The Place Where Sadhana Begins
“Beloved, in your sadhana did you ever fear anthing?”
Adi Da Samraj, 2006
THE PLACE WHERE SADHANA BEGINS
“You are suffering many things in your life and others are suffering you!”
Sadhana or spiritual practice begins in that place where you make this knot, this fundamental discomfort. It has the characteristic of fear and you basically experience that fear as a kind of anxiety in the pit of your stomach.
If you are not really in touch with this self-contraction, you at times may experience the anxiety that is constantly underlying and motivating your behavior, your moment to moment existence. With this anxiety, you build all kinds of stuff on top of it and desensitize yourself to it. This self-contraction is the quality of anxiety, of your moment to moment existence and it is a stressful anxiety.
You may want to forestall the observation of this uncomfortable feeling, that realization. But you can’t begin real spiritual life unless you start to observe and understand the mechanism of it. But once you do and get bit, that’s it! Unless you find yourself out you will be continually running from it, covering it over with ‘lifes demands’ and ‘stressful situations’. Once you do observe this fundamental contraction, then you can’t escape it, and that’s when sadhana really begins. That’s when sadhana starts becoming profoundly effective.
Adi Da Samraj, unpublished talk 1974
“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.”
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“Feel into that knot of stress. Feel into it and account for it. See it as your own action. Regard Me in that moment, in every moment. And then you begin to feel Me. Then the surrender comes, the self forgetting comes, the native sense of Non-Separateness is felt. This is actually what I am Calling you to do! Actually to do that. Just to be doing it grants equanimity to you, even bodily, grants equanimity to your speech, your actions, your feelings, because you are registering this depth-point and going beyond it and feeling Me. This is the context of practice of the Way of the Heart, not merely outer observances. This is what it means to listen to Me: to be examining this point of contraction in depth, to feel it, and by its unfolding to feel Me. This is not the end of the Way of the Heart. It is the foundation of it. Self-understanding and devotion at depth – this is what you must do in every moment. This is what it is to practice the Way of the Heart.
Adi Da Samraj: April 8, 1993