Believing In God

For as long as I can remember I have wanted a relationship with God. My first serious prayers consisted of a plea to above to give me a chance to get a placing in the school cross country. When I came in first my faith was cemented and the process of developing some sort of understanding of the powers beyond the physical began.

In my 12th year I became anorexic and pretty much sent my whole family into a spin. My mother belonged to a 12 step group and I ended up joining this organization to heal my 'eating problem'. Again, a call to above instantaneously relieved me of the more serious aspects of that crippling obsession and I had more confirmation of the God Power in the world. I also had a very healthy dose of moral bargaining as part of the deal...I will be a 'good' girl if you continue to help me succeed in life. In hindsight and with some maturity I realized that one type of dependency just replaced another but 18 years heavily involved in a 12 step program did give me a certain grounding and continued yearning for real relationship with the Divine.

After ousting the moral God of my youth I decided that New Age personal growth might be where some deeper sense of what it was all about could be found and I spent many years in self development and experiential body therapies, developing skills and connection with people but I would always come up against a growing sense of failure to really find the God that surely was. Along with all the searching was a an observation of what I did - found the new 'saving thing', threw myself into it, fantastic, amazing, then a descending sense of acute disappointment and confusion about how it didn't quite cut the mustard. I got so familiar with this in myself that every new venture began with the foretelling of the upcoming tragic move away from the modality and memory of the feeling in the pit of my stomach that heralded the turn of the tide downward.

I tried periods of giving up altogether, just taking life as it came and accepting this was its lot but it never lasted long before I would dive into the next hoped for salvation, regardless of my awareness of my pattern of searching. It never occurred to me that the search might be the root of the problem although I always had a major kickback reaction when my search was pointed out.

Which leads to now and my search leading to Adi Da Samraj. At last I have found the the peace I knew was possible, not in any realized personal manner but certainly in the Form of this truly Realized Man. Something that was attractive to me was Adi Da's address to the search being the problem and the impossibility of finding God through seeking. He also said that trying not to search was grounded in the same search so that was fruitless as well! Now I didn't quite know what one was supposed to do with that but on some level it made perfect sense given what I had done with my life so far.

Adi Da calls people to notice their seeking and how the lack of connection to the Divine goes with this. He calls the seeking and whole feeling of 'Me' and 'I', 'Self-contraction'and explains how it is this sense that actually prevents us from Divine Self Realization. My practice is to notice this and over time it is becoming clearer and clearer that this is indeed the case. It is in moments when this self is somehow not turned in on itself with attention that I feel freedom and happiness. I can feel how habituated and fooled I am in the belief that I really exist as a totally separate being and how most everything I do is a reinforcement of that being the case. And so I have been called to question most everyhing I have presumed about life and what it truly so in the deepest sense.

I now feel a real living relationship with the Divine Itself, or at least the process that can unfold into true realized understanding rather than mere thoughts and guesses and searches about it. Its a miraculous thing and I am most grateful for it, even to the point of seeing that all the searching has been a necessary part of getting to here now. In many ways I needed to give many avenues, mental, emotional and physical in nature, a jolly good go, in order to be convinced of the lack of success in the search