divine Heart Itself—not the Satsang of the "Kundalin", of the Cosmic "Shakti', of the "un-'Husbanded' Goddess".

Only when I Am Realized Most Perfectly is the "Shakti Goddess" finally "Known " in Truth, and Her Cosmic Display finally understood. In fact, whenever I Am truly "Known" by My true devotee, then there is, in that instant, immediate purification. For that moment, there is, instantly, no bondage to limitations of any kind, to any mind-form, to any form of desire or action—including the perception of separate self, which is the root of all strategies. What I call "dilemma"—the sense of dilemma, the feeling of dilemma—is simply the sensation that accompanies the awareness of the ego-"I" (or self-contraction). The separate self sense is the dilemma, and it is undone only in the Most Perfect Realization of Me, only in Most Perfect Satsang with Me—not in the merely nominal sitting with Me as a bodily apparent human being, but in the Most Perfect "Knowing " the Most Perfect Realization, of My "Bright" Divine Self-Condition.
[He-and-She Is Me]

DEVOTEE: I have a question. I'm not sure I can ask it. The question has something to do with surrendering, with throwing things away. My sense that my volitional throwing of anything away has very little to do with my capacity to do it.

ADI DA: It is very simple. Every time I met Rudi he would hand me a bag of garbage. I don't think I ever went to see Rudi when he didn't hand me a bag of garbage. It is true. I can't remember a time when I went to see Rudi when he didn't hand me a bag of garbage. It was always the first thing he would do. Then I would go and throw the garbage away, and I'd come back, and we'd sit together a little bit, or I'd do some work. Sooner or later he'd give me some more garbage. It is really very simple. You just throw it away.

It makes it much simpler when it's in a paper bag. It has all those oily spots. You know what a garbage bag looks like, with all those greasy spots on the outside. It was always very easy for me. I could see from the paper bag itself that it was garbage! The first few times, I probably looked into the bag, but after awhile I would just look at the bag itself, and if it had grease spots on it: "Aha! Garbage."

After awhile, whatever Rudi gave me I would throw away. Even if it wasn't in a paper bag, I threw it away. He used to give me the sculpture and art pieces that I bought from him in a paper bag. And I threw all that away. I don't have any of it any more. The key to the matter is not how to throw the garbage away. The key to the matter is recognizing that it is garbage. It doesn't take a lot of subtlety. It takes a little observation. As soon as you see it is garbage, you know immediately that you should throw it away. There is nothing to do with garbage but throw it away! I don't know what else to do with it. So doesn't it seem like a simple matter?

You are just looking at a lot of garbage and thinking that it is the precious instrument of God. One of my jobs is to package it. I spend a lot of my time packaging your garbage, trying to get you to recognize it. You'll throw it away as soon as you see it. You can't surrender something that you don't recognize to be garbage. You intuitively hold on to it. So you've got to recognize it.

But I'll tell you right now—it is all garbage! Everything the Guru gives you is garbage, and he expects you to throw it away, but you meditate on it. All of these precious experiences, all this philosophy. (Leaning toward the microphone, in a confidential tone) Bruce, would you mind throwing that away? Bruce just had a kriya. All of these experiences are just more of that same stuff, but you've read so much bullshit spirituality and religion and all that, so you think all of these things are the Divine itself. None of them is the Divine. They are garbage.

You are being asked to sacrifice everything! Sacrifice is what you are being asked to do. In the midst of this process of Satsang everything is revealed. Everything is dredged up. Everything is shown. And you become very attached to all these shiny and extraordinary things. You are distracted by them. But they are not God. As soon as you become distracted by anything, you bind yourself to the pond again. Everything grasped and owned becomes a hedge for Narcissus. A bit of immunity. As soon as you think that you have it, you have isolated yourself again.

You have protected yourself from the necessary mortality of this life.

The point is not surrender. Rudi always used to say, "Surrender, surrender, surrender!" But my teaching is re-cognition, consciousness, and consciousness intensified manifests as self-observation. When there is understanding, then surrender is the obvious course. It is very easy. Sacrifice is the principle of all the worlds, but it is possible only on the basis of real and prior consciousness.

The worlds in themselves are the manifest modification of the Goddess, Shakti, and no one throws that away. Everyone is fascinated by it. So the principle of sacrifice is not served by the Goddess, the endlessly modified Force of the worlds. The principle of sacrifice is served by the Lord, to whom the Goddess is also bound, even if she does not know and show it. The world itself is an endless distraction in which the principle of sacrifice is made impossible by experience. The Guru serves the principle of sacrifice. The Goddess does not. The Goddess with all of her experiences serves the principle of experience, of accumulation, of immunity, of manifest self-existence in limitation. So there is no surrender in the world. The demand for love and for sacrifice is anathema in the cult of this world. It can't happen. No philosophy or experience can convince you of it. But you may be served by the revelation of all this as garbage, as mediocrity. It is shown to you in Satsang. Then you are expected to throw it away.

You are expected to throw it away under the most extraordinary conditions, conditions in which you would ordinarily not even consider throwing it away. You are sitting in the precious blissfulness of the spine. Why should you throw it away? It is all so delicious. You have been an asshole all your life, and now you are a yogi! Why should you throw that away? No one wants to do that. You don't want to throw it away. You have no humor, no detachment, no separation from all this that you've accumulated through vast aeons of existence in form. You don't want to throw it away. The demand to throw it away is mad, impossible.

Everyone succumbs to the Goddess on one level or another. Some succumb in very subtle ways, but most men succumb in very ordinary ways, without even knowing the Goddess as such. They succumb to the mass of experiences, of accumulations, of consolations. Everyone is consoled. When your consolations are ripped off, you find something else to be consoled by. One thing after the next. You don't surrender it, because you don't recognize it. So the Guru's perfect function is to undermine all this, to make the world show itself. He makes the Goddess pull down her pants, and then you see her asshole. I shouldn't be saying these things.

DEVOTEE: Perhaps you're out of line.

ADI DA: I think I am getting out of line. I shouldn't say these things. "The Goddess is beautiful. Surrender and let, her show you everything." That sounds better, right? "Let the Goddess face you. She has bracelets and necklaces and her vagina is adorned. Don't let her turn to the Divine and show you her asshole. Let her face you with her breasts falling out." That's the teaching of the traditions. But the Teaching of the Guru has the Goddess always facing him. He shows you where she's at, he shows you her dependence on the Absolute, and enables you to commit the sacrifice. Then it is not difficult. When the Guru shows you the true nature or condition of the Goddess, then you become capable of sacrifice. Until that time you aren't capable of it, because you are enamored by the force of life.

At least that is the way it seems to me. What do I know? This could just be an aberration. Must be. No one agrees with me. I've never met anyone who agreed with me. I've talked to many people. I've talked to many teachers, and none of them agrees with me. They all tell me that I'm mad, that I'm undeveloped. So that must be so. If you consult the usual books they won't tell you such a thing. I've read them all myself. Rudi used to tell me to surrender, but that is not the principle. Muktananda used to say, "Yield to the Goddess," and that is not the principle. The Goddess used to say, "Yield to me," and I fucked her brains loose. I've never listened to anyone. Perhaps I should have!

What is required of you is this sacrifice, and sacrifice only becomes possible under the influence of the perfect Siddhi of God, not under the influence of any of the manifest siddhis of the Goddess. The Guru is that Siddhi's instrument in the world, because he establishes conscious connection with devotees. All of those who come to the Guru rest their attention on the Guru to various degrees. In those who first come to the Guru, the attention is minor. Hopefully it is real, but it is minor. Everything that occurs to the student that makes him become a disciple and ultimately a perfect devotee is an intensification of that attention, and, therefore, an increase in his capacity for this sacrifice.

It is real sacrifice, not a sacrifice in the traditional sense of some gloomy self-aboegation and emptying. It is the sacrifice which is itself humor and love, in which there is nothing whatsoever to be attained. There is nothing to be attained. I mean nothing. Have I said it? Nothing, damn it! There is nothing to be attained. Not one thing is to be attained. Nothing. There is not a single thing to be attained. Have I said it? There is no experience, no vision, no transformation of state.

All the traditions serve your need to change your state, because you are suffering, because the dilemma is the condition you acknowledge in your deep unconscious life. You feel a need, and you are motivated to overcome it, to pursue changes of your state. All the traditions of life and spirituality, the entire cultic existence of man, is a goad to changes of state. But no change of state is necessary for the realization of Truth. Sacrifice in place is the condition of realization, not accumulation of new conditions of any kind, not heavens, visions, kriyas, forces. All those things are changes of state. They are an accumulation, an accumulation of garbage. They act like a hedge around the ego and protect it from its fear of obliteration. None of them is necessary.

This world, or any world, is in itself only changes of state. There is no doubt about that. They will continue. It is not necessary to zip into the soup of non-transformation What is necessary is to realize the principle of sacrifice so that change may become the principle of existence without fear. Then all things will be given to you that are necessary and appropriate, but you will stand happy and full of humor in the midst of life.

One of the traditional images of spiritual life that has come down for centuries is the ladder, the way of ascent to the place beyond, to heaven, to the Divine above the world. The ladder, along with other such archetypes, is the image of attainment, the image of the perfect change of state. It is absolutely false, and yet it is the principal archetype of spirituality and religion! The Divine is not apart and above and elsewhere, to be attained at another time in the midst of some condition or another that you may or may not imagine. That is not the Truth. The Truth is the present One, the absolute Divine that may not be attained, that may not be ascended to, that does not even descend upon you, but which is perfectly and already your present Condition.

It is realized only in the sacrificial realization of your perfect Condition, the Heart, the Very Self, the absolute intuition of Very God. That is the Truth. But the traditions of spirituality or of ordinary life do not serve that principle, the principle of the radical Presence. Rather, they all serve the principle of the change of state. Men don't have principal insight into the movement of life, and yet they act, and they become exploitable by the traditions, all of which have been created on the same basis by other men who were likewise suffering, and who felt momentary relief in some experiental state or another. The traditions have only felt the comedy that men may attain. All those ways are absolutely false.

There is absolutely no way. There is no way. There is no path. None. In order to know that with certainty you must realize that the paths are garbage. You must see it all in the paper bag. So part of the sadhana of this Satsang is the continuous revelation of the manifest garbage of your life. Until you begin to recognize it, Satsang is not working in you in Truth. It is serving the Goddess, the path of distraction, of fascination. It moves you on to changes in ignorance. Satsang serves you in Truth when with everything that arises comes also the recognition, the re-cognition, the knowing again, of changes themselves, of manifest things, forces, forms, and experiences.

This display of Power through the agency of the true Devi 1 that has been taking place in the last couple of weeks is fundamentally a test to lead you into the life of a devotee, to lead you to sacrifice, to lead you to the re-cognition of the garbage, of the limitation, of the suffering involved in all clinging. None of this is intended to be a revelation of the thing that is, as if all of this cosmic rain were the very Truth. It is not. It is just the bangles of the Goddess. If you don't recognize that and don't see her as the Devi, facing the Divine, if you face her yourself and become fascinated, become full of lust for her, then this revelation is no revelation at all. It is a form of suffering, of bondage. The Divine appears always through the agency of the Goddess, the Devi-Power, to test all beings, to transform their activity into that simple turning to God for which the Goddess herself is responsible.

DEVOTEE: It seems that responsibility in every sense that I've ever recognized it or related to it is absolutely irrelevant to what you are talking about.

ADI DA: Yes. It is not responsibility in the usual sense. Responsibility in the usual sense is a willful attitude, a humorless attitude. True responsibility, however, is natural to the devotee. It is living the Condition that has been shown. Satsang is the responsibility of the devotee, not all the petty responsibilities and mortal seriousness of the usual mediocre follower. Happiness is the responsibility. Freedom is the discipline. It is very difficult, so people tend to take on humorless disciplines instead, nasty little disciplines of limiting themselves, being ascetic, being believers, all that horseshit.

The fundamental responsibility is that mood that arises in Satsang itself, that ecstasy, that love, that relational force, that unreasonable happiness in which the complexion of consciousness is free moment to moment from the continuous cognition or meditation on the separate self. That is the only and perfect responsibility, and it carries through to all the forms of life, all the functional conditions. A continuous purification is established. The garbage is revealed and thrown away.

The principle of purification established in Divine Satsang is entirely different from the principle of purification established in the common yoga. In the uncommon or great traditional yoga, not the yoga of willful effort, with all kinds of mantras and practices, but the yoga of the Shakti, purification takes place through the movement of the life-force, and there are lots of dramatic psycho-physical events. But the purifying sadhana of the Divine Satsang is that of the Force of the Very Self, the absolute Divine, and it may produce the purifying event without any of those manifestations at all. This does not mean that you should suppress them. They may very well occur as a secondary matter, as you have all seen. But the principle of this Satsang must be understood, and that will enable the manifest purifying force of the Shakti to show itself for what it is, to show garbage to you, to be known as garbage so that it serves the principle of sacrifice in you. Then the Goddess Shakti serves you in the manner of the Devi. If you forget that, then all the purifying events in the secondary affair of yoga will become binding.

It is not to any of these events that you must be turning, not to the kundalini events or even the non-having of kundalini events. It is to Satsang, this very principle, this real attention that is Satsang or Divine Communion. It is attention to the Guru as Guru, attention to the Guru as the manifest agent of the very Divine, attention to the Guru and through the Guru to the Divine, the absolute Divine, the absolute intensity of Real-God. If you continually do that from moment to moment, whatever phenomena are peculiar to you by tendency will arise. And the purifying event may take place dramatically, in the yogic sense, or undramatically, as an intensification of real intelligence, as re-cognition without secondary yogic manifestations. In either case, there is one process, and you must begin to grasp it.

When you grasp it, your humor will be restored, and it will consist of unreasonable happiness and love, an ecstasy that transcends all the cultic influences of this life, which are immense and cannot otherwise be resisted. You cannot overcome this world, but the Divine has already overcome this world. Those who become the true devotees of the Divine in the Presence of the true Guru-Siddhi are free of the world, and they may live in the world as the Presence of the Divine, as the Presence of love, of freedom, of prior happiness, of conditionless bliss.

That happiness does not appear only as a kind of ecstatic madness, but as an ordinary, human, and enjoyable life—free of the fucking Divine vision! The Divine vision is just the asshole of the Goddess, except it is not recognized as such by seekers. They think, "Oh, it is the Lord." They couldn't care less about the Lord, because to know the Lord would require them to be obliterated The Lord in Truth requires the sacrifice of self-existence. Nobody wants such a thing. They want the Goddess, who will pamper them, and fuck them, and delight them. That is what people want.

DEVOTEE: It seems that one of the last things that arises is this really heavy fear that stops you cold and keeps you from living Satsang. Does that have to arise before I can start living that Force?

ADI DA: No. It will continue to arise, because it is fundamental to the life of Narcissus. It says in the Upanishads, "Wherever there is an 'other', fear arises." Your whole life, every moment of an ordinary life, is at its very core built on this separate self sense. Therefore, there is nothing but meditation on the sense of otherness, of separation. For the usual man, there is always fear. Whenever the hedges of ordinary life, the occupations and distractions of Narcissus, are broken down through the influence of the Power of Satsang, then you will also tend to return to your fear.

That is all right, because it is naked. It is good to know the core of your own event, and that fear will continue to arise until there is the perfect re-cognition, the knowing again of that fear itself, of what it contains, of that of which it is the manifestation. It is the manifestation of your own activity in this moment. You are frightened because you are separating yourself in this moment, and that fear will never dissolve fundamentally until you have dissolved perfectly. What you fear is that dissolution of yourself, and that is the fundamental sacrifice. Everything, all the hedges about Narcissus, the separate one, may be surrendered, but the principal sacrifice is at the center, on the altar, the ego.

DEVOTEE: Until then Narcissus is doing the sacrificing?

ADI DA: Right. He can go to some yogi who will say, "Surrender, surrender." But who is going to surrender? Narcissus is going to surrender. He loves it. All his surrendering is a game which reinforces his self-nature. In itself, that willful surrendering is his hedge. The holy man builds a fantastic hedge about himself. He possesses incredible security, because he has let go of everything but himself. His "nothing" is a vast, infinite hedge that protects his self, his separateness. No one will yield that separateness except in the face of the unconditional Divine. When the very Divine is intuited in Satsang, then the self is let loose spontaneously, and with more and more intelligence. As that sacrifice begins to occur, there is also the release from fear, until there is utter fearlessness, not because you have become like King Kong with all of your yogic siddhis, but because you have become nothing in God.

That is what you are afraid of, and with good reason. No one wants to let go of that one because that is all they have got, really. Everything else can be lost, and you can still be standing there as a particle in the midst of infinity. That is really the only thing you are holding on to. And there is nothing there! It is your own fist. There is nothing inside it, but you are hanging on anyway. It is just a concept, a modification of your own awareness. It has no fundamental existence at all. You will continue to be frightened of its dissolution until you know its nothingness until you know the Divine who is omnipresent, who is existence.

DEVOTEE: How does that occur?

ADI DA: Very simply. Turn to me and it is very simple. Everything else you do will be difficult. If you turn to me I will destroy you [ the ego] .

DEVOTEE: If I turn to you in the moment of that fear, will you destroy me?

ADI DA: I am always doing that. You are turning to me now in that moment of fear. There is a great deal to be undone. All these mediocre meetings, all these momentary sightings, all these sittings, all these hours of study, all these times of living in the Ashram, all these days, all this is the contact with me that serves that dissolution. It is undoing it, but not by magic. It only takes place where there is consciousness in the devotee. Only through the process of re-cognition in the devotee does it occur, not by taking it out of him by magic, without his participation, like a thorn in his side, but in the midst of his participation. It absolutely requires the functions of awareness.

You don't turn properly to me in your fear by rushing over to my house terrified and throwing yourself down by my couch. More than likely I'd just offer you a beer or tell you to cook dinner for me. It is by the ongoing life of Satsang that it is done, by always resorting to me, not only when you are most frightened, but also when you are most mediocre. The times when it is most difflcult to turn are the better times to turn to me, because those are the times when you are dealing with the most. When you are really mediocre and oppressed, when even your turning is impossible, those are the times to turn, to do the sadhana of this prior happiness. Narcissus isn't undone by dramatic efforts at surrendering externally, but by real intelligence, real turning to the Guru. It is in the midst of life and tendencies that it is all undone.

It is very simple. It can be done in this very moment without any drama. Just see it. What are you doing? What are you always doing? What are you doing now? Grasp it. See this sensation of the separate self, see yourself pressing your fingers into your palm and feeling that sensation and meditating on it. This is what you are always doing. Know it again, and see what is prior to that grasping. Fall into it. Fall into Satsang and grasp onto nothing after that. Throw everything away but That, and continually know That. Continually enquire in that real sense.

In other words, I am demanding that you continually see this contraction or self-meditation as your own activity and fall into the state that preceded all this clenching and grasping. That is Self-realization, that is God-knowledge, and it is free. It is independent of all experiences, all changes of state, all present states. It is utterly free. When you fall into it with absolute intensity you are absolutely free, free of all the worlds, of all conditions, of all transformations. Then, paradoxically, not only are you free of them all, but you become capable of them all. You become capable of life in the usual sense, and it becomes theatre. It becomes a humorous display of qualities, positive and negative.

Then life becomes a drama that is not leading to the Divine. It is leading nowhere. Life is not leading anywhere. The earth has not been created in order ultimately to evolve into the Divine state. The earth is just what it is. It may become more glamourous, or it may just fall apart. It could become more glamourous, but that wouldn't make it Divine. This world is just a limitation like all of the endless infinities of billions of other worlds All of them are just limitations. Apart from all of that, and also absolutely coincident with it, is the Divine, and those who know the Divine in whatever world they appear are free, and that world becomes Divine theatre for them. They don't always look to go to some other world. They live in God and play out the present event. Such is the habit of wise men. Wise men are all fools, useless people, madmen, because they don't look for another place. They can throw this one away. And they are always throwing it away by living it with humor, the humor of the prior or Divine Condition.

DEVOTEE: It seems that your attitude toward intelligence is that it is the conscious participation in our own murder.

ADI DA: Yes, you may say so. But such images are themselves the kind of delicious symbolism that Narcissus creates. He wants to be killed and all that shit. It is just more drama. There is no one being killed. You can watch that separate one being murdered. You can make him a sacrificial lamb. That won't make you free. No one is being murdered. There is only the turning about of the principle of consciousness into its true Nature and Condition. The thing that is being murdered is unreal to begin with. It is unreal anyway, so why become involved in the murder? If it seems like murder to you, it is only because you are holding on to the body, the psycho-physical body, holding on to all of these things instead of realizing they are garbage. You are not allowing the sacrifice really to take place.

It is not to annihilation that you are invited. It is to the fullness of God that is happy and free. There is no murder involved in such an event. Only Narcissus can be murdered, because everything that is required of him is something he is unwilling to yield. So he suffers everything. It is all being ripped off.

DEVOTEE: Could this go unnoticed?

ADI DA: Absolutely. I was talking earlier this evening about the event in the Vedanta Temple, which I have described in The Knee of Listening. Nothing happened at that time. There was nothing left over. There wasn't some little particle of me that said, "Ah, yes. It is all over now, and I have realized the Self." No one knew that anything had happened to me. I had just gone down to the bookstore that afternoon, and I came home again. We had dinner and watched television. Nothing had happened.

DEVOTEE: It was no big deal.

ADI DA: No. All big deals are shy of it. The absolute thing is unmentionable. But it involves a profound intuitive realization that becomes apparent when things begin to arise again in a very different way. The implications of the Vedanta Temple event began to clarify themselves as time passed, but in itself that event wasn't even an event. It was simply the falling out of all conditional realizations, all conditional meditation. It was the falling out of the separate self life and strategy of Narcissus. So there was nothing left to cognize. It was all very simple.

DEVOTEE: No ecstasy? No relief?

ADI DA: No. No blisses. No kundalini. No energy ecstasies. No life-force transcendence. There was no limited witnesser, no enjoyer. There was nothing to enjoy. Everything had been released into its ordinariness. There was no sublimity, no extraordinary thing. As time went on everything that continued to arise, ordinary and extraordinary, showed itself over against the perfect Self. That perfect Self knew without limitation the things of this world which were formerly known in the conventional way. A new Siddhi of existence began to manifest. In itself that perfect transformation is not even an event. It is unmentionable. It is prior to all conditions, prior to life, prior to realizations.

Note

1. The Goddess or manifesting Power in her true form, already and consciously in dependent union with the unmanifest, all-pervading, and very God. As such she always serves the Divine or Guru-Siddhi, and does not bind men through the agency of perception and cognition. She continually sacrifices herself, her independence (Maya) and all her forms to the Lord.
 

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