CRAZY WISDOM
Volume 7, Number 2
MARCH/APRIL 1988
Sadhana
Hurts
a talk by Da Avadhoota
December 19,
1987
DA AVADHOOTA: Practicing stage one
in each of its phases is a test of your ability to grow up,
to be human, to understand reality and to function in it
with a will, and to be transferred to the Great Reality. And
if your impulse is strong, you do not waste any time at it.
You go to some reality group, there are six guys in a room,
they point out “blah-blah-blah” about you. “Oh, shit! Thats
completely right. Fuck me! Adios to that. No more! Flat!
What do you guys think my discipline ought to be? No, that
is not quite precise. What do you say, so-and-so? Oh, that
touches everything. Good! That is the best discipline. That
is what I am going to do, flat. (Laughter.) And it will
cause me great difficulty, no doubt, but that is what I will
do.”
That is how you grow. You do not
grow otherwise. You guys are all weakening yourselves,
consenting to be identified with your early-life
complications, early-life adaptations, old adaptations, as
if complication is your right. That is nonsense. What about
your understanding? What about your will to discipline based
on understanding? Change it, then! Do something else! Suffer
the heat of it, and grow. Without heat there is no growth,
there is no cooking, there is no alchemy, there is no
change, things are not thrown into the pot, nothing
happens.
Well-you are all in your
emotional-sexual problems. How many more gatherings and
reality groups are you going to have to talk about it? You
have all been considering it in my Company for years on end
already. Thats it! That is what there is to say about it.
Now, where is the discipline? That is what you
do.
It hurts. It definitely hurts. It
hurts the body. It hurts the feeling. It hurts the mind. It
is just heat. It is just energy. And all the time you are
enquiring and feeling beyond it. What a glory! That is how
you grow. It is greater than death. It is the domain of
love, you see. That is what exceeds limits. Love exceeds
limits. Love is not indulgence in desire. It is a heat. It
is a purifying force. It is a glow. Ultimately it becomes
infinitely Radiant and “Outshines” everything.
The stresses you all suffer are the
stresses in your reluctance, your weakness. It is time to
start suffering the stress of great commitment, of great
strength, of manliness, of humanness, of understanding, of
the will to discipline, such that you do something
different. Thats it.
And it is difficult, yes. That is
why I call the Way of the Heart an ordeal. It is necessarily
difficult. In fact, measure it: If it is not difficult
today, you are not doing sadhana. Sadhana is difficult. It
is a heat. It works against motions, energies, impulse,
adaptations. It works against them. It confounds them. It
frustrates them. If you dont feel so confounded every day,
you are not practicing. You are not doing
sadhana.
You all think sadhana is a
consolation, a matter of feeling good every day. No. Sadhana
is about feeling bad every day-in some sense this is true!
If you are going to feel good, pay the dues of encountering
that and transcending it. If you are doing sadhana, that is
how you justify feeling good. Not by relaxing into your
self-indulgent mode, your weakness. No. Do the sadhana
intelligently. Be willed. Do the sadhana. You will
inevitably suffer difficulties. It will be an ordeal. You
can feel beyond it in any moment through self-Enquiry, real
practice, real sadhana. And even the stresses, the
difficulties themselves, may remain, but they will be
peripheral. They will be just the heat in the
pot.
You, conceiving of that process
intelligently, will be able to endure it because you
understand the necessity of it, the virtue of it. Growth
hurts! You must hurt to grow. You must burn to grow. Burning
is absolutely necessary. You want to feel good. That is why
you remain a seeker, self-indulgent, mediocre, weak-willed,
and weak-minded. You are on the teat. You are in bed. You
are on the genital. You want to pleasurize yourself. You
want anything but the necessary principle of ordeal, which
is the only principle that allows growth. There is no growth
otherwise.
Look at what a woman goes through to
produce a child. It is not just sitting there and knitting
booties! Every energy, every chemical, in her body is
converted to the making of this child. Incredible stresses
are in the body. The whole being changes. The whole
body-mind changes. It is an imposition. It is a struggle. It
is a glory. It is a delight. It is terrible. It is
incredible pain in the birth process. That is just one image
in life that indicates to you what growth requires, and
exactly what you resist. Women eventually want to put kids
in a test tube-no stress, only pleasure and intellectual
acknowledgement, no work, no pain, no obligation, no
commitment. No growth.
DEVOTEE: Love-Ananda, what I am
feeling tonight is that the ultimate pain is to sit here
while You say there is no change, and yet I know everyone in
this room feels there is change. But it does not measure up
to what You need, what You require.
DA AVADHOOTA: You look for the way
out. You will not consistently encounter the discipline your
own intelligence proposes. And that is exactly what you must
do. You must propose a discipline intelligently and do it.
That is sadhana! That is it!
I can say this having done sadhana,
not having been merely born from the forehead of Zeus.
Having been born in the ordinary way, having lived the
ordinary life, having had to suffer the entire ordeal in
every dimension, every stage of life, I know what I am
talking about. Even in your company. Teaching you has been
an ordeal. To Teach is an ordeal. To serve others in their
growth requires participation in their ordeal. That ordeal
is terrible! Difficult! Painful! But that is what it takes,
and if you are not enduring it every day, you are not doing
sadhana.
I expect that people who have been
associated with me for a long time have understood this
message already, that they have found out that this is what
growth requires, that this is what the process requires. You
do sadhana. You do tapas. You do renunciation. You do a
discipline based on intelligence. You do it every day. You
struggle with the limitations that are automaticities in
yourself. You feel beyond them. That is what it takes. And
you love it. And you move on in the practice and no
bullshit. You know what I mean? None. That is what you
do.
I am not getting any messages that
suggest there is even one person doing it. You are still
requiring me to address you about the basic principles of
that gesture and to indulge myself in your limitations and
problems to somehow inspire you to this tapas, this
discipline, this Work, this ordeal, this
demonstration.
That is why you constantly invest me
in my Teaching Work again, you see. No matter how many times
I communicate to you what this Great Matter requires, you
fail to respond. You require me to invest myself once again
in consideration with you at the lowest level of response
because you dont do it. And you say your motive is
God-Realization? Knowing what that requires?
Self-transcendence absolute? If you have been students or
are practicing at level 1.1 or 1.2, I must expect that you
are up to it. So where is the response? Where is the
endurance, the manliness-for man or woman-that it requires?
Where is it?
People who understand this principle
get down to it, handle business, and bring me signs. They
dont wait for fifteen and a half years and then tell me to
wait more. They dont do nine months here with me and change
nothing. You people are indulging yourselves in my Company.
You are coming to lectures. You are being amused. You are
indulging yourselves in my Company. To practice is to
suffer, but it is not egoic suffering, you see. It is the
suffering associated with transcendence of egoity.
Therefore, we do not call it suffering. We call it tapas. We
call it the ordeal of practice. We call it renunciation. We
call it discipline. It is necessary! Thats it. That is the
substance of change! That is the alchemy of change. That is
the fire on the pot. Everything must be thrown into
it.
Suffer the heat of this sadhana
every day. Thats it. Not the heat you think you are
suffering because you are failing, but the heat of
succeeding, the heat of doing it. Thats it! God is not a tit
or a genital hanging down out of the top of the universe.
God is That which is Realized only through transcending
yourself. God is the Principle of existence itself,
realizable only when you uncover and release what you
superimpose on existence itself. Reality is the principle of
sadhana. To be submitted utterly to reality without
superimposing anything on it-that is sadhana. To function in
reality without superimposing anything on it is the great
tapas, a great ordeal.
Well-doing that, you dont have any
time for any silly household nonsense, any silly
emotional-sexual nonsense, any lack of discipline, any
vagueness, any conventionalities. You dont have any time for
any of that. You cant afford it. It is not it! You eschew
it. You renounce it. You throw it away. You do something
else, and consistently. That is the kind of person who
should be in Hermitage. That is the kind of person who
should be practicing this Way. That is what the Way of the
Heart is about.
Sadhana hurts. It sublimes you. It
intensifies and deepens meditation. It moves you into a
greater sphere before you indulge in reactivity, before you
indulge in self-contraction, before you indulge in the
body-mind, before you indulge in conditional identification.
There is a Supreme Place of Being Itself. That is Where you
locate yourself through sadhana, through discipline, through
heat, through ordeal.
Therefore, it is all for meditation.
It is all for Samadhi. Not for life-fulfillment, not for
personality changes. It is for Samadhi, the Sublimest of all
realizations, the unique State, the Absolute! God! Truth!
Your entire life must be devoted to that Absolute. That is
what it is to be a practitioner of some maturity, some
advancement, some sort of seriousness, such devotion. And
the mature student is the first to express such potential.
Then he moves on to level 1.1, level 1.2, and so on, based
on that impulse.
But do not come to 1.1 and 1.2 and
start arguing. Where is your impulse? Where is your
discipline? Where is your intelligence? Where is your
understanding? Where is your capacity to be human, manly,
male or female? Where is your endurance? Where is your use
of this great heat of self-frustration? The heat of
self-frustration is the energy of meditation. It is the seat
of meditation. It is the Heart.
On the other hand, it looks like I
am trying to inspire you again. What I am looking for is
people who have responded and are getting on with it who
will give me the goods, give me the gifts, and move on. Give
me something to Work with. Retire me from my Teaching Work,
yes. Give me a Free Renunciate Order, give me a gathering of
devotees, give me a sacred institution, an institution based
on the Spiritual Process. Give me those involved in
“Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga”, that concentration, that Spiritual
sublimity. Give me people manly enough to move beyond the
difficulties of discipline in the ordinary human context,
instead of this weak-willed, children-of-Israel horseshit,
golden-calf making, indulging in the world, being consumers,
being racked with ordinary life.
(To one of the men) What difference
does it make how Jerry changes, Jerry? Stand prior to Jerry!
Understand it, but do it. Do the work of it. Do the
meditation. Do it in daily life. Do it in your service. Do
it relative to transitions and practice. Do it in your
intimate circumstance. Do it as a man. Do it sexually. Do it
everywhere.
Cut it! It burns! It burns to cut
it. And that burning is the glory you register in meditation
and its depth. It purifies. It releases contraction. It
releases limitation. It Outshines it. It burns it off. You
want to make use of this person, make use of my Company?
Then meditate in my Company. Come to me in the right
disposition. Come to me disciplined. Come to me with
understanding. Receive my Transmission. Move, grow,
Awaken.
That is what I am here for.
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