Go To The Heart Of It, The Practice Of Deep Listening

In aboriginal Australian culture, Dadirri means a deep inner listening to the quiet, still Awareness within. In this deep listening, we experience little drops of inner stillness, or what Premasudha has described as "Blue Moments", multi-leveled instances of illumination that arise as we turn inward. Dadirri is so simple! It is awakening each morning and deciding yet again to open our hearts to life, making room for the subtle glimmerings from the Soul. Or it might be walking through Nature and allowing ourselves to be captivated by a tree, a flower, a cloud, and just "being with" its full presence. It is the ongoing reverence for life expressed moment-by-moment by listening inwardly, even during our busy lives.
Contributors (Satsang members): Jenna S. & Eva D.

Transcript

Premasuddha feels there's a great gift coming through today, Because it is totally possible to do this, Even in the most complicated society. Premasuddha promises you this. And there will be room for mistakes, Without catastrophe occurring. The heart has endless spaciousness, Endless. So, I wish to speak about didheri. Didheri is the name the first people of Australia give to their primary spiritual practice. It is beyond that. It is the way they live their lives. And it's a deep listening. And children learn this very early, And of course children are deep listeners anyway. So in this simple, Simple society, That intrinsic innocence is validated and fertilized, And there's room for it to grow. It is the gateway to the heart. It's the gateway to, You know, Amma, Christ, Krishna, Buddha, All of them. We find them in our hearts because we are that too. You know, When Amma Suddha looks back at her life, I see that in that period of emotional chaos where I basically encountered the ego, And it was like totally getting lost in the labyrinth. And what got me out of it was no religion. It was this deep listening. It was like when, You know, There were no rules left. There was sort of nothing left of my existence. All I could do was to just listen. And Paramahansa Suddha really wants to help you feel how safe it is to listen, To listen to your heart, To listen to the heartbeat of the universe. Your heart is the heartbeat of the universe. It's not separate from you guys. It's not like a game that we have to learn the rules to, And then we'll play it successfully. It isn't that. It's living this didiri way. No matter what religion one's in or what country one's from, I don't think anything else is going to work. You know, I've said many times that what Westerners can do with practices, It's not just Westerners, Any of us. In a way, The ego loves practices. It will say, OK, I did my meditation, I'm doing my yoga, I'm being a good girl, I'm being a good boy. But it's not just that. I mean, The whole purpose of these practices are to still our minds enough. We learn to still our minds enough so that we can enter into the practice of didiri, Which is the deep listening. Right. That's it. That's it. The Vedantins say the same thing. They say, You know, If you keep the focus on the silence within as you live your life, Gradually, That silence within will dissolve your ego. It's the same thing, You guys. And, You know, Doing practices regularly does help to kill the ego, Because if we do them, Even when we don't want to, We weaken the ego. So it's all good. I feel that it's like, Though, You know, You know, Just as the focus on climate change has got lost in endless meetings and political, Just endless meetings and discussion and everything, And we lost the heart of it, Which is to love Mother Nature and to realize that if she's damaged, We're damaged. We won't be able to continue. You know, If all the bees die, Our food goes. We kind of lost sight of that. We got lost in meetings and discussions and arguments, All at the head level. We missed the heart of it. I feel with the religious journey, With the spiritual journey, The same thing can happen. We can get lost in just doing spiritual practices, But not at a deep level, But just doing these things, These rituals and all these things which are wonderful. But if we lose the heart of the journey, If we lose, If we don't open to the deep listening, We don't open to the love within us and that's in everything, We're going to miss the heart of the spiritual journey. Again, I want to say this is not our fault. This is our conditioning. You know, Amma said recently, Or I saw a video recently where she said, You know, If children grow up with nature, They cannot treat her badly in adulthood. They will love Mother Nature if they grow up surrounded by her. It's so simple, You guys. And the aboriginals all over the world, They grow up in Mother Nature. You know, When we first come to the earth, We really are like infant souls. There's soul development. It's infant souls, Baby souls, Young souls, Which are like 8 to 12. That's where we are as a world, Mature level, Which is, You know, Teenagehood kind of conflicted. And then there's adulthood where, You know, It's the full development. So, The really early souls, Like infant and baby, Have a lot of the same understanding that finally comes to us in late-level soul development. We get like grandmother energy, Grandfather energy. Do you know that, You know, With grandparents, You know, The grandparents and the kids walk at the same pace, Basically. So, The parents are rushing along and behind them come, You know, The old people and the kids. And that's the same with the understanding. We start off just incredibly innocent like babies and small children. And as we develop on our spectrum, We go through the other phases. And then we return to late-level old soul wisdom, Which is a return to the innocence. If that person goes conscious, There's a return to the same level of innocence in the earliest souls. Pemasuta wonders if a lot of the Aboriginal cultures aren't full of infant and baby souls, Who just know that, You know, The sun is God, The earth is God. And then our cultures are more like the young soul development, Maybe mature a bit, But a lot of the young soul, Which is this focus on, I win, You lose. So, The older soul will say, I win, You win. Let's come up with that kind of solution. The younger soul, Who's really hoodwinked by this material illusion, Will say, You know, I win, You lose. That will make them feel safest, Oddly enough. And they'll feel the safest with a big, You know, A lot of material gain. Because they don't really think there's anything beyond. But as the soul develops, More and more, The true knowledge bleeds through. So, Even if an older soul gets, You know, Is growing up in a very materialistic culture, It doesn't fit very well with them. They know there's something else that's really true. They can't, You know, Really, Older souls will tend to try to find some kind of place where they can earn their living without having to enter into the chaos of the regular world. They'll often be like manual labor. Older souls will tend to, Or even being a bartender, You know, Sharing wisdom, Hearing stories. They'll kind of try to live off the grid a bit. That's if they're following their hearts, You know. If they're going along with their conditioning, They'll just do what everybody else does. But they'll be uncomfortable with it. This practice of Tadiri is so simple. It's like waking up in the morning and deciding to be just open and listening. To make room for the glimmers that are wanting to come, That your soul is wanting you to hear. The soft messages that we have to slow down to hear and open our hearts and minds to hear and to respect them, To value them and follow them. And again, It's not a to-do thing. It's just part of the practice. It's not like, Oh, I have to listen. It's just sort of getting up, Standing, And opening your heart to life and going into your day. It's a being quality. It's a being action. It's something that comes out of the truth of you more. It's not a practice to be imposed on you. It's just to come out of the truth of you. It's like a loving mum doesn't get up in the morning and go, Well, I have to love my kids today. She just gets up in the morning and she loves them. It's like that. You know, When we first start listening more deeply, Okay, I'm feeling this for the group, You might see your prickles. You see, We, As we deepen into this practice of living this way, At first, What will happen is, Our soul will be asking us to clear our resistance to it. So, I'm seeing this kind of bouquet of prickles that we might, We might encounter in ourselves, And we see, Yeah, Like, Boy, Does Premasutha ever know about encountering your prickles, Believe me. Truly. So, You see them. With the practice of the theory, Or the same Vedanta, You know, Looking at it from that way, You observe. You observe. And the act of observing these prickles, And feeling how much they do not work, Dissolves them. You see, This is why it's sincerity is so important. And a true yearning, Because without sincerity and a true yearning, You can't really do this process. You won't be able to listen deeply. So, Just noticing where you aren't allowing yourself to listen deeply, Dissolves the resistance, The obstruction, And you deepen. Really, I can tell you, Premasutha's seen horrifying resistance within herself, Believe me. Thank you. And so, You know, Please don't judge whatever you encounter. But, You know, Even just behind this bouquet of prickles, Or, You know, The resistance that comes up, You will feel the depth. It's like smelling the scent of the ocean, Smelling the scent of the soul. You'll feel something beyond it. That's it. And we need great, I feel, We need great compassion for these prickles, Because our cultures were growing up in prickles. And, You know, We have lifetimes of learning resistance, Of learning that it was safer to resist the soul energy. So, This is how it is, You guys. This is how Premasutha experienced life. If you think of a tree, You know, In the forest, And there's a fire. And the fire comes, And it, You know, Burns your bark, I mean, Singes your leaves. And maybe think that the fire didn't come your way because you were praying with such sincerity to be in touch with the Creator, To know the Creator, To be in Amma's energy, To express the love and compassion that she shows so fully. So, The fire didn't totally destroy you. You see, It won't. No matter what happens in your life, Nothing can destroy you if you hold on to the Creator. I promise you. It can't. That is Premasutha's secret. This is how I survived having a mentally unbalanced mom in the early years, My brother beating me up in my early years, Randomly, Any time, And then going through all the traumas I went through that came as a result of having that kind of difficult patterning. And I just prayed through it all, Basically. You know, And if I didn't pray, I just I knew there was something more. So, You guys, We emerge, Maybe, With a bit of a burnt bark, Maybe our difficulties, What we're feeling right now, Emotionally, Or you know, Maybe we're getting a difficult situation in the outside. So, Your bark gets a bit burned, Your leaves a bit singed, But you have that nectar within, You have the sap within that is coming from you know, Your roots are tapping into something deep underneath. And the nutrients come. And the sap flows. And it brings you back into high, Good health. And it's a bigger health, It's a wiser health. When steel goes into the you know, When they're making steel, When they put it into the fire, Every time it goes into the fire, It's stronger. It emerges stronger. There is nothing outside of you that can defeat you. The only thing that can defeat you is your head, Your thoughts, Your view of yourself and this world. Yeah. And this practice of dideri, This way of living, Is this ongoing, Continual focus on love, The truth, The Creator, Amma, The little proddings of your heart, The insights. And truly, It's invincible because God is invincible. You know, In this practice you might go out into nature and find you know, Either focus on something like a tree or a plant or even a clump of dirt and you make a bond with it, Not trying to. It just happens. Especially as you develop, As your heart develops, It just happens. Or you can let something grab you. You can let a flower grab you. Or a tree or a cloud, Whatever, Grab you. And be with it. Be with it. It's less of a focusing on it that I said before, It's more of a being with it. Being with it. You guys, That is what Prama Sutta does. I be with you. Yeah. You know, If somebody's in great grief, What helps isn't advice or anything, It's just being with them. And then from that being, You do whatever you feel they most need. It's being with nature. But this practice of either choosing something to be with or letting it choose you is very much like how we make progress by either loving somebody, Loving the creator, Or letting the creator love us. You know, Receiving it. Giving it or receiving it. Prama Sutta made a lot of progress. I did it for my kids. It was only later I realized that really underneath I was doing it for myself. That I was the one who was benefiting. It's so simple, You guys. It's so simple and deep. And there is no fixing in it at all. It is just being with. But it's like I say with my kids, I used to feel that I missed the obvious. The simplest thing is just being with kids and responding to them. But I had kind of all kinds of ideas of how I thought a mother should be and how I thought kids should be and blah blah blah blah. Right. But we don't have to miss the obvious anymore. We can just deepen at this time, You guys. There's this tremendous opening where we can come into our hearts just simply. And it's like you just get it. It's just like on the spiritual journey. It's often a couple of years after somebody begins it there's this kind of watershed moment where they start understanding it much more deeply. We just get brought to it by something beyond us. Right. I can feel how all of you, All of us are being held by the creator. Yeah. You see, It's all okay. It's safe to deepen. It's even safe not to deepen in a way. It's like it's safe to just be where you are Can't force deepening. It's trying to force a love affair. We know what happens. It doesn't work. The couple split. You can't force someone to love you. But you can receive love. You know, In the practice of Dhadiri, It's like following the little drops of stillness that you might experience in this way of deep listening is exactly what Premasuddha talks about with the blue moments. The blue moments where there's a convergence of meaning. It is just like experiencing these drops of stillness that come from the practice of listening is the same thing. Premasuddha feels that rituals keep us focused on the creator. It's really good. And they can suspend our usual intellectual mind for a while. We get lost in the ritual. And so then we open to the deeper understanding. We open. We start receiving these drops of stillness. That's the point of why the rituals. But you can do a ritual in a very arid, Mechanical way and never get anything from it. This is why, You see, We can't fool the creator And, You know, If our results, If we're feeling we're not making progress, Maybe we need to make a big change in focus. Maybe we need to really wake up and smell the coffee and look at ourselves and how we're living. You know, This can feel so scary to Westerners, I mean, Premasuddha feels, Just because it was very scary to me because I was so lost in the labyrinth and so my intellect was so busy so to deepen was profoundly scary on one level because the whole labyrinth was saying to Premasuddha, You know, You can fix it. It's solvable in here. Don't don't go too far away. Don't there's nothing out there except darkness and an abyss. That's what it feels like in the labyrinth. It will feel like, You know, If you stray too far, There's an abyss, But I'll tell you guys any abyss we fall into, When you fall into an emotional abyss, You get an experience of everything you're not loving. Truly, That's all an abyss is. It is you get an experience of the cost of the refusal to love. That's it. And if you just be with it, Embrace it, You know, Go out into nature, Journal, Do something creative, Just be with it. Be with it. It will turn into God. The resistance to the Creator dissolves and you unite with your heart. This happened to Prema Sudha over and over again in her 40s. And the whole point of, You know, The reason why I teach is like I say, I can't stand the thought of people being lost in these experiences without assistance. And you know, Maybe I'm scaring some of you and it's like, You guys, You know, We're gonna get it. We're gonna get hardship from the outside or the inside. If you feel it on the inside, You work with it there, Your whole life will be soft and you'll be the tree that did not get burned up by the fire. And if you resist facing the stuff inside, You get it from the outside. It's kind of how it is. So I want everybody to have like, You know, The usual expression is have balls but also, You know, Have ovaries. You know. I mean it. Down on your ovaries, Ladies. Really, Because I'm sometimes the degree of oh, I don't know if I can do this. I'm kind of like, Do you want this or not, Sweetie? You know, It's kind of like, Oh. It's sort of like if you're doing a PhD course, You do it. If you want it, You do it. And I have endless empathy for the fear and everything but you know. If you've got a little kid who wants to play in the shallow water, You let them play in the shallow water. And just be with you guys. Be with whatever. Premasutha would be with her fear. I would be with my desire to manipulate my experience. I would be with my corruption. I would see it. I would be with it. And it would transform. Be with. Turn to the creator and be with whatever comes up. Whatever you're experiencing. Be with it. Right. And you know, Let it change as it changes. Let it change for you. We might be stuck in incredible resistance that feels that it could never be solved, But I'll tell you, If you're just with it, With all the feelings, Keep reminding yourself about the creator. Listen to your heart. Listen to the glimmerings. Listen to the signs of spring. If you're going through a hard time, Listen for the signs of spring and water them. Water the little sprouts of understanding that come. You can't fail. And it's always all right, Because we're just held here in great love and devotion, And angels are talking to us all the time. Our soul is always witnessing us, And it will speak to us as we ask, As we open. You know, Angels are always witnessing us. The soul goes along with us, And then every so often it will just say a few words. It's like Amma like that. This is my experience of Amma, That she lets us do what we do, But if we're really starting to, Whatever we're doing is really starting to hurt us, Obstruct our progress, She will speak a few words. Our souls do that too. You know, I've talked about my dad's overwhelming ambition and stuff, And I don't know whether it's genetic or what, But Premasuddha's drive has been one of my biggest difficulties. A huge drive. Even now, I can feel a kind of okay, Let's get this show on the road. It's kind of like, I know it's so stupid, And you know, Sometimes I'll just get a few words coming from my soul. It's kind of saying that it's all being orchestrated by something beyond. It's already happened. Whatever's happening is the creator's will, Sama's will, And it is perfection. It is perfection the way it is. It kind of has come from, It's like an inevitability that it is the way it is. And it is the flow of the creator, It is absolute perfection as it is. Right. And wherever you are in your life is the flow of perfection. And we get brought into difficulty, And we get brought out of it. And the highest way is to observe and let the resistance or darkness within you dissolve over time. Many of you, When I speak to you, You speak as if oh, There's darkness in you that has to be fixed, And as soon as you think that way, You're screwed. I'll tell you, You're a divine being. Think that way. You're a divine being learning. You are love incarnate. You are love incarnate and listen. Okay, Do you get the difference? I am love incarnate, And I listen and respond to my soul. You see the difference between that and I've got this darkness. I've got to do something to fix it. Remember, Any darkness you feel is coming from this life before you were able to do anything about it or other lives. There's deep reasons for it. It's not a mistake. Even the fact that we get so deluded on our journeys, This is the gig. We come to earth, We get totally deluded, Get full of vasanas and darkness, And then we start waking up and evolving out of it. Just like the grandmother, Grandfather energy, That person, They have a wisdom. They view what's going on and they hopefully become non-reactive. They just watch all the people in their families go through their stuff and they love them as much as possible and they offer advice when they're asked. Right, It's like that, You guys. It's like a gradual unfolding of the true essence of the soul within a human life. You know, The East say the point of life is self-realization and at some, There is some lifetime where we will get it and we will open like the rarest orchid in the world and give our gift. Right. It will happen. Our premise suit is private theory is sometimes people stay asleep just till their last deathbed. They get it on their last deathbed like my mom did. You see, There are all kinds of ways to live our lives, You know. But please understand that this is a gig of self-realization for souls and we need a lot of compassion for ourselves, I feel, With our training to be anything other than our souls, You know. It's kind of like, You know, Don't love too much. Look at our culture. We're interrupting the bonding time with the moms. We are setting up people to be alienated. Truly, The stupidity of it is just boggling, You know, Because we got, You know, Gandhi said that if you take care of the innocence of children, You would not have hardly any social problems. It's, You know, I remember Abraham saying, If you hold the hand of the child between zero and six well, Then at six you can let the hand go. The child becomes pretty independent in a good way. Having had all their early needs met. And they become independent and, You see, What we do is we don't meet these early needs and then we have children coming back long into adulthood or maybe we're one of the children who's still looking for the love from our parent that we didn't get as children. You see, We have so much to learn. But, You know, Small groups change the world. So, You know, And look, There's Amma. Yeah. She has changed the world. The fact that we're even doing this, I feel, Is because of Amma. It wouldn't have happened without her. See, It's so simple, You know, You hear this and it's so simple and then it's too. You know, To do the listening. But, You know, There is some change happening. This opening into the heart is getting easier with all of you. I feel this. And it will be going, I mean, It will be happening all over the world. I said this before, This evolutionary shift we're in. We've had this, You know, From about 1945. We've had like this will be like 100 years for us to make the shift. You know, It's like an offering of relative peace so we can make this shift. Into, From a young soul with a focus on material, Goods, The, You know, I win, You lose. The kind of focus on this illusion without much trust is anything else. Shifting into material level, Which is more, It's focused more on cooperation than the individual. The young soul highlights the individual who got all these billionaires, You know, Walking around with, You know, Enough wealth for countries. This focus on the individual. The shift into the mature level is shift into cooperation and working together. There's huge outburst of knowledge at the mature level, And we're seeing this, The great growth in knowledge in every direction. The mature level has got a great focus on relationships and thoughts and feelings, Paying attention to thoughts and feelings, Looking inside. And the mature level has got more conflict because it's not solidly in the old soul wisdom of the peace of the grandmother and grandfather stage, But it's growing out of the young soul's blinkered understanding, So it's a little fraught. But this is our shift that we've had this hundred years to go through, So we'll see, You know. I mean, We, You know, Pramasiddha seems like, Well, We seem to have got lost in materialism a lot, But who knows what miracles are almost going to come up with, So we'll see. And we've got groups like this, You know. This just would not have been possible, I don't think, You know, Before this time. You know, At this time we've got, Like, Random people can just achieve enlightenment, You know, Sort of, Not necessarily monastery and. . . Right. Right, And there's no witch burnings. I want to reaffirm this to the women, There are no witch burnings, Ladies! You know? Yeah. You can come forward, We need this feminine wisdom. There's no firing squads. You know, There was a guy outside the dollar store, And he was homeless, And Pramasiddha had extra 20 bucks in her purse, So I went over to give him the 20, And he said, No, Thank you. I was like, Wow. No, Thank you. And I was doing it with an open heart, I wasn't being patronizing at all, I was just doing it from a spontaneous open heart, Yeah. But Pramasiddha was pretty impressed with that, I don't know why that came up. I guess, You know, Maybe dignity is possible anywhere. I feel that's it. Because freedom and dignity, We can take our freedom and have our dignity anywhere. Just do it. Listen. The universe. And let it strengthen you and bring you into clarity. It's a practice of Dhadiri. Are there any questions or comments at all? Hi Pramasiddha, It's Eva. Sweet one, Hi. I have a simple question because I don't know the German word for Dhadiri. I don't understand what you mean with it. Maybe someone can translate it. It's just the aboriginal term for this deep listening that I was talking about, Sweet one. Okay. It's actually what the whole satsang has been about. Yeah, There's no. . . Yeah. There's no German translation. Okay, I know what you mean, But I was wondering about the German word. If there is one, Yes. But I think I can feel what you mean with this inner listening. Right. Okay, Good. Good. I can feel it's like a habit of taking steps to things almost. I don't know how else to put it. It's a kind of resistance to a great global understanding. It's kind of a resistance to really letting something hit home. And it's not your fault. Okay, Sweetie? It's just let Prama Sutta do this surgery within you because it isn't just for you, It's for everyone. So how do you feel as I'm speaking? Honest? Come on, Come on. Find it. How do you feel? Come on, Stand with it. How do you feel? I feel okay. There's nothing. . . It's fine. It feels fine. So you feel peaceful? Mm-hmm. Okay, Good. Okay, Good. Good. Okay, So Prama Sutta's feeling like she's clearing some walls around your connection to the creator in your habitual way of the spiritual journey. Yeah. Right, And you know, Just be very patient until you find the light, Until you find this deeper light within you. It's like call for God, Call for the creator, And then listen for the answer. Like I'm seeing you actually calling for the creator and learning to be more willing to hear the answer. Right. Good. This has helped everybody deepen into their hearts, Eva. It was really good that you spoke. These walls of obstruction are basically in many, If not all. So, Yeah. Now, Prama Sutta can do this, Kind of clear the blueprints, And then the person goes through it emotionally. But that's the whole point why we have satsangs for the coming and sitting by the fire with others, Right? You know, Think of a campfire. You sit by the campfire, And it's cozy and Say, All is well. That's it. And I'm seeing this energy from the creator, The light coming now to you. It's flowing up to you because you're more willing. Like you're willing to. . . You spoke and you've listened. Yeah. Yeah. And you'll feel this light coming in. Subtly. It's going to be very subtle. First, There will be darkness. Don't worry about the darkness. Just keep going. Prama Sutta is so cavalier now because I forget, Really, I forget what it's like on the journey, You know? It's just like a woman forgets the pain of childbirth. I forget the pain of what it's like on the journey, But I kind of remember it's there, Which is why I do the work, But I have forgotten it. So I get a bit cavalier with people. I go, Okay, We'll just do it. And I have endless empathy for you guys. Or actually, What is like that? Do it. But Prama Sutta, Remember, Prama Sutta didn't really have a teacher for years, So I just did it. So, You know, We've got a group. Yeah. We've got support. Right. Good. God doesn't come cheap, You know. Yeah. God doesn't come cheap. There's a price, But it's so worth it. It's so worth it. Yeah. You guys, Bless your dear, Dear hearts. Thank you. Thank you for your willingness. Thank you for speaking. You guys, Blessings. Blessings. Blessings, You guys. Blessings. Bye.