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Adi Da > Chris Tong > Part IV (Waking Up From the Dream) > Chapter 3
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Moving Beyond the Beginner's Plateau in Practice
Beginning practitioners of the Way of Adidam often reach a plateau in their practice, and then do not grow significantly for years. In this chapter, we explore that plateau in greater detail, and we focus on four elements of practice that are key to moving beyond that plateau:
- a practice that is increasingly more moment-to-moment
- an increasingly more whole bodily practice
- an increasingly deeper surrender of the whole body to the Divine — transforming what would otherwise be merely the bodily experience of an organism into a gesture toward transcendence of body identification.
- an increasingly deeper demonstration of self-understanding.
- a practice that has grown enough to start benefitting from certain key advantages — like an increasing intensity of Happiness; an increasing sense of liberation from the binding effects of conditional existence; and more.
Coming soon
Where there is surrender, you feel Happy. This is fundamental Wisdom. Exploit it! Fulfill it Perfectly. Allow it to become what it can become when it is fully developed. Do not let it just be a little gentle sort of consoling sensation. Allow yourself to be completely surrendered, completely Radiant, completely Happy. Why not? Why should you choose to do otherwise?
Most everyone will reach their cutoff point, the point where they will tend to stop, the point where practice tends to be sufficient for them or where further effort is too frustrating and too offensive. Everybody reaches the point where he or she tends to withdraw from the stream of practice. Most people reach that point even before they begin the practice. Either they are never moved to find anything greater than ordinary ego-fulfillment in the world, or they are just “fans” of spiritual life. They like the books, but they basically resist and even resent the interference represented by a Spiritual Master and a Teaching and the idea of practice.
The practice must occupy your entire life. You must devote your entire life to it. You must be devoted completely to it. Otherwise, being only superficially associated with it, you may perhaps realize a better life by virtue of your coming into my Company, but you will not fulfill the Way in your lifetime. Instead you will devote the Virtue of this Way, the Spiritual Transmission Awakened in my Company, to the ordinary purposes of your living, and fundamentally It will only grant Energy to the same thing you are already doing. Therefore, to the degree you are suffering, your suffering will be intensified. To the degree you are successful, your successes will be intensified. But you will never merely be successful. You will also become exaggerated and bastardize the Virtue that is given to you.
Practice in My Divine Avataric Company is about passing tests, such that the total body-mind constantly goes through ego-transcending changes and makes an always greater and always new ego-transcending demonstration.
The Practice accounts for the dual or dynamic nature of the body-mind, while it is also founded in the radical point of view of the Free soul. At every stage of the Way, right functional or whole bodily activity is the chosen principle, rather than any or all forms of exclusively subjective or internal and mental self-manipulation. The individual must change his action first, or else the contents of the mind, which are only a reflection of past actions, will not change. At every stage of the Way, the devotee is obliged to accept responsibility for a more and more total functional spectrum of action.
Beyond the Presumption of Unfruitful Practice
The Two Doubts
Two kinds of negative presumptions: "The practice doesn't work." And "The practice may work, but my practice just won't ever grow beyond my current plateau.
Two forms of doubt quote
Doing What We've Never Done Before
I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.
Monastary quote
His Qualifications: The Horse Takes You
There is no explanation or magical “technique” that will eliminate the necessity to endure the ordeal of profound practice.
Profound practice puts you in touch with the absurdities of your own bondage, and that can, at times, depress you, confuse you, make you feel that your practice is failing altogether, and that it is fruitless. And, in fact, that may be completely true.
You may come to a point, years from now, when you realize that everything you are doing now, and everything you will do between now and then, was completely fruitless and completely off. And you would still have to deal with it.
You would have to refresh your practice, learn the lesson, and get on with right practice, even if you did not find this out about yourself for another ten or twenty years. On the other hand, you could find this out about yourself right now, and save yourself a good ten or twenty years.
There is no freebie. There is a profound process required, profound devotion is required, really holding to My Feet is required, doing so in spite of all inclinations to the contrary, all the bullshit you tell yourself, all the bullshit everybody else tells you, all the bullshit of the “world”, all the possible diversions, distractions, fearful happenings, and all the rest of it.
Regardless of all of that, you turn to Me. If you are serious, this is what you do. And what does turning to Me do? It purifies the mind. The Power of My Person and Presence and Regard and Blessing and Grace will deal with the mind, without you “working on yourself”.
Simply by devotionally recognizing Me and devotionally responding to Me, be turned to Me at all times. . . This is your vow. Do whatever you have to do in order to be turned to Me.
First of all, it has to be important to you to do it, and, secondly, you are going to have to suffer the ordeal of turning the faculties of the ego-possessed body-mind to Me, with utterly “self”-surrendered devotion.
People think there is something about life that prevents them from practicing “radical” devotion to Me. But there is, in fact, nothing about life preventing you from practicing this devotion to Me.
Searchless Beholding of Me is a characteristic of those who, without struggling, are able, moment to moment, to be turned in all their faculties to Me. It is a moment to moment practice.
It's a conscious process. Any moment that we are not consciously turning to the Divine, we are unconsciously turning away from the Divine and reinforcing egoic patterns.
A man went to his Master and said, "Master, I feel like there are two dogs fighting inside me, a good dog and a bad dog. Which one is going to win?" The Master said, "The one that you feed the most."
If you are My true devotee, you (necessarily) turn to Me in every moment — such that you cannot meditate on yourself. In any moment when you are not turning to Me, you are (inevitably) meditating on yourself.
Devotion to Me is Inherently Love-Bliss-Full. It must be done in every moment — otherwise you remember yourself, instead of Me. To remember yourself is not Bliss. To remember yourself is stress and struggle. To always Remember to merely turn to Me — and, as an inevitable consequence, to forget yourself — is to live in my Love-Bliss-Fullness.
We have no precedent whatsoever for a conscious "moment-to-moment practice"! We do not engage anything consciously for hours at a time, let alone all the time. More than that: we simply are rarely "conscious" for hours at a time. Huge portions of our time every day — are us on "auto-pilot" or in some kind of (semi-conscious) reverie state. So a moment-to-moment practice is a huge step up in degree of consciousness throughout each day.
A niyama I have founfd useful: slow down with everything, just a little bit. To do this discipline naturally brings more consciousness to all periods that are normally in “autopilot” mode, without affecting your ability to function.
Fanning the fire vs. letting the fire go out and starting it again from scratch.
The day that unfolds after you have gone to the Communion Hall in the early morning is not a vacation until nightfall when you go to the Communion Hall again. No. All the hours between the times when you go to the Communion Hall are the times of this same Yoga. You must do it persistently and artfully. Do not allow yourself the vacation of wandering into the content of the conditioned body-mind. The only thing it is going to show you is its conditioning, based on your egoic "self-possession" and denial of God. Your business is this Yoga, in the midst of your practice of it noticing this and that in order to apply a discipline of right life that is in conformity with Me, and in greater conformity with Me always.
In His Omnipresence, Adi Da is always already perfectly coinciding with us; when we give Him the gift of greater practice sometimes that gift is returned in the form of Him initiating the fire. It's a relationship not a technique. "Only real gifts create right relationship to Me." Nine Great Laws
Virtuous circle or positive feedback loop.
Foreground activity vs. background subjectivity
Moment to moment practice is self-reinforcing. When you are in the core, the subjectivity in general rises above the level of detectability: both the positive of Divine Happiness, and the negative of self-contraction. That subjectivity, whether positive or negative, serves as a constant reminder throughout the day to practice. Whereas normally, as a seeker, we’ve converged on a subjectivity that is largely below threshold most of the time — an immunized state, as Adi Da describes it.
One reason why moment-to-moment practice is self-reinforcing is that Divine Happiness, in the context of the relationship with Adi Da. You look up in so many moments of the day, to feel Him kissing you somewhere with His Happiness. You are instantly moved to respond to Him and return the gift, and not waste it, so grateful for His steady Presence, and never taking It for granted.
Sleep and practice
this was when it took off for me; release of limiting beliefs in limits; plano sonata example
In the Prayer of Changes you purge yourself of false views, negative views, presumptions, and feelings, and intentionally, through whole-bodily submission, enter into a higher presumption, a perfect presumption, the presumption of change from what appears. That new presumption influences the universal field of mind that is controlling phenomena. . .
This is another reason why it is so important for the community of devotees to grow in size and for the individuals within it to cooperate intentionally with one another relative to changes of all kinds, including the will to Enlightenment for all. That is fundamentally what the Prayer of Changes is about, but it does not mean that lesser positive changes that are secondary to the ultimate matter of Enlightenment are disregarded or considered negative.
Pilot lights represented a major advance in water heater and furnace design. Before pilot lights were invented, a heater needed to be manually lit, every time you wanted to use it. A pilot light is a permanently burning little flame, that obviates the need for manual lighting. Simply turn on the furnace, and the pilot light will automatically ignite the main burner.
So what do pilot lights have to do with practice of the Way of Adidam? After several months of intensive use of the Devotional Prayer of Changes to reveal how my practice could be intensified, I woke up one morning with what I have ended up calling a "two pilot light" practice! I felt Adi Da's Divine State of Happiness burning steadily like a pilot light at the top of my head; and I felt a similar "pilot light" in the right side of my heart. It feels natural to call them "pilot lights" because they are just there — He is just there — glowing, all the time. And they bypass the usual "Communion Hall practice", where significant time can often be required to feel Adi Da's Divine State. With this "pilot light" practice, no time is required! I feel Adi Da as always present. Even when I would wake up at night, those two pilot lights still would be glowing.
If you and I play were to play a game where you say a number, and I say the first thing that springs to mind, and you said “3”, I’d tell you, “three glowing balls of fire”.
Story about pool filling up when I was a kid.
Adi Da has given us an operational definition (i.e. of the "I'll know it when I see it" kind) for recognition: "Anybody who is recognizing Me is absorbed into My State. It is a profound Transcendental Spiritual condition. That's how I tell." In this "two pilot light" practice, my head and my heart could now readily be absorbed in Adi Da's State. You could say that my head and heart were recognizing Adi Da, but my vital was not yet recognizing Him.
ADI DA: It’s not enough to know something about “Samraj Asana” in Yogic terms as I have Given it to you. You have to do it for real, responsively — and then you have to do it profoundly, consistently. Over time, for real, altogether, such that the cup gets full.
It’s not enough for it just to be a cup — it must be Filled. Realizing all that’s Realized in the in-Filling and Pervading, including being beyond this cup. Realizing that by demonstration is the real Process. It’s not a technique. It is a relationship. This relationship is the Way of Adidam.
So what is it — not only in terms of the practice — what is it as a demonstrated Process and Realization?
WILLIAM: Most fundamentally, it is Samadhi, the Samadhi of heart-Communion with You, bodily.
ADI DA: Mm-hm. By surrendering whole-bodily, psycho-physically. But it’s not a matter of being a cup that’s getting Filled. To be the cup you must be surrendered to begin with. There’s just this Filling. But it is about this Filling, and not merely about being in the cup position. It’s Filling by heart-Communion with Me, ego-forgetting Communion with Me. Live the Yoga, and that’s the proof of it — the capability to become full of this nectar, My Tangible Touching Presence, Love-Bliss.
You must become Filled to the crown. I in-Fill you from Above, but you become full from the bottom, in some sense. When the level of the wine rises, it gets to the top last — and, yet, it has to come in from the top to begin with. You see how it works.
And when it is full, there’s no more up or down, because it’s full. There’s no position relative to up or down — it’s the “Thumbs”, if I am allowed most profoundly, ego-forgettingly, given up in heart-Communion with Me. It is “intoxication” of life. But more and more so — not done occasionally, a little bit, and so forth, but truly, most profoundly done — it is Filled by Me. It is Me, in heart-Communion with Me, you see — all else Melted, such that there is utter transparency to Me.
Only when you accommodate Me, all the way down to the base, does the cup begin to become full. Not an impediment. It’s this in-Filled Realization of Me beyond egoity that is the Enjoyment of My devotee. All else is preparation. That Enjoyment is the transcending of that which is, otherwise, Raymond’s “problem” — all the change and mortality, all the inevitabilities and this and that. This relationship, this asana, this Way, this Process in heart-Communion with Me, transcends that. Not merely in attitude, but in in-Filling. To demonstrate the Way of Adidam truly, it must become a Spiritual matter of true devotion to Me — fully lived, and Yogically lived, to the point of becoming a Fullness of Me, Tangibly Present. And all the signs that come from that. Until then, the virtue of the Way of Adidam is not yet Full, and your Realization of it likewise. That Fullness must become Most Perfectly Realized, Most Perfectly Demonstrated.
No matter how much you know about the Way of Adidam, until it becomes Full of Me, literally, in this Yogic devotion, it’s only a beginning. The beginning is necessary, because there needs to be a foundation in every aspect of life. There needs to be responsibility for the gross aspects of the character, the egoic presumption, the ego-asana, “Narcissus” looking at himself.
That knot is you. It’s a pattern of point of view. It is bereft of Me. It has nothing to do with Divine Realization, Realization of Reality Itself. It’s the opposite of that asana. It is the ball, not the cup — not the open, upturned cup, but the ball. The whole form and feature crunched upon itself, a kind of knot of individuality.
“Samraj Asana” isn’t merely a shaping of the physical body in a certain position, such that everything then follows. “Samraj Asana” is a Yogic form. It comes about in response to devotional heart-recognition of Me, which becomes Spiritual Communion with Me. It is not ego-based, it’s not a seeker’s gesture, and so on. It’s not merely to assume a position physically and hold it — that’s not it. It’s a matter of heart-Communion with Me, transcending “self” and the self-knot, therefore. There are certain kinds of Realizations that can come about by holding oneself in place that can relate to any of the stages of life, truly. But it’s all point of view, the pattern that persists.
There must be a full cup, fully Realizing Me now, whatever the nature of the “now” is, whenever, wherever. If the cup isn’t full, you’re still working on your asana.
It must become one immense cup, indeed. All the oceans on earth are piss, compared to the size of that cup. As soon as you can get out of the way, it stops being miniaturized.
The "soup of egoity" (the former content of the cup) is replaced by the monochromatic Happiness of Adi Da's Divine State.
Without extending the practice down to the whole body, one can easily end up having part of oneself (in my case, the head and the heart) devoted to self-transcendence, but another part (in my case, the vital) still full of all kinds of hidden, uninspected motives and desires that were powering unconscious seeking.
Ever since Adi Da wrote His masterpiece, The Enlightenment of the Whole Body in 1978, the whole body has been a key theme in Adi Da's Teaching.
The process of death requires not intellect, but letting go, the willingness to surrender. Letting go is also required in the process of life, for life to become Realization. Having Found Me, how profoundly will you surrender to Me?
By habit, you prefer to survive — whereas the business of life is not survival but surrender, Realizing No-separation, No-“difference”, egolessness. If you were not unwilling to surrender right now, you would Realize Me Most Perfectly, right now. There would not be any way to not Realize Me. There would be no mechanism to prevent you from Realizing Me. There would simply be Me. Every one of you, right now, is dramatizing the refusal to surrender, to some significant degree — and, therefore, you are (of course) refusing it to the ultimate degree.
We are having a rather pleasant, rather social conversation right now, even while talking about something rather profound. Yet, with your knot of “self”-contraction, you are equipped only to be sort of socially amused — because you are afraid, right now. All kinds of habit-mechanisms in you are keeping you from being stark raving afraid. Therefore, none of you are in stark raving terror at the moment.
Why not? To be in your situation and not to be stark raving insane is foolish in the extreme! The body is using all kinds of mechanisms to prevent you from being overwhelmed with terror. And that is lucky for you — in some sense! You get to be foolish (as you are, in general, from moment to moment), and, yet, not “experience” the worst results of your limitations. Such is a Function of My Divine Avataric Grace in the “world”. My Eternal, All-Pervading Divine Avataric Grace keeps you from “experiencing” the worst of your results all the time, and always Gives you a chance to recover, to do right, to Awaken.
Because of My Divine Avataric Grace, you are not in hell. On the other hand, you are not in heaven, either — because you are associated with countless limitations, and you are associated with a burden of ending that you cannot escape. No matter how hard you try, no matter how many distractions you invent, you cannot escape it. The more intensively you devote your life to habit and dissociation from the Divine Reality, the less prepared you are for the transition of physical death. Physical death is not ego-death. It is not the end of anything except a particular physical appearance and perception.
There is nothing but the Infinite Self-Existing Self-Radiance of the Divine Self-Condition. Everything is an apparent modification of That. That Is All There Is. Only One. And I Am That One.
However, you do not Realize the One Condition, Who I Am. You seek for It. You even aspire toward It, sometimes. You struggle to Realize the One Condition, you disregard It, you do all that you do with Me, always putting off the Realization of Me. As My devotee, you are supposed to be doing real ego-transcending practice in My Divine Avataric Company, in order to Realize Me. If you are to do that, you must be serious. You must persist in the ordeal of practice. You must devotionally resort to Me, and not be a merely social relation of Mine.
Organisms. Growth in practice is ultimately about transcendence of body identification. Loose clothing. Blankets not tight. Dancing not according to a prescribed form.
Major point: You are inside God; God is not inside you. Bodily experience. Monumental art.
Recognition = Absorption in the Divine State = whole bodily feeling-awareness of the Divine State + surrender
Transitioning to the position of Consciousness Itself.
Zen: the goose is out of the bottle.
preliminary "Perfect Knowledge" teachings.
The total (psycho-physical) human body — with its dimensions of gross, subtle, and causal — must (altogether) become round.
The total human body does not merely have a circular path within itself. In Truth (or “Located” in Reality Itself), the total human body is a Sphere — and, in its (inherently) perfect balance, it has no “up” or “down”, no “in” or “out”, no central point and no bounds. When My Avatarically Self-Transmitted Divine Transcendental Spiritual Current Descends Fully Down the front of the total human body, and also (thereupon, and thereby) Rises Up the back of the total human body, such that the “Thumbs” Achieves an Equalization of Transcendental Spiritual Force, Down in front and Up in back — then the Circle becomes an Equanimity, a Conscious Sphere of Tangible “Energy” (or Self-Existing and Boundlessly Self-Radiant Light).
- greater intensity of Happiness
- greater whole bodily surrender — greater awareness of the difference between ordinary subjectivity and the Divine State of Happiness — not taking it into the body, reducing it to subjecivity, and dissociating from the Divine like a dog with a bone
- greater awareness of the Divine as freedom from conditional existence — greater awareness of the Divine as another Dimension
- a better context for self-understanding — increasingly less (or "flabbier") self-contraction and an increasingly better context for self-understanding
- a practice that is experienced increasingly more as Samadhi
- greater ability to effectively engage the Devotional Prayer of Changes
One of the reasons beginners often get stuck on the "beginner's plateau" is that they are not experiencing any of these benefits, at least to a degree that makes a difference. At the very beginning, the degree of Happiness can be so relatively small that it doesn't really stand out from the usual means one uses to pleasurize or relax oneself. Given that, it's easy for beginners to fall into a life that Adi Da described as "one foot in the world, and one foot in the Divine — and the bigger foot is in the world". And that pretty much guarantees one will not progress in practice.
In contrast, the more of these benefits you are experiencing, the more they can help create a "virtuous circle" or "positive feedback loop" in your practice — where, for example, greater experienced intensity of Happiness motivates greater practice which leads to even greater intensity of Happiness. Then, as Adi Da once put it, "you will move through these stages [of practice] like a hot knife through butter!"
We opened this chapter with Adi Da's quote: "Do not let it just be a little, gentle sort of consoling sensation." We're now going to delve into just how Happy we can be through Communion with Him.
There Is Only Happiness. Go and make morality out of That. Go and make society, culture, life, and death out of That. That is My Teaching. Therefore, what does your un-Happiness have to do with anything? It is your disease, your patient-life. You are waiting to be Happy. How could one wait for the Principle of Existence Itself? Only a fool would wait for It! Only the Happy claim It. Only those who understand themselves magnify It through every moment of their existence, in every cell.
In the following talk, "The Pleasure of God-Communion Must Exceed the Pleasure of Sex", Adi Da makes it clear that "God-Communion is the Primary Bodily Pleasure":
 Bernini's The Ecstasy of St. Teresa |
You may have observed that during sexual intercourse you become self-possessed, you dissociate yourself emotionally. The feeling dimension of your being collapses and you become concentrated in mere physical sensation. Under such circumstances you view emotion or feeling as just a way to make sex more "fun." You may even think that you are "adding" God-Communion to the event, but really you are only adding pleasure to your own sexual involvement. Such self-manipulation is not the same as self-transcending love. Thus, you see, you suffer emotionally during sexual intercourse.
Entering into pleasurable Communion with God is part of our necessary consideration of sexuality. Your association with God should be equally as pleasurable as sexual play, even more pleasurable because it is continuous and it involves the entire body, including the mechanisms that you exploit in sexual play. Thus, surrender to God is more pleasurable than sexual play, even in ordinary bodily terms.
You simply do not yet know how to surrender, you see. You have not learned it. Meanwhile, you are troubled by what you have already learned, the inclinations you have by tendency! That is the trouble with learning sex before you learn devotion: Thereafter it is difficult to cultivate devotion, because you cannot feel good about devotion itself in the face of this intense pleasure of sex. Sex is a familiar and pleasurable distraction, whereas God-Association is not so familiar and seems to require a certain period of learning during which you do not feel as blissful as you would like.
This consideration of the ecstasy of God-love is just beginning in you. You are still only considering being ecstatic rather than actually involving yourself in this moment in the fierce, direct confrontation with God. You are still only thinking of self-improvement.
You speak and act like people who are obsessed with and somehow consoled by this world. You see, then, what is required of you in order to take up this Way of Life. You cannot be naive about yourself. You cannot be full of yourself. There is so much to be transformed, so much to realize, that you must give up all resistance, all wishing that from now on you could be the perfect devotee without having to learn or suffer or sacrifice.
You would like this Way to be consoling — but it is not. Yes, you can enter directly into ecstasy in this moment — but only through perfect sacrifice. Your moment to moment existence must be the heartfelt practice of literal sacrifice, service, and surrender, and it must be performed with great intelligence. This Way of devotional surrender cannot be mere emotional good-heartedness. No, you must be intelligent about your practice, and you must make your God-Communing life as intensely pleasurable and blissful as all the other things that now distract you. God-Communion is the primary bodily pleasure.
It is simply that you have not realized it as such, and, therefore, you conceive of God-Communion as self-limiting and ascetic. You think you will engage some form of asceticism a little bit at a time and without practicing fiercely, and that eventually, as a result, you will realize God. You tend to feel that God-Realization is a matter of stripping yourselves of attachments, relations, and enjoyments, rather than giving up to God.
However, in truth God-Communion has nothing to do with such self-denial. It is a matter of outshining attachments, relations, and enjoyments through Communion with the Primal Enjoyment. If you are already in a condition of spiritual, bodily enjoyment, then all manifest enjoyments become superficial, ordinary, conventional processes that are neither overwhelming nor binding.
We were talking recently about St. Francis. Whenever he felt worldly desires, he would mutilate himself, punish the body for desiring. Once he threw himself into a briar patch. On another occasion he threw himself naked into the sea to cool off his cravings. Rather than living in the principle of God-Communion, he was busy working against desire. He associated with troublesome desires for which he could not be sanely responsible. He felt that they were happening to him. Thus, he could deal with them only in this bizarre, ritualistic, strategic fashion, trying to tear himself away from their binding force.
In contrast to St. Francis, others spend their whole lives indulging sexual desire. But neither the solution of indulgence nor the solution of suppression, as we see in St. Francis, is illumined. Neither of these two tendencies in any individual is true in itself — everyone adapts in some way to both solutions. Therefore, this matter of the emotional conversion, of the spiritual transcendence of all experience, is the root of the consideration of sexuality and the root of daily life for all practitioners of this Way. When the emotional conversion is not realized moment to moment, all practice becomes mediocre, if not simply false.
All beings are always already Happy. You always know, at this very moment you know exactly, what it would be to look and feel and be and act completely Happy.
Not just a little bit Happy. Not even very happy. . . He goes out of His way to say: COMPLETELY HAPPY! So this quote from Adi Da is something to consider not only when you are not feeling happy at all, but also even when you are feeling Adi Da's Transmission of Happiness just a little bit, or even a lot. Feel the Happiness you are currently feeling and consider what it would feel like if you could "magnify it" (His phrase from the earlier quote) to the point where there is no limitation whatsoever. Let me give you a feeling for it.
Last night I was semi-awake for several hours, feeling Adi Da's Love-Bliss entering me through the "ceiling" (as He calls it) — my head — and filling the body. That went on for several hours, and I'd alternate between being awake (and actively helping the process) and falling asleep. At one point, the Bliss in my head grew so intense that I wondered if it might get to a point where I would not be able to stand it. That was the first time I ever had reason to wonder that! But then it became clear that it was a gradual process of adaptation, and it was very relational — Adi Da was not giving any more than I could endure. So the point is this: this kind of experience is a natural one when you are truly considering the matter of being "completely happy", and doing everything possible to get out of the way and allow complete Happiness.
Greater Awareness of the Divine as A Non-Separate Dimension: Ordinary "Translation"
. . .the “Emergence” of the Divine “Bright” Spherical Self-Domain As the Room of Existence Itself, rather than the (otherwise presumed) ego-“world” of bondage. . . .
To whole bodily recognize Me is to Enter into My Divine “Bright” Spherical Self-Domain.
To whole bodily recognize Me is to Exist in My Divine “Bright” Spherical Self-Domain.
That Instantaneous Translation Is Da.
That Is the “Thunder-Crack” of Reality Itself, when Reality Itself Shatters the illusion of all appearances.
Then you Are in the Infinite Room, Prior to the mind, the body, and the “world”.
The Boundlessness and Centerlessness of Love-Bliss That Is My Divine “Bright” Spherical Self-Domain Is What There Is to Realize.
There is nothing inherent in you that is holding you back from Infinity. Whatever you are holding on to is your position and therefore your destiny. Whatever you are holding back from Infinity, that is what you will continue to be. That is the destiny that will repeat itself in experience. If you are capable of being feeling-attention then conditions will arise for you, but they will also become obsolete and fall away.
The way to give up everything is not through strategic renunciation or turning in and turning up, but through love without qualification. Then everything falls away. Everything becomes God. Everything becomes enjoyable and not binding. When you can be released as love completely and fall into Infinity completely, then everything dissolves.
But you see, you are afraid to dissolve. You think that you have to be in a position somehow, observing something, holding on to something, being held by something, whether it is in this gross form or in some subtle contemplation. You are afraid to release your consciousness to Infinity, because that means you will lose your point in space. You are going to lose your life — that is exactly true. Thus only when the Happiness of Communion at Infinity becomes obvious to you will that dissolution be permitted to become perfect.
Because it does involve the dissolution of everything, the dissolution of body, of all energy, all forms, all worlds, all that is mind, all concepts. It does involve that literally, you see. That is exactly what you are afraid will happen! [Laughter] That is what you call death and try to prevent. And that is exactly what does happen in this Communion. Everything is given up, everything is dissolved at Infinity.
Infinity must become your pleasure. Then this world becomes humorous and livable. Then you can make something sacred out of it, without holding on to it. It will pass away. Everything passes away. Everything is changing here. Everything is action. Everything you hold onto changes because it is itself change.
Therefore, holding on to a position obviously is not Truth. The surrender of all positions is true. Ultimately that becomes your position, moment to moment, not just in intense moments of formal meditation, when you have temporarily relaxed from the games of life. Ultimately, there is no limitation under any conditions. Even while active and appearing in the ordinary way, you are complete Zero, without a center, without any shapes whatsoever.
To the ordinary man that does not sound like Happiness — it sounds like some sort of craziness, some sort of tremendous, terrifying state, as Arjuna experienced in the Bhagavad Gita when he saw Krishna in his thousand-armed form. That is what that vision is all about — losing all ability to comprehend yourself in time and space. It is not just seeing somebody with a thousand arms. Actually that would be wonderful and interesting.
But to Commune with Something with endless dimensions, to fall into Infinity yourself, is terrifying. When Arjuna was drifting into that open-ended Divine Condition he shouted and screamed and told Krishna to please show him his two-armed, objective form which was good enough! [Laughter]
But my confession to you is that this Infinite existence is ultimate Bliss, the Great Happiness.
