A talk by Santosha Tantra
10/6/1996
Santosha Ma: What I am trying to do is use this occasion, not just to serve your impulse, but for other people in other places, and other generations. In our society particularly, I feel the need and necessity for the contemplative life is not understood. It is not welcomed, and in most cases, it is absolutely rejected. There is a certain aspect of religious life that can be a little bit accepted. But somehow you are supposed to be able to realize what is deeper than the usual seeking in life, or what is more sensitized to God, while having an incredibly hectic, fulfilling life. In other words, you are trying to fulfill the body-mind, and that is supposed to be part of how spiritualizing your life is.
There is one thing that you have to see, that not only does experience not arrive at happiness – but the very act of trying to find this happiness is the cause of all your stress, is the cause of all your unhappiness.
One of the important aspects of seeing how bodily life cannot produce happiness, or arrive at happiness, is to accept the nature of your own experience, and the nature of your own biology, which is dealing with your mortality – which is something people do not deal with at all, so they do not arrive at any clear understanding about it.
Now, the real lesson of biology, as you have seen, is you grow, and you mature and you reproduce, and the body declines. There is no way to escape that bitter fact. It is a bitter fact. It is not a happy fact! Especially if you put all your cookies into that somehow the body is going to maintain a stream of pleasure for you, and that ultimately it will arrive at a great fulfilling pleasure! When the actual proof of it is, not only does it not do that, but it actually goes into decline.
Spiritual life is really different from the mistaken life where people identify with biology – even though everybody knows that everybody’s going to die, and biology will never fulfill itself – everybody STILL, INCREDIBLY, with great force of karma, asserts that you will be fulfilled through biology.
When you really understand that no experience will arrive at happiness, that the very act of the search is causing the stress, then you are really ready for the contemplative life. Master Da calls that ‘hearing’.
A contemplative life means that now, when you do feel stress, because your life is now disciplined and minimalized, you are not going to call up and try to go to the movies, you are not going to run out and go masturbate, or have sex. All of that has been very quieted down. You understand the necessary discipline of that – and you begin to get to a quieter place where you can begin to observe your own seeking head on, straight on.
You begin to notice that there are cycles of seeking, and cycles of desire, and how the energy builds for those cycles. When that cycle of desire starts to build, it causes you to become more stressed. You think that when you get it fulfilled you will be happy, and you need that stress to propel you towards the outcome of your desire! We have been observing the moon cycle around here. I do not know if you’ve ever observed the moon cycle in your own life, but we are seeing that as the moon moves toward being fulfilled, when the new moon comes out, it’s like a new desire comes, or desire comes. And the desire always relates to the force of your karma.
And then Death! That is our next big adventure. It is! Really, biologically, it is our next big adventure. That is the only adventure we have. See, all the other things are just part of the first and second stages of life that you keep repeating over and over again, because you are just distracted. You never want to stop. You never really allow yourself to see the mechanism of your seeking, of desire. You do not allow yourself to genuinely feel what the seeking is doing, how it creates all the stress. Not the failure of getting your desire met – it is the seeking.
And yet we are bored of our whole goddam karmic destiny! We are bored that we are going to die! We are bored, we are bored… That is why everybody is so mean! Because we are bored! Another day of doing this same boring stuff! Another day! ANOTHER DAY! ‘What are you doin’?’ “Uh, don’t ask!! The same old boring stuff!” When you were a kid you did all that stuff, and it was not boring, because it was like “Wha…???…Wow!!” Because everything in life was new. It is not new anymore. That is why, after you understand the lesson of biology, to save yourself a lot of awful wear and tear, cynicism, abstraction, coding everything, complicating everything, being psychological, all that kind of stuff, it’s best to say, “OK! Time to face death. Time to just get to what matters now.”
The very fact that you want to see Me is because you are bored! You never had sex with Me, and I am still the most exciting person you ever met! Because you cannot control Me, you cannot censor Me, you can’t inhibit Me, you can’t do anything but actually release your perceptions in My Company! And so, it is in your receptivity! If you practice release, what is true of your own nature? You are bliss! You are not someone trying to get bliss, you are bliss! How are you going to let the body-mind be animated by this bliss that you are?
There is NO INDIVIDUAL!!! You are all living mass jumbles of karma! That is it! There is no individual. You penetrate that, and through self-understanding, the karma has no force whatsoever! Now you are not a mass of karma and desires just playing with each other, now you are bliss itself. No movement. You are peace of mind, you are stillness of Heart. You are clarity. You are bright space, the clearing space. Every perception that comes into you cannot survive! And you can make this moment the moment of pleasure, not the moment where some result happens.
All that running around has NOT got to do with you are really convinced that you will arrive at happiness, it has all to do with that you are convinced there is no such thing as happiness. It is all your bitterness. It is all your rejection of the pleasure. You are rejecting it! People that reject Dharma, rejecting the moment – are really unhappy! They never get to experience the pleasure of their life in this moment. It always has to be in some moment when some perception that they have will be fulfilled. They are the unhappiest people.
If people are releasing, and not holding on to some perception, they can also be absorbed into a deeper ecstasy if they are around Me. The more they are released, the more they can tap into the Infinite amounts of pleasure or happiness you can feel. That is why a little Dharma can restore some hope in people. The unhappiest people need it the most.
And pride is just self-reference. It is the mechanism of desire. Pride does not have any force to it! The self-reference does not have any force, karma does not have any force – not if you have this understanding! Nothing can stand up to this understanding. But the force of this understanding! That no perception, no desire, is who you are, or what you are – and you do not have to do, or go, or try anything. You just are in perpetual release, always released, always always released. What would it be like to always be in samadhi? And never leave samadhi? And yet function as a human being in a body-mind.
You say, ‘If I can get that next desire, then I’ll do the contemplative life.’ But what is so wrong with the pleasure of this moment right now? Why is it a perception you have about some other moment? What is wrong with now? What is it? What is it? Why can’t this be it? Why can’t you enjoy the pleasure of this? Why is it some perception you stick in your mind that if you get that, then you will be happy, and then you can release. What is going on now that you cannot release? Is there pleasure absent now? No! But it is like you do not have your physical body here, so you cannot enjoy it. You are just, somehow, a little bit here, so you cannot enjoy it. You are running away from it.
****
Now I am going to talk about the contemplative life. To enter into this, obviously you have to understand the value, the need, the necessity of releasing perception and experience. And that requires you to minimalize your life. Now you are willing, and want to, and see the necessity, and also see the benefit of doing true practice – the practice of release. To minimalize your life would be quieting everything down, so you can examine your life.
Then you turn to the meditation now.
As you are doing that, the first month you begin to notice the mood and moon of your seeking. You begin to perceive the cycles of seeking, and they become obvious to you. You do not dramatize seeking. You not only become capable of practicing release, you begin to see that there’s a growing sensitivity going on, it’s occurring in certain ways. Continue with that, and it will produce natural insight. It will produce, probably, a purifying force into the body-mind, and that will continue.
You will find that, if you can stay in the minimal life, get through these cycles of desire and seeking, and understand it by either using this talk, or perhaps not even having to use it, just arriving at your own understanding strong enough – then if you get through, say, three or four months of this, you will begin to have a different life altogether, where if any perception comes up, you’re not going to quite believe it. You are more interested in practicing release. You begin to see the real effects of practicing release, and they are quite exciting to you.
The understanding is the only way you get out of the karma mechanism. See, I can temporarily take you out of it through the force of My own understanding. But the force of My understanding is taking you out of it. You must begin to understand yourself, or there’s no way to get out of it.
The world is either seeking or doing contemplation. What you understand, you must proceed with. That is the best example, just doing exactly what you need to do for your life. That is the best sign. There is no other sign. It is not in your thinking that you get this. It is just an “Ah! I get it,” because all your experience tells you the truth. But we are not able to directly understand our experience, most people are not. Everyone has the same freedom, in this second, to release. No one has to hold on to any perception at all, right now! You do not have to hold on to all these past ones. You do not have to hold on to these future ones. They are all phantoms.
If you are looking back and being a bad, guilty person, it is because the seeking is still going on. If you look back and say, ‘Oh, yeah! Look at that, yeah…’ – when you get the ‘Ah-ha!’ of seeking or desire, and you know it cannot fulfill itself – everything in your past makes sense. Everybody looks at their past as an explanation of why they are so fucked up now, but now, you look at the past, and see why you are free now!
If you are looking for Bliss Itself, you must realize it as yourself, not seek it out. Seeking is causing the stress. Seeking is causing the stress. You are putting all these perceptions on happiness. All the perceptions are around biology, and biology is just this simple matter! It is not complicated!
And once you are able to practice contemplation of Bliss Itself most directly, you will have the great benefit of it, and you will be very happy with it. You never see anybody contemplating Consciousness going around complaining about it. (laughter)
