Yes. There is a disturbance, a feeling of dissatisfaction, some sensation that motivates a person to go to a teacher, read a book about philosophy, believe something, or do some conventional form of Yoga. What people ordinarily think of as Spirituality or religion is a search to get free of that sensation, that suffering that is motivating them. So all the usual paths — Yogic methods, beliefs, religion, and so on — are forms of seeking, grown out of this sensation, this subtle suffering. Ultimately, all the usual paths are attempting to get free of that sensation. That is the traditional goal. Indeed, all human beings are seeking, whether or not they are very sophisticated about it, or using very specific methods of Yoga, philosophy, religion, and so on...

As long as the individual is simply seeking, and has all kinds of motivation, fascination with the search, this is not understanding — this is dilemma itself. But where this dilemma is understood, there is the re-cognition of a structure in the living consciousness, a separation. And when that separation is observed more and more directly, one begins to see that what one is suffering is not something happening to one but it is one's own action. It is as if you are pinching yourself, without being aware of it. . . Then one sees that the entire motivation of life is based on a subtle activity in the living consciousness. That activity is avoidance, separation, a contraction at the root, the origin, the "place", of the living consciousness.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
(from "Understanding", Adi Da's first public talk, on April 25, 1972)