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From: cyee@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Chut Ngeow YEE)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: The Mode of Enlightenment (Part 3 of 3)
Message-ID: <1991Jun7.032903.9751@nas.nasa.gov>
Date: 7 Jun 91 03:29:03 GMT
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Organization: NAS Program, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
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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