Lay It At My Feet
November 15, 1975
he kind of responsibility required
of you as a student in the Ashram is nothing! I hate to tell
you this!
It is the least of it. I mean, how much discipline
is there really involved in the conditions you have been
given? They’re all very ordinary. They amount to just a
simple, life-supporting, natural, ordinary, pleasurable
life. But even as ordinary or natural as that life is, as
lawful as it is, it is sufficient to be entirely offensive
to a subhuman life, a life in ignorance. These simple
conditions are enough to test and try every possible kind of
complex so-called human condition. The offenses are there
for everyone. And you notice how childish you are as soon as
you get a little offended. As soon as you cannot at will do
a few of the crazy things that you are used to injecting
into the routine of your life over a year’s time, you get
petulant, you get crazy.
When I was doing the equivalent of
your student sadhana, I felt these inclinations. These
tendencies are there to be dealt with, to become matters of
your responsibility. It is not just that you are not
supposed to be aware of tendencies, but there is a higher
process to which you are fundamentally committed, and which
you would not abandon under any conditions. Thus you must
pass through the difficulties created by your tendencies at
times. That is what it is to be a human being. Everything
else is just subhuman, the exploitation of the mechanisms
only. Human life is responsibility, consciousness. You must
bring that kind of manliness, whether you are male or
female, to the process of this sadhana.
It is not that you have been given
a little technique to focus your attention in some subtle
center, in which you can forget the body and all of its
complications, and by continuing to focus on that subtle
something-or-other you then drift out of this world into
heavenly wonderments. You have not been given such a
process. Such a process is not true. The real process that
is in God is all a matter of responsibility. It involves a
moral transformation of life in consciousness, a complete
transformation, a restoration to the law of sacrifice of
your gross life. You cannot abandon your gross life by
focusing your attention somewhere and thus attain
liberation. You can temporarily change your experience if
you focus your attention with enough interest, but
eventually you return to the place where you have
karmas.
There must be the moral
transformation or the return to consciousness and
responsibility of the dimension in which you are appearing.
On that basis then, there is the appearance of other kinds
of transformations and for the same purpose: to test you to
the point of consciousness and responsibility, not to
entertain you or to give you a thousand-year lifetime in a
better place rather than a seventy-year lifetime here. This
sadhana, therefore, requires a great deal of you, but once
you decide to do it, it is very interesting and
happy.
In general, to come to the point of
maturity takes years. There must be intense commitment and
involvement for years before there is maturity, not an
end-phenomenon of some super state but just maturity, real
responsibility for the spiritual process in the totality of
your life. That maturity goes on and develops eternally,
without time. But to come to that point of maturity, to come
to the point where you are doing the sadhana of a devotee,
is essentially a matter of years, in some cases, many, many
years, in some cases, perhaps many lives. But since you have
essentially begun it or are willing to begin it, I am
willing for your sadhana to be resolved in this lifetime,
because I am not coming back here! There are no conditions
under which I would come back to this place. There will be
an Ashram here for those who come in the future on their
second and third time through! I am willing for this sadhana
to be conclusive not only in this lifetime, but long before
your so-called death in this world. But if it is to be so,
you must cease to resort to your childishness.
You must do this sadhana with great
intensity, with great and ordinary maturity, and pass
through this process that is entirely offensive to all your
tendencies. It is absolutely true that this process of
sadhana offends all your tendencies, which means it offends
you absolutely, in every way, in every dimension in which
you have existence or in which you may realize existence.
You will feel that offense, you will feel your resistance,
you will feel all kinds of tendencies that are anything but
the availability to this Satsang and its sadhana. And you
will be tested by them because you must pass through them.
That is what sadhana is about. There are times when it is
extremely difficult, difficult beyond belief, and you must
go through those times. Those are the most valuable, the
most purifying times.
If your approach to me is wonderful
and full of love and sacrifice, as it should be, then all
the karma that must be seen, that must become your
responsibility, can be shown to you easily. I am willing for
it to be shown to you in a dream or in just a brief moment,
some little circumstance that comes and goes. I am perfectly
willing for you to understand that dimension that you must
understand in yourself on just such an occasion. I am
willing for these karmas to pass in easy ways, in dreams and
simple circumstances. But if your approach is not whole, not
direct, not one of service, consciously lived all the time,
to the degree that you do not live such sadhana in my
Company, you must suffer your karmas as they stand. They
will still be awakened in you by the force of this Company
that you keep with me, but they will be awakened in gross
ways, as they tend to appear outwardly in your life,
outwardly in the waking state. Then the process has to be
very dramatic and heavy.
But the drama is unnecessary. If
you are a little intelligent, a little happy, a little free
in my Company, then you can grasp it as a little lesson. But
some people have to be beaten half to death to stop chewing
their fingernails! The little lesson they have to get
requires incredible circumstances! This life is just such a
lesson, a lesson that would not be necessary if you were
straight. Nevertheless, it has happened, and by taking on
the form of sadhana in this life, you can make all of the
necessary lessons much easier, much more simple.
This is one of the effects of this
Prasad, to make it possible for the entire affair of your
appearance in this world to become a matter of
responsibility in this lifetime. Independent of that
sadhana, that Satsang, that Prasad, that Grace, it is
absolutely impossible for most human beings to complete the
cycle of realization in a single lifetime. There are a few
who appear at random in the human plane for whom it all
seems to happen very easily, very quickly. But for the usual
man, independent of the real process of Satsang, the
transformation and liberation of manifest life is a matter
of billions and billions of lifetimes, of numberless
lifetimes. This is true!
Now in some sense all of that is
amusing, and the dumber you are, the more likely you are to
be amused by it! But there is really nothing amusing about
it at all from my point of view. It has never been amusing
to me. This life as it is commonly lived is insane. It was
perfectly obvious to me that there was nothing to do but
sadhana. There was nothing else in life that was worth the
suffering. I haven’t become a pleasureless man, obviously,
at any point in my life. But I made life sadhana, and doing
that required great discipline and great humor.
And it requires the same of you.
The way of the Siddhas is simple and easy, because it does
not take billions of lifetimes, but it requires a helluva
lot in one lifetime. And yet some day you will look at it
and see that it required nothing at all, that you did
nothing. It all seemed very dramatic at the time, and yet it
involved nothing at all. But you must stop being children.
You must be present with force, with energy, with life!
You’ve got to kick ass! And lay it at my feet every time you
come to me, in other words, all day. Eventually you will
have laid it all down, and you will have gotten everything
back. But if you bring nothing, if you literally bring me a
piece of fruit, be warned!
The play between us is the
theatre
of sadhana. It requires
great responsibility, consciousness, and discipline, and on
the other hand it is also amusing, pleasurable, and
interesting. I expect you to do it all and not complain.
When I ask you how you are, I want to hear that you are
good. I do not want to see any coming and going and all that
nonsense. Just do what you have to do and get it started.
Then it goes on forever. Everything else is
quick.