cyee@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Chut Ngeow YEE) (06/25/91)
I had wanted to post this article for some time, but could not locate the
material until now. It is from talks Da Avabhasa gave in the early years
1973 and 1974. Here he is answering questions that I think many of you
would raise at one stage or another.
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DEVOTEE: If God is here already then why is the Spiritual Master necessary?
DA AVABHASA: Because you do not see it. You do not know God. You think
you are someplace and god is someplace else.
DEVOTEE: You actually make us see?
DA AVABHASA: Through the process of the crisis that is awakened in Satsang,
you begin to intuit the Dimension in which you really exist. Without the
service of the Spiritual Master's function, you perceive this world in
itself, in mystery, with unconsciousness, without any idea whatsoever of
what your true Condition is. The Spiritual Master is just a bit of
business. The only reason he exists is to produce a crisis in
consciousness in which you break away from your identification with what is
arising, and begin to fall in on your true Nature. And by that process you
begin to intuit and then cognize where you really are.
The Spiritual Master can realize his identify with another and then go
about meditating in a very natural way, and his meditation literally
becomes the meditation of that one. It is because this possibility exists,
and because it can be controlled and literally used, that this Siddhi that
is lived in Satsang can do what it does. If the Spiritual Master could not
realize his identify with his devotee, the devotee could never enjoy his
Spiritual Master as the Divine. It is not the devotee who, through effort,
realizes his non-separation from God. It is the Spiritual Master
who lives his devotee as non-separate from God, and that becomes
spontaneous knowledge in his devotee. The Spiritual Master first transforms
his devotee. Then his devotee begins to realize what has happened.
So the Spiritual Master does not operate by giving his devotee a method to
realize oneness with God. It is a hopeless task. A process must be created
wherein the Divine can enact his oneness with his devotee, and then the
devotee, depending on the degree of his intelligence, sooner or later
realizes that that is the case. And that is how the principle of Satsang
works. That is what makes it different from the principle of the search.
In the search you begin separate, or at least considering yourself to be
separate, or un-Enlightened, and you strategically work to realize oneness,
identity, union. You essentially do this by methodically duplicating the
experiential path whereby some other individual realized such oneness, or
felt he did, or intuited something about it. All the paths generated in
the traditions are essentially means for duplicating the experience of some
extraordinary person who claimed to have realized the Divine by that very
path of experience.
But the Divine Way that continually enters the human world is one in which
this dilemma, on the basis of which the search is generated, is undone from
the beginning. A new Condition is established from the beginning. A new
Condition is established from the beginning of the true spiritual path.
That Condition is in itself without dilemma, without separation. That is
Satsang.
I could not care less about creating an organization of solemn or silly
people. It has no value to me. The world is already solemn and silly, and
I would rather be away from it. I would rather play like a madman with a
few, until they begin to Awaken, and then let them serve the world. That
is the way I do it.
Therefore, I make demands that are not easily met. It is not as if you
come here, receive an initiation, feel holy and quite, and have a grand
weekend. it is difficult to be involved in this Communion. There is a lot
that is offensive about it. I know how offensive and difficult it is. I
make demands that most are not interested in dealing with. They feel those
demands before they even get anywhere close, so you do not see thousands of
people coming here. I am interested only in the creation of devotees.
DEVOTEE: Is the Siddhi like a thread connecting the devotees and yourself?
DA AVABHASA: Yes. That is the medium. It is a conscious thread of
attention, not an astral thread or something like that. It may make use of
some subtle and vital connections, but the fundamental thread that I am
talking about is one in Consciousness, and it is a form of attention, of
love, of devotion. That is the thread. If that does not exist, all the
other kinds of connection, karmic and otherwise, are dead. There must be
the life of the devotee, the thread of love, of real attention, and he must
be willing to suffer the condition of such attention.
The individual by tendency does not want his attention placed on anything
but himself. He is a self-meditator, he is Narcissus, and he is
continually creating a hedge about himself. The demand for placing
attention on a conscious being out his self-acknowledgment is taboo. That
is the fundamental thing he fears. But the Awakening of a devotee requires
that turning, that upset in Narcissus. Only one who has begun to suffer
his own game at the pond will be willing even to begin to make such a
crisis of turning grow and intensify. Then he begins to require that
turning and demands it for himself as responsibility. He intensifies that
turning more and more, until that attention is perfected and there is no
one looking in the pond any more.
The Spiritual Master is the living manifestation of the Principle of this
universe, so his activity is always paradoxical. His activity is not a
reflection of his fixed quality. It is always an expression of his
Transcendent activity in relation to someone else's fixed quality. The
Spiritual Master is always working to undermine the usual quality of his
devotee. If you took all the Spiritual Master's words together, you would
eventually find him saying everything. All the contradictions would come
through him as Truth.
The Spiritual Master is not a common word, a one-sided word against which
there are a whole bunch of words that are contradictory. The Spiritual
Master is a process, an activity. His words merely serve that activity,
and his words might contradict one another, depending on the situation in
which he is acting. You an generally see a certain comprehensive form in
the Spiritual Master's communication, but his activity is essentially
paradoxical. And the purpose of his speech is not to inform you with some
solid mass of thinking to which you can oppose all other kinds of thinking.
His activity is to serve the crisis in you. And when the crisis occurs, it
becomes obvious that all thinking is obsolete as an expression of Truth.
So the Spiritual Master is not a fixed quality. The Spiritual Master is a
paradoxical process. And the Spiritual Master is not obliged to try to be
right. Why should he have to be right? How ridiculous. Why not be wrong?
It is amusing. Part of the Spiritual Master's Work is, at times, to
purposely be wrong in the eyes of his devotee, because of the game that his
devotee will play if he sees his Spiritual Master is wrong. So in order to
serve his devotees, the Spiritual Master must have the freedom to be wrong.
He would never permanently mislead someone, but in order to free a person
from some particular quality, he may contradict himself, say something
wrong, be wrong, be foolish, lose face.
He must be free to take on any quality. How can he serve everyone, even
the world itself, if he can not be free to take on every quality? The
Spiritual Master himself is not identical to any quality, any more than
Truth itself, the Divine Person, is identical to any quality. Every
quality is appropriate for the True One.
DA AVABHASA
The Lessons (vol 1)