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If you are not obliged by right understanding of your
practice to submit yourself in totality to the spiritual
process, you could seem to be even an advanced practitioner
at any moment. However, if you are obliged to consistently
demonstrate a stage of practice beyond your level of real
responsibility, you begin to show signs of difficulty. You
simply cannot practice any better than you practice at the
feeling level, in the emotional domain of your hidden
personality that only comes forward in difficult
confrontations. You practice no better or deeper than that.
That dimension must be brought to school. If it has not been
touched, then you are still in the domain of listening, and
listening is your discipline, then. If you assume any other
discipline, you will either show signs of obvious emotional
aberration or you will simply magnify your relatively
feelingless social personality, which looks like it has got
it all together. You will be an idealistic character who can
conform to orderly patterns rather easily. Of course, none
of that has anything to do with practice.
Be manly, man or woman. This is My advice-you do what you
will. Believe that every moment of life is on the edge. Wake
up! You do not want to, because to be on the edge, to be
truly mortal, means you must suffer pain in your heart in
every moment of your existence here in this body-every
moment. You all know who is doing the really important work
in life among ordinary human beings. It is the people who
are dying. They are on the edge of having to deal with
everything which has to be dealt with and they have no
options. And there is no relief. None. Not with sex,
alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, politics-nothing can relieve you
of this heart-pain that is true to life. Nothing. Only this
devotion to Me, to My Sign here, only you embracing Me,
wakes up the capability for love with all your friends and
lovers. That is the great love. All your faces will be eaten
by worms like the faces of all the millions that came before
you. Do not be stupid! No one is protected! NO ONE! Everyone
is dying. Everyone is threatened. Wake up at heart. Truly!
Truly!
Real practice of the Way of the Heart is to be on the
edge moment to moment, always stepping back from reactivity,
desires, search towards objects and others, stepping back
from all of that, in the location of the self-contraction,
that unique sensation that precedes all the seeking.
So you must go through that purifying process in the
midst of self-frustration, difficulty, binding psychological
tendencies, and go beyond them. So the process is purifying
all along till the “Perfect Practice” becomes your
capability. It relieves knots, you see. And the sign, then,
in somebody who’s My devotee, who’s advancing in the
practice, is that you are feeling beyond the knots
consistently. Its noticeable by those who know you over time
that previously you showed certain kinds of signs in certain
situations, had a certain disposition, or whatever-your
egoic personality showed itself in some way-and now ten
years later, somebody who’s known you all along can notice
for you how those things have changed, they’ve disappeared,
even, you see. You may feel you’re still dealing with a lot
of it on some subtler level, but others notice all kinds of
signs in your physical, emotional, and mental qualities,
your relational qualities and so on as well, and all your
behavior, that its become-one good word for it is benign,
relatively En-Lightened, so to speak. In other words, Light
has been brought there. You released it in Communion with Me
and found the State of Light. It is Radiant, Love-Bliss, not
contracted, not negative. And so It shows Itself in
everything about you.
So you are presuming darkness or negativity. And you
notice everybody you meet, then, in the general attractions
of people, is constantly showing signs of going through
changes-different every hour, or day, or week, or year, or
whatever-they’re going through all kinds of changes that
have to do with being less than Happy, less than
Enlightened, or “Bright”. They go through signs, in other
words, of being, to one or another significant degree, not
Radiant. They show the sign of being contracted rather than
Radiant.
Sadhana then is not about the good life, what people
would commonly call the good life, the western idea of
self-fulfillment. Its not that at all. However, the
person who does sadhana can and rightly should and in
general maintain positive life signs, healthful signs,
positive relational signs and so forth and all these are
simply expressions of the dispositions of sadhana in
fact.
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