Sadhana – Adi Da Samraj

 

“Krishnamurti seems to argue against anything that appears like ‘sadhana’.Ramana Maharshi said that sadhana was always necessary, even for the realization of the always present Reality. I must also say the same. Sadhana is absolutely necessary. There is a unique process in consciousness, moving from the critical beginnings of that despair which is the root of spiritual life, through all the forms of intelligence and enquiry, to intuitive understanding. But this process is not a willful remedy or search. It is various degrees of real understanding of the whole dilemma and search that is being lived. Sadhana is necessary because the dilemma and search is being lived. Therefore, a process of another kind of actual living must take place.”

“I agree with Krishnamurti that the motivated remedy is false and unnecessary. But, with Ramana Maharshi, I assert there is a necessary process wherein the Truth manifests and lives through the qualities of life. Otherwise, any fool who heard a lecture or read a book could be perfected by the experience. The Truth must be lived, and its intelligence must acquire the process of life.”

Franklin Jones (Adi Da Samraj) – unpublished notes, 1971.

see more:

On The Teachings of J. Krishnamurti, by Bubba Free John (Adi Da Samraj) – The Dawn Horse Magazine, 1975

 


 

 

What is Sadhana?

A Beezone Investigation

 

 

“On 26th February, 1947, the topic of Guru Swarupam (The Guru’s Form) was discussed.

This afternoon a Tamil youth approached Bhagavan, and asked, ‘Swamiji! Yesterday morning you told the Gujarati lady that renunciation means internal renunciation. How are we to attain it? What is internal renunciation?’

Bhagavan: Internal renunciation means that all vasanas should be subdued. If you ask me, ‘How to attain that?’ my reply is, ‘it is attainable by sadhana.’

Question: Sadhana requires a Guru, doesn’t it?

Bhagavan: Yes! A Guru is required.”

Letters from Sri Ramanaasramam by Nagamma


 

 

 Sadhana – A Sequence Of Stages Of Growth Culminating In Consciousness Of All Of Reality

Sutra 48 – The Dawn Horse Testament

 


 

 

 Sadhana in the Literature of Adi Da Samraj

As taught by Adi Da Samraj

Presented by Beezone

 

“You are suffering many things in your life and others are suffering you!”

 

Adi Da Samraj 2006

.

“Notice, no matter what is arising, you are basically the Witness. This is still the Case, even while there is involvement in klik-klak [conditionality]. That Which is Always Already the Case is still Always Already the Case. The Truth is Always Already the Case. Consciousness Always Already Is.

“Well, why aren’t you then simply living that? As I said, you have assumed the disposition of the fruit-eating bird. You are enmeshed in klik-klak-land here. I Am Not. I know what I am talking about.

So there is a way beyond it. And in the midst of it, you can’t just ‘go out the door’. So you have to Realize What Is Beyond this by a process that is, at the moment, enacted in the context of what was your bondage. You have to process out of your bondage, in other words. You can’t just simply think your way out of it, or have a lecture magically relieve you of it, or any kind of examination in a moment. It requires a lifetime of reorientation, surrender, Communion, and Grace.”

Excerpted from Klik-Klak: The Pattern Patterning, Adi Da Samraj – 1996


 

Contents

Definitions

Introduction

Preparation

Practical Disciplines

self-Contraction

Crisis

Becoming Serious

Listening to Hearing

self-Observation

The Cramp of Mind and Body

Contraction

Crisis and Responsibility

Purification

Renunciation

Hearing to Tapas

Breath and Name

Teaching Argument

Spiritual Practice

What Is Sadhana For?

Additional Reading

 


“The nature of the apparent sadhana of Adidam, The Way in terms of practice…is not a something in itself and it is not a method. It is searchless participation in My Self-Revealed Person or the Very Condition [REALITY – TRUTH – THE FOURTH STATE] that is Always Already the Case [ALWAYS, EVEN NOW]. From the beginning it is that, whatever you could manage to say about Me. My devotee is realizing Me. It is so and That is the basis of the sadhana. That is what authenticates the sadhana and mere descriptions of the exercise of the sadhana, the practice to mention, the activity to mention, you see – is always off the point of it. “

 

From the Avataric Revelation Discourses; nos. 1-49, Adi Da Samraj – December, 2004


 

Summary

“Sadhana” in the context of the first three stages of life and some of the fourth is all the waking state disposition (The Waking State Yoga). The point of view is always that of the physical body-mind – it is your sense of yourself that is the domain of your experience. What you are is the waking state character.

“Then there is a period within practice where the gross busyness is quite relaxed, and the exploration of subtle possibilities begins to become expansive. This develops potentially in the fourth stage of life, particularly when it comes to its ascending phase, and in the fifth. It is a resort to the dream dimension. The subtle domain is presumed to be Reality. The gross is incidental to it, peripheral to it. In effect what is being affirmed is that the dream state is the state one should be in, or is the state presumed to be the essential Reality with which one is identified – not the gross physical but now the subtle persona, essentially the domain of ascended mysticism and such. So that is sadhana done from the point of view of dreaming. Whereas previously sadhana was done from the point of view of the waking-state body-mind.

“[The next potential levels of] practices [are] associated with the sixth stage of life….toward or from the position associated with sleep and the transcendence of it – the domain of objectlessness, all objects one way or another relinquished as not ‘it’ [not this, not this]. So rather than focusing on the body and the mind, there is a focus on the Domain of Consciousness, the Domain of the Witness, and so on – the Condition Prior to the body-mind.

“In the context of the sixth stage of life, [Sadhana] is done in the mode of what is called the fourth state, turiya, or Consciousness Prior to the body-mind – as sleep is, and yet Prior to a particular limitation that is still there in sleep.

“The right side of the heart is associated with anandamayakosha. It is the seat of sleep, the seat of egoity, the first (and last) knot. It is also the doorway, or the last place Prior to the Unconditional Domain and the fourth state, and ultimately turiyatita, beyond it.”

The Torque of Attention, The Yajna Discourses of Santosha Adi Da

 

SADHANA – DEFINITION

Root: Sadhato accomplish, achieve, practice, means, method, “Means of Achievement”

Sadhan literally “a means of accomplishing something” – is ego-transcending spiritual practice. It includes a variety of disciplines in Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist and Muslim traditions that are followed in order to achieve various spiritual or ritual objectives.

Etymology: Sanskrit sadhana; akin to Sanskrit sadhu going straight to a goal

1. Hindu religious training or discipline through which an individual attains samadhi

2. Hindu or Buddhist spiritual training through which an individual worships a formed image as a mediate step to the worship of a formless deity or principle

3. The tantric evocation of a deity by means of spells and ritual for the purpose of getting control of the deity

 

Traditionally – From The Teachings of the Sadhana Society:

“Effective means of attainment.” Religious or spiritual disciplines, such as puja, yoga, meditation, japa, fasting and austerity. The traditional effect of sadhana is the building of willpower, faith and confidence in oneself and in God, Gods and guru.

Today you begin a journey that can lead you to the Highest Achievement of Human Awareness – which is Unlimited Consciousness of Self and Oneness with the Infinite. You will be guided on your journey by the Teachings of The Sadhana Society, and by the use of the oldest Methods and Practices known to Man. These will include the Teachings of the Enlightened Sages of the East, and the Long ignored Methods and Practices of the Ancient People of the North American Continent.

As you progress on your journey, you will Awaken the Great Hidden Powers that lie dormant within you. These are the already Perfected Manifestations of your own body and mind. You will learn to tap this Infinite Storehouse of Energy, and call forth The Divine Law of Abundance from your own Being. You will also learn to communicate through the use of the Ancient Akashic Records. Soon, you will discover that there is nothing that you cannot do. YOUR POWER IS LIMITLESS. Because there is no separation between Life and Death, you will also learn to communicate with Divine Personalities beyond the physical.

 

From Swami Sivananda

Sadhana is any practice to steady the wandering mind and to fix it on God.

Who does sadhana is called a sadhaka.

Uses self-restraint

Purifications of the mind

Cultivates divine virtues

Prays

Does Japa

Does Kirtan

Practices Dharana or concentration

Meditates

Looks within

Tries to remove defects

Understands the real value of practice

Understands sadhana is a great struggle

Habits and patterns will have to be rent asunder

 

 

Adi Da on Sadhana

From ‘The Fire Must Have Its Way’, Adi Da Samraj, July 17, 1978

 


 

 

“Sadhana is the process of Awakening and Insight which takes the form and is developed in the form of spiritual practices.”

***

“Sadhana is the process of release of energy and attention from the things that are binding you. When something or other is not binding anymore, you just move on. It’s business handled.”

Adi Da Samraj, ‘The Yajna Discoures of Santosha Adi Da (1995-1996)

***

“Sadhana is ego-Transcending Work, It is a constant ego-transcending work.”

 

 


 

 

“Persistence is a fundamental requirement in the case of someone doing sadhana.”

“Spiritual life is a demand, not a form of therapy, and this demand does not make life easy but it does change it into a creative affair.”

“Sadhana is not merely some manipulation of the body-mind, strategically trying to create some effect. Sadhana is this capability to live wholeheartedly, to feel beyond self-contraction”.

“You cannot realize Real God, Truth or Reality. You can only be led into that Realization. And if you resist it, then of course it does not take place. And such Realization is difficult, I grant you that. It is immensely difficult.”

“The foundation sadhana is established in the context of the body. If you do not deal with the karmas signaled by the body, sadhana is fruitless. Sadhana is not the interiorizing of attention. It is the transcendence of self-contraction. It is not a matter of going inward. It is a matter of purifying the karmas of your conditional existence. To do sadhana, therefore, you must handle the business of your life. By that I do not mean that you should indulge in all kinds of fanciful cravings or motivations toward self-fulfillment or the ‘good life’. I mean that you must take this physical vehicle, this physically manifested body-mind, and put it to school, command it to do the sadhana of devotion, service, and self-discipline.”


 

According to Adi Da, Spiritual Practice is eventually purposed to transcend the point of view that is the physical body, the mind, and all conditional experiences. Which requires:

 

Persistence,

Demand,

Intelligence,

Tremendous discipline,

Tremendous feeling,

Difficulties

 

Sadhana is understood to mean: to transcend the self-contraction and limitation of the body and mind and its philosophy and birth.

 


 

 

Summary Statements Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

PREPARATION

Table of Contents

In the beginning of sadhana the individual is humanized and is called to complete (or bring to order) life in the context of the first three stages of life. – Adi Da Samraj

 

Foundation Phase of Sadhana
Adi Da Samraj, 1975

 

“Just to begin the Way you must hear the Teaching. You must Awaken. Whole-bodily Enlightenment in the most thorough, full, and high sense involves a Great Process, but Enlightenment is not its goal. Enlightenment is its root. Enlightenment is a fundamental Awakening, a fundamental insight, which you then use moment to moment to create the Way. A practice that is not based on that fundamental insight is not based on Truth.”

 


 

 

“The basic Teaching this institution should represent is the understanding of this fundamental error, or the mechanism associated with manifest existence that makes it into an illusion, into suffering, un-Happiness, un-Enlightenment, Godlessness. You cannot merely believe something positive and develop a true religious or Spiritual life. Enlightenment is not simply a matter of believing in conventional God-ideas that motivate you to be better. All such ideas must be understood. You must enjoy this Awakening, this insight. You must hear the Teaching Argument.”

“The foundation of my Teaching Argument is this: You are, as a matter of habit, and in every part, conformed to the activity and the results of self-contraction”.

“Once the argument has been considered, felt, and lived, the devotee…is convicted…of the necessity of the Teaching and of right action for the rest of his life. Then he has heard the Teaching, he is prepared, and he approaches the Divine Master as a true devotee.

 


 

 “You do not really enter into anything like the Spiritual Process, even in its beginning forms, until you have passed through the ordeal of self-confrontation and struggle with your childish and adolescent character in the context of the first three stages of life.”
Good Company

 

Preparatory practice of the Way that Adi Da has Revealed is “listening”, or giving one’s attention to the Teaching Argument and considering it in the context of one’s life.

Sadhana is based upon the discovery of the futility of seeking. Having made that discovery, then you will be able to connect with the thread of my Argument to the point of understanding.

The first step, then, is simply to study this consideration. Consider the teaching argument, do what you will in your personal life, assume responsibility to study. Study, ponder, observe yourself, observe your life. When it becomes your own, then you can begin to add to the discipline.

In every area of our lives, the fundamental error in the past is the presumption of unlove. And the essential dimension of our preparatory work, and the key to happiness in any case, is the regeneration of the life of love.

All the practical disciplines are necessary but secondary.

In their initial preparation – instructed in the right and lawful practices:

1. Diet

2. Health

3. Sexuality and Intimate relations

4. Study of spiritual teachings

5. Service to others

 

Table of Content


The following selections are from talks and various writings by Adi Da Samraj in the years 1972-2006.

 

Summary Statements Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

 

“What must occur in each person’s case is the realization, felt with the whole being, that he (or she) must be love, that he must fulfill the Law of sacrifice regardless of past history, present circumstance, or any condition that may appear in the future.”

“The individual must become committed to that principal discipline with the whole force of his life. No matter what arises to distract, console, or frustrate him, he must remain as love in God-Communion.”

“When he is in love, convinced of the Teaching, full of energy and delight in ordinary relations, then the individual may come to the Spiritual Master for initiation into the higher or spiritual dimensions of adaptation and sacrifice. But not before that time.”

 


 

“Prior to Hearing and Seeing all preparatory and preliminary practices are for those beginning or ‘approaching’ the Way.”


 

“The initial stage is the responsibility of the individual to live the life Sadhana in the place where he lives it, in the world.”


 

“All the drama, all the up and down, the this’s and that’s, wishes, hopes, coming and going and success and failure, must have the world scene in which to develop.”


 

“If you feel you are interested in Spiritual life, you should have a serious appreciation of your unpreparedness and not come to the Communion gleefully. If you do walk in gleefully, sooner or later you will be confronted with demands that will make you resistive, because you are not prepared to meet the demands of discipline. Discipline is not what you are asking for. You are asking for consolation, something to believe in, something to relieve you of the stresses of the failed first three stages of your life. You are defending your egoity. Even though you may be interested in Spiritual life, when you are confronted by the real discipline involved, you will inevitably resist.”


 

“You must move out of your worldly frame of reference. People in these days think there is no difference between Spiritual life and an ordinary worldly life. They think all you add to ordinary life is a mantra or meditation in the morning and in the evening. There is a vast difference between worldly life and Spiritual life, however, and one of the principal differences is discipline, even an all-embracing, all-encompassing discipline that touches every area of your life. Every function, every practical detail, every relationship must become subject to sadhana, or an intelligent discipline. Such discipline is one to which you agree in consideration, but it is nonetheless real discipline. You must therefore move out of the frame of worldly life. You must be educated out of the uninspected mind, and you must come to understand through consideration and by developing self-awareness what Spiritual life really requires of you. It requires the transcendence of egoity.”


 

“You should therefore appreciate this fact with some seriousness at the beginning and not take too many big steps. Simply listen, investigate what this Way is really all about, feel your way into it, and do not become involved any sooner than you are really prepared to. There are many ways to associate with this Communion long before becoming a practitioner even at practicing stage one. There are many serious ways to study the Wisdom-Teaching and consider it in your own life while you otherwise do whatever you like. For even many years you can support the publication of the Teaching literature, support the Communion in various ways, and participate in some of the services the Communion offers. Do not get too close to it while you are yet unprepared, because inevitably you will resist it.”


 

 

 “We do not have an ‘Enlightenment-product’ to sell here. The Way must be lived. The Way requires disciplines.”

Adi Da Samraj

 

 

Table of Content

 

Summary Statements Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

 

SELF-CONTRACTION

“You may want to forestall the observation of this uncomfortable feeling, that realization. But you can not begin real spiritual life unless you start to observe and understand the mechanism of the self-contraction.”

 

 

Simplify your life

Handle business, get your life in order, create a situation that will enable your life to function in a relatively simple and harmonious fashion.

 

“Spiritual life first becomes functional life and your essential responsibility to yourself and others becomes creative work.”

 

“Until you become capable of working with your resistance or failure to function, your past adaptations or lack of them will continue to dominate you and your life. You may be able to change the modality of your life to an ashram setting or a meditation center but your basic understanding of your fundamental condition will not change. You will not fulfill the Law.”

 

“You cannot continue to grow, you cannot continue to move past your prior adaptations until you handle your business. You must handle your personal business, the business in your past, the business in your friendships, the business in your blood relations, the business in your intimate relations, the business in your friendly relations, your business with the world.”

“You have very real things to do, very human things, even very ordinary things. You must do these things and there is no two ways about it. Your life requires it. Others require it of you.

“We are only at the beginning, you are dealing with all the basics. You must endure that beginning, the handling of life-business, and be purified. That is where it starts.”

 

“Spiritual life is sadhana, a work. It is the always present demand of function in the midst of whatever is going on. It is the counter-egoic effort necessary to transcend limitations. And limitations constantly arise every day. To practice is to suffer, but it is not egoic suffering. It is that suffering associated with the transcending of egoity. It is not hidden in the events of the world or in the events of his internal or non-volitional life. Life demands attention and in that attention you must handle business. You must be responsible for yourself at the human level, and in a profoundly uncommon way. You must live the discipline of ordinary life. You yourself must be love under all ordinary, daily conditions. You must make this change in your life. There is no way whereby you can be relieved of this necessity. Nobody can do it for you.”

 

Also see:

The Beginning – A Workable Situation

 

Table of Content

CRISIS

“The heat of self-frustration is the energy of sadhana.”

“There is a purifying dis-ease involved in spiritual life. There is a crisis.”

“It must be a perfect crisis in consciousness in which this one form of ordinary knowledge is seen perfectly and known to be your condition from moment to moment. Knowing that you have no way out of this in the ordinary way.” 

 


 

 

“You realize you are truly locked in to this one form of existence, which is ordinary suffering, the search. It is in that entrapment, that isolation of real recognition, that the whole process begins to be undone.”

“When you realize you can’t play your game’s any more, you can’t depend on your games because you know all your games are essentially based on the same impulse, the same structure. You realize ultimately the same vision, the same cognition of the search.”

Core of this Sadhana

“In the process of this sadhana you must come to the point, through self-understanding, of relinquishing the motive of union with another – because the fundamental understanding, the core of this sadhana, is the transcendence of the motive toward union or the search based on self-contraction, the search for any conditional object, stage, condition, or other).”

“People continue to think that all this Life is leading somewhere in some grand evolutionary design and they continue to thrive on the search with ‘what’s next’. But the more sensitive you become, the more you become aware of this structure of limitation. It is only when consciousness returns to the zero, moment to moment, that this insight begins to break the bondage. It’s only when you have become so limited, when you have no options truly, that you begin to understand what is going on and what you’re up to. Then you will change your entire life.”

“This crisis confronts the mental, emotional and physical aspects of the practitioner in the form of a demand. The demand is to function. The demand to give energy and attention to others and to life in general.”

 

“You need not [be unique] to practice and fulfill [Sadhana]. But you must be moved. That is the difference.”

 

“It is not ‘fun’ to be alive. It is, ultimately, a dreadful circumstance, a completely bewildered circumstance, in which some things make you feel good temporarily, but, essentially, apart from temporary pleasures, you do not feel good. You are in trouble, and you are mortal.

Therefore, life is not ‘fun’. There are pleasures, but even to the extent that there are pleasures a great dimension of suffering also pervades one’s entire life. Everything that might grant pleasure ultimately disappears. Every relationship that one might enjoy ultimately comes to an end, if not through immaturity and lovelessness then through death. There is no fundamental happiness or satisfaction in this life. Awakening to revulsion toward our ordinary possibility is the beginning of true ‘hearing’ and ‘seeing’, or radical intuition and true feeling, in which we may realize a Condition that is absolutely Blissful and absolutely Conscious.”

Enlightenment of the Whole Body

 


 

Table of Content

 

Summary Statements Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

 

BECOMING SERIOUS (REAL)

Practitioner: I notice that when I’m confronting something in myself and a greater understanding breaks through then instantly there’s something else to consider. That process just keeps moving.

Adi Da Samraj: You should notice this, because you all tend to be addicted to constantly fulfilling yourself through a variety of conditional purposes. But look at the state that follows upon such fulfillment. How does it compare to those moments when you directly transcend yourself and exceed your conventional desiring? You must value that intensity. If you do, that will help you to eliminate the motive to be conditionally consoled, made to feel good by circumstances outside the body, or circumstances in the body, or circumstances in your emotions, or your mind, your thoughts. When you know that the consolation associated with circumstances is not profound, and only the intensity realized by the transcendence of circumstances is profound, then you will cease to be mediocre. You will become serious. You will exhibit great signs of discipline. You will become an extraordinary human being.”

 

 


 

Table of Content

 

Summary Statements Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

 

LISTENING TO HEARING

 

“Do not imagine for a moment that right and true practice of the only-by-Me Revealed and Given Reality-Way of Adidam is an easy matter, that you can simply Listen to My Teaching-Argument and Realize the Intrinsically egoless and Self-Evidently Divine Self-Nature.”

“The Reality-Way of Adidam is the Work of Reality Itself.”

 

The key here is “you do not exist by your own creature power.” The search or seeking as Adi Da teaches is fundamentally rooted in the identification of ego or separate self, as self-contraction with objects of body, mind, and spirit. He calls the activity of the search “Narcissus”.

“I have Called you to understand all seeking and to be free of the effort toward union. A characteristic effort toward union is associated with each stage of life. There are even many such efforts associated with each stage of life, and there is also a fundamental effort associated with each one. I have Called you to observe and understand this effort in the context of each stage of life. You cannot merely choose to bypass any stage. You must understand it. You must understand it very directly in a participatory manner. You cannot merely by ‘considering’ My Instruction assume the asana of the Realization of the seventh stage of life. You must do the sadhana.”*

*The Effort Toward Union Has Nothing to Do with Realization, Adi Da Samraj, May 1992.

 

 

Self Observation

“The purpose of observing yourself is to refine the details of your sadhana – not to delay your sadhana, or avoid it, but to refine it, in the real process of doing it.”

“When you realize that you truly are confined and that there is this one quality of knowledge, experience, and existence from moment to moment, then are you are beginning to understand.”

“The actual practice of The Way is founded in a radical insight into self and the avoidance of relationship, The conviction of Narcissus. This radical insight or intuition reveals the factuality of reactive self-confinement and fruitlessness of the search for salvation, release, or perfect fulfillment.”

THE “BRIGHTENING” WAY TALK SERIES, The Yajna Discourses of Santosha Adi Da (1995-1996), PROLOGUE, A Mastered Life, Adi Da Samraj, December 29, 1995

 

The Cramp of Mind and Body

Mind = Doubt – First form of contraction

Body = discomfort – fear, anger and sorrow.

Emotion = Boredom = search

 

“Doubt is not about anything. It only seems to be about something because you are constantly tending to register self-contraction in terms of doubt.”

The mind is always stress. It is always trying to think itself into a better system of thinking so that it will never doubt again (EX: belief).

“You are to stand in the position of that knot, feeling your own disease, your motivation – but that means you have to endure it. There is not only the fundamental knot itself. There are all the reflections in the body-mind, tendencies of one kind or another, and so on.”

 

Table of Content

 

The following excerpts are from a variety of Adi Da written and spoken teachings – IN ITALICS

CONTRACTION

“Once you do observe this fundamental contraction, then you can not escape it, and that is when sadhana really begins. That is when sadhana starts becoming profoundly effective.”

“This understanding [of the self-contraction] is absolutely fundamental to my teaching.”

“On this basis [understanding the self-contraction] a person begins an approach to his experience, habits, thoughts, and actions that would perceive the root of his dilemma and at last he will come to see that all of this, his dilemma, his suffering, is his own.”

It is not the product (effect) of some process (cause) outside himself or his control.

“You have to endure the purification of these things, the standing in the knot position sensitive to all the limitations of the disposition and surrender to me to the point of forgetting it, relinquishing it, keeping the faculties all focused in me in this communion.”

 

Table of Content

CRISIS

“The sense of crisis is only the sense of irresponsibility – you have something happening to you. Whereas when this process is alive in you, when this sacrificial process is truly active, it is no longer happening to you. The fact is that one’s suffering (or enjoyment) is not happening to you at all. It is something that you are doing and for which you must become responsible for. And then surrender it to the divine.”

“The crisis in spiritual life is supposed to occur. You are supposed to suffer the purifying events. You are supposed to encounter resistance in yourself. You are supposed to discover all kinds of garbage in yourself. So why should there be any special resistance to it when it occurs?

 

“There may be discomfort, and you may wish you did not have to go through it. But apart from that, there is no reason why you should be overwhelmed or completely disenchanted by the fact that you are witnessing a period of intense conflict, crisis, suffering, and disturbance. The more time you waste identifying with all of that, the less sensitive you become to the event.

That is why The Spiritual Masters continue to stress that there is a crisis in consciousness involved in spiritual life, because you must come to this zero point in which you see the one thing you are always doing, the one state lived, in which you see the search as your very condition. It’s only when you’ve returned to this condition of suffering without recourse, when you have fallen into your own limitation, that True Insight and Understanding can arise as The Spiritual Master has described it. So there must be a crisis.”

 

In the beginning there may tend to be reactions and breakdowns whenever this crisis process begins. There is very often an emotional collapse, even a physical collapse. There are episodes that have an almost psychotic quality to them. But as one passes through these purifying episodes, one begins to realize how important functioning is, handling life’s business.

All of these apparently disturbed or crisis episodes in this real process of spiritual life are themselves very intelligent, very meaningful. They have a great deal to show you. The more capability you have for passing through these times, the more useful they become.

 

Table of Content

PURIFICATION

“One could say, that altogether, sadhana basically is self-purification. Because it is not the divine that must be found. It is the things that you are deluding yourself with that must be released. The divine is the context of existence. But self-contraction has taken on all kinds of forms, the summary of which is non-awareness of the divine condition. Sadhana then is basically purification of these forms of self-contraction.”


“Until this heart comes to rest, there is only contraction, this separate and separative consciousness, whose mind is separative, obsessive, bewildered, pursuing fulfillment on the basis of what is apparently possible in the midst of this puny limitation we wake up to each day. But there is help for it – there is Grace. And you must give up your whole life for it!

“Whatever you do not give up, keeps you here, and until you have given up everything, here is what you see.”

“Spiritual practice is not an effort whereby you eventually transcend yourself. It is self-transcending in its very disposition. In this Way, you do not perform an action and transcend yourself as a result. The action in its very performance is a self-transcending action. It does not produce self-transcendence.”

In the Way of the Heart, Satsang is a practice, or a sadhana. Therefore, it is work, not merely something that happens to you. It is responsive work, not merely self-effort. It is real and true work. It is purification work.

 

Table of Content

HEARING TO TAPAS


 

Summary Statements Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

 

“My devotees must fit themselves to right devotion to Me, and go through the living ordeal of right practice—moment to moment, and day by day. The process of life-rightening is an ordeal of shedding the ego-pattern, or the imagined persona. Therefore, that process of life-rightening is, necessarily, a process of renunciation. The patterns of egoity are built into the body-mind-complex as psycho-physical tendencies. Therefore, those patterns do not disappear merely because you come up with a notion about changing them. The life-rightening process must be profoundly engaged and persisted in, so that real turning away from, and real shedding of, ego-patterning occurs. That is a fundamental aspect of the “Radical” Reality-Way of Adidam Ruchiradam—the “ordeal” aspect.”

The Aletheon

 

“This is what must be understood: All seeking, all disturbance, and all dissatisfaction are one’s own activity. To understand this is to be free of ‘victim-consciousness’, or the notion that your fundamental difficulty is somehow caused by others or by the conditions of manifested existence. To understand this is the essence of true hearing.”

 

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Self-discipline must come from self-understanding, or it is just another form of self-contraction. Without self-understanding, discipline is just another expression of the will of the ego-“I”. Instead, self-discipline in the only-by-Me Revealed and Given Way of Adidam is based on that force of intention that expresses the capability to transcend yourself by feeling beyond yourself, by feeling beyond all of the body-mind’s intentions, tendencies, and patterns. Right discipline is associated with the radiant disposition of ego-transcending devotion to Me, not the effort of the self-contraction. To be impulsed toward ego-transcending Real-God-Realization through your devotion to Me – that is a radiant disposition. On that basis, you take on some (by Me Given) disciplines. You observe the self-contraction, and you add detail to the discipline of your life based on that observation. The disciplines of the Way of Adidam include more than just vital things like food and sex. The discipline covers everything. That is why you must practice all the disciplines, including all the functional, practical, cultural, and relational disciplines.

 

“Hearing is a matter of transcending the notion that your suffering is caused from without, or the notion that you are being ‘victimized’ by life. True hearing is a matter of transcending the ‘victim strategy’ altogether and is the foundation of spiritual practice.”

“One could say that, altogether, sadhana basically is self-purification. Sadhana is basically purification of fear, doubt, sorrow, aggression, anger, and delusion. These are forms of self-contraction and fear is at the root of all of them.”

 

Sadhana is Self-Purifying Work

 

Summary Statements Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

 

“Sadhana is not called ‘suffering’. It is called ‘tapas’. It is called ‘the ordeal of practice’. It is called ‘discipline’. It is necessary! That is 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.”

“The principle of spiritual life is a light and that light is a fire. It produces a crisis in consciousness that is both illuminating and penetrating. An awakening is what it is all about. An awakening of your own liberation and, in the beginning, your fundamental refusal to open and take responsibility for your own process.”

 

“Sadhana is something you do. The whole process or circumstance of Realization is not about passivity or waiting. It requires endeavor. It requires change. It requires a purpose. It requires use of energy and attention. It is not something that happens to you in your passivity. It transcends your passivity and your activity. But this does not exclude your activity. Your activity must be sadhana. You are not relieved of it by Grace or by a Gift. It is demanded of you through Grace and through Gifts and through understanding, then.”

 

“Your desiring will be frustrated in its goal and you will meditate on the fire and that fire will be your attention to Me so that your attention from hour to hour will become more fiery, more intense, more loving, more sacrificial, more absurd, less and less the character that you are born to be and live and die. You see there must come into your case a sympathy more profound than your inevitability, a sympathy more profound than your logic.”

 

“Wherever your attention lies without confusion, that is what you realize. If you will give Me your attention through true hearing, if you will be gravitated toward Me in every moment so that all of your desiring, even your inevitability, becomes superficial and all of that quality that arises from moment to moment will be truly superficial. Its impact will be lost. It won’t create incarnation. It will create heat only.”


 

 

Table of Content

BREATH and NAME

Chapter 5.24

HEAT

Summary Statements Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

 

There are certain basic considerations relative to practice that should remain effective in the daily affair of living this Way.

Sadhana involves:

1. Application to ordinary forms of relationship and activity.

But all such forms are to be lived Lawfully, as relational discipline. When ordinary conditions of life are themselves made forms of loving sacrifice, then ordinary life itself becomes a form of ascetic practice or “tapas” (which means “heat”).

It is not necessary or even useful to embrace habits of action and isolation which are conventionally ascetic. Neither is it appropriate to indulge and exploit the gross and subtle potentials for fascinated and consoling experiences.

2. The true Way involves re-adaptation of ordinary actions and relationships to the Law.

Thus, such ordinary relations and enjoyments and responsibilities become ascetic in the truest sense. They awaken the “heat” which is the sign of the frustration of old adaptation. And this “heat” (mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual) purifies and transforms us in our habits and liberates us from the illusory consolations of experience.

3. Those who constantly and steadily embrace ordinary relations and actions in the spirit of the Law – as sacrifice, service, love, the discipline of relationship itself-necessarily experience the “heat” which is the sign of the frustration of old adaptation, old tendencies, old (both latent and habitual) desires, motivations, demands, and preferences.

Nonetheless, patterns of un-Lawful inclination still arise. Thus, you feel frustrated – the “heat” of practice is awakened. This “heat” is not necessarily pleasant. Thus, devotees tend to develop habits and points of view in practice that tend to sidestep the heat or tapas of the spiritual process.

4. The most destructive of these habits or points of view that weaken the transforming power of the heat of your discipline is that of concern relative to the tendencies that characterize your life.

Negative, self-Indulgent, and self-possessed tendencies of all kinds are constantly awakened in the intentional frustration or natural asceticism of our discipline. There is no end to what may be revealed about oneself in negative terms.

The practice is to steadily engage relational disciplines, and to persist in an ordinary life of service, study, and positive or moral restraint of functions. If this is done, you will observe that the heat of discipline becomes a purifying and transforming current of life. Then, secondarily, you will notice that the signs of old adaptations are gradually transformed, becoming less and less gross, less and less frequent, until, at last, they cease to arise or to qualify the natural Intuition or Radiance in Ignorance.

5. Transformation of the loveless adaptations of life is a secondary or indirect expression of our practice. It may not be attained by direct, willful, strategic, concerned effort in dilemma, in a milieu of problems and solutions, but it occurs naturally in a life which is persistently turned, as an ordinary discipline, from problems, concerns, and subjective dis-ease, to felt sacrifice and loving service. Such is the sane and venerable discipline of those who are devotees rather than self-seekers. This discipline is present release from the ego-position. Other disciplines or ways, ascetic or self-indulgent only reinforce the ego-position, the principle of separation, and thus they accumulate experiences and changes of which are only a hedge or armor around Narcissus.

6. Accept the discipline of the Law as a whole-body obligation in my Company. Endure the heat thus awakened. At first it burns up the signs of old adaptation in a purifying manner, but then it becomes a transforming and illuminating fire. Renounce indulgence or dramatization of un-Lawful inclinations. Likewise, renounce all reactive concern about the continuous pattern of arising tendencies. Whatever arises in this discipline is only a reflection, high or low, of old adaptation and, as such, requires neither analysis nor complaint. Be at ease in service and devotion. All past actions, their tendencies, and their destinies are unnecessary for the devotee. Thus, the devotee yields all to the Divine and is happy in Divine Communion, in Ignorance, free of bondage to both knowledge and victory.

7. Spiritual discipline only follows in the case of practical discipline. The grosser elements must be transformed in fire before the subtle is revealed above. Then even the subtle must be converted and dissolved in the same fire. That fire is the Heart, the Radiance, the Condition of conditions. It is the Principle in the midst, the fire in the middle {“pyramid”], beyond both the lower and the higher physics. It is Bright in Ignorance. It is the Light in discipline and devotion. It is the devotee of the Presence, and it is the Presence itself.


 

 

“Practice is not a matter of mulling something over, struggling with it interiorly. It is a feeling matter. It occurs in the context of relationship. Always return to this principle”

 

“The best thing to do, then, is to be uncomfortable. That is the one thing you do not want, though. Bottom line, nobody wants to be uncomfortable. Everybody wants to be comfortable. You do not want to use your greatest virtue, which is the virtue of discomfort and the capacity to transcend the spell. Instead of doing that you try to maintain a level of consolation and involvement with all this hardware and software so that you will not feel uncomfortable.”

Hardware, Software, and Transcendence – Adi Da Samraj, 1982

“Sadhana is tapas. It is a profound ordeal. It is painful, to some degree. However, when you understand the reasonableness of the cure and its purpose, you become willing to endure it. You must be 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 and your understanding.”

Beyond Pleasure and Pain – Adi Da Samraj – 1994

 

Table of Content

Summary Statements Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

 

Mature Phase

“You must come to the point at which it is no longer acceptable to you to fall from such Grace, at which you are no longer interested in merely surviving and functioning, however cleanly. You must come to the point of commitment to the Ecstasy and Intoxication of Divine Life, the Way of life in which you are no longer separated from the Divine, but are constantly one with the Divine, in constant Communion. Only that must be acceptable to you. That is the capacity for real practice. That is the impulse to Realization. That is the core of every mature practitioners life.”

Crazy Wisdom magazine, Vol 1, No 3, June 1982

———

All Previous Practice (Prior to Full Seventh Stage Realization) Of The Way Of The Heart

Is A Process Of Conversion

From the conditional or Extended self

To The Unconditional, Transcendental, Original, Inherently Spiritual, and Divine Self

Prior to the Full Realization of the Seventh Stage of life.

 

HEARING IS MOMENT TO MOMENT

“At the beginning of the Way you must break through the limit of the first three stages of life and move on to the fourth stage of life, which is a profound transition that very few have made in human time. Basically all of humanity is at school, and the fourth stage of life is the next transition. Therefore, this transition is most profound and requires great preparation. Thus, you must humanize yourself to a significant degree before you take up practicing stage one.”

 

“True sadhana is persistent and progressive renunciation.”

 

“True sadhana is (and must be) persistent, because the ego game is constantly arising.”

 

“If one does sadhana consistently and faithfully, one becomes more of a renunciate and a Realizer.”

 

***

 

“If someone persists in doing sadhana, the quality of the individual will naturally become more renunciate, because if sadhana is done consistently and deeply, the karmas of non-Realization are released by Grace, and Realization becomes more and more profoundly full.

The practical and relational disciplines of spiritual practice or sadhana are designed to assist in minimizing the degree and kinds of exploitation of life to which the individual, by his or her mechanical psychophysical inherited karmic tendency, is bound by conscious and unconscious forces.

Therefore, there are preliminary or preparatory exercises, beginner’s forms of practice, the whole purpose of which is to liberate attention so that it may consider its own Source.”

The Energy of Consciousness – Adi Da Samraj, 1982

 

 


 

For many people sadhana is just dealing with karmas…and that is sufficient Calling for them.

 

“Sadhana is established in the context of the body. If you do not deal with the karmas signaled by the body, sadhana is fruitless. Sadhana is not the interiorizing of attention. It is the transcendence of self-contraction. It is not a matter of going inward. It is a matter of purifying the karmas of your conditional existence. To do sadhana, therefore, you must handle the business of your life. By that I do not mean that you should indulge in all kinds of fanciful cravings or motivations toward self-fulfillment or the ‘good life’. I mean that you must take this physical vehicle, this physically manifested body-mind, and put it to school, command it to do the sadhana of devotion, service, and self-discipline.

For some, that is a sufficient Message. For many people, in fact, just that process, dealing with that reality, is enough to occupy them for the rest of their lives. Dealing with the grosser personality, putting it to school, obliging it to do the basic sadhana, just that is sufficient Calling for them. And it is mainly that kind of individual that in The Love-Ananda Gita I suggest need not take up the Way of the Heart formally by stages. And, in fact, thus far My experience is that perhaps most people fit into that category. All the forms of Realization are potential in that simple, or even simplest, practice, but the sadhana of practitioners of the simplest practice is rather basic, even the most fundamental orientation, as a general rule. With great Help, however, some may pass through the processes at the beginning more easily than others. In any case, what must come of such practice is the capability to really and responsibly practice the Way of the Heart as it is Given.”

Adi Da Samraj – Loveananda Gita 1989

 


Additional reading

 

Table of Content

You Must Hear the Teaching Argument

From a talk by Adi Da – Do Not Reduce This Institution to a Religion Business

a talk by Adi Da Samraj – October 18, 1981

HEART-MASTER DA: I started Communicating this Wisdom-Teaching, rather bright-eyed, more than a decade ago already, and I am still Struggling with the same lack of response in people that I encountered when I began. Nobody is really interested. I have not really seen any response to my Work. I have seen the usual, gleeful, sitting­around-at-a-lecture attitude with which people respond to movies and TV. The Teaching Argument is just a commonplace. To enter into a higher frame of existence is just not very important to people. They really do not care to do it, particularly if it requires great effort, great energy, great attention, great intelligence, great will. Anything great to be Realized requires all of those things, but people are used to being sold everything, as if they can just have it at a cost they can comfortably afford.

Like everyone else, you are adapted to the psychology of the consumer. If something exists to be desired, you can have it just by coming into contact with it, or by going to a store, by picking up a book, and by going someplace for a weekend. Everything is supposed to be instantly consumable. The message is that what is between you and a mouthwash is the distance between here and the store. You only need to plunk your money down. Everything is like a sex-object, conceived solely in terms of its consumability, its desirability. Even the great Realizations of human life have somehow been drawn into the stream of communications that propose such things merely as desirable objects. However, the substance of Spiritual life is not merely a desirable object that you can notice and then desire just because it is there, or that you can acquire simply by coming in touch with it. The conventional consumer’s mind says that there is nothing between you and anything you might desire but space, whereas what is really between you and What is Great is much more than space!

The distance between you and What is Great is not only space but time, or mind. It is the distance between where you are now and your ultimate overcoming. God-Realization is not a consumable product. Spiritual Teaching cannot be presented as a consumable object. To become a successful institution or religion business involves making the Teaching somehow consumable, an object you can sell. And if the Teaching is to be an object you can sell, then not only the Instructions but also the Realization must become salable.

People are not interested in coming to your church if Enlightenment is not what they get by coming there. If they do come to your church, and you tell them all the things they must do in order to become Enlightened, they go to sleep. People simply do not have any tolerance for the Way whereby the Great Things are Realized. They reject the whole process. It is too much. They think it is evil. They cannot desire the Way.

If you cannot make a religious or Spiritual offering in its fullness available like a consumable object, you cannot generate the growth that seems desirable. Religious institutions grow, therefore, by creating religious illusions, consumable religious products, consumable Spiritual products. Religious institutions hype illusion, or ideas, in such a fashion as to make them desirable, make them somehow seem like Enlightenment itself. You would think that just the ideas themselves were the equivalent of ultimate Realization, or ultimate Happiness. All you have to do is consume these things. All you have to do is get kriya initiation, and right then, having gotten that now, you are happy. People flock to organizations to get products that are hyped, thinking that they are getting Happiness, or getting the ultimate Great Thing. But they are not getting true Happiness at all. The religion business exists to make the unattainable seem like a product that can be purchased.

I have been Teaching the Real Thing to people all these years, and I know what happens to people when they are confronted with the realities of Spirituality. Unless they are unusual people, they basically do not respond. They somehow can get attached to the Teacher, or attached to whatever organization may seem to develop around the Teacher, because they are hopeful of something, or because in the context of belonging certain goods come across so consoling that people do not mind being hangers-on.

But we do not have an “Enlightenment-product” to sell here. The Way must be lived. The Way requires disciplines. As soon as we emphasize the disciplines in The Laughing Man Institute and talk about the profound orientation to practice, every student wants to retreat and become a friend. But if we keep The Laughing Man Institute a kind of middle-class religion business, wherein we do not make demands too heavily and we permit people to dramatize their human ordinariness, then we can make that department into a business. People do not mind being consumers of The Laughing Man Institute business we produce here-although even so it is very difficult to develop that business!

One of the reasons it has been so difficult to establish The Laughing Man Institute is that the Wisdom-Teaching is inherently critical of the point of view of religion business. This Wisdom-Teaching just does not have anything to do with anything like religion business. The Wisdom-Teaching is not consumable. The Way is not consumable. The Way is not something some smiling jerk can purchase and tell his friends about. It is too difficult, too profound.

The problem with the people who are involved here is that they have not observed life itself in such a light that they are motivated toward the Great Process. Life still seems to them to be an amusing opportunity. They want to continue with its consolations. They are not really observing life as a whole. They are not really seeing what is before them. The profound nature of existence escapes them. They are involved in a very superficial level of existence, largely oriented toward bodily amusement. For them, life is the proposition of bodily fulfillment. Of course there is mortality and difficulty, and therefore they like to throw a little religion into their heads, just to protect themselves.

This Teaching is not the kind of religion that can serve such a purpose. The kind of religion that can serve that purpose is conventional, exoteric, downtown churchism and all the hype of self-help groups. The ultimate, Transcendental, esoteric Spiritual Process has always been a great matter. Very few have ever been involved in it. Very few even heard about it before the last century. The ordinary run of humanity just is not in touch with it. Thus, it has always been reserved.

Yet, because the world has gotten into such a bad state, and because the science of communication has advanced, the secret stream of human evolution and higher Teaching has become more public. As a result, the secret Teaching became part of the domain of business and superficial culture. And that is our double bind: We are involved in a Teaching that is fundamentally only for those who can use it, and at the same time we have an apparent obligation to the world at large that requires a worldly business.

Today all kinds of weak-minded people are making commentaries on great matters, as if they were authorities. The Great Teaching has been made an object of abuse and casual treatment by the general public, who are threatened by its existence. If you want to succeed as a religious institution, you must reduce yourself to a common message. You must present yourself as a congenial, friendly little thing, a little character that does not know too much or own too much, is not free too much, is just a good guy. You must be like everybody else. You must present something that is consumable by all people just as they are. “Jesus loves you just as you are” is the message, you see.

All people want to be just as they are, and they want to enjoy themselves just as they are. Such is the common motivation – to be exactly as you are and to enjoy yourself. People basically come around here expecting to find out that they can simply enjoy themselves and not have to change one whit. They merely want to be what they are, the born physical character. They desire all the things that would be fun to do, and they want to know how to do them. The reason they are asking about how to get happy, of course, is that they are frustrated and unhappy and mortal, but they do not want to get too philosophical about all that. They do not want to look at their frustration and unhappiness to the point of becoming something else altogether. Of course, if they come to me, they are told, “You should really examine all of this and be something entirely different.” Yet they keep coming back every week, asking, “Are you sure that is the way it is? Are you sure I have to do all this stuff? Are you really serious, or is this just a bit of theatre? Are you just setting us up for a big party? What you are really going to wind up telling us is that we really do not have to do anything but simply enjoy ourselves, right?” Meanwhile, I am busy working myself over, trying to Communicate the Truth to you in such a form that it will make a difference to you.

Now, why should I be worried about that? Why should I be concerned to find some new way of phrasing the Truth that will somehow make the difference for you people here? If you had half a wit, The Knee of Listening would have changed your life! It has been in print since 1972, but you simply do not like the implications of The Knee of Listening. It suggests that you must change, you see. It suggests that you cannot enjoy the consoling religious ideas. You must have a fundamental understanding now, and if you live on the basis of that fundamental understanding, you will change your life. Your whole life will be taken up by disciplines, meditation, and God-Realization, but you do not want it.

What do you want? You want some promise, some graduated path. Why must a Teaching based on the Wisdom that there is no graduated path and that the ultimate Realization is not the goal of human life busy itself creating a graduated path wherein the goal of Realization is constantly sought? Why must a gradual path be created? Because of the nature of the people who come around. Because they are not really available to the Wisdom that is offered to them, they must be given something else to do in the meantime so that perhaps they will gradually be brought around. Not only are people not ready for the esoteric dimension of this process, but they are not even ready for the basic communication.

You simply do not use the radical Wisdom. You insist on being associated with the conventional archetypes. As long as I use archetypal words, you feel you are in the presence of something religious, you feel all right, you will keep struggling along, applying yourself in some very minimal way because you are not truly motivated. You are motivated only if you wake up, and then you have great energy. But since you have not awakened yet, you only want to be surrounded by a few comfortable slogans and archetypes, and you will apply the discipline only to the degree that you are not burdened by guilt.

The trouble with religious and Spiritual institutions all over the world is that people do not practice. In general the institutions do not even regard this reality to be a problem. They become immune to it. They are willing to exist specifically for people who do not practice. Lack of practice has likewise always been a problem here. I have been able to function as someone who communicates, but I have not been able to function as somebody who communicates in the company of people who practice. The institution itself takes on more and more of the quality of non-practice, on the justification that “If we are going to succeed and grow, then we must give up on this idea that people are supposed to practice seriously, if at all.”

If all there is is what there was at the beginning – which is me, having Realized the Truth – then that is all there is about this institution that is real. All the rest of it is a worldly machine that has developed around me because of my poor interest in bringing other people into God-Realization. But I ask myself, “Why should it be a concern of mine?” Why am I concerned about whether or not people hear me and change their lives? That concern just led me into more and more involvement with people and with the world, an involvement that confines and threatens my own existence and that does not represent a change in other people.

I did not become involved in this Teaching Work in order to create a religion business, not at all. My Teaching Work was a serious impulse, a real impulse, based on what I had observed in everybody since the day I was born. What I had seen in other people seemed to make them worthy of being instructed. Something needed to be found out, and if it could be found out, there would be profound change. It always seemed to me that if I could find it out, then to let other people know about it was something important to do. Such has always been my impulse, but it is an impulse that is always frustrated, even subverted and reinterpreted by the institutional process of communicating the Teaching Argument to people. Something could be profoundly different about everybody’s life, but the fact that I am interested in its being profoundly different does not mean that other people are interested in its being profoundly different. Basically people are not interested.

You know that saying in The Knee of Listening, in “The Man of Understanding” section, something like “Nobody understands so he makes himself happy with the idea that you have already understood.” There is no way whereby you get to understand. There is nothing I can do to make you understand. The Bodhisattva vow does not really work, not in any ultimate sense. Some sort of Transmission is involved in the awakening of one individual, because the Divine Reality Transmits Itself to the world in one way or another, but such Transmission is required eternally. It must happen again and again and again and again. Nothing one individual can do in one lifetime is going to make the ultimate or absolute difference for mankind as a whole because of the nature of this material bondage that is humanity.

I have had only the best intentions, but this world, and the people who come around to hear the Wisdom-Teaching, and the people who are available to listen to it, are doing something different than I am doing. I lived what everybody else lives in the midst of this Teaching Work in order to be instructive. It became very clear to me in the midst of that submission that everybody is interested in my living what they are living forever. What they liked was the fact that I was living their kind of life, not the fact that I was Teaching in the midst of their life. Everybody was really very disappointed by the fact that I did not want to live that kind of life very long and by the fact that I am not doing it now.

Everybody is wondering where the good times are! People become worried when they see me just as I am, when I am not taking on their qualities, playing life just the way they want to play it. They start getting uptight. If I am just sort of invisible, criticizing things and making demands, people become uninterested. They feel burdened by everything. When all they hear about is the disciplines of Spiritual life, they lose interest.

The survival of the institution should not be dependent on immature people who presume they are already Enlightened beings. Because immature people are what they are, we must have a proper formal structure for their involvement. That is the way it was always done traditionally. If there existed a core of renunciate or esoteric practitioners, they related to the public and to beginners through the kind of very formal temple structure I have described in the past. They did not create folksy, informal association with inappropriate expectations and access to beginners.

It is a nice idea that there be a gathering of mature practitioners, but it is very difficult to manifest, particularly in this wasteland where forces propagandize against the higher possibilities of humanity from all directions. It is basically against the law to become Enlightened. You must violate basic human taboos to enter into the real Process of Spiritual life. There is not enough free space. Everyone is obliged to be the same. How can you possibly create an authentic gathering under such circumstances? It would be a rare case if any single Realized individual came out of that, and it is rare and unusual, but today everybody wants to maintain the egalitarian view of humanity. Everybody imagines that if one guy can do it, everybody must be able to do it in a weekend. It must be as easy as pie.

Adepts almost never appear. Real practitioners are very, very rare. That is the way it has always been, and it is still the way it is. To hear people talk you would think there were thousands of Adepts all over the country. There are not even thousands of real practitioners. There are people famous for their Spirituality who are not even real practitioners. This is an Alice-in-Wonderland world. It is not real. That is why there must be the Great Teaching. That is why the Truth is of such great consequence, because it is hardly understood, and the real implications of Spiritual Wisdom are not grasped.

Even in the optimum circumstance of the traditional setting, it still took years and years to develop a disciple. And there were very few of those. Look at the history of the traditions and consider the people who were associated with Adepts. How many Adepts were, in effect, fathered by other Adepts? How many Adepts produced one or more other Adepts, even in the apparently optimum circumstances of the traditional setting?

All of the Adepts basically act as if, in their sort of bright-eyed fashion, they are going to save the world. What they have Realized obviously has great consequences. If everybody else could Realize it likewise, things certainly would be remarkably different. Thus, the Adepts are always laying the Teaching onto people and suffering and being abused for doing so. What is the history of mankind? It is not the absence of Adepts and Teachings. These have always appeared. It is the non-use of them, the non-response, the abuse, the suppression. Yes, religion is famous, but not as true religion, not as the servant of Truth, not even as the medium of Truth. Religion has become famous because it is not really religion. It is the same thing that existed before the Truth was proclaimed. And it makes the Truth or the atmosphere of Truth into something else entirely, basically a justification for the conventions of worldliness, not Enlightenment.

And yet religious institutions have value in that they keep some sort of stream of Spiritual teaching in the world. What they present is often falsified, manipulated, suppressed, abused, and miscommunicated, but these institutions are the only vehicle apart from the occasional arising of an Adept. This is why it seems important to me to create an institution that functions rightly, but not because I have even the slightest sense that the world could be suddenly changed by hearing the Truth. It has never happened, and it is never going to happen, at least not with humanity as it is. In general, it is not going to happen in the manifest realms, and there is no other place where it could happen.

To communicate the Truth is always difficult because the Truth is about waking up from the presumption you are making on the basis of manifest existence. Even religion and so-called Spiritual endeavor tends to be based on that same presumption. The religion people hold on to, cling to, feel consoled by, is the religion based on that error, that false presumption. The Truth is another matter. The Truth is taught in a religious or Spiritual context, but if it is to be practiced, the error you are making on the basis of manifest appearances must be thoroughly transcended. Such transcendence is Enlightenment. Such transcendence is hearing the Teaching.

Just to begin the Way you must hear the Teaching. You must Awaken. Whole-bodily Enlightenment in the most thorough, full, and high sense involves a Great Process, but Enlightenment is not its goal. Enlightenment is its root. Enlightenment is a fundamental Awakening, a fundamental insight, which you then use moment to moment to create the Way. A practice that is not based on that fundamental insight is not based on Truth.

Therefore, the basic Teaching this institution should represent is the understanding of this fundamental error, or the mechanism associated with manifest existence that makes it into an illusion, into suffering, un-Happiness, un-Enlightenment, Godlessness. You cannot merely believe something positive and develop a true religious or Spiritual life. Enlightenment is not simply a matter of believing in conventional God-ideas that motivate you to be better. All such ideas must be understood. You must enjoy this Awakening, this insight. You must hear the Teaching Argument.


 

The Way Out of Pleasure and Pain

February 19, 1994

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.

 

“You have more to learn about your desires and your bargaining.”

 

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.

 

“Your destiny is dependent on the tendencies of attention you have not yet understood and relinquished.”

 

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.

 

“self-discipline bears an obligation”

as tendencies fight you back

 

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.

 

“A summary word from the traditions for the cycle in which you are caught is ‘samsara’

 

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.

see Full talk

 


 

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Table of Content

“All who study the Way of Adidam should remember that they are responding to a Call to become responsible for themselves. They should understand that they, not Avatar Adi Da Samraj or others, are responsible for any decision they make or action they take in the course of their lives of study or practice.”
Excerpted from the front matter of The Aletheon

“Nobody is taking you home”
Beezone

 


 

What is Practice?

 

 

What is Meant by Practice?

Beezone enquiry into the nature of Spiritual Practice
in the literature of Adi Da Samraj

 

 

Summary Statements Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

 

Introduction

Beezone’s definition of “Practice” is the ability to embrace life by adapting to devotional discipline and purification, enabling a practitioner to go beyond the activity and pattern of ego.

“Practice” is always revealed in stages of what there was in the beginning – devotional recognition and response to Reality.

“Though this discipline in the Reality-Way of Adidam Ruchiradam is based on ‘no search’ and ‘no seeking’ and ‘no ego-effort’, there IS a ‘practice’ and a ‘method’ associated with it. It is a paradox and the conundrum of ego. That paradox and conundrum is in association with a Blessing Power and a Recognition-Response to What Is; The Divine Samadhi of Avatar Adi Da Samraj, the Form of God, Truth and Reality, The “Bright“.”

“The various practices are themselves simply ways of responsibly adapting to higher aspects of psycho-physical existence in the Play of Life but the essentially spiritual responsibility in the Reality-Way of Adidam is the one of transcendence of experience, or the limiting conditions of the soul.” (The Enlightenment of the Whole Body)

“The question you must answer from the very beginning is, ‘Will you grasp this principle and become a practitioner?’ Not will you merely practice the outer features of the discipline and habits associated with our unique culture, but will you practice as someone who has truly ‘heard’ and ‘seen,’ who has been converted from the problem, converted from always trying to solve some problem, overcome some dilemma, or achieve some release.” (The Dreaded Gom Boo)

 

*For clarification of Adi Da’s meaning of “Me” see: Beezone Study on “Do Not Misunderstand Me”.

 

Summary Statements Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

 

Spiritual life – Spiritual Practice – Is not a cure.

There is no remedy.

There is no achievement, there is only conformity to Reality, Me.

Conformity requires Right Effort.

No practice realizes Truth, that is the search.

Truth is the context of practice.

Spiritual life Is the life of Truth.

Spiritual life is a demand, not a form of therapy.

It is the practice of life In a world where the Living Heart, Not your dilemma and search, Is the condition.

All experience binds unless there is ego transcending practice.

As long as … “experience” persist, there must be the Practice AND The Realization—both.

The Heart is the practice regardless of what arises, regardless of your circumstance, regardless of conditions. This does not mean that you deliberately ignore conditions. It means that you turn the faculties to the Heart instead of wandering in conditions…When you are turned to the Heart, the contents of “experience” do not bind you.

Turning to the Heart does not make you dysfunctional.

Truth is realized through the inspection of experience to the point of realizing that experience has no obligatory force and that none of it is the point of spiritual life.

The point is this single responsibility, this single principle, this single inspection of your state in this moment, of your Narcissistic self-concern, of the contraction toward fear.

Be responsible for that contraction so that you exist instead as Love, or God-Communion.

That is everything.

That is the whole Teaching.

There is nothing to be attained.

There is a single principle for which we must be responsible, and that is God-Realization.

It is not the way to God-Realization.

It is God-Realization itself.

It is the disposition in Truth.

It is the Way of life.

 

Spiritual Practice is a Paradox. Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

 

The Great Principle of Spiritual practice is Satsang.

The Guru-Function is associated with the Great Principle of Satsang.

The Essence of the practice of Satsang is to focus attention on the Realized Condition of a true Adept.

And for that Realized Condition to:

The function of the Guru is first of all to make the student a devotee through the process of understanding, until he comes to the point of surrender. Then the Guru enters where he surrenders, and that one becomes a devotee. That is the entire yoga of this Way.

Exactly how this mechanism of Satsang works is not clear at the outset.

Prior to its perfect realization, it cannot be grasped (with the mind).

It is elusive.

“….even though initial adaptation to the practice of the Way develops many characteristics of interior attention, the primary and ultimate force and attitude of the practice is not …inverted pattern.

There is no direct method for removing either behavioral tendencies or the obsessive stream of thinking. Nonetheless, these patterns must be mastered and undone, since they are the essential content of the motivated, compulsive, and illusory display of egoic suffering, or subjective differentiation.”

 

top of page – key terms

 

The Heart – Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

“The heart-region of the egoic individual functions as the primary seat of functional emotion and of my Avatarically self-transmitted divine spirit-energy. And the heart-expression is retarded by the self-contraction, such that it becomes characterized by a range of non-spiritual and diminished spiritual signs – from the absence of spiritual awareness to the spiritual “disease” of diminished spiritual delight. And the self-contracted heart is also characterized by a range of emotions associated with un-love, or non-love, or ego-based and superficial pseudo-love, or diminished love.”

From The Dawn Horse Testament

The core of the being is the heart, not the head or the navel, but the heart, the function of feeling-attention, the unobstructed emotional connection, or communion with everything through feeling.

That function is the principal one, and the realization of spiritual life depends on that function, on its becoming active.

Spiritual practice is about the re-adaption to this feeling function of the heart.

The problems we have in functioning from day to day and our failure to realize God, or Truth, are both the consequences of the contraction of the heart, or the feeling being.

The Reality-Condition could be Realized simply by Sighting Me here…but the reason it’s not is because of the self-contraction.

The reason that My “Bright” Divine Self-Nature, Self-Condition, and Self-State is not Obvious to you is that you are bound up in your own errors, your own habits, your own “self”-reflection, your own egoic “self’-identification with the body-mind-complex.

If the heart is obstructed, we become obsessively physical, emotional, or mental in our play of life.

Likewise if the heart, or the feeling dimension, is obstructed, we cannot realize God, or Truth, or the Real Condition.

The practice of real, or spiritual, life is to exercise the feeling devotion of the being, to come alive at the heart, and therefore to inform with unobstructed feeling the mental and the physical functions that surround the feeling nature.

If the heart is awakened, we ultimately will realize the true Condition of our manifestation, which is not independent consciousness at all.

 

For a full inquiry of “self”-contraction see Beezone Study on “The Knot of self-Contraction”.

For a full inquiry of ‘THE HEART’ see Beezone Study on  “Three Hearts”.

 

The Heart and Grace – Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

In the only-by-Me Revealed and Given Transcendental Spiritual Process, the feeling heart awakens.

The Spirit-Presence is Found by Grace. The Company, the Argument, and the Teaching-Work of the Spiritual Master are the principal Agents of Transmission or Grace.

Practice of the Way is made possible through the Grace that Radiates via these human Agencies of the Divine. Therefore, practice of the Way should be engaged within the culture of these Agents of Grace. 

Initially the left side of the heart is awakened through feeling (the waking, frontal, gross dimension of conditionally manifest existence).

As the practice develops in the middle heart the subtle and higher psychic region awaken and the fully Transcendentally Spiritualizing Process occurs in the domain of the frontal personality.

top of page – key terms

 

Satsang – Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

Satsang with Me begins as an essentially homely affair, in which, having already heart-recognized Me, you begin to respond to Me by heart-responding to My Avataric Divine Wisdom-Instruction. You begin to deal with your life in the practical ways I require, until you can truly turn to Me.”

Satsang with Me is not simply a common relationship between a Teacher and a disciple.

Satsang with Me includes all of the practicalities and ordinariness and homeliness of a human relationship and a Teaching relationship – but, fundamentally, even from the beginning, Satsang with Me is the Enjoyment of My Bright Divine Spiritual Body

When that begins, then all of the transforming events follow. But Satsang is always the context for the process of self-observation, insight, and enquiry.

There may also arise the secondary process of the movement of the life-force, and your consequent participation in it in the form of conscious conductivity.

In order for that to be true sadhana and not an organ of the search, you must continually return to the fundamental, which is Satsang itself.

It is to that fundamental and prior Condition, Satsang, that you are continually returning, even in the midst of these transforming events. Otherwise, they become your concerns. They become distractions, fascinations, images in the pond, ritual instruments, liturgical instruments for the priesthood of Narcissus. So I am continually reminding you of this fundamental Condition.

Exactly how this mechanism of Satsang works is not clear at the outset. Prior to its perfect realization, it cannot be grasped. It is elusive. So, as you say, you are trying to get down to it. But if you try to discover or perform it yourself, your blood vessels will burst. It won’t happen. If you don’t already live the point of view of the heart, vital, subtle or causal, how are you going to move into it? Your point of view is in your head, or your legs, wherever. Satsang, the company and condition of Truth, is your true resort, and in Satsang you will find yourself falling spontaneously into the “Heart,” the Heart of Truth, which transcends the manifest realizations.”

 

For a full inquiry in SATSANG see Beezone Study on ‘The Nature of Satsang’.

 

Guru Function – Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

In The Way of Adidam, even from the beginning, I Am the Principle of your practice. Therefore, every aspect of the practice of the only-by-Me Revealed and Given Way of Adidam is Informed by Me, and Informed by your heart-Communion with Me, and Informed by the only-by-Me Revealed and Given seventh stage Realization.

For more on “THE GURU FUNCTION” see 1973 talk ‘Guru as Prophet’.

 

The Practice and Realization – Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

“As long as the ego-based pattern-conventions of conditionally arising ‘experience’ persist, there must be the practice of The Reality-Way of Adidam and The Realization of The Reality-Way of Adidam—both.”

Beezone Study on “Discipline”

The Practice of Satsang is NOT a technique.

But there is a process called Practice and it requires action.

True spirituality is a moral and spiritual transformation.

 

Levels of Practice and Stage of Life – Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

Only those who have accepted the discipline of religious or spiritual renunciation sufficiently to release attention from the bond of the mechanics of ego or body-mind can practice the conscious process in its radical form. The radical process of spiritual practice can be described to people, and I have written a great deal about the radical form of the conscious process. It need not be kept secret particularly, but it cannot be practiced fruitfully by an individual in whom attention is not fundamentally free. One cannot simply communicate to people in general a sixth stage teaching, for instance, such as the teaching of Advaita Vedanta or the mindfulness discipline of original Buddhism, and expect that everybody will therefore be able to practice it. Most people must engage preliminary or supportive practices. Most people should approach the radical Way through the lesser stages of life, because one cannot practice the advanced levels without an increase of available energy and attention.

Thus, this radical practice that I communicate based on the seventh stage disposition is not something that people can rightly, truly, fully, and fruitfully practice without preparation, without available energy and attention. Therefore, I have also communicated the forms of spiritual practice that basically represent the preparation for the most radical practice, preparation that releases energy and attention for the conscious process, which is the fundamental process I consider. That process in consciousness cannot really be engaged until there is free attention, because in that process attention itself is encountered and transcended. If you cannot enter into the consideration of naked attention itself, the fundamental mechanics of the being, then you cannot practice in the radical sense. Most people cannot. The attention of most people is wandering in the conditions of the body-mind and is not free to inspect and transcend itself.

 

Realization – Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

Right Life requires Right devotion and Right Recognition

To Realize the Supreme State of the Eternal Divine Person, Adi Da Samraj, requires absolute devotional subordination of separate “self” to Him and relinquishment of the ego-bound search. This “radical” devotion is the first aspect of the Reality-Way of Adidam.

or said another way…

To Realize Divine Enlightenment, the separate “self” and its search must be relinquished to the One Eternal Divine Reality that is always already prior to self, other and world.

The second aspect is renunciation, enacted as all the forms of “self”-discipline, or right life.

The third aspect is “perfect knowledge” of the Eternal Divine One, which is “perfect knowledge” of Reality Itself.

Surrender requires profound discrimination and obedience.

 

Transformation – Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

I do not propose a Way of practice that is based on belief in the Transcendental Reality.

The fundamental Argument of the radical Way of the Heart is not a description of the Divine or Transcendental Reality, nor a prescription for practice based on the affirmation of belief in that described Reality.

My fundamental Argument is simply a criticism of the self-contraction in all its forms.

When my Argument has been thoroughly considered, when the self is discovered to be Narcissus or the activity of self-contraction, and when all the forms of self-contraction, appearing as self and not-self, have been re-cognized and transcended, then the Transcendental Reality is Realized as the Obvious. But only then.

 

“We may say, then, that the direct intuition of the Radiant Transcendental Being is my ‘method’ or Way.”

 

For a full inquiry of ‘self-contraction’ see Beezone Study on ‘The Knot of self-Contraction’.

For a full inquiry of ‘self-observation see Beezone Study on ‘self-observation’.

 

top of page – key terms

Sadhana, Practice, Renunciation and RealizationBased on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

Therefore, in the “Radical” Reality-Way of Adidam Ruchiradam, Realization and renunciation are the same.

In the “Radical” Reality-Way of Adidam Ruchiradam, Realization and renunciation are not “two different things”.

It is simply that renunciation does not “cause” Realization—nor does Realization “cause” renunciation.

If you whole bodily recognize Me and whole bodily respond to Me, Realization and renunciation are both spontaneously evident and intrinsically coincident.

Aletheon – Adi Da Samraj

 

The Argument – Based on Adi Da’s Teaching (Direct quotes are in italic).

Narcissus, Ignorance, and Happiness are the three principal Subjects of the Argument that must be heard (or understood).

Only when the Argument is heard can seeing, conversion, or the moment to moment location of prior Happiness begin.

Crisis – No one begins to live Spiritual life Until he or she has suffered.

The first great crisis of life occurs in all of us. But most of us simply go on from there to seek Happiness, or even to despair of It.

The second great crisis of life occurs only in the case of those who can seriously accept and understand the Lesson of the first great crisis of life.

Therefore, I Argue that Lesson, so that you may become serious, understand your unhappiness, and begin the Way of Happiness Itself.

The second great crisis of life is this process of serious understanding of unhappiness and conversion to the Way of Happiness (rather than the futile search for Happiness).

The practice of real or spiritual life begins to make a difference when people who are living conventional lives are no longer addicted to the worldly game. Not that they become otherworldly and separate from the world entirely, but they no longer live as a manifestation of conventional consciousness and interests.

Serious people are not committed to superficiality. If you are My devotee, you must become serious and become moved to seriousness. The practice of the only-by-Me Revealed and Given “Radical” Reality-Way of Adidam – beginning with the foundation practice of Sighting Me and Listening to Me – is entirely about such seriousness. My devotee must embrace the in-depth process that rightly and thoroughly deals with the issues of existence.

 

For a full inquiry of ‘NARCISSUS’ go to Beezone “Study of Narcissus

For a full inquiry of ‘CRISIS’ go to Beezone Study of “Truth, Romance and Illusion”

For a full inquiry of ‘THE ARGUMENT’ go to Beezone Study on “Adi Da 101”

 

 

Serious

ADI DA SAMRAJ: One would expect that if you were as serious as you just said you are, that you would have gotten your act together by now and not just be coming to Me twenty-one years later or whatever and just starting to feel a little serious or getting a little bored with your act, that kind of thing. That is not hearing. That is not renunciation, that’s not great devotion, that’s not maturity, that’s not Samadhi.

You, personally, want to avoid dissatisfaction. You want to be basically pleased and do not want to have difficulty. Perhaps one of the greatest characteristics of a most serious devotee is the characteristic of dissatisfaction, the awareness that you are not, and will not be, satisfied by anything, by anyone, by any arrangement, any experience. The closer you are to having dissatisfaction be profoundly true of you, the closer you are to being a most serious devotee of Mine.

 

Profound Consideration – One Pointed

top of page – key terms

 

Listening

“Listening” is Avatar Adi Da’s technical term for the orientation, disposition, and beginning practice of the Way of Adidam. A listening devotee “listens” to Avatar Adi Da Samraj by “considering” His Teaching-Argument and His Leelas, and by practicing feeling-Contemplation of Him (primarily of His bodily human Divine Form). In the total (or full and complete) practice of the Way of Adidam effective listening is the necessary prerequisite for true hearing and true seeing.

For those who would thus adapt themselves at least with a little of their lives, I recommend a way that is easy to conceive and fulfill. Simply turn to God through me. Submit, surrender yourself to God through me. Love and receive God through me.

“Those who are simply listening to the Teaching, who have not entered into this conversion in the Company of the Spiritual Master, may as part of the natural discipline of listening assume the various practical conditions associated with the practice of this Way, but even so they are not yet practicing the Way. They are listening or giving their attention to the possibility of practice. When there is full conversion, or ‘hearing’ and ‘seeing’ to the point of real practice, then real preparation for the ultimate form of the Way begins—and not until then.”

The fundamental right and true practice of Listening to Me is engaged as a tacitly heart-intelligent whole bodily devotional receptivity-practice, wherein My Divinely Avatarically Self-Revealing Leelas and My Divinely Avatarically Self-Revealed Word are neither addressed to nor received by nor mediated by the mind…but are, rather, tacitly received At, and In, and By the ‘Root’-and-Prior Depth—or tacitly and directly, by the inherently thought-free nervous system and brain as a whole, and At, and In, and By the egoless Transcendental, Spiritual, and Self-Evidently Divine Self-Nature, Self-Condition, and Self-State That Always Already Is, Prior to egoic “self”-identification with the body-mind-“self”.”

The listening process is not just struggling with the practices, the disciplines, all that, that’s all just something to do.

The listening process is this profound consideration, engages Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga, making use of the technical elements of practice, of the “conscious process” and “conductivity”. The disciplines and such are simply the order, the structure, within which you do this profound consideration, because you cannot become profound in it or one pointed in it if you don’t simply establish those disciplines covering everything. There will always be vacation-land for you.

In The Way Of The Heart, The Practice Of self-Enquiry Is First Developed As A Formal and Rudimentary Activity, Whereby the conditional self, and, Thus, the entire body-mind, Is Simply Observed and “Considered”, and Felt Beyond. This Original Practice Of self-Enquiry Is Based On Simplest Listening, or The Beginners Devotional Feeling-Contemplation Of My Own Sign, and Also The Beginner’s Devotional “Consideration” Of My Full-Given Word and Storied Leelas, and Also The Beginner’s Devotional “Consideration” and Application Of The Basic functional, practical, relational, and Cultural Disciplines Given By Me To All Practitioners Of The Way Of The Heart. And This Original Practice Of self-Enquiry Is Experimentally Engaged, Along With The Similarly Experimental, and Formal, and Rudimentary Pondering Of My Arguments Relative To Divine Ignorance, During The Student-Beginner Stage Of The Way Of The Heart.

The Way Of The Heart Is Begun Through The Practice Of Listening, but The Way Of The Heart Becomes Directly Effective Only With Real and True Hearing. Therefore, Listening To The Point Of Hearing Is The First Ordeal.

***

“The practice of Adidam is not about listening to Me talk all the time as if there were something I must yet say in order to convince people to be devotees of Mine. Indeed, there is nothing that I can say to make people devotees of Mine. People will become My devotees only if they notice Me and are (thereby) moved to Me. That is it.”

 

For a full inquiry of ‘LISTENING’ go to Beezone Study on ‘Listening’

 

In The Way Of The Heart, Whether It Develops In:

The Manner Of The Devotional Way Of Insight or

In The Manner Of The Devotional Way Of Faith.

The first period of the first practicing stage of the technically “fully elaborated” form of the way of the heart, the student-beginner must have already chosen either the listening beginners form of the devotional way of insight or the listening beginners form of the devotional way of faith. The student-beginner must already have effectively practiced either in the listening beginners form of the devotional way of insight or the listening beginners form of the devotional way of faith.

The Dawn Horse Testament

 

“To do sadhana you must die to yourself in some sense. You enter into the process of such dying by submitting your own body-mind to Divine, submitting your own body to the Sat-Guru through the practice of sadhana, submitting these conditional mechanisms to the Condition that is Free of limitation, to the Samadhi of the Realizer Himself, Which is nothing but Samadhi. This is the ancient offering, the ancient means.

A death, then, a throwing off of your own egoity as the principle of existence and accepting sadhana as your destiny. This is a great gesture. Each person making this gesture may say it is an act of faith or it is based on understanding. It is always both. Both the heart-response and some intelligent consideration are required in any case. It is just that some people, because of the quality of the personality, say it is more the act of faith, and some others say it is more the act of understanding. This quality you read in yourself is responsible for the choice later on of which of the two basic approaches to practice you take up. But both of those approaches are fundamentally the same, with just a somewhat different emphasis”

There is Nothing Left But the Ash

 

Sighting Me – Devotional Recognition-Response

Devotional recognition-response to Me is not merely conventional (or nominal) devotionalism. To devotionally recognize Me and devotionally respond to Me is to have come into the Intrinsic Feeling-Apprehension of My Intrinsically egoless and Self-Evidently Divine State. To devotionally recognize Me is to Find Me As My State. To devotionally respond to Me is to turn to Me As My State, and to devotionally Commune with Me through sensitivity to My Avatarically Self-Transmitted Transcendental Spiritual (and Always Blessing) Divine Presence. By Means of simply Sighting Me, one who devotionally recognizes Me and devotionally responds to Me is, thus and thereby, turned to Me by Means of Intrinsic Feeling-Apprehension of My Divine Avataric Self-Transmission of My Intrinsically egoless Self-“Bright” State.

Conscious Process

Is the Epitome of This Way

The conscious process is part of the total affair of practice, which involves the transcendence of the ego, or conditional attention. The conscious process develops by stages–it has a number of forms.

From the beginning it may simply have the form of prayer or enquiry.

The conscious process goes through stages of development as the individual matures, but the conscious process is not the whole of the practice.

The practice is associated with supportive disciplines that are secondary but necessary, such as

1. The dietary discipline,

2. General health discipline,

3. The discipline of sexuality,

4. And of service.

All of these disciplines come under the heading of what I call conductivity. That total regime of practice, exercised within the devotional culture, is indicated by the single term, the conscious process.

The conscious process is the epitome of the Way and its most fundamental exercise, but it is necessarily associated with this total culture of life.

 

For a full inquiry in “CONSCIOUS PROCESS AND CONDUCTIVITY” see Beezone Study of Conscious Process.

 

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Practice of Conductivity

This practice of conductivity is a great art. Therefore, the practice develops over time as you magnify this hearing and seeing in the form of an effective life-practice. But in terms of what there is to observe about it locally, the ultimate change that develops through that practice of conductivity is a change in your capacity to be responsible for the full openness of this frontal line of your manifest existence.

The descending current is the dimension of this process of conductivity that must be realized and practiced first, for all the reasons that I have discussed. It is also important to apply that descending process relative to health.

And

This Way Is Not a Way of Conductivity, nor a Spirit Religion, nor a Fourth or Fifth Stage Practice

 

For a full inquiry in “CONSCIOUS PROCESS AND CONDUCTIVITY” see Beezone Study of Conscious Process.

 

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Content of Practice

Ego

You must give up your life, the identification with this rhythm, this contraction, this recoil that defines you. And how do you give it up? It is impossible. It cannot be done by the one who would do it.

No one can transcend the rhythmic contraction of the heart, which defines our consciousness, except by the most perfect and absolute sacrifice.

 

For a full inquiry into the ‘EGO’ see Beezone Study on Development of Ego

 

Experience

The practice is not to eliminate the patterns. It is to be aware of the patterns, playfully using the self-understanding that arises in association with the occasion. This is how the emotional-sexual practice becomes a mode of Ruchira Avatara Bhakti Yoga. It is not an interference. In every circumstance, there should be full playful participation in this Yoga in which you go beyond and it becomes, therefore, a transformative act and not an analysis by which you attempt to get rid of some pattern or content.

 

Habit Patterns

The practice must cover everything, ultimately. It is about relinquishing all modifications. They attract attention. They control your body. They control your emotion. They control your breath. The modifications – when they become the focus of your life – are common bondage. That’s “bonding” to the world. Its “bonding” to modifications of That Which is the Truth.

 

First Thing

The first thing to do is not to believe some proposition or to become absorbed in the practice of a remedial technique. The first thing to do is to observe yourself, consider your motivations, consider your habits and activities, beliefs, and desires. Consider your thinking. Consider the thoughts that you find persuasive. Consider all the traditions with which you are, or may become, familiar. Consider the whole thing, to the point of understanding the mechanism motivating you to seek Truth or Reality or God or Enlightenment, because it is only if you will observe and understand and transcend that mechanism that Truth or Reality or God or Enlightenment becomes Realizable. Not otherwise. Not ever otherwise.

 

Study

The practice of reading, systematically studying, thinking about, and talking about My Divinely Avatarically Self-Revealing Leelas and My Divinely Avatarically Self-Revealing Word has its necessary use as a basic practical support for right and true practice of the Reality-Way of Sighting Me and Listening to Me.

 

Realization and The Way

There are two primary elements to practice in My Company: Ishta-Guru-Bhakti, with all of the practices associated with it, and the process of self-understanding and self-transcendence. These are the two elements. They both must be very strong if there are to be any significant transitions in the Way of the Heart.

 

Ignorance

In The Way Of The Heart, “Radical” Understanding Is The Practice, and Divine Ignorance.

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THE ELEMENTS

Self-Understanding

To practice fruitfully, therefore, there must be self-understanding. Self-understanding is fundamental to the practice of the Way of the Heart from the beginning. That is why the practice is called “listening” from the beginning. It is real ‘consideration’, from the beginning.

 

Listening

 

Self-Transcendence

“Practice…requires the capability of feeling the primary sensation of the self-contraction and feeling beyond it.”

AVATARA ADI DA: Well, truly, you’re only willing to feel that knot that motivates you when you simultaneously, Gracefully, discover What Transcends it and are Given a Wisdom that communicates itself to you so that you know how to go beyond it. In other words, individuals will automatically dissociate from this depth unless they can somehow come to terms with it through the Graceful discovery of What Transcends it and the finding of Wisdom to deal with it. So when all those things coincide, and all of a sudden you find you are able to feel this thing that motivates you, this knot, this disturbance – because you know that there is something you can do about it – then there is the What to Realize that’s beyond it.

 

For a full inquiry of ‘self-contraction’ see Beezone Study on The Knot of self-Contraction.

 

Discipline

The Principle, or Great Mover, of the…practice…is not discipline itself, but Distraction by Me and Attachment to Me.

“The earliest stages of the practice of this Way in my Company, are associated with changes that serve… purification of attention…the establishment of psycho physical equanimity, and the freeing of energy and attention”.

Rightly conservative “self”-discipline of the whole body is fundamental to the practice of the only-by-Me Revealed and Given Reality-Way of Adidam (or Adidam Ruchiradam).

You should assist this process through two natural disciplines, one which is practical or humanly based, and one which is spiritual.

 

For a full inquiry of “DISCIPLINE” see Beezone Study on Discipline.

 

Natural Discipline

The practical discipline which assists this turning or Communion is the practice of

1. Minimizing the degree and kinds of exploitation of life in your own case.

This involves, to whatever degree you are able.

1. The study of listening to teachings about God and Divinely realized individuals.

2. The maintenance of a productive work life and the effort of service.

3. Compassion and love for all human and earthly beings.

4. The keeping of a clean, orderly, healthful, and pleasurable environment for yourself and your companions.

5. The adoption of a healthful and “harmless diet” (an essentially lacto-vegetarian diet that involves, to whatever degree possible, non-killing of higher creatures, who possess the sense of independent existence).

6. The confinement of sexuality to a single partner.

7. An orientation toward human community.

8. Service to the common life.

This practical discipline should be fulfilled by you to whatever degree you find the capacity in yourself. To whatever degree you fail or find yourself unable to fulfill this discipline, simply observe yourself, be easy, be full of enjoyment, make your actions at least an indulgence that does not harm others, and continue to turn to God with feeling, from the heart.

The practice is to steadily engage relational disciplines, and to persist in an ordinary life of service, study, and positive or moral restraint of functions. If this is done, you will observe that the heat of discipline becomes a purifying and transforming current of life. Then, secondarily, you will notice that the signs of old adaptations are gradually transformed, becoming less and less gross, less and less frequent, until, at last, they cease to arise or to qualify the natural Intuition or Radiance in Ignorance.

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THE NECESSARY FOUNDATION OF RIGHT LIFE

 

FOUR FACULITIES

All experience binds unless there is ego-transcending practice.

Rightly conservative “self”-discipline of the whole body is fundamental to the practice of the only-by-Me Revealed and Given Reality-Way of Adidam (or Adidam Ruchiradam).

Serve the practice of devotional turning to Me.

The practice of the Reality-Way of Adidam requires the devotional recognition-response to Me, and the moment to moment turning of the four principal faculties to Me.

That does not begin only when you come into the “inner temple” of fully established practice of the Reality-Way of Adidam-it must happen even in the “outer temple” of approach and adaptation to the Reality-Way of Adidam.

“The practice is not just a matter of trying to feel Me. It is a fierce effort of surrender to Me. You must exercise the surrender of the faculties of body, emotion, mind, and breath in order to go beyond yourself. It is not comfortable. You must steal these faculties from their common ‘objects’. When you try to do it, the limit is revealed. This becomes True Hearing of Me–the understanding of the single fact that is your ego-possession. Then there is the capability, in any circumstance, and in every stage of practice-demonstration from then on, to enter into devotional Communion with Me.”

 

For a full inquiry in “THE CONTEXT OF THE FOURTH STAGE OF LIFE”
see Beezone Study:
Adaptation to the Third Stage of Life and the Call to The Fourth Stage Stage.

 

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EARLY STAGES

“The following section of text is a Beezone adaptation and summary using Adi Da’s language as given in The Dawn Horse Testament (1991 edition):”]

“The ordeal (of Sadhana) never comes to an end. There is no such thing. This is my Confession to you. There is no end to the ordeal. Responsibility is the process. Enlightenment is perfect responsibility, and there is no end to that requirement You are not relieved of it in the transition to the seventh stage of life. That responsibility is magnified to the point of absoluteness. It is only from the position Where you Stand that the Realization that is above all is manifested. It never happens to you. It must be regenerated Where you Stand.”Adi Da Samraj, 1987 – Enlightenment is Perfect Responsibility

 

The first three (or foundation) stages of life are lived and fulfilled in an ego-transcending devotional disposition, or (as Adi Da Describes it) “in the original (or beginners) devotional context of the fourth stage of life”.

In The First Practicing Stage self-Understanding Develops Relative To The First Three Stages Of Life, and, By This, The Heart Is Prepared To Feel In The Spiritual Context Of The Fourth Stage Of Life.

In The Student-Novice Ordeal Of Listening, Are Only Beginning To Adapt To

The daily Formal Meditative Practice, Via Random Name-Invocation Of Me, and As Feeling-Contemplation Of Me Via My Murti, and As Feeling-Contemplation Of Me Via Representations Of My “Living Murti”,

Should Meditate each day For A Minimum Of fifteen minutes to one-half hour In the early morning, and Again In the evening, and they Should Gradually Increase the length of the periods Of Formal Meditative Sitting Over time.

In Order To Be Formally Accepted and Formally Acknowledged As A Student-Beginner In The Way Of The Heart, The Student-Novice Must Be

Consistently Sitting In Formal Meditation For At Least one-half hour each morning and For At Least fifteen minutes to one-half hour each evening.

And

The Formally Acknowledged Student-Beginner Should Gradually Increase the length of the periods Of daily Sitting In Formal Meditative Exercise.

The Basically Prepared Student-Beginner, and The Mature Student-Beginner, and Every Beginning “Lay Congregationist”

Must Sit In Formal Meditation For At Least a full hour each morning and For At Least forty-five minutes each evening.

And, Optimally,

Those Two Principal Occasions Of daily Meditation Should Occupy a full one and one-half hours each morning and a full hour each evening.

However, Practitioners who Would Make The Transition From The Student-Beginner Stage Of The Way Of The Heart To The First Period Of The First Practicing Stage Of The Technically “Fully Elaborated” Form Of The Way Of The Heart

Must Already Sit In Formal Meditation For a full one and one-half hours each morning and For one hour each evening.

As A Prerequisite For The Transition To

The First Period Of The First Practicing Stage Of The Technically “Fully Elaborated” Form Of The Way Of The Heart,

The Student-Beginner Must Have Already Chosen Either The Listening Beginners Form Of The Devotional Way Of Insight

Or The Listening Beginners Form Of The Devotional Way Of Faith.

And The Student-Beginner Must Already Have Effectively Practiced Either

The Listening Beginners Form Of The Devotional Way Of Insight Or The Listening Beginners Form Of The Devotional Way Of Faith.

For a full inquiry in “THE CONTEXT OF THE FOURTH STAGE OF LIFE”
see Beezone Study:
Adaptation to the Third Stage of Life and the Call to The Fourth Stage Stage.

 

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HEARING

Hearing is to realize that — when you are at your best, when you are at your worst, whatever angle you have on it, however you may be thinking about it — is simply the self-contraction, the actual present-time dramatization of the avoidance of relationship. It is all that. There is not some sort of thought about it you can have or examination of it you can enter into that is different from doing the self-contraction. It is all the doing of the self-contraction.

Hearing is not the case until there is this most fundamental capability, universal to the character, such that movement beyond the self-knot can be demonstrated every moment. And if that is done, of course, then it deals with whatever associations there may be in any moment, you see. Whatever the circumstances, whatever the qualities otherwise of the body-mind, in any moment there still is this fundamental root-capability. That is the profound nature of hearing. Its not enough to be purified some, based on My Teaching and devotional Yoga and such, not enough to be purified of some things and have it be hearing. So, this matter of people making (transitions) and otherwise which we’ve been discussing, requires this capability.

Hearing is the capability to transcend the self-contraction, because you are in the root position, which is the equivalent of the closed fist, in your own nature. You are right in that position, you’re noticing that you are clenching your fist and that is why your hand hurts, and you open your hand up. You see? Or another simile I’ve Given is that you’re pinching yourself, and you’re suffering the pain, and you are thinking and emoting, trying to do all kinds of things to be relieved of this, and you never figure it out, and the pain is constant. Then, maybe somebody points it out to you, or you somehow notice that you’re pinching yourself, and you take your hand away and all of a sudden the pain is gone. Well, hearing is this discovery of your own fundamental action that is the root and cause and nature of your own disturbance and your search. So its not meditating on the self-contraction and regretting it. Its enjoying the capability of going beyond it.


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Hearing and Equanimity

“…stand prior to self-contraction. When you stand in the position of the knot itself, the position of creating it, you can then feel beyond it and simply stand in the natural condition of relatedness. Thus, in any moment in which this simple feeling-realization is re-awakened whole bodily, the knot of egoity is released, and you stand in the position of equanimity.

This realization, this original insight is twofold.

First the knot of the self is released,

and you are established in prior equanimity.

When you stand prior to self-contraction, the disposition of merely being, feeling toward, feeling through, and feeling beyond, is awakened.

Such understanding is what I call ‘hearing’ and such conversion is what I call ‘seeing’. It is only when such hearing and seeing prevail that the practice of the Way can begin.

The free, feeling disposition of free energy and attention, the natural state of equanimity, is realized.

The second aspect of the same realization is that you are restored to relatedness.

In the context of the first three stages of life, then, this self-understanding restores you to the variety of relations that pertain to the grosser dimension of the body mind.

The process must proceed through the advancing stages of life, where this same self-observation, self-understanding, and self enquiry awaken in relation to the limitations that belong to the subtler dimensions of the self-experience.

Thus, the process that leads through the stages begins with listening and hearing.

You practice in the sphere of relations and experiences, and you realize fundamental equanimity and relatedness.

You progressively observe, understand, and feel beyond the limitations of the stages of life.

In the equanimity prior to self-contraction, the feeling of relatedness is wholly felt, wholly allowed, and in any moment in which the self-contraction intervenes, it is observed, understood, and felt beyond, or felt prior to.

Instead of self-contraction generating your experience, the feeling of relatedness, simple being, feeling toward, feeling through, and feeling beyond, is awakened in every moment of true self-enquiry or True Prayer.”

 

For a full inquiry of self-observation see Beezone Study on “self-observation”.

 

Equanimity

Spiritual Sila Is One Of The Key Means For All Advanced and Ultimate Practice Of The Way Of The Heart.

Ultimately, true sila is the discipline of love itself, or even happiness itself.

“The heart of true sila is true heart-fullness, or the spiritual heart-infusion of conditional existence through self transcending divine communion. Therefore, not false sila and not self-indulgence, but self-transcending love-communion with Me under the circumstances of conditional existence, is the necessary ordeal.”

“Understanding is a matter of naturally or usefully abiding in the Condition of Mystery, or Ignorance, no matter what arises in the field of awareness. It is a matter of constantly abiding in the ultimate or Real Condition of all conditions, rather than reacting to events or conditions themselves. If this is done, then there is no Problem, no Question, and no seeking.”

“When you Understand the apparent lifetime of the body-mind thus achieves equanimity, or freedom of participation, so that its destiny becomes natural, easeful, free of the strategies of ultimate fulfillment and release via knowledge and experience.”

Equanimity – Servant not Product

“True sila is good discipline, if applied by one who would understand the conditional self. True sila is not the product of a problematic or negative summary view of conditional existence. True sila is a servant of consistent self observation and, ultimately, it is an expression of real and most fundamental self-understanding. Ultimately, true sila reflects real experience and true knowledge of the structural laws of the functional, practical, and relational processes of the body-mind. And such true sila expresses a reality-sense of the limits of conditional existence.”

 

For a full inquiry of HEARING go to Beezone Study on “Hearing”

For a full inquiry of ‘EQUANIMITY’ go to Beezone Study on “Equanimity”

 

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SELF UNDERSTANDING and EQUANIMITY

Believe it or not there is a technical matter of love. It is part of the esoteric Teaching, the secret stuff. Secret does not mean hidden. It means in the old days it was withheld from those who were deemed as not prepared. But it cannot be secret anymore. It must be made available. Its availability does not mean though that anyone will be able or willing to do it. But the ‘word’ must be out. The test is whether you will do it or not.

Before anyone can do it, before anyone can love absolutely, they must:

1. Understand themselves sufficiently

2. Stand straight, conduct the full desent of energy circulating in the body, without contraction in body, emotion, or mind.

3. Consider and understand Adi Da’s argument to the point of Standing Free of the self-contraction.

4. Notice, locate, and be available to this Living Reality, the Self-Radiant Being or Condition of all beings, all forms, all worlds.

Once this equanimity is true of you, you Commune with That, and develop more and more self-understanding through real self-observation. You use the various aspects of this Teaching that serve self-understanding in very specific, practical terms. You develop the practical disciplines of equanimity and God-Communion, of life and meditation.

When all that matures, when you really have done all that, when you are an advanced practitioner, a spiritually mature personality, then life becomes the Magnification of that Wisdom in every moment, in all relations, under all circumstances, in every stage. Likewise, meditation or the secret act of Communion with the Divine becomes utter absorption, transcendence of self absolutely. It becomes Enlightenment. That is the business of maturity, the life of Wisdom and the meditation of Enlightenment.

 

SEEING

Seeing, or Love, Is Able To “Locate”, Acknowledge, and Feel My All-Pervading Spiritual Radiance.

Seeing Is Heart-Felt and Whole bodily Identification Of The Love-Bliss-Presence and Person Of The Divine Via Spirit-Baptism.

Seeing Is Spiritually Activated Conversion Of attention, emotion, and the Total psycho-physical personality From self-Contraction To The Spiritual Form Of God,

Seeing Is Spontaneous Devotional Sacrifice Of the self-Contraction.

Seeing Is The self-Transcending Reorientation Of conditional Existence To The Transcendental, Inherently Spiritual, and Inherently Perfect Divine Self-Condition In Whom conditional self and conditional worlds Apparently arise and Always Already Inhere.

My Spirit-Baptism Awakens Signs In and Of The Middle Station Of The Heart In My Devotee. In The Technically “Fully Elaborated” Course Of The Way Of The Heart, That Baptism Is To Occur, To Real Effect, During The Second Practicing Stage. At That Stage, The Spiritual Basis For The Lovelessness That Was egoically Associated with The Second Stage Of Life Is To Be Directly Transcended Through The Grace-Given Spiritual Conversion To Love. That Is To Say, By True Seeing, the frontal personality Is To Be Released From the Spiritual limitation that Diminishes Love, and the Truly Spiritual socialization of the frontal personality Through Love Is Thereby To Be Set In Motion.

For a full inquiry on ‘SEEING’ see Beezone Study on “Seeing”

 

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Fourth Stage

“I speak not only about that change (from the third to fourth stage of life) but of the entire spiritual process to the point of ultimate Realization. Mankind in general, however, is struggling with the step from the third to the fourth stage of life. Individuals like to think about, feel into, and consider the higher stages of life, but in reality they are involved in the neuroses of the first three stages of life, struggling with the possible transition to the fourth stage.

People everywhere are profoundly resistive to the matter of actual spiritual practice. Individuals are inclined to continue in the third stage of life and not to go through the crisis of a transition beyond it.”

“The ‘yoga’ of the frontal personality takes place in the context of the fourth stage of life. It is a matter of the submission of the “gross body” and the total “frontal” personality to the heart-principle.”

The Third Practicing Stage Of The Technically “Fully Elaborated” Form Of The Way Of The Heart Is The Most Basic Technically “Elaborate” Practicing Stage Associated With The Fully Established “Basic” Context Of The Fourth Stage Of Life. During That Stage Of The Technically “Elaborate” Practice, the individual Is To Complete The Work Of Growth Beyond the ordinary limits Of The First Three Stages Of Life By Fully Integrating the frontal personality With The By Grace Revealed Spiritual Reality. Therefore, In The Context Of The Third Practicing Stage Of The Technically “Fully Elaborated” Form Of The Way Of The Heart, the frontal personality Is To Be Spiritually Purified, Spiritually Balanced, and Made Full Of Spirit-Life, Through The Ecstatic Yoga Of Devotional self-Sacrifice, In Which The Frontal Line Of the body-mind Is Spiritually Converted To Divine Love-Communion By The Constant Exercise Of The Spiritually Awakened Heart.

All of this is just conversation, you see, until you can stably enter into the practice of the fourth stage, until you can hear this Teaching and surrender into the Life Current of the Living God with feeling, whole bodily. Not only in your formal devotional practice but in all of the forms of activity you engage in every day. You must be morally transformed, you must be physically transformed, you must practice the principles of a moral and physically transformed life, as a daily regimen, without fail, that is what the conditions of practice are about.

“In this Way or Yoga, the ‘seven stages of life’ and the ‘seven practicing stages’ do not correspond to one another exactly (number by number), except in the… fifth, sixth, and seventh stages of life respectively. Practicing stages one through four…is initially a culture of adaptation to (or toward) the fourth stage of life, and then, progressively, to the seventh, stage by stage. (Of course, the ‘Radical’ or ‘Perfect’ Disposition of the seventh stage of life informs and inspires the practice at every stage of the Way that I Teach.)”

“Making the transition to the fourth stage of life is the best almost anyone on earth is at the present time can do. Most people are involved in lesser stages of complication or growth.” Very few people on earth entered into any of the higher stages above the fourth.

“The urge of the Teaching in the world is to draw people toward the fourth stage of life, which is the foundation of higher existence or human sacrifice.”

For a full inquiry in “THE CONTEXT OF THE FOURTH STAGE OF LIFE”
see Beezone Study:
Adaptation to the Third Stage of Life and the Call to The Fourth Stage Stage.

 

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The practice is to:

Enquire [prayer]

Conduct the Spirit Power bodily.

The Practice Of Spirit-Conductivity Begins When You Are Baptized By and In and To My Mere and Blessing Presence.

“The Spirit” is a name for it, you see. To call it the Spirit is appropriate because this name designates the breath and emotion through which we recognize the Spirit.

To surrender into the Spirit in every moment is to Commune with the Transcendental Being.

To “see” the Spirit is to see the Vision of God. It is a whole bodily realization, like the realization that the body has at the level of touch. It is profound, psychic, prior to bodily and mental configurations.

The total being of the body-mind touches the Infinite Being of the Spirit, surrenders into the Spirit with every breath, whole bodily, on the basis of true emotion, love-surrender. That surrender is the epitome and the practice of the Way of Truth.

The general practice I have Given you is not about observing breaths, counting breaths, noticing breaths in any technical fashion. It is about entering into relationship with Me via the breath, Communing with Me via the breath. The breath is not the subject of your practice. I Am! All the faculties of the body-mind must be devoted to Me, and, since breath is a primary faculty, you must exercise yourself in relation to Me via the breath. The practice is not to get very curious about the breaths themselves, or finicky about breathing. It is to devote yourself to Me completely and to use the leading faculties of the body-mind as a principal mechanism for it. It is a devotional practice, then, not merely a functional one.

Constantly serve (or love) the Spiritual Master and all beings,

Maintain the equanimity of the body-mind through functional self-discipline.

Hearing, seeing, and practicing all originate, develop, and mature in the Transcendental, Spiritual, and Radiant Initiatory Company of the Adept Spiritual Master. The Fullness of Realization is necessarily dependent on Transmission (or Grace).

In the Company of Truth I (Satsang)

The Fourth Practicing Stage Of The Technically “Fully Elaborated” Form Of The Way Of The Heart Is The Stage Of “Advanced” Practice In The Context Of The Fourth Stage Of Life. And The Fourth Practicing Stage Of The Technically “Fully Elaborated” Form Of The Way Of The Heart Is The Stage Of Transition From The Context Of The Fourth Stage Of Life To The Fifth Stage Of Life. The Transition From The Third Practicing Stage Of The Technically “Fully Elaborated” Form Of The Way Of The Heart To The Fourth Practicing Stage Of The Technically “Fully Elaborated” Form Of The Way Of The Heart Is The Transition From “Elaborate” Technical Practices Predominantly Associated With The Frontal Line and the frontal personality To “Elaborate” Technical Practices Predominantly Associated With The Spinal Line and Evolutionary self-Transcendence Through Devotional Ascent. Practice During The Fourth Practicing Stage Of The Technically “Fully Elaborated” Form Of The Way Of The Heart Must Continue, In the ordinary daily circumstance, To Submit the frontal personality To Divine Communion, but The Primary Practice To Which My Devotees Are Called In The Fourth Practicing Stage Of The Technically “Fully Elaborated” Form Of The Way Of The Heart Is That Of Devotional self-Submission From The Anahata Chakra, Which Releases The Spirit-Current Up Into The Spinal Line and To The Ajna Door. And The Fifth Stage Of Life Has Begun When Devotional Concentration, or Ascending Feeling-Contemplation, At The Ajna Door Is Steady In daily Meditation Practice.

 

For a full inquiry in “THE CONTEXT OF THE FOURTH STAGE OF LIFE”
see Beezone Study:
Adaptation to the Third Stage of Life and the Call to The Fourth Stage Stage.

 

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TURN TO ME – Lifting yourself up from your bootstraps – The Tautology, The Paradox and The Double Bind.

The Primary Practice

“How can you turn to me? Even trying to turn to Me is not how to turn to Me, because that itself could be an ego-effort. In that case, you will be a mummer, playing at devotion – seeming, bowing and scraping, genuflecting, wearing labels of states of practice, and all the rest of it. Everything is made into complete nonsense.

How do you become turned to Me? Through devotional recognition-response to Me. That statement itself is a paradox and tautology. The practice is not a matter of just following an instruction from me telling you to turn to Me. If just telling you to turn would do it, then you would simply be following My instructions. But it doesn’t work that way.”

The Way of Realizing the “Bright” is the Way of constant turning to Him with all the faculties of the being – the mind, emotion, breath, and body.

Turning is true devotion, a relinquishment of ego.

How can you engage in anything counter-egoic if you do not understand egoity? You may be doing things to work against the results of egoity and to try to feel a little better, but to be practicing Truth, to be practicing truly counter-egoic activity, you must understand the ego, you must be in the place of understanding it.”

“You are already in that place! You are doing this act! What is so remarkable is that you cannot grasp this fact.”

To persist in that turning means that you cannot avoid anything. All the contents of mind, emotion, the obstructions in the breath, and the knots in the body stand out more than ever.

Turning to Me is not a dissociative strategy. You are not moving away from something and turning to something else. It is not a movement of attention from something to something else. In your presumed practice of turning to Me, you have added the “method” of turning away from what is in the field of view of the faculties. That is not the practice. That is something you are egoically adding to the practice. Some form of religion. You are applying a willful religious “method” of your own, and not simply resting the faculties in Me. That is the cult. That is Narcissus. You have put a priest between yourself and Me. It is your own ego, your own mind. It is performing the practice for you. You must relinquish your association with this priest.

Turn your attention to me and do not measure that turning relative to whether or not your mind stops and you feel better. Love me and do not measure that against whether or not you still feel negative emotions and confusion. Give your life to me, turn to me bodily, recollect me at all times, whether I am physically present with you or not, and do not measure that activity against whether or not you feel pains in your body. Maintain that discipline of turning to me. It can be done, as long as you do not associate that turning with the reading of the problems in you. The turning can always be done. You are never disabled in terms of that turning. It is only these effects – because you are always reading them and wanting to manipulate them – that make you doubt your ability to turn.

But you can always turn. That is the principle wherein these effects become obsolete, not in that moment necessarily, although on some occasions they disappear immediately. But ultimately they disappear, because they are not being used. What you are doing is this turning. They are simply memories presently communicating themselves as your functions. They are a kind of remembering. But when your conscious life becomes participation in relationship to me, then these effects become obsolete. It is not for you to measure that process, to decide when they should become obsolete. Be willing to have these things arise in you forever. Make your business turning to me.

“Therefore, at last there is no turning within, and no strategy without, but dissolution in Ignorance-Radiance itself.”

 

For a full inquiry in to ‘TURN TO ME’ see Beezone Study “Counter Egoic Activity”

 

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Spiritual Practice

Sadhana or spiritual practice begins in that place where you make this knot, the self-contraction, 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.

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 all kinds of enquires, philosophies, psychological investigations and all other mental means of avoiding something deep in your psyche. 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.

Above has some Beezone paraphrasing

Practice Of The Way Of The Heart (and The First and Basic, or Frontal, Spiritual Yoga Of The Way Of The Heart) In The Context Of The Fully Established (or Actually Seeing) “Basic” Fourth Stage Of Life Takes Place

In The Context Of The Third Practicing Stage Of The Technically “Fully Elaborated” Form Of The Way Of The Heart (or, Otherwise, In The Context Of The Technically “Simpler”, or Even “Simplest”, “Lay Congregationist” Practice Of The Way Of The Heart, Once Such Practice Is Formally Acknowledged To Be Based On Both True Hearing and Real Seeing, and, On That Basis, To Be Capable Of The First and Basic, or Frontal, Spiritual Yoga Of The Way Of The Heart).

“If An Early Transition Is Not Made To The “Perfect Practice” Of The Way Of The Heart In The Context Of The Sixth Stage Of Life, The adult Practitioner Of The Technically “Fully Elaborated” Form Of The Way Of The Heart Should Continue Practice In The Context Of The Fourth Stage Of Life By Transitioning To

The Fourth Practicing Stage Of The Technically “Fully Elaborated” Form Of The Way Of The Heart, Wherein and Whereby The Transition Should Eventually Be Made Either To Practicing

The Stage Five Of The Technically “Fully Elaborated” Form Of The Way Of The Heart Or, Even More Directly, To

Practicing Stage Six Of The Technically “Fully Elaborated” Form Of The Way Of The Heart, Before

The Final Transition Is Made To Practicing Stage Seven Of The Technically “Fully Elaborated” Form Of The Way Of The Heart.”

The Dawn Horse Testament

 

For a full inquiry in ‘THE CONTEXT OF THE FOURTH STAGE OF LIFE’
see Beezone Study:
Adaptation to the Third Stage of Life and the Call to The Fourth Stage Stage.

 

 

The Most Difficult Stage

“In the Great Process of the Way of Divine Ignorance, body and mind are ecstatically released or surrendered into Life, or the Fullness of Divine Radiance. Thus, as the Process matures, the structures and functions of the body-mind first awaken and then become a sacrifice into their Source-Condition.

The most difficult stage is the one of transition from Lawless, subhuman existence to the responsible beginning of spiritual life in the Way of Divine Communion. After that, the whole affair is more creative and freely voluntary. Thus, in the earliest stages of life, where personal, moral, and religious preparation is developed, much attention still remains in reactive and self-indulgent physical, emotional, and mental patterns. But as the stages of true practice of the Way develop, there is less and less of the mechanical and self-conscious attachment to the structures of the body-mind.

As the Way of Relational Enquiry develops, the entire lower body-mind becomes Awake in the prior Fullness of the Divine. Thus, social, dietary, sexual, and other areas of habit and obsession gradually relax and are sublimed through ecstatic Communion with the Divine. As a result, by the time the devotee makes the transition to the Way of Re-cognition, there is no longer any overriding need to indulge such habits, and he can easily and naturally maintain a daily practice that is wholly regenerative, moderate, and free of the accumulating effects of enervation, toxicity, distraction, reactivity, doubt, and unlove.”

 

For a full inquiry in “THE CONTEXT OF THE FOURTH STAGE OF LIFE”
see Beezone Study:
Adaptation to the Third Stage of Life and the Call to The Fourth Stage Stage.

 

 

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HIGHER LEVELS of PRACTICE

“…higher levels of practice… cannot even begin until spiritual maturity, or until the body-mind is responsibly and naturally maintained in a conservative state of equanimity, and thus no longer obsesses or controls attention.”

“The practice of The Reality-Way of Adidam is, at last, Most Perfectly Self-Established by Grace in Perfect Freedom-Divinely Self-Recognizing all the forms of “self” and “not-self” that (apparently) arise.”

 

SIGNS

People who understand this principle get down to it, handle business, and bring me signs.

 

TRIAL – Hard School

To rightly and truly engage the ego-transcending practice of the Reality-Way of Adidam is (inevitably) demanding, and even (at times) difficult – but the practice is, itself, never mere and egoic suffering. Rather, the practice is the ordeal associated with the transcending of egoity. It is the ordeal of right and true renunciation, right and true “self”-discipline. That ego-transcending ordeal of “self”-discipline is necessary. That ordeal is, itself, the substance of change, the alchemy of change. That ordeal is the “fire on the pot”-into which you must throw everything.

The only-by-Me Revealed and Given Reality-Way of Adidam is the transcending of everything, Liberation from everything, in the Utter Freedom of egoless Most Perfect Divine Self-Realization.

Devotional life is constant attention to the Divine Presence, and participation, through real functional activity, in that Presence.

It is a constant test of the born life, because the born life wants to randomly fulfill its conflicting tendencies or desires.

The conscious life or the life of spiritual discipline wants to remain in God. Therefore, the Way of Divine Communion is a trial between these two motives.

“Most everyone will reach their cutoff point, the point where they will tend to stop, the point where practice tends to be sufficient for them or where further effort is too frustrating and too offensive. Everybody reaches the point where he or she tends to withdraw from the stream of practice. Most people reach that point even before they begin the practice. Either they are never moved to find anything greater than ordinary ego-fulfillment in the world, or they are just “fans” of spiritual life. They like the books, but they basically resist and even resent the interference represented by a Spiritual Master and a Teaching and the idea of practice.

Practice in My Divine Avataric Company is about passing tests, such that the total body-mind constantly goes through ego-transcending changes and makes an always greater and always new ego-transcending demonstration.

The Practice accounts for the dual or dynamic nature of the body-mind, while it is also founded in the radical point of view of the Free soul. At every stage of the Way, right functional or whole bodily activity is the chosen principle, rather than any or all forms of exclusively subjective or internal and mental self-manipulation. The individual must change his action first, or else the contents of the mind, which are only a reflection of past actions, will not change. At every stage of the Way, the devotee is obliged to accept responsibility for a more and more total functional spectrum of action.

Practice in My Divine Avataric Company is a “hard school”, a persistently ego-transcending life-based upon:

1. The Great Purpose of transcending all limitations,

2. Transcending the body-mind-complex itself, and

3. Transcending the cosmic domain itself.

To rightly and truly engage the ego-transcending practice of the Reality-Way of Adidam is (inevitably) demanding, and even (at times) difficult.

but the practice is, itself, never mere and egoic suffering.

Rather, the practice is the ordeal associated with the transcending of egoity.

It is the ordeal of right and true renunciation,

Right and true “self”-discipline.

That ego-transcending ordeal of “self”-discipline is necessary.

That ordeal is, itself, the substance of change, the alchemy of change.

That ordeal is the “fire on the pot” – into which you must throw everything.

 

Renunciation and an Ordeal

My devotees must fit themselves to right devotion to Me, and go through the living ordeal of right practice—moment to moment, and day by day. The process of life-rightening is an ordeal of shedding the ego-pattern, or the imagined persona. Therefore, that process of life-rightening is, necessarily, a process of renunciation. The patterns of egoity are built into the body-mind-complex as psycho-physical tendencies. Therefore, those patterns do not disappear merely because you come up with a notion about changing them. The life-rightening process must be profoundly engaged and persisted in, so that real turning away from, and real shedding of, ego-patterning occurs. That is a fundamental aspect of the “Radical” Reality-Way of Adidam Ruchiradam—the “ordeal” aspect.

Right-life discipline is simply a necessary sign of the whole bodily devotional recognition-response to Me.

Indeed, profound whole bodily conformity to intrinsically ego-transcending right-life discipline (and, thus, to renunciation) is one of the necessary signs of true devotional recognition-response to Me and, Ultimately, of Perfect Realization of Me.

Therefore, in the “Radical” Reality-Way of Adidam Ruchiradam, Realization and renunciation are the same.

In the “Radical” Reality-Way of Adidam Ruchiradam, Realization and renunciation are not “two different things”.

It is simply that renunciation does not “cause” Realization—nor does Realization “cause” renunciation.

If you whole bodily recognize Me and whole bodily respond to Me, Realization and renunciation are both spontaneously evident and intrinsically coincident.

Self-contraction or identification with the body-mind coincides with infinite fear, the other. The sense of other or difference is fear, limitless fear. Feeling limitless fear with limitless opposites that are a distraction from fear, is life, bondage, seeking, driven from the void, perpetually, until there is the perfect transcending of it all. Realization, then, is renunciation of it all–not merely by giving it up, but by transcending it inherently.

 

ADI DA SAMRAJ: And whatever you must do to bring yourself to enter into your own egoic “self-possession” in depth, that is what you must do. Until then, you will still be yammering about all the things you want to do out here and around–be the golden boy, sexy with everybody, selling big candy–just the stress itself registered by the search rather than the depth of the stress itself. When you enter into it deeply, you are discovering in that deepening that it is your own act, and the mere discovery of it is the relaxation of it. That is what you must find out. Try it out.

 

You all do not believe it is okay to lose interest in what is going on in life, in your life and in the lives of others around you and in the whole world. You think it is not okay. To lose interest to what is ordinarily going on is the secret of renunciation.

Errors of Renunciation

The alpha strategy is motivated primarily by the desire to avoid conditional or psycho-physical pain and suffering. Since psycho-physical pain and suffering arise inevitably, in natural opposition to psycho-physical pleasure, the alpha strategist must avoid both pain and pleasure. Therefore, the alpha strategist is moved to escape or turn away from the total context of natural, bi-polar, and cosmic existence.

In India you hear all about renunciation and detachment. From the common Indian point of view renunciation means withdrawal, separation from functions and relations. But that separation is not true renunciation or true detachment.

The alpha strategist is motivated to avoid or escape the entire cycle of desiring, getting, having, and enjoying, because the alpha strategist is obsessed with the desire to desire not, to avoid pain, and to not suffer.

The alpha strategist is constantly struggling to avoid or escape from suffering, pain, pleasure, money, food, sex, fear, sorrow, anger, greed, lust, attachment, boredom, doubt, discomfort, conditional experience, conditional knowledge, and egoity.

The alpha strategist seeks to avoid conditional or psycho-physical pain or suffering to an absolute degree, but this is not possible within the context of conditional existence, or in the experience of the body-mind.

Alpha strategist suffers from the problem of the desire of desiring not to desire. And the chronic signs of this fault are too much dissociative effort, too much seeking to avoid or escape, too much external or merely apparent renunciation, and too much strategic control and suppression of body and mind.

The Alpha strategist tends to manifest self-involved reserve, dryness, weakness, and a lack of sympathy or love for others.

Before you are My devotee, ego is king, or queen. When you become My devotee, ego is a servant – not meaning this in any demeaning sense, but meaning that there is a, different understanding of what should govern life. The ego-principle should not.

My true devotee does not make much of himself or herself. Practice is self surrender, self-forgetting–not merely in and of itself but in Communion with Me, by Communing with Me, by responding to Me.

Knowing this is what it means to wake up. And that awakening is where renunciation comes from, by the way. Not the seeker’s renunciation, already seeking, already self-bound, deciding to cut things off. Such is a game within the illusion. It is one of “Narcissus”‘ games. All your gestures, all-your adventures, all your proposals – they are all the same game.


 

Read more by Adi Da on Renunciation.

 
All who study the Way of Adidam should remember that they are responding to a Call to become responsible for themselves. They should understand that they, not Avatar Adi Da Samraj or others, are responsible for any decision they make or action they take in the course of their lives of study or practice.

Standard text in Dawn Horse Press publications

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