In order to be faithful to a vow — like the Eternal Vow of Adidam — you have to be a person with integrity. And in order to be a person with integrity, you have to be an integrated person.

You cannot do moment-to-moment practice if you are a dis-integrated person! Whatever you promise or vow or intend to do one day is negated by what you do the next day, when a different "you" — a different egoic pattern — is sitting on the throne of the body-mind.

The third stage of life is mature when the individual enjoys integrated responsibility for the whole of the living being (physical, emotional-sexual, and mental). Thus, he is in that case able to be present as a clear will and as love under all the otherwise frustrating or pleasurable conditions of lower experience. Those who seek to begin spiritual life must be mature in this sense in order to move on to higher maturity. Otherwise they will have no stability of will and love to keep them in the practice. Those who are constantly complaining and regressing in the practice of the Way are simply not yet mature in the ordinary human sense. They are weak of will (thus of mind) and of love (thus of life and body and feeling). Prepare yourself first. Approach me when you are strong in the human way. And waste no time in that preparation. Otherwise you will only suffer a life and a future that are mediocre, foolish, frustrated, obsessed, and unawakened to Truth and Happiness.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
"First Become Human", The Enlightenment of the Whole Body

Over His years of teaching devotees, Adi Da has given us a couple of ways to address the matter of integration:

  1. Integrate via right alignment using the higher faculties — Use the will to command the lower faculties to do the practice.

  2. Happiness serves as the principle that integrates the person — "Come to me when you are already happy." My desire to stay Happy in Divine Communion, and not lose my current state of Happiness moves me to engage the disciplines, etc. Also the presence of Happiness, rather than self-contraction, removes the usual motivation that turns one into a seeker. You don't need to overeat or eat junk food if that disturbance in the vital that usually is why you want to stuff something in your mouth (with the intent of numbing that abdominal pain) is not there.

    Even after you are able to release the vital shock in the abdomen, so that motivating feeling of discomfort isn't there to move you to seek, to fully deal with overeating and junk food eating, you also have to deal with force of habit — which creates a sense of "psychic discomfort" if you don't do what you have always been in the habit of doing.


Part IV-C, Chapter 7




Da