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From: cyee@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Chut Ngeow YEE)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: The Mode of Enlightenment (Part 2 of 3)
Message-ID: <1991Jun6.171912.20408@nas.nasa.gov>
Date: 6 Jun 91 17:19:12 GMT
Sender: news@nas.nasa.gov
Organization: NAS Program, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
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Approved: prabhu@amelia.nas.nasa.gov

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.