I learned from my Beloved Adi Da that as responsibility for the avoidance of relationship matures, the dilemma that “inner-outer” begets is revealed to be false, and a most simple naturalness is already true. The knot of history is un-done, allowing being and love to mature. Slowly or suddenly, being and love are found to be transcendental fullness. Slowly or suddenly, we realize that the reality ourside the cave has been given to us by the “divine Incarnations”, the Siddhas (“Powerfully Shown”).
When you die in Egyptian mythology, your heart is weighed upon a scale, balanced by a single feather. If your heart is heavier than a feather, Bebe, the hound of the Underworld, devours you. But if your core is lighter than a feather, you enter paradise and are said to be 'true of voice'. This is obviously a discriminating metaphor, because the lesson is also true now, while still breathing.
As the master of the Christians advised, “Do not lay up for yourself treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, that same place where thieves break in and steal, but store up treasures in divinity, where moth nor rust nor thieves can touch.” Archetypically, this discernment is presented as the error of overvaluing money or power or anything that rots and the corresponding undervaluing of relationship to others and to all.
As I learned from my Beloved, we must work on developing and harmonizing our ordinary self if we are going to have much to give in relationship. In this ordinary maturation, the growth of will is a pre-requisite (and is most often the developmental vehicle whereby we make money). Now pay attention: the promise of happiness from self-fulfillment is strong as we devote energy to self-development (and money) — even as this concentration myopically and mechanically binds us to short-termed, other-forgetting views. This developmental self-concentration and psychological Naricissism, combined with our natural protectiveness and organism survival instincts (or primal, habitual Narcissism) hides how we unconsciously withdraw. The inner-outer dilemma and mentality of developmental adolescence compel us unknowingly in self-concentration. Our unconscious disengagement creates the schism that, in turn, drives us to seek relief from our self-inflicted pain (dukka). Thus, we are tortured in a self-concerned prison of thinking, thinking, thinking.
Described exquisitely by Adi Da in The Knee of Listening, “When you see that you are always seeking, understanding is emerging. When you see the pattern of Narcissus as all your motives, all your acts, all your seeking, understanding is emerging. When you see you are always suffering, understanding is emerging. When you see that every moment is a process in dilemma, understanding is emerging. When you see that every moment is a process of identification, differentiation and desire, understanding is emerging. When you see that every moment, when you are at your best as well as when you are at your worst, you are only avoiding relationship, then you understand. When you see that which already is, apart from the avoidance of relationship, which already absorbs consciousness prior to the whole dilemma, motivation and activity of avoidance, then you have finally understood.”
Growing up, we are driven to rise to our greatest capacity, embedded in becoming, with being only visited in success, pleasures, and moments of grace. In adolescence, the focus-given satisfaction of results can grow large, in a swell of authentic personhood, yet focus-given satisfactions remain always temporary, and mentality's dilemma, doubt, and dissatisfaction plague us like furies.
As important as self-development, growing focus, and money are, our vision must be also liberated from confinement to self-oriented fulfillments. Then the pleasure from achievement is just an ordinary reward in the process of ordinary human maturation, not a final goal.
From my master, I saw and learned that beyond the growing achievements of sustained clear focus is yielding to the Bright, which is not achievable. Orpheus taught how these un-do-able “secret women's mysteries” transform the proficient into a muse, the adolescent into the adult, and pleasure into ecstasy. (See the critical role these feminine mysteries have for Dionysus himself in “The Ecstatic Dance of Apollo and Dionysus” in The View from Delphi.)
Let the secrets be heard. The goddess mysteries are to letting go and surrender what growing focus and great achievement are to holding on. It is not by fierce intent that we become mature and integrated — except for moments of grace, like temporarily being in the madness of creativity or 'the zone' of integration. Only by letting go does the knot of self yield to the whole; every athlete, dancer, and artist can tell you something of this. Like growing focus, we slowly learn to let go, let the whole, adapt to gratitudes, trust more and more, feel more and more, receive love more and more, and gratefully return the same in every kind of intercourse and elegance.
Like perfections of attention, utter surrender is a natural possibility, even if stability in love is most difficult. The secret goddess mysteries yield beyond the developing self as the freeing of feeling gives mystic vision, self-evidently.
The goddess mysteries conduct great energy through the body and the kosmos. This bodily energy of yielding develops and courses throughout and up the nervous system, and is archetypically represented in the reptilian snake. Passionately, we learn to give ourselves up entirely, like the Pythia / Sybil performing the Oracle of Delphi.
Thus, the Minoans, whose most elegant culture empowered women to radical equalities, knew the role the goddess held in the mysteries of the snake. This surrendered feeling or spiritual force resonates throughout and up the nervous system in baptisms of free feeling. The goddess holds the snake energies as surrender raptures. With clear focus, we give ourselves up to raving submission and bow to supreme being — shown and given by the Awake Ones.
My Beloved Adi Da transmits to us how the yielding powers (of gratitude, letting-go-trust, and love's reception) completely descend with fullest breath of heart-yielding to the bodily base in perfect peace; as the last knot of feeling is un-tied, holy spirit falls upon us, and we are naturally awash in immortal beauty. We intercourse and breathe the Presence of Beloved in unfettered beholding. What is Prior to all conditions is Given and Shines with all-consuming Presence. The Condition of all conditions is heart-rich, now and forever. Fortunately, humankind is resplendent with sacred demonstrations of love and brilliance. Radiant Master, I surrender.
We must remember that going beyond self-orientation in happy giving and yielding is not a lesson to be learned in adulthood or perhaps as a saintly rarity, but at every stage of self-development, naturally. At every stage of childhood development beyond rapprochement (~18 months), it is appropriate to also artfully demand relationship in addition to giving and inviting it. (See “Ten Spiritual Principles of Discipline” following.) Too much self is unreal, only partially happy; being with others is more real, with more happiness.
It could be said that the foundation of morality itself is found in this distinction in the 'two' kinds of happiness. Growing in this simple understanding, we easily confess that no thing makes you happy. We grow in the happiness that is the substance of participating in relationship. Inviting love is invocative indeed: the etymology of “God” reveals “calling, invoking”.
Understanding the kinds of happiness that can be acquired, achieved, or bought for the self and the happiness that is naturally invoked, simply enjoyed, yielded to, and shared in relationship strives to show 'true' happiness, deep happiness. Deep happiness is simple, beyond changes, prior to form while naturally identical to all. How thoroughly a glass of water satisfies a thirst. How great family and friends can be. What sweet peace is given in love's demonstrations. What beauty surrounds us!
By cleaving to the 'true' happiness of relationship and present communion, we grow to cut away money, fame, and “our calendars of want”. We confess our attachments to short-term consolations and gain insight into our self-created delays to feel naturally happy. Our decision to discern true happiness makes a precise incision into what obstructs the present flow of happiness, and yields to the disciplined excision of all clinging. This cutting sword of discrimination allows us to let go of not only things, but ultimately any relation that is mortal, as in the lesson of strong-hearted Orpheus and his beloved Eurydice. Clinging to reasons to be happy is at last radically understood and primal joy is always here, as native happiness is restored to prominence and we are free to behold divinity, the immortal heart of reality. This is fully revealed by the awake ones and appreciated by grateful devotees.
“Beholding” is the heart's knees in divinity. In the enlightening words of Sage Adi Da, “There is only the one process, the one form, the one experience. It is beholding, enjoyment, unqualified present bliss. It has no special origination in time or form. Therefore, cessation or change has nothing to do with it. These things do not qualify it. They are only the conditions of the same primary enjoyment, as forms churning in the light, cycling about the sun, resolving and dissolving in an endless pattern of enjoyment, as the loved-one turns herself before her lover.”
Thus it has been trumpeted throughout time and across the globe: True happiness is not caused. The naive voice retorts, “But ice cream makes me happy!” Can you be happy without it? Et cetera. True happiness is un-reasonable, you can be happy with nothing.
As Adi Da laughed, “There are only reasons to be unhappy!” The enquiry now becomes: how deeply and thoroughly can I rest in trust, in inherent happiness, native joy, intelligent disciplines, and clear simplicity?
Following the discernment of true happiness, bolstered by harmonic living, we grow to rest in our core, lighter than a feather, even as we carry the world. Here, happiness is not acquired, not caused, but “inherent, native, acausal,” Adi Da emphasizes. Nothing causes happiness. Happiness is the feeling of Reality itself.
I learned and saw and felt from the Free Standing Man how the ground of being or core or heart is always here. The only question is will we feel to here or not? If not, let us find out why and what is the obstruction or responsibility to be learned.
Here, I find Sage Adi Da's discernment most useful:
“What is it that you mean, that you are signifying and pointing to, when you say or feel you are suffering, unhappy, not at ease? You are pointing to your own action and finding it as the experience of separation, contraction, pain. But it is the compulsive and presently not-conscious avoidance of relationship, relative to the Divine Presence, and relative to all arising conditions. When this action becomes your responsibility, then these experiences and concerns will become obsolete by degrees in the action of God Communion, and then in the intuition of your true Condition.”
Adi Da showing the closing/withdrawing fist of self-contraction
— in contrast with the open face of simple relationship —
as the sign of understanding and radical responsibility.
I am utterly served by Adi Da's gift of discrimination: Ego-I is not an entity, but an activity, the unconscious activity of contracting in feeling, avoiding relationship with every person and event, in every direction, altogether, and with Presence Itself. Indeed, the words “anxious/anxiety” are rooted in the Latin anguere, meaning to “choke, squeeze” (also root of “anger” and “angst”). As I withdraw in the field of relations and squeeze the flow of feeling in anxiety, I make the choking fist of me; I unconsciously create my own anxious version of Narcissus in a kaleidoscope of reflections, all of which implies the angry ghost of me upon the targeted center. I heedlessly project my unseen anxiety and dilemma into the field of compromised relations. Upon this soiled seat of the differentiated soul, identity-I and fisted-desire are born and endlessly repeated. In this angst, I am always seeking the Presence, unwittingly abandoning the Fullness Here.
Avatar Adi Da instructed, “Try it: make a fist; there seems to be a center. Opening your hand reveals the center to be an illusion created by the squeezing.”
Listening to this wisdom, we grow in sensitivity to our own action as well as the naturalness we disturb. Hearing this, we nakedly feel the pain and dilemma we are adding now to present happiness. In the face of the free Avatar, we understand our active withdrawal and choking anxiety, and, turning naturally to Love's Gifts, we open our habitually-closing fist of self. Beyond ourselves and every limitation, we see His Freedom and Heart, and so naturally receive and breathe His Liberating Gift of Transcendental Presence and Love-Bliss-Fullness. Desire transfigures into adoration and even the soul is forgotten in This Joy. Jaya Guru Adi Da!
