Adi Da – The Grid of Attention

Adi Da – The Grid of Attention

Salepage : Adi Da – The Grid of Attention

Arichive : Adi Da – The Grid of Attention

Shortly after the excerpt below begins, Adi Da Samraj decides to speeds directly into the speaker phone, rather than having His words relayed to devotees by Quandra Mai Jangama Hridayam. The effect of His voice being suddenly amplified via loudspeaker to all devotees in and around the Communications office was arresting. Devotees immediately felt drawn directly, into Beloved Adi Da’s intimate sphere, and all sensed that there was a special import to the words Beloved Adi Da. was choosing to Speak.

Furthermore, Beloved Adi Da paused briefly before continuing His Discourse, obviously preparing very deliberately to correct the conventional misconceptions regarding the process of attention and how it functions in relation to the body-mind and Consciousness. Then He proceeded to speak to His devotees in slow, measured phrases, periodically checking with them to be certain they were clearly understanding His clarifying words.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, in a recent phone gathering, You spoke about how attention does not move. That was an extremely useful “consideration” for us, pointing out how our actual subjective experience of attention is that it does not move. In that particular conversation, You were especially talking about people being able to feel You at any distance, so that there was no geographical movement necessary for attention to rest on You.

After that conversation, some people were studying various passages in Your Source-Texts where You do speak about attention moving. It’s obvious that You’re using the word “move” in a different sense in the Source-Texts, but we wanted to make sure that we understand this completely clearly.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I already explained Myself about this the other night. It is a matter of convention, to refer to the movements of attention. And so I use that language rather commonly.

DEVOTEE: We understood that when You speak of attention moving, that is another way of describing the fact that the focus of attention changes. Since attention is not a feature of the gross realm, it is not associated with movement in the gross realm, is that correct?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, it is, obviously. On the other hand, you could say that the gross realm is attention itself. All objects are attention itself. Therefore, attention does not have to move to get to any object.

[DEVOTEE puts Beloved on speaker phone.]

ADI DA SAMRAJ: I decided at this point that I would just put it on speaker phone.

DEVOTEE: Yes, thank You, Beloved. It’s so wonderful to hear Your Voice.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Attention doesn’t move to get to objects. There are no objects, so to speak, in any independent sense. Attention is always in place. It doesn’t have to move to get to any object at all. Whenever there is an apparent object, it is one with attention. So in this sense, there is no difference between attention and objects. Objects are merely apparent, they are nothing but the grid of attention itself. The will associated with attention simply moves the grid, so to speak. The whole field of attentive awareness is like a large grid.

You’ve seen grids in the school room, those things made of horizontal and vertical lines?

DEVOTEE: Yes, Beloved.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You can think of attention in this way, then, as being an unmoving point on a grid, a grid of infinite size, made of horizontal and vertical lines, or in other words, made of an infinite number of possible points. If attention appears to move or is willed to move, so to speak, it’s the grid that moves. The point of attention is the same; it never moves. The grid apparently moves. And apparently then, attention is shifted to another point on the grid. That point coincides with the object of attention in any, moment.

Fundamentally then, in terms of the mechanics of attention, that is all there is, this point of attention and the grid, which is the field of apparently modified energy, taking on the apparent form of objects or points in space-time. So in terms of the mechanics of experiencing, there is the unmoving point of attention and the apparently moving grid, associating attention with different modifications of energy, moment to moment. Then, in Truth, there is neither attention nor the grid, there is simply Consciousness itself and Its inherent Radiance.

So attention and the grid, or attention and any apparent object, is the conditional form of the Ultimate. Do you understand?

DEVOTEE: Yes! Thank You, Beloved.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Even though there is only this grid and this fixed point of attention, speaking in conditional terms, you perceive it to be objects and spatial conditions and time conditions and so on. All these pictures and so on that you call the world, experience. But it’s just an illusion made by this apparently fixed point of separate attention and this mechanical grid. And something like that is what is going on in the brain, you understand?

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: When you are seeing objects and so forth, you imagine that you’re looking into an objective space. But the mechanism that is showing you visual objects is this brain intermediary, and the visual cortex functions very much like I just described. It’s a kind of energy grid, that associates the fixed point of attention with apparent visual modifications of energy. If you weren’t identified with the body and therefore with a spatial concept of your existence, all you would see is this grid. And what is it ultimately, anyway? It’s just an illusion or a conditional representation of Consciousness, which is one with Its own Energy. In conditional terms, attention is one with its every object. There is no difference between Consciousness and Energy, and therefore, there is no difference between attention and its any object. Don’t you know?

DEVOTEE: Yes, Beloved. Then this is obviously the Realization in the “Perfect Practice”, that Standing Prior to objects is the same as Standing Prior to attention.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. But also in the seventh stage of life, everything is Recognized. There is no difference, no separation, between Consciousness and Its own Energy, between Consciousness Itself and Energy Itself. They are inherently one. So also then, for one thus awake, Recognizing whatever arises, there is no difference between any object and Self-Existing, Self-Radiant Consciousness Itself. It is merely an apparent modification of that, without limitation.

But also then, attention is recognized in the context of any object. There is no difference between attention and any object, there is no difference between Consciousness and Its own Energy, there is no difference between Consciousness Itself and anything that appears to arise. There is only one absolute condition, and there is no illusion in the seventh stage of life. It is in the most positive sense utterly disillusioned, or free of illusion. So That Which Is, Which is One, is inherently obvious to one thus awake. And it is also obvious to such a one that there are no independent objects and there is no independent attention.

But it is also true right now, in the case of every one of you, that there is no difference between attention and its any object. You propose a difference, you imagine a difference, you suffer the illusion of a difference, just as you also forget that no matter what arises, you’re the Witness of it. You’re not identified with the body or the mind, but are simply identified with Consciousness Itself, Self-Existing and Self-Radiant, and you can see clearly that there’s no difference between attention and object. And that there truly are no objects. There is only Awareness itself, in its own infinite Field of Radiance.

It is the case right now with you all. You don’t have to be changed in any way for this to be so; it is simply so, inherently so, always already so. It is not noticing it because you are presuming illusions based on self-contraction and identification with the body position. Truly, always and already, you are even in the conditional context unmoving attention against the grid that is undifferentiated, nothing but Light Itself.

So what about all this? You brought it up, so what about it?

DEVOTEE: Well, first of all, thank You, Beloved, for this Instruction. It makes extremely vivid the matter of the seventh stage Recognition of everything that arises. And then I presume that in the various stages of life, one of the things that differentiates the different stages of life is that attention will only move in a certain range of that grid?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: It will only associate itself with a certain range of the grid?

DEVOTEE: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. But the objects aren’t different from one another, nor are they separate from attention itself. Truly that is the case.

DEVOTEE: The differences only appear because of the presumptions that we are making, is that it?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes: Someone asked Me the other night, what do I see when I look at you all in a room? All there is is Self-Existing, Self-Radiant Consciousness Itself. It stands in apparent association with the conditional domain. I simply perceive a pulse in the midst of an infinite undifferentiated grid. I Recognize it, and I am responsible for the pulse.

DEVOTEE: Ah, Beloved.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: It’s also in visual terms called the bindu, you see, the source point. It may be visualized as a kind of object in subtle consciousness, subtly-manifested consciousness. When it appears as an object, it appears to be a blue point of light, what Baba Muktananda called the blue pearl or the blue bindu. Its core is infinite white brilliance. It can be peripherally associated with other colors, it seems to change its color. But ultimately it is not visualized in the ultimate condition beyond difference. It is as I’ve just described it to you, a pulse.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, is that a pulse in the tactile sense? You’ve spoken about how touch is the primary…

ADI DA SAMRAJ: There is nothing bodily about it.

DEVOTEE: There is nothing bodily about it?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: It is in the Infinite Field of the Self-Condition. And everything is in that pulse. And I touch and affect every thing and every one by what I do with that pulse. If I want to function or appear in conditional terms, I simply appear through the core of that pulse, or otherwise look through it.

Appearing through it or looking through it, there can be all the seeming perceptions and so forth that even others may commonly experience. But truly, all I experience is this core pulse in the midst of My Own Infinite State of Being, Love-Bliss Itself. There is simply that Infinite Love Bliss or the “Bright” Itself, Which is Consciousness Itself, Self-Existing. In terms of My apparent association with the conditional domain, there is that pulse.

And therefore, it is very simple for Me to do everything I do. It is not complicated. You are complicated. Appearances are complicated. Reality is not at all complicated. You are simply appearing as a point of attention associated with an infinite grid of light, and yet you imagine or presume all this complexity that you call the world. Stand back in the Source-Position, and you see how it really is. And in that Position, it is realized that all of this complexity is mere imagination. In Truth, you never experience it. You are not where you think you are, anymore than you are where you think you are when you are in a dream.

Nonetheless, as long as you think you are where you think you are, conditional existence is a serious matter, filled with all kinds of laws and paradoxes and obligations. And you have sadhana to do. If you stand in the Source-Position itself, you have no sadhana to do. So you have to do sadhana until you stand in the Source-Position. Standing in the Source-Position is what Enlightenment or ultimate Realization or Divine Self-Realization is all about. You understand?

DEVOTEE: Yes, thank You, Beloved. This is sublime Instruction.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: What else about it, then?

DEVOTEE: Anthony is mentioning that You have written about the vibratory field of cosmic energy. Is that another way of describing this pulse that You mentioned just now?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: You’re talking about something cosmic; I am not. I’m talking about the Divine Self-Condition. The vibratory field within the cosmic domain is a different perception, associated with the point of view of conditional experiencing. It is the Shakti acknowledged by embodied beings or conditionally manifested beings. You understand?

DEVOTEE: Yes. Beloved, is there some kind of connection between the pure You’re speaking of and the physical pulse in the human body, the heartbeat?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: That again is physical. I’m not talking about something physical.

DEVOTEE: Is the perception of Your Divine Pulse something that would be the case for any devotee who realizes the seventh stage of life, or is this part of Your unique Siddhi?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: We’ll have to see [laughter] Seventh stage realizers among My devotees are not My successors, you see.

DEVOTEE: Yes, I understand that.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: They are invested in the same Realization. This doesn’t mean they will manifest My Siddhis in any intentional sense. But they certainly will be aware in fundamental terms of that I am talking about. For the seventh stage Realizer, there is only Self-Existing, Self-Radiant Consciousness Itself. And everything that arises is inherently Recognized as a merely apparent and non-binding, transparent, un-necessary, merely apparent modification of That.

So the devotee who Realizes the seventh stage of life Realizes this. Such a one does not stand in the position of the body-mind. It Stands in the Prior Position of the Divine Self-Condition Itself. And that is the Position in which Divine Recognition is demonstrated, you see?

DEVOTEE: Yes. Thank You, Beloved.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Even now, you are not the body. You are attention. The body is an appearance to attention. But when you speak, you talk about being the body, you refer to yourself in bodily terms and refer to Reality in terms of the apparent relations of the body. You don’t presume that you Stand in the Position of the Witness. You certainly do not presume that you Stand in the Position of the Divine Self-Condition. But you don’t even presume you stand in the position of attention! You presume you’re the body, one of the objects of attention. Why do you do this?

DEVOTEE: Because I’m contracting.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Hm?

DEVOTEE: Through a mistaken presumption that I am the body-that what happens to the body is what happens to me.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes, I know that that is what you are presuming, but why are you doing that, when only a moment of attention, clear attention, would prove to you that it is not so. The moment you’re simply standing as attention, in functional or conditional terms, and have any experience of any object, any condition, any thought, whatever, you put an indescribable stress on the point of attention itself, and then a thought appears, or a sensation appears, or a perception appears. You do this operation every moment, but you don’t notice that is what you’re doing. You say you’re doing something else, because as soon as you put this stress on the point of attention, something arises. You identify with what arises, or otherwise dissociate yourself from what arises, but, in other words, you become completely involved in the appearances of arising, and forget how you got the experience to begin with. To think, for instance: You don’t think first, and then think, do you?

DEVOTEE: No, it’s very spontaneously arising.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: By simply putting a kind of stress on the point of attention, a thought appears. But you don’t think in order to think.

DEVOTEE: No, not at all.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: The same with everything else that appears to arise. You don’t do something physical in order to feel the body. You directly feel the body, by allowing stress on the point of attention to generate that appearance in the field of attention. You don’t think in order to think, you don’t emote in order to emote, you do not do something physical in order to have the feeling of being physically existing. So if none of these experiences are caused by their likeness, then how do you get to have these experiences? You’re doing the same thing in every case. You’re putting stress on the point of attention, and then spontaneously, magically even, an object arises that corresponds to that particular stress.

It is the field that appears to change, it is the grid that appears to change. Attention doesn’t create it. Attention doesn’t move. It is always one with that grid, that grid of energy. Mysteriously you put stress on the point of attention. In other words, by attention, you put stress on the grid. Automatically a thought arises, an emotion arises, a physical sensation arises, a perception arises, an object of any kind arises. None of that is in attention itself; it is in the grid, in all the presumed structures of modification, that have been made to arise in that grid by this very operation of stressing the grid by stressing attention. You don’t really think then, at all. Do you understand?

JONATHAN: Yes, Beloved. But there is one thing that I don’t quite understand, when You say “you put stress on attention”. I can’t understand who “you” is anymore.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: We are just talking about psycho-physical operations now, or conditional operations, so in such an apparent event “you” are attention. Simply that. But attention is one with its grid of energy. It is never separate from any object. Attention simply places a curious stress on the grid itself.

JONATHAN: And attention presumes itself to be identified, to be a certain portion of the grid, a certain very limited portion of the grid?

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Everything is in that grid, including the subtle operation-so mind and so on. These all become associated with attention by habit of association, habit of presumption. They become activated spontaneously through the simplest act of stressing attention. It is not that attention creates anything. These mechanisms which were in the grid make the changes, generate the thoughts, the feelings, the sensations, the ideas, the perceptions. They were all sort of in the grid. You can imagine it to be something like an immense computer then, you see. Attention doesn’t think, you see?

JONATHAN: Yes.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: How do you get to have a thought? Standing as attention, you don’t think. Curiously, you can enjoy the appearance of thinking, but what do you do to do so? You don’t think in order to think, you see? You do something mysterious with attention in its grid. Attention is never separate from the grid itself, therefore, it is never separate from appearance. It may presume in the mechanisms appearing to attention, that it is an appearance of some kind, a body mind, and so on. It suffers illusions. This is why ultimately, one must Realize one is not attention, but one stands as the Witness. And then one must find the Source-Condition that is otherwise appearing as the Witness. To be attention is to be bound to the illusions in the grid. So how do you get to think then, Jonathan? How do you get to speak, which is an expressed form of thinking, generally? Do you think thinking into thinking? Or is it just happening mysteriously at the point of attention?

JONATHAN: It is just happening, definitely.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: What did you do to speak just then?

JONATHAN: I didn’t do anything at all.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: When you were apparently initiating speaking, how do you get to do it? How do you know what you are going to say? How do you know what you are going to think before you think it? Why, when you intend to think, does it turn out to be some kind of, in general, meaningful thought, if you don’t think first? If you don’t think before you speak, how does it make any sense? If you don’t think before you think, how does thinking make any sense? how do you know what you are going to think before you think it? You intend to think about something, all of the sudden in general some reasonable meaningful thought process takes place but you didn’t think it beforehand. So how does it wind up happening at all? Or how does it wind up being meaningful or reasonable if you don’t think about it first? Do you have any sense of how to answer this at all, Jonathan?

JONATHAN: Well, You have just given tremendous Instruction, Beloved. I understand You to have been saying that attention brings itself into conjunction with parts of the grid that are meaningful by their own nature, at least to the perception of attention they are meaningful and they spontaneously are thoughts and speech patterns and so forth spontaneously arise in that conjunction.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Do they make any sense to attention? Does anything at all make any sense to attention, attention itself?

JONATHAN: No, attention itself seems more like a….

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Attention does not know any meaning whatsoever. The mind knows meaning. But the mind is another apparent object of attention. Attention does not know any meaning, otherwise attention would think. How could attention generate a thinking mind, which is, in general, full of meaning if attention itself stands prior to meaning? Attention knows no meaning whatsoever. Attention does no thinking. Otherwise, it would think thought. It would think in order to think. So to find thought meaningful, you have to stand in the position of the mind. You have to relinquish the position of attention, you see?

JONATHAN: Yes, thank You, Beloved.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Presume that you are the body, you have to be associated with the mind and identify with the body. To do all of that, you have to relinquish the position of attention. But you can’t really dissociate from the position of attention. You can’t be anything but attention which is prior to thought, prior to mind, prior to the body, prior to perception, prior to the world. So illusions are not in attention itself. They are the product of presuming to relinquish the position of attention and be identified with the appearances in the grid. When that becomes habitual, then habitually you relinquish the position of attention and its Source. And you lose your True Self. You must go back to the Source.

Well, one of the traditional ways of doing that, by analysis anyway, is to observe. And you see that everything is an object. The body is an object to you. You observe the body. Emotions are an object to you. Energies are object to you. You observe these things. Thoughts are object to you. You observe them. So what is your position then? It is the position of attention. Well, what is the position of attention? It stands in the Witness. The true position is actually the Witness. Well, what is that which is appearing as the Witness? It is the Self, prior to all objects, prior to attention. It is Consciousness Itself. Enter into this most profoundly by Grace and you Realize the True Self-Condition.

Sadhana is a progress like that, but it is not mere analysis. It is analysis, nonetheless. It is obviously true any moment in which you engage it. You talk as if you are identified with the body, but look: You are observing the body. You are attentive to the body. But more than attentive, you are merely Witnessing it. More than merely Witnessing it, you are That Which Is Appearing as the Witness. Sadhana is simply a process in-depth, leading to the Realization of the Ultimate Subjective or Self-Position of Reality.

When you truly enter into Spiritual sadhana in My Company, you are drawn, attracted by Me, into the Source-Position. If you are merely attentive to the effects of My Spiritual Presence, however, you will be drawn into the realm of experience-perhaps unfolding subtler experiences, but nonetheless, it is the realm of experience, in other words, the realm of objects. Therefore, seeing is not about experiences of My Effects, My Spiritual Effects. It is about locating Me and being drawn by Me to the Source-Position. You would be making an error, you see, to focus on the effects of My Spiritual Presence, rather than to focus on My Spiritual Presence itself. This is the common error.

So I have pointed out, even beginning devotees can have Spiritual experiences of Me, experience My Spiritual Effects. But they notice all of this in a self-referential manner. In other words, they experience Me as experiences, rather than experiencing Me. They become attracted to the experiences themselves. They still make references to themselves in the midst of these experiences. They are their experiences.’ So only when there is a certain maturity, only when there is true hearing, that the devotee is equipped to do Spiritual sadhana in My Company-because it is not the sadhana of Spiritual effects. It is the sadhana of, by Grace, being attracted to the Source Position, to the root, which is attention. But attention is merely a knot. It is the causal knot. So it is an attraction even beyond that root to the Witness-Position and beyond.

This is the Spiritual sadhana in the Way of the Heart. Whereas, the traditional Spiritual sadhana is what I call an evolutionary sadhana. It is an experiential development in the context of the developing stages of life. It is a kind of self-developing process, ego-developing process. It is an enlargement of experiencing. But that is not the Spiritual sadhana in the Way of the Heart. There may be such experiences secondarily, but they are not the key to the sadhana. They are not the principal of the sadhana. You understand?

DEVOTEE: Yes, thank You, Beloved.

ADI DA SAMRAJ: The Way of the Heart, the Way I Revealed to you, is the Wav of Realizing the Divine Self-Condition, Source-Position, rather than the cosmic way, or an evolutionary way of developing the illusion of separate and cosmic experience.