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Seeking and desensitization
Even though we always are acting (mostly unconsciously) on all levels of egoic activity depicted in Figure 1, most of our time we find ourselves only consciously inhabiting the outermost circle of ego activity. This is the most peripheral or superficial level, corresponding to the least depth of feeling. In fact, our motive for only being conscious there is to desensitize ourselves from what is being generated at the deeper levels of ego activity, especially the pain at the core. Avatar Adi Da Samraj describes our occupation at the peripheral level as seeking — generally in the areas of money, food, sex, and relationships. This search is driven by an uninspected (and unfounded) motive that suggests that, if one could find what one was seeking, whether the search is for a million dollars or the intimate partner of one’s dreams, one would become happy; one would be relieved of the pain. This is basically how most of us pass most of our lives. The searches can never fulfill their promise because they don’t in any way relieve the fundamental sense of separation at the core that is creating the pain: |
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You have little searches that can be attained in the next moment, and you have bigger ones that take a little longer, and you have immense ones that could take you forever. . . . And this is how you prevent yourself from finding out that you are just a seeker and the search is based on pain and that it is founded on an act of separation and cannot be fulfilled. You keep yourselves from finding this out by projecting some of your searches onto such a large scale that you can never prove the point.
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Even seeking for "spiritual" experiences proves to be exactly the same kind of search. It is motivated by the pain associated with "being" a separate self. And, like more conventional materialistic self-fulfillment, it is only a distraction from what we actually need to be doing to be free of the sense of being a separate self : |
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Every time I met Rudi [Adi Da Samraj's first Spiritual Teacher], He would hand Me a bag of garbage. I cannot remember a time when I went to see Rudi when He did not hand Me a bag of garbage. It was always the first thing He would do. Then I would go and throw the garbage away, and I would come back, and We would sit together for a little bit, or I would do some work. Sooner or later, He would give Me some more garbage. It is really very simple. You just throw it away. . . . The key to the matter is not how to throw the garbage away. The key to the matter is noticing that it is garbage. . . . You are looking at a lot of garbage and thinking that it "Is" the Divine! One of My Functions is to "package" the garbage. I have spent a lot of My time packaging your garbage, trying to get you to notice that it is garbage. You will throw it away as soon as you notice this. You cannot surrender something that you do not see to be garbage. You compulsively hold on to it. So you must notice that it is garbage. But I will Tell you right now — it is all garbage! Everything I Give you in the realms of experience is, ultimately, garbage — and I expect you to throw it away. Nevertheless, you tend to meditate on it — instead of meditating on Me! Every one of these seemingly precious experiences, all of this profound philosophy, is — ultimately — just more of the same stuff. But you have "bought" the conventional religious and Spiritual propaganda — so you think that these experiences and this philosophical "profundity" are the Divine Itself. None of that is the Divine. It is all garbage. . . . You are expected to throw the garbage away under the most extraordinary conditions — conditions in which you would, ordinarily, not even consider throwing it away. You are sitting in the precious blissfulness of the spine — why should you throw it away? It is all so delicious. You have been a fool all your life, and now you are a Yogi! — why should you throw that away? No one wants to do that. You do not want to throw it away. You have no True Humor in relation to it. You have no detachment from all this that you have accumulated through vast aeons of existence in conditionally manifested form. You do not want to throw it away. The demand to throw it away seems mad, impossible . . . What is required of you is this sacrifice of separate and separative self — and such self-sacrifice only becomes possible through the Influence of My Perfect Siddhi of Divine Liberation. . . . It is real sacrifice — not a sacrifice in the traditional sense of some gloomy self-abnegation and emptying. It is the sacrifice which is itself based on True Humor and expressive of overwhelming love of Me, in which there is not anything whatsoever to be attained. There is not anything to be attained. I mean not anything. Not anything! There is not anything to be attained. Not one thing is to be attained. Not anything. There is not a single thing to be attained. There is no conditional experience, no conditional vision, no conditional transformation of state that must be attained. There. Have I said it? Avatar Adi Da Samraj, He-and-She Is Me |
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So most of our life passes by on the periphery of self-awareness, in cycles of stress-generation (as we engage the next search) and stress release (when a goal is attained). We try to stay consoled and pleasurized; in other words, we try to stay immunized from the always present, underlying pain produced at the core of the ego. But sometimes those distractions fail to work — “I was fired from my job”, “my mother died”, “my husband left me” — and we fall into our suffering at a deeper of self. We feel more fully the underlying motivators of seeking and distraction: fear, anger, sorrow, anxiety, and so on. But it is at this level too, for the length of time we can endure staying in it, that we can consciously discover and master a deeper level of our patterning: our constant need to distract ourselves, to occupy ourselves in seeking, so as not to feel this generally covered-over “pit of snakes”. Obviously investigating this level by choice is better than being thrust into this level by random circumstance (through the death of a loved one, disaster, etc.) This increasing depth of feeling-awareness — painful though its discoveries will be — is the direction we need to move in, because in fact, we must consciously fall into the core of all this egoic activity and suffering in order to find the true and completely effective key to freedom from suffering. We need not wait for our distractions to fail to fall into this deeper level. Understanding our mission, we can intentionally and voluntarily discipline ourselves, renouncing or reducing our seeking activity in specific areas systematically. It’s very simple: as soon as we cease to engage distractions, we feel precisely what we are trying not to feel (via those distractions). There are two good reasons why we do not hear too much about people making it all the way to the core, and telling the world they have found the way beyond being a separate self, and all the suffering that stems from that:
And so the road to fundamental self-understanding is paved not with the exquisite torture of deeper and deeper self-meditation, but rather, with the progressive taking on of disciplines that curb or renounce our various forms of distraction, while our primary activity remains our surrender to the Divine. For it is only the consciously embraced Happiness of the Divine that allows us to endure the falling into our undistracted suffering, and only the Revelation of the Divine that by way of contrast also Reveals the self-contraction. We are basically relaxed by Grace into our own True Depth and Ultimate Nature (beyond ego), in (and by) the Divine, as we feel to, through and beyond all the self sensations to the Divine. Thus, the discovery of the primal activity is a Revelation by and Gift from the Divine. Quite in contrast with our conventional patterning — which avoids feeling fully, suffering in all its forms — fullness of feeling is the key to the process of understanding, because the self-contraction is most fundamentally a limit on feeling: |
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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. . . . If feeling becomes limitless, if you do not contract, then feeling becomes Being itself — no reaction, no contraction, Feeling without limit. . . . What is It? It is Love-Bliss.
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All excerpts from the works of Avatar Adi Da Samraj and and pictures of Avatar Adi Da Samraj © 2003 The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as trustee for The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam. All rights reserved. Perpetual copyright claimed. |
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