I’m fairly confirmed in my having “truly heard” Bhagavan Adi Da Samaraj. True Hearing in Adidam refers to a degree of self-understand in which the self-contraction is most fundamentally understood and the ability to become responsible for it has significantly grown. By the time I wrote the post, Conscious Energy & the Echo, “I Am”, I had begun to tacitly understand how the conscious witness position is never truly relinquished even as attention attaches to the objects of the self-contracted, body-mind. Even as I identify with the world according to Cage by habit and pattern, the feeling sense that my actual conscious location is prior to that world is accompanied by a current of love-bliss that undermines the solid presumption of myself and that world. This ecstatic dreamer begins to toss and turn.
I can see how a year ago, while the current of love-bliss and ecstasy began to overwhelm and fascinate me, my insights at that point were definitely preliminary to true hearing. In October 2020, in a moment’s exquisite self-understanding, I noticed that all possible experiences I’d had or could ever possibly have were all “objects” to where I actually stood in the place of the simple awareness of those experiences. And I wondered, how could I be any of the things I normally thought of as myself, my hands, my body, my feelings, my mind if I could clearly notice those and therefore must occupy a position prior to them as subject to object?
From that moment a year ago, Bhagavan’s Grace began to wash away the Cageness of me by liberating my attention and energy from patterns of mind, emotion and body while the conducted current of His Samadhi began to leave me more and more often ecstatic and still.
I’ve seen how self-understanding has grown and understand more clearly many things, such as His use of the word “tacit“. A year ago, the Five Reality Teachings, which I’d considered countless times without insight, spontaneously, by the Guru’s Grace, penetrated with enough force to begin the process which I’m currently immersed in and has led to true hearing. The witness position was somehow noticed that day, but the clarity of that noticing was at best murky. A year later, I am more and more tacitly able to understand and locate The Beloved by feeling as my very own consciousness.
The reason the word, tacit, is so appropriate (oh how I love His use of words!) is because this understanding is becoming so direct that it no longer even needs “restating” to myself as thought. It’s becoming obvious. Everything I see and experience as Cage is a modification of the conscious energy of whatever and all that is actually arising. And I notice this as though I’m the experiencer, but even this noticing is registering only where consciousness is, in the Witness Position, where The Beloved Heart Master Is, Radiant, calling me to awaken.
But the truth is that I’ve come to see tacitly that true self-understanding is not a possibility for the ego. In fact, this kind of understanding of the self, understanding that is counter-egoic, or to the root as Adi Da says, is The Beloved Being revealing Itself in and as my Conscious Case.
There is only the Divine. Easy to say, hard to trust or know. Easy to “believe” in the way we believe in a lot of things such as our “selves”, and yet this Truth starts to become visible through moments of insight that don’t originate with Cage, because every possible Cage event is objective, or secondary. The mere fact of my noticing anything at all is a demonstration of it’s being an object and while I’ve always presumed my experiences were “me”, the certainty of that has been shaken to the root.
As a result of this understanding, over the past many months, my need to be a someone has started to collapse. Am I a businessman? Am I a hunter? Am I a husband? Am I a devotee? Are the words passing through this mind mine? When I interact with “others” while feeling this current of love-bliss, the noticing of myself and others becomes fluid. The conductivity of this current, this fluid feeling of ecstasy, intensifies even as my objective reality seems washed away in moments of mere feeling, regardless of what objectively seems to be happening.
So reflecting back to a year ago, I can see that Cage had little to do with why the insight while hunting started the process I’m now deeply immersed in. This sadhana is not an ego’s process. Which Cage pattern would be useful to achieve results in this domain? Cage the businessman? Cage the hunter? Cage the husband? All of these persona are becoming directly known as mere strategies or patterns of thought and behaviour adapted to produce effects in the world of conditions. Which strategy is suitable to surrender the strategist?
Perhaps, Cage the devotee? How many devotees of the world’s awakened beings have died short of realization? How many of Beloved Adi Da’s? A year ago, I was a fool in a field with a gun, rarely thinking of Adi Da, never mind living a life of devotion to Him. And yet, here I now float in a field of ecstasy, documenting my case blissfully without a clear goal or purpose. Am I a writer?
As my sense of myself as any specific “thing” is broken up by the process of this sadhana, my ability to respond to conditions and others in my world becomes more fluid. When “problems” arise related to my business activities I can feel the tug of my Cage the businessman pattern which has its own way of solving problems. But often, instead, I feel The Beloved AS the entire array of conditions giving rise to the current moment and feel myself and the others and the “problem” awash in bliss and then I take some action or say some words, or suggest some prescription. And I’m becoming indifferent to the outcomes even as the actions take form.
When bliss is the case now, what is the purpose of any action? The only actions that make any difference are those that diminish the free flow of this love-blissful feeling of being. So if I actually believe the words I’m saying matter or feel the actions I take will make a difference, or become Cage the Businessman, “just for a minute to solve this one issue then I’ll get back to my sadhana”, then I become more solid in those instances and the conductivity is diminished.
I was watching a video of Adi Da talking with a devotee who was recounting an intense experience from a few years earlier, wondering if his experience was of “The Midnight Sun“. At one point, I had the thought that Adi Da was speaking very compassionately to this person who I felt seemed very fragile. I had the sense that in the past I would have lost patience with this person’s way of communicating.
Then it occurred to me that Adi Da is not being “compassionate” as I was thinking in that moment. The Avatar of The Bright is Free! Compassionate is certainly a way of describing the activities and actions that Adi Da may be performing at any given moment. His way of speaking to the devotee could be described as compassionate, but noticing it as though there is a separate someone with a quality like “compassion” is generated from my separate self-sense and point of view. It’s Narcissus staring into the pond. If Adi Da had been hollering, would I have thought He was being unkind?
In that moment, instead of thinking of Adi Da as a someone, I saw that The Great One, The Very Divine Person who is appearing as Adi Da Samraj, is not-different or separate from all the people in that room where the conversation was taking place, of the technology this conversation was communicated through or my very own conscious awareness of this happening. I then imagined that Adi Da and His entire activity, words, existence at all levels through all space and time seem to function like how water fills in and takes the shape of the container into which it is poured. As metaphors go, it’s a good one and Adi Da has talked about water often.
The Divine imagined as water in this way connects the parts together while also being the substance of all parts. A movement in one part reverberates in all parts. Would it make sense to think of water as intentionally acting with compassion?
Adi Da’s principal communication is that there is only the Divine. There are no separate others right now. To think of Adi Da as a compassionate person is to anthropomorphize the Divine, which is the same act we’re doing when thinking of ourselves as separate human persons. This of course seems absurd. Obviously, there are people, human beings, billions of them. And yet I’ve begun to feel deeper than the appearances and understand that all the experiences, thoughts, feelings, actions of those billions exist as mere noticings, consciously registering where the One Divine Conscious Being Is mere Witness.
In the way of Adidam, true hearing is followed by true seeing which I anticipate will be demonstrated when looking into this world of others and seeing only the Divine. I feel that this “stage” will arrive both subtly and all at once, like how one wakes up in the morning, with a sense of the morning being there just before you open your eyes, unsurprised by the light filling the room.
I’m beginning to understand that these stages of development are not like clearly defined bullet points in terms of the way they manifest for devotees. True hearing is not an achievement that must be demonstrated before going onto the next stage. It’s simply that in this Way of Understanding, progressive levels of self-understanding seem to unlock or enable further degrees of self-understanding.
The noticing of my actual conscious location as prior to all possible experiences, even those presumptively associated with “me” like my sensations, thoughts and feelings, seems to have unlocked the capacity to feel the self-contraction and release it. Later, that understanding along with the conductivity of this spiritual current has allowed me to intuit that the actual location where all experience registers or is witnessed, is never relinquished, even when self-referential thoughts arise such as, “I am the one who is experiencing love-bliss”.
Now, often, all through the day when being Cage and functioning in the world, seemingly as I have always done, the notion that whatever and all that arises as experience and objects of attention while recognizable as the world and things with which I am interacting, are identical and ultimately undifferentiated in Truth. Experiences only seem different as a consequence of self-contraction, but in Truth, all experience is just the noticed modification in consciousness of what is. Hungry is identical to music is identical to skiing is identical to bliss.
The body-mind that is Cage feels hungry, or listens to music or skis or feels blissful. These are all mere happenings registering where I actually am as mere witness, and even the meanings or reactions to these experiences are merely witnessed.
Imagine the countless ripples and waves on the ocean in any instance. Would being aware of those ripples and waves as different from one another make them any less than the ocean?
Thus, In every moment of the Apparent arising of attention and “things”, “Locate” Self-Evident Happiness Itself, By Means Of Whole bodily Immersion In My Avatarically Self-Transmitted Spirit-Current Of Self-Evidently Divine Love-Bliss. Sutra 56, The Dawn Horse Testament Of The Ruchira Avatar.
One thing that becomes obvious, this Way is about Immersion in the Spirit-Current. This past year, bathed in Grace, has begun to wash away my qualities, exposing the feeling Heart to God.
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