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From: cyee@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Chut Ngeow YEE)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: The Mode of Enlightenment (part 1 of 3)
Message-ID: <1991Jun6.015557.27413@nas.nasa.gov>
Date: 6 Jun 91 01:55:57 GMT
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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.

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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.