Beezone

Beezone note:

Italizied words indicate Beezone edit (see
original talk)

ADI DA SAMRAJ (SRI DA AVABHASA): You make the
choices. I Make the Revelation. I can Call you to greater
understanding and more profound practice, I can urge you on,
but you make the choices. If you want What is Ultimate and
Most Profound, you must be changed likewise, in your
choices, in your understanding, and in your involvement in
everything. Such transformation requires a profound
discipline and a great ordeal.

Sooner or later, any kind of self-indulgence whatsoever
reaches the point where discomfort is greater than pleasure.
So it is with the world and with everything karmic, with
every indulgence of attention in conditions. There is some
pleasure in your indulgence, but as you repeat the
indulgence, you reach a point after a while when the
pleasure is greatly reduced and you are mostly suffering the
results. Sex, intimate feelings, drugs, cigarettes, alcohol,
TV, food—absolutely everything you can do in the domain
of conditional existence produces the same result in due
course, which is that at some point the pleasure is greatly
reduced and you are mainly suffering ill effects. Such is
life.

All indulgence in conditionality is the same. There is no
difference in effect. This is just how conditional existence
works. Conditional existence is a play of opposites. If you
work on the pleasure side, the opposite comes into play
sooner or later and, like any addict, you continue to seek
for pleasure, but now to relieve yourself of some pain
rather than to magnify the enjoyment. Most of the time, you
are just suffering, and the pattern is repeating itself
automatically. You do not quite know what to do about it.
You are just stuck with it, and you think, “Well, that is
the way it is supposed to be.” You are basically just
feeling the pain of it and trying to get rid of the pain.
your whole life feels like a dilemma of disease.

The way out of the cycle of pleasure and pain, the cure
for your addiction, is also painful, to some degree. There
is tapas in it. However, when you understand the
reasonableness of the cure and its purpose, you become
willing to endure it. Having so thoroughly adapted to what
is inherently painful, you must understand, 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, your understanding.

Participation in conditional existence ends in pain. In
the meantime it shows all the signs of the addictive cycle,
eventually becoming the endurance of pain and the search for
release. Everything associated with conditional existence is
just this cycle. If you are noticing this truth about some
things and not others, you have more to learn about your
desires and your bargaining. You must find out that every
indulgence in conditions is the same: It becomes the
addictive cycle, and it ends in pain.

If you could make a truly summary and most profound
estimate of the nature of conditional existence and the
option of true devotion, what would you do? You would do no
more bargaining. You can be My devotee without having come
to the great estimate about everything yet, but your destiny
is dependent on the tendencies of attention you have not yet
understood and relinquished. Because you have not understood
most fundamentally yet, because you have not gotten the
lesson yet, attention makes repetition. It keeps you
continuous with your limitations, until you understand and
are not moved toward them any more. When you come to that
point, you are not strategically renouncing, without
understanding, but it is obvious that you just do not do
that anymore.

If people who drink or smoke day after day are honest
with themselves, they find that eventually drinking or
smoking does not feel good. It toxifies you more and more
and makes you more and more uncomfortable. Eventually, the
only motive left is to grasp something of the original
pleasure, but you are only being sick and poisoned. You
enjoy a few moments of pleasure, then the indulgence
degrades you, you feel uncomfortable and sick, you must
endure the aftereffects the next day, and then struggle with
the process of purification, however long it takes.

Everything is like this. Everything! To understand this
point transforms a life. You seem to be waiting to reach
that point. What about it? What about everything? What about
the habit of granting attention to conditional matters that
eventually end in the pain of the addictive cycle? There is
fun in it at the beginning, and then immediately you feel
the results of the toxins and it is not so much fun any
more. You are unsteady physically, emotionally, mentally,
and in your breath. Instead of Listening to Me and doing
the Yoga, then, there is bodily unsteadiness, emotional
unsteadiness, mental unsteadiness, unsteadiness of
attention, unsteadiness of breath, and you must endure these
results and take actions that will purify you and restore
your equanimity—and then you will Listen to
Me.

So it is with everything! As Listening to Me and doing
the Yoga is delayed…by your concessions to your
addictive tendency…you do not understand. You bargain
with yourself. Understand this and change your life.
Such understanding does not make the ideal life or utopia
here. The reason for right discipline is not just to feel
good as a human being and live an ideal, utopian life but to
be in a position to make this sacrifice to Me in every
moment, because you are able to be responsible for these
faculties. As an addict, however, distracted by attention
not merely to toxins but to everything else you do
conditionally, you are not responsible for these faculties.
You cannot give them directly to Me in every moment. You
always have something else to do with them, some
distraction, some leftover from previous indulgence. It is
so!

Everything about your life-action, your life-process,
your life-circumstance is a result of the concessions you
have made and, therefore, everything you do is the picture
of the degree to which you are living or not living the
practice I have given to you in this moment.

You must “consider” this, examine your life with true
understanding, and make choices. Whatever your choice,
whatever your circumstance…it is your business, and there
is no bargaining with Me about it.

No matter how much longer you do what you have been doing
all your life, you are not going to feel as good as you did
when you started. You are only going to feel worse.
Appreciate this, and then make the choices.

Whatever is binding you—your intimacy, sexuality,
toxic substances, social life, daily life, food,
money—whatever it is, it is your business to deal with
it. Find your addiction, and cut it off. Then see what is
left over that is compatible with the Way of the Heart. It
is for you to discover, and it is different in every case,
even a different process in some sense, but at last it is
the same process fundamentally, the same requirement: Either
you are given up to the tendencies of your attention and
their results, or you are giving yourself with full
attention to Me.

DEVOTEE: Beloved Heart, when attention moves with
sympathy, if I am sympathetic with something I focus my
attention on . . .

SRI DA AVABHASA: You would not put your attention
on it if you were not sympathetic with it. Even if you are
revolted, there is also a sympathy there, because your
attention goes there.

DEVOTEE: The sympathy is the ego expressing
itself.

SRI DA AVABHASA: It is not only egoity, not just the
self-contraction, but it is the patterning of egoity, the
adaptations of egoity, and they must be dealt with. If you
weigh five hundred pounds, losing weight does not depend
just on what you do with your attention! Yes, give your
attention to Me, practice, but you must also handle the
business of straightening out the body and losing a great
deal of poundage.

The tapas of real self-discipline is an essential,
necessary part of right practice of the Way of the Heart.
Yes, it can be said that the basis of self-discipline is
devotion to Me, giving Me your attention with feeling,
directing the whole body to Me, surrendering with every
breath—yes, that is so. Yet self-discipline bears an
obligation for all your adaptations. Everything that has
occurred as a result of your addiction, everything that has
occurred as a result of your granting of attention to
conditional matters, must be purified. Such purification
requires real tapas, real devotion of attention to Me. In
the process, you are losing those five hundred pounds and
getting down to normal weight, meaning that you are
relinquishing all the tendencies of your attention.

Your tendencies will be fighting back, because of your
adaptation. Therefore, the fundamental principle of
My Yoga is simple to understand, even to do, if you
bring yourself to it every moment, but you must go through
the purification, or the reorientation. It is not fun, but
it can be interesting—you can allow yourself an
intelligent participation in the purification.

All of your karmas, all the results of your attention,
all the tendencies of your attention must be redirected to
Me. There is a necessary tapas in that process, in every
moment and along the course. If you do this practice most
profoundly, Most Perfectly, then all the movements of
attention, all the results of attention, and all the destiny
of attention are relinquished, gone, and all that is left is
the Source of attention, the Domain of attention, the Origin
of attention, the Divine Person, the Divine Self-Domain.
Realization of the Ultimate requires the conversion of
attention and the purifying process, the tapas, the
understanding, the change of life, the discipline, the
continuous moment to moment devotion, the profound work.

You are making more lifetimes, either here in this
yellow-red place or somewhere else, on the basis of the same
tendencies, adaptations, addictions. A summary word from the
traditions for the cycle in which you are caught is
“samsara”. It is an irreducible cycle of suffering. The
secret of renunciation is to comprehend it whole, in one
glance, and be disposed unlike that, not making karma
anymore but instead given up to Divine Communion with all of
your faculties, moment to moment. Everything is purified in
the heat of such constant practice. It is the Circumstance
of Most Ultimate Realization.

The Great Way of the Heart is a Great Matter, beyond
Wonderful. You must get on with it, with no bargaining, or
you stop at one place or another. You can see even now that
all kinds of things that relate to your present stage of
life-demonstration are no longer addictive, not of interest,
not binding you, and you do not have any attention for them.
Yet just one fraction, one part, one element, one function,
one kind of association can bind you to the entire stage of
life.

DEVOTEE: Sri Gurudev, I felt just a moment ago the
consolation of the ocean, the air, the sand, drawing me so
that I wanted to lie down in it.

SRI DA AVABHASA: You have the faculties to enjoy
it, but you could be in another state, the body profoundly
diseased and in pain, wherein the rustling of the waves
would be profoundly disturbing to you.

The conditional realm is only Me. It is only the Divine
Person. Why fasten onto it? Why luxuriate in it? Why be an
odalisque, oblivious to the Place Where you Are, oblivious
to the Person in Whom all of this is arising? You should
devote your life to the Person in Whom all of this is
arising, rather than clinging like an addict to such
temporary luxuries.

Come to Me in every moment. How profoundly you will do
that coming to Me in every moment, depends on your
understanding of all of your uses of attention. I Call you
to devote your attention to Me utterly, your feeling to Me
utterly, your entire bodily existence to Me utterly, your
breath, altogether, in every moment, utterly. Yet you have
adaptations, tendencies, justifications in mind for doing
something else with your faculties, and you bargain with Me.
This is what is yet to be more profoundly inspected and
understood and converted to Me. It is the circumstance of
your sadhana, stage by stage, in My Company.

Your choices change, through right sadhana. The
understanding develops, fine, but you must take your
understanding seriously. You must take My Revelation
seriously, and truly respond to Me, as a serious person. My
Revelation is not serious if you are not a serious person.
You cannot worship Me, surrender to Me, in this bodily
(human) Form in limitation. You must be continuous with the
Divine Person.

I am not an ordinary man nor is this an ordinary
world. All and all is My Very Person, to be
recognized as such and acknowledged as such, so that your
submission to Me, your worship of Me, becomes most profound,
not merely a token gesture of a part of you.

Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga is an expression of your impulse
to Divine Communion and Divine Self-Realization.
Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga is worship of the Divine Person. If
you choose Me as your Ishta, you choose the Divine
Person.

Beezone note:

Italizied words indicate Beezone edit (see
original talk)