During His Teaching Years, Avatar
Adi Da undertook a vast, in-life “consideration” with
His devotees, covering everything related to Spiritual life—from
the most rudimentary matters to the most esoteric. One extremely
important area of “consideration” as how to rightly
relate to the most basic urges and activities of human life—what
Avatar Adi Da describes as the realm of “money, food, and
sex”. (By “money”, Avatar Adi Da means not only
the earning and use of money itself, but the exercising of life-energy
in general.)
In most religious traditions, an ascetical approach to these primal
urges is recommended—in other words, desires related to “money,
food, and sex” are to be minimized or denied. Avatar Adi Da
took a different approach. When they are rightly engaged, ordinary
human enjoyments are not a problem, not “sinful” or
“anti-spiritual” in and of themselves. Indeed, the ascetical
effort to “cut out” or (“cut down on”) such
enjoyments is itself simply one of the possible variations on the
ego’s impulse to manipulate the conditions of existence to
its own benefit. Thus, the root-problem of human beings is not any
particular activity or desire of the body-mind, but the ego itself—the
governing presumption that one is a separate and independent entity
attempting to counteract the inevitable suffering of embodied existence.
Therefore, in living dialogue and experimentation with His devotees,
Avatar Adi Da brought to light, in detail, exactly how the human
functions of money (or life-energy), food, and sex can be rightly
engaged, in a truly ego-transcending manner—an entirely life-positive
and non-suppressive manner that is both pleasurable and supportive
of the Spiritual process in His Company.
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mankind is, by reactive tendency, patterned
ego-centrically. Therefore, even when people become involved in
religious or Spiritual activity, there are certain uninspected notions
that automatically tend to be brought into play. One of the principal
such notions is that Spiritual life requires separation from vital
and physical life. Indeed, in many religious and Spiritual traditions,
that is exactly what Spiritual life is regarded as being—a
strategically exclusive effort, an "inward"-turning search,
getting away from all of life (away from the life-force, the life-form,
the life-mind, the life-appearance, the life-sensation), and (by
means of that strategic inversion) getting into some "inward",
subtle, non-life perception, or vision, or heaven, or whatever.
Because this traditional association of ideas tends to be blanketed
over everything that has to do with religion, Spirituality, Yoga,
and the like—every demand, every quality suggested within
religious and Spiritual life that involves the physical and vital
being, tends to meet immediate resistance.
Money, food, and sex are the essential activities of life. Those
are the vital processes, the forms of vital appearance and function.
And money, food, and sex are the first things that people begin
to resist or manipulate when they become involved in anything that
even remotely resembles religion or Spirituality. So-called "religious"
people, for the most part, are extremely confused and guilty about
money, food, and sex. People involved in conventional Yoga and religion
are endlessly preoccupied in experimenting with money, food, and
sex. What are such people always doing? "Should I or shouldn't
I?" "What is the right diet?" "Fasting? Macrobiotics?
No food?" "Renunciation? Poverty?" They are on and
off food all the time, on and off sex. They may be celibate for
years in order to get "enlightened", but then, just as
dramatically, they are seeking the "tantric bliss" or
the restoration of "mental health" in a perpetual orgasmic
exercise. Then there are all of the other games of self-denial,
no work, no income. Such are the notions that tend to arise whenever
anything like religion or Spirituality comes into a person's life.
. . .
If you become My true devotee (egoless in Me), your one and whole
and entire body-mind (or total psycho-physical body) becomes (by
Means of My Avatarically Self-Transmitted Divine Spiritual Grace)
progressively Filled with My Divine Light, My "Bright"
Transmission of Divine Love-Bliss. Thus, as My true devotee, your
participation in money, food, and sex becomes (Really, and, at last,
Most Perfectly) En-Light-ened, along with all the rest of indivisible
you (non-separate in Me)!
The cosmic domain is entirely psycho-physical—not merely
(or exclusively) psychic (or interior, or egoically subjective),
and not merely (or exclusively) physical (or exterior, or apparently
objective). If you conform yourself responsively to Me, I "Brighten"
all of that.
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