The Greatest Principle of Sadhana
“Things get very interesting when your head is between the jaws of an alligator”
“You know that there is at least one time when you have to deal with everything, when you know you will come to the point where you have no options, no strategies that apply. The whole mass of it will be so overwhelming, so complex the maya cannot be figured out”
Adi Da Samraj
The following is a portion of a talk by Adi Da Samraj from a talk entitled The Beatitude of Perfect Surrender to Me from The Heart Conversion – Talk Series
SRI DA AVABHASA: In some sense the greatest power of all, the greatest Grace of all, therefore, is unqualified pain. As long as you have an option, some way to slip and slide out of your dilemma, your difficulty, your egoic “self-possession”, you will tend to take the way out or otherwise just be confused. All of you must have had some moments in your life when the pain, the confusion, the forcefulness, of the intrusion of the difficulty of life was so profound you could not figure anything out about it, you could not make an emotional gesture to escape, you could not do anything physically about it, you could not do anything socially about it, or anything else. It was so confusing, so overwhelming, so profound, it was not even that you could surrender but surrender was inevitable. You nakedly felt beyond yourself, relieved of your apparently independent self, the egoic self eliminated by that most profound intrusion.
No gesture can be made by it. And then there is a kind of beatitude, not necessarily Divine Enlightenment every time such a thing occurs, but a kind of beatitude, continuous with What Is. In such a moment, you must be given up to What Is, whatever It Is, and there is no choice about it.
Well, but you are all the time fearing death and great pain and the most dreadful of consequences. If any of those things did happen, a beatitude would be inevitable. But there is a great lesson in pain. In pain, you can allow that very same condition of beatitude to coincide with your ordinary life. You can allow it. It can become the greatest principle of Yoga, the greatest principle of sadhana. You will allow, even embrace, great discipline, great devotion, great service, great meditation, great heat, great tapas, knowing that in such circumstances there is always beatitude, because no choice is available to you.
The great Realizers know this secret. I know it. If you can come to the point of allowing such complete and total surrender, so that you never avoid it, so that in fact it becomes the condition of existence, then life is beatitude, existence is beatitude.
There is a secret in such surrender that is most fundamental to sadhana in the Way of the Heart. Allow yourself to be cooked, to be burned alive, to avoid nothing. To be, in this moment, in such a place where surrender is not even your only choice, where it is only inevitable this is the secret of most effective sadhana. It is the secret of renunciation. It is why renunciation is the secret of Realization, bereft of all means, all strategies, only There, without resorts of the egoic kind, in Place with the One Who Is,only devotion and not by choice. There is no choice. Giving yourself no choice whatsoever is the greatest principle of sadhana.
Be God-made, God-born, with God allowed, God Existing, and with no alternatives this is the great Secret. The greatest Realizers, the greatest renunciates, all know this Secret. This is why they do what they do. But if you are only mediocre, always trying to avoid the great Imposition of Reality Itself, then you always have an option, some way to slip or slide to the right or left, always some way to desensitize yourself to the great Condition, not to mention all conditions. To become so humbled, so ground up, that there cannot be anything but Divine Enlightenment, this is the Secret. Mark My Words!
You are all maintaining options that is what I am telling you. You always have an option. Even suggesting to yourself “I would choose always the option of surrender and devotion” still gives you room. You should give yourself no room, devotion absolute, imposed upon to the absolute degree so that no gesture even can or even need be made, but only God Is. That is the Secret.
“You are not simplified, you are not full of Grace, beatitude does not characterize your face. You are not murdered, not wounded absolutely. Struggling to survive. You have that hard face, that surviving look, and you are moving about to accomplish it. There are some moments in life, obviously, there is the moment in death, in which you get this Grace with the possible knowledge, though some may escape it or forget about it. But it is the Secret, to be so vulnerable that you are not performing your own act anymore. It is the secret of life to be so given up, in life, not merely fearing death because that is required of you then. But in life, to be so given up so surrendered. This is the secret of Beatitude, the secret of Enlightenment.”
Adi Da Samraj