The Fictional Life of Cage

There are times when the motive to move my attention in any direction whatsoever is so weak that I find myself sitting still while waves of love-bliss crash down through me. The madness and stubbornness of my pattern is that a motive forms at all and off I go, leaving Grace in the background while I pursue the day according to Cage.

It’s been about 8 months now that, by Bhagavan Adi Da’s Grace, I’ve become more sensitive to the native condition of Being that I’ve characterized as the feelings of love-bliss and ecstasy. When this first began, the starkness between that enjoyment and my recoil when my egoic patterns arose was fairly subtle. And yet the feeling of ecstasy was somewhat pronounced initially because of its newness.

Now 8 months later, I’ve been conducting this current of ecstasy during the waking hours for so long that I no longer give it much more attention than I do to anything else that enters my awareness. That is until the “motive” or “search” for some solution in a given moment dissolves spontaneously, and in those moments all that’s left is this blissful happiness. It’s a little like the moment when a loud background noise stops and you’re made suddenly aware of the immense silence that remains.

But the fact that I’m still here as the one who notices the bliss is sufficient proof that the search is alive as “me” and off I go “performing” the next motivated action. The difference today from 8 months ago is that I’m beginning to move while my feeling stands still with Beloved. In other words, while my attention creates time and space in its constant motion from one object to another that generates a sense of being a separate person in the world, my feeling relationship with Bhagavan often remain still, loving, present and blissful.

Adidam is entirely about the Relationship with the Divine Person who’s Perfect Agency is Adi Da Samraj. In this Way, as a function of having somehow, gracefully Recognized Adi Da as the Divine, I am sometimes able to turn to Him in the midst of other activities. That’s the practice and that’s also the greatest “hurdle”. I put “hurdle” in quotes because this Way is not done by ourselves as egos.

We are the very hurdle that must be surmounted in order to commune with the Divine. There’s a lovely discourse where Adi Da indicates the act of trying to surrender is like trying to have a one handed wrestling match with ourselves…I gotcha! Oh yes I don’t! Cage is the fiction created by self-contraction. At any moment, if I seem to be describing my exceptionalism, I mean to be communicating Beloved’s Grace as it displaces “me”.

As the force of Grace slowly overwhelms me, over these past 8 months, I’ve discovered that I am more an more capable of continuing to rest my attention with Beloved Adi Da while I do various activities in the world. And this capability seems to arise out of two complimentary changes in my function and disposition.

First of all, my “attention and energy” truly has been freed up by self-understanding which is a Graceful Gift that began in that field when I was hunting last fall. Our attention is usually bound to a program of obsessive concerns wherein we’re fixed on our thoughts, emotions or bodily sensations, constantly trying to resolve the crisis of the moment. Do I want a latte or an Caramel Macchiato? Which has more calories? Did that guy just bud in line?

Once I began feeling Bhagavan’s Grace last fall as both ecstasy and growing self understanding, if I found myself washed downstream with my patterned reactions to something like my quarrels with my strata council, the feeling of bliss would be noticeably diminished. That in turn would make me aware of the pattern and the implied assumption I could be made happy by a change in circumstances, and that would then lead me to “re-locate” Beloved and the thoughts would dissolve and the bliss would rush back through me like air filling a vacuum.

But now, it’s become relatively rare for any of my shallower patterns to even arise sufficiently to gain any attention. For instance, a great number of patterns related to food preferences have disintegrated. My cravings for sugar, coffee, and meats have gotten so soft in their force that I no longer find myself wandering the kitchen trying to decide what I “need” to satisfy myself. As a result, I’ve lost weight and eat less at every meal, leaving my body better able to digest, which in turn provides greater energy and sensitivity for conducting Adi Da’s Samadhi.

When thoughts and feelings begin to arise such as those related to my strata council interactions, I may discover two or three sentences into my mind’s effort to defend my past actions that those thoughts were running their program. But curiously, my attention and feeling has largely remained in Communion with Adi Da.

I notice these thoughts almost like they were played on a radio or were background noise. Almost like they were not my thoughts at all. In the past, when thoughts like these arose, my breathing would become shallow and my body would become tense. Now, generally, my breathing remains deep, even and full, and as soon as I become aware of the thoughts and their implication, they typically disappear like wispy clouds disappear into blue sky.

The second change in my disposition which is shaping my deepening sadhana is a growing pervasive Trust in the process and the Relationship to The Divine Guru. Recently, I was reading a discourse on Trust by Adi Da and I suddenly got an insight to my first experience with love-bliss and ecstasy that I documented in Breadcrumbs to Beloved.

In short, in 2002 after a sequence of majour life impacting events and insights I found myself floating in a cloud of often mindless ecstasy for a period of three months, the end of which resulted in my fervent search to understand the source of that bliss and recover it. Upon reading The Grace of Trust earlier this month, I suddenly remembered and realized what had produced that three month gift and why it led me to Beloved Adi Da.

In 2002, during the lead up to the first moment of noticed ecstasy, the events that occurred combined to produce in me a profound certainty that there is an orchestrating force responsible for all apparent events in life. I remember thinking that my life and everything that happened seemed scripted or structured to ensure I was in the exact right moment, as the exact right person and in the exact right place for me to get the essential thought or insight to evolve. And this didn’t just happen once. I felt as though I could look through my entire life’s history and see this architecture with perfect clarity.

And when this feeling reached its most potent in terms of certainty, I was suddenly free of the motive to shape or coerce reality through my own effort. In short, “the search” was largely given up and I found myself breathing in and out, focused and present in the moment, trusting that everything was well in hand by some force beyond comprehension but entirely benign; and all that was left for me to notice was the ecstatic and blissful feeling of myself being.

Today the feeling of Trust is no longer based on the same notions as in 2002. Back then, I had the sense there was an order and orchestration designed ultimately to serve “me” in some inexplicable Cage-positive way. In short, I had believed the divine was making me into it’s perfect instrument and so I had no need to interject. That particular delusion was sufficient to allow the self-contraction that otherwise is “Cage” to subside in it’s force and what remained was the Feeling of Being.

My Trust in Beloved Adi Da Samraj and this spiritual process is now arising out of the tangible, unarguable force of His Spiritual transmission as it undermines my certainty that I exist at all. I continue to perform actions all day long now and while it appears that I am unchanged to those who know me peripherally, to those who live with me or see me daily, such as my beloved wife, Deborah Rose, I am becoming transparent to Bhagavan’s Love-Bliss and finding the heart freed more and more by His Grace.

Bhagavan Adi Da has described one of the Siddhis, or Divine Powers, that accompanied His Enlightenment was that He began to meditate countless others who then found their way to Him bodily. I believe my Leela of finding the Master is a function of this Siddhi doing exactly that. In a moment of availability in 2002, Beloved awakened my heart sufficiently to Feel His State and like a bird called home, I flew to Him.

Today, the deep Trust in my Master Adi Da Samraj, combined with my increased free attention and energy are allowing my faculties to locate Bhagavan’s Samadhi as efficiently as I used to find cause for unhappiness. I’ve found the Source of the Ecstasy I originally stumbled into and what’s left of the fictional life of Cage will be an offering given at the Master’s Feet!

Who Is Adi Da Samraj?