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From: cyee@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Chut Ngeow YEE)
Subject: Da Avabhasa - Study the Great Tradition as Sadhana (Part 3)
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 91 07:02:08 GMT
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Sacred Study versus Academic Study
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Da Avabhasa: "In academic study, you are called to indulge in an exercise of
literary criticism, to discover the contradictions or faults, and play the
school-boy games of one-upsmanship and finding the author out. Such study is
an academic game in which you are called to engage in a critical examination
of the piece to be studied. This is not the approach to the sadhana of study.
You do use the discriminative mind, and you may be critical to some degree,
but you primarily exercise discriminative intelligence in another fashion. In
academic study, you are called to examine an objective matter and win over
it. In sacred study, you are called to a subjective voice, and to find out
about yourself. That is the sadhana of listening.

If you undertake study as a sadhana, your participation is unique. What you
study must have the force of sacredness. It must be authoritative to you. And
you must have some trust in the source, and accept it as a subjective voice to
you from within. You should have already tested it via your casual reading,
examined it to the point that it authenticates itself and shows its alliance
to other great communications from the Great Tradition, and come to the
conclusion that the author is a Teacher for you. Once this is done, then you
should be able to take up the sadhana of listening, and approach the Teaching
as sacred literature, and the author as Teacher. But you can only do this
when you feel the Way is authentic and authoritative, and when the Master is
also.

This should be one of the prerequisites for becoming a student in the Way of
the Heart. You must have found yourself to be in a sacred sphere. And from
then on you yourself must honor the Teaching in your study. So in a real
sense, even to study you must bring a unique discipline, which is to
transcend the mechanics and habits of academic study, and convert it into
sadhana. You are no longer involved in examining an objective text from an
objective point of view. Rather, you must allow it to speak to you as you
Are, Where you Are, and in the context of your being. do not do something to
the text or argument to objectify it or abstract it. Let it do its work, and
find yourself out. The purpose is self-transcendence, which is a matter of
struggle with self, and not with the literature or the Teacher. These errors
must be understood and transcended at the outset, to make full use of the
sacred Teaching."(1987)


Self-Understanding Is the Basis for Understanding the Great Tradition
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Da Avabhasa: "You have to awaken to a present understanding of the real
factors of existence that will permit you to reassociate with the Divine
Reality in ultimate terms, in universal terms. And when you do that, then you
can discriminate between that Awakened disposition and all of the accretions
of religious lore which are present in the mass of religious cultures. By
coming to this understanding and awakening, you can transcend the dogmas of
your own time, which are not particularly religious in nature. They are
secular, represented by the point of view of scientism.

By coming to this awakened understanding of the Living Divine Reality, you
can revalue the living Adepts, Their biographies are somewhat difficult to
discern from the mass of lore that gets associated with these individuals
over time, but their Presence nonetheless shines through when you have
awakened to this understanding yourself. In that case of practitioners of the
Way of the Heart, you have the Heart-Master representing this same Awakened
Work. Your relationship to the Heart-Master in present time is thus a link to
the Adept tradition throughout all of history. And your awakened
understanding enables you not only to relate to the Divine, the Living
Present Divine, but to discriminate among all of the teachings, religious
points of view, and conventional or secular points of view in the present and
in every historical epoch that you may study."(1981)

Discover the Grand Argument of the Seven Schools of God-Talk
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Da Avabhasa: "Even books in the seventh stage section of "The Basket Of
Tolerance" list are limited. Who ever told you about Transfiguration,
Transformation, Indifference, and Translation [the Divine Process that happen
in the seventh stage of life]? That is not to be found in the Great
Tradition. Certain aspects of it may be implicit there, but basically it has
not been communicated before, nor has a right understanding of the seven
stages of life and placement of the various traditions in the context of the
stages of life been considered before. The Great Tradition does not speak for
itself. Only the Master of the Great Tradition can make sense out of it, and
he is not merely to be believed. You must enter into full consideration. You
must consider my argument. My argument in the form of "The Basket Of
Tolerance" appears not only in the commentaries, but in the choices of the
books and the placement of them and the headings that designate their
placement. It is a Teaching demonstration in itself. Even that one
demonstration or leela that is "The Basket of Tolerance" is something you can
consider for the rest of your life. You cannot exhaust it, even though it is
also finite."(1987)

"It is impossible for me to exhaust my commentary on "The Basket Of
Tolerance". The commentaries I have made and the introductions that I have
written must be a sufficient suggestion to you to guide your real study of
it. When you read the religious philosophy section, the first section of "The
Basket Of Tolerance" list, you must read it with discrimination, and you must
ask yourself the question: "Why is this book here? What point in the Argument
is this?" "The Wisdom of Insecurity", by Alan Watts, is the first book on the
list, Does that mean it is the best book of all time, or the ultimate,
essential, primary book? Is that why it is first? It does not mean anything
of the kind. So why is it there, and what is its importance? "Memories,
Dreams, Reflections", by Carl Jung, is the second book. Why is that book
there?

You are not supposed to just these books and indulge in the personal views of
the author and indulge in your own illusions, and presume that maybe this one
particular point of view is true. That is a childish or adolescent approach,
that is college-level academic nonsense. Why is the book there? What kind of
discrimination are you supposed to bring to it? That is the real question.
And what does it represent that you must overcome in yourself? What is its
particle of representation in this great process? You must ask yourself great
questions and not oblige me to discourse on every sentence, every book. You
have to bring more to it. I am not here to give you every last word that
could be spoken about everything on the list. I am here to give you basic
guidance, and then you are going to have to struggle with no commentary, just
a suggestion, just dealing with yourself. Even though I have given you a
great deal of guidance, it still requires you to struggle with yourself, and
not just indulge in these hairy authors and their illusions. They are
dramatizing illusions that you must deal with in yourself, and that is why
they are there.

I have addressed all these books in general in the preface to "The Basket Of
Tolerance". Use that material, along with the commentaries in "The Basket Of
Tolerance", to study these expressions with discrimination. They are not
presented to you as ideals or ultimate shiny examples of the perfect Truth.
You will, in any moment, as I have said in the preface, presume that this
point of view, this expression, is sufficient, perfect, or substantial enough
to cause or justify the arising of doubt in yourself. You will get into these
kinds of mental dispositions because that is what the mind is all about.

The mind is a hog. The mind is a fat-bellied pain in the ass. It changes from
hour to hour to hour to hour - it is your suffering, it is the obstacle, it
is egoity. "The Basket Of Tolerance" is a great display of mind, that is what
it is altogether. It is just a display of mind. And it registers in you and
tends to delude you. Therefore, use my consideration, so that you will not be
deluded. Use it to understand yourself. Inform yourself further by
discriminative consideration of the Great tradition and discriminative
consideration of your own involvement in that tradition, or in those ideas,
communications, points of view, and tendencies. Always you must address it in
this way. You must do sadhana with "The Basket Of Tolerance".

"The Basket Of Tolerance" is not a slice of the Ultimate, or the great bright
star of shining magnificence. It is a display of limits, an argument of
limits. Even the books in the seventh stage section of "The Basket Of
Tolerance" expose a variety of limits that you must understand by considering
my argument, observing yourself, understanding the seven stages of life,
understanding the Great Process as it is, studying all the books that precede
the seventh stage list. At every point in the study of that list you must be
prepared to study it with discrimination and be free of it - not attached to
it, not deluded by it. It is really the study of yourself, of the ego's
argument for progressive transcendence. You must use me, my Company, my Word,
to help you - not merely to believe it. Consider it, make it one with
yourself intelligently, and bring that to bear on the study of all of these
representatives of mankind. Every book on the list must be approached that
way - it is a sadhana. And if you do not do it that way or you do it
otherwise, then every book is some sort of delusion, it is a whore, a
peripheral lover, an opportunity to become distracted, consoled, and deluded
by yourself.

It does not make any difference what these various authors say, you will
delude yourself it you are deluded at all. They propose mind forms that are
in you, within the realm of your possibility. You are going to have to
struggle with every book, and you should struggle with every one, just as you
struggle with every moment of life. It is a struggle, and ordeal. You must
transcend yourself with every book - that is what I intend. That is what "The
Basket Of Tolerance" is for, don't you know?

The real point in studying the books on "The Basket Of Tolerance" list is not
what you can remember about them, but what you encounter and overcome in the
process of reading. What you are relieved of is more important than what you
can remember afterwards. Years from now you may remember nothing about books
that you have read already, but the moments of those readings, properly
guided and considered, should relieve you of something. That is what you will
have gained, rather than what you can recollect in your memory."(1987)