I Am More Like You Than You Are

a talk by Avatar Adi Da Samraj
September 15, 1982

The following is a most profound, impassioned talk given to devotees by Avatar Adi Da Samraj, spoken in 1982, during the years of His Teaching Work, when He animated the specific Spiritual Capability to identify with devotees in order to Instruct them. Here Adi Da laid bare the unprecedented Nature of His Unlimited and Unrestrained Participation in His Teaching Work during that time.

My Play with My devotees is associated with profound physical discomfort. This process of Submitting Myself to you all involves physical suffering, because in doing so I become you. I take on your mind-force, your karmas, your vision, your state. I duplicate you in this body. I express you. I do the same things as you. It is not Me — it is a reflection, a mirror, a form of sacrificial participation.

My Work with you involves a particular Siddhi [Spiritual Capability], one that has not been fully animated traditionally, because the circumstances were different in the past. When I sleep at night, I experience the dreams of people, the states of mind of people. These dreams and mind-states do not have anything to do with Me. Yet I experience very directly all of the qualities of everyone with whom I become associated, because My particular way of Teaching does not involve abstraction from those whom I Teach. It involves intimate identification with them. This is the unique quality of My life, My manner of Teaching, My manner of Instructing people, My Service to them. This is what you must understand. This is what you must communicate about Me, such that people will understand the unique quality of My Work.

My Work is not altogether performed as the work of teaching has been performed traditionally. Traditionally, it has not been required of Adepts to Work in precisely the manner that I do. I Work through a different form of Submission to My devotees. Thus, I Submit to be vulgar and ordinary, like you, in order to Teach you. I am just like you when I Teach. People occasionally do not understand how the process works when it takes this special form. I certainly hope you understand it.

Adi Da Samraj: I enter into this body, from the head all the way down to the feet, into the whole damn thing, in order to examine the conditional body-mind with you, to animate it with you, to be exactly that and to transcend exactly that. This is my unique manner of Working. Although some precedents exists for it traditionally, it is basically a unique way of Working that has been necessitated by this particular time and place. You who have been witness to it, who have enjoyed My Service to you, must understand it and communicate to others exactly how it has taken place. It has not occurred merely in the usual form of persuasive speech from a thinking, convinced character. This Work that I have done is the expression of the Transcendental, Inherently Spiritual, and Self-Evidently Divine Samadhi and Divine Self-Realization, Descending not merely into the upper regions of the brain or the throat, but into the body altogether, and thereby Submitting, in love, to those with whom He is associated.

You become what you meditate on. I meditate on My devotees and I become them. I become exactly them. I take on all the limitations that they are. I become just like them. I become more like them than they are. I become exaggeratedly what they are. I become what they are altogether, while they remain only what they can express in the midst of their limitations, their self-consciousness. I become them completely. Thus, that which I "Consider" with you is the very thing that I have actually become by meditation on you. I Submit to devotees as to the Divine Reality, just as they turn to Me in the same fashion.

This is the unique form of My Teaching Work. Teachers in the past have talked about coming down a little into the body and still being above it somehow. I am also always Above and Beyond the body-mind, but My manner of Teaching is to Submit to the body completely, to be this body completely. By becoming this body, I become your bodies. This is how I meditate people. This is why the Siddhis associated with My Demonstration of Divine Self-Realization are as they are. After I passed through the incident of My Divine Re-Awakening in the Vedanta Temple (in Los Angeles in 1970), I continued to do something like meditation every day, even though it was not necessary. I did not feel My own body and mind. Instead, I saw hundreds and thousands of people and experienced them directly. I was them directly.

This is what I mean when I say that I am meditating you. It is not merely a matter of introducing force into your body-mind — although that is an aspect of it. I actually become what you are. I receive it. I become your state of mind, your state of body. I experience the dis-eases, the neuroses, the emotional problems, the state of everyone with whom I am associated, including many more people than are with Me personally and many more people than those who are presently associated with this gathering. I experience thousands upon thousands of people, ultimately everyone, including entire conditionally manifested universe, subtle and gross.

I take on the form of all beings, and by taking on their form I meditate them. In other words, I do the Sadhana [Divine Work] of Divine Self-Realization in the form of you. I do your sadhana while being you. I do not merely tell you the Teaching, but I become you and enter into the process as you. In that process, I experience all of your psychic states, your emotional states, and your social states.

I am a wild character, because I am being all kinds of people other than the one that I seem to be. This is literally true. This is exactly what I am doing, and it is a remarkable and extraordinary process. There are no precedents for it, because the moment has not previously existed for an Adept to Work as I Work. In their time and place all the Adepts have Worked as they should have. This is a unique time, however, and the Siddhi of My manifestation, My Work of Teaching, must be uncommon, unusual. The precedents that exist for it are only partial. No one has Worked precisely as I do. My Work is the most Heroic way to Teach. I actually become the limited or (un-Enlightened being) that I Teach. This is a completely unique, dangerous, and Heroic way of Teaching.

I am not carrying out any formulated plan. I Work spontaneously. This is the way I have always done it from birth.

The pleasures in this body never exist by themselves. All of the opposites are always present in My body. Whenever pleasure is stimulated in this body, pain is stimulated, also. The more this body enjoys itself, the more sick it becomes. It is a very strange affair. My Play with My devotees has been associated with sickness, disease, and pain. This does not mean that it should not have been done, or that you should keep Me from doing it. To Me, it is merely interesting. It is fine. This exaggeration is always a marvel, a Mystery.

I Work this way only because I am moved to you emotionally. I have felt this emotional movement ever since infancy. I first decided to incarnate this Work when I was about two years old, and the reason for it was a spontaneous motivation associated with a painful loving of the people around Me. It was not merely compassion for them, as if they were poor people whom I could help — it was a painful emotional and physical sensation in My heart and in My solar plexus. It was profoundly painful even then, and it always has been. It was associated with the full knowledge that these people to whom I was committing myself were going to die, and that I would die. I knew that if I incarnated this Function, if I became this body, I would die. We are going to be separated from one another. We are all going to be destroyed. This was all fully obvious to Me, and yet this spontaneous gesture, this painful loving, this profound sensation awakened in Me and moved Me into the body, animated Me physically.

Thus, all of My life I have been animated by this Siddhi. You can describe this motivation as the spiritual quality of compassion or love, but it is more than that. It actually enters into the realm of the body and goes beyond ordinary decision-making, ordinary thinking. It is controlled by the sensation of loving itself. When that sensation arises, it animates the body. My entire life has been moved by this peculiar, strange sensation, this painful acknowledgment, this painful loving of people, this painful sensitivity to the state of people. This has moved Me to enter the state that you are in, to enter into it completely, psychologically, emotionally, physically. I have always entered into the state that everyone is in. I have entered into it more profoundly than people ordinarily do, because most people have tremendous blocks to experiencing their actual state. I have completely entered into it, but have done so spontaneously. It is not a decision I make based on any idealism. It is nothing like that. It is an imposition, a spontaneous, living motivation.