Our Sadhana

Our sadhana:

“ it cannot be helped, you cannot skip your sadhana….” these are the words said by Nisargadatta Maharaj to a seeker in the seminal classic I Am That. Here, he’s urging the seeker to turn away from the outer world and look within to until it’s seen how the inner world merges with its outer expression, to keep looking until there is no true difference between the two, one single world of seamless beauty. Our sadhana is a specific spiritual practice, it’s often seen as a daily discipline of yoga and meditation, perhaps some form of prayer, or other means of cultivating a deep awareness of the mind. I believe that in this case Nisargadatta is recommending inquiry as a form of practice, telling the seeker to keep their focus beyond the conditioned view of consciousness, to see that nothing has an independent reality of its own, that existence itself depends upon the flow of events and objects that seem to give meaning to our lives.

beyond conditions…

is truly who we are.

but I’ve always loved that line, that we can’t skip our sadhana, and really I see it as meaning more than a formal spiritual practice. Our first and most significant practice is life itself, we cannot skip what is here and present even with distractions of a modern, busy world. Our practice is to live, it’s our sadhana, and it provides its own discipline and order, grief…