Most of us don’t know how identified we are with our minds. Or, to use a phrase Adi Da once used, how identified we are with “the chaos of mind.” In this sense, we are like the proverbial fish who doesn’t know he lives in water. Adi Da said that if we could somehow step back and really, nakedly see our situation – of identification with the chaos of mind – we would be terrified. 

Conversely, when our feeling-attention is constantly rested in the Divine, “the mind is quieted. It becomes, to the degree it has to be used, just useful – not endless blah blah like a constant reverie or dream that you can’t do anything about…” 

According to Adi Da (and pretty much every other Enlightened Being in the history of ever) our True Identity is the Boundless Radiance of Divine Being, the Infinity of Living Light. But we’ve forgotten that. On an epic scale. 

Consequently, we find ourselves in a dream that we are a tiny “capsule of self,” a body-mind, blinking out at the universe, strapped to a tiny computer-like brain – a computer-brain whose “operating system” might as well have been created by a band of drunken Visigoths wearing mittens. These brain-minds of ours have been randomly patterned by quadrillions of arbitrary causes, stretching back through epochs of time. And what do we call this rollicking kaleidoscope of fragments? What do we call this ball of karmic shrapnel? We call it “I!” 

Adi Da says that the verbal discursive mind should be a specialized tool that we use for specific operations, like something James Bond might whip out of his suitcoat pocket in a pinch. It should not be a virtual-reality spacesuit we live in, ‘round the clock, night and day. It should not be a non-stop acid trip that we think we are. 

In the same discourse I quoted from earlier, Adi Da says, “You think all the time, don’t you? [You’re] thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. It’s not that thinking has no function, in your moments of daily obligation. Thinking does have a function, but you all don’t do very much of that. You don’t do very much usefulthinking, that really has a function. You do ‘wandering-of-attention.’ And so the mind just sort of pours out its contents, based on conditioning. It’s just a bizarre display, that makes you even more stressful and confused. If you have a purpose in thinking, some obligation required of you, well do so with clarity! With real intention, straightforward…”     

For me, Avatar Adi Da Samraj is exactly what all true Gurus have always been known to be: A transparent window to the Radiant Silence that Transcends mind (and everything else). And His Grace has given me very real tastes of that Radiant Silence on countless occasions. These “tastes” have given me an pretty compelling revelation of the madness of my usual, every day, “normal” mind-scape – its droning repetitiveness, its incessant fixations on “problems,” its protean moods and dilemmas, its clunky cliches, its mechanical reveries. 

This nascent-but-growing sense of the inchoate craziness of mind feels liberating. It makes me more and more available to the Spiritual Reality, the Field of Radiant Consciousness, in which these bodies and minds are apparently arising. 

Sam gets all advicey

1) Meditate. Mindfulness, mantra, watching your breath, envisioning fluffy rainbow unicorns from outer space – whatever you’re into. Any style of meditation can give us a sense that we aren’t our ordinary cacophony of thoughts. Because, y’know, there you are, ostensibly observing your dreary, screwball thoughts. Like leaves drifting past on a river. Clouds floating across the sky. All of that stuff. So yes, meditation practices can be heading in the right general direction. 

That said, I’m more interested in a deeper shift. And here I’m going to go ahead and break out the old-timey biblical term, repentance…And that brings us to number two.

2) Repentance of mind. Here I’m talking about an emotional realization, or at least a growing tacit intuition, that our conventional thinking minds are, yes, batshit-crazy…arbitrarily-patterned machines. 

Observing our thoughts, or any other strategic meditation practices, can help till the soil for this realization/intuition, so I’m all for them. But that’s all they can do. Because the magisterial “you” that’s observing your thoughts is, deep down, just another tiresome, randomly accumulated thought-creature. As Adi Da has pointed out, one’s “observer self,” still feels itself to be a separate locus of awareness. The observer is, in other words, a part of the same “chaos of mind.” It’s just a deeper dimension of mind, one that Hindu and yogic scriptures call Vijnanamaya Kosha, the sheath of discriminative intelligence. 

But once in a while, during meditation, that Thing happens. The Radiant Silence somehow breaks through and turns you into an impossible openness. Adi Da once wrote, “Touch my heart, and I will widen you to God knows where.” So it’s kind of like that.

Even if this happens only for a few moments, the contrast with your usual state, marooned in the plastic diorama of mind, can drastically recalibrate the ol’ compass. It’s a game changer. 

I’m not saying to “chase” or “seek” these shifts, these openings, these kensho-ish happenings. You can’t. Nor am I saying to cling to them and fetishize them when they happen. But I am saying to know they’re possible, to know that they are a thing, and to be willing for them to be. And when they do happen, notice how insane your normal thinking appears, by contrast. Notice it a lot.

3) Contemplate the first three steps of AA (modified). So it would be like: 1) Admitted we were powerless and that our lives had become unmanageable. 2) Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 3) Made a decision to turn our lives and our will over to the care of God as we understood God. 

Contemplate the hell out of these three luminous steps. If you’re not into “God/Higher Power” language, substitute the Radiance of Consciousness, the Force of Being, the Tao, the Heart, Buddhanature, Melvin – whatever you want. If you come to these three steps humbly, in a raw, needful way, they can be subversive indeed (to the ego-mind) IEDs (improvised explosive devices) of the psyche. 

4) Cultivate grave suspicion. Now and again, as you go through your day, stop and question the entire way you’re thinking about, relating to, framing, and orienting to everything. Your whole M.O. Your whole deal. Your whole trip. 

Take all of your mind’s zany madcap antics with mountainous grains of salt. Cultivate a hearty suspicion of the whole world of your thoughts. This suspicion won’t turn you into an amorphous, indecisive, influenceable blob of jelly. Rather it will increase your availability to a vast, free, mindless Intelligence and Power that – according to Adi Da and all the sages throughout time – is much better at living you than you are. 

END

What if the part of you that doesn’t want to subscribe to this blog is the lunatic conditioned mind, while the part of you that secretly longs to subscribe is the spontaneous motion of the Heart of Being? Think about it. And while you’re at it, for God’s sake, leave a comment! All the cool kids are doing it! And by “all the cool kids,” I mean, of course, absolutely nobody.