|
SADHANA AS AN ORDEAL
Adi Da Samraj – 1974
Sadhana is an ordeal and
some people don’t want to do that because they think they’ll
give up all the pleasure of life, the good life in some
sense. It certainly has to be cut into by doing sadhana but
people who think in those terms don’t understand themselves.
They have no direct perception of existence, no awareness of
their origin or their destiny and they are utterly oblivious
as to what is going to happen at death and what determines
what happens at death.
People who don’t understand. They think of death as
you’re just dead or you’ll go to heaven or something like
that. It’s just out there in the future. It’s not connected
to the present. What occurs after death is determined by how
you live. It’s determined by your state of consciousness.
During life the physical vehicle is present in people and
consciousness is limited by, defined by the brain, nervous
system and body mechanism. The mind is trimmed down. Most of
it is kept away by this barrier of brain and nervous
system.
It’s unconscious. It’s in the unconscious, so you can
just live your life on the basis of this stimulation of this
bodily entity and get out of it what you can in terms of
pleasure and whatever else you do. That’s the choice that
many make. They don’t understand what’s on the other side of
that barrier. And the barrier gets lifted and you fall into
the domain of the so-called unconscious.
Before death you make mind and after death mind makes
you. Mind is your circumstance after death and not just what
you’re thinking. The unconscious is your circumstance after
death. You know the potential you have for bad dreams? Well
if you stay healthy and keep your mind focused on positive
thoughts and what not, maybe you won’t have a bad dream but
it’s all there all the time right?
So after death you don’t have the physical means to
prevent the unconscious from becoming conscious.
If you use the body circumstance as a means to purify the
mind, the unconscious that is outside the realm of the
brain, cut off by the brain you see, then those mechanisms
will not control destiny after death. Because if your use
your lifetime simply as an opportunity to indulge basically
in bodily-based existence, you will do nothing but add to
the sum total of karma in the unconscious and all that
becomes your destiny then.
So you must get wisdom. You must understand. You must do
sadhana and be purified of karma. People think that maybe
the brain is it. Maybe that’s it. Maybe mind is just brain.
Maybe when you’re dead you’re dead you see. Well it’s not
true. The brain however is a limiting mechanism. It keeps
you from having certain kinds of experiences. It’s not
really that the brain is here to evolve so that you can have
all experiences.
The brain is here to keep you from having experiences or
to limit, define what kinds of experiences you can have and
most of what is potential is outside the brain mind area,
not accessible as a general rule.
Sometimes there are these openings and you have these
unusual experiences, sometimes positive, sometimes negative.
But for the most part you remain in a state controlled by
the brain mind. You have those thoughts and experiences that
relate to your present physicality and so on but for the
most part this is what people experience. And they think
therefore that’s it, that’s what life is supposed to be you
see. They don’t understand what the purpose is of having a
limit place on which you can experience.
The purpose of it is for you to purify the karmic
consciousness, the karmic mind that preceded the present
birth. You must devote your life not to the fulfillment of
the bodily personality but to the purification of karma
through the devotion of the bodily personality so that in
death when you lose the vehicle that shuts off experience
and all experience is opened up to you, what you’re opened
up to will be auspicious because mind has been purified.
Attention has been given to its source.
The degree to which you’ve done all this in other words
the stage of life you represent in manifestation will
determine the quality of experience after death. Whereas
during life in the body you see the body as a limit. People
are always remarking, “How come you perform good right
actions, you don’t get good results? How come there are all
these really bad guys that are having an apparently good
life.
Everything seems to happen good for them. How come?”
They’ve got all these virtuous people and they’re all
suffering so terribly you see. Well in the context of bodily
existence results do not immediately follow necessarily, the
place where you’re getting your results is outside the brain
mind. You’re getting results of purifying that unconscious
or you’re getting the results of adding to it and
complicating it.
So in the context of the body a person can be performing
actions that are building up karmic destiny but in the
present context of the body, it having its own destiny and
tendencies, apparently what people might call good results
are taking place and some other person who is actually
purifying the sum total of bondage karmicly through right
action is having a difficult life in many cases.
The more you mature and practice, the more you come to
appreciate what’s really going on, what kind of mechanism
you are associated with here. People generally, especially
westerners, tend to make the casual choice of bodily
self-fulfillment. This is also a tendency of the ego in
general no matter what the place of origin east or west. But
westerns have a certain omega-like way of tending and I have
observed in my work in the west that people struggle
intensely against the demand for self-discipline and they’re
always struggling with this notion, should they discipline
themselves, or should they just go for the good life you
see. They are always thinking about this nonsense because
you have so little experience, so little understanding of
what is really taking place. You will not resort to
wisdom.
People generally do not resort to wisdom or to realizers
so they just go with the flow so to speak but you’re not
going to experience a collective destiny after death you
see. You’re going to experience a personal destiny and one
that goes beyond individuality ultimately but in other
words, you’re not going to realize after death what
everybody thought life was about. You’re going to realize
the sum total of your karmic tendencies.
So you should use this lifetime of practice in my company
to be purified of these tendencies. 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 very 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 from these forms of
self-contraction.
Sadhana then is not about the good life, what people
would commonly call the good life, the western idea of
self-fulfillment and so forth. It’s not that at all.
However, a person who does sadhana can and rightly should in
general maintain positive life signs, healthful signs,
positive relational signs, and so forth. All these are
simply expressions of the disposition of sadhana in fact.
It’s not about pursuing self-fulfillment, glorification of
self, clinging to qualities of life, relationships,
experiences, limitations and so forth for their own
sake.
The daily qualities of life may be generally whole and
positive by your intentions but still you must do the
sadhana of self-transcendence and if the qualities of life
at the moment are not all that positive, likewise, it’s the
same sadhana. From the point of view of sadhana then, it
doesn’t make any difference whether the qualities of any
given day are positive or negative because you have to do
the same thing in any case.
The import of this sadhana is not merely to, not only
relative to destiny after death, it’s relative to this
lifetime also but its fruits to be valued are not merely
those of physical design. Either the great virtues of
sadhana can be seen in terms of the advancement in the
stages of life so one’s practice matures and becomes most
profound, and then the state of consciousness is
transformed.
The general life signs become more and more
characteristic of renunciation and the quality of
consciousness exhibits the characteristic of realization
along the lines of one of the advanced or ultimate stages of
life, this progressively.
In general then, the destiny after death corresponds to
the realization while alive and that being the case, then it
is also clear that except in the case of absolute perfect
enlightenment, after death the opportunity for further
growth must be given. But all that takes place, all that is
given in the context of a paradox and a mystery of
unfathomable proportions and signs of time and space that
are not comprehensible from the present bodily point of
view.
Fundamentally as I said, sadhana is a matter of
self-purification, it is then the outshining of all forms of
limitation by the force of consciousness itself by
magnifying the force of consciousness itself, the force of
love, bliss itself. This purifies, this releases. That
virtue is what you are coming into contact with in sodsong
with me and as you mature you become a more and more
responsible participant in that process of self-purification
or ultimately outshining, recognition with outshining.
The divine reality is simply the absolute objectless
expansiveness of mere being without a trace of limitation,
self-radiant bliss absolute. Between this apparition and
such realization there is much more more than merely living
and much much more than talking school, attitudes, gestures
you see.
Real sadhana is necessary. Resort to grace. It’s
necessary. Grace must work. This is necessary.
More:
Sadhana
|
