Finding the Divine In Person and Waking Up From the Dream: Part I, Chapter 7

"This Way Is All About Feeling!"

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
"The Fire Must Have Its Way", July 17, 1978

Adi Da and Chris Tong To jump ahead in my story for a brief moment: I remember so clearly a moment (in 1992) a few years after I became a devotee. Adi Da had His arms around me in an embrace, and He whispered in my ear, "This Way is all about feeling!"

On May 24, 1983, Adi Da gave a talk called "Feeling Without Limitation", which would be released to the public shortly after on audiocassette. (The talk and relevant materials would be released as the book, Feeling Without Limitation: Awakening to the Truth Beyond Fear, Sorrow, and Anger, in 1989.) When the tape was made available, I listened to this talk repeatedly. It had a profound impact on me. In the talk, Adi Da makes the point that what we normally call "feeling" — fear, sorrow, anger, and other emotions — are actually limitations on feeling. I'll illustrate His point with a couple of stories from my life at the time.

Feeling To, Through, and Beyond Fear

A friend of mine once took me to visit a "New Age" relaxation center whose primary feature was a set of flotation tanks. This was back in 1983, when such things were hitting the peak of their popularity. My friend told me, "You'll love it! It's a deeply relaxing experience!"

Here's the way it worked. You go into a private room, undress, take a shower, and then enter the white tank in the middle of the room. The tank is full of a liquid solution that has a heavy Epsom salt concentration that causes anyone lying back in the tank to float, effortlessly. And the tank also has a lid.

So I climbed into the tank, and lay back. It was wonderful! Just floating in that liquid... very relaxing, soothing. Then I pulled the lid down. The idea was that you’d stay in this "womblike" environment for about half an hour, undisturbed by any sounds, sights — any sensory stimuli at all — and you would have something like a meditative experience. Then after a half an hour, some gentle music would "bring you back", and you'd climb out of the tank.

But, in fact, as soon as the lid went down, I felt sheer terror. I suppose it was a kind of claustrophobia. Everything in me wanted to push that lid up again and climb out. Right away! I fought down that immediate impulse, only to find distressing thoughts creeping in. What if the attendant who was responsible for turning on the music forgot? How long might I lay in that tank? And on and on.

The "relaxing experience" had turned into a nightmare. But two things held me in place. The first was the thought that I might very well have a similar feeling of terror when I died. (I had been learning a lot about death and after death through Adi Da's Teaching, especially His book, Easy Death.) But after death, there would be no "lid to lift up", no way of "climbing out". So, I thought: better to start getting acquainted with such intense feelings now, and somehow learn to practice with them. The second thing was that I had recently begun reading the teaching of my Spiritual Master, and I had some sense of the way things actually work in the realm of the psyche, and I realized that this was one of my first opportunities to see my Master's words about "surrender" and "feeling" in action in a very personal way.

So I hung in there. I didn't raise the lid. I simply allowed myself to feel the terror.

It got worse. It grew to the point where I felt certain I was going to die. And I continued to just feel it.

And then a miracle happened. In a single instant, all the fear dissolved, and I suddenly felt completely happy.

I was blown away by this. I mean, after all, isn't it completely counter-intuitive that one instant you would be feeling complete terror, and then the next, complete happiness? It didn't make any sense to me, in that moment. But there it was.

I was so happy! I just revelled in that happiness mindlessly without any self-consciousness. At a certain point, the music came on, and I climbed out of the tank. I looked at my watch — an hour had passed! The attendant had indeed forgotten to turn the music on at the appointed time.

And I didn't care.

* * *

Through studying Adi Da's Teaching, I came to understand how what I had experienced actually makes perfect sense. Our Native State is a state of unlimited feeling — not confined by a mortal body, the brain, etc. Normally, what we feel is one or another contracted state, like fear, sorrow, or anger. But if we could only allow ourselves to feel such "limitations on feeling" fully — feeling to, through, and beyond the limitation — the limitation would dissolve, and we would taste the unlimited feeling that is Perfect Happiness, the Feeling of Being Itself.

Somehow in the midst of this round of existence you realize that you can feel a lot better than you now feel, that you can feel absolutely blissful, that you can love absolutely, that you can be absolutely free. But feeling blissful stands in contrast to your common state. You are addicted to reactive emotion, low levels of energy, gross fixations of attention, psycho-physical obstruction. You are addicted to countless programs that are less than love. In every moment your attention is moving toward one or another object, and your feeling in every moment is an expression of the program of mind into which you are locked in that moment.

Now, what have you learned in your whole life? Have you learned to feel perfectly? To feel absolutely? Did you ever go through a period of study in which you learned to feel to Infinity, to feel Absolute Divinity? No, you learned all the reactive patterns of life, all the desires for ordinary things. You knew them even before you became familiar with them again in this body. You cannot feel any better than you can feel, and you are addicted to feeling less than love, to being less than ecstasy. When you come to see Me, you will realize that you cannot feel any better than you can feel.

Sometimes, when you come into My Company, for no good reason you may suddenly be Given a moment in which you awaken a little and feel much better. But that moment passes. What was the purpose of it? To help you to become aware that you can feel better. At another time, you feel worse. You come into My Company full of yourself and feeling bad and wanting Me to make you feel good. The more you notice it, the worse you feel, and the more confirmed you become in the feeling that you were animating when you arrived. Well, what was the purpose of that? To awaken in you the conviction that you can feel much better.

You can be ecstatic. However, to be ecstatic is different from all the things you are programmed to feel. To be blissful is different from everything that you are desiring. Your desires are movements of attention toward states of energy that are very low in the spectrum of possibility. If they were any lower, they would be as solid as stone! Therefore, if you are meditating on such a low level of energy with your mind, your attention, your desiring, how good can you feel? Not very good. What you feel is reactive emotion in the form of skin and bone and bodily processes. Your feeling is depressed. It is less than Light. It feels the cramp that Light feels when it collapses on itself.

I am here to Awaken you to the Realization that you can feel absolutely, that you can be ecstatic, that there is a different way to be than you are tending to be in every moment. The only way you are going to feel better consistently is to feel better, is to feel in the spectrum of Energy, Light, or Absolute Radiance. You must begin to be ecstatic rather than always being fixed in your attention, and defined by your fixation, in the realm of money, food, and sex. You are involved with yourself, and you wonder why you do not feel better. Because you are not feeling better!

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, The Fire Must Have Its Way

So in order to feel better, we must learn how to feel better. And in some sense, that is what the Way of Adidam is all about. Our egoic patterning creates the limit on feeling. When we transcend egoity, we feel without limitation.

Feeling To, Through, and Beyond Sorrow — The Distraction Machine

At another point in my life (in 1985), my girlfriend and I had just separated. The sadness and sense of loss that I felt was greater than I had ever felt before in such a separation. Over the next month, my life was dominated by this feeling of intense sorrow. I was a professor at the time, and, as I'd be walking down the corridors of the school building, tears would suddenly start pouring down my face, and I’d have to do my best to turn in such a way that my students and colleagues didn’t see them.

The intensity of this sorrow kept growing for weeks. Then, one night, as I lay in bed, the sorrow became overwhelming. And something very interesting began to happen.

The thought came to mind that I could call a friend, and try to distract myself that way. But even as the thought arose, I simultaneously somehow knew that the pain was too deep for this distraction to relieve it.

Then I thought of going to a movie. Same thing.

Reading a book. Same thing.

On and on. Even as this was happening, another part of me was watching in fascination as I witnessed something I had never really noticed so clearly before: my mind was primarily organized, in every moment, to search for ways to distract myself from intense feeling! And how it operated was literally like watching a computer program in action. It was very mechanical, like a machine, in the way it operated. It tried one option. That failed. Then it tried another. That failed. But it systematically stepped through all my usual distractions, one by one.

Finally, it ran out of options.

There were no more distractions. There was not the possibility for distraction in that moment. I no longer had an option: I had no choice but to feel this sorrow. And so, having no choice, I surrendered. I let the sadness overwhelm me. Just like my feeling of terror in the flotation tank, I felt sure that I was going to die.

And then the miracle happened again — in a single moment, the sadness was replaced by sheer Bliss.

Feeling Without Limitation as a Way of Life

These two experiences showed me different aspects of the same revelation.

In the second case, I tried hard to distract myself from feeling — in fact, I had an entire machine of distraction working on it — but the feeling was too intense. I ran out of distractions, and was forced to allow the feeling of sorrow to overwhelm me, again allowing me to feel it fully, then feel through it fully and beyond it, to locate and feel my Native State of Perfect Happiness.

In the first case, I consciously chose to not resist feeling the fear fully. I let it overwhelm me, which allowed me to feel it fully, then feel through it fully and feel beyond it, dissolving it suddenly, even as an expanding balloon might suddenly pop, merging the small bit of air inside with the unlimited air outside.

Remarkably enough, the reason you are so disturbed about the facts of life that might make you fearful, sorrowful, and angry is that whenever something arises that you might appropriately be angry, fearful, or sorrowful about, you do not feel it completely. You limit your feeling of even these reactions. And you certainly limit your feeling of the circumstance, or the condition that is arising. You are always exhibiting the evidence of limited feeling, obstructed feeling. If feeling becomes limitless, if you do not contract, then feeling becomes Being Itself — no reaction, no contraction, Feeling without limit. That Feeling goes beyond fear, sorrow, anger, and conventional happiness and loving attitudes.

What is It? It is Love-Bliss. It is the Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Force of Being, without the slightest obstruction. It is Divine Enlightenment. It Divinely Transfigures the body-mind and becomes a Power, a Great Power, and — because now you are looking at manifestation through this color, this "one flavor", this Free Force or Free Energy — It even allows you to interpret everything differently. Now you will not be saying that manifest existence is evil or suffering or sinful, or that others are unloving, that we are mortal, that we are going to die, that it is a terrible life, and so forth. Instead, you will regard all of manifest existence to be pervaded by Love-Bliss. Not merely Bliss coming at you from every direction, but Love-Bliss, Self-Existing and Self-Radiant, Radiating from every direction in the Place where you Stand, as you, and everywhere, altogether. It has no center, it has no bounds, it has no limits. It is Free Energy. And, in the midst of Free Energy, you are Free as attention, not limited, not obstructed in your attention.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, Feeling Without Limitation

Adi Da has described how — in a similar manner — the moment of our death, or moments of profound pain where we no longer are capable of distracting ourselves from feeling, also can be great gifts, revealing our True State of Perfect Happiness.

Such moments also suggest an alternate way of life that is based on consciously choosing to feel fully (as in my first example of being in the flotation tank) in every moment:

In some sense the greatest power of all, the greatest Grace of all, therefore, is unqualified pain. As long as you have an option, some way to slip and slide out of your dilemma, your difficulty, your egoic "self-possession", you will tend to take the way out or otherwise just be confused. All of you must have had some moments in your life when the pain, the confusion, the forcefulness, of the intrusion of the difficulty of life was so profound you could not figure anything out about it, you could not make an emotional gesture to escape, you could not do anything physically about it, you could not do anything socially about it, or anything else. It was so confusing, so overwhelming, so profound, it was not even that you could surrender but surrender was inevitable. You nakedly felt beyond yourself, relieved of your apparently independent self, the egoic self eliminated by that most profound intrusion. . . .

And then there is a kind of beatitude, not necessarily Divine Enlightenment every time such a thing occurs, but a kind of beatitude, continuous with what Is. In such a moment, you must be given up to What Is, whatever It Is, and there is no choice about it. . . .

You are all the time fearing death and great pain and the most dreadful of consequences. If any of those things did happen, a beatitude would be inevitable. But there is a great lesson in pain. In pain, you can allow that very same condition of beatitude to coincide with your ordinary life. You can allow it. It can become the greatest principle of Yoga, the greatest principle of [Spiritual practice]. You will allow, even embrace, great discipline, great devotion, great service, great meditation, great heat, great tapas, knowing that in such circumstances there is always beatitude, because no choice is available to you.

The great [Spiritual] Realizers know this secret. I know it. If you can come to the point of allowing such complete and total surrender, so that you never avoid it, so that in fact it becomes the condition of existence, then life is beatitude, existence is beatitude.

There is a secret in such surrender that is most fundamental to [Spiritual practice]. Allow yourself to be cooked, to be burned alive, to avoid nothing. To be, in this moment, in such a place where surrender is not even your only choice, where it is only inevitable — this is the secret of most effective [Spiritual practice]. It is the secret of renunciation. It is why renunciation is the secret of Realization, bereft of all means, all strategies, only There, without resorts of the egoic kind, in Place with the One Who Is, only devotion and not by choice. There is no choice. Giving yourself no choice whatsoever is the greatest principle of [Spiritual practice]. . .

Be God-made, God-born, with God allowed, God Existing, and with no alternatives — this is the great Secret. The greatest Realizers, the greatest renunciates, all know this Secret. This is why they do what they do. But if you are only mediocre, always trying to avoid the great Imposition of Reality Itself, then you always have an option, some way to slip or slide to the right or left, always some way to desensitize yourself to the great Condition, not to mention all conditions. To become so humbled, so ground up, that there cannot be anything but Divine Enlightenment, this is the Secret. Mark my words!

You are all maintaining options that is what I am telling you. You always have an option. Even suggesting to yourself, "I would choose always the option of surrender and devotion" still gives you room. You should give yourself no room — devotion absolute, imposed to the absolute degree so that no gesture even can or even need be made, but only God Is. That is the Secret.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, The Incarnation of Love

Every being must fulfill the Law, regardless of his or her past. It does not make any difference how difficult it is for you. The Law remains the Law. The Law is unobstructed feeling-attention to Infinity — under all conditions, and in all relations. If you are obstructed in feeling and attention, you fail to fulfill the Law. That is why you suffer, and why you stop growing.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
The Complete Yoga of Human Emotion-Sexual Life

An Infinite Degree of Yes! Is All 'It' Takes.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj

The moments I described (as well as the moment of our death or moments of great pain) are relatively rare moments of feeling with the whole body. The whole body is flooded by the "feeling". That is why I felt like I was going to die if I surrendered to the feeling, because it was overwhelming the entirety of "me". But by that same token, when I did let go and surrender completely, when I did let it overwhelm me, I was gifted with a taste of the unlimited Happiness that is prior to egoity, the unlimited Happiness that is our Native State.

Such moments of intense negative feeling are, however, relatively rare in the life of the ego, because the ego is absolutely committed to not feeling to that degree or depth. We have instead developed a strategy of staying in a superficial state of feeling in which we are identified with a point in our head, rather than "getting down" and standing as the whole body (and feeling with a far greater intensity, with the whole body). As that point in the head, the main negative states we feel are not intense, whole body feelings like I described, but rather "mediocre" (more contracted) feelings like boredom, doubt, discomfort, stress, and angst. And, as I described, each of us has developed (with the help of the society in which we live) an entire machine of distraction (which Adi Da calls "seeking"), for not even feeling those mediocre, negative feelings, and being distracted instead by mediocre "pleasurable" feelings all the time.

It only takes watching oneself for a short while to confirm this. I'm sitting on the couch. The instant a feeling of boredom comes up, I am consulting my distraction machine for a way to not feel bored. . . That very instant! We allow such a tiny, mediocre sensation as boredom to control and dictate most of our life, from moment to moment, without ever inspecting that pattern, or asking ourselves whether we want to allow our life to be bullied in that manner.

And modern society supports us in every possible way with a complementary machine of distractions, that gets increasingly varied and sophisticated with each passing year of further technological development. I recall really noticing this on a particular plane flight. There was some technical problem that kept the staff from being able to show the scheduled movie. The staff was extremely apologetic, as though they had just committed the most heinous crime by opening up an unoccupied hour and a half for the passengers. They hastened to make all kinds of suggestions for using the resources of the plane (music, magazines, snacks, etc.) for the purpose of filling every passing moment (until the plane landed) with something they hoped would sound pleasurable to the passengers. The fervor with which they engaged in this surprised me. It had the intensity of a zoo staff when one of the fences keeping the tigers in has just accidentally broken open; the staff is terrified that a bunch of wild tigers is on the verge of pouring through and attacking them, and they are doing anything and everything to appease and placate the animals, tossing snacks and anything else they could find to the tigers through the break in the fence (and hoping it was enough to keep them from coming out).

On some level, the airline staff knew they were dealing with addicts — addicts of superficial pleasure.

Samadhi is the Sanskrit word used in Hindu spiritual traditions to refer to the great states of temporary absorption in some aspect of the Divine (absorption in the Light, absorption in Consciousness, etc.) Only a rare few Spiritual Realizers enjoy such states. However, Adi Da has observed that, like the great Spiritual Realizers, all of us love being in samadhi states. Only, our samadhi states are what He calls "lesser samadhis": we get absorbed in a movie, a TV show, a meal, a sexual encounter, even sipping a cup of coffee. And our society keeps evolving increasingly better immersive technologies (from the Web, to smart phones, social networks, and virtual reality devices) to cater to the "lesser samadhi" addict. We can "plug in", in virtually every moment, and tune out the world (and our negative feelings), at least temporarily.

Narcissus at the 21st century pond

So actually living a life based on feeling without limitation requires a complete turnabout in how we are living our lives. Adi Da has made it clear that true renunciate life is not about asceticism, but about renouncing egoity and the life based on egoity. And the first level of that renunciation is about understanding and disciplining that endless life of seeking — cutting into that moment-to-moment machine of superficial distractions and lesser samadhis that prevents us from feeling anything greater, including our Native State of Perfect Happiness.

You are trying to feel good. Every one of you, right now, is trying to feel good. You want to feel good because you feel bad. You always already feel bad. Always already, you feel bad! Not good — BAD! You always feel bad, and through your seeking you want to feel good. Here and there, using all of the methods you can generate in your daily life, you get a little spell of relief — just brief. How long does the pleasure of an orgasm last? [Snaps His fingers.] Just like that — very brief. Almost instantly, you are cruising back to feeling bad. Even when people go into fifth stage conditional Nirvikalpa Samadhi [a very advanced spiritual state], almost as soon as they get there, they are cruising back — almost immediately.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, "Self-Understanding", April 8, 1993

Examine these pleasures in their moment and you will see that they are an effort of struggle, a search to eliminate pain, boredom, doubt, and discomfort.

Individuals may imagine that when they are moved toward sexual experience they are simply looking for or embracing pleasure. But if you examine the source of this pursuit, you will see that it is motivated by discomfort, by pain, by boredom, doubt, and discomfort.

Why would you seek happiness if you were not already uncomfortable? Observe yourself in any moment in which you are moving to do something else or moving on the basis of desire. Observe the state that you are in. It is always boredom, doubt and discomfort. A state of wretchedness, pain, and dis-ease always precedes your desiring. Always!

Contraction is always the motivator.

Seeking is a way out of contraction. Ordinarily, an individual does not recognize that that is why he or she is pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, "The Principle of Retreat"
Crazy Wisdom Magazine, May 7, 1986

As egos, identified with a limited mortal form, we are always suffering. But instead of addressing the root of that suffering (through a process of God-Realization, in which we ultimately awaken as unlimited Consciousness, unlimited Being, and unlimited Feeling), we contract even further (usually into a point in the head) in mediocre, superficial states, developing all kinds of ways to keep them as "pleasurable" as possible, as often as possible, from watching a movie, to chit chat at the water cooler.

But the way out is not merely a matter of enduring mediocre or intense states of feeling, until we feel through them into our Native State.

There is a Perfect Way, that exploits our very tendency to be distracted and to seek samadhis by offering us, in every moment, a Divine Distraction, a Divine Samadhi, that directly addresses the root cause of our suffering.

In the Way of Adidam, Adi Da transmits His Divine State — our Native State of Perfect Happiness — to us in every moment. It is available to us not just in relatively rare moments of intense feeling, but in every moment, through His Transmission. By allowing ourselves to locate and be absorbed in Adi Da's State, all the egoic patterns of seeking and contracting relax and become obsolete over time. Ultimately, through this process of immersion in His State (through the principle, "you become what you meditate on"), we awaken perfectly and permanently to our real Condition, our True Self — Consciousness Itself, the Divine Reality — no longer identified with or suffering a limited, mortal form.

Ego-bound ordinary life is characterized by a constant seeking-effort to resist boredom, doubt, and discomfort — by exploiting the functional possibilities of the body-mind-complex to try to escape the moment to moment arising of the ego-states of boredom, doubt, and discomfort.

Among the many means commonly used in the seeking-effort to escape boredom, doubt, and discomfort are "techniques" that are usually called "religious" or "spiritual".

Apart from egoless Divine Self-Realization, "religious" or "spiritual" exercises are basically "techniques" of consolation — "methods" applied by the ego-"I" (or the "self"-contraction) to escape its fundamental dis-ease, which constantly takes the form of boredom, doubt, and discomfort.

In the only-by-Me Revealed and Given "Radical" (or Always "At-the-Root") Reality-Way of Adidam (or Adidam Ruchiradam), the necessary context of whole-bodily-to-Me-turned recognition-responsive Transcendental Spiritual life in My Divine Avataric Company is "radical" (or always "at-the-root") "self"-surrender and the intrinsic (and moment-to-moment-demonstrated) transcending of egoity.

When the ego-"I" is always already (or intrinsically, rather than strategically, or by effort of seeking-"technique") transcended, the otherwise to-be-applied "methods" for avoiding boredom, doubt, and discomfort by means of developing one’s egoic life — whether in exoteric or esoteric terms — are also (thus and thereby) transcended and relinquished.

Boredom, doubt, and discomfort are not merely to be endured and suffered.

Rather, it is always necessary to directly and intrinsically transcend boredom, doubt, and discomfort, by directly and intrinsically transcending the "self"-contraction, so that — instead of being limited to boredom, doubt, and discomfort, and the motives of escape — you participate directly in the Transcendental Spiritual Divine Self-Nature, Self-Condition, and Self-State of Reality Itself. This directly participatory Reality-Way Is the Secret of the Real Transcendental Spiritual Process in My Divine Avataric Company.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
"The Perfect Transcending Of Boredom, Doubt, and Discomfort"
The Aletheon, Volume III, Part 9

Chapter 8