"Be Fearless!": Part 2

John Bent


Although the trip to California was very difficult for Tammy, we finally made it. And very soon after we arrived, we were invited to Darshan, an occasion of devotional sighting of the Guru.

It was a beautiful evening, cool and clear. Two devotees accompanied Tammy and me to the residence of Adi Da Samraj, and we were met there by other devotees, who helped get Tamara to the front of the room, directly in front of Avatar Adi Da's chair. We waited in the peace and stillness of His residence, enveloped by the sound of quiet chanting.

He entered a few minutes later, striding with great Force and Intention toward His seat, but He suddenly turned toward Tamara. She was weeping, and so were all the other devotees in the room. She had a beautiful flower in her mobile right hand, and threw that arm around her Beloved Guru, pulling Him to her.

Their embrace felt as if it was taking place beyond this world. Later, she told me that Adi Da just kept saying over and over, "I love you, I love you, I love you." When the embrace ended, Avatar Adi Da kissed her hand and the flower in it, and then took His seat.

So began a remarkable period of Blessing, during which Tamara and I were invited to every Darshan occasion that Avatar Adi Da offered.

In the midst of this Divine Help, Tamara and I made one last attempt at an alternative cure. It did not work. Both of us now simply turned to Adi Da Samraj to guide Tamara's Spiritual process in the last months of her life.

* * *

In October and November of 2001, Adi Da Samraj Granted His precious Darshan nearly every day. And, every day, Tamara was readied for the trip to her Guru's residence and we drove out — in good weather and bad — to sit with Him. This daily pilgrimage became our life — and we valued it more than life.

Throughout this period, Adi Da Blessed Tamara with His Touch and His Love-Blissful Gaze. He also Graced her with two very important communications that helped her move beyond attachment to the body.

The first communication was on October 23, 2001. It occurred after a Darshan during which Tamara entered into a "depth" place, transcending her ordinary experience of body and mind. Adi Da could feel that in her, He said.

When, after the Darshan, she reassociated in an ordinary way with people around her, her effort to make things socially "okay" reattached her to the body and the objective world of things and events. The consequence was that more fear and anxiety arose in her, and this was reflected in a subsequent letter she wrote to Adi Da about her experience. In response, He said:

The body has fear signs, and these fear signs are no different than a pain in the toe. People who are terminally ill need to give their life to a different purpose.

Basically, it is a life of retreat, a life that leads to the death process. You are allowed that. You are allowed to do that, to be relieved of superficial social involvement. You are allowed to enter into a true renunciate circumstance, a serious life of practice that is profound.

You must allow yourself to go through the changes that lead to the death process, and that has to become a capability and a disposition.

The conditions of life, therefore, have to be completely suited to that and cannot be social. There cannot be a double life. There cannot be double talk about it. Live quietly and meditatively.

Realize the depth zone that you felt in Darshan. You have to have that knowledge or you return to the stress and the double-mindedness. You must release the body.

When someone is sick, that puts everyone in touch with their own reality — and people in general do not give those who are terminally ill the right to die.

Confronted with the terminally ill, people make death into an "evil thing" happening. And that is terrible. It is not true. The community of My devotees must have a way to truly take people through the death process, rather than merely provide supports at the social-environmental level.

The community must really serve the process of release of attachment to the body-mind and its sphere. Double messages about all of this cause suffering, and that seems to be what has occurred with Tamara.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, October 23, 2001

Our Beloved Guru Adi Da was yet again exhorting us to a deeper process of retreat in His Company, and telling His community of devotees to truly support this process in Tamara. More devotees began to serve Tamara in this simple way, and Tammy continued to deepen her resort to Adi Da Samraj.

Simultaneously, we were both pushed to our physical and emotional limits by her disease. The seizures continued, there was another visit to a local hospital, and she was less and less able to talk. And I was still her primary care giver, while trying to keep an accounting and tax business intact.

So, late in November, our letters and their expressions of evident frustration brought the following response from Adi Da Samraj. They were His last detailed instructions to us, full of His Great Intention to Liberate Tamara, myself, and all beings from bondage to suffering and pain.

In her letter, Tamara speaks of coming to terms emotionally with the reality of her circumstance, including feeling anger and transcending it — because, she says, she cannot bypass the feeling of anger.

It is not sufficient for ego-transcendence to merely feel that death is a "perfect insult", as I once described it. I have Spoken to her about this before. Her situation is the same as everyone else's. In replying to her, I am Addressing everyone:

Human beings try to ignore the reality of death, simply because they feel they do not have to deal with it immediately. But that is actually an illusion. You indulge in distractions, and then when something occurs, as in Tamara's case, all of a sudden you feel that you are in a "reality situation".

But everyone lives all the time under that potential threat on life. A threatening disease may make the threat more real, but all must understand that they are in the same circumstance as someone who has a terminal illness.

The business of life is fundamentally a struggle with the fact of death. I recommend that everyone understand this, understand that your situation is the same as that of someone with a terminal illness — from the beginning.

Tamara thinks she is in a more "real" situation now — because she, like everyone else, has been oblivious to the reality of conditional existence. As My devotee, she was not dealing with the reality of death. She was being My devotee nominally, and that is not enough. You must really do the practice of this Way, as I have said.

To be a devotee of Mine, you must become involved in reality altogether — both conditional reality and Unconditional Reality. Do not waste your life in obsessive concerns about the reality of your conditional situation.

What is the mortality of the body? That mortality is primarily what she has her attention on, and she is experiencing much emotion about it — as is her intimate partner. However much he may be dealing with his own piece of flesh in the boat, they are both riding the same wave.

All are riding the same wave, and it is a false concern. You are wasting your life struggling to accept the fact of death. You should have faced that reality when you were born. Remarkably, human beings do not. By virtue of being born, you are involved in an immediate threat to life, and you do not even relate to the fact of it.

I am not blaming Tamara for what she is feeling and experiencing. Her emotional struggle is perfectly natural. However, it does not make any difference that it is perfectly natural. She is wasting life and struggling with the fact of her own mortality, as if something could be done about it.

Nothing can be done. She is wasting time in a psychological crisis, and that is not real sadhana. It is a dimension of sadhana, and I am not belittling it. I feel greatly for her situation. I cannot escape it, either.

But already, throughout the event of her illness, I have addressed this matter. She is using up time coming to terms with My Instruction to her. She, like all, is going to die sometime.

Her intimate partner, by the way, could drop dead sooner than she does. To deny this is a false occupation. It is a dramatization of egoity and a failure Spiritually. It is a form of suffering. The exercise of transcending this illusion must be engaged.

Tamara's business is the Yoga of Divine Realization and Communion with Me, not struggling with conditional reality. There is no "news" about death. Concern about death is just a preoccupation with egoic self and the emotional struggle with the reality situation of conditional existence.

It is a failure to locate the Spiritual Divine and to become preoccupied with That. Being bodily occupied with the Spiritual Divine is the Yoga of the devotional and Spiritual relationship to Me.

Either you will surrender into Communion with Me or you will not. Now is the time to get on with it and stop bargaining with Me and with Spiritual life, which, in her case and everyone's case, requires becoming Divinely Enlightened in Communion with Me instead of boo-hoo-ing about your piece of meat.

I am trying to straighten her out, so I have to make hard sayings sometimes, so that she can allow herself and others to really take advantage of this opportunity she has. She is wasting her opportunity if she remains preoccupied with mortality.

This is the time in her life, given by Grace, for the sake of Spiritual maturity. This woman is not dead. She is alive, and she has been sensitized to mortality. This is her opportunity to forget about that mortality and do the Yoga that I have Given and enter into this Great Process with Me.

Death is a perfect insult to those who have been intensively ego-possessed. That ego-possession is what she is suffering. That is what all her emotions are. Tamara, and all, must enter into the Fullness of the Spiritual Divine. That is the only relief from this obsession.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, November 26, 2001


Next: Part 3


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