ADI DA SAMRAJ: The plant form, or the plant structure, is the basic form that all other forms share. You can observe the tree in the midst of the human body. The root of the human body is a plant. The trees became humankind and every other kind of being. Mysteriously, this is so. The plant is the fundamental structure—you see the same structure in the tree and fundamentally in any form of vegetation. Even all the other beings that actually move from their position—not just move in the sense of growing, which even trees do—have this rooted, balanced, tree-process at the core. But that core tends to be forgotten in all this moving, confrontation, and memory…

I have used many times the metaphor of the Upanishadic story of the two birds in the tree—the fruit-eating bird and the Witness bird. The tree itself can be seen as the same metaphor. There is an attitude, a disposition inherent in the tree-form, the core, the spinal structure of the being. One can be the body-mind that is just functioning, detached from the consciousness of its essential nature and root. Or one can abide in the Native Position, this core structure, as one is before any thoughts, sensation, or presumption—as simple feeling-awareness itself.

The tree, the vegetation, is the origin of the form with which you are identifying. It is interesting, when you hear of evolutionary accountings based on scientific-materialistic considerations, they show how “this became that”, “that became that”, and “that became the human after all that time”—they don’t show any trees at the beginning of it! It is as if they have not even considered this yet. Their descriptions are only about independently moving life-forms like human beings.

It is a kind of conceit to presume that the origin of Man has to be like Man. You tend to presume that it couldn’t possibly be anything else. You can handle maybe some inheritance through the animals, including the apes, and down to the little amoeba, perhaps because they are all sort of independently moving individuals. You cannot see the tree in them anymore, you see. But you cannot accept that the source of human functioning and awareness could be trees. And the trees come from something that falls out of the sky. Everything that falls or moves or seems in this conditional domain is made of star substance. Every cell in your body was originally star material—every fraction of your physical appearance.

Like those dolphins and belugas there, [Adi Da Samraj points to a painting on the wall in the room] you live in a fluid. The air that you are always breathing—which, if you are feelingly aware, you do not only to get some chemical into your body, but to equalize and balance the body, and to work the energy of the body—you are just breathing this fluid like the fishes do. Of course, in the case of dolphins and belugas, they survive on air from above the water, and not through gill power. Yet, they are down there in the water. They have to keep coming up to get some air, but they are fundamentally in the water.

You can see the tree in them also—head to tail there, that spinal line. It is always the same motionlessness, you see, except for the energy process in it. It is the tree.

A talk by Adi Da Samraj, April 28, 1996

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