In the lengthy Adi Da excerpts I’ve included below, he talks about how spiritual aspirants throughout history have often deliberately chosen to live in constrained, enclosed circumstances – not unlike our quarantine situation! – to focus and magnify their spiritual practices. To eliminate distractions. To more intensely observe the “event” of their own being. Monks in their tiny Spartan cells. Swami Muktananda in his small broiling hut. Yogis like Swami Rama or Patrul Rinpoche in their dank caves. 

Traditionally, these enclosed spaces were kept spotlessly clean. Spare and minimal. But I’d like to say this: just imagine how much more concentration you’d have to develop if your enclosed space was cluttered with tons of empty paper bags and boxes, laying all over the floor, in every room of your home…because it turns out empty paper bags and boxes are, in fact, cat toys, and your wife has decided that it is mathematically impossible to have too many of them on the floor, because, after all, each new one is a fresh vista of thrilling kitty discovery, especially when your wife sprinkles gobs of catnip in them, and each one must be decisively and expectantly sat in, by said cats, for enormous stretches of time, like some terrible feline Beckett play.

And just think how much focus you’d have to cultivate if there were also huge stacks of books teetering on every horizontal surface of your home – the floors, desks, dressers, nightstands, coffee tables – books that you want to read, or at least want to have read, or at least want to be able to tell people you’ve read, and having them sitting out in huge heaps and stacks perpetuates the agreeable illusion that you are, in fact, still actively reading them, even if, in most cases, it’s been many months indeed since you cracked them.

And let’s just say – purely hypothetically – that there’s a fair amount of organic refuse, plant-matter, on the floor, too, because, when your big orange cat beats up on your little grey cat, you are sometimes too lazy to get out of your dilapidated couch to intervene, so you and your wife instead throw dinner leftovers at the big orange cat – empty avocado shells, the stems of romaine leaves, organic non-GMO corn chips, or any other reasonably aerodynamic foodstuffs. 

Point is, in such a totally imaginary and hypothetical scenario, just think how one-pointed in your practice you would have to become to maintain even the slightest shred of sanity. 

Here are the Adi Da excerpts. The context is that he had just watched a documentary film about an Irish man who’d been held as a hostage in Lebanon for five years. The man had apparently been praying for his nightmarish situation to end, but…

“Then, he said, he stopped praying in those terms. He accepted his confinement and stopped thinking about being released. He realized that his struggle was basically fruitless. There was nothing he could do about his situation, which just continued to be. He began examining the situation just as it was. It was his situation. He was living in that place. Imprisonment was his life.

“Only with that acceptance did he come to terms with his fears and reactions and his suffering in confinement, and he began to realize a process of growth. He learned many lessons over those terrible years, but he came away from the ordeal feeling that he had received an advantage. It was not that he liked being in prison – certainly not – but he felt he had understood something and had overcome something in himself. 

“Fear, for instance. He felt very frightened – for obvious reasons, since he was not only confined but under threat, he could neither deal with his circumstance nor escape it, and he was physically abused. Yet, once he had accepted his situation and was no longer struggling against it, he had a great deal of time to examine his fear. Over time, he said, fear became more and more just this little ‘something’ that he was doing. He made a gesture like this [Adi Da holds up his thumb and index finger about two inches apart] to indicate just that small ‘something’ he was doing. Eventually, the fear vanished.

“This man was suggesting that there are advantages to a situation of confinement. Many people in the past have chosen just such a circumstance of renunciation. When you accept a situation of discipline (even of confinement or isolation) – in other words, when there is no more seeking, no more struggling to escape your situation, and you are able just to deal with the event that you are being in the context of that situation (and your situation need not be as extreme as this man’s), only when you are no longer seeking to escape the confinement, the pressure, the suffering, the limitation, the mortality of existence, then you can just deal directly with your own mechanism of reaction – only then is there a breakthrough beyond the common and petty limitations you are otherwise suffering psychologically and Spiritually…

“… Somehow or other, you must bring a halt to the mode of seeking, of being confused, ‘self’- indulgent, peripheral, superficial. Whether by choice or by circumstance, you must be confined to just the examination of what is, without struggling to get out of it. Then, and only then, do you go through the crisis of breaking out of your limitations…

“The ordinary person, on the other hand, with all the gaming of an ordinary life and a history of adaptation to it, refuses confinement of any kind.  Likewise, you, in your ordinariness, want to be ‘ free’ (to use the common language) – meaning that you want to be able to act without obligation or intrusion….

“Therefore, in summary, at its foundation, all of Spiritual life is just such a discipline – a kind of confinement, or a relinquishment of the arbitrariness, casualness, superficiality, wandering, and seeking of your usual act of attention – to such a degree that you become focused, calmed, and able to deal directly with the suffering that prevents Divine Self-Realization.”

Takeaway

As ghastly as this quarantine is, see if you can frame it differently. Place your situation in the long tradition of monks and yogis who have used “enclosures” to deepen and magnify their spiritual practices. Pretend you’re in a Himalayan cave. But with WiFi and take-out. And cat toys.

Also, in the same talk that I quoted from above, Adi Da goes on to describe how we can duplicate the powerful effects of enclosures through self-disciplines. Self-disciplines, like caves and cells, lessen our distractions and diversions. So if you’re really feeling gung ho, use this time to play with some simple self-disciplines, in whichever way most serves your practice. Maybe around food, alcohol, weed, or internet use. 

If it seems hard, explore why it’s hard. What about it is hard? Adi Da would suggest that it is only our own primal action of contracting, moment to moment, from the Radiance of Being, that could turn just existing in an enclosure (or in the “confines” of self-discipline) into discomfort. Sounds like a decent hypothesis to me.And hey, here’s a handy self-discipline idea. You could take on a discipline to overcome your tendency not to subscribe to enough Adi Da related blogs!