To Be a Practioner

The true Spiritual process is not a kind process with which and to whom you can indulge in a romance! The Gopis were not romantically involved with Krishna. You cannot be casually asking for salvation or even playfully and amusedly involved with the Divine or with Truth. You first must overcome yourself. Once you overcome yourself and truly understand your relationship with the True Romance of the Divine or Truth you can also appear playful, but it is most profound, it is a creative affair.

You can feel My Presence and still be self-possessed, but that is not practice, that’s just energy without self-understanding. You may have some sense of My Influence but you must understand your releationship to Me in total. To rightly use my Presence is to enter into my Condition, the Condition of the Spirit-Force, not merely to associate with It as a pleasurable Other, someone fun to be with, an Energy that makes you feel better in yourself the way an infant feels better when it sucks the tit and feels a little full. An infant sucking the tit is not Enlightened, and likewise a devotee just breathing the excess and superior Energy of the Spiritual Master is not Enlightened, not practicing, not being a practitioner. You must give the gift, which is sacrifice of self, before you can use the Prasad. You can feel It, because It is there, but you cannot use It rightly. You are not truly using It rightly unless you give your own gift, which is self-surrender, self-transcendence.

In order to surrender and transcend yourself you must first understand yourself. You must know what you are all about. And what you are all about is this contraction. You must appreciate it, be humbled by it, and Stand Free of it. Only then can you can use this Blessing, this Baptism, but not otherwise. Even though you can say that It exists, even though you can acknowledge this Blessing, this Baptism, you may still not be a practitioner. Hundreds and hundreds of people have spent time in my Company and know very well there is a Blessing there, a Force that came upon them, but they did not become practitioners. They were self-possessed when they were there and they were self-possessed when they left. They felt the Divine Power, they know It exists, but It does not make a difference to them, not in the true sense. For them it is just some unusual, big thing among a number of other unusual and interesting things in life. Some even became thieves and are deluding themselves into believing they were enightened by this Force, this Blessing Baptism.

You must relate rightly to this Blessing Force and understand yourself in the midst of it. Otherwise you engage in a romance with me or delude yourself in some form or fashion. This is not receiving gift, this is romance and delusion. It is to grab the fruit out of the basket without offering anything first. It is to take heaven by storm. It is an intrusion, a violation, and inappropriate, and it will cause you to experience difficulty ultimately because if you come into association with superior Energy and remain self-indulgent or self-possessed, that very Energy will begin to disturb you, disorient you, cause you to react, individuate yourself, and aberrate yourself.

The only way rightly to relate to the tangible Blessing of the Adept is to hear the Masters Teaching, understand yourself, bring the gift of attention, self-surrender, self-transcendence. Then you can receive the Blessing. You can know the Blessing experientially without giving your own gift, but you cannot receive It, accept It, and use It without first submitting yourself. You cannot suck the ear of the Infinite and get away with it!

You can play all sorts of games. You can get devotional, romantic, righteous and delusional but unless you truly understand yourself, this contraction, this fundamental knot you’re avoiding and truly feel the heat of your disturbance then you only have your search and your avoidance. You end up running scared.

People continue to think that all this is leading somewhere in some grand evolutionary design and they continue to thrive on the search. But the more sensitive you become, the more you become aware of this structure of limitation. The more sensitive you become the more you realize that is all that is felt, truly, from moment to moment. It’s only when consciousness returns to this zero of the one thing known from moment to moment in the ordinary sense that this insight begins to break the bondage. It’s only when you’ve become so limited, when you have no options truly that you begin to understand what’s going on.

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. When you realize you can’t play your games any more. You can’t depend any longer on your games because you know all games are essentially based on the same impulse, the same structure. You realize ultimately the same vision, the same cognition of the search. You realize you are truly locked in to this one form of existence, which is ordinary suffering, the search. It’s in that entrapment, that isolation of real re-cognition, that the whole process begins to be undone.

That’s why I 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, it’s only when you have fallen into your own limitation, that True Insight and Understanding can arise as I have described it. So there must be a crisis. There’s 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.

And that fundamental understanding should your impulse, your discipline, your intelligence, your capacity to be human, manly, male or female. That crisis is your endurance, your use of this great heat of self-frustration. The heat of self-frustration is the energy of meditation. It is the seat of meditation. It is the Heart.

Cut it! It burns! It burns to cut it. And that burning is the glory you register in meditation and its depth. It purifies. It releases contraction. It releases limitation. It Outshines it. It burns it off. You want to make use of this person, make use of my Company? Then meditate in my Company. Come to me in the right disposition. Come to me disciplined. Come to me with understanding. Receive my Transmission. Move, grow, Awaken. That is what I am here for.

 Beezone essay edited and adapted from three talks by Adi Da Samraj