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The following
excerpts have been taken from a variety of essays and talks
from Adi Da Samraj covering over 30 years of his teaching
demonstration.
This style of
presentation is called the ‘White and Orange Books” project
and is based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown books.
The Blue & Brown Books of Wittgenstein’s were dictated
as a set of notes to his student in 1934-1935. I have been
collecting materials from Adi Da that I find would be
suitable for the same format.
Offenses, Resistance and Outrage
“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.
“The effect of this way of life was a perpetual and
growing encounter with my own resistance”.
“You must do this sadhana with great intensity, with
great and ordinary maturity, and pass through this process
that is entirely offensive to all your tendencies. It is
absolutely true that this process of sadhana offends all
your tendencies, which means it offends you absolutely, in
every way, in every dimension in which you have existence or
in which you may realize existence. You will feel that
offense, you will feel your resistance, you will feel all
kinds of tendencies that are anything but the availability
to this Satsang and its sadhana. And you will be tested by
them because you must pass through them. That is what
sadhana is about. There are times when it is extremely
difficult, difficult beyond belief, and you must go through
those times. Those are the most valuable, the most purifying
times”.
“People do well to be offended or even outraged by
me”
“So when you come across the man of understanding,
regardless of the quality that you look for by which to
identify him, he will always offend that. “He is an offense
to those who are entranced, elsewhere, contained in the
mechanics of experience, asleep, living as various forms of
identity, separation and dependence.” So the seeker is
always offended in the company of the man of understanding
regardless of what pictures are motivating his search. These
things must all fail, they must all come to an end, they
must all dissolve in the company of the man of
understanding. In Satsang all of these things are
undermined, and only those who begin to move in the
principle of understanding itself, only those who
understand, find him acceptable. So only those who begin to
live this quality which precedes all limitations actually
find him in the sense that they discover this function and
live with it, live in Satsang truly and remain in it. All
others are offended, all others will separate at some
point”.
“…you notice how childish you are
as soon as you get a little offended. As soon as you cannot
at will do a few of the crazy things that you are used to
injecting into the routine of your life over a year’s time,
you get petulant, you get crazy.
When I was doing the equivalent of
your student sadhana, I felt these inclinations. These
tendencies are there to be dealt with, to become matters of
your responsibility. It is not just that you are not
supposed to be aware of tendencies, but there is a higher
process to which you are fundamentally committed, and which
you would not abandon under any conditions. Thus you must
pass through the difficulties created by your tendencies at
times. That is what it is to be a human being. Everything
else is just subhuman, the exploitation of the mechanisms
only. Human life is responsibility, consciousness. You must
bring that kind of manliness, whether you are male or
female, to the process of this sadhana”.
“Sadhana is tapas. It is a profound
ordeal”
The
Knot of Self-Contraction
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