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From: cyee@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Chut Ngeow YEE)
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Subject: Da Avabhasa - Study the Great Tradition as Sadhana (Part 2)
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Date: 20 Jun 91 00:15:56 GMT
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Transcending Intolerance and Religious Provincialism
----------------------------------------------------
Sri Da Avabhasa: "To be a Spiritual practitioner in the context of the Way of
the Heart, you must be a very tolerant person. That does not mean that you are
blithe, stupid, thinking everything is great, or that all paths lead in one
direction. You must be very discriminative, certainly, and you must transcend
your aggressiveness relative to alternative views. It is one thing to
transcend your aggressiveness. It is another matter to believe that everything
is the same and to have no discrimination - that is not what tolerance means!
Tolerance must be based on discrimination. You must be discriminative in the
framework of your own consideration, and you must be led by that
discriminative understanding. You must not only tolerate the views of other
individuals and cultures, you must understand their views and not become
aggressively polarized or depolarized in relationship to them. That is a key
orientation of this "Basket Of Tolerance" and of the Way of the Heart in
general". (1987)


"Have you notice that when you read spiritual or philosophical texts, or
think about the Great Tradition yourself, that you are constantly coming upon
great, archetypal ideas? Those ideas or mind-forms then inform your entire
personality for a while, if only for those few minutes, although frequently
it lasts for days. Those ideas re-emerge throughout your life. The Great
Tradition in some sense is a flow or a vault of such archetypal ideas, along
with a lot of other secondary notions. When you come upon these principal
ideas, through your own thinking or your study of the traditions, then you
move into the domain of that archetype and it begins to control your mind,
your psyche, your feeling, your body. You begin to talk in that mode, you
become possessed in some sense. It is like plugging in a crystal in a radio
set, or putting a tape into a computer or a video machine. Suddenly you
become a theater of comprehension, and adopt a particular feeling about
existence.

To become religious or to become involved in one or another traditional
approach to Truth is to acknowledge these great archetypal notions to be the
Truth, to allow them to control your disposition more or less constantly. And
anyone who gets in this mood becomes the advocate of one of these traditions.
Every one of these traditions within the Great Tradition has one basic and
perhaps several supporting ideas like this. When you plug into them, or plug
them into yourself, you take on that form, and them you "blah blah blah" those
ideas. Whether you advocate that teaching as a scholar or a practitioner, I
suggest that your advocacy is completely mechanical. You could have plugged
into anything! You could have plugged in the television program "I Love Lucy"!

The Great Tradition is a bearer of a finite number of these great archetypal
notions that have the ability to control the entire conditional person. And
they have the quality that suggests they account for everything altogether -
everything about the conditional person, including everything beyond
everything. Merely to be in the presence of such ideas is to be a believer
somehow, because it permeates every aspect of mind, of psyche, of feeling,
even of action. As long as you are plugged into any given idea, your mind or
your entire personality tends to be animated along those lines, and the power
of discrimination gets lost to a significant degree."(1985)


"Students and practitioners are not here to practice the Great Tradition. They
are here to practice the Way of the Heart, and they are to study the Great
Tradition in the context of the Way of the Heart. I do not want individuals
to get into this fetishistic approach relative to the Great Tradition, nor
any abstract notions about it. We must cut into this fetishism, this
provincialism and this lack of information. Formal study of the Great
Tradition is the way to do that. And this study must be done systematically,
not randomly." (1986)


"If you spend some time in the library simply reading the books on this
reading list, after a while you will begin to get bewildered. Eventually you
will begin to develop, perhaps unconsciously, certain kinds of attitudes that
will obstruct your life and your real practice. You will tends to take on the
various traditional attitudes that are so fully communicated in this vast
literature. However, there is as much to be overcome in that vast literature
as there is in the world, so-called. The study of the literature of the
traditions not only informs one's understanding, it is a test of
understanding. Understanding is a living process, not merely information or a
state of mind. So you must be able to deal with the different kinds of
communication that are involved in traditional literatures." (1981)