Bhagavan Adi Da Samraj has, since the beginning of his teaching work, used the myth of Narcissus to communicate to beings what we are constantly doing and how that is the root of our suffering. We look into the pond and see only ourselves. Or put another way, we look into the world and see our likeness, separate beings in a realm of others.
After meditation this morning while watching a video in bed with my beloved wife, Deborah Rose, drinking tea and tickling her back and arms, each of us enjoying our own flavour of bliss, insights into the metaphor of Narcissus and Adi Da’s admonition to “Turn to Me” rolled over me in waves.
Every thought, body sense, emotional feeling or awareness of any kind “registers” in my consciousness in a constant stream of energy like an endless current. For instance, visual input arrives at my eye after light reflects off an object and the remaining wavelength is channeled by my iris through the lens. I see a blue sky after my brain converts the image into electrochemistry and then that in some way registers energetically in consciousness.
In this same way, sounds, thoughts, tastes, and emotions are energetic phenomenon that through some mechanism ultimately present to consciousness their unique energetic signature and, if I “know” what that signature is, I recognize it. For instance, I recognize the dark green of a fir tree offset against the blue sky on the edge of a my local mountain.
All experience that registers has it’s unique energetic signature or pattern otherwise we wouldn’t be able to tell one “thing” apart from another. Our minds can be tricked for sure by colour and light which creates illusions but generally, at every single moment of our existence, we’re filtering the present moment’s energetic input based on memories of similar patterns in order to make sense of the total range of experience we are having.
In short, our entire universe of experience is energy presented to our body-minds that is then recognized, named and categorized by it’s unique signature or pattern.
However, our body-minds themselves are energetic. What I call my right hand has enough mass in it, that using Einstein’s, E = mc2, if all atoms in my hand could be split to release their energy, I suspect my right hand alone could blow up the western coast of North America. We typically forget this energetic fact in our normal solid day.
So we are energy, and at every moment of our awareness, we’re “experiencing” a phenomenological world that is itself energy in a constant flow of change that we then compose into a sensible understanding of ourselves and the world. So energy is passing through consciousness as energy and somehow I have an experience of myself lying in bed with my lover, drinking tea and watching a video related to Adi Da Samraj.
My daughter recently had her first child, my beautiful grandson, Deklyn! While observing him in his first four months, it has occurred to me that while he’s looking into what I presume is the same world as I am, he’s not having the same experience by a long shot. First of all, I’m not sure he even knows he exists yet. Does he have self referential thoughts? The energy passing through his sense apparatus when looking into the living room is presumably similar in it’s signature or pattern to the room I’m looking into, but there’s no chance he sees the same room. He doesn’t recognize the pattern yet, and may not have a firm sense of himself as a subject.
I doubt he understands colour yet. Would he understand that the changing colour on a wall represents a picture mounted by his parents? Over time, he’ll be taught by us how to make sense of the energy input he’s “experiencing” and soon enough, we’ll teach him to use language in a way that will allow us to share ideas of the world.
The sentences we’ll speak to each other, based on the English language, will use the form of subject, verb and object, “Deklyn drinks milk“. Eventually, Deklyn will look into the world and see himself over and against a realm of objectified others and things. He’ll go on to enjoy life as a well loved, but separated and frightened ego, just like the rest of us.
However, in recently times, as the self-understanding of our real condition has begun to sprawl through my being, when I look into the world like Narcissus looking into the pond, I have begun to “see” and “feel” Adi Da Samraj instead. Metaphorically this is like looking into a pond with ripples on it so my own image and that of the world is broken up and felt as ecstasy and bliss instead.
Adi Da Samraj is not just a man in this world like we’re teaching Deklyn to assume when he looks out into a world of others. That is the mystery and the Heart of Adi Da’s communication. He is an Incarnation of the Divine Conscious Being Itself, communicating at all possible levels of consciousness that He is our own very Conscious State.
There is only God and no one is separated from this Truth no matter how they experience the world. But this is only True upon Realization, when the act of Narcissus, the action of self-contraction itself, which is directly responsible for us modifying the current of energy into ourselves and the world, ceases.
In my morning meditations, I’ve begun to feel closer to the edge of the self-contraction. There are times when all body awareness, thoughts and feelings fade into a blissful current of felt energy, and I can almost sense how it’s not inherent in the energy itself that it be experienced as “things”. That somehow, there is just energy and “I” am spontaneously generating the dichotomy of subject and object as my attention “notices” what appear to be patterns.
And so, I think that is part of why Adi Da communicates that the Way to Realize the Truth of our existence is to turn all the faculties of body, mind, emotion and breath to Him. In all our universe of experience, there is only one Being who’s signature doesn’t reflect back our sense of separation, and that is the Divine Being Itself, Appearing uniquely as Avatar Adi Da Samraj.
It’s a remarkable Grace to “recognize” Adi Da. That’s how devotion to Him begins. When through some remarkable confluence of factors, an apparently separated person, let’s call him Cage, sees someone he used to think of as a very groovy and wise spiritual teacher named, Bubba Free John, but suddenly when looking at Him, Cage sees only Light and feels only Bliss.
And from that moment on, the surface of the pond is disturbed. The concrete world of energy is broken up, moment by moment, and I see less of myself reflected when looking at Deklyn and more of the Person of God.
