cyee@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Chut Ngeow YEE) (06/19/91)
I am rather amused by Mr. Kumar angry reactions to my posting. If Da Avabhasa is wrong or if I am wrong than that is our problem. But his anger is definitely his problem now. I hope the following postings will perhaps pacify him a bit. To my understanding the Way of the Heart, the spiritual practice that Da Avabhasa offered, is already fully given in the very first days of his teaching career. The next twenty years, including the constant review of new and ancient books and the creation of "The Basket of Tolerance", are elaborations for the shake of his present and future devotees. The core of his teaching is already given in his autobiography "The knee of listening" (1970) and his very first book "The Method of The Siddhas"(1972), and his devotees still constantly refer to these two books even until now. It blew my mind that a 32 year old young man would come out of seemingly nowhere, open a samall shop front in downtown Hollywood and gave those amazing talks. I will do more postings from these two books later on. In fact most of my previous postings were from his books prior to 1980. In the next few postings I will attempt to give you some ideas of what, why and how of "The Basket of Tolerance"...and, what he meant by discriminative intelligence. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Da Avabhasa: "I myself have suggested on occasion that it is useful to study religion and spiritual philosophy in terms of the Great Tradition. The reason such critical study is useful is that you already have all kinds of inherited, thought-up, and propagandized ideas that correspond to ideas that can be found in the traditions. Thus, you can see how those ideas traditionally get elaborated as a way of life, and you can see their limitations. Doing philosophy in these terms, then, can be said to have a purpose. Doing philosophy is thus a way of undoing philosophy. Part of what I am doing is to help people break out of the mold of religious provincialism, the mode of feeling that you are somehow obliged by virtue of childhood training to presume that you are related to just one tradition, a specific dogmatic tradition, or a Western orientation, or whatever your birth signs and early cultural life or society determined was to be your religious background. In fact, we are not truly the inheritors of these provincial religious traditions, At this point in history we are all the inheritors of the Great Tradition, the total tradition, and we should acknowledge this. One of the great traditional means of Realization and of practice toward Realization is the affirmation of the sacred tradition. If you study the Hindu scriptures, for instance, they outline various means that should help you to become convinced of the Way and equipped to practice it, and ultimately to enter into its Realization. Discriminative intelligence and insight are prominent among all those means. The authority, rightly understood, of the sacred tradition - represented by Realizers of the past and their reports - is one of the great aids to practice of the Way. In this time of doubt, people are highly secularized, not even religious. If they are religious they are basically provincial and associated with religion in its lowest form, the form it takes in the lesser stages of life. In this epoch, people tend to live on the basis of doubt. Doubt informs our culture, it is a primary principle of our world society. One of the great traditional means to restore faith is to consider the testimony of those Realizers who have come before and those now communicating the Way of Realization. Having entered into this Domain of Realization, I can affirm to you the force of this Great Tradition as a whole. I help you to understand all those features of it which represent its primary force, which we should take into account and affirm, and use to heal our doubt and transcend the mechanical disposition of doubt." (1983) Da Avabhasa : "I do not mean that you should just read a couple of lines [of traditional literature] here and there. You should be obliged to read and formally study a complete book every week or two ... Thus, you will eventually become familiar with these works and become responsible for the hash of ideas you have in the back of your mind. In the present moment, no matter what stage of practice any one is at, he or she has to go to school relative to the Way of the Heart and the Great Tradition. Everybody must understand that their formal study of these matters is just as much a part of this Way of life as their service, their meditation, and their devotional activities." (1986) Da Avabhasa : "You cannot see the subtle uniqueness in the various aspects of this Teaching because you do not know what the Great Tradition itself is. The religion you all know is Sunday school or its equivalent at the synagogue. Beyond that, there is very little that you reresent in terms of an educated understanding of this Great Tradition. My own Teaching is not an effort to brainwash you or lay arbitrary notions on you. I represent the entire Great Tradition. However, it requires great understanding of that tradition to practice this Way. It does not require a doctoral degree, or something like that. It is fine that there are various levels of the capacity for study. Nonetheless, there must be some fundamental understanding of the Great Tradition. All these years, I have been calling on students and practitioners to study and gain this understanding. I have talked about the traditions in all kinds of ways. I have generated an educational process through my own Work with you. Through all these years, I have also been creating what is now known as "The Basket Of Tolerance", which is a very specific design for your study of the Great Tradition - something that is workable, and usable by everyone. Becoming familiar with the Great Tradition is another fundamental that you must have established in order to practice as a devotee. If you do not have some true familiarity and understanding of the Great Tradition... you are so full of prejudices relative to sadhana and what it requires that you freeze yourself out of real participation in the process. So you must get an education to unlearn your own prejudices and mental blocks against the Spiritual process. You do not only need an education in this Way in particular. You need an education in the whole history of human religion and Spirituality, so that you can overcome your prejudices, your failed religion neurosis and all the rest of it. You have to set yourself free for the Spiritual process. It is not that you have to encumber yourself with this education. You have to use it as a means for transcending your own limitations relative to the Spiritual process. That is what I call you to do by using "The Basket Of Tolerance" - not to get involved in the stuff of the Great Tradition for its own sake, but to use that study critically as a means for clarifying your own mind, relieving your own prejudices, and making the Great Tradition your tradition in some fundamental sense. Through that study, you overcome your religious prejudices and free yourself for the real practice...." (1987) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- "I did not enter into and endure or pass through the Spiritual process by being an asshole or true believer. Doubt was my Siddhi, the kind of Siddhi I acquired through that intellectual discipline. I do not believe or communicate bullshit, nor do I suggest that you bullshit yourself. Put yourself through the hard school, and really consider it. You must realize that capacity for discrimination, or you really cannot cut it in the Spiritual process. It takes a long time to be really schooled in discrimination. There is more to discrimination than just things of the mind, ideas and so forth. Discrimination is a tool you also bring to non-ideas - to impressions and events that have nothing to do with intellect or mentality or culture or society. You must bring discrimination to events that transcend the conventional or lower body-mind, that transcend the first three stages of life. I was able to use that tool in the higher stages of life. I know how important it is as an instrument for growth into the higher stages. Therefore, you must acquire a similar capacity. Developing the discriminative mind is not a matter of absorbing content. You do not have to absorb all the books in "The Basket Of Tolerance" and be full of thoughts. You must use "The Basket Of Tolerance" as a means for polishing the discriminative intelligence, and let it serve the Spiritual process. You must use it to relieve yourself of mind, not to build it up, or create accumulations of thought. Something like that may occur for you in the beginning. But if you truly and seriously enter into this consideration of the Great Tradition, it will break your mind like the Spiritual process breaks your heart. It does not break your mind in a negative sense - it will relieve you of your egoic prejudice, your provincialism, your small- mindedness, your self-possession in mind. It will give you an instrument that is beyond the body and beyond mere energies and sensory impressions and casual thoughts. It will grant you an instrument that will be useful to you in the transition from the whole cosmic game of the first five stages of life. That is a hard school, yes. That is the way it is. It is not that you are born in this lifetime to realize the Ultimate. You exist to realize the Ultimate. You will have many opportunities in life. This is one of them. If you can fulfill this grand passion of the Way, then maybe you will realize it perfectly. If you cannot, then you will realize a lesser stage, and that is the way it is. It is not damnation. It is reality. To realize the great stages of the Way, you must become a Genius of Realization, a Saint, a great Yogi, a true Seer, a true Siddha. That is what it takes, absolutely nothing less. You are given every advantage, but it nonetheless requires a great deal of you. In My Company you can Realize Happiness. But if you are to Realize Happiness of Self, you must learn how to think, learn how to discriminate, learn how to transcend, learn how to overcome yourself. You must go through this hard school here. It was Columbia for me. but for you it is this hard school of consideration. There is no easy way to go through it. You all want to be calm and congratulate yourselves into the ultimate Realization of existence! It is absolutely impossible to do it that way! You must be refined and hardened, polished, brightened, awakened, quickened, transcended, perfected, or else you can be a level 1.1 practitioner or something just a little bit beyond it for the rest of your life. That is the way it is. There is not a damn thing I can do about it. Cult be damned! The cult cannot enlighten you. The real process is a kind of extraordinary asceticism, but not asceticism as it is commonly understood - just putting on a hair shirt, keeping your genitals in your pants, eating very little and so on. It is a superior asceticism, the asceticism of the total being, whereby it transcends itself. Apart from that asceticism, you cannot realize the Ultimate. You cannot realize much beyond the beginning without it. A little bit of discipline, a little bit of understanding, a little bit of responsiveness can enable you to enter into the process of the Way. But you cannot fulfill it without being hardened, polished, brightened, made into a fire by discipline. It is impossible. So the choice is up to you. What will you do about it? You tend to cop out by assuming the point of view of limitation, choosing associations that make you feel comfortable. Notice how you make this choice, then discipline yourself. If you choose not to discipline yourself and overcome your point of view, do not blame me. Do not suggest that I said that is what you should do. Of course, there is not only that sheer discipline in this Way, that hard school - there is also the Grace of the Presence of Samadhi, the Attractive Power. That unique Gift is also given to you. That Power does not make this Way into A silly middle-class religion business. The Way itself remains a hard school. But the hard school becomes effective and quickened by that Attractive Power. This is the Gift I give to you, and I cannot give any relife from the hard school itself. I do not suggest to you that there is a cultic way to realize the Ultimate. I do not suggest that you can choose the disposition or the way of the ego, be self-consoling, and somehow fulfill this practice. You absolutely cannot. Look at all the details that I communicate to you and the summaries of the Teaching. There are very real disciplines, very real requirements, and there is no way to cop out and still grow and Realize. Easy for me to say? No. My life became really difficult when I started to Teach. It certainly was difficult before, but compared to the difficulties that have developed since I begun to Teach, my earlier life and ordeal of Realization was nothing. So I have had to live the hard school, and so must you. And I have not, by fulfilling that process in Realization, relieved myself of difficulty, you see. It becomes more and more difficult, never less and less. so what is the moral?" (1987)
cyee@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Chut Ngeow YEE) (06/20/91)
Transcending Intolerance and Religious Provincialism ---------------------------------------------------- Sri Da Avabhasa: "To be a Spiritual practitioner in the context of the Way of the Heart, you must be a very tolerant person. That does not mean that you are blithe, stupid, thinking everything is great, or that all paths lead in one direction. You must be very discriminative, certainly, and you must transcend your aggressiveness relative to alternative views. It is one thing to transcend your aggressiveness. It is another matter to believe that everything is the same and to have no discrimination - that is not what tolerance means! Tolerance must be based on discrimination. You must be discriminative in the framework of your own consideration, and you must be led by that discriminative understanding. You must not only tolerate the views of other individuals and cultures, you must understand their views and not become aggressively polarized or depolarized in relationship to them. That is a key orientation of this "Basket Of Tolerance" and of the Way of the Heart in general". (1987) "Have you notice that when you read spiritual or philosophical texts, or think about the Great Tradition yourself, that you are constantly coming upon great, archetypal ideas? Those ideas or mind-forms then inform your entire personality for a while, if only for those few minutes, although frequently it lasts for days. Those ideas re-emerge throughout your life. The Great Tradition in some sense is a flow or a vault of such archetypal ideas, along with a lot of other secondary notions. When you come upon these principal ideas, through your own thinking or your study of the traditions, then you move into the domain of that archetype and it begins to control your mind, your psyche, your feeling, your body. You begin to talk in that mode, you become possessed in some sense. It is like plugging in a crystal in a radio set, or putting a tape into a computer or a video machine. Suddenly you become a theater of comprehension, and adopt a particular feeling about existence. To become religious or to become involved in one or another traditional approach to Truth is to acknowledge these great archetypal notions to be the Truth, to allow them to control your disposition more or less constantly. And anyone who gets in this mood becomes the advocate of one of these traditions. Every one of these traditions within the Great Tradition has one basic and perhaps several supporting ideas like this. When you plug into them, or plug them into yourself, you take on that form, and them you "blah blah blah" those ideas. Whether you advocate that teaching as a scholar or a practitioner, I suggest that your advocacy is completely mechanical. You could have plugged into anything! You could have plugged in the television program "I Love Lucy"! The Great Tradition is a bearer of a finite number of these great archetypal notions that have the ability to control the entire conditional person. And they have the quality that suggests they account for everything altogether - everything about the conditional person, including everything beyond everything. Merely to be in the presence of such ideas is to be a believer somehow, because it permeates every aspect of mind, of psyche, of feeling, even of action. As long as you are plugged into any given idea, your mind or your entire personality tends to be animated along those lines, and the power of discrimination gets lost to a significant degree."(1985) "Students and practitioners are not here to practice the Great Tradition. They are here to practice the Way of the Heart, and they are to study the Great Tradition in the context of the Way of the Heart. I do not want individuals to get into this fetishistic approach relative to the Great Tradition, nor any abstract notions about it. We must cut into this fetishism, this provincialism and this lack of information. Formal study of the Great Tradition is the way to do that. And this study must be done systematically, not randomly." (1986) "If you spend some time in the library simply reading the books on this reading list, after a while you will begin to get bewildered. Eventually you will begin to develop, perhaps unconsciously, certain kinds of attitudes that will obstruct your life and your real practice. You will tends to take on the various traditional attitudes that are so fully communicated in this vast literature. However, there is as much to be overcome in that vast literature as there is in the world, so-called. The study of the literature of the traditions not only informs one's understanding, it is a test of understanding. Understanding is a living process, not merely information or a state of mind. So you must be able to deal with the different kinds of communication that are involved in traditional literatures." (1981)
cyee@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Chut Ngeow YEE) (06/20/91)
Sacred Study versus Academic Study ---------------------------------- Da Avabhasa: "In academic study, you are called to indulge in an exercise of literary criticism, to discover the contradictions or faults, and play the school-boy games of one-upsmanship and finding the author out. Such study is an academic game in which you are called to engage in a critical examination of the piece to be studied. This is not the approach to the sadhana of study. You do use the discriminative mind, and you may be critical to some degree, but you primarily exercise discriminative intelligence in another fashion. In academic study, you are called to examine an objective matter and win over it. In sacred study, you are called to a subjective voice, and to find out about yourself. That is the sadhana of listening. If you undertake study as a sadhana, your participation is unique. What you study must have the force of sacredness. It must be authoritative to you. And you must have some trust in the source, and accept it as a subjective voice to you from within. You should have already tested it via your casual reading, examined it to the point that it authenticates itself and shows its alliance to other great communications from the Great Tradition, and come to the conclusion that the author is a Teacher for you. Once this is done, then you should be able to take up the sadhana of listening, and approach the Teaching as sacred literature, and the author as Teacher. But you can only do this when you feel the Way is authentic and authoritative, and when the Master is also. This should be one of the prerequisites for becoming a student in the Way of the Heart. You must have found yourself to be in a sacred sphere. And from then on you yourself must honor the Teaching in your study. So in a real sense, even to study you must bring a unique discipline, which is to transcend the mechanics and habits of academic study, and convert it into sadhana. You are no longer involved in examining an objective text from an objective point of view. Rather, you must allow it to speak to you as you Are, Where you Are, and in the context of your being. do not do something to the text or argument to objectify it or abstract it. Let it do its work, and find yourself out. The purpose is self-transcendence, which is a matter of struggle with self, and not with the literature or the Teacher. These errors must be understood and transcended at the outset, to make full use of the sacred Teaching."(1987) Self-Understanding Is the Basis for Understanding the Great Tradition --------------------------------------------------------------------- Da Avabhasa: "You have to awaken to a present understanding of the real factors of existence that will permit you to reassociate with the Divine Reality in ultimate terms, in universal terms. And when you do that, then you can discriminate between that Awakened disposition and all of the accretions of religious lore which are present in the mass of religious cultures. By coming to this understanding and awakening, you can transcend the dogmas of your own time, which are not particularly religious in nature. They are secular, represented by the point of view of scientism. By coming to this awakened understanding of the Living Divine Reality, you can revalue the living Adepts, Their biographies are somewhat difficult to discern from the mass of lore that gets associated with these individuals over time, but their Presence nonetheless shines through when you have awakened to this understanding yourself. In that case of practitioners of the Way of the Heart, you have the Heart-Master representing this same Awakened Work. Your relationship to the Heart-Master in present time is thus a link to the Adept tradition throughout all of history. And your awakened understanding enables you not only to relate to the Divine, the Living Present Divine, but to discriminate among all of the teachings, religious points of view, and conventional or secular points of view in the present and in every historical epoch that you may study."(1981) Discover the Grand Argument of the Seven Schools of God-Talk ------------------------------------------------------------ Da Avabhasa: "Even books in the seventh stage section of "The Basket Of Tolerance" list are limited. Who ever told you about Transfiguration, Transformation, Indifference, and Translation [the Divine Process that happen in the seventh stage of life]? That is not to be found in the Great Tradition. Certain aspects of it may be implicit there, but basically it has not been communicated before, nor has a right understanding of the seven stages of life and placement of the various traditions in the context of the stages of life been considered before. The Great Tradition does not speak for itself. Only the Master of the Great Tradition can make sense out of it, and he is not merely to be believed. You must enter into full consideration. You must consider my argument. My argument in the form of "The Basket Of Tolerance" appears not only in the commentaries, but in the choices of the books and the placement of them and the headings that designate their placement. It is a Teaching demonstration in itself. Even that one demonstration or leela that is "The Basket of Tolerance" is something you can consider for the rest of your life. You cannot exhaust it, even though it is also finite."(1987) "It is impossible for me to exhaust my commentary on "The Basket Of Tolerance". The commentaries I have made and the introductions that I have written must be a sufficient suggestion to you to guide your real study of it. When you read the religious philosophy section, the first section of "The Basket Of Tolerance" list, you must read it with discrimination, and you must ask yourself the question: "Why is this book here? What point in the Argument is this?" "The Wisdom of Insecurity", by Alan Watts, is the first book on the list, Does that mean it is the best book of all time, or the ultimate, essential, primary book? Is that why it is first? It does not mean anything of the kind. So why is it there, and what is its importance? "Memories, Dreams, Reflections", by Carl Jung, is the second book. Why is that book there? You are not supposed to just these books and indulge in the personal views of the author and indulge in your own illusions, and presume that maybe this one particular point of view is true. That is a childish or adolescent approach, that is college-level academic nonsense. Why is the book there? What kind of discrimination are you supposed to bring to it? That is the real question. And what does it represent that you must overcome in yourself? What is its particle of representation in this great process? You must ask yourself great questions and not oblige me to discourse on every sentence, every book. You have to bring more to it. I am not here to give you every last word that could be spoken about everything on the list. I am here to give you basic guidance, and then you are going to have to struggle with no commentary, just a suggestion, just dealing with yourself. Even though I have given you a great deal of guidance, it still requires you to struggle with yourself, and not just indulge in these hairy authors and their illusions. They are dramatizing illusions that you must deal with in yourself, and that is why they are there. I have addressed all these books in general in the preface to "The Basket Of Tolerance". Use that material, along with the commentaries in "The Basket Of Tolerance", to study these expressions with discrimination. They are not presented to you as ideals or ultimate shiny examples of the perfect Truth. You will, in any moment, as I have said in the preface, presume that this point of view, this expression, is sufficient, perfect, or substantial enough to cause or justify the arising of doubt in yourself. You will get into these kinds of mental dispositions because that is what the mind is all about. The mind is a hog. The mind is a fat-bellied pain in the ass. It changes from hour to hour to hour to hour - it is your suffering, it is the obstacle, it is egoity. "The Basket Of Tolerance" is a great display of mind, that is what it is altogether. It is just a display of mind. And it registers in you and tends to delude you. Therefore, use my consideration, so that you will not be deluded. Use it to understand yourself. Inform yourself further by discriminative consideration of the Great tradition and discriminative consideration of your own involvement in that tradition, or in those ideas, communications, points of view, and tendencies. Always you must address it in this way. You must do sadhana with "The Basket Of Tolerance". "The Basket Of Tolerance" is not a slice of the Ultimate, or the great bright star of shining magnificence. It is a display of limits, an argument of limits. Even the books in the seventh stage section of "The Basket Of Tolerance" expose a variety of limits that you must understand by considering my argument, observing yourself, understanding the seven stages of life, understanding the Great Process as it is, studying all the books that precede the seventh stage list. At every point in the study of that list you must be prepared to study it with discrimination and be free of it - not attached to it, not deluded by it. It is really the study of yourself, of the ego's argument for progressive transcendence. You must use me, my Company, my Word, to help you - not merely to believe it. Consider it, make it one with yourself intelligently, and bring that to bear on the study of all of these representatives of mankind. Every book on the list must be approached that way - it is a sadhana. And if you do not do it that way or you do it otherwise, then every book is some sort of delusion, it is a whore, a peripheral lover, an opportunity to become distracted, consoled, and deluded by yourself. It does not make any difference what these various authors say, you will delude yourself it you are deluded at all. They propose mind forms that are in you, within the realm of your possibility. You are going to have to struggle with every book, and you should struggle with every one, just as you struggle with every moment of life. It is a struggle, and ordeal. You must transcend yourself with every book - that is what I intend. That is what "The Basket Of Tolerance" is for, don't you know? The real point in studying the books on "The Basket Of Tolerance" list is not what you can remember about them, but what you encounter and overcome in the process of reading. What you are relieved of is more important than what you can remember afterwards. Years from now you may remember nothing about books that you have read already, but the moments of those readings, properly guided and considered, should relieve you of something. That is what you will have gained, rather than what you can recollect in your memory."(1987)
cyee@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Chut Ngeow YEE) (06/21/91)
Understanding and Transcending the Difficulty of Study ----------------------------------------------------- Da Avabhasa: "At first, the student's form of meditation is study, a constant confrontation with the Teaching. He will see his turning away, his contraction, his avoidance, in all kinds of ways. Eventually, this will become an intense form of self-observation and insight. Do not expect me to propose that you become anti-intellectual. I expect you to bust your ass in studying this Work. You will tend, however, to yield to the dilettante's view of the mind if you are lazy and do not apply yourself to study." "The usual student develops all kinds of agonizing devices to retain information long enough to take an examination: underlining, keeping notes on cards, memorizing, grinding the material over and over again in his head. Then when the examination is over, it is all forgotten! This is because people think that the mind is a little box in the head with only a certain number of volts, and that they must play all kinds of games to get it to hold things. But the student must, through one or another crisis in his life, come to the point where he trusts his mind, realizes that it is not a little box that he has to play games with to get it to retain and do things, but it is completely fluid, formless, boundless, capable of remembering everything, doing anything he wants. And when he begins to make that assumption, while being a student at the same time, study will become much easier form him. Understanding must take place in the midst of that whole affair of looking at the page and falling asleep and drifting away and thinking. Understanding must awaken in the midst of life, and so it must also apply to this particular activity of study. Understanding is not an unconscious activity. It depends entirely on the force of your insight at the level of consciousness at any moment. Ordinarily we have to be interested in something in order to be able to learn or to deal with it in any way. Otherwise we suspect we will go to sleep or get angry. When you are in school, you have to study things, whether you are interestered in them or not, and so school provides the circumstance in which you have to deal with the mind, at least to a certain degree. In this case you are not about to get a degree. You are not about to get paid or applauded or anything else for studying this course. So there is no external motivation. And if sadhana is going to be meaningful in relation to you in this study, you must first of all find some reason for doing it. But, ultimately, the problem we are describing is not one of interset. It is one of resistance. It is resistance, contraction, the avoidance of relationship enacted relative to the functions of the conscious mind. Now it is clear enough that there is something interesting to you about reading books about God and and Divine Realization and Truth. If you have some degree of interest in all that, then this course won't seem so alien, as though you had to pack in a whole mass of stuff of which you really had no comprehension at all. But, fundamentally, you must live spiritual life. Bring the understanding that is growing in your practice to bear on all the incidents of your life from day to day, including this study. There is really no mystery about what is happening when you are sitting down to read, any more than there is a mystery about what is happening in Satsang and meditation. There is this turning away, this contraction, this avoidance of relationship. When there is no longer any turning, the mind becomes very useful, just like everything else does. It becomes open, free. And it becomes useful. It is able to deal with things outside itself, information, data, things to observe. It also becomes open and active within itself. There is no dilemma in the mind itself, any more than there is a dilemma in any other function. All dilemmas are your own creation in this instant, and until there is penetrating understanding of your own functional existence from moment to moment, your life is just and endless enumeration of dilemmas, of problematic situations. So you sit down to read and that is difficult. You sit down to be in the Company of the Heart-Master and that is difficult. You have to go to work today and that is difficult. Everything is surrounded with massive complexities, and these are your own creations. You will continue to find difficulties and dilemmas everywhere, until you begin to see something fundamental about yourself. And in the case of that kind of insight, real changes begin to occur, when you happen to be reading or when you happen to go to work. This is the same understanding that becomes active under all conditions."(1983) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Phew. That was more typing than I thought. I hope I haven't lost everybody yet. It must have been the sixth time that I read those essays, but they are just as shocking and delightful as the first time I discovered them. Every time I am reminded of the phoney and superficial air of tolerance and discrimination and faked spirituality that I tend to putting on. It seems to me that Da Avabhasa is saying that real tolerance and discrimination are attributes of Enlightenment, and yet the very things that are supposed to be the end results are demanded from the very beginning! As a student beginner of the Way of the Heart, I can tell you that we are literally busting our ass in meeting our Guru demand to understand, to be conscious, and to function in every aspects of our life, beginning from money, food and sex. I am not sure how the hell I got myself into this mess. I have not much inclination and capacity to take up any form of discipline, but one day I found myself madly in love, crazily in love, and that's the beginning of the end.... Yee.