Steve, you asked Fred a question about hell. No doubt you will hear from him. Here, for alternate-view purposes is a talk from my Guru, which contains some references to the
"hell-states"
And Greg, this will be too long for you! It also has a point of view that you will consider demonic, anti-Christ, or whatever terms you use to describe differing points of view than the traditional Christian.
And Bill, you should find lots to challenge and take exception to here! <ggg>
Does God Take Care of You?
a talk by Adi Da, September 23, 1982
(1) MASTER DA: On the basis of everything you have observed, your life altogether, do you think that God is taking care of everybody?
(2) DEVOTEE: He's doing a wonderful job!
(3) MASTER DA: Is God taking care of everybody? Is God a Someone who takes care of people?
(4) DEVOTEE: Well, yes, in some sense. I'm not beating my own heart and breathing my own breath.
(5) MASTER DA: Yes, but is the experience of breathing and having your heart beat exactly like being taken care of?
(6) DEVOTEE: [Laughing] No!
(7) MASTER DA: [Laughing] There could be a way of existing that is a lot less dangerous!
(8) DEVOTEE: When you first started the consideration about "I is the body," you advised us to include an examination of the body if we wanted to truly consider anything, because the body is a reflection of any process that we might consider.
(9) MASTER DA: Yes, the other day I talked to you about gnosis, or knowledge, being the fundamental impulse of religion, the fundamental impulse of human beings. There are many levels of gnosis, but basically what human beings have the urge towards is experiential knowledge based on concrete, direct observation-what is traditionally referred to as gnosis. When, for instance, I asked if you think that God is taking care of everybody, I was asking whether, on the basis of your own gnosis, this appears to be the case. I did not ask you to think about it-in other words, to resort to what is not gnosis-because in the absence of gnosis, or experiential knowledge, we can think any number of things. Therefore, on the basis of what you have experienced, on the basis of what you have observed and what you have understood about your observation, could you characterize God as a Being who takes care of everyone? Do human beings exist in a situation in which they are being taken care of, or is something else occurring?
(10) DEVOTEE: I do not feel particularly protected or preserved in a personal way by God, and yet it does seem that everything goes on, that the force of Being lives and moves and creates and destroys. I wouldn't say I feel taken care of, but there is this continuation of existence altogether, although the form of it keeps changing.
(11) MASTER DA: As Westerners who have inherited the Semitic religious tradition, primarily in its Christian form, you are influenced by the suggestion that there is God, that God created everything, and that God is, therefore, in charge of everything, and if you will assume an appropriate, believer's relationship to God, God will take care of you. God is called the Father in the New Testament, and in that Christian Gospel human beings are basically called to associate with the Divine as a protector, Somebody who is far greater than they and who will, if they will simply accept a child-parent relationship to the Divine, take care of them as He takes care of the lilies of the field or the sparrows.
(12) However, people all over the world are believing in God in response to one or another kind of religious message and yet they are suffering starvation, deprivation, frustration, and lack of every kind of fulfillment. To the degree we are protected, it appears that we are protecting one another. Perhaps we could say that we are the Agents of God and that God is therefore protecting us, but apart from our own gesture in that direction, it does not seem that there is much protecting going on, does it? To presume that God is the protector of individual beings is to presume that God is the protector and sustainer of egos. And if God is the protector and sustainer of egos then God must, in some sense, be a super-ego, the largest ego. The true gnosis of God, however, the true Realization of God, does not convey any sense that God is an ego or that you are an ego. When we actually enter into the gnosis or Realization of God, we transcend our egoity and the concerns that are associated with it. We also, by transcending our infantile, childish, and adolescent ways of relating to God, transcend certain relatively infantile or childish notions about God.
(13) An infant, a child, or an adolescent is obviously controlled by the sense that he is parented. To transcend infantilism, childishness, or adolescence, is to transcend egoity, and the dependence-independence association with what might be considered to be God before actual God-Realization. Mankind tends to create religions for the sake of egos, for the sake of common society which calls upon human beings to assume a relatively infantile, childish, or adolescent relationship to God. That relationship is reflected in certain presumptions and metaphors about God that we have inherited through the common instruments of religion. The metaphors, images, and descriptions of God and of our relationship to God, and the description of how God functions in the lives of individuals, are not the expressions of true gnosis, but of the ego in its infantile, childish, and adolescent state.
(14) If we are to believe in the God of the ego described by the conventional mechanisms of religion, we must ask why this God is not simply in charge. Why is there so much suffering? Why do individuals who do not believe in God, who even deny any association with God, or the reality of God, seem very often to have a relatively enjoyable life? And why do the believers, who claim absolute dependence on God, suffer just as frequently as others? If God is a Parent-Force, active in this world and beyond this world, then why does the commitment to God not bring into your life all the evidence that you are being protected and sustained? There is not simply a little bit of difficulty in life, which could, if used creatively and correctly, bring you to the point of Wisdom. There is much more difficulty and suffering than that. Thus, there does not seem to be any justification for this relatively childish or infantile view of the Divine.
(15) Instead of freedom, love, and spiritual qualities being magnified through belief in God, the egoic, separative, and Narcissistic qualities may be magnified in individuals through their religion. Is there anything religious, then, in the conventional call to religion? In other words, is it an expression of gnosis or is it simply an offering to egos who do not enjoy the gnosis of God and who are perhaps not even inclined toward it? Is it not simply a device for bringing order to society based on presumably sacred principles?
(16) In Christianity, for instance, there is a kind of gnosis, the knowledge of Jesus as Christ, but it is almost entirely based on the myths and stories surrounding his sacrifice and its presumed effects. It is not, in other words, based on the actual, experiential knowledge of practitioners of his Teaching. On the other hand, the Semitic religion in its Hebrew form prior to Christianity was not a religion based on the kind of gnosis proclaimed by Christianity. For the Jews, inherent separation from God was not preached. On the contrary, what was taught was that everyone is the creature of God, everyone has been created by God, who is the king of the world, and what you need to do is to stay aligned to God. If you do step out of line, or you miss the mark (sin), you come back into line through the performance of acts that purify and realign you to the blessing power of God. But the Christian Teaching at its base preaches that we are inherently separate from God, and therefore sin achieves the force of a prior absolute-as in the notion of original sin-about which you can do nothing. Therefore, because of our state of sin, the usual purificatory acts and ritual activities, such as the Jews had employed, are no longer considered efficacious from the point of view of the Christian Teaching. Thus, Christianity represents a new, dualistic, even gnostic principle-gnostic in the traditional Greek sense of the word. The Greek Gnostic's view of life was rooted in a sense of primary separation from God in which something or someone extraordinary had to appear in the midst of individual lives in order for them to be restored to a sinless condition of unity with the Divine Principle. In the Christian tradition, this gnostic philosophy appears in the form of belief in Jesus as Christ, as Savior, as a sacrificial being, an Agent of God whose sacrifice, if you believe in it, purifies you and therefore brings into the domain of your present and future existence the blessing power that is natural to a state of unity with God. And yet, except for what we can manufacture by changing our own behaviors and getting others to likewise change, there is no more evidence of the effective intervention of a superior blessing power in the lives of Christian believers than there is in the lives of Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Zoroastrian, or any other religious believers.
(17) You see, conventional religion is not based on true gnosis of God. It is based on a presumption that one or another prophet, saint, savior, or teacher has enjoyed the gnosis of God, but it is not based on the experiential knowledge, the gnosis of believers.
(18) The basic presumption in Biblical religion is that if you align yourself to God by one or another means, then God, who is eternal and omnipresent and all-powerful, will make things happen for you while you live and after you die. It is presumed that God is a great parent with infinite resources and infinite power. This is the myth of Semitic religion, but is there any evidence that it is so? In our weakness, in our self-possession, we, like children, would prefer that there be a parent-like force in charge of everything, a force that we can connect with and consequently have nothing but enjoyment-no anxiety, no frustration, no pain, no disease, optimally no death, but if death, then no pain in death, no fear in death, merely a transition into an eternally enjoyable circumstance. But is there any evidence that this is possible, that this actually occurs? Human beings have been believing in Jesus, believing in Yahweh, believing in Allah, believing in Krishna, Ram, Ra, for centuries. Such believers, or individuals motivated by the affirmation of the Divine, may in that process of affirmation or submission, when it is truly made, enjoy something that we could point to and call spiritual. Apart from that spiritual gain, however, is there any evidence that believers show the signs of connecting, through the ordinary mechanisms of religion, with a parent-like force that eliminates or at least profoundly reduces suffering in the same fashion that an infinite parent would whose attention is on you constantly? That is what is preached. Does it occur? Does it occur for anyone? Has it ever occurred?
(19) What kind of situation are we in then? Is there really no Parent-Deity?
(20) Near-death experiences shed further light on this consideration. There are certain traditions, such as the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, that conceive of the after-death process as a process in mind, a process of mind. In fact, in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, life is also conceived as a process of mind, as an apparently objective apparition which is profoundly determined by psychic states. If we truly enter into the gnosis of any experience, if we thoroughly understand experience itself, we realize that after-death experiences are the developments of mind, of psychic potentiality, and not merely the revelations of some single, factual, and objective reality which is in charge. Your after-death experience depends on who you are and your view and model of reality. It depends on your experiences and the experiences of people who seem to you to be persuasive. The tradition in which you were born tends to generate mind in your case and therefore to control your experiences during life and after death. All traditions agree, however, based on the collective gnosis of centuries of people having all kinds of experiences, that there is the potential, during life and after death, for terrible experiences, horrible, frightening, absolutely frustrating experiences as well as the potential for pleasurable experiences, paradisiacal experiences, or at least very happy experiences. There is, then, a general motivation in all the traditions to do in one's practice whatever will make one's experience while living and after death as pleasurable as possible.
(21) The motive to survive pleasurably is thus the primal motive of human beings and this motivation is reflected in the programs of religion, as well as in all the forms of gnosis enjoyed within the traditions of religion, spirituality, and esotericism. Observing that your own input can affect your fate pleasurably or painfully, you are most likely to choose activities and orientations for the purpose of maximizing your enjoyment of the future and the present. Nevertheless, in your neurotic self-possession you often become self-destructive and other-destructive, creating mechanisms and destinies in life, and perhaps therefore after death, that are, at least temporarily, very unpleasant.
(22) Therefore, if we take into account all of our collective experiences, including after-death experiences, is there any evidence that there is some other power whom we may call God, who is simply in charge and to whom we have only to say "yes," as a child would say yes to a parent, in order to experience at least a high percentage of enjoyable present and future circumstances? Is there any evidence of such an Other-Power? Or are we all involved in a matrix of possibilities in which there is no Other-Power, and in which our present attitude and circumstance are determining our present and future states? In other words, do we have any option other than self-responsibility? Is submission to the Other-Power truly an option?
(23) Take, for example, the man whose testimony we heard recently in a documentary on near-death experiences, who died and was subsequently resuscitated. During his death experiences he found himself in a dark, ominous room, screaming for God to forgive him and release him from the fiery pit that awaited him just outside. Having miraculously returned to life, he now has the idea, because he is a Christian, that all he need do is believe in Jesus and stop sinning in order to avoid that pit when he actually dies. He is an old man with very few real opportunities to sin any more. Basically, he thinks that by simply believing in Jesus now and being a little nicer to people he will get a new body of the kind "promised" to another man who was interviewed about his own near-death experience, ultimately to be reunited with his dead relatives in the other world. If this man were an individual of the Tibetan tradition, it would be said that he had fallen into one of the lesser bardos. In that tradition, the possibility of being thrown into a fiery pit is acknowledged, but it is not assumed that such an experience would last eternally, merely on the basis of what you are. Rather, it is assumed in the Tibetan tradition that you are most fundamentally and inherently Free and capable of absolute Freedom, and that what you need to exercise is that inherent Being. You would not be forever damned if you were to fall into one of those bardos. You would still have an option which, even in that moment, could liberate you immediately or very quickly from it, or at least from certain of the implications and effects of such a bardo. The phenomenon would be temporary and recognizable, if you could exercise the Enlightened Mind or the Transcendental Disposition.
(24) The Christian idea, on the other hand, is that Hell is real and once you go, that is it! You will be eaten by a hot worm there and suffer, unable to be unconscious, damned for eternity. This is a daemonic view of reality and promotes a daemonic view of God. Just imagine if, based on the ambiguities of ordinary suffering, poor creatures such as us could be damned to eternal, timeless suffering. Imagine if that were true, how horrible the world would be, how horrible God would be! Such a view is not based on gnosis, you see. Certain kinds of experiences are perhaps represented by that view, but such an outlook is largely the propaganda of a man-made religious organization. People have suffered profoundly while alive, and have had visions and near-death experiences that revealed hellish phenomena and possibilities. On the basis of such experiences, a great deal of propaganda is generated in the form of popular religious teachings and metaphors. However, on the basis of the gnosis, the direct Realization, the full knowledge of individuals in human time, no such picture of the universe has been created. Dreadful experiences are possible. It is eminently possible that you may suffer while alive in human form. It is also eminently possible that you will suffer after death. There is no presumption, however, in the traditions of gnosis, that you will suffer permanently, or that you will only suffer while alive as a human being, or that you could suffer eternally after death. Nonetheless, the report of those who have entered into the true knowing, the direct knowing of things, is that you can suffer. Suffering is exquisite perhaps, but always temporary, and there is always an option, even in the moment of suffering.
(25) There is a teaching that has been communicated by true knowers, by those who have entered into the gnosis of higher things, subtle things, this world and other worlds, which is different from the teaching that has been magnified and transformed and rigidified by non-knowers in the form of popular religious teachings. It is clearly more auspicious to go to the true knowers than to the transmitters of popular religious messages, and more auspicious still to become a knower yourself. Even so, the great Adepts do not teach the way of gnosis or knowledge or experience itself, but rather the Way of Realization or Enlightenment, the transcendence of the gnosis of every kind of phenomenal possibility.
(26) While such Adepts communicate about the various forms of possible gnosis, positive and negative, their fundamental Teaching does not communicate a parentlike God or an Other-Power. I do not teach the Other-Power, or the God that is inherently other than yourself, and to which you can only relate through the non-gnosis of the infantile or childish psyche. The Divine Being that we may Realize and encounter through relations, as well as directly, is a Being with Whom we are ultimately Identical. In other words, we inhere in the Divine and ultimately we must Realize the Divine on the basis of profound submission to our status of inherence, unity, oneness, and non-separation.
(27) If we enter into the gnosis of the Divine-in other words, if we transcend ourselves in God-Realization-then life does change. Mind, emotion, experience, knowledge, and relations all change-you change as an active personality. As an active personality changing things and changing others, you may also begin to live in a circumstance with others who are also changed, and who, like yourself, are animated in the Freedom of God-Consciousness. In that circumstance of Realization, it is true that the Divine Power in Which we inhere is released into the circumstances of existence. It does transform those circumstances, and those circumstances change more and more profoundly to the degree that our Realization becomes more and more profound. To the degree that our self-transcending gnosis intensifies or matures, there is less and less of the vision of God as Other-Power or as a parentlike deity on which we can depend as self-possessed children might depend on a parent.
(28) You can respond to the conventional teachings of religion, the common path of submission to the Other-Power or belief in the Other-Power, without transcending yourself. You can submit out of fear or out of a desire to improve your circumstance-having a more enjoyable environment to live in, a more pleasurable physical state, more congratulations to the senses, or a happier state of mind. However, you will not actually achieve such a purpose by these means, nor can you transcend yourself without entering into the gnosis of the Divine. Only gnosis of the Divine is associated with self-transcendence. Mere belief in the Divine, acceptance of the Divine as Other-Power, or as Parent-Force, does not require self-transcendence in the ultimate sense.
(29) Conventional religion does not require true self-transcendence because conventional religion is an ego-made, ego-based, ego-congratulating, ego-serving force, generated in the human world by self-possessed or ego-based human beings. When we enter into the gnosis of the Divine we become more and more profoundly aware that the common religious options are simply human creations, or even subhuman creations, very much like all other ordinary human activities and communications. There are certain ideals associated with religion that appear to be superior, but those ideals are rarely practiced profoundly in life. Basically, religion is a socio-cultural communication separate from gnosis-true knowledge or realization-on the part of those who receive it, and it is an ordinary product of human consciousness, containing within it metaphors, descriptions, and constructs of mind that are ego-based and not ultimately true to their subject. The idea of God as Other-Power or Parent-Power is an image of the Divine that does not express true gnosis or Realization, which is why the general propositions of conventional religion are not ultimately acceptable, and why they have been argued against for so many centuries. The result that is proposed by conventional religion is not in fact incarnated by the people who accept it. Conventional religion serves the purpose of consoling egos and organizing egos socially into certain kinds of conventional behavior patterns, but it also reinforces egoity. At the present time, for instance, a great deal of the trouble we see all over the world is the product of religious consciousness. There is an ideal inherent in all conventional religion, but it is an ideal realizable only in the case of self-transcendence, of self-transcending gnosis or Realization of the Living Divine. Apart from such Realization, such self-transcendence, religion is nothing more than part of the circuitry of personal and social egoic existence, and the god of such religion therefore is an image, a myth, a mental construct that is superimposed on the ego-mind.
(30) Those who stand apart from conventional religious commitment in order to consider it see a paradox, even an absurdity. They see no evidence that God determines the outcome of football games or marriages, nor do they have any active gnosis of any specific intervention in life on the part of God. A siddha may appear (siddhis may appear in the case of anyone who enters into the real process of God-Realization), but apart from the animation of God through the ego-transcending Agency of Realizers, there is no evidence that there is one conscious, Absolute Being in charge of everything. You can readily observe that all the trouble in this world is the creation of profoundly humble beings. If there were a being of Infinite Power, simply in charge, these poor little creatures would never be creating such difficulties. Not only are non-religious sinners creating difficulties, but believers, "saved" beings, beings who claim to be under the command of God and are presumably submitting themselves to the will of God, are creating as much of this trouble as atheists.
(31) Ultimately, however, it is neither theism nor atheism that is the source of human difficulty. Human difficulty is inevitable. It is inherent in Nature itself, during life or after death. There is no Absolute Other-Power merely making things happen. Countless beings and forces, visible and invisible, are making things happen. This is a cause-and-effect cosmos. There is no one anything in charge. Everything is in charge. Everyone is in charge. Everyone is having an effect and everyone is suffering from effects. Therefore, we do not truly have the option to submit to a single, mythological power that we presume to be in absolute charge of everything. The only great option we have is to transcend ourselves through self-understanding and enter into the full consciousness of That in Which Nature inheres, That in Which every part of us inheres, That in Which every being inheres.
(32) When we transcend ourselves through self-understanding a Spiritual Process is generated in which various phenomena may arise. Merely to enter into that Process is not necessarily to begin experiencing paradisiacal pleasantries in this life or after death, because to transcend yourself through God-Communion does not put you in charge. There is no one in charge. There is a One in Which everything inheres, but there is no single one who is in charge. If everyone would enter into a condition of absolute unity with that One, conditions would change by virtue of the Agency represented by all those who enter into such submission, such unity with the Transcendental Reality.
(33) God-as I have often indicated-is not rightly conceived as the parentlike Cause of the universe and of all events. There are infinite numbers of causes, an infinite number of parentlike forces, and because there are an infinite number of them, countless numbers of them are in conflict with countless others. Merely to believe in one power in charge of everything does not amount to ease. It is simply infantile. It may be appropriate for an infant or a child to have such a naive belief. As you grow older in years and in associations and presumed responsibilities, however, you must have more than an infant's or a child's sense of the Divine. You must enter into a great Process of submission in which you actually transcend yourself and enter into a state of unity with that Power Which is not merely present as one form, one causal force making everything happen happily, but Which is manifesting as all forms.
(34) Through self-transcending gnosis of the Transcendental Reality, you will be transformed spiritually and in every respect according to your maturity as a spiritual Realizer and according to the circumstance with which you are conjoined in every moment. Even if you were to find yourself in a horrible room with a fiery pit outside, the same Practice would be required of you that is required of you now in a less terrible circumstance, or that would be required of you in a wonderful circumstance during this life or after death. You do not always have a second chance like the man who was resuscitated, but in every present moment you have the option of entering into the Real Condition and transcending yourself, and that is the Way that I Teach. It is the Way inherent in the considerations of all Free Adepts. The path implied in conventional religion, the religion of childish resort to the Other-Power, the Parent-Deity, is a myth that has been disproven by the gnosis, the experiences, the real commitment of human beings over centuries. It is a false teaching. It is not the Truth. There is Truth, there is a Way, but it is not found in conventional religion. The childish concept of God, you see, is ultimately expressed through the gleeful madness of the religious fanatic. The direct gnosis or Realization of God, however, is expressed through the qualities of Siddhas and Realized saints, real Practitioners and beings who have attained to their Freedom through the process of gnosis in its higher and ultimate form. The religion that is commonly propagandized in the world is exactly like the propagandizing of politics or social norms, the hyping of products and personalities on television. |
