A Discourse by Avatar Adi Da Samraj

The reality of the world as humankind inhabits it is mummery, is a deluded enterprise based on the fundamental and unanimous or universal denial of the nature of nature, but everyone is making much of something else that makes it sound like it's better than that or more than that. The illusions generated by desire and seeking give a different temporary feeling about the world, that it's somehow going toward utopia, or it's not about death and so on. The hormones and the tricks of mind have people acting—mumming—as if the world is something different than their actual experience makes it clear to be, makes it clear that it's completely otherwise than the mummery of life that people enact. And egoity is its cause, identification with the body-mind, all the opposites, the yes and no, the desiring and seeking that script the life, all of this.

Egoity is madness. It can seem to be rational. It can speak rationally, perhaps, sometimes. But that does not make it sane in the sense of perfect coincidence with Reality, with Truth. Coincidence with desiring and seeking, and all the yes and no of the categories of conditional existence is not sanity. That is mummery. The transcending of it in That Which Is The Case, in which all of these conditions and opposites and so forth are apparently arising, that Reality is Truth. It must be realized.

How is it to be realized? There is not merely a teaching given, there is a teacher given. The relationship to the realizer is the way, not merely thinking about or applying practical application, you see, of the science of Adidam, and so on. That’s not the way. That is a self-possessed mummer’s activity. Response beyond “self”-contraction is the way. Communion with the self-transmitting source that is the acausal Divine Truth—that’s the way. But it’s not merely the way as a statement, stated as such, that is not the way. The way is the actual living of that.

Mummers, egos do what is dark, every day all over the world, and people are pretending everywhere that they are some place other than where they really are, everyone imagining this is not a place of death. Oh yes, everyone dies, as if [matter of fact] “oh yes, everyone dies”. Right! Everyone dies. That's fundamental, you see, and vast thousands of human beings die every day. Tens or hundreds of thousands of human beings die every week.

The serious life knows what this place is about. If you can be made serious by a clear, direct, and unambiguous evaluation of the nature of the circumstance you are really in, that is what I call “positive disillusionment”. It is a fundamental basis for a serious life. The life of true devotion to me, the life of sadhana in this way is a serious life. And it's at its foundation there are many characteristics there, but clearly one of them is positive disillusionment, that understanding of the nature of life just as it is commonly, that relieves you of illusions of fulfillment in this world.

But just sitting here as you all are now, bodily alive, you are feeling a sense of tacit and irreducible identification with something that is vulnerable and dying, vulnerable to loss, separation, every kind of disease, disturbance, threat, unhappiness. And inevitably it is going to die, and everything and everyone with which it can become associated will be gone in that instant, if not long before. You are identifying with something that has this potential in it—right now, you see, and that is a double bind. You want to just sort of feel good and enjoy life and get on with it, you see.

What if instead of just moving along by desire and seeking and so on, distraction, you seriously come to terms with this, that it actually is the case, and there is nothing whatsoever that you can do about it. Nothing.

So, the situation you're in as a psycho-physical identity is irreducible, inescapable. It is, in its own terms, just that, and that's that. That is the “positive disillusionment” that stops you in your tracks as a seeker. No illusions are attractive from that perspective then, you see. No nonsense, no unserious absurdities, no desires. And, nothing desirable has the force of being able to overwhelm that and divert you from it. So all that is desirable, then, becomes no longer fascinating. It becomes ordinary. It's a kind of renunciation then. Just that seriousness is renunciation.

It's not the end of it. There is far more. Realization is beyond this disillusionment. But the disillusionment is there immediately when you come to terms with the actuality of your circumstance of life and are not merely whizzing on with your desiring and seeking faculties, you see. And from that perspective of positive disillusionment you have to consider further what you will do. And in the traditional setting it's that people will go find a master when they get some kind of point like that, you see.

And a realizer has a profound function in the lives of people who are disillusioned. And for people who only want illusions, there is no usefulness in a master at all. For those who want to experience the world or be satisfied, fulfilled through the mechanisms of desire and seeking, you see, the teaching of Truth has no value and they will shun it, flee it. And they will flee from a master likewise.

The teaching of Truth is for those who are disillusioned in the positive sense, who have been sobered, who are renunciate in their disposition, who have become moderate in their lives by grasping the nature of existence and being cured of search.

—Avatar Adi Da Samraj
November 23, 2005