David: When you’re doing sadhana and your mind is opening up to the Bliss of the Absolute and you’re still practicing within it you will do anything to maintain that. You look to maintain, you’re living for it. It’s like the long-lost friend that is now found so you try to keep it in your company.
Don’t you read on my websites when I was discussing my days in college when I was really performing my sadhana at full hilt? Full tilt? I was in love with extinction, ecstasy, oblivion. I didn’t just make that up because it sounded good in a sentence. I really was that, in love with that, not just practicing dispassionately. Everything in me was responding the way sex is responsive or addiction is responsive. Everything in me was responding to the innate reality as being that which was most adorable, desirable and to plunge myself in it if I had any choice in the matter at all, or simply becoming intoxicated on the Bliss of that opening. That’s the same thing, letting yourself enjoy.
You fall in love with the thing that you are. You fall in love with what you are, and your Bhakti gets stimulated into your own realization. So, you start surrendering into it, emptying yourself into it the way a lover empties him or herself into the beloved. You don’t stay tepid and cool, shiny and tidy in the midst of sadhana. You get all turned inside out and upside down over love. That’s what real sadhana is, real spiritual practice, communing with the Divine shamelessly in all of its forms.
Extraordinary experiences are welcome. Those who fear losing the ground of Being for phenomenal experiences of extraordinary and Blissful nature have an incorrect understanding of what brings liberation. You literally have to be shocked out of your waking state mind again and again and again so that you become fully permeated with the Bliss, infinite and all-encompassing in its nature, of the Absolute of reality.
When it comes in a wave, a single wave enjoy it. When you get intoxicated, when you get expanded enjoy it. Why would you not enjoy it? You’re afraid your enjoyment process is going to run away with you? It’s already running away with you. Your problem is not that you’re enjoying too much, but you don’t know how to enjoy. You don’t know how to enjoy infinitely.
So, there’s no amount of restricting enjoyment that’s going to produce liberation. There’s only the following through into deeper and deeper levels of enjoyment, expansion, and that will deliver you. Your process and mechanism of pleasure will deliver you. Pain is just the opposite of pleasure. Abstinence is just the opposite of indulgence. So, you can’t use that as a path. Or you can if you want to be ineloquent and undignified about this.
Everything in nature follows its pleasure mechanism, everything. Every animal, every insect, every bird follows its pleasure-based experience as an indication of positivity. So, pleasure is the guiding light of the Divine. And the only reason these paranoid thoughts creep up on people such as, “Well, if I start that then I’ll never stop,” is because they’re already so restricted in the field of enjoyment. They’re afraid of enjoyment, that it might run away with them and that they might be hedonists, that they might live only for the next moment of enjoyment. What’s wrong with that? Because when you’re in Bliss Consciousness you’re in Absolute enjoyment. You are absolutely enjoying. You are enjoying and being enjoyed.
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