Sadhana – Adi Da Samraj

“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

 

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 Sadhana in the Literature of Adi Da Samraj

As taught by Adi Da Samraj

Presented by Beezone

“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

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

“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: Sadha – to 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

“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

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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

“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.

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

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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.”

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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

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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.”

“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

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

“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

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.

The way out of the cycle of pleasure and pain, the cure for your addiction, is also painful, to some degree. There is tapas in it. However, when you understand the reasonableness of the cure and its purpose, you become willing to endure it. Having so thoroughly adapted to what is inherently painful, you must understand, like a five-hundred-pound man or woman committed to losing weight, that you must endure a process of purification. Therefore, a part of self-discipline is that you become willing to endure it, because of your intelligence, your understanding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DEVOTEE: The sympathy is the ego expressing itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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