ADI DA SAMRAJ: The sadhana is a matter of actually dealing with this disease. In other words, the religious life in this Way in particular is not about consolation merely and distraction and so forth in the conventional sense or ego-supporting sense. The process moment to moment goes beyond the self-contraction.
Listen
DEVOTEES: Yeah.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Particularly as hearing awakens that’s when there is most profound understanding, knowing of this self-contraction that it is your own activity.
Even the thought of that (understanding) from the beginning is about going beyond this knot and not avoiding it through conventional mindedness and consolation. So the actual process is to stay in place in this place of self-surrendering to Me to the point of self-forgetting communion with Me. Truly going beyond it. It’s that from the beginning, not merely after hearing, even from the beginning it is so. But you have to understand that that’s what the sadhana is about or you’ve missed the point and think the religious life is about consolation or only behavior and so forth.
You are to stand in that position of that knot feeling your own diseased motivation. That means you have to endure it. There’s not only the fundamental knot itself there are all of its reflections in the body-mind – tendencies of one kind or another. You have to endure the purification of these things by standing in the knot-position sensitive to all the limitations of your disposition and surrender to me, to the point of forgetting it, relinquishing it, keeping the faculties all focused in this communion.
Only then do you make this knot obsolete. And you initially go through a process of purification where the resultant knots, the different kinds of behaviors, attitudes, and so forth that bind you appear….these must be purified through the initial stages of sadhana even up to the Perfect Practice.
The initial sadhana is purifying and is necessarily. Then it is the matter of being in touch with this knot in life’s difficulties…all tendencies that are not likely felt. Instead of the drama of dramatizing them, maintain the discipline of this way and practice this communion every moment. In this manner, you will be purified by this communion with Me in all those areas that are relaxed, forgotten, and disciplined.
So the more and more the practice becomes extraordinarily concentrated, not in peripheral matters of experiencing and so on, but in the root itself, then the Perfect Practice can begin. Once sufficient purification has occurred, then there is this extraordinary concentration – then suddenly my instruction about the Witness becomes inherently obvious and is thereafter not something that can be forgotten. It’s not really a thought. You can say it’s a noticing that you never forget.
It’s a noticing even beyond the mind. Now, you can notice it of course for a moment. If I call you to, “isn’t it true right now, no matter what is arising, you are the witness of it.” But to stand in the witness position itself truly requires purification of attention and therefore of the bondage signs in the body-mind altogether and in life experience.
So, sadhana is tapas. You must be in the place of the knot sensitive to the limitations in your own disposition, in every moment, instead of dramatizing that, disciplining it, surrendering it to Me, entering the communion with Me by forgetting the content that is simply the garbage itself. The past must be made obsolete. All the modifications of the fundamental reality must be purified and transcended. What is to realize is the unconditional reality, the reality that is always already the case. Even, now you’re preoccupied with the modifications of that reality, that divine reality distracted by them and dissociated from the fundamental reality by this very knot.
Just as soon as you enter into depth, no superficiality, as you entered the knot the first part of this consideration. You are not doing this in the fullest capable sense now. So you say as you relax into this fundamental feeling you feel a knot there. You say you don’t simply feel the inherent love of reality, but you do feel it. (group responds, “Yeah”) Flowing through it.
DEVOTEES: Yeah. Same.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: But you’re experiencing this knot in the midst of it you see. To realize the Divine Self-Condition you have to go beyond that knot. So it’s not really a matter of thinking and accumulating experience and so on. It’s a matter of being established in that place, surrendering to me, to the point of self-forgetting. This allows a course of purification and development that becomes the Perfect Practice and ultimately the Seventh Stage Demonstration. It is truly an inevitable process. It will go by its appropriate stages and so forth unless you step outside the process itself and become superficial again. But if you stay with the process itself as I’ve given it to you altogether, then the development is inevitable.
