Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!ukma!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!eagle!data.nas.nasa.gov!news From: cyee@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Chut Ngeow YEE) Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern Subject: Awakening From the Dream of Experience Message-ID: <1991Jun4.013633.19919@nas.nasa.gov> Date: 4 Jun 91 01:36:33 GMT Sender: news@nas.nasa.gov Organization: NAS Program, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA Lines: 101 Approved: prabhu@amelia.nas.nasa.gov To follow up my previous posting, here is an excerpt from a talk given in 1979, titled "Awakening From the Dream of Experience". ------------------------------------------- SRI DA AVABHASA: This process of Divine Radiance is analogous to the process of dreaming. In dreams you may appear to talk to others standing before you, but when you awaken, you realize that they were arising entirely in your own consciousness. From the Enlightened point of view, that is exactly what you realize about the waking state as well. We commonly speak to one another while assuming our psychic separation from each other, but we do not realize that all beings are enlivened by the very same Consciousness and arise in the same Mind as we do. If we Awaken truly, we perceive our daily experience in the same way that we might interpret our dreams from the point of view of the waking state. If you could be awake while dreaming, you could ask the people in the dream if they are aware that they are extensions of your own Being, and you would also tacitly understand this to be true. You might then stop dreaming suddenly and wake up, but you might continue to dream with a different point of view. The significance of the Way that I Teach, therefore, is not that you may go to other worlds in extraordinary dreams, but that you may wake up to Wisdom. You must enjoy the same understanding of the waking state that you enjoy in relation to dreams when you awaken. That Wisdom is the great Awakening, not the ability to go to a higher world or another condition of sublime experiential existence. Such higher experiences are not the ultimate attainment, but only transitions in the pattern of arising phenomena, or dreams. The great Truth is that our relationship to experience, in this and every present moment, is the same as the relationship that we have to dreams from the point of view of the waking state...... You are a dreamer who is not aware that he or she is dreaming. I, however, am a dreamer who is Awake, and who sees you as himself, a modification of his own being, or the very Being with Whom he is perfectly Identified. Thus, I do not spend my life trying to escape this world. The attempt to escape or avoid life is a fearful effort of the ego, the one who does not understand but only reacts fearfully to his or her condition. therefore, I spend my time talking to and living among people in the dream in such a fashion that I am always agitating them to Awaken, as I have, to understand the Condition of this world. That is what people naturally and spontaneously do when they wake up: They understand.... Thus, the perfectly Enlightened individual exists in perfect Identity with the Transcendental Being while alive in the dream. He need not go elsewhere to find himself, but he presently plays the dream. He is Awake and fully active in the dream, and he is happy and Life-positive in relation to the events in the dream. He is interested in the whole affair, and in the characters met there, and in the fact that they are suffering. The people in the dream, as it happens, do not speak as if they are the Transcendental Being. Rather, they speak as un-Enlightened people. If you could talk to the people you meet in dreams at night, you would presume yourself to be a separate person and you would presume them to be separate from you, unless you yourself were fully awake in the dream. If you talked to them, they would proclaim this separation to be true. If you met me in your dream, however, I would tell you I am simply arising in your own Being, and that you are arising as a condition of the same Being that I am. Even so, to be told that Truth in a dream would not necessarily be sufficient to Awaken you. This assertion could be perfectly true from my point of view in the dream, but unless you begin to be present in the dream as one who is Awake, it is just another communication you hear in the midst of your dream experience. Thus, YOUR Awakening is the one that is significant. In this dream, you see that I am always acting in such a way as to call attention to the fact that our experience is a dream. This world is only a modification of the Radiant Conscious Being. I am always fulfilling the role of the Transcendental Person in relationship to you. This is my dream. I am the Transcendental Person. I am the primary person in my own dream, even when awake. And when you Awaken, you will Awaken to and as the very same Being that I Am. DA AVABHASA Easy Death ------------------------------------------------------------------- This is one of Da Avabhasa's writings that short-circuited my mind about two years ago when I first 'by chance' came across his teaching. I have been fervently reading J. Khrisnamurti for quite a few years then, and I was also studying Buddhist and a few other schools of teaching simultaneously. In retrospect I realised that I was unconsciously trying to make a grand synthesis of the various schools of teachings through J.K. point of view. When I came across Da Avabhasa I was immediately captured by his incredible humour, but then the profoundity of his teaching hit me, HARD. It soon became clear to me that there is no way I can accomodate him within K teaching. When I said that Da Avabhasa teaching short-circiuted my mind it was literarly so. I used to enjoy talking to people about various school of teachings (or rather my misinterpretation of them), but after reading his teaching I found that I just could not do so anymore. I was no longer sure what anything is all about anymore and I went through a period of anger and frustration and withdrawal. But here I am, happyily typing away again, not that I have it all figured out, but rather I have seen the habit of the mind to be fixated, and the humour and pain and non-necessity of it. You see, I am not too interestered in getting into arguments or scholastic discussions, and I am not here to defend anything either, not even Master Da's teahing. I remembered reading him saying that all knowledge are ultimately contradictory, and if we try to sum up his teaching we will find that it is just a big contradiction. Yee.