the great tradition

Extract from a Discourse in Losing Shadow 
3rd September 2018 

 Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek to find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. 
Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

 The Process of the Sadhana of Self-Realisation is often referred to as the Great Tradition. Why is this? The Great Tradition is the Practice of the Heart rather than the practice of the search for the Heart. In other words it begins with our acknowledgement and understanding that our True Condition is the Un-conditioned Consciousness, rather than our conditioned consciousness. 
It is not a cultural tradition nor is it exclusively contained within any particular religious or spiritual order. 

The Great Tradition makes its way on the basis of the Present Liberating Truth Condition (our prior un-conditioned consciousness) rather than the search for Liberation based on our conditioned consciousness. 

Our conditioned consciousness tends to create a sense of lack in us, a feeling that could be described as existing as a separate entity, alone and frightened. This sensation of lack, of needing love, provokes us to look outside of our self for what seems to be missing. 

For the Process of Liberation from the separate-self complex (ego) to begin we must be willing to examine and understand what we are doing to our Conscious State, what we are actually experiencing as our Conscious State. We must be vulnerably willing to observe and understand the level of Consciousness we inhabit and how we perceive our self and the world. 
For this purpose, the various levels we inhabit are described by such terms as “the personal” and “the impersonal” - the separate self-complex and the Impersonal Being. 

That separate self-complex is most often “who” we think we are, the person we are. 

Rather than take up practices that indulge the search for spiritual fulfillment or, in other words, that offer some sort of fulfillment for the conditional conscious self, the Sadhana of Self-Realisation begins with one’s inspection and understanding of one’s own state of consciousness. 

Anyone who believes and feels their self to be a separate self-person seeks one thing alone and that is fulfillment from relationships and activities and so forth. 

If Realisation of our Un-conditioned consciousness is to be Realised, attention must be progressively liberated from the ego-bound-self - the separate self-complex that is at the root of all our human problems. 

And, if this is to be True of us, the preparation and practice must be practical not merely theoretical. When it is reduced in our minds to a theoretical practice we can justify anything at all to be Spiritual Practice. 

For this preparation and the practice of devotional understanding to begin, one must be willing to observe how one’s emotional attention is turned towards and in sympathy with the separate self-complex. 

While we are seemingly “trapped” in our separate self- complex or the personal consciousness, we are not involved in an acute emotional feeling response to the Natural world, to fulfillment by the already Universal Consciousness but rather, we are in a contracted feeling response to our own need to obtain the feeling of self-fulfillment from another. 

Whether we want to admit it or not (and mostly we do not) at the level of energy, attitude, expectations - we harbour demands upon another to fulfill our sensation of lack. 
In fact we interpret love, or the feeling of being loved when our sense of lack is obliterated or fulfilled by another. 

Now, allow me to be clear in your mind. I have never said the Way of Self-Realisation excludes relationships and activities. I have never said we need or should give up sex, money, food. I do not subscribe to those kinds of remedies. 

You are not required to throw away or transcend or reject food, sex or money. In the Way of Self-Realisation we are obliged to devotionally understand and love-fully transcend the fear complex, generated by the separate self-complex idea or assumption that is underlying and informing our food, sex and money motive. 

The sensation of lack is fear. To understand is to understand the lack-complex and how we go about trying to blot it out. 

The Way of Sadhana, the Way of True Self-Understanding, is not an invitation to look at your mind and find an answer. 
It is a Process, first of all, to focus attention on the Source of individuation within yourself (not another) or how the mind is a contraction upon the separate self-complex and its own concerns. In other words, this practice makes its Way by love-fully surrendering yourself at the root out of which individuation arises ….Universal Consciousness or Love. 

In other words, surrender is to give up the perceived barrier of separation and the separate self-complex determination to maintain it.  

The circumstance and function of the Great Relationship with the Spiritual Real or the Impersonal Consciousness or the Living Human Spiritual Adept is for the Sacred purpose of investigating the Nature of our form, of what you call you. We are investigating the Truth Condition of that conditional form. 

We are not merely examining the experiences of the body-mind or trying to work out the mayhem that it has created. All the trying to fix the problems created by the ego-bound self has nothing to do with, or is not concerned with Liberation from the ego-bound self. All this fixing is just another way of turning attention to the separate self-complex and its dilemmas.

The Practice of Self-Realisation has nothing to do with fixing anything at all. That is one of the reasons it is such an offense to most people’s search.

The personal sense of self is an arbitrary superimposition, a self-centered projection upon Reality. It is all about me and me and me, and what I am entitled to and what I deserve, and so forth. From that point of view we humans have created all the problems, our social inequalities, our conditional relationships, our destructive stress. We do not co-create Life with Life - we create stress. 

So, why would one truly desire to begin the Process of the Sadhana of Self-Realisation?
Only one who has truly come to see she or he is missing, or avoiding, or in denial of the State of Un-conditioned Love (Un-conditioned consciousness) the State or Force or Energy that is the State of Nature. It is Nature and therefore it is the State of the body. Love is the State of Nature. That Inherent State is the Source of one’s true sense of fulfillment. 

However, it must be Realised whole bodily. It must be Realised as your True identity, rather than the conditioned identity, the personal identity. 

When one truly sees this they will, at the same time, genuinely see how they are looking for the sense of fulfillment externally. One becomes brave enough to see and acknowledge how one is relying on the “other” (other meaning the external) be it some experience, some person or some form of knowledge to obtain the feeling, the sensation of fulfillment. We truly begin to see our demand on nature and others, our self-righteous justified demand on all others and experience, to give us that sense of fulfillment. It is a crippling demand on our self and a crippling demand on the other. It is Soul destroying to both. 

 It is to live as though you are not a whole human being. 

When we live our self that way we are constantly moved towards opportunities and practices wherein we feel we will have a better chance of getting fulfilled from whatever “external other.” 

Our sense of obtaining fulfillment becomes reliant on some or other external condition, not on our Very True Self Condition. 

In this way our need to obtain a sense of fulfillment from a function or relationship gets in the way of freely and creatively participating in and with our function or our relationships. 
The need to obtain a sense of fulfillment from the function gets in the way of our present free energy Self. 

I feel more and more how much it confounds me, dismays me, that most humans do not want to truly look into this. 

The misunderstanding of the Great Tradition of the Sadhana of Awakening is most often revealed through our misunderstanding within this context of the terms “personal” and “impersonal,” the “Being” and the “person.” 

If a carpenter comes to this Heart and begins truly to enter into the Process of Awakening, she can still “do” carpentry. 
Later on, the difference for that one is she will no longer be doing it to obtain her sense of fulfillment, which will already be the case. 

So, what does that mean for her? She will not be there for her. She will be Present. She will be un-usually attractive at the level of Energy, of Disposition, of Love. She will not be trying to get a sense of fulfillment from the function. She will be already full. She will be Present. She will be free of the self-complex demand to get her own fulfillment from the function. She will be Present. She will function as Love in the midst of whatever the earthly function she serves. 

Her or his Free Being will perform the function through her or his body. The “personal” body is still there but Love or the Impersonal Consciousness is the doer. 

She will progressively be free of the “personal-self-complex” that previously looked outside of itself for love, for acknowledgement, for approval; the person that is always measuring, comparing, wanting, arguing for its entitlement to externally given fulfillment. 

She will be free at last of the adolescent stage within the shock or recoil of our physical birth. She will be born again as Her Free Self. 

That Self Truth Condition does not need love from another or approval from another for the human being to feel fulfilled. One has no more demands on another in order to obtain one’s sense of fulfillment. In this way you have set all others free – free of the demand they must fulfill your expectations, your demand they make you feel fulfilled. 

I am not a “teacher.” 
The teaching function is the function wherein one teaches something that is not Inherent in the Being. 
I do not “teach” anything that is not Inherent in the Human Being. 

I do not teach any form of yoga. I do not “teach” any form of meditation from a sect, or a method of meditation such as Zen meditation, or chakra meditation, or kundalini meditation and so forth. 

I have declared before, many years ago, to the vexation and resentment from those who hold onto their forms, that I am not interested in supplying lightweight luxuries for the mob. 

Rather, I exhort you to understand this: our Practice must be a Practice of the Very Best that is in us already - Love. 

 Here in this Hermitage, the Renunciate Heart approaches you in such a Way as to initiate you into the Mystery of Love in order that you are able to ascend by means of Love, rather than merely gratify the self-complex-person effort for external fulfillment. 

What I came to see through the years of Sadhana and, again now, is how we much prefer teachers (or that kind of relationship) because it provides the “student” with a sense of getting something. It tends to satisfy (for a while and for as long as each can meet the other’s demand) the desire to be special or important to someone. 

As long as we are getting something (that is, achieving some sense of fulfillment from the teacher or relationship etc. - something outside of our self) we feel better. 

We want to “fix” something. To go out and “fix” the world, “fix” the social problem, “fix” others. Not to stop, to retreat, to move back through the layers of conditioning in our own case to discover, feel and locate the Un-conditioned Consciousness that patiently awaits us….that State that needs no fixing. That State that is already Love and is its own fulfillment. 

If you get what you want in your current self-complex condition or state, you will not Awaken. You will move deeper into comfortable sleep and you will call it enlightenment. Yes, you will feel better, your self-complex will feel better, and you will perceive that as being more Awake. 

When you get what you want while in the current separate self-complex, you are only more separate self-complex remembering and not separate self-complex forgetting.  

Beloved. 

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek to find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. 
 Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī