Life is about having experiences. Life as a human on this planet is the experience we all signed up to live.
Many of us are content with a repetitive life, with ritual behavior and repeatable experiences. Many of us derive pleasure and comfort from this apparent stability.
Repeating experiences creates a groove in the pattern of life and over time it is easier to slip into that groove, and many people react with hostility when they are forced to leave the groove they're accustomed to being.
Who was it that said that repeating a behavior and expecting something different is insane? Yet we do this daily. We consume things that we know are bad for us, but expect to be satisfied and happy with what we've consumed, and express dismay and disappointment when our expectations are thwarted. Isn't it?
Who wants nothing to change? You? You're insane! : )
I was doing some reading the other day - Rajagopalachariji's collections of speeches given to Danish abhyasis in the early nineties and literature from Adi Da's website. I came across Adi Da's writings in a leaflet at my corner shop and was curious. I found that some of what he was saying, while apparently very ego-centric (I always resist spiritual teachers who request their devotees to worship them and venerate them as God-head), was making sense. I could not feel the usual intensity of transmission of divine love that I usually feel from the writing of bonafide spiritually realised teachers, but there was a little something there. I've copied some relevant passages for some food for thought.
There's a common theme of repetitive experience, creating something within and finding it without, and how verification of experiences relates to living a spiritual life.
"So what is it we are trying to create here? In the old tradition again, a human being is nothing but a symbol of this universe. We are each one of us a universe in ourselves. We have in us the wisdom of the owl, the strength of the lion, the viciousness of the tiger, the poison of the snake, the gentleness of the rabbit, the fleetness of the deer, the beautiful vision of the hawk. We have within us everything. Kill something outside and you kill that within yourself. Create something within you which is beautiful and you create that outside. The old tradition says that this universe is a mirror. Create a lion in yourself, you have created a lion outside yourself. Create fear in you, you have created fear outside. Create hatred in yourself, you have created hatred outside. Create a black man within yourself, you have created a black man outside. And they are going to fight
you. It is our creation which fights us."
'Revealing the Personality' - Parthasarathi Rajagopalachari. p.30.
"Clearly, the search for Realization via experiences of whatever kind is the principal characteristic of both the childish and the adolescent stages of human development. Those who come to Me are, like all other human beings, temporarily, more or less fixed in the demands of their childhood and adolescence. They look for experiential justifications to fall back into the childish sense of unconscious dependence, while at the same time they struggle to realize some kind of idealized and experientially justified independence. Therefore, they are always rising and falling, coming and going."
Adidam
"you must see the strategies that are arising in you always and see that they are wedded to the principle of unconsciousness, of conflict, of dilemma. You must see that they are always giving rise to dilemma"
"Serve the crisis which makes the life of understanding possible. I will not Serve the random needs of individuals to be fulfilled, to be consoled, to be fascinated. I must always Work to offend, criticize, and undermine the usual egoic process of every individual who comes to Me in order to Realize the Self-Condition that is God, Truth, and Reality.
"I must be paradoxical, I must be Free, in order to Serve those who come to Me. The qualities of My action cannot be predetermined. I will not consistently assume the qualities of an archetype--the holy man, the Yogi, the philosopher. I must be Free to appear in any form. I must be Free to behave in all common ways, as well as all uncommon ways, at any moment, in order to undo the expectations of those who come to Me. I am always acting to undo the egoic life of individuals in My Company.
"I do this so that people will not identify Spiritual life with qualities, tendencies, preferences, all the armor people take on when they think they are turning from the world of suffering and turning towards Truth. Religious or Spiritual seeking is not the Way to Truth. The remedial or strategic path is not the Way to God. No experiential process makes you Realize God."
"The true prophet does not lead you to align yourself with karmic destiny. The true prophet leads you always toward a "radical" new position relative to the entire force of your ordinary life.
"The prophets of Israel are representatives of that kind of prophecy. They were all aggravated, annoyed, humorous, paradoxical. They sought to draw people to God only, not to occupy them with psychism. In My prophetic role, I must take the same position relative to all of the occult, psychic, and falsely popularized Yogic and religious hype that permeates our society. Time has not fundamentally changed anything. People are still turned from the Divine Condition and want to find their way back by exercising the capability for experience. They want to read the stars and have visions. They want to read tarot decks and see ghosts. They do not want the prophet."
adidam
On verification, how do you verify:
"that by which the eye sees, but which the eye itself cannot see. That by which the ears hear, but which the ears themselves cannot hear"
?
"Let us not complicate it with the mental acrobatics of the so-called intelligent and refined thinking mind of the West, which is a disease. It is a cancer which is killing us slowly."
"Verification, which is always after the fact. Science proves by verification. Spirituality proves by the immediate presence of the thing, which must be, and which has been, and which shall eternally be there; myself, yourself, the Self. So this is why we seek within, not withstanding what the great religions may say."
- Revealing the Personality by Parthasarathi Rajagopalachari
I feel, after reading the quotes above, that if we have to continually ask for verification, we are like the numb, desensitised man standing in the rain asking for proof that he is wet.
We know intimately the wages of the body and of the ego. After all the ego is always identified with the machine of the body, and to know the arts of the body is to know the space of the body and its emotional forces.
The danger of knowing the arts of the body is to think that this is all there is. That is why the search for the source of consciousness has always failed, because scientists have always stopped at the body.
The danger, I feel, of the martial arts is to isolate spirit into the body, for only then can the martial artist destroy other bodies without also destroying part of Self. The price of this is isolation in the body and in the mind.
The dance of martial arts and the arts of the body and intellect is to reinforce the body and the mind. It becomes denser, heavier and less subtle. The more the intellect "knows" of the body, the less the intellect apparently "knows" of the spirit that animates it.
When what we appear to wish for is to seek to escape the body by over- and under- standing the body, we become even more concrete, the more we struggle to release the bondage of the flesh, yet, paradoxically, the means of "knowing" the body is to surrender control of the body and the intellect to the spirit in the center, the heart.
Enter and become driven through and by your heart, for your heart, the pump of life. Meditate upon the bright light in your heart. Release control of the machine of your body, surrender control of the programs running your body and mind and dissolve into that light.
Know that God has no attributes, no power, no knowledge and is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, and is no thing.
All that we know is that we are alive, for that is what we are.
Cease to kill so that spirit can rise from the body and become subtle and free of all the little gross deaths. When we attack, we attack our self, we are killing something within our Self. Embrace our fears and fear will run a mile because fear cannot tolerate the presence of love any more than darkness can tolerate the presence of light.
I wonder if we make a decision to reject those whom we can not reach, who will not accept our teaching because of a sense of failure. And because we have had failures, or had few failures, we balance on a sense of supremacy, a sense of indecision, and as a result our compassion suffers.
To "know" something truly, it is necessary to "be" that something.
This is the value of personal anecdote when teaching, for it shows that you have been there and done that, and the student can therefore be inspired with hope.
This knowledge can be transmitted from heart to heart. The greatest misfortune for humanity is that many have never met a true, living, heart-teacher; and must be inspired by the memories of dead heart-teachers.
There are few that can transcend time and space, very very few.
Heart-to-heart teaching is limited only by the student's own receptivity and reciprocality to the teaching.
People who wreckognise the message and deny the validity of other streams of being are encompassed by a sense of separation and a paradigm of exclusivity and have abandoned hope to humanity. Until they embrace what they have rejected, they cannot know hope.
Spirituality cannot be known by the intellect, and spiritual experiences are conditioned by the individual's accumulation of attachments, not by any external environment or external influence. A living master of the spirit is required for such individuals to realise escape from their bondage.
What a contradiction we are: on one hand we deliver spiritual food to this list, and on the other some teach the right of intolerance and violent response and rejection of that which does not "fit".
Some more quotes:
"We have healthy bodies with sick minds in them. It is time for raja yoga
par excellence. Not for hatha yoga, not for energy fields, not for Tai Chi,and things like that which will only deepen your misery. It is the mind which has to be regulated, not destroyed, but regulated."
"Whenever you hate something, look into yourself and try to find it and remove it from within. Then you will not hate it anymore. When you are afraid of something, look into yourself and remove it from inside. And you will not be afraid of anything in this universe after that. You are seeing enemies everywhere. Look inside, all of you is rebelling against you."
- Revealing the Personality
So, by being agent provocateurs on this list in expressing controversial ideas and stirring things up, insulting and belittling people's ways of life, getting heteronormatively medieval with the alphabet, we are bringing into question the experience of faith based on personal illumination and initiation.
Using the violence of actions to make others submit to will, we create only a recoil, a resistance in the self that is then difficult to overcome by yourself, and must be given up so that we progress towards the goal of realising our inner freedom. In this way, written actions reveal the personality of other people, and that can be useful. However the recoil counts against this usefulness.
Faced by our adversary, the personality grows stronger as a tree grows stronger against the wind. The times may require that strength.
However, this is not the only way of existence. Doing that can damage that which has the potential for viability, which all life has. Because of our belief systems that are not based on experience, others are condemned to their fate, and the hope of awakened life is taken away.
Any chance of the seed of knowing the Self to grow is killed by laying concrete over the top of the awakening self, locking them into a machinic fate when it is our destiny to work the alchemy of transmuting this iron machine age into the golden age.
True knowledge is transferred from heart to heart by a master. Don't read what I'm saying, feel it in your heart!
"The brain has nothing to do with spiritual existence, except to give me such guidance as I need, - like the instruments in a pilot's cabin, to show direction, height, the weather outside. The intellect is for guidance only, temporal guidance, it has nothing to do with the spiritual life."
"... tendency to ask questions, to seek intellectual satisfaction, answers, is utterly, in one sense, pressing us down, keeping us on this level, from which we have to rise."
- Revealing the Personality.
So all reciprocal relationships are based on heart-to-heart communication. This is real communication, real reciprocality.
From my heart to your heart
