Beezone adaptation and edit from various talks by Adi Da Samraj.
The Beginning – A Workable Situation
Simply because you take up spiritual life and have expressed a certain willingness to begin some form of it, does not mean that you have ceased to live in the usual way. Your usual life just doesn’t disappear simply because you take up some form of yoga or meditation. In fact, it may very likely intensify your troubles. It may intensify into a crisis in consciousness in some sort or manner.
Spiritual life is sadhana, a work. It is the always present demand of function in the midst of whatever is going on. 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.
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. Basically this means to 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.
But in the beginning there may tend to be reactions and breakdowns whenever this crisis process begins. In the beginning 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.
Life demands attention and in that attention you must handle business. 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 are suffering many things in your life and others are suffering you! 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.
Because you 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’s where it starts.
Adi Da Samraj
There’s a dimension to this sadhana that can very clearly be called an ordeal. It is tapas. The traditional name for it is tapas – one of the names for it. Its straining through the bolt, the twist that this bondage is, the torque of this machine here, straining through what would bind you otherwise. You have to pass these tests.
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.
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.
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.
Get out of bed!
Every dramatization abuses others, because the dramatizing ego thinks it is the victim of others and events. As long as you think that way, you will display sometimes horrific dramatizations and abuse then collapse. Such drama is infantile and not the kind of thing that adult human beings should be doing.
Even though you may be older 21 years of age, you perhaps feel you still have the right to act like a child or adolescent, to live and react in an infantile manner. You should still be at home with your mommy and daddy in that case!
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.
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.
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.
Spiritual Practice
As taught by Adi Da Samraj
Presented by Beezone 
.
“Consolation was never part of my sadhana, because I was certain that I could not be be consoled – that all conditions are, in and of themselves, binding, purposeless, and fruitless, so I could not be bound by any containment. I… had all of the classic (spiritual) experiences. But I could not be consoled by them”. They were not it.
You must …be equipped with ..two (primary) visions, the knowledge of the reality of limitation and its inevitable results (death) and the knowledge (faith) of Realization, the purpose of Realization itself.”
Adi Da Samraj