Adi Da: "surrender without a leg to stand on"
Updated: 3d
From The Sign of My “Brightness”
A Discourse Given by Adi Da on March 20, 1993
Adi Da: "The real process is an in-depth process of surrender without a leg to stand on. It is real tapas. And the right practice when tapas is closing in on you is not to react and seek and console yourself but to endure it, to maintain a discipline, to practice devotion to Me, to be straight in daily life. Do not dramatize. If you rightly do it, apart from your confession in your intimate groups with your friends nobody will even notice that you are going through such difficulty.
But you think that as soon as it is difficult, it is time to dramatize, time to lay it onto your friends, time to console yourself, time to indulge yourself, time to desensitize yourself. That is the technique you use as an ego-based worldling, and that has no relevance to the process you must endure. It just puts it off. That is how you prolong the beginnings, and that is what you must outgrow. It is a sign of maturing in the Way of the Heart that you do not indulge in such consoling efforts and do not dramatize. That is maturity.
By such maturity you keep straight in the midst of the tapas. You are having a bad day, feeling rather fragile, so you want to take a vacation? No! Maintain the discipline of surrender to Me, maintain the discipline of service to Me, do not change a jot of your behavior, do not dramatize with others, do not seek to indulge yourself. Be without a leg to stand on. Endure it. That is how you will grow. Abandoning that position, bypassing it through consolation and all the rest of it, you desensitize yourself and fail to grow, and you prolong the beginning.
There is nothing I can do about it. I cannot lay down some absolute law to prevent all dramatization. I can just tell you how it is and what is really required. You will take as long to grow as you are pleased to do. It is your business. Bypass the transforming purifying event and you are building time into your beginning practice, building time into your practice altogether. It is entirely up to you."
