Avatar Adi Da, 2008
in Money, Food, and Sex
by Avatar Adi Da Samraj
En-Light-ened Participation
"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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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.
—Avatar Adi Da Samraj
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?
[Excerpt from "The Non-Dual Healing and En-Light-enment
of Money, Food, Sex, and the Whole Body" in Santosha Adidam]
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” is 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.
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Avatar Adi Da Samraj
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