Finding
Adi Da > Chris Tong > Part IV (Waking Up) > C (Further Elements) > Chapter 7
7. Turning Every Moment into God-Communion
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| This is Part IV-C, Chapter 7 of Chris Tong's book, Finding the Divine In Person and Waking Up From the Dream. | |
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When Adi Da would gather with His devotees on Naitauba in Hymns To Me, He often would make some part of the gathering be a dance gathering. For instance, He might start an evening by talking to to us extensively about some subject; but then He'd end the evening with a dance gathering. (And sometimes the entire gathering would be a dance gathering.) Our DJ, instructed by Adi Da, would choose upbeat, usually energetic pop songs, often ones whose lyrics were capable of being interpreted in terms of the Guru-devotee relationship — examples of some favorite, often replayed songs were Steve Winwood's Higher Love, Huey Lewis's The Power Of Love, and the Police's Every Breath You Take. Adi Da would sit in His chair at the center of one side of the hall, lovingly watching all His devotees ("Every breath you take, I'll be watching you"), and we'd be dancing to the music with each other in the rest of the room while we contemplated Him.
I sometimes would sit down next to His chair, and simply contemplate Him. It was so much easier to feel Him, and be in Divine Communion with Him like that! Of course, regardless of where His attention appeared to be, He was completely aware of my sitting there, but would often indulge my sitting there for a while. But sooner or later, He would turn to me, often with a smile, and then make a gesture with His right index finger pointed downward. He'd move it as though He were using it to stir a drink — He was using His finger to symbolize dancing, and He was instructing me to get back to it. And so I would, re-energized from having sat with Him.
The point of this story is that, in the practice of Adidam, we need to discover how to be in Divine Communion with Adi Da in every moment of the day, no matter what we are doing. And in this moment it was: how to dance and interact with other devotees, and still be in Divine Communion with Him.
The Secret is to always remain in devotional Communion with Me. You have different kinds of functions and obligations and all the rest of it. Therefore, you must live the practice of Adidam to such a degree that you are able to be in devotional Communion with Me no matter what you are doing — no matter what kind of activity, function, or whatever, is happening at the moment. Therefore, the complexities of right practice are about how you conform every kind of function and moment to devotional Communion with Me.
It is a simple thing that is always being done, but you are required to adapt to all different kinds of particularities. It is the particularities that make the simplicity seem complex. In this moment, you have some requirement to do something or other. You can either do that, just merely as it is, or you can have it be devotional Communion with Me, true service to Me. What do you have to do to your action in any moment to have it be true devotional service to Me, to have it be such Communion with Me? That is what you must “consider”. You must intelligently “consider” every detail, every aspect of your life, and decide what you must do relative to each kind of function, relationship, and all the rest of it, such that you are always transcending egoity, always devotionally Communing with Me.
That is another aspect of what I Intend to Communicate when I Say that you must, in the beginning, find out what it is to be Reality-intelligent. This is how to function intelligently: As a practitioner of Adidam, you must require every aspect of your life to be a form of devotional Communion with Me. That does not mean you stop doing everything and just stay in your room to Commune with Me. It is more complex than that — because, even if you did go and sit in your room, you would still be haunted by yourself. Therefore, you must do the practice of Adidam relative to all of the aspects of your life. You must practice with them. You must adapt everything to the Divine Process — not adapt the Divine to them, not subordinate the Divine to them, but subordinate all aspects of your life to the Divine.
By natural necessity, you are active in all kinds of ways. You must find out how each of those kinds of action can be true service to Me, devotional Communion with Me. How do you do it with work? How do you do it with lunch? How do you do it with sex? How do you do it with social relations? How do you do it with everything? This is what I have “Considered” with people since I first began to Teach.
You live all the time as if you are somehow under the worst of circumstances. You will not allow yourself to release the “self”-contraction and enter into Divine Communion, whole bodily, because you are aware that there are circumstances under which you would not be able to do so. You must discover that there is no circumstance under which you are incapable of entering into Divine Communion. Whatever you must do in order to get to that point of certainty is what you must do. Everyone must do that. It is not necessary to suffer mightily in order to discover this. But you must be able to somehow get in touch with your psychological limits. You must be tested.
"Moment-to-moment" practice means twenty-four hours a day! So what about when one is sleeping?
I realized this was a serious matter when my daytime practice had become much closer to a moment-to-moment practice. But every now and then, I'd wake up in the morning completely contracted, because of all that sleep time when I was not practicing — and the contrast between the daytime state, largely free of contraction, and this wake-up state was startling. It wasn't bad every morning. As Adi Da has observed (as we mentioned in the chapter on the self-contraction), the self-contraction has a natural cycle or rhythm. But when the cycle was on the downward phase, the morning contraction could be quite severe.
So I prayed for an answer to how to engage in some form of practice while asleep. A couple of nights later, I found myself practicing while I was dreaming. I don’t recall the details of the dream, but I do recall practicing in the midst of it.
Another couple of nights later, I woke up with Adi Da pouring Love-Bliss down the entirety of the body, from my head all the way down to the toes. This went on for hours, as I'd alternate between engaging in Communion with Him while awake, and then letting Him continue the process while I was asleep. The good thing about our practice being a relationship, and not merely a technique, is that either partner in the relationship can take the initiative! And this was one of the moments where Adi Da was initiating. What I needed to know was how to "grasp the tail of the Horse" and let the Horse take me, while I'm sleeping. And what was demonstrated that night was that being in a powerful state of Divine Communion when I fall asleep is a good way to "grasp the tail of the Horse".
