Sadhana – Adi Da Samraj

“On 26th February, 1947, the
topic of Guru Swarupam (The Guru’s Form) was
discussed.

This afternoon a Tamil youth
approached Bhagavan, and asked, ‘Swamiji! Yesterday morning
you told the Gujarati lady that renunciation means internal
renunciation. How are we to attain it? What is internal
renunciation?’

Bhagavan: Internal
renunciation means that all vasanas should be subdued. If
you ask me, ‘How to attain that?’ my reply is,
‘it is attainable by sadhana.’

Question: Sadhana
requires a Guru, doesn’t it?

Bhagavan: Yes! A
Guru is required.”

Letters from Sri
Ramanaasramam by Nagamma

“Notice, no matter what is
arising, you are basically the Witness. This is still the
Case, even while there is involvement in klik-klak
[conditionality]. That Which is Always Already the
Case is still Always Already the Case. The Truth is Always
Already the Case. Consciousness Always Already
Is.

“Well, why aren’t you then simply
living that? As I said, you have assumed the disposition of
the fruit-eating bird. You are enmeshed in klik-klak-land
here. I Am Not. I know what I am talking
about.

So there is a way beyond it. And
in the midst of it, you can’t just ‘go out the door’. So you
have to Realize What Is Beyond this by a process that is, at
the moment, enacted in the context of what was your bondage.
You have to process out of your bondage, in other words. You
can’t just simply think your way out of it, or have a
lecture magically relieve you of it, or any kind of
examination in a moment. It requires a lifetime of
reorientation, surrender, Communion, and
Grace.”

Excerpted from
Klik-Klak:
The Pattern Patterning,
Adi Da Samraj – 1996

“The nature of the apparent sadhana of Adidam, The Way in
terms of practice…is not a something in itself and it is
not a method. It is searchless participation in My
Self-Revealed Person or the Very Condition [REALITY
– TRUTH – THE FOURTH STATE] that is Always
Already the Case [ALWAYS, EVEN NOW]. From the
beginning it is that, whatever you could manage to say about
Me.
My devotee is realizing Me. It is so and That is the basis
of the sadhana. That is what authenticates the sadhana and
mere descriptions of the exercise of the sadhana, the
practice to mention, the activity to mention, you see – is
always off the point of it. “

From the Avataric
Revelation Discourses; nos. 1-49, Adi Da Samraj –
December, 2004

“Sadhana” in the context of the
first three stages of life and some of the fourth is all the
waking state disposition (The Waking State Yoga). The point
of view is always that of the physical body-mind – it is
your sense of yourself that is the domain of your
experience. What you are is the waking state character.

“Then there is a period within
practice where the gross busyness is quite relaxed, and the
exploration of subtle possibilities begins to become
expansive. This develops potentially in the fourth stage of
life, particularly when it comes to its ascending phase, and
in the fifth. It is a resort to the dream dimension. The
subtle domain is presumed to be Reality. The gross is
incidental to it, peripheral to it. In effect what is being
affirmed is that the dream state is the state one should be
in, or is the state presumed to be the essential Reality
with which one is identified – not the gross physical but
now the subtle persona, essentially the domain of ascended
mysticism and such. So that is sadhana done from the point
of view of dreaming. Whereas previously sadhana was done
from the point of view of the waking-state
body-mind.

“[The next potential levels
of] practices [are] associated with the sixth
stage of life….toward or from the position associated with
sleep and the transcendence of it – the domain of
objectlessness, all objects one way or another relinquished
as not ‘it’ [not this, not this]. So rather than
focusing on the body and the mind, there is a focus on the
Domain of Consciousness, the Domain of the Witness, and so
on – the Condition Prior to the body-mind.

“In the context of the sixth
stage of life, [Sadhana] is done in the mode of what
is called the fourth state, turiya, or Consciousness Prior
to the body-mind – as sleep is, and yet Prior to a
particular limitation that is still there in
sleep.

“The right side of the heart is
associated with anandamayakosha. It is the seat of sleep,
the seat of egoity, the first (and last) knot. It is also
the doorway, or the last place Prior to the Unconditional
Domain and the fourth state, and ultimately turiyatita,
beyond it.”

The
Torque of Attention,
The Yajna Discourses of Santosha Adi Da

SADHANA –
DEFINITION

Root: Sadha – to
accomplish, achieve, practice, means, method, “Means of
Achievement”

Sadhan literally “a means of
accomplishing something” – is ego-transcending spiritual
practice. It includes a variety of disciplines in Hindu,
Sikh, Buddhist and Muslim traditions that are followed in
order to achieve various spiritual or ritual
objectives.

Etymology: Sanskrit sadhana; akin to
Sanskrit sadhu going straight to a goal

1. Hindu religious training or
discipline through which an individual attains
samadhi

2. Hindu or Buddhist spiritual
training through which an individual worships a formed image
as a mediate step to the worship of a formless deity or
principle

3. The tantric evocation of a deity
by means of spells and ritual for the purpose of getting
control of the deity

Traditionally – From The Teachings
of the Sadhana Society:

“Effective means of attainment.”
Religious or spiritual disciplines, such as puja, yoga,
meditation, japa, fasting and austerity. The traditional
effect of sadhana is the building of willpower, faith and
confidence in oneself and in God, Gods and guru.

Today you begin a journey that can
lead you to the Highest Achievement
of Human Awareness – which is Unlimited Consciousness of
Self and Oneness with the Infinite. You will be guided on
your journey by the Teachings of The Sadhana Society, and by
the use of the oldest Methods and Practices known to Man.
These will include the Teachings of the Enlightened Sages of
the East, and the Long ignored Methods and Practices of the
Ancient People of the North American Continent.

As you progress on your journey, you
will Awaken the Great Hidden Powers that lie dormant within
you. These are the already Perfected Manifestations of your
own body and mind. You will learn to tap this Infinite
Storehouse of Energy, and call forth The Divine Law of
Abundance from your own Being. You will also learn to
communicate through the use of the Ancient Akashic Records.
Soon, you will discover that there is nothing that you
cannot do. YOUR POWER IS LIMITLESS. Because there is no
separation between Life and Death, you will also learn to
communicate with Divine Personalities beyond the
physical.

From Swami Sivananda

Sadhana is any practice to steady
the wandering mind and to fix it on God.

Who does sadhana is called a
sadhaka.

Uses self-restraint

Purifications of the mind

Cultivates divine virtues

Prays

Does Japa

Does Kirtan

Practices Dharana or
concentration

Meditates

Looks within

Tries to remove defects

Understands the real value of
practice

Understands sadhana is a great
struggle

Habits and patterns will have to be
rent asunder

Adi Da on Sadhana

“Persistence is a fundamental
requirement in the case of someone doing
sadhana.”

“Spiritual life is a demand, not
a form of therapy, and this demand does not make life easy
but it does change it into a creative
affair.”

“Sadhana is not merely some
manipulation of the body-mind, strategically trying to
create some effect. Sadhana is this capability to live
wholeheartedly, to feel beyond
self-contraction”.

“You cannot realize Real God,
Truth or Reality. You can only be led into that Realization.
And if you resist it, then of course it does not take place.
And such Realization is difficult, I grant you that. It is
immensely difficult.”

“The foundation sadhana is
established in the context of the body. If you do not deal
with the karmas signaled by the body, sadhana is fruitless.
Sadhana is not the interiorizing of attention. It is the
transcendence of self-contraction. It is not a matter of
going inward. It is a matter of purifying the karmas of your
conditional existence. To do sadhana, therefore, you must
handle the business of your life. By that I do not mean that
you should indulge in all kinds of fanciful cravings or
motivations toward self-fulfillment or the ‘good life’. I
mean that you must take this physical vehicle, this
physically manifested body-mind, and put it to school,
command it to do the sadhana of devotion, service, and
self-discipline.”

According to Adi Da, Spiritual
Practice is eventually purposed to transcend the point of
view that is the physical body, the mind, and all
conditional experiences. Which requires:

Persistence,

Demand,

Intelligence,

Tremendous discipline,

Tremendous feeling,

Difficulties

Sadhana is understood to mean: to
transcend the self-contraction and limitation of the body
and mind and its philosophy and birth.

Summary Statements Based on Adi
Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in
italic).

PREPARATION

Table of
Contents

In the beginning of sadhana the
individual is humanized and is called to complete (or bring
to order) life in the context of the first
three stages of life.
– Adi Da Samraj

“Just to begin the Way you must
hear
the Teaching. You
must Awaken. Whole-bodily Enlightenment in the most
thorough, full, and high sense involves a Great Process, but
Enlightenment is not its goal. Enlightenment is its root.
Enlightenment is a fundamental Awakening, a fundamental
insight, which you then use moment to moment to create the
Way. A practice that is not based on that fundamental
insight is not based on Truth.”

“The basic Teaching this
institution should represent is the understanding of this
fundamental error, or the mechanism associated with manifest
existence that makes it into an illusion, into suffering,
un-Happiness, un-Enlightenment, Godlessness. You cannot
merely believe something positive and develop a true
religious or Spiritual life. Enlightenment is not simply a
matter of believing in conventional God-ideas that motivate
you to be better. All such ideas must be understood. You
must enjoy this Awakening, this insight. You must hear the
Teaching Argument.”

“The foundation of my
Teaching
Argument is this: You
are, as a matter of habit, and in every part, conformed to
the activity and the results of
self-contraction”.

“Once the argument has been
considered, felt, and lived, the devotee…is convicted…of
the necessity of the Teaching and of right action for the
rest of his life. Then he has heard the Teaching, he is
prepared, and he approaches the Divine Master as a
true devotee.

Preparatory practice of the Way that
Adi Da has Revealed is “listening”, or giving one’s
attention to the Teaching Argument and considering it in the
context of one’s life.

Sadhana is based upon the
discovery of the futility of seeking. Having made that
discovery, then you will be able to connect with the thread
of my Argument to the point of understanding.

The first step, then, is simply to
study this consideration. Consider the teaching argument, do
what you will in your personal life, assume responsibility
to study. Study, ponder, observe yourself, observe your
life. When it becomes your own, then you can begin to add to
the discipline.

In every area of our lives, the
fundamental error in the past is the presumption of unlove.
And the essential dimension of our preparatory work, and the
key to happiness in any case, is the regeneration of the
life of love.

All the practical disciplines are
necessary but secondary.

In their initial preparation –
instructed in the right and lawful practices:

1. Diet

2. Health

3. Sexuality and Intimate relations

4. Study of spiritual
teachings

5. Service to others

Table of
Content

The following
selections are from talks and various writings by Adi Da
Samraj in the years 1972-2006.

Summary Statements Based on Adi
Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

“What must occur in each person’s
case is the realization, felt with the whole being, that he
(or she) must be love, that he must fulfill the Law of
sacrifice regardless of past history, present circumstance,
or any condition that may appear in the future.”

“The individual must become
committed to that principal discipline with the whole force
of his life. No matter what arises to distract, console, or
frustrate him, he must remain as love in
God-Communion.”

“When he is in love, convinced of
the Teaching, full of energy and delight in ordinary
relations, then the individual may come to the Spiritual
Master for initiation into the higher or spiritual
dimensions of adaptation and sacrifice. But not before that
time.”

“Prior to Hearing and Seeing all
preparatory and preliminary practices are for those
beginning or ‘approaching’ the Way.”

“The initial stage is the
responsibility of the individual to live the life Sadhana in
the place where he lives it, in the world.”

“All the drama, all the up and
down, the this’s and that’s, wishes, hopes, coming and going
and success and failure, must have the world scene in which
to develop.”

“If you feel you are interested
in Spiritual life, you should have a serious appreciation of
your unpreparedness and not come to the Communion gleefully.
If you do walk in gleefully, sooner or later you will be
confronted with demands that will make you resistive,
because you are not prepared to meet the demands of
discipline. Discipline is not what you are asking for. You
are asking for consolation, something to believe in,
something to relieve you of the stresses of the failed first
three stages of your life. You are defending your egoity.
Even though you may be interested in Spiritual life, when
you are confronted by the real discipline involved, you will
inevitably resist.”

“You must move out of your
worldly frame of reference. People in these days think there
is no difference between Spiritual life and an ordinary
worldly life. They think all you add to ordinary life is a
mantra or meditation in the morning and in the evening.
There is a vast difference between worldly life and
Spiritual life, however, and one of the principal
differences is discipline, even an all-embracing,
all-encompassing discipline that touches every area of your
life. Every function, every practical detail, every
relationship must become subject to sadhana, or an
intelligent discipline. Such discipline is one to which you
agree in consideration, but it is nonetheless real
discipline. You must therefore move out of the frame of
worldly life. You must be educated out of the uninspected
mind, and you must come to understand through consideration
and by developing self-awareness what Spiritual life really
requires of you. It requires the transcendence of egoity.”

“You should therefore appreciate
this fact with some seriousness at the beginning and not
take too many big steps. Simply listen, investigate what
this Way is really all about, feel your way into it, and do
not become involved any sooner than you are really prepared
to. There are many ways to associate with this Communion
long before becoming a practitioner even at practicing stage
one. There are many serious ways to study the
Wisdom-Teaching and consider it in your own life while you
otherwise do whatever you like. For even many years you can
support the publication of the Teaching literature, support
the Communion in various ways, and participate in some of
the services the Communion offers. Do not get too close to
it while you are yet unprepared, because inevitably you will
resist it.”

Table of
Content

Summary Statements Based on Adi
Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in
italic).

SELF-CONTRACTION

“You may want to forestall the
observation of this uncomfortable feeling, that realization.
But you can not begin real spiritual life unless you start
to observe and understand the mechanism of the
self-contraction.”

Simplify your
life

Handle business, get your life in
order, create a situation that will enable your life to
function in a relatively simple and harmonious
fashion.

“Spiritual life first becomes
functional life and your essential responsibility to
yourself and others becomes creative work.”

“Until you become capable of
working with your resistance or failure to function, your
past adaptations or lack of them will continue to dominate
you and your life. You may be able to change the modality of
your life to an ashram setting or a meditation center but
your basic understanding of your fundamental condition will
not change. You will not fulfill the Law.”

“You cannot continue to grow, you
cannot continue to move past your prior adaptations until
you handle your business. You must handle your personal
business, the business in your past, the business in your
friendships, the business in your blood relations, the
business in your intimate relations, the business in your
friendly relations, your business with the
world.”

“You have very real things to do,
very human things, even very ordinary things. You must do
these things and there is no two ways about it. Your life
requires it. Others require it of you.

“We are only at the beginning,
you are dealing with all the basics. You must endure that
beginning, the handling of life-business, and be purified.
That is where it starts.”

“Spiritual life is sadhana, a
work. It is the always present demand of function in the
midst of whatever is going on. It is the counter-egoic
effort necessary to transcend limitations. And limitations
constantly arise every day. To practice is to suffer, but it
is not egoic suffering. It is that suffering associated with
the transcending of egoity. It is not hidden in the events
of the world or in the events of his internal or
non-volitional life. Life demands attention and in that
attention you must handle business. You must be responsible
for yourself at the human level, and in a profoundly
uncommon way. You must live the discipline of ordinary life.
You yourself must be love under all ordinary, daily
conditions. You must make this change in your life. There is
no way whereby you can be relieved of this necessity. Nobody
can do it for you.”

Also see:

The
Beginning – A Workable Situation

Table of
Content

CRISIS

“The heat of self-frustration is
the energy of sadhana.”

“There is a purifying dis-ease
involved in spiritual life. There is a
crisis.”

“It must be a perfect crisis in
consciousness in which this one form of ordinary knowledge
is seen perfectly and known to be your condition from moment
to moment. Knowing that you have no way out of this in the
ordinary way.” 

“You realize you are truly locked
in to this one form of existence, which is ordinary
suffering, the search. It is in that entrapment, that
isolation of real recognition, that the whole process begins
to be undone.”

“When you realize you can’t play
your game’s any more, you can’t depend on your games because
you know all your games are essentially based on the same
impulse, the same structure. You realize ultimately the same
vision, the same cognition of the search.”

Core of this
Sadhana

“In the process of this sadhana
you must come to the point, through self-understanding, of
relinquishing the motive of union with another – because the
fundamental understanding, the core of this sadhana, is the
transcendence of the motive toward union or the search based
on self-contraction, the search for any conditional object,
stage, condition, or other).”

“People continue to think that
all this Life is leading somewhere in some grand
evolutionary design and they continue to thrive on the
search with ‘what’s next’. But the more sensitive you
become, the more you become aware of this structure of
limitation. It is only when consciousness returns to the
zero, moment to moment, that this insight begins to break
the bondage. It’s only when you have become so limited, when
you have no options truly, that you begin to understand what
is going on and what you’re up to. Then you will change your
entire life.”

“This crisis confronts the
mental, emotional and physical aspects of the practitioner
in the form of a demand. The demand is to function. The
demand to give energy and attention to others and to life in
general.”

“It is not ‘fun’ to
be
alive. It is,
ultimately, a dreadful circumstance, a completely bewildered
circumstance, in which some things make you feel good
temporarily, but, essentially, apart from temporary
pleasures, you do not feel good. You are in trouble, and you
are mortal.

Therefore, life is not ‘fun’.
There are pleasures, but even to the extent that there are
pleasures a great dimension of suffering also pervades one’s
entire life. Everything that might grant pleasure ultimately
disappears. Every relationship that one might enjoy
ultimately comes to an end, if not through immaturity and
lovelessness then through death. There is no fundamental
happiness or satisfaction in this life. Awakening to
revulsion toward our ordinary possibility is the beginning
of true ‘hearing’ and ‘seeing’, or radical intuition and
true feeling, in which we may realize a Condition
that is absolutely Blissful and absolutely
Conscious.”

Enlightenment of the Whole
Body

Table of
Content

Summary Statements Based on Adi
Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in
italic).

BECOMING SERIOUS
(REAL)

Practitioner: I
notice that when I’m confronting something in myself and a
greater understanding breaks through then instantly there’s
something else to consider. That process just keeps
moving.

Adi Da Samraj: You
should notice this, because you all tend to be addicted to
constantly fulfilling yourself through a variety of
conditional purposes. But look at the state that follows
upon such fulfillment. How does it compare to those moments
when you directly transcend yourself and exceed your
conventional desiring? You must value that intensity. If you
do, that will help you to eliminate the motive to be
conditionally consoled, made to feel good by circumstances
outside the body, or circumstances in the body, or
circumstances in your emotions, or your mind, your thoughts.
When you know that the consolation associated with
circumstances is not profound, and only the intensity
realized by the transcendence of circumstances is profound,
then you will cease to be mediocre. You will become serious.
You will exhibit great signs of discipline. You will become
an extraordinary human being.”

Table of
Content

Summary Statements Based on Adi
Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in
italic).

LISTENING TO
HEARING

“Do not imagine for a moment that
right and true practice of the only-by-Me Revealed and Given
Reality-Way of Adidam is an easy matter, that you can simply
Listen to My Teaching-Argument and Realize the Intrinsically
egoless and Self-Evidently Divine
Self-Nature.”

“The Reality-Way of Adidam is the
Work of Reality Itself.”

The key here is “you do not exist by
your own creature power.” The search or seeking as Adi Da
teaches is fundamentally rooted in the identification of ego
or separate self, as self-contraction with objects of body,
mind, and spirit. He calls the activity of the search
“Narcissus”.

“I have Called you to
understand
all seeking and to be
free of the effort toward union. A characteristic effort
toward union is associated with each stage of life. There
are even many such efforts associated with each stage of
life, and there is also a fundamental effort associated with
each one. I have Called you to observe and understand this
effort in the context of each stage of life. You cannot
merely choose to bypass any stage. You must understand it.
You must understand it very directly in a participatory
manner. You cannot merely by ‘considering’ My Instruction
assume the asana of the Realization of the seventh stage of
life. You must do the sadhana.”*

*The Effort Toward Union Has
Nothing to Do with Realization, Adi Da Samraj, May
1992.

Self
Observation

“The purpose of observing
yourself is to refine the details of your sadhana – not to
delay your sadhana, or avoid it, but to refine it, in the
real process of doing it.”

“When you realize that you truly
are confined and that there is this one quality of
knowledge, experience, and existence from moment to moment,
then are you are beginning to understand.”

“The actual practice of The Way
is founded in a radical insight into self and the avoidance
of relationship, The conviction of Narcissus. This radical
insight or intuition reveals the factuality of reactive
self-confinement and fruitlessness of the search for
salvation, release, or perfect fulfillment.”

THE “BRIGHTENING” WAY TALK
SERIES, The Yajna Discourses of Santosha Adi Da (1995-1996),
PROLOGUE, A Mastered Life, Adi Da Samraj, December 29,
1995

The Cramp of Mind and
Body

Mind = Doubt – First form of
contraction

Body = discomfort – fear, anger and
sorrow.

Emotion = Boredom =
search

“Doubt is not about anything. It
only seems to be about something because you are constantly
tending to register self-contraction in terms of
doubt.”

The mind is always stress. It is
always trying to think itself into a better system of
thinking so that it will never doubt again (EX:
belief).

“You are to stand in the position
of that knot, feeling your own disease, your motivation –
but that means you have to endure it. There is not only the
fundamental knot itself. There are all the reflections in
the body-mind, tendencies of one kind or another, and so
on.”

Table of
Content

The following excerpts are from a
variety of Adi Da written and spoken teachings –
IN ITALICS

CONTRACTION

“Once you do observe this
fundamental contraction, then you can not escape it, and
that is when sadhana really begins. That is when sadhana
starts becoming profoundly effective.”

“This understanding [of the
self-contraction] is absolutely fundamental to my
teaching.”

“On this basis
[understanding the self-contraction] a person
begins an approach to his experience, habits, thoughts, and
actions that would perceive the root of his dilemma and at
last he will come to see that all of this, his dilemma, his
suffering, is his own.”

It is not the product (effect) of
some process (cause) outside himself or his
control.

“You have to endure the
purification of these things, the standing in the knot
position sensitive to all the limitations of the disposition
and surrender to me to the point of forgetting it,
relinquishing it, keeping the faculties all focused in me in
this communion.”

Table of
Content

CRISIS

“The sense of crisis is only the
sense of irresponsibility – you have something happening to
you. Whereas when this process is alive in you, when this
sacrificial process is truly active, it is no longer
happening to you. The fact is that one’s suffering (or
enjoyment) is not happening to you at all. It is something
that you are doing and for which you must become responsible
for. And then surrender it to the divine.”

“The crisis in spiritual life is
supposed to occur. You are supposed to suffer the purifying
events. You are supposed to encounter resistance in
yourself. You are supposed to discover all kinds of garbage
in yourself. So why should there be any special resistance
to it when it occurs?

“There may be discomfort, and you
may wish you did not have to go through it. But apart from
that, there is no reason why you should be overwhelmed or
completely disenchanted by the fact that you are witnessing
a period of intense conflict, crisis, suffering, and
disturbance. The more time you waste identifying with all of
that, the less sensitive you become to the
event.

That is why The Spiritual Masters
continue to stress that there is a crisis in consciousness
involved in spiritual life, because you must come to this
zero point in which you see the one thing you are always
doing, the one state lived, in which you see the search as
your very condition. It’s only when you’ve returned to this
condition of suffering without recourse, when you have
fallen into your own limitation, that True Insight and
Understanding can arise as The Spiritual Master has
described it. So there must be a crisis.”

In the beginning there may tend to
be reactions and breakdowns whenever this crisis process
begins. There is very often an emotional collapse, even a
physical collapse. There are episodes that have an almost
psychotic quality to them. But as one passes through these
purifying episodes, one begins to realize how important
functioning is, handling life’s business.

All of these apparently disturbed or
crisis episodes in this real process of spiritual life are
themselves very intelligent, very meaningful. They have a
great deal to show you. The more capability you have for
passing through these times, the more useful they
become.

Table of
Content

PURIFICATION

“One could say, that altogether,
sadhana basically is self-purification. Because it is not
the divine that must be found. It is the things that you are
deluding yourself with that must be released. The divine is
the context of existence. But self-contraction has taken on
all kinds of forms, the summary of which is non-awareness of
the divine condition. Sadhana then is basically purification
of these forms of self-contraction.”

“Until this heart comes to rest,
there is only contraction, this separate and separative
consciousness, whose mind is separative, obsessive,
bewildered, pursuing fulfillment on the basis of what is
apparently possible in the midst of this puny limitation we
wake up to each day. But there is help for it – there is
Grace. And you must give up your whole life for it!

“Whatever you do not give up,
keeps you here, and until you have given up everything, here
is what you see.”

“Spiritual practice is not an
effort whereby you eventually transcend yourself. It is
self-transcending in its very disposition. In this Way, you
do not perform an action and transcend yourself as a result.
The action in its very performance is a self-transcending
action. It does not produce
self-transcendence.”

In the Way of the Heart, Satsang is
a practice, or a sadhana. Therefore, it is work, not merely
something that happens to you. It is responsive work, not
merely self-effort. It is real and true work. It is
purification work.

Table of
Content

HEARING TO TAPAS

Summary Statements Based on Adi
Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in
italic).

“My devotees must fit themselves
to right devotion to Me, and go through the living ordeal of
right practice—moment to moment, and day by day. The
process of life-rightening is an ordeal of shedding the
ego-pattern, or the imagined persona. Therefore, that
process of life-rightening is, necessarily, a process of
renunciation. The patterns of egoity are built into the
body-mind-complex as psycho-physical tendencies. Therefore,
those patterns do not disappear merely because you come up
with a notion about changing them. The life-rightening
process must be profoundly engaged and persisted in, so that
real turning away from, and real shedding of, ego-patterning
occurs. That is a fundamental aspect of the
“Radical” Reality-Way of Adidam
Ruchiradam—the “ordeal”
aspect.”

The Aletheon

“This is what must be understood:
All seeking, all disturbance, and all dissatisfaction are
one’s own activity. To understand this is to be free of
‘victim-consciousness’, or the notion that your fundamental
difficulty is somehow caused by others or by the conditions
of manifested existence. To understand this is the essence
of true hearing.”

AVATAR ADI DA
SAMRAJ: Self-discipline must come from
self-understanding, or it is just another form of
self-contraction. Without self-understanding, discipline is
just another expression of the will of the ego-“I”. Instead,
self-discipline in the only-by-Me Revealed and Given Way of
Adidam is based on that force of intention that expresses
the capability to transcend yourself by feeling beyond
yourself, by feeling beyond all of the body-mind’s
intentions, tendencies, and patterns. Right discipline is
associated with the radiant disposition of ego-transcending
devotion to Me, not the effort of the self-contraction. To
be impulsed toward ego-transcending Real-God-Realization
through your devotion to Me – that is a radiant disposition.
On that basis, you take on some (by Me Given) disciplines.
You observe the self-contraction, and you add detail to the
discipline of your life based on that observation. The
disciplines of the Way of Adidam include more than just
vital things like food and sex. The discipline covers
everything. That is why you must practice all the
disciplines, including all the functional, practical,
cultural, and relational disciplines.

“Hearing is a matter of
transcending the notion that your suffering is caused from
without, or the notion that you are being ‘victimized’ by
life. True hearing is a matter of transcending the ‘victim
strategy’ altogether and is the foundation of spiritual
practice.”

“One could say that, altogether,
sadhana basically is self-purification. Sadhana is basically
purification of fear, doubt, sorrow, aggression, anger, and
delusion. These are forms of self-contraction and fear is at
the root of all of them.”

Sadhana is Self-Purifying
Work

Summary Statements Based on Adi
Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in
italic).

“Sadhana is not called
‘suffering’. It is called ‘tapas’. It is called ‘the ordeal
of practice’. It is called ‘discipline’. It is necessary!
That is it. That is the substance of change! That is the
alchemy of change. That is the fire on the pot. Everything
must be thrown into it.”

“The principle of spiritual life
is a light and that light is a fire. It produces a crisis in
consciousness that is both illuminating and penetrating. An
awakening is what it is all about. An awakening of your own
liberation and, in the beginning, your fundamental refusal
to open and take responsibility for your own
process.”

“Sadhana is something you do. The
whole process or circumstance of Realization is not about
passivity or waiting. It requires endeavor. It requires
change. It requires a purpose. It requires use of energy and
attention. It is not something that happens to you in your
passivity. It transcends your passivity and your activity.
But this does not exclude your activity. Your activity must
be sadhana. You are not relieved of it by Grace or by a
Gift. It is demanded of you through Grace and through Gifts
and through understanding, then.”

“Your desiring will be frustrated
in its goal and you will meditate on the fire and that fire
will be your attention to Me so that your attention from
hour to hour will become more fiery, more intense, more
loving, more sacrificial, more absurd, less and less the
character that you are born to be and live and die. You see
there must come into your case a sympathy more profound than
your inevitability, a sympathy more profound than your
logic.”

“Wherever your attention lies
without confusion, that is what you realize. If you will
give Me your attention through true hearing, if you will be
gravitated toward Me in every moment so that all of your
desiring, even your inevitability, becomes superficial and
all of that quality that arises from moment to moment will
be truly superficial. Its impact will be lost. It won’t
create incarnation. It will create heat only.”

Table of
Content

BREATH and NAME

Chapter 5.24

HEAT

Summary Statements Based on Adi
Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in
italic).

There are certain basic
considerations relative to practice that should remain
effective in the daily affair of living this
Way.

Sadhana involves:

1. Application to ordinary forms
of relationship and activity.

But all such forms are to be
lived Lawfully, as relational discipline. When ordinary
conditions of life are themselves made forms of loving
sacrifice, then ordinary life itself becomes a form of
ascetic practice or “tapas” (which means “heat”).

It is not necessary or even
useful to embrace habits of action and isolation which are
conventionally ascetic. Neither is it appropriate to indulge
and exploit the gross and subtle potentials for fascinated
and consoling experiences.

2. The true Way involves
re-adaptation of ordinary actions and relationships to the
Law.

Thus, such ordinary relations and
enjoyments and responsibilities become ascetic in the truest
sense. They awaken the “heat” which is the sign of the
frustration of old adaptation. And this “heat” (mental,
emotional, physical, and spiritual) purifies and transforms
us in our habits and liberates us from the illusory
consolations of experience.

3. Those who constantly and
steadily embrace ordinary relations and actions in the
spirit of the Law – as sacrifice, service, love, the
discipline of relationship itself-necessarily experience the
“heat” which is the sign of the frustration of old
adaptation, old tendencies, old (both latent and habitual)
desires, motivations, demands, and preferences.

Nonetheless, patterns of
un-Lawful inclination still arise. Thus, you feel frustrated
– the “heat” of practice is awakened. This “heat” is not
necessarily pleasant. Thus, devotees tend to develop habits
and points of view in practice that tend to sidestep the
heat or tapas of the spiritual process.

4. The most destructive of these
habits or points of view that weaken the transforming power
of the heat of your discipline is that of concern relative
to the tendencies that characterize your life.

Negative, self-Indulgent, and
self-possessed tendencies of all kinds are constantly
awakened in the intentional frustration or natural
asceticism of our discipline. There is no end to what may be
revealed about oneself in negative terms.

The practice is to steadily
engage relational disciplines, and to persist in an ordinary
life of service, study, and positive or moral restraint of
functions. If this is done, you will observe that the heat
of discipline becomes a purifying and transforming current
of life. Then, secondarily, you will notice that the signs
of old adaptations are gradually transformed, becoming less
and less gross, less and less frequent, until, at last, they
cease to arise or to qualify the natural Intuition or
Radiance in Ignorance.

5. Transformation of the loveless
adaptations of life is a secondary or indirect expression of
our practice. It may not be attained by direct, willful,
strategic, concerned effort in dilemma, in a milieu of
problems and solutions, but it occurs naturally in a life
which is persistently turned, as an ordinary discipline,
from problems, concerns, and subjective dis-ease, to felt
sacrifice and loving service. Such is the sane and venerable
discipline of those who are devotees rather than
self-seekers. This discipline is present release from the
ego-position. Other disciplines or ways, ascetic or
self-indulgent only reinforce the ego-position, the
principle of separation, and thus they accumulate
experiences and changes of which are only a hedge or armor
around Narcissus.

6. Accept the discipline of the
Law as a whole-body obligation in my Company. Endure the
heat thus awakened. At first it burns up the signs of old
adaptation in a purifying manner, but then it becomes a
transforming and illuminating fire. Renounce indulgence or
dramatization of un-Lawful inclinations. Likewise, renounce
all reactive concern about the continuous pattern of arising
tendencies. Whatever arises in this discipline is only a
reflection, high or low, of old adaptation and, as such,
requires neither analysis nor complaint. Be at ease in
service and devotion. All past actions, their tendencies,
and their destinies are unnecessary for the devotee. Thus,
the devotee yields all to the Divine and is happy in Divine
Communion, in Ignorance, free of bondage to both knowledge
and victory.

7. Spiritual discipline only
follows in the case of practical discipline. The grosser
elements must be transformed in fire before the subtle is
revealed above. Then even the subtle must be converted and
dissolved in the same fire. That fire is the Heart, the
Radiance, the Condition of conditions. It is the Principle
in the midst, the fire in the middle {“pyramid”], beyond
both the lower and the higher physics. It is Bright in
Ignorance. It is the Light in discipline and devotion. It is
the devotee of the Presence, and it is the Presence itself.

“The best thing to do, then, is
to be uncomfortable. That is the one thing you do not want,
though. Bottom line, nobody wants to be uncomfortable.
Everybody wants to be comfortable. You do not want to use
your greatest virtue, which is the virtue of discomfort and
the capacity to transcend the spell. Instead of doing that
you try to maintain a level of consolation and involvement
with all this hardware and software so that you will not
feel uncomfortable.”

Hardware, Software, and
Transcendence – Adi Da Samraj, 1982

“Sadhana is tapas. It is a
profound ordeal. It is painful, to some degree. However,
when you understand the reasonableness of the cure and its
purpose, you become willing to endure it. You must be like a
five-hundred-pound man or woman committed to losing weight,
that you must endure a process of purification. Therefore, a
part of self-discipline is that you become willing to endure
it, because of your intelligence and your
understanding.”

Beyond Pleasure and Pain – Adi Da
Samraj – 1994

Table of
Content

Summary Statements Based on Adi
Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in
italic).

Mature Phase

“You must come to the point at
which it is no longer acceptable to you to fall from such
Grace, at which you are no longer interested in merely
surviving and functioning, however cleanly. You must come to
the point of commitment to the Ecstasy and Intoxication of
Divine Life, the Way of life in which you are no longer
separated from the Divine, but are constantly one with the
Divine, in constant Communion. Only that must be acceptable
to you. That is the capacity for real practice. That is the
impulse to Realization. That is the core of every mature
practitioners life.”

Crazy Wisdom magazine, Vol 1, No 3,
June 1982

———

All Previous Practice (Prior to
Full Seventh Stage Realization) Of The Way Of The Heart

Is A Process Of Conversion

From the conditional or Extended
self

To The Unconditional,
Transcendental, Original, Inherently Spiritual, and Divine
Self

Prior to the Full Realization of
the Seventh Stage of life.

HEARING IS MOMENT TO
MOMENT

“At the beginning of the Way you
must break through the limit of the first three stages of
life and move on to the fourth stage of life, which is a
profound transition that very few have made in human time.
Basically all of humanity is at school, and the fourth stage
of life is the next transition. Therefore, this transition
is most profound and requires great preparation. Thus, you
must humanize yourself to a significant degree before you
take up practicing stage one.”

“True sadhana is persistent and
progressive renunciation.”

“True sadhana is (and must be)
persistent, because the ego game is constantly
arising.”

“If one does sadhana consistently
and faithfully, one becomes more of a renunciate and a
Realizer.”

***

“If someone persists in doing
sadhana, the quality of the individual will naturally become
more renunciate, because if sadhana is done consistently and
deeply, the karmas of non-Realization are released by Grace,
and Realization becomes more and more profoundly full.

The practical and relational
disciplines of spiritual practice or sadhana are designed to
assist in minimizing the degree and kinds of exploitation of
life to which the individual, by his or her mechanical
psychophysical inherited karmic tendency, is bound by
conscious and unconscious forces.

Therefore, there are preliminary
or preparatory exercises, beginner’s forms of practice, the
whole purpose of which is to liberate attention so that it
may consider its own Source.”

The Energy of Consciousness – Adi
Da Samraj, 1982

For many people sadhana is just
dealing with karmas…and that is sufficient Calling for
them.

“Sadhana is established in the
context of the body. If you do not deal with the karmas
signaled by the body, sadhana is fruitless. Sadhana is not
the interiorizing of attention. It is the transcendence of
self-contraction. It is not a matter of going inward. It is
a matter of purifying the karmas of your conditional
existence. To do sadhana, therefore, you must handle the
business of your life. By that I do not mean that you should
indulge in all kinds of fanciful cravings or motivations
toward self-fulfillment or the ‘good life’. I mean that you
must take this physical vehicle, this physically manifested
body-mind, and put it to school, command it to do the
sadhana of devotion, service, and
self-discipline.

For some, that is a sufficient
Message. For many people, in fact, just that process,
dealing with that reality, is enough to occupy them for the
rest of their lives. Dealing with the grosser personality,
putting it to school, obliging it to do the basic sadhana,
just that is sufficient Calling for them. And it is mainly
that kind of individual that in The Love-Ananda Gita
I suggest need not take up the Way of the Heart formally by
stages. And, in fact, thus far My experience is that perhaps
most people fit into that category. All the forms of
Realization are potential in that simple, or even simplest,
practice, but the sadhana of practitioners of the simplest
practice is rather basic, even the most fundamental
orientation, as a general rule. With great Help, however,
some may pass through the processes at the beginning more
easily than others. In any case, what must come of such
practice is the capability to really and responsibly
practice the Way of the Heart as it is
Given.”

Adi Da Samraj – Loveananda Gita
1989

Additional
reading

Table of
Content

You Must Hear the Teaching
Argument

From a talk by Adi Da – Do Not
Reduce This Institution to a Religion
Business

a talk by Adi Da Samraj – October
18, 1981

HEART-MASTER DA: I started
Communicating this Wisdom-Teaching, rather bright-eyed, more
than a decade ago already, and I am still Struggling with
the same lack of response in people that I encountered when
I began. Nobody is really interested. I have not really seen
any response to my Work. I have seen the usual, gleeful,
sitting­around-at-a-lecture attitude with which people
respond to movies and TV. The Teaching Argument is just a
commonplace. To enter into a higher frame of existence is
just not very important to people. They really do not care
to do it, particularly if it requires great effort, great
energy, great attention, great intelligence, great will.
Anything great to be Realized requires all of those things,
but people are used to being sold everything, as if they can
just have it at a cost they can comfortably
afford.

Like everyone else, you are
adapted to the psychology of the consumer. If something
exists to be desired, you can have it just by coming into
contact with it, or by going to a store, by picking up a
book, and by going someplace for a weekend. Everything is
supposed to be instantly consumable. The message is that
what is between you and a mouthwash is the distance between
here and the store. You only need to plunk your money down.
Everything is like a sex-object, conceived solely in terms
of its consumability, its desirability. Even the great
Realizations of human life have somehow been drawn into the
stream of communications that propose such things merely as
desirable objects. However, the substance of Spiritual life
is not merely a desirable object that you can notice and
then desire just because it is there, or that you can
acquire simply by coming in touch with it. The conventional
consumer’s mind says that there is nothing between you and
anything you might desire but space, whereas what is really
between you and What is Great is much more than
space!

The distance between you and What
is Great is not only space but time, or mind. It is the
distance between where you are now and your ultimate
overcoming. God-Realization is not a consumable product.
Spiritual Teaching cannot be presented as a consumable
object. To become a successful institution or religion
business involves making the Teaching somehow consumable, an
object you can sell. And if the Teaching is to be an object
you can sell, then not only the Instructions but also the
Realization must become salable.

People are not interested in
coming to your church if Enlightenment is not what they get
by coming there. If they do come to your church, and you
tell them all the things they must do in order to become
Enlightened, they go to sleep. People simply do not have any
tolerance for the Way whereby the Great Things are Realized.
They reject the whole process. It is too much. They think it
is evil. They cannot desire the Way.

If you cannot make a religious or
Spiritual offering in its fullness available like a
consumable object, you cannot generate the growth that seems
desirable. Religious institutions grow, therefore, by
creating religious illusions, consumable religious products,
consumable Spiritual products. Religious institutions hype
illusion, or ideas, in such a fashion as to make them
desirable, make them somehow seem like Enlightenment itself.
You would think that just the ideas themselves were the
equivalent of ultimate Realization, or ultimate Happiness.
All you have to do is consume these things. All you have to
do is get kriya initiation, and right then, having gotten
that now, you are happy. People flock to organizations to
get products that are hyped, thinking that they are getting
Happiness, or getting the ultimate Great Thing. But they are
not getting true Happiness at all. The religion business
exists to make the unattainable seem like a product that can
be purchased.

I have been Teaching the Real
Thing to people all these years, and I know what happens to
people when they are confronted with the realities of
Spirituality. Unless they are unusual people, they basically
do not respond. They somehow can get attached to the
Teacher, or attached to whatever organization may seem to
develop around the Teacher, because they are hopeful of
something, or because in the context of belonging certain
goods come across so consoling that people do not mind being
hangers-on.

But we do not have an
“Enlightenment-product” to sell here. The Way must be lived.
The Way requires disciplines. As soon as we emphasize the
disciplines in The Laughing Man Institute and talk about the
profound orientation to practice, every student wants to
retreat and become a friend. But if we keep The Laughing Man
Institute a kind of middle-class religion business, wherein
we do not make demands too heavily and we permit people to
dramatize their human ordinariness, then we can make that
department into a business. People do not mind being
consumers of The Laughing Man Institute business we produce
here-although even so it is very difficult to develop that
business!

One of the reasons it has been so
difficult to establish The Laughing Man Institute is that
the Wisdom-Teaching is inherently critical of the point of
view of religion business. This Wisdom-Teaching just does
not have anything to do with anything like religion
business. The Wisdom-Teaching is not consumable. The Way is
not consumable. The Way is not something some smiling jerk
can purchase and tell his friends about. It is too
difficult, too profound.

The problem with the people who
are involved here is that they have not observed life itself
in such a light that they are motivated toward the Great
Process. Life still seems to them to be an amusing
opportunity. They want to continue with its consolations.
They are not really observing life as a whole. They are not
really seeing what is before them. The profound nature of
existence escapes them. They are involved in a very
superficial level of existence, largely oriented toward
bodily amusement. For them, life is the proposition of
bodily fulfillment. Of course there is mortality and
difficulty, and therefore they like to throw a little
religion into their heads, just to protect
themselves.

This Teaching is not the kind of
religion that can serve such a purpose. The kind of religion
that can serve that purpose is conventional, exoteric,
downtown churchism and all the hype of self-help groups. The
ultimate, Transcendental, esoteric Spiritual Process has
always been a great matter. Very few have ever been involved
in it. Very few even heard about it before the last century.
The ordinary run of humanity just is not in touch with it.
Thus, it has always been reserved.

Yet, because the world has gotten
into such a bad state, and because the science of
communication has advanced, the secret stream of human
evolution and higher Teaching has become more public. As a
result, the secret Teaching became part of the domain of
business and superficial culture. And that is our double
bind: We are involved in a Teaching that is fundamentally
only for those who can use it, and at the same time we have
an apparent obligation to the world at large that requires a
worldly business.

Today all kinds of weak-minded
people are making commentaries on great matters, as if they
were authorities. The Great Teaching has been made an object
of abuse and casual treatment by the general public, who are
threatened by its existence. If you want to succeed as a
religious institution, you must reduce yourself to a common
message. You must present yourself as a congenial, friendly
little thing, a little character that does not know too much
or own too much, is not free too much, is just a good guy.
You must be like everybody else. You must present something
that is consumable by all people just as they are. “Jesus
loves you just as you are” is the message, you
see.

All people want to be just as
they are, and they want to enjoy themselves just as they
are. Such is the common motivation – to be exactly as you
are and to enjoy yourself. People basically come around here
expecting to find out that they can simply enjoy themselves
and not have to change one whit. They merely want to be what
they are, the born physical character. They desire all the
things that would be fun to do, and they want to know how to
do them. The reason they are asking about how to get happy,
of course, is that they are frustrated and unhappy and
mortal, but they do not want to get too philosophical about
all that. They do not want to look at their frustration and
unhappiness to the point of becoming something else
altogether. Of course, if they come to me, they are told,
“You should really examine all of this and be
something entirely different.” Yet they keep coming back
every week, asking, “Are you sure that is the way it is? Are
you sure I have to do all this stuff? Are you really
serious, or is this just a bit of theatre? Are you just
setting us up for a big party? What you are really going to
wind up telling us is that we really do not have to do
anything but simply enjoy ourselves, right?” Meanwhile, I am
busy working myself over, trying to Communicate the Truth to
you in such a form that it will make a difference to
you.

Now, why should I be worried
about that? Why should I be concerned to find some new way
of phrasing the Truth that will somehow make the difference
for you people here? If you had half a wit, The Knee of
Listening would have changed your life! It has been in print
since 1972, but you simply do not like the implications of
The Knee of Listening. It suggests that you must change, you
see. It suggests that you cannot enjoy the consoling
religious ideas. You must have a fundamental understanding
now, and if you live on the basis of that fundamental
understanding, you will change your life. Your whole life
will be taken up by disciplines, meditation, and
God-Realization, but you do not want it.

What do you want? You want some
promise, some graduated path. Why must a Teaching based on
the Wisdom that there is no graduated path and that the
ultimate Realization is not the goal of human life busy
itself creating a graduated path wherein the goal of
Realization is constantly sought? Why must a gradual path be
created? Because of the nature of the people who come
around. Because they are not really available to the Wisdom
that is offered to them, they must be given something else
to do in the meantime so that perhaps they will gradually be
brought around. Not only are people not ready for the
esoteric dimension of this process, but they are not even
ready for the basic communication.

You simply do not use the radical
Wisdom. You insist on being associated with the conventional
archetypes. As long as I use archetypal words, you feel you
are in the presence of something religious, you feel all
right, you will keep struggling along, applying yourself in
some very minimal way because you are not truly motivated.
You are motivated only if you wake up, and then you have
great energy. But since you have not awakened yet, you only
want to be surrounded by a few comfortable slogans and
archetypes, and you will apply the discipline only to the
degree that you are not burdened by guilt.

The trouble with religious and
Spiritual institutions all over the world is that people do
not practice. In general the institutions do not even regard
this reality to be a problem. They become immune to it. They
are willing to exist specifically for people who do not
practice. Lack of practice has likewise always been a
problem here. I have been able to function as someone who
communicates, but I have not been able to function as
somebody who communicates in the company of people who
practice. The institution itself takes on more and more of
the quality of non-practice, on the justification that “If
we are going to succeed and grow, then we must give up on
this idea that people are supposed to practice seriously, if
at all.”

If all there is is what there was
at the beginning – which is me, having Realized the Truth –
then that is all there is about this institution that is
real. All the rest of it is a worldly machine that has
developed around me because of my poor interest in bringing
other people into God-Realization. But I ask myself, “Why
should it be a concern of mine?” Why am I concerned about
whether or not people hear me and change their lives? That
concern just led me into more and more involvement with
people and with the world, an involvement that confines and
threatens my own existence and that does not represent a
change in other people.

I did not become involved in this
Teaching Work in order to create a religion business, not at
all. My Teaching Work was a serious impulse, a real impulse,
based on what I had observed in everybody since the day I
was born. What I had seen in other people seemed to make
them worthy of being instructed. Something needed to be
found out, and if it could be found out, there would be
profound change. It always seemed to me that if I could find
it out, then to let other people know about it was something
important to do. Such has always been my impulse, but it is
an impulse that is always frustrated, even subverted and
reinterpreted by the institutional process of communicating
the Teaching Argument to people. Something could be
profoundly different about everybody’s life, but the fact
that I am interested in its being profoundly different does
not mean that other people are interested in its being
profoundly different. Basically people are not
interested.

You know that saying in The Knee
of Listening, in “The Man of Understanding” section,
something like “Nobody understands so he makes himself happy
with the idea that you have already understood.” There is no
way whereby you get to understand. There is nothing I can do
to make you understand. The Bodhisattva vow does not really
work, not in any ultimate sense. Some sort of Transmission
is involved in the awakening of one individual, because the
Divine Reality Transmits Itself to the world in one way or
another, but such Transmission is required eternally. It
must happen again and again and again and again. Nothing one
individual can do in one lifetime is going to make the
ultimate or absolute difference for mankind as a whole
because of the nature of this material bondage that is
humanity.

I have had only the best
intentions, but this world, and the people who come around
to hear the Wisdom-Teaching, and the people who are
available to listen to it, are doing something different
than I am doing. I lived what everybody else lives in the
midst of this Teaching Work in order to be instructive. It
became very clear to me in the midst of that submission that
everybody is interested in my living what they are living
forever. What they liked was the fact that I was living
their kind of life, not the fact that I was Teaching in the
midst of their life. Everybody was really very disappointed
by the fact that I did not want to live that kind of life
very long and by the fact that I am not doing it
now.

Everybody is wondering where the
good times are! People become worried when they see me just
as I am, when I am not taking on their qualities, playing
life just the way they want to play it. They start getting
uptight. If I am just sort of invisible, criticizing things
and making demands, people become uninterested. They feel
burdened by everything. When all they hear about is the
disciplines of Spiritual life, they lose
interest.

The survival of the institution
should not be dependent on immature people who presume they
are already Enlightened beings. Because immature people are
what they are, we must have a proper formal structure for
their involvement. That is the way it was always done
traditionally. If there existed a core of renunciate or
esoteric practitioners, they related to the public and to
beginners through the kind of very formal temple structure I
have described in the past. They did not create folksy,
informal association with inappropriate expectations and
access to beginners.

It is a nice idea that there be a
gathering of mature practitioners, but it is very difficult
to manifest, particularly in this wasteland where forces
propagandize against the higher possibilities of humanity
from all directions. It is basically against the law to
become Enlightened. You must violate basic human taboos to
enter into the real Process of Spiritual life. There is not
enough free space. Everyone is obliged to be the same. How
can you possibly create an authentic gathering under such
circumstances? It would be a rare case if any single
Realized individual came out of that, and it is rare and
unusual, but today everybody wants to maintain the
egalitarian view of humanity. Everybody imagines that if one
guy can do it, everybody must be able to do it in a weekend.
It must be as easy as pie.

Adepts almost never appear. Real
practitioners are very, very rare. That is the way it has
always been, and it is still the way it is. To hear people
talk you would think there were thousands of Adepts all over
the country. There are not even thousands of real
practitioners. There are people famous for their
Spirituality who are not even real practitioners. This is an
Alice-in-Wonderland world. It is not real. That is why there
must be the Great Teaching. That is why the Truth is of such
great consequence, because it is hardly understood, and the
real implications of Spiritual Wisdom are not
grasped.

Even in the optimum circumstance
of the traditional setting, it still took years and years to
develop a disciple. And there were very few of those. Look
at the history of the traditions and consider the people who
were associated with Adepts. How many Adepts were, in
effect, fathered by other Adepts? How many Adepts produced
one or more other Adepts, even in the apparently optimum
circumstances of the traditional setting?

All of the Adepts basically act
as if, in their sort of bright-eyed fashion, they are going
to save the world. What they have Realized obviously has
great consequences. If everybody else could Realize it
likewise, things certainly would be remarkably different.
Thus, the Adepts are always laying the Teaching onto people
and suffering and being abused for doing so. What is the
history of mankind? It is not the absence of Adepts and
Teachings. These have always appeared. It is the non-use of
them, the non-response, the abuse, the suppression. Yes,
religion is famous, but not as true religion, not as the
servant of Truth, not even as the medium of Truth. Religion
has become famous because it is not really religion. It is
the same thing that existed before the Truth was proclaimed.
And it makes the Truth or the atmosphere of Truth into
something else entirely, basically a justification for the
conventions of worldliness, not
Enlightenment.

And yet religious institutions
have value in that they keep some sort of stream of
Spiritual teaching in the world. What they present is often
falsified, manipulated, suppressed, abused, and
miscommunicated, but these institutions are the only vehicle
apart from the occasional arising of an Adept. This is why
it seems important to me to create an institution that
functions rightly, but not because I have even the slightest
sense that the world could be suddenly changed by hearing
the Truth. It has never happened, and it is never going to
happen, at least not with humanity as it is. In general, it
is not going to happen in the manifest realms, and there is
no other place where it could happen.

To communicate the Truth is
always difficult because the Truth is about waking up from
the presumption you are making on the basis of manifest
existence. Even religion and so-called Spiritual endeavor
tends to be based on that same presumption. The religion
people hold on to, cling to, feel consoled by, is the
religion based on that error, that false presumption. The
Truth is another matter. The Truth is taught in a religious
or Spiritual context, but if it is to be practiced, the
error you are making on the basis of manifest appearances
must be thoroughly transcended. Such transcendence is
Enlightenment. Such transcendence is hearing the
Teaching.

Just to begin the Way you must
hear the Teaching. You must Awaken. Whole-bodily
Enlightenment in the most thorough, full, and high sense
involves a Great Process, but Enlightenment is not its goal.
Enlightenment is its root. Enlightenment is a fundamental
Awakening, a fundamental insight, which you then use moment
to moment to create the Way. A practice that is not based on
that fundamental insight is not based on
Truth.

Therefore, the basic Teaching
this institution should represent is the understanding of
this fundamental error, or the mechanism associated with
manifest existence that makes it into an illusion, into
suffering, un-Happiness, un-Enlightenment, Godlessness. You
cannot merely believe something positive and develop a true
religious or Spiritual life. Enlightenment is not simply a
matter of believing in conventional God-ideas that motivate
you to be better. All such ideas must be understood. You
must enjoy this Awakening, this insight. You must hear the
Teaching Argument.

The Way Out of Pleasure and
Pain

February 19, 1994

ADI DA SAMRAJ (SRI DA
AVABHASA): You make the choices. I Make the
Revelation. I can Call you to greater understanding and more
profound practice, I can urge you on, but you make the
choices. If you want What is Ultimate and Most Profound, you
must be changed likewise, in your choices, in your
understanding, and in your involvement in everything. Such
transformation requires a profound discipline and a great
ordeal.

Sooner or later, any kind of
self-indulgence whatsoever reaches the point where
discomfort is greater than pleasure. So it is with the world
and with everything karmic, with every indulgence of
attention in conditions. There is some pleasure in your
indulgence, but as you repeat the indulgence, you reach a
point after a while when the pleasure is greatly reduced and
you are mostly suffering the results. Sex, intimate
feelings, drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, TV,
food—absolutely everything you can do in the domain of
conditional existence produces the same result in due
course, which is that at some point the pleasure is greatly
reduced and you are mainly suffering ill effects. Such is
life.

All indulgence in conditionality
is the same. There is no difference in effect. This is just
how conditional existence works. Conditional existence is a
play of opposites. If you work on the pleasure side, the
opposite comes into play sooner or later and, like any
addict, you continue to seek for pleasure, but now to
relieve yourself of some pain rather than to magnify the
enjoyment. Most of the time, you are just suffering, and the
pattern is repeating itself automatically. You do not quite
know what to do about it. You are just stuck with it, and
you think, “Well, that is the way it is supposed to be.” You
are basically just feeling the pain of it and trying to get
rid of the pain. your whole life feels like a dilemma of
disease.

The way out of the cycle of
pleasure and pain, the cure for your addiction, is also
painful, to some degree. There is tapas in it. However, when
you understand the reasonableness of the cure and its
purpose, you become willing to endure it. Having so
thoroughly adapted to what is inherently painful, you must
understand, like a five-hundred-pound man or woman committed
to losing weight, that you must endure a process of
purification. Therefore, a part of self-discipline is that
you become willing to endure it, because of your
intelligence, your understanding.

Participation in conditional
existence ends in pain. In the meantime it shows all the
signs of the addictive cycle, eventually becoming the
endurance of pain and the search for release. Everything
associated with conditional existence is just this cycle. If
you are noticing this truth about some things and not
others, you have more to learn about your desires and your
bargaining. You must find out that every indulgence in
conditions is the same: It becomes the addictive cycle, and
it ends in pain.

If you could make a truly summary
and most profound estimate of the nature of conditional
existence and the option of true devotion, what would you
do? You would do no more bargaining. You can be My devotee
without having come to the great estimate about everything
yet, but your destiny is dependent on the tendencies of
attention you have not yet understood and relinquished.
Because you have not understood most fundamentally yet,
because you have not gotten the lesson yet, attention makes
repetition. It keeps you continuous with your limitations,
until you understand and are not moved toward them any more.
When you come to that point, you are not strategically
renouncing, without understanding, but it is obvious that
you just do not do that anymore.

If people who drink or smoke day
after day are honest with themselves, they find that
eventually drinking or smoking does not feel good. It
toxifies you more and more and makes you more and more
uncomfortable. Eventually, the only motive left is to grasp
something of the original pleasure, but you are only being
sick and poisoned. You enjoy a few moments of pleasure, then
the indulgence degrades you, you feel uncomfortable and
sick, you must endure the aftereffects the next day, and
then struggle with the process of purification, however long
it takes.

Everything is like this.
Everything! To understand this point transforms a life. You
seem to be waiting to reach that point. What about it? What
about everything? What about the habit of granting attention
to conditional matters that eventually end in the pain of
the addictive cycle? There is fun in it at the beginning,
and then immediately you feel the results of the toxins and
it is not so much fun any more. You are unsteady physically,
emotionally, mentally, and in your breath. Instead of
Listening to Me and doing the Yoga, then, there is bodily
unsteadiness, emotional unsteadiness, mental unsteadiness,
unsteadiness of attention, unsteadiness of breath, and you
must endure these results and take actions that will purify
you and restore your equanimity—and then you will
Listen to Me.

So it is with everything! As
Listening to Me and doing the Yoga is delayed…by your
concessions to your addictive tendency…you do not
understand. You bargain with yourself. Understand this and
change your life. Such understanding does not make the ideal
life or utopia here. The reason for right discipline is not
just to feel good as a human being and live an ideal,
utopian life but to be in a position to make this sacrifice
to Me in every moment, because you are able to be
responsible for these faculties. As an addict, however,
distracted by attention not merely to toxins but to
everything else you do conditionally, you are not
responsible for these faculties. You cannot give them
directly to Me in every moment. You always have something
else to do with them, some distraction, some leftover from
previous indulgence. It is so!

Everything about your
life-action, your life-process, your life-circumstance is a
result of the concessions you have made and, therefore,
everything you do is the picture of the degree to which you
are living or not living the practice I have given to you in
this moment.

You must “consider” this, examine
your life with true understanding, and make choices.
Whatever your choice, whatever your circumstance…it is
your business, and there is no bargaining with Me about
it.

No matter how much longer you do
what you have been doing all your life, you are not going to
feel as good as you did when you started. You are only going
to feel worse. Appreciate this, and then make the
choices.

Whatever is binding you—your
intimacy, sexuality, toxic substances, social life, daily
life, food, money—whatever it is, it is your business
to deal with it. Find your addiction, and cut it off. Then
see what is left over that is compatible with the Way of the
Heart. It is for you to discover, and it is different in
every case, even a different process in some sense, but at
last it is the same process fundamentally, the same
requirement: Either you are given up to the tendencies of
your attention and their results, or you are giving yourself
with full attention to Me.

DEVOTEE: Beloved Heart, when
attention moves with sympathy, if I am sympathetic with
something I focus my attention on . . .

SRI DA AVABHASA: You would not
put your attention on it if you were not sympathetic with
it. Even if you are revolted, there is also a sympathy
there, because your attention goes there.

DEVOTEE: The sympathy is the ego
expressing itself.

SRI DA AVABHASA: It is not only
egoity, not just the self-contraction, but it is the
patterning of egoity, the adaptations of egoity, and they
must be dealt with. If you weigh five hundred pounds, losing
weight does not depend just on what you do with your
attention! Yes, give your attention to Me, practice, but you
must also handle the business of straightening out the body
and losing a great deal of poundage.

The tapas of real self-discipline is
an essential, necessary part of right practice of the Way of
the Heart. Yes, it can be said that the basis of
self-discipline is devotion to Me, giving Me your attention
with feeling, directing the whole body to Me, surrendering
with every breath—yes, that is so. Yet self-discipline
bears an obligation for all your adaptations. Everything
that has occurred as a result of your addiction, everything
that has occurred as a result of your granting of attention
to conditional matters, must be purified. Such purification
requires real tapas, real devotion of attention to Me. In
the process, you are losing those five hundred pounds and
getting down to normal weight, meaning that you are
relinquishing all the tendencies of your
attention.

Your tendencies will be fighting
back, because of your adaptation. Therefore, the fundamental
principle of My Yoga is simple to understand, even to
do, if you bring yourself to it every moment, but you must
go through the purification, or the reorientation. It is not
fun, but it can be interesting—you can allow yourself
an intelligent participation in the purification.

All of your karmas, all the results
of your attention, all the tendencies of your attention must
be redirected to Me. There is a necessary tapas in that
process, in every moment and along the course. If you do
this practice most profoundly, Most Perfectly, then all the
movements of attention, all the results of attention, and
all the destiny of attention are relinquished, gone, and all
that is left is the Source of attention, the Domain of
attention, the Origin of attention, the Divine Person, the
Divine Self-Domain. Realization of the Ultimate requires the
conversion of attention and the purifying process, the
tapas, the understanding, the change of life, the
discipline, the continuous moment to moment devotion, the
profound work.

You are making more lifetimes,
either here in this yellow-red place or somewhere else, on
the basis of the same tendencies, adaptations, addictions. A
summary word from the traditions for the cycle in which you
are caught is “samsara”. It is an irreducible cycle of
suffering. The secret of renunciation is to comprehend it
whole, in one glance, and be disposed unlike that, not
making karma anymore but instead given up to Divine
Communion with all of your faculties, moment to moment.
Everything is purified in the heat of such constant
practice. It is the Circumstance of Most Ultimate
Realization.

The Great Way of the Heart is a
Great Matter, beyond Wonderful. You must get on with it,
with no bargaining, or you stop at one place or another. You
can see even now that all kinds of things that relate to
your present stage of life-demonstration are no longer
addictive, not of interest, not binding you, and you do not
have any attention for them. Yet just one fraction, one
part, one element, one function, one kind of association can
bind you to the entire stage of life.

DEVOTEE: Sri Gurudev, I felt just
a moment ago the consolation of the ocean, the air, the
sand, drawing me so that I wanted to lie down in
it.

SRI DA AVABHASA: You have the
faculties to enjoy it, but you could be in another state,
the body profoundly diseased and in pain, wherein the
rustling of the waves would be profoundly disturbing to
you.

The conditional realm is only Me.
It is only the Divine Person. Why fasten onto it? Why
luxuriate in it? Why be an odalisque, oblivious to the Place
Where you Are, oblivious to the Person in Whom all of this
is arising? You should devote your life to the Person in
Whom all of this is arising, rather than clinging like an
addict to such temporary luxuries.

Come to Me in every moment. How
profoundly you will do that coming to Me in every moment,
depends on your understanding of all of your uses of
attention. I Call you to devote your attention to Me
utterly, your feeling to Me utterly, your entire bodily
existence to Me utterly, your breath, altogether, in every
moment, utterly. Yet you have adaptations, tendencies,
justifications in mind for doing something else with your
faculties, and you bargain with Me. This is what is yet to
be more profoundly inspected and understood and converted to
Me. It is the circumstance of your sadhana, stage by stage,
in My Company.

Your choices change, through
right sadhana. The understanding develops, fine, but you
must take your understanding seriously. You must take My
Revelation seriously, and truly respond to Me, as a serious
person. My Revelation is not serious if you are not a
serious person. You cannot worship Me, surrender to Me, in
this bodily (human) Form in limitation. You must be
continuous with the Divine Person.

I am not an ordinary man nor is
this an ordinary world. All and all is My Very Person, to be
recognized as such and acknowledged as such, so that your
submission to Me, your worship of Me, becomes most profound,
not merely a token gesture of a part of you.

Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga is an
expression of your impulse to Divine Communion and Divine
Self-Realization. Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga is worship of the
Divine Person. If you choose Me as your Ishta, you choose
the Divine Person.

see
Full talk

Top of
page

Table of
Content