cyee@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Chut Ngeow YEE) (06/06/91)
Thanks for all those who responded to my postings. I know that I have to eventually say something about my time with my Guru (yes indeed, Da Avabhasa is my guru, most of you should have guess so by now). But as to how I ever get to see him is still a mystery to me, wonderfully confusing. He lives in his principle hermitage in a remote island of Fiji, and I in Australia, he is a guru, and I a hard core anti-guru, anti-authority "Kill the Buddha on the Road" advocate . One day I pick up a book of his, apparently by accident, and for a year I was happily (sometimes angrily) reading away and laughing away, not suspecting what lie ahead. Then I went along to an introductory video session, and wamp, before I knew it I joined his community of practitioners (The Free Daist Communion) and in less than a year time I was on my way to see him. Having said all these I still do not know how to sort out a tellable story from the wonderfully confusing mess. All I can say now is that he is a living and purifying fire of love that burns me to ashes. So for now I will opt myself out with another talk. Since arond 1986 Da Avabhasa has stop giving those wonderful discourses that I have been posting to the net. He said that his teaching words by itself amounts to nothing, and it is nothing more than a means to draw people into his company and keep them in place. His IS the teaching. His bodily-human form is a living demonstration of the spiritual process. And the spiritual process is all about Satsang (sat = truth, sang = company), the living relationship with a Realizer. He is here to offer an mutual sacrificial relationship, not a method to satisfy an ego. As you can see there is nothing really useful that we can walk away with from his talks. This use to drive me crazy. But being already crazy now I can laugh my head off again and infect you with this crazyness. For now I will give you a taste of how a full length discourse sounds like. The talk below is called "The Mode of Enlightenment", recorded in _The Enlightenment of the Whole Body_. This is a rather long talk, so I will do it in 3 parts. --------------------------------------------------------------------- SRI DA AVABHASA: While you are alive, everything seems important. Even despair is important, an acknowledgment that something important to you has not happened. Thus, life, while you live it, is full of importances. On the other hand, the entire universe conspires to make you surrender what seems important, because everything in the universe comes to an end. All experience is conspiring to move you to transcend experience while at the same time demanding that you fulfill experience. Every instant of your life contains both of these urges. Life is completely absurd. Every particle of it would move you toward some experience or other, and yet all experience conceals the ultimate message of the necessity for transcendence or freedom from experience. That one must attain freedom from something that is unnecessary to begin with is utterly absurd. Why bother with it to begin with? Enlightenment is to Awakened from the seriousness of experience. It is not to despair or to destroy oneself. Despair is serious, and so is suicide. Self-indulgence is serious, stressful effort is serious, discipline is serious, interest is serious, knowledge is serious, death, sex, food, everything is completely serious. This movement or tendency to survive, to continue in independent form, is profoundly serious, and it is also absurd because it must be transcended. Enlightenment is to be restored to Divine humor, to realize that nothing is necessary. No experience is necessary. You can either become distracted by experience and repeat it, or you can transcend it. One or the other. If you have transcended experience, than it is no longer necessary. In that case, whether or not experience continues makes not the slightest bit of difference to you. Experience will come to an end with death in any case. We are under the incredibly absurd illusion that there is an object world "outside" Consciousness. There is not a shred of truth in this presumption. There is no world independent of Consciousness. The world is a modification of Consciousness, a play on just possibility. What Consciousness does in terms of possibility in any moment is the drama of the seriousness of existence. When it Awakens to its true Position, which is senior to phenomena, then it is full of humor and there is no necessity to any experience. There is only Enlightenment, Divine Freedom. You are constantly imagining that you are experiencing objective things, but you are not. You do not actually see an object - that lamp over there, for instance. It is not the object you are seeing. Isn't it obvious to you that you are experiencing a phenomenon of the brain? You cannot see the lamp. You are not inside your head looking out at the lamp. A bizarre phenomenon of the brain produces the sensation that there is a lamp over there. Where is it anyway? A reflected image twists around in the eyeball, and nerve impulses and electrical currents flash around the meat brain in order to construct an illusion, a sensation, an idea. What is objective about it? It is just your own fascination. It is your own mind. it is your own Consciousness, modified by organs of experience. It is mind. It is harmless enough in itself, really, but you are so distracted by it that you have lost your humor. You have lost your true position. You do not have a right relationship to experience. The right relationship to all experience is to exist as the Transcendental Consciousness, the Radiant Reality Itself, in which phenomena arise without necessity, humorously. The wrong relationship to experiential phenomena is to presume that you are a separate person, a separate consciousness, in the midst of a world that you know nothing about, that somehow encloses you, that is objective to you, that is separate from you. In that case, you see, experience is a very serious business. You have no option but to submit to it, to be distracted and tormented by it. Spiritual life is simply the Enlightened life. There really is no spiritual life until Enlightenment, or the seventh stage of life. All the stages of life before then are stages of experience wherein, as a discipline, we bring the Intuition of the Truth to experience, thereby transcending that level of experience. We engage this process stage by stage, practicing this Transcendental discipline relative to the many qualities of experience until all possible experience is transcended. Only then have we resumed the Transcendental Position, and only then can we live the Enlightened Life. Existence is spiritual only when lived from the point of view of Enlightenment. Previous to the Awakening of that Disposition, existence is not spiritual in the truest sense. It is simply a struggle with the impulse of experience, the humorlessness of experience, the motive to survive as this moment with all of its parts and implications and motives.
cyee@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Chut Ngeow YEE) (06/07/91)
SRI DA AVABHASA: The motive to continue, the motive to fulfill desire, the motive to remain self-conscious, to remain yourself, to remain embodied, is basic to your sense of existence. Surviving as experience is what you are chronically doing, you see. You are not existing as the Transcendental Reality. You are just being this body-mind. You are moved to continue as that, and to glamorize it, and to have as much pleasure as possible while being the body-mind. Consequently, if you can temporarily manage to acquire a great deal of pleasure as this body-mind, you begin to think that pleasure itself is Enlightenment! As soon as you get a little physical or emotional or mental pleasure, right away you think that you are existing in the highest state that one can realize. But in true Enlightenment there is no struggle whatsoever for the continuation of phenomena. There is no fundamental or binding effort to make phenomena continue. There simply are phenomena, these conventions of experience, but they are unnecessary, temporary, harmless modifications of Consciousness. That Consciousness, Realized in Enlightenment, is not an independent person. It is without qualification, Transcendental. It is Enlightenment. The Enlightened individual is no longer fitted to the separate soul-consciousness, the individuated self struggling to survive as itself or to become something else. In Enlightenment, the motive to survival dissolves. Continued bodily existence is spontaneous, no longer dependent upon a psychological motive to continue. It simple continues, and then at some point bodily existence also simply comes to an end. It is neither necessary nor ultimate. Likewise, the universe is not ultimate. It does not hide a great Fact. it is perfectly ordinary and unnecessary. We could just as well be having any one of an infinite number of other possible experiences at this moment. It happens that this one is arising, but anything else could also arise. However, you are determined that this experience continue to arise more or less exactly as it is now arising. If you could relax that demand just a little bit, something entirely different would happen. But you are afraid of something entirely different. You are afraid to die. You are afraid to allow things to change. Therefore, you hold on to your present experience. But if you could give up everything, not through negative, reactive effort, but through Transcendental Realization, then your humor would be restored, and a different sense of existence would quite spontaneously arise. Then you would realize that there is no necessity to this present experience, except that it is set in motion through ordinary causation and will therefore continue for its term. We are not present in our experience. In other words, acting, or experiencing, is not a present activity. It has nothing to do with the present, the absolute Moment of Existence. It is the past. All experience is the past. there is nothing new, and there is nothing real about the mind that experiences. The mind is simply memory, past association. It is not perceptive, nor truly sensitive to anything. It is just the mechanical record of patterns. The body is exactly the same as the mind, but because we think so much, we imagine that the mind is something different from the body. Actually, the body-mind is one, a simultaneous coincidence, Just as the mind is past associations, the body is past associations. The body is the past. It is like a star - the rays of light that we now see were generated light years before now. The present form of the star is not visible, because it is so far away that the light it generates today takes eons to arrive. Likewise, these bodies are the reflections of the distant past. They have no present significance. They must be transcended before we can Realize the Present, or the Transcendental Reality. Such a Realization, however, occurs only in the seventh stage of life. Many people read and think about spiritual teachings and their minds prattle the traditional ideas to the point that they think they are already Enlightened. Yet they have never become the bodily Sacrifice that is essential for this Realization. Enlightenment, or the Realization of God, is not just a conceptual understanding. It is not just a relative calm state of mind. Enlightenment is an absolute Condition of Existence that literally transcends the body-mind. It is not just an idea the body-mind has that makes it feel better. From the radical, Enlightened point of view, there is no body-mind! Thus, in order to enter into the seventh stage of life, one must pass through the most profound and even terrifying transformation. That event cannot be casually created by a little thinking. One must come to the point where there is literally no necessity to the body-mind, to the psyche, or to experience. Countless silly people think that they are Enlightened when, at best, they feel good today. That mediocre sense of pleasure is not Enlightenment. Enlightenment involves no thinking whatsoever. There is no rational justification for enlightenment, no logical sequence of thought that leads to it. Enlightenment is a spontaneous, absolute, transcendental Awakening that is free of all the seriousness and necessity of bodily and mental existence. Therefore death, the cessation of experience, the cessation of states of mind, the cessation of the body, the cessation of the world, is no longer a threat. So much the worse of it! There is complete freedom from the implications of all that dreadful destiny that everyone fears so profoundly. The Enlightened being is not at all threatened by all of that. His is laughing. He is free. But one must pay the price for this Freedom. It is not simply an attitude toward the world that one enjoys from some conventional position of separation. There is the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness, the Absolute Divine Reality. That truly is Existence, and It must be Realized if Enlightenment is to be true. In that Realization, the Divine Person is tacitly obvious, as concrete as any object that you now associate with bodily life and experience. Once this Realization is Awake, there is no necessity to the phenomena of experience. They simply continue in this moment, but they have no power to deceive. All the stages of life leading up to the seventh stage are stages of distraction by the seriousness of one or another kind of experience. The process of the transcendence of experience begins at the lowest level, where experience involves the fear of loss of the body and the profound connection to food, and the craving for sexual self-indulgence. These experiences characterize the ordinary person, the lowest kind of person in the spectrum of existence. Yogis, mystics, and saints all cling mightily to experiential inwardness, visions, flashing lights in the brain, vibrations in the middle of the head, exotic, many-armed works of art that they create in imagination, infinite peacefulness without a single thought, or even seeing and thinking nothing and having no experience at all. But these are all, high and low, merely the possibilities of human beings in the first six stages of life. In the Way of Divine Ignorance, what makes these possibilities spiritually significant is that in each stage of life, in the midst of each stage of distracting experience, whether high or low, we must realize self-transcendence and whole body surrender into the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness, or Divine Person. Apart from such self-transcendence, however, the first six stages of mere maturing in the structural possibilities of Man are absurd, humorless, fundamentally very serious. Something in each of the first six stages is taken profoundly seriously by ordinary human beings. The body and food, sex, thinking, psychic awareness, higher mental hallucinations, even blissful, internal silence - there appears to be something profoundly serious and meaningful to one's hallucinated existence in each of those stages. But in the seventh stage, the enlightened stage, is not serious at all. In that stage we Realize our native Transcendence of everything. There is the tacit realization that there is nothing serious whatsoever about experiential existence. It could end in this moment, casually, and that cessation in itself would not have the slightest significance. Or, it could continue for infinite eons of time, through infinite permutations and transformations of experience, and its continuing would not have any significance either. That is the Disposition in Enlightenment - Realization of the non-necessity of everything. Absolutely nothing is of serious consequence or of ultimate necessity - absolutely nothing.
cyee@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Chut Ngeow YEE) (06/07/91)
SRI DA AVABHASA: The ordinary reactive personality, who is basically in
despair and hysterical, can also say that life is meaningless, but such a
person is very serious. The Enlightened man, however, Realizes total
Freedom. He is no longer serious, but neither is he self-destructive. He
has passed into Ecstasy. He has not suppressed or separated from himself -
rather, all that he is has been transcended in the Radiant transcendental
Consciousness. Thus, he is full of humor and delight. He is not
aggressively opposed to the world, nor is he clinging to it. All the
tension in his heart has been released. To speak of Enlightenment without
that sign is nonsense. There is no Enlightenment without the release of
the heart from all of its seriousness, all of its clinging to phenomena,
high and low.
>From the view of Enlightenment, even mystical phenomena are nonsense. They
are not serious. They are hallucinations, brain phenomena, psychism,
permutations of your own body-mind. they are just more of your seriousness.
They have no necessity and they are not the source of Bliss. Whether they
are higher phenomena, viewed from the mental or subjective point of view,
or lower phenomena, viewed essentially from the bodily point of view, all
phenomena are serious and unnecessary. They do not bring happiness,
fundamentally. Happiness is inherent in the Radiant Transcendental
Consciousness. When that Reality is Realized, its inherent Bliss is
obvious, and phenomena are seen not to contain any independent Life or
Consciousness, nor to grant Freedom or Bliss. From the Enlightened point of
view, all phenomena are simply the theater of Eternal Blissfulness, a
theater that may or may not continue.
Therefore, all one's serious occupations while alive are absurd expressions
of the past. They are all ways of serving limitation in oneself and
limitations in others. Better that they all fall apart - but not in the
negative, nihilistic sense. We must simply be given up in God, the Current
of Radiant Bliss. We must become Radiant. We must be allowed to manifest
the Radiant Blissfulness of the Absolute Consciousness. We must be allowed
to become love, to be free, to be humorous. Then everything that is past
will dissolve. The mind is the past, and so the mind dissolves. The body is
the past, and so the body dissolves.
For the usual man, the body is the past, moving into the future. There is
no present in the usual life. We are too busy having experiences to be
Awakened in the present. The present is the Transcendental Reality Itself,
for which we have no time because we are so occupied. Thus, you must Awaken
from your vulgar disposition of clinging to vital desires themselves. You
must Awaken from your romantic nostalgia for life and your desire for
experiences. You must Awaken from your coolness of mind, whereby you
inspect the world and find logical consistency and meaning. You must Awaken
to your true Position, wherein all the locks on the heart are dissolved and
all the tension in the heart is released.
It is the tension in the heart that produces obsession with vital
experience, with reactive and illusory, emotional experience, with mental
forms and inner psychic forms, all the subjective distractions. When the
tension in the heart is released, there is no clinging to the body-mind or
its experiential possibilities. If the body-mind arises, that is fine, and
if it does not arise, that too is fine.
When you begin to come to rest in the native Blissfulness of God, you
realize freedom and you receive Grace. Grace is the humor you enjoy by
always already resting in God. Grace is not ultimately a matter of
achieving all kinds of successes in life. Success may come also, but that
is just part of the game of experience. Grace is the liberation that comes
when we rest in God. Then the locks in the heart are loosened, and the
seriousness of experience is dispelled. We feel Radiant. Our occupations
become Blissful. Our capacity to enter into the spiritual process is
clarified and intensified. We have energy for spiritual life. The process
of self-transcendence is quickened, and we move into higher stages of the
transforming process until Enlightenment is Radical or Perfect, uncaused
and unsupported. In that case, there is simply rest in God, or Grace
Absolute, and the world and the body-mind are allowed to float in Infinity.
There is no tension in the body-mind, and no illusion.
The moral of this talk is that all devotees must realize Humor, Freedom, or
Distance from all the seriousness of their interests and their occupations
from day to day. They must see the ordinariness of it, even the absurdity
of it, without becoming ironic. They must be free of the world in itself
and rest naturally in the mood of the heart, the Intuition of the Radiant
Transcendental Consciousness. If you rest in God, then you have received
Grace. Then Grace has entered into your daily life and only serves its
ultimate transcendence. If you do not come to rest in God, the heart is
like a stone or a clenched fist. It has not entered into the Infinite
Radiance of Consciousness. It is fixed upon itself. It is Narcissus,
self-meditative, self-protective, threatened by everything to Infinity,
obsessed with possibilities and the repetition of experience in order to
acquire a sense of survival, consolation, and pleasure.
The only Happiness is the release of the heart, or the differentiated self,
which is not a fixed entity. The self is just like this clenched fist.
Relax the fist and there is nothing inside. Relax the heart and there is no
one inside. The sense of self is just the tension in the body-mind that
gives it the sense of independence. Relax the tension and the body-mind
becomes transparent. There is no ego. There is no ego in experience. That
is why Enlightenment is not really an event in the universe. It is not
associated with experience of special, so-called "Enlightenment phenomena".
It would seem, from the ordinary point of view, that Enlightenment is the
dissolution of this separate self. But Enlightenment is the Realization
that there is no such self and that there never was, that there is no such
self in the other beings that now continue to exist, and that there never
was a self when one was struggling to become Enlightened or to transcend
oneself.
The Disposition of the Enlightened one is paradoxical. It is a bodily
Disposition, because he is, in a conventional sense, embodied, and he
therefore represents the past and its movement toward the future. And,
paradoxically, his obligation is to somehow serve the Enlightenment of
other beings. But from the point of view of Enlightenment itself there are
no other beings, and those conventions of experience that we call other
beings are not in fact failing to be Enlightened. They ARE Enlightenment.
They are themselves only the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness.
Therefore, all that we are confronting is a conventional concept of bondage
and the need to survive. It is a superficial concept, and yet all beings
are profoundly organized around these notions of bondage and survival. They
create their daily lives around motives based in these notions. Thus, all
beings appear to be tormented, and yet their torment is totally superficial
and insignificant. The affair of life is unnecessary, but it is inevitable.
The best description of it is that it is absurd. The entire universe and
all experience exist only to be transcended.
The Spiritual Master is absurd, like everything else. He is a Function that
serves to Enlighten or Awaken beings from this condition that is absurd and
unnecessary to begin with. The occupation of the Spiritual Master is as
absurd as anything anyone else does, you see. Therefore, it requires a
Sense of Humor, or the Enlightened point of view. Likewise, people must be
obliged to be responsible in their approach to me. Irresponsible people
cannot be Enlightened, cannot be Awakened, cannot hear the Teaching. That
obligation for responsibility having been met, then there is the right
circumstance for our meeting, and then our meeting is truly Enlightening.
DA AVABHASA
The Enlightenment of the Whole Body