Adi Da Samraj Instructs his devotees to “be love,” an admonition probably made, in one way or another, by virtually all Spiritual Masters, Gurus, Sages, and Saints. Here, now, a brief sampling of my failures to be love in a typical day. 

I’m in the produce section at the co-op. I want to grab some celery. I cannot, however, grab some celery, because a woman has installed herself directly in front of it for a leisurely conversation on her phone. She appears to live there, now, she and her phone, in front of the celery. I roll my eyes with infinite, exasperation. 

In truth, I guess it’s not really a “leisurely” conversation, so much as it is just a conversation. A regular old one. And actually, she doesn’t stand there very long at all. But can’t she see that I’m in a hurry? And that me-in-a-hurry is vitally important, certainly way more important than whatever inane nonsense is going on in her trifling existence, and hence, all lower-order life forms, vis a vis herself, should scatter out of my way like bowling pins? How is this not obvious? What part of “I am Sam Guthrie” does she not grasp? 

Moments later, as I tromp through the aisles, everyones’ covid-related behavior makes me angry and judgmental. The ostentatious double-masker parading through the frozen section. Despite a complete lack of evidence, I feel certain that he radiates a smug self-righteousness. I find it all but impossible not to see the 8,000 selfies he’s taken of himself in his hyper-compliant, virtue-signaling-gone-wild double mask, selfies no doubt slapped up on Instagram – and always with captions explaining how he does it all out of concern for others…the elderly, the vulnerable, the puppies. Ugh, I think. Shoot me now. 

Next, I’m kneeling down in the bulk section, scooping walnuts into a bag, when some dude, ignoring even the tiniest gesture toward social distancing, starts bumbling around in a bin directly above me. His skeevy, covid-panting face is about 2 feet away, as he shovels, into a bag, whatever idiotic food a cretin like this eats. Some kind of Stupidity Noodles. Privileged white male freak, I mutter to myself (without even the remotest sense of irony).

When I get home, arms full of groceries, the millennials who live right below us are cranking hideous corporate pop music. Mmthump, mmthump, mmthump. Compressed, auto-tuned, technified, adolescent vocals croon through a thousand computer filters and studio effects. It sounds like teenage robots faking orgasms. A wave of revulsion passes through me. I snarl to myself something about how anyone who could listen to this inhuman computerized dreck – made by ghastly algorithms and douchebag executives in business suits – is a soulless husk of a human being with a heart of plastic polymers made in Chinese sweat shops.

So, you get the idea. Not exactly hitting it out of the park when it comes to the whole “being love” thing. The real problem, though, is not simply that I fail to be love; it’s that I keep going about the whole be love project all wrong. That is, I try to be love. I try to be or feel loving, towards others. Usually because I’m trying to live up to an ideal of a good, evolved, spiritual person. Some days I’m more successful than others, but, in any case, the whole endeavor to be loving in order to fulfill some virtuous image is, on the best of days, absurd.

Once in a while, though, this Other Thing happens. I’ll be at the coffee shop or walking down the sidewalk or waiting to get to the celery. And, somehow, I’ll remember the feeling of my Guru. Lately, the feeling of my Guru has been a feeling of a wide, open spaciousness that’s as vast and silent as the sky. But it’s like a nectarous honey-ish silence. Or like the air is suffused with a rich, soothing, earthy incense – except it’s emotional rather than olfactory. So a nectarous silent emotional incense. You totally get it.

Anyhoo, when this happens, who knows how I behave? It’s always spontaneous and never pre-known. It conforms to no ideal or image. But I’m pretty sure it’s a lot closer to “being love” than anything else I do. 

Adi Da occasionally referred to the quote from the Bible, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself.” Adi Da said that the order of these two injunctions is the key. The calling to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, comes first for a reason. It’s because that’s how the transformation of the living being happens. And if you truly do that – love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind – then the second injunction happens spontaneously. Thy can’t help it. 

But, according to Adi Da, we in the West typically reverse the order of these two callings. We do this because culturally, the West has a tendency to reduce religion to mere positive social behaviors (and, of course, the opium of consoling beliefs). A system to keep social order, as Marx and armies of bookish atheists have pointed out. 

In the West, we often give lip service to the first injunction without ever really facing what it could possibly mean…the ruinous ramifications of actually loving the Divine with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind. The Divine Chaos that would actually create. Then we run around just trying insipidly to be “really nice.” Or, as in my case, trying to “be love.” And failing abysmally. 

Here are three relevant Quotes from my Guru, Adi Da Samraj:

“Love is Unqualified Divine Self-Radiance, without center or bounds. Since it is without center (ego-self) or bounds (body, thought-conception, perception, world), Love may not be willfully presumed or generated. It is a Process Realized by Grace, progressively, until it is altogether True.”

“…you cannot idealize the great love-feeling you discover in My Company and say that from now on that is how you are going to live. You will discover, as you may have discovered on countless occasions previously, that you do not do that. The heart is bound until energy and attention are free from the motive of the egoic self-knot, and that motive is essentially a contraction at the heart, or in the feeling-dimension of the body-mind.”

This last one I transcribed from a video, so all punctuation weirdness is mine:

“There’s no magnification of the capacity for love without self-transcendence, without self-understanding, therefore. So it’s not just a matter of ‘wanting it to happen’ and [Adi Da makes a face of effort, scrunching His shoulders up toward His ears] ‘trying to love.’ That’s a rather silly business anyway, because if you could do that, you would do it immediately. And you notice that you don’t do it immediately. And what does that mean? You don’t want to do it, that’s what it means. 

“It’s your own limitation, in other words. You want to do it and immediately notice you can’t. What does that mean? That there’s some uninspected part of you – apart from this idealistic motive – there’s another part of you, more or less uninspected, that doesn’t want to do anything of the kind. So that’s why idealism is not enough. Belief is not enough, and so forth. You must observe and understand yourself, and be willing to make self-understanding into a tool, for growth. Well, that means a real process, in the midst of real life, day by day, moment by moment.” 

[That process, for those of you who are unfamiliar with Adi Da’s Teaching, is basically to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind – which devotees access in, as and through our Guru, just as Jesus’ devotees accessed It through Him – and to also make great use of the self-understanding that then comes about, spontaneously.]

If you scour the lost Essene Gnostic Dead Sea Scrolls of Nag Hamadi, you find there was actually a THIRD injunction in that iconic Biblical quotation. The full version, hidden until now, goes: “Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and they neighbor as thyself, and also make sure and subscribe to this blog.” It will be in Umberto Eco’s next novel.