Even Science is a Magical Activity

a talk, October 27, 1980

 

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ:

The attitude, asana, or method of science is one that treats the processes of experience as objective phenomena. The forms that are cognized and perceived by the method of science are treated as phenomena that exist in and of themselves, independent of cognition and perception. The forms of cognition and perception may obviously be regarded in this way, and in treating them as such we simply put ourselves in a position to study or find out about those phenomena as a process of forms.

We are mistaken, however, if we make this attitude or procedure the only allowable or justifiable procedure of human existence. In doing so we make various philosophical presumptions about the nature of Reality that are clearly false and that suppress and depress various other ways of human knowing and aspects of human existence and in general deny the possibility of equanimity, or harmonious Realization of the Condition of our existence.

The attitude or asana of science is a method based on analysis, made possible by the objectification of phenomena and the assumption of a point of view wherein the viewer is conceived to have either no fundamental effect or a rigorously reduced effect on the things observed. When this attitude becomes the only possible human stance, Reality tends to be defined in terms of that objective dimension of things, and the other dimensions of our Condition tend to be reduced to the description we propose of the objective world. Thus, the psychic dimension of the being, including the process of cognition and perception and conscious existence itself, is typically reduced to a secondary development of matter.

We have already discussed that there are other ways of knowing, in particular the way of knowing that I have called participatory knowledge. Historically, when participatory knowledge became the exclusive way of knowing, the psyche and the essential condition of being or consciousness tended to provide the limiting structure we define as reality. When the self-Essence and the psyche are deemed to be the only "real" reality, then the forms that arise and anything that may be proposed as an objective world become secondary, even unnecessary and illusory. That attitude characterizes the extreme oriental disposition. Even so, this process of participatory knowledge, without being made into an exclusive and dominant approach to things, is a natural dimension of our existence, a simple, ordinary expression of the totality of our condition, to which we must adapt and with which we must become naturally familiar.

Now, if we do not define Reality simply in terms of the conscious essence of the subject or self, if we understand that Reality is the Transcendental Condition of all the features of our condition, then we can presume various asanas in the midst of our daily living. One of those asanas is the left-brained, analytical approach to forms of phenomena in themselves so that their laws and interrelations may be inspected and understood. But we may also presume the participatory way of knowing without making it reductive — in other words, without passing into the inverted state of the subject independent of forms. We can simply make use of the process of participation in all possible phenomena, a process that is native to our condition.

We have already considered that we do not in fact have any awareness of a world that exists in and of itself. Our awareness of the world is always in the form of cognition and perception. And the world itself is always in the form of a perception or a cognition. In other words, our fundamental association with the world is participatory. There is no distinction in our basic Condition of existence between the psyche, consciousness, cognition and perception, and the forms that arise. They are a single process, no part of which is the only reality, the "real" reality, and no part of which causes any other part. All parts arise simultaneously in a condition of mutuality as modifications of the Transcendental Being.

Since we do not realize the world in any terms other than psychic ones, and since the world for us is always apparent in the form of states of cognition and perception, it is reasonable to participate in the world as a psychic phenomenon. It is quite natural to do so. We already exist in that psychic and participatory circumstance.

In other times and places, the participatory way of knowing was dominant, particularly in the oriental setting. Until the dogmatically dominant appearance of the mood of scientism and the left-brained model of Man, other ways of knowing and the fundamental disposition of participatory knowing were common in the schooling of human life.

But the convention of knowing that is dominant and popular in our time is essentially a development of the one way of knowing seen in the discipline of scientific activity. This activity is otherwise animated by everyone in the form of a left-brained, verbal, or waking mentality primarily associated with motor activity, wherein attention is moved bodily into gross relations. This is the primary attitude or asana to which we adapt in present social circumstances. We are therefore not very well schooled in the disposition of participation wherein we realize our existence to be a Condition of continuousness with all phenomena or all beings. We tend to exclude and suppress the participatory disposition. We do not enjoy a high level of adaptation to that way of knowing or relating to the conditions of existence.

We would do well to generate tools for investigating the world in and of itself. Such investigation is a useful development of our association with the world, so long as it does not become an exclusive philosophy. But if our association with the world is fundamentally psychic to begin with and is never anything but that, then even this scientific activity (in which we presume to be analytically differentiated from phenomena in order to know them in and of themselves) is itself a psychic phenomenon.

Even science, then, is a psychic development, a psychic process, a way of relating to the psychic phenomenon we regard as the so-called objective world. But when science presumes to provide the basis for an exclusive point of view toward life, we forget this truth. We act as if it were not the case, and then the principle of scientific knowing becomes destructive.

The participatory way of knowing is a way of psychically inhering in the World-Process and becoming sensitive to it as a psychic phenomenon, becoming active in it through psychic processes, and observing in it the effects of psychic processes. We could call that way of knowing magic. It is a magical activity. There are many kinds of magical activity, but if we simply understand our relationship to the world as I have just described it, then we realize that that form of relationship is naturally magical, because we know the world only as a psychic phenomenon.

We may consider the world to be an objective phenomenon, but then we are actually treating a psychic phenomenon as if it were an objective phenomenon. To do so produces a certain kind of knowledge and a certain strategy of association — an asana or a disposition — but it does not change the fact that we exist essentially in a participatory association with the phenomena of the world. We are inherently related to the world in a magical fashion. The world itself is inherently a magical process, a magical or psychic phenomenon.

Science is therefore a kind of magical activity, a way of relating to and using the magical nature of our existence, a disposition of relationship to a phenomenon that in its totality is psychic or magical in nature. Of course, those who advocate the scientific point of view would not in general want to equate science with magic. More likely they would propose science as the antithesis of magical activity. But because of the inherently psychic nature of our association with the world, science must nonetheless be understood as a species of magical activity.

Yet, the disposition of science could be called antimagical. Science presumes the antimagical disposition to pursue a certain familiarity with or knowledge about the World-Process. When the disposition of science becomes exclusive and dominant, its antimagical quality becomes obvious as a kind of dogmatic inclination, a cultural effect that is dehumanizing — antimagical activity is antihuman activity.

Now, we could not say that science simply as a rigorous method for acquiring certain kinds of knowledge is antimagical in the negative sense. But when its point of view is made exclusive, then the effect of the antimagical disposition is negative because it suppresses and argues against the fundamental nature of our association with things, as if by doing science and acquiring knowledge by its means, we could ultimately magically cease to be human, magically cease to be magically related to the universe, and magically eliminate the magical and psychic nature of the universe!

Antimagic is itself a kind of magic, and when developed in an exaggerated fashion, it becomes bad magic, negative magic. To presume the scientific disposition exclusively depresses us psychically. It demands that we identify with what is mortal, what is limited, what is material, what is not psychic. To confront this dogma and the force of this antimagical disposition is to suffer the suppression of the fullness of conscious existence.

Fundamentally, then, we could say that the fault of our science-dominated time is its dehumanizing effect, its antipsychic or anti-magical effect, which is tending to destroy our inherent understanding of the nature of our existence and to suppress and delegitimize the naturally magical process of associating with the world.

As a result of the Westernization of mankind through the movement of scientism and its extensions, we have seen a gradual disappearance of the profession of magic and the esotericism of religion, spirituality, and mysticism. These ancient cultural processes are being studied today, but most of that study is based on the scientific, antimagical inclination to reduce magical processes to explanation via the antimagical, scientific model of Man.

Thus, in our anthropological and other scientific studies of magic, mysticism, and shamanism there generally exists a prejudice to perceive those activities and the individuals associated with them as infantile versions of Man operating on the basis of illusion and false models of the world. Likewise, scientific commentators constantly point out that modern mankind is not supposed to be capable of relating to the world through magical processes and that furthermore we should not try to relate to the world in such fashion. To do so would be dangerous, they warn. We would be getting involved with illusions, unreality, even madness.

I once went to see a woman who was a principal student of Carl Jung. In the psychological school of Jung there seems to be a level of tolerance for the psychic process and the forms it has taken in various cultures — magic, yoga, mysticism, shamanism, and so forth. But the conventional, occidental model of Man and the mood of scientism continued to inform even the investigations of Jung and his followers. When I spoke to this woman about the spiritual process in which I was involved, she immediately warned Me against having anything to do with mysticism, kundalini, or spiritual esotericism. She said that anything like that would be dangerous for a Westerner, anathema, leading definitely in the direction of insanity. She was clearly expressing the conventional prejudice of scientism and the exclusive view of the occidental mind.

It is true that from a certain disposition of adaptation, such as may more or less characterize people in the West, to take up the way of life strictly as it appears in the Orient could well be either impossible or ultimately deluding. But the principles of the participatory way of knowledge are true of all of us wherever we happen to have been born and raised. Merely Western Man is a partial development of Man, just as merely Eastern Man is a partial development of Man. Ultimately, all the features of Man that have developed separately in both the East and the West must be awakened in us and organized in a different fashion to give rise to Complete Man, who is neither Eastern nor Western, but who is Transcendentally Occupied, and in whom all features of the body-mind and of the brain are in a condition of equanimity, fully awake and functional.

Considering the degree to which mankind has become Westernized, it is perhaps no longer appropriate or even possible to develop the way of participatory knowledge precisely in the terms of oriental esoteric spirituality or even in the terms of the vitalistic magical cultures of the world. But the psychic structures that originally were culturally adapted from the oriental point of view are still there to be developed — not simply from the oriental point of view, but from this total point of view. To become whole, Western Man must develop the capacity for participatory knowledge and therefore must develop a kind of magical consciousness in new, present, living terms.

If we understand ourselves in this manner, then clearly we must begin to adapt to another dimension of our existence. We must include this other dimension along with our capacity for analytical objectification of the world and the mood of doubt, so that we can observe phenomena through psychic means, without attributing patterns to what we observe that are not inherent or fully integrated. We must begin to operate on the basis of the obvious, on the basis of the presumption of the condition, with all of its features, that is obvious to us in our moment-to-moment existence.

That means we must begin to participate in the world as a psychic phenomenon, as a dimension of forms that is a direct expression of the psyche, just as dreams are a direct expression of the psyche. We must transcend the conventional bias against the discovery and observation that the world of the waking state is full of psychic phenomena. The world is that kind of psychic event, but we are prejudiced against seeing it as such. The scientific disposition, as a point of view, as a tool or method of activity, is prejudiced against this discovery because it is prejudiced against this psychic way of relating to things.

In science or other similar activities, we are not participating in the magical process in its positive sense. But so long as science is just a portion or part of one attitude by which we associate with things, there is nothing inherently wrong with it. It is in fact a kind of discipline that can help us associate with phenomena as they really are without becoming psychically aberrated. But even the activity of science is a magical activity, a way of using the fact that we are psychically involved with a psychic phenomenon.

And the world is a psychic phenomenon. In other words, we never experience the world except psychically. We never experience it except as knowledge and perception. We never experience it except as a condition that includes us. We are not separate from it. What we are at the level of the psyche and at the level of consciousness is just as much an inherent part of the world as the so-called material, objective forms. When we associate with the world on the basis of the totality of all the conditions of our existence, we participate in the world of forms as a psychic process. By participating psychically in the psychic phenomena of the world, we learn the laws whereby we can influence the phenomena of the waking state. We generate a process wherein we can become sensitive to the phenomena of the waking state so that we can observe unusual coincidences of form and psychic significances that our verbal mind tends to exclude from what we are observing.

If we examine the presumptions and activities of people involved in magical culture, such as mystics, shamans, medicine men, and psychics of a certain kind, we find them noticing phenomena in the features of the so-called objective world that correspond to psychic states. They are always seeing in the world the very things that they say they see in visions. From the magician's point of view, the world is populated by psychically significant beings, forms, and processes. The magician has a magical relationship to all the things that can change. All the things that can appear and disappear in the waking state are conceived and perceived by the magician as psychic or magical phenomena.

In the early years of My Own sadhana, when I went from Columbia College to graduate studies at Stanford University and was living on the beach, I was involved in a process of the bare observation of all the conditions that arose, whether internal and subjective or so-called objective in the external world. Whatever they were, I put Myself in a position to observe those things unqualifiedly without bringing an attitude to them. I developed this capacity over time. I simply presumed the disposition of the observer and did not presume any left-brained or right-brained dogma about the nature of things. I did not presume any absolute distinction between the internal and the external. I just allowed experience to be whatever it was. Nor did I presume a relation between internal and external. I just observed things as they were. And over time, the nature of things as they are began to become more and more obvious.

I presumed that I was performing an activity out of which I would create a work of fiction, a kind of novel. But I discovered over time that the process in which I was involved was what was significant, not the results, not the boxes and boxes of notes and writings I produced over those years. Eventually I just burned all those papers when I moved to New York and became involved with Rudi. I recognized and acknowledged that all those notes and writings were basically without significance or use and that I could not convert them all into a book. I had to somehow throw them into a fire and allow them to become unified as a psychic form rather than as boxes of notes that could no longer be integrated.

The process in which I was involved, however, ultimately demonstrated to Me that there was no distinction between the internal, psychic, subjective world, so-called, and the outer, objective world, that all states were essentially psychic states and crossed over into one another. In some sense the waking state affected dreams and the subtle, psychic, and hallucinatory activity. But the opposite was also true. Things that were going on in dreams and at a purely psychic level crossed over into the objective world of the waking state. A kind of story began to develop wherein I would sometimes observe some character or event in a dream or a flash of consciousness, and then I would observe that event being played out in the phenomena of My external life. The characters in the internal world appeared in the external world. Pieces of the events being worked out in the external world carried over into the internal world. My experience was a single, fluid, psychic plastic.

As a result of this process, the phenomena of the objective world began to achieve psychic force. They became recognizable as states and signs of the psyche. The beings in the objective world became psychically significant beings. I became sensitive to My daily life as a psychic process, even in the terms of the simple perception of objective events. A psychic unfolding was taking place, much as in dreams.

I began to become profoundly sensitive to certain processes in the so-called natural or objective or material world. I developed the ability to read them, to observe them, to see dramas proceeding in the phenomenal world that from our ordinary, verbal, self-abstracting, objectifying point of view would not be observable. Thus, I achieved a psychic inherence in world forces, forces of weather, natural phenomena, and creatures of all kinds. I became unusually associated with certain animals and patterns in the natural world such as the weather and the ocean. The ultimate outcome of this development was the awakening of a state of brilliant equanimity and awareness of the coincidence of all phenomena. And when this awakening occurred, there was a breakthrough in the process of My sadhana, and I went on to find a human spiritual teacher.

Eventually — several years later — I actually did write the novel I had originally presumed to be working on. The novel, which I have titled The Mummery, was one of the outcomes of that process of submission to the totality of My existence, in which the external and internal worlds were perceived and lived as a single process, and through the observation of which archetypal characters and archetypal configurations of destiny and tendency appeared. The novel, then, is itself a magical text, not like a realistic novel. It is full of cryptic meanings, like a complex dream. It is magical language.

The novel is not filled with arbitrary archetypes, but it is the product of a profound consideration that took place over several years. And there is a great magical message in it, discoverable only by those who are sensitive to it, perhaps never completely discoverable, you see. The Mummery is like magical texts that have appeared in magically based cultures in the past — a book of magical beings and magical creatures, a magical story, an archetypal adventure. It is a secret book, a "sealed" book, an esoteric book.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, many of the events You prophesied in The Mummery have already come true.

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ:

All kinds of slices of meaning, slices of space-time, appear in that book. It is full of paradoxes. On one level, it seems to be a story about something happening in this world. But time in that text does not really work the way time works in this world, and the transitions between places are all magical transitions.

Well — having made this discovery of the coincidence of the subjective and objective domains through the rigorous sadhana to which I applied Myself, I then went on to develop the other aspects of My sadhana, which became conclusive in the six years following that initial stage, from 1964 to 1970. The conclusiveness of that six-year period depended on My entering into it with the disposition that had been generated in the earlier sadhana. I did not go to Rudi and to India like an ordinary Western college boy, in other words. I had already passed through a phenomenal transformation that fitted Me for the sadhana to come.

DEVOTEE: Even Your discovery of Rudi occurred in a magical way, through a vision of his art store.

ANOTHER DEVOTEE: And around that same time You also came to understand about life beyond death.

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ:

Yes. In other words, the Reality, the unkillable Force of our essential existence, our psychic existence, was proven, demonstrated, and brought back to life in the face of everything that suppresses such a Realization in the current context of human life. An ordinary, Western, left-brained character doing yoga and performing various psychic disciplines would not necessarily enjoy a comparable awakening.

You must awaken from the suppressed state of the being, transcend the dogmas in the common world that suppress the being, and rediscover the psychic nature of the world. You must rediscover your own existence as a psychic process that is not threatened by the apparent limitations of the physical world and that does not come to an end simply because one feature of your existence — physical, bodily manifestation — comes to an end.

This coming to the front of the psychic being, the essential character of your existence, is a necessary preliminary for the Spiritual process. Another vision, another model of existence, in other words, must achieve reality for the Spiritual process to be true, or for it to be anything more than a consolation for you and your mortal understanding. All the capacities that can develop through the Spiritual process will seem unreal to you unless you can achieve the point of view wherein such phenomena are real and comprehensible.

Otherwise you can have unusual experiences by disciplining the body and concentrating yourself in a certain way, but those experiences will always be doubtable to you. You will always be able to explain them, it would seem, in scientific terms, using the ordinary mortal model of the nervous system. No great change will have occurred then. You will just have made your mortality a little more elaborate, a little more complicated, a little more showy. But you will be essentially in the same condition or disposition as you were at the beginning, unless you can pass through this crisis wherein the psyche ceases to be dominated by the phenomenal world that is proposed to be the only reality by the dogmas of our time.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, it was not until my conventional model of existence began to break down and I began to see that in Truth the world is a psycho-physical realm in which I am involved and to which I am psycho-physically related, that a kind of opening and awakening in the being itself occurred that allowed me to participate in life with a fuller understanding and consciousness.

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ:

Yes, the confession that "I" is the body-mind, whatever the "body-mind" is in its totality, is more than a confession that you are the body as you conceive it from the analytical, left-brained point of view. It is the confession that the body-mind, the totality of your existence, is altogether, thoroughly, psycho-physical. In other words, what you regard to be body is not merely body. It is psycho-physical. It is mind. It is psyche apparent in a particular fashion, but it is not merely body, not merely matter.

The magical disposition, then, must reawaken in us if we are to achieve the human process in its fullest terms. To reawaken this disposition is not necessarily to revert or regress to, or reassociate with, the cultural disposition toward magical activity to be found in the orient or in vital cultures. On the other hand, the development of this psychic disposition will clearly show some of the signs that were present or were made available to experience in those cultures. A likeness naturally exists between those who live the Way of Adidam and those who are otherwise yogis, mystics, shamans, magicians, medicine men, witch doctors, and so forth. It is simply that the Way of Adidam has its own cultural and Spiritual uses of the psychic faculties.

Throughout these many years I have had a magical relationship to all kinds of things. The world is for Me a psychic, magical phenomenon. I work with it directly as such. I work with every individual as such. I live My daily life as such. Therefore, I am associated in My daily life with forces in the world that are psychic in nature. Things that become apparent in My environment, in the apparent coincidences of possible changes and the appearance of beings, are magical and are observable to Me in psychic terms. I have dreams and then things occur in life that directly correspond to them. I see the world as a psychic process. My association with the world has developed on one level similar to the way life develops for a shaman. For instance, I have had many occasions of unusual association with animals and the recognition of a kind of empowerment that comes with association with certain creatures.

An example of such magic occurred here yesterday. A shaman from Mexico was brought to this country for a few days. He was contacted by devotees and was invited to stay in a place near The Mountain of Attention. I did not meet him personally, but some of the community's doctors and a few other practitioners spent some time with him. He is not a shaman who also has a Western, intellectual understanding of what he is doing. He is literally an Indian shaman who lives way out in the country in Mexico in a tribal setting where he has lived all his life. He is now in his nineties or perhaps around a hundred, and he has practiced as a shaman in the traditional way all his life. He has never had any association with downtown, urban society. He was just lifted out of his circumstance and brought here for a few days — I do not know how long he was in this country. He came to us yesterday and then zipped back to Mexico last night.

DEVOTEE: Without a plane! (Laughter.)

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ:

He was a sweet character but not really very outward, not really into what occupied everybody else. While devotees were visiting with him yesterday, I just sat here alone, psychically tuning in to him and to the mass of psychic forces associated with such people.

In the shamanistic tribal culture of this man the primary animal is the deer, the being seen in the world and in visions that helps us to pass through the portal to the other reality, the other side of the world, the visionary dimension.

Today I left the house for a little while. As I walked, I was thinking about this shaman and about the magical process in which he is involved and in which I am involved. I was walking the path beside Great Food Dish when I saw an acorn. This acorn seemed unusual to Me because it was complete, not broken. It still had its "cap". I picked it up and I began thinking about the multitude of oak trees here on the Sanctuary and about how the acorn is a kind of ritual symbol, a sacred object in this place.

Then I walked over to the Tree of Life at Skyway Temple — which is an old oak tree — and as I looked at the site there and thought about the deer in this man's practice, suddenly I heard a thumping. I looked up, and right next to Me was a deer, a stag with antlers. It came right next to Me, stomped around a bit, and then moved across the lawn. Now and then he would stop and then start again, giving Me the clear impression that I should follow him and that he would guide Me. I watched him run off, cresting the hill.

I walked to where he had disappeared, generally feeling where he had gone and recognizing that this event duplicated the shamans' following the deer into the visionary world. The shamans get the idea when they see a deer. If you see a deer, you only see it. You cannot grasp it. It is always off, away. You can see it, and it leads you and then disappears.

When I reached the corral, I saw the deer grazing up the hill by My office. I still had the acorn in My hand, and it occurred to Me that it was a kind of spirit offering. Just then the deer lifted his head and saw Me. He kept grazing, and I kept walking. He showed no inclination to run off, but when I came within a hundred feet or so, he started again to move. I called him — "tchick-tchick-tchick" — and started making noises toward him, holding up the acorn. He looked back at Me, then leaped up and down, and then leaped off. It seemed that he leaped off the hill right at My office.

I quickly walked up the hill, but the deer was absolutely nowhere to be seen. From the prominence next to My office and below The Manner of Flowers, the football field, the garden, and the whole area of this valley are visible. And the stag was nowhere to be seen. He had disappeared.

Well, that is how the shaman tracks the deer. To relocate the deer you must allow it to lead you into vision.

The deer is regarded as a magical creature, and it is a prominent creature in the magic of various peoples. Each tribe or group has its prominent animal figures, and the deer is particularly valued in some, as it is in the culture of the old Mexican shaman. The deer is also a prominent creature on this property. Deer live all around here. The presence of deer, like the presence of other creatures, has magical significance to the right ceremonial and sacred use of this ground. When you are doing magic, you associate with the creature world. Creatures can come and be around you, or they can be absent. That they have mobility, can come and go, appear or not appear, is a prerequisite for magical association with them. They move freely. They are not contained. Thus, their appearance on any occasion is naturally acknowledged to be auspicious from a magical point view.

Whenever a shaman or medicine man is doing magic, he is always associating with the powers of the Earth: the weather, the living things, the creatures and their coming and going. He looks for signs when he performs any magical act. He will choose to perform that magical act by observing features in the area that seem to be auspicious. The time seems to be auspicious. The conditions of the day, the weather, the wind, and all the play of the elements seem auspicious. The feeling seems auspicious.

Certain creatures are also associated with the place that is auspicious. So the magician usually looks for creatures to appear during or after the ceremony. And, in the magician's feeling, the appearance of creatures always confirms the potency of the magic. Whenever he performs magical activity and animals in one or another way associate with him during that time, the magician acknowledges a kind of empowerment that comes through that association.

Over the years, I have had a number of auspicious conjunctions with animals of all kinds and psychic, visionary association with them preceding or following My meetings with them. I have had a long history of empowerments and magical associations with creatures. I have talked to you about a number of them, such as lions, snakes, birds of all kinds, horses, spiders, the scorpion that appeared on My genitals once when I was meditating in the dark. The ultimate truth of this psychic process is to be able to engage in moment-to-moment existence as a magical event, to always be tending the Spiritual Fire, which is the Universal, Radiant Current.

I was tending the fire today, you see, and that stag's appearance was a magical sign. I was not tending a physical fire. It was psychic. The recognition of the world phenomena as psychic phenomena permits us to be awakened psychically in the midst of those phenomena. In other words, it is not only closing one's eyes and seeing a deer in a vision that is a psychic phenomenon. The magical conjunction is itself a psychic phenomenon. Yes, there can be visions associated with exalted states of awareness. There can also be dream phenomena and hallucinatory reveries. These are other features of the magical process. But the magical moment should coincide with the recognition of the fact that you are not existing in the world of science. You are in the Divine World, the same world in which you are psychically alive — not merely the world in which you are bodily present, not merely the world in which your foot is standing or is placed, but the world in which your entire being resides.

Therefore, it is a world filled with magical conjunctions. That is its significance. That is its meaning. The meaning of a bird and the description of the part of the cosmos to which it relates may also be apparent to you. But the recognition that you are in the Divine World, or the psychic world, is the essential force of such phenomena.

You must awaken to the exhilaration that comes through such recognition, instead of just falling back into the mood of doubt, saying, "Oh, there's a deer there — deer live here all the time," or "Lightning — oh, there's a storm coming up," or "Birds — well, there are always birds flying around." [Laughter.] See? Right away you want to think that you are in the mortal world instead of recognizing that you are in the Divine World.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, the shaman said that two things would happen when he got home. First of all, he said his people missed him very much, and the radio was going to announce his return, and he gestured how they would all be cheering and singing. Then he said he was going to go up into the mountains far away for a few days.

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ:

You see, he came into a different world. He came into the world that is presumed to be non-psychic, non-magical. The world is transformed by our presumption about it. Those who live in a magical disposition toward the world change their world in one characteristic way: They do not seem to do very much with it as a natural phenomenon. They are very protective of it as a natural phenomenon and want to interfere with it as little as possible, because it is only by letting the world be what it is as a natural process, without interference, that it has the opportunity to produce magical signs and therefore to permit them to engage in magical relations with it.

The disposition of scientism changes the world. It is a magical activity in the form of antimagic, and so the world at large is at present being transformed from the point of view of antimagic. And that activity is all about interfering with the World-Process, interfering with changes in the Earth, and producing human environments that systematically exclude the features of the natural world that are otherwise interpreted magically by those who are so disposed.

The city is the world as science creates it. It is the world of the left brain, the antimagical or non-psychic world. The forces and magical beings you can observe in a natural setting are eliminated there. It is a wholly controlled, "interfered with" environment. It is Man becoming the master, Man controlling all forces, Man eliminating the arbitrariness of change that Nature represents. No creatures wander in the cities except for a few domestic little characters — a few dogs and cats and canaries and parakeets. Basically, the life cycle of animals living free is eliminated or contained so that it no longer has the ability to reflect itself magically. Animals may perhaps be kept off somewhere in a zoo in the city, but they no longer live and act as they would in their own domain. Their magical force is systematically eliminated by the way we cage and contain them.

The entire effect of scientific Man, occidental Man, non-magical Man on the world is to eliminate the magical content of the world as well as to eliminate magical association with the world. Because this view is dominant, we are seeing the world being changed, in ways that people who still exist in a magically based culture are always complaining about. I understand that one of the reasons the shaman came from Mexico is that his tribal way of life is being interfered with by the encroachment of urbanization and other forces detrimental to the life of natural Man as well as animals and natural forces of all kinds.

Tribal Indians in this country are all very much associated with a way of life of relative noninterference with Nature, using its bounty in various ways, yet not controlling it or interfering with it, but rather relating sympathetically and magically to it. Their complaint is that the white man, scientific Man, is destroying the whole natural world and is doing so because he is presuming a false relationship to the natural world, a dissociated and power- or dominance-oriented relationship to things. This abstracting feature of the scientific mind, therefore of the Western mind, with its thirst for control is systematically destroying the capacity of mankind to enter into magical relationship with things as a human activity and to be related to a world that is unchanged by the scientific attitude.

It is difficult nowadays to find an environment in which to do magic even if you were personally disposed so to live. People who are disposed toward a freer, more total psychic existence usually try to get out of the cities, the urbanized, downtown, TV world, and they look for places in the country. It is very difficult to find such places in the United States anymore. Mexico is still a place where, to some degree, this wild natural world survives, but it is only a matter of time before it will also disappear.
 

2.


AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ:

Only one human force is dominant on Earth at the present time. It wants to take over and change the entire world. It wants all human beings to conform to a model of existence. It wants to change the total environment of Earth into a technologically mastered condition. And when mankind leaves the Earth and physically goes out into space, this force wants to do the same thing in space. [Laughter.]

But people have been associated with outer space for thousands of years through the medium of psychic association with the universe! People have visited other parts of the physical universe and the total cosmos through psychic means. Through the medium of psychic association or participatory knowing, people have already left the sphere of Earth. They are being prevented from doing so now by the anti-psychic trend of the new Man. The only way the new Man can envision getting off this planet is through the medium of technology and scientism. The only relationship to the universe, therefore, of which such people conceive is to move around in association with analyzed, technological environments, pursuing that one kind of knowing and entering into relations of power with all forces. Science fiction is always conceiving of the ultimate human destiny in outer space in very much the same territorial, power-mad terms people live on Earth, in which there are galactic wars and people blow one another to pieces with superior machinery and all the rest of that nonsense.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, you mentioned the American Indians. It always seemed to me that the story told in the book Black Elk Speaks describes the end of the magical way of relating to the world.

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ:

That epoch was the end of magic for that particular cultural group, or at least was a profound end of a certain part of its history. Some of those people are still active, but they do not have the same world to live in, nor the same freedom nor even the same intention to live in the old, magical ways.

In other parts of the world other kinds of ancient human groups are still active in this magical fashion. Magic, you see, is of many types. There are vitalistic, older magical cultures, of which the American Indian is an example, as are the Mexican Indian, the South American Indian, and the Hawaiian Indian. Many vital magical cultures still exist in little pockets of activity. First they are usually studied by anthropologists, then the missionaries come, and then the territorial politics starts enclosing them. Eventually they are assimilated.

Other magical cultures of a higher type exist, although calling them a "higher type" does not mean that they rightfully or in absolute terms dissociate themselves from the domain of vital magic, but that they presume a more expanded, spiritual purpose for magic and are less associated with the negative or black magic that tends to be pursued obsessively in vital cultures. These so-called higher magical cultures include certain aspects of Hinduism or the culture of India in general.

In our own time and very recently we have seen the destruction of such a culture in Tibet. There has been no great outcry about what has happened in Tibet, and yet one of the principal philosophical magical cultures that has ever appeared on Earth has been systematically destroyed within our lifetime by the encroachment of the Chinese in Tibet. Many Tibetans have had to flee from their homeland. Those who stayed have been systematically washed out of their magical world into the idealism of Communism and a kind of objective, occidental Man's view of things. The Tibetans have been dispersed, just as were the American Indians, the Jews, and many other groups. Today these peoples are trying to survive as groups by regenerating their traditions in other places. But in general we see a movement all over the Earth to destroy all vestiges of the spiritual, magical disposition and the kinds of culture and human life created on its basis.

As a just-coming-to-life spiritual culture, we too are being met by the same kinds of intrusions. The same forces are threatening us and would want to complicate us. Those same forces are in you because you have not been born into a spiritual culture. You have for one or another reason come to the point of entertaining the possibility of wanting to generate the spiritual Way of Adidam in your own case; but there exist features in your disposition that work against your practice and the development of this Way of life in your case as well as in this community and in this institution.

The disposition in Man at the present time is opposed to this Way of life, and the evidence of opposition is visible all over the world. We are witnessing the worldwide development of insane, power-mad, analytical Man and all the self-destructive and other-destructive habits that that kind of man generates when he is otherwise bereft of Wisdom — in other words, when he does not have the ability to bring into balance what he discovers through the one way of knowing called science. The scientific man cannot bring science into balance with a total understanding or a higher Wisdom about life and this world.

For that reason, we see warfare everywhere on Earth, which can produce the terrible consequences we have already discussed, nuclear explosions and the technological and political domination of mankind by the point of view inherent in the psychology of science. But the true war is not occurring at the level of technological weapons. The true war is taking place at the level of consciousness. It is a war between the species of Man who lives according to the model reflected in scientism and the species of Man who lives in his old form, which is magical and tends to be more exclusively subjective and unable to understand and control certain of the forces that perhaps human beings should try to control or associate with in a more sophisticated fashion.

Ultimately it is a war between the left-brained model of Man and the transcendental development of Man, which is not magical in the old sense but Magical in the perfect sense, wherein Man is unified and enjoys a unified understanding of the universe and his position as a process or as an expression of the active Principle that is manifesting and evolving in the apparent world.

The urban world in which we all tend to be crammed reflects a basic human — or subhuman — attitude. Even in the country, the urban design of Man still encroaches. Living out here in the country trying to safeguard this place, trying to survive as a sacred institution, we therefore endure all kinds of problems. The city is a form of consciousness, not merely a place in space. It reflects an attitude, a way of life altogether. It is a dogma, a psychological field. It is a vision. And it is antithetical to magical culture.

In the culture of magic, the world is approached as it is, not as it becomes after human beings have manipulated and changed it. The world to which the magician looks to relate himself is the spontaneously living world into which he is born, not into which he is educated and with which he is combined through human strategies. People who work to develop the magical process in an advanced form usually dissociate even from their villages or tribes for a while. They go out into the wilderness to dissociate themselves, as a temporary technique at any rate, from all kinds of ordinary human activity, to readjust, to balance themselves out, to become resensitized to the larger dimension of their existence. Having become magically active, they then see the given world in magical terms, and they simply and sensitively observe the changes that take place and then perform various activities that constantly generate and regenerate the magical forces in the world.

From this magical point of view the features of the observed world — even the gross, so-called "outer" world — are understood to be magical. In particular, certain characters of that world, certain of its characteristics, are considered magical — especially those that are in a state of free flow rather than unchanging. The animals, the patterns of weather, human others apart from the ordinariness of daily social obligation — these features of the world are conceived in magical terms, are constantly observed for any changes, and are approached via magical activity to generate certain kinds of changes. These magical features of the world are conceived to be a bridge to the total world. The so-called objective world is not viewed as a thing in itself, but it is always a form of connection to the total psycho-physical world.

The deer, for instance, is not just an animal in the objective world. It is a living psycho-physical feature of the formal universe and is therefore a bridge between the various dimensions of the formal universe. The deer is not merely an animal in the objective physical world but a psychic presence. It is a way of relating to the more fluid, psychic dimension of the world. Likewise, this fluid, psychic dimension of the world makes its bridge to the objective world through these creatures and forces.

From the magical, shamanistic point of view everything is alive. The cosmos is a living process. A little while ago we were talking about accepting the positive as well as the magical significance of creatures other than Man. From the magical point of view, so-called inanimate objects are also conceived as being alive and participating in a living, magical cosmos. And this is certainly true. The more psychically awake you become, the more you are aware of the psycho-physical nature of what you call the objective world.

Once you see that the world is psycho-physical in nature, you begin to appreciate the living condition of everything that arises in the field of experience — not living, perhaps, in the sense that a chair can get up and walk out of the room, but living in a magical sense. Your association with so-called inanimate objects can go through many changes. Association with an inanimate place, even just a room, can change. There are feelings associated with it, a sense of energies, emotions, moods, influences, all kinds of factors to which you become sensitive relative to so-called inanimate things, just as you can be sensitive relative to moving and living things.

It is not that you should just arbitrarily take up a view that everything is alive, as if everything were a creature. Rather, you must develop and mature in your psychic sensitivity to things and then begin to appreciate just in what sense everything is alive, and in what sense everything has effect and should be acknowledged as a force. Living things are significant to us because a force is associated with life. Inanimate things are also living in the sense that a force is associated with them. They are living in this sense rather than in the sense that they are mobile. Perhaps it is also true that they can move around. This is not totally out of the question, but it must be observed. At any rate, so-called inanimate objects are alive as forces and influences, and the forces can change and vary in our association with them.

This, then, is part of the magical consciousness that is natural to us: to awaken to this sense of the total cosmos as a living presence, a circumstance of forces. At the root of all these things, animate and inanimate, is Radiant Being, the Utterly Living Conscious Reality. Inanimate things, lower creatures, Man, Nature, the Earth, everything is a modification of That Which is ultimately perfectly Alive, Radiant, Forceful, Conscious, Existing. Thus, to have this sense that everything is alive is not illogical or somehow strange. Everything is alive as force, as energy, as psychic reality.

You all can see that table, right? You call it a thing, and in calling it a thing or an object and getting involved in the objective consciousness we analyze with our left brain, you tend to reduce that object to something not alive. But if we naturally relate to that table, first of all we realize that it is a perception. I say, "There is that table over there", but this table is a perception, a development of My own nervous system. It is made to seem a table by virtue of a convention, a process of the nervous system, a process of cognition and perception. I do not see the thing itself. I see this perception. The table exists only as a psychic condition. It is itself a psychic condition, because it is not other than a perception. If we relate to it openly, without defining it, excluding it, or analyzing it into something not alive, we realize its natural livingness, its natural psychic condition.

Even to understand things in analytical, scientific terms, we must recognize that everything is a species of Light, a modification of Force. Even from that point of view, then, without otherwise sympathetically participating in everything as energy, you must presume that everything is Light. To enter into open psycho-physical participation with this world is to recognize it as Force, as Energy, as Light, and therefore as something alive and something that is not absolutely separable from Consciousness, from Being, from the psychic Condition of our existence.

The world participates in Conscious Being utterly because we have no way to dissociate ourselves from the world to the point that it is no longer a psychic phenomenon. Therefore, we cannot have any association with that table without being involved in a psychic phenomenon, because our perception is nothing but a psychic phenomenon. It is never not that, in other words. We presume in some sense that the table is "over there," but in between "over there" and "me" there exists this game of perception/conception.

Ultimately, all that arises to perception is transparent, and something about the nature of so-called reality begins to become clear to us. We are all the time chattering about the external world and presuming ourselves to be separate from it. But when we enter into the deepest recognition of the actual circumstance of our existence, we realize that we are never involved with anything but a psychic phenomenon. Our entire existence is for us a psychic phenomenon, a perception of Energy, a convention of Energy. Therefore, it is temporary and changing. It is to be gone beyond. It is not forever, and as it appears now is not the only way Reality or Light can modify Itself. It is just modifying Itself in this way at the present time.

If a particular kind of psycho-physical mechanism were not in operation in us, if a particular kind of brain-mind and nervous system were not active, we would not observe this world as we now do. We would be in another state altogether. And some day you will be in that state, and it will be perfectly natural for you. It will just be a development of the same State that is fundamentally yours at the present, except that you are not acknowledging It as such. You are presuming another convention, another design. You develop a convention of presumption about the world that is based on bodily relations as they are perceived and analyzed by this nervous system. But that convention is not otherwise necessary. It is just a convention, a temporary model, and it does not describe Reality as it Is. Rather, it is a description of a particular way Reality gets modified. Reality otherwise transcends the description.

What is Reality? Is it the objective, material world? What is that, anyway? Even science is finding out through its investigations that space-time is a paradoxical affair and that our consciousness is determined by the local "Earth-universe" game in which we see things in a certain temporal and spatial frame. But if you get out beyond this local consciousness, the universe is a very paradoxical affair. Space-time is not always as linear and fixed as it seems to be here. Space does not always look precisely as it does here, cannot always be cognized or perceived as it is here. Objects have a different kind of locus, a different kind of process. Light appears differently, modifies itself differently. Mind, therefore, would presumably be entirely different under those expanded conditions. Psychic states would also, therefore, be entirely different in that context of awareness. The knowledge and experience we can develop under the present conditions are therefore local knowledge and local experience. They are not absolute in any terms. And therefore, ultimately, they are transcended.

In the Bhagavad Gita (9:24), Krishna says, "I am the Recipient and Lord of all the sacrifices." All the dharmas can be reduced to the one Dharma of sacrifice to the Universal, Transcendental Being. However, we are all used to a monotheistic notion of the Divine wherein very little evidence of the Power of God is demonstrated in people's lives. People believe that there is only one God and that all these other gods are untrue, that there are no ghosts, that there is nothing but one God — but there is also no God-Power. This is because people do not understand this world as the Divine Domain, as a psychic realm fundamentally, and they do not see that in fact all conditions and all beings live in God and are a bridge to God.

All things and beings are a bridge to the Infinite. They are not simply things in themselves, but they are in fact such a bridge. Merely to think, then, in terms of the One Transcendental Being is not necessarily to generate a process wherein the Power of God and the Person of God, or the Being That Is God, is directly contacted through practice of your Way of life. You must Awaken and discover the Divine World wherein everything is a bridge to the Infinite, One Being.

That Awakening is what is primary. It is not merely an awakening to the mental truth that there is only one God. It is a matter of Awakening to the Nature of your Condition and therefore to the Nature of the Condition of everything that you are observing. Because that Awakening is primary, when it occurs you begin to become sensitive to the world in a new fashion. And in that sensitivity you will see in magical terms how various presences, beings, and events — in gross visibility or only in subtle visibility, or altogether invisible and only sensed — are bridges to this One. Therefore, you may become aware of magical association with beings or forces, states of presence and the like, that are actually part of the magical apparatus of your association with the One Divine. Having made this discovery, you may continue to enjoy magical association with those entities, forces, or conditions, but you will not fall prey to the error of worshipping those features of the world in themselves. Rather, you will be making use of your association with those forces or beings as a bridge or medium of association with the Living Divine.

All beings are that One, but they are each still the being each appears to be, with the particular characteristics each obviously has. You acknowledge and recognize that One, but in the form of every particular individual and the particular relationship you have to that individual. Likewise, you must become sensitive to the total world, to the great features of the world and its fluid, magical features.

The four cardinal directions are associated with the movement of the Earth, the movement of the sun, and the movement of the winds. Therefore, they are associated with energies, and the field of those energies corresponds to the directions or aspects of the field of energy in the body. In this way we are associated with a complex of forces that can be understood to be wholly integrated and to abide in One Great Universal and Transcendental Reality. But we must not abstract that One from the complexity of the magical universe. We must recognize that One in the complexity of the magical universe and use the magical universe as a bridge, a form of association with that One.

We should not merely associate with the power of the north wind and the deer, you see. We should associate with the One, but through these characteristics, and we should observe and understand and feel that these characteristics of the moving universe exist, with their particular dynamic features, their particular proportions, the particular quality of Energy or Force that they represent in this complex Unity.

The shaman has a magical cosmos in mind. He has names for everything. He has a diagram of the universe. But the true shaman does not simply have this scheme in mind, as if he learned it from somebody or a book. The true shaman has realized this scheme. He is in the habit of recognizing things in magical terms, and he therefore begins to become sensitive to what they are indicating about the world. Once he sees what is shown, then he names it or spontaneously feels a name for it, regards it in a particular fashion, and introduces a certain feature into his magical process or his sacramental life that will continue to acknowledge that which he has realized.

Therefore, as a spiritual practitioner you must be able to acknowledge and recognize all the powers that combine in your perception and conception to be the magical representation of the One Who is Alive as everything and everyone. The body-mind is just such an incarnate representation. It is not an ego. It is a total, complex configuration of the One Being. Just so, all beings are That, and the total environment is just such a Singleness, if we Awaken to understand, recognize, and acknowledge it as such. If you begin to engage in this recognition and acknowledgment through sacramental activity and through daily life, you will discover that much more Power appears in your practice. You will not just be performing rote rituals. You will see that an even greater Power, a greater Dimension of influence and of actual change, appears in your daily practice and in your sacramental practice.

Your practice must become true magic. You must be a shaman, but you also must be more than a shaman. You must practice beyond the limitations of the vitalistic shaman, but you must be at least as good as that, at least as conscious as that, at least as aware of the magical nature of everything, at least as perceptive and sensitive, and at least as capable of acknowledgment, so that you can see what is trying to influence you through the medium of all kinds of relations, odd appearances, and coincidences.

Everything altogether is trying to be a revelation for you. It is just that you are not sensitive to it in your ordinary habit. The shaman, you see, has entered into a discipline to make himself sensitive. It is not that he is making the magic happen. The magic is already there. He is just not sensitive to it, not in a position to observe it. Thus, he must engage in a discipline that enables him to participate in what is already happening. Then all of a sudden he sees all kinds of magical things.

We likewise should not devalue the media of association with the Divine. We should not fail to allow this world to be a bridge of association with the Divine, just as we should not fail to allow the body-mind to be such a bridge. We should make all our relations such a bridge. We should recognize the world as sacred and therefore value its particular features and not desecrate it. We should rightly use and value those features, not as fetishes we value for their own sake, but as what they truly are, as media of Divine Association, recognizable in the One Divine.

 

3.

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ:

The trouble with conventional religion is that it has broken down the bridge to the Divine World. Conventional religion talks a great deal about God, but it has no bridge to God, in the form of either esoteric practices or an understanding of the world as a sacred universe. In conventional religion the universe has been emptied of its sacred significance as a bridge and as an expression of Divine Communion. The Divine is therefore considered only in the abstract. People are everywhere crying out for help from God, but there is no Power in their cries because they have established no link to the Divine. Without the link there is no Power. The medium of connection, the actual connection, the bridge, makes the Power possible, makes prayer and all sacred activity workable, makes such activity effective and not merely imaginary.

We must value all the links, all the media, of Divine Association. Such valuation is the significance of the body-mind as "the temple of God." It is not such a temple in and of itself, but when rightly related to the Divine, the body-mind is a bridge, a form of Divine Association. It is in this sense that it should be valued, not merely for its own sake, as an egoic temple to oneself.

Likewise, the entire world is a temple of Divine Association. All temples are really summations or descriptions of the total cosmos. They are empowered as the summary of the cosmos, as a perfect bridge to the Divine. The Divine is perfectly apparent in Holy Places, therefore, and may be contacted directly there through right kinds of association. The body-mind is such a temple, but worship is not to be reduced to self-possessed activities of indulging one's body-mind. Such a view justifies Narcissistic immersion in oneself, inversion only.

No, the total universe is a sacred manifestation, an incarnate expression of the Divine. It is a perfect link to the Divine if we are Awakened. Then, when Awakened, we see the magical significance of the cosmos and of the present moment and no longer discount the features of this world because we are in mortal fear. Rather, we use all the features of this world as a bridge to God, as a medium of God-Communion, as a Vision in fact of the Divine — not a vision in and of itself but something that is transparent to God, and a medium nonetheless, not something that is supposed to be discounted and emptied of Divine Power.

This world is God Present. God is not merely behind the world and elsewhere and up there and inside. God is Omnipresent, absolutely Present, unqualifiedly Present. Not to see God in the terms of manifest reality is to fail to Realize God. Therefore, we must awaken to the magical nature of this world, see the Divine, and enjoy the link or bridge to God that all our relations, the body-mind itself, and all the media of this world represent, particularly all its outstanding features, those unique magical entities, places, and substances that show themselves to be of great significance in the course of Spiritual practice. These things, above all, must be valued in the ritual terms of sacred activity.

To live such a sacred life, you must be free of all automatic asanas, prejudices, and habitual ways of adapting the nervous system and accumulating presumptions totally independent of clear thinking or experience. You must free the body-mind, the nervous system, the being altogether from the entire concoction of suffering that is just an obstruction even to seeing what is before your eyes at this moment. Therefore, apply the discipline of being unreservedly associated with what is. Make that your occupation, instead of spending your lifetime spewing out the logic of your own suffering and calling it knowledge. Apply yourself to that discipline of unqualified association for a period of time, and something remarkable about the nature of things is bound to break through it.

This is what I did in college. I just gave Myself up to that discipline. It was very difficult, no doubt about it, but it is the only option you have when you recognize that your life is nothing but accumulated suffering. If life is nothing but a mortal cage and "when you're dead, you're dead," then let that really be seen, and then the hell with all of it! If mortality is all there is to life, the hell with the whole machine! Who gives a damn! Why should you even suffer then? Pleasurize yourself into oblivion! Kill yourself with pleasures! What difference does anything make, if mortality and annihilation really are what life and death are all about? But find out if that really is the way it is!

To find out, however, you must apply yourself to another discipline altogether than just presuming that that is the way it is. Those who simply presume that this is the way it is have not applied themselves to the difficult affair of existence with sufficient energy to really find out about life. They have just suffered in a bind, a box of ideas and presumptions, a certain logic of the nervous system, one particular asana or attitude. Such a state is of no value and cannot produce anything of significance. Therefore, really find out the way it is for yourself.

Having done that personally, it has not at all been My discovery that "this life is a mortal cage" and "when you're dead, you're dead." Not at all. But I have not come to this point of view merely by thinking in some predecided fashion or by wanting to believe something like that. I simply gave Myself up to the Process of existence. I allowed its Revelation to take place. When you live in that sensitive disposition, the universe moves and breaks up, you move and break up, and What is Alive begins to show Itself.

Now if it had turned out that life is a mortal cage and when you're dead, you're dead, then I Myself would have said the hell with it. But that is not what became obvious. Likewise, all of you must do the same thing. You must go through the same trial. I am not suggesting that you believe a certain bunch of propositions based on whatever authority you may want to presume exists in My case. We simply consider this together. And you must consider it to the point of understanding, practicing, associating yourself with the Real Process of existence, and seeing that revelation.

The Way of Adidam is about finding Real God, the Actual, Living, and Present, Revealed God, the God Who is Tangible, Obvious, not merely believed in, not merely thought about, but directly, obviously Revealed. And it is a Way of associating with That One in which you can participate with your entire being. The Way is about developing that capacity. If you are weak and afraid and in doubt, then obviously you are not very close to that capacity. But know that the actual development of the Way involves the transcendence of fear and weakness and doubt, not by working on fear and weakness and doubt or on other characteristics in yourself you feel you must somehow press out or cease to notice, but by discovering, through the submission of yourself to the Totality of things as they are, whatever That is, and entering into association with That in the Presence of Which fear and weakness and doubt simply do not arise.

If you are hungry and there is lunch, then hunger ceases to be your attitude. You simply eat. In the Presence of the literal Divine, in the moment of actual Communion with the Divine, fear and weakness and doubt do not come into play. The only reason they exist at all is that we are involved with ourselves and not with the Real God.

The fathers and prophets of Israel would wander around in the wilderness calling for God. Then suddenly they would have a direct Revelation of God. Wherever that Revelation took place, they would build a temple and settle the tribe there. That is how those early patriarchs became part of the ancient history of the Jews.

In the earliest days the Jews were not a single great tribe. Theirs was an accumulated culture whose alliances were based on the wanderings of individuals who would perform this exercise of surrender, calling upon God and waiting for the Revelation. They did not just arbitrarily believe in God. They kept praying, wandering, actively looking for God. Then, when the Revelation came, they would build a temple on that spot and settle. The individual patriarchs acknowledged by the Jews were originally principal figures in single tribal groups. Over time these various tribal groups began to become integrated with one another, and they collectively acknowledged all the individuals who had made this discovery. Eventually, as a single culture they came to certain opinions about the nature of God.

You must do the same thing. You do not know what anything is. You do not know what this entire existence is. You have no reason to presume any of the ideas you have, positive or negative. Thus, you have no option but to surrender yourself completely to Whatever It Is and wander and call upon It, Whatever It Is, until It Shows Itself. Then when It Shows Itself, you settle down and relate to It.

People should get out of their houses and out of the cities and go screaming into the countryside and do whatever the hell they must do just to maintain their attention in discovering the real nature of their existence. If they did this for a few years, instead of just carrying on as everybody is, there would be much positive change. Let all those politicians abandon their mansions. Let them take off their damn clothes and go out into the desert somewhere and find out what is happening. Everybody is upset, crazy, negative. Well, kick them out into the desert. Do not place them in positions of power. Let them go and find It as It is. This has been done in times past. This is exactly what ancient societies used to do with aberrated people. [Laughter.] Youth was supposed to be devoted to finding It out, rather than being idiotic and a threat to everyone.

But in our time you are not expected to find anything out. You are expected to believe life as it is given to you, you see. We were all naive in our childhood and willing to accept what parents told us, what everybody told us. But after a few years, you realize that life is rotten, that you are just an unhappy, confused son-of-a-bitch, and that everybody is suffering. The whole affair is insane!

Rather than settling down to an adolescent life of complaint, you should kick your ass out of the house and submit yourself to the bare facts of existence. Wander until you find It. This was an obvious course to Me. There was no way I was just going to take a profession or a job and settle down to a middle-class life. To do so was insane from My point of view. I did not see any Happy people. I only saw people burdened with their lifetime occupation, their dumb ideas about existence, and their endless neurotic fretting. What is the purpose of organizing that into a career? What is the purpose of devoting yourself to a life of preserving that?

Since My Own inheritance was lacking, since I really received no inheritance but suffering, there was no possibility, then, from My point of view, of just assuming the life of an ordinary householder, working and paying My dues to society. Since, in spiritual terms or real terms, I only received a negative inheritance, it was obvious to Me that there was no option but to take up a life of wandering, of submission, in order to discover the Truth, whatever That was going to be. My intention was simply to discover Reality altogether as It Is, rather than presume It to be anything whatsoever.

You likewise must do this in some essential sense before you can actually take up the Way of Adidam. You must become capable of real consideration, real observation, submission to the Reality of your total existence. You will take up the Way when that consideration has become conclusive, when the Revelation is in some sense basic enough to initiate the further process whereby the Revelation becomes total Enlightenment.

I have seen some people wandering in My lifetime, but they have a lot of baggage with them. They are just walking around, tasting everything and settling for all kinds of nonsense. I have not seen many real wanderers. I have not encountered many people who have actually confronted the Revelation of the Truth, because you must submit yourself to the extreme to Realize that Revelation.

A little bit of the Truth covered over by a lot of nonsense, you see, is as aberrating as no Truth at all. And I have seen people with a little Truth who were aberrated like everyone else. Your commitment to the Truth must become so profound that you are willing to become aberrated by that commitment. You must be willing to go mad with it. You must be willing to be destroyed by it. Your commitment must be complete.

At the beginning, of course, there is no guarantee of anything whatsoever. My engagement of this Way of life was totally open-ended. There were no guarantees. Thus, it is a dangerous proposition to submit yourself, not to that which you know, but to That Which you do not know at all. After a while, perhaps, you know something about It, and maybe some of Its features begin to brighten up, but you never know It. You are still always submitting yourself to What you do not know.

The trouble with people in general is that they are submitting themselves, consciously or unconsciously, to all kinds of things they think they know. The discipline is to submit yourself to What you do not know. Most of what people think they know is not knowledge at all. It is just presumption, imagination. Ultimately, you must be in an utterly mindless, uncontracted disposition of total submission to the Infinite.

In that disposition the Revelation can take all kinds of forms. It is Crazy Wisdom, you see. All Wise Men are Crazy. You must be Crazy to surrender so hard that the room gets bright! If everything looks bright to you, you must be a little mad. But do not even look for brightness. Just surrender, because if you demand brightness, the Brightness may start glaring at you like a five-million-watt bulb and drive you insane. Merely to see brightness is not to be Enlightened. Schizophrenics see brightness and become terrified.

Do not look for all kinds of psychic stuff, therefore. Psychism can be deluding and maddening. Simply surrender the total body-mind into the Infinity that you do not know, through the practice of Ruchira Avatar Bhakti Yoga in every moment. Do not demand any kind of experience. Whatever experience occurs for you could very well drive you mad and disturb you unless you are simply in a surrendered disposition. Enlightenment is not necessarily associated with all kinds of psychic phenomena. It is very likely that such things will develop, but it is not necessary that there be psychic phenomena, visions of light, or anything of the sort. There can be just utter surrender, an intuition of Bliss, and Freedom, tacit but Real nonetheless, and utterly Liberating.

Therefore, let existence take whatever form it is going to take. Do not demand that it take on some sort of extraordinary psychic form or any extraordinary form in the world. Simply surrender. The Revelation will take whatever form it is going to take in your case. And when it takes place, and when it is real, it will be obvious and also sufficient. Therefore, you should make no prejudgment about what form it is supposed to take. Simply put yourself in a position to observe all its forms.

Do not arbitrarily make the decision that you exist in an objective, independently existing, material world. You have no reason to believe such a thing. Conventionally you are associated with forms and others, but you need not assign independent existence to all of that. Your perceptions are all psychic in nature. They are developments of the mind and nervous system. They are not really associated with something independent of a process of psychic perception and cognition.

Do not be so quick, therefore, to presume that the world is of that objective kind. Submit as you are. Submit in human terms. To submit in human terms, you must submit in consciousness. You must submit psychically. You must surrender into existence as a psychic being, a conscious being, who is not associated with objective, independent events, but only with a mass of psychic states. That is the way it is in any case. You cannot make it any different. Surrender as that, therefore, and look for all the peculiar signs of the nature of things.

My experience is that it is utterly and directly confirmed that what we call the physical world is just a dimension of the psyche, a dimension of the world in which we exist psychically. The so-called physical or material universe is passing through changes according to psychic laws. All the physical laws ultimately coincide with psychic laws and with the whole domain of subtlety that cannot be differentiated from the mode of existence we call the psyche. You know that anything positive or negative can arise in the mind, but the same is true of this physical universe. It can seem to be dark and dismal and mortal. It can also seem to be totally different from that — bright and immortal and magical. It is not that one or the other of those perceptions is true. Both possibilities exist, and the one you perceive depends on your habit of association with existence. You command the karma of your destiny by virtue of your technique or habit of association with things.

You must become responsible for the attitude — mental, psychic, and emotional — whereby you relate to moment-to-moment existence. The place where we are thinking is the same place we see with our open eyes. The changes of mind are changes of the same universe we see with open eyes. It is simply that we apparently cognize these mental phenomena in a different dimension from this physical one. We do not see the coincidence between them, and so we are stuck with a mind that seems to be inside and separate from the world. We must ultimately recognize that there is no dividing line between the psyche and the body and the world. They are an infinite plastic. They are one Process. And when the psyche and the world begin to coincide and the barrier breaks down, then we begin to become Happy, because the Energy, the Being, That Is Inherent in the universe is then allowed to Move freely and to Saturate our existence.

You can see through the mind and the physical world at the same time. There is no obstruction between oneself and God. There is no self between oneself and God. We reside simply in the Seat of Being. And we are totally capable of being Happy simply to Radiantly Exist. It is just that we have all kinds of habits of mind that involve us in formalities, patterns, adventures, and limitations. So we cease to recognize things and we forget our Position, which is simply the Domain of Infinitely Radiant Being.

We will not achieve That Condition in time. We are already resident in That Condition. If you will recognize all these psycho-physical phenomena, then it becomes obvious that you are in that Position. You become Happy again. The body-mind begins to Shine. It begins to become blissful, transparent, and unnecessary. Its being unnecessary does not mean that you make the decision to dissociate from it. Paradoxically, its being unnecessary makes it possible that it continue, because it is not binding. It is not caused.

In our suffering and despair it seems that it would be nice to die and be taken out of here into some better place. But the discipline of our existence is to Realize the Brightness in this incident. Only on that basis, paradoxically, are we released from it. Thus, we are obliged by the very Law of our existence to transcend the limitations that are themselves only presumptions and that seem to exist by virtue of birth. We must become Happy and Outshine this body-mind, Outshine this world, Outshine all the doctrines of this world.

Ultimately, then, the secret is not to become psychic and peer through the hole in your forehead to the other side. It is rather to recognize this world totally, become free of all of its limits, outbreathe it, outlove it, outlive it. Achieve such Force through submission to God that the God-Force overcomes the world.

In our natural or usual condition there seems to be a consciousness, simply, and there seem to be processes of cognition and perception, and there seem to be forms of all kinds. But in the Enlightened Disposition of total Communion with the Reality That is the Condition of all of those features of our existence, they all become transparent. They have no significance or limiting existence. Everything is tacitly recognizable, transparent. There is no self. There is no mind. There is no perception. There are no forms. There are no relations. There is no world. There are no limits. There is no past, no future, no place. There is simply the Radiant Being, and it is to This that we must resort ultimately. It is This to which we submit all forms, all states, every sense of independent existence, to the extreme, to the point of Ecstasy, to the point of Translation.

In the seventh stage of life such Translation has already taken place. It seems to others, perhaps, that the individual is still current in the ordinary fashion. But from the point of view of Realization there is already no self, no mind, no body, no world, no time or space. Everything is recognizable, Shined through. In the Bhava of that recognition there is no sense of being a self behind anything or in any place. There is no thinking, no psychic or mental form, no bodily perception, no otherness, nothing concretely arising. There is only Radiant Transcendental Being.