I think this was the last address Mr Adie delivered at the weekend work.

 

Sunday 16 July 1989

 

This is a very special day, because what happens today will affect tomorrow, and so on. This very moment is critical for us, and we are present before it. Do we have any hope? If so, what are our hopes? We should have some: it is an impulse in a conscious man. How can it be otherwise?

So do we lack hope? Are we hopeless?

Don’t forget that hope depends upon now, hope depends on the present. How the present is, so the future will be. Influenced. Effective.

My hope is present now. What is our feeling now?

As I open to experience by feeling, another question arises: where is faith? Our faith, if we have any, is based on fact. Faith is fact. Faith is based on fact. I cannot have faith based on imagination, on unverified thoughts. How can I put faith in them? I put faith in what I know, what I experience, what I can remember. So I see that faith is related to the present and the past. I can only know faith now, so it relates the present and the past.

And with that realisation, I see that hope relates to the present and the future. So faith and hope are present now, and connect me to the past and to the future.

And maybe love is the element of the present, love which relates to both, which relates to everything, with which I am divided from nothing.

This is too big a concept, is it? But if I have any experience of it as I speak, surely it is very solid. It is more real than that spoon (he picks up and puts down a spoon). We can all have opinions about that spoon. Some think it’s nice because it’s old, others think it is so-so, or that they have better ones at home, and so on. But faith … and hope … I cannot think about them like how I think about this spoon, but if they are present in my state, then my thinking becomes finer, freer, and faster.

This experience is something of what I wish to share today, at the beginning. Do we have a strong feeling of work? And what would it need for us to be able to share that, each with the other? The relationship between us would need to be something in the direction of love, surely.

Could there be love without work? Are we at all like brothers? Look and see. Would I really share? Would I put anybody here before me?

Our work, our possibility, is miraculous; and so the work is very mysterious. The higher the idea, the more I need my feet on the ground, I need my sense of what is around me. I need awareness of everybody in the room; then I might not make the same mistake of taking it all for granted. Then the mysterious can enter. You see how the mysterious, what eludes us, is right here. What eludes us is here, the immediate objective fact.

What can be more real than the living being beside me? What could be more real? And do I take it into account? How do I sense that reality? What is my attitude? Can I forget it entirely? How is that possible?

We come together in order to be able to share sensation, share feeling. So on this starting day, to retain some of the influence of what we have been trying to approach, we need the practical work prepared for us. We need that work because we couldn’t puff this up for ever. Somebody’s got to cook some food, we shall be hungry by one o’clock, and so work has to be done. I’ve got to have some work to do. So let me keep some connection with this, making the practical work an instrument of continuity with the inner work.

This is what we need to do. We do come together, we do share things; not everybody at the same moment, but then how to find them again? How to make it objectively available?

Of course, it will never available until I am worthy of it. I have to be able. It’s very fair.

There is the treasure. I have to be able to have the key –  that’s all. So where is the key in all of this? We come, we work, we go. We come again, we listen. We do movements. Where is the key to the reality?

Why is it so extraordinary and unusual?

It is extraordinary when because it is not this compulsory dream life. We live our lives mostly dreaming. To realise our possibilities, we have to come out of dreams, centralize ourselves, and the dreams then thin out. But the dreams will come again because we are predisposed to them. We were reared in dreams, and we have efforts to make to seize each miraculous moment, open to it, keep it, and then apply it so that we can harmonise and pacify and reconcile the past, about which we blame ourselves very stupidly. There was no “I” there. There was nothing. No “I” is chaos, just serving nature’s purposes. Alright. But we come here to make something which serves higher nature, the next creation.

And is that prospect not a basis for hope? If I work, it becomes something like objective hope.

I am trying to emphasize the fact that the greatest reality, the greatest, solid, like a piece of wood, is the most mysterious. Our lives are very amazingly mysterious. If we could have hope for that life on one hand, and the need for practical life on the other, then we really should be in business. As he said, hope of consciousness is strength.

There are many things about me which cannot love everybody, and yet there is something in me which perhaps does. So how am I to be? If I can be impartial, it is a totally different situation. So we wish to be impartial, and share that.

We must have material for our life on earth under the sun, practical things, things for cleaning, things for living, things for eating. We need that. So this is vital for us to do, and to do it freely, to know one is doing it and why, to have an awareness. That is how we try and work. And stop every half an hour, and try and make everything of it that you can. Be free. Be quite free. Free on this side, free on that side.