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From: cyee@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Chut Ngeow YEE)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Da Avabhasa - Study the Great Tradition as Sadhana (Final)
Message-ID: <1991Jun21.014936.28797@nas.nasa.gov>
Date: 21 Jun 91 01:49:36 GMT
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Understanding and Transcending the Difficulty of Study
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Da Avabhasa: "At first, the student's form of meditation is study, a constant
confrontation with the Teaching. He will see his turning away, his
contraction, his avoidance, in all kinds of ways. Eventually, this will
become an intense form of self-observation and insight.

Do not expect me to propose that you become anti-intellectual. I expect you
to bust your ass in studying this Work. You will tend, however, to yield to
the dilettante's view of the mind if you are lazy and do not apply yourself
to study."

"The usual student develops all kinds of agonizing devices to retain
information long enough to take an examination: underlining, keeping notes on
cards, memorizing, grinding the material over and over again in his head.
Then when the examination is over, it is all forgotten! This is because
people think that the mind is a little box in the head with only a certain
number of volts, and that they must play all kinds of games to get it to hold
things.

But the student must, through one or another crisis in his life, come to the
point where he trusts his mind, realizes that it is not a little box that he
has to play games with to get it to retain and do things, but it is
completely fluid, formless, boundless, capable of remembering everything,
doing anything he wants. And when he begins to make that assumption, while
being a student at the same time, study will become much easier form him.

Understanding must take place in the midst of that whole affair of looking at
the page and falling asleep and drifting away and thinking. Understanding
must awaken in the midst of life, and so it must also apply to this
particular activity of study. Understanding is not an unconscious activity.
It depends entirely on the force of your insight at the level of
consciousness at any moment.

Ordinarily we have to be interested in something in order to be able to learn
or to deal with it in any way. Otherwise we suspect we will go to sleep or
get angry. When you are in school, you have to study things, whether you are
interestered in them or not, and so school provides the circumstance in which
you have to deal with the mind, at least to a certain degree. In this case
you are not about to get a degree. You are not about to get paid or applauded
or anything else for studying this course. So there is no external
motivation. And if sadhana is going to be meaningful in relation to you in
this study, you must first of all find some reason for doing it. But,
ultimately, the problem we are describing is not one of interset. It is one
of resistance. It is resistance, contraction, the avoidance of relationship
enacted relative to the functions of the conscious mind.

Now it is clear enough that there is something interesting to you about
reading books about God and and Divine Realization and Truth. If you have
some degree of interest in all that, then this course won't seem so alien, as
though you had to pack in a whole mass of stuff of which you really had no
comprehension at all. But, fundamentally, you must live spiritual life. Bring
the understanding that is growing in your practice to bear on all the
incidents of your life from day to day, including this study.

There is really no mystery about what is happening when you are sitting down
to read, any more than there is a mystery about what is happening in Satsang
and meditation. There is this turning away, this contraction, this avoidance
of relationship. When there is no longer any turning, the mind becomes very
useful, just like everything else does. It becomes open, free. And it becomes
useful. It is able to deal with things outside itself, information, data,
things to observe. It also becomes open and active within itself.

There is no dilemma in the mind itself, any more than there is a dilemma in
any other function. All dilemmas are your own creation in this instant, and
until there is penetrating understanding of your own functional existence
from moment to moment, your life is just and endless enumeration of dilemmas,
of problematic situations. So you sit down to read and that is difficult. You
sit down to be in the Company of the Heart-Master and that is difficult. You
have to go to work today and that is difficult. Everything is surrounded with
massive complexities, and these are your own creations. You will continue to
find difficulties and dilemmas everywhere, until you begin to see something
fundamental about yourself. And in the case of that kind of insight, real
changes begin to occur, when you happen to be reading or when you happen to
go to work. This is the same understanding that becomes active under all
conditions."(1983)

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Phew. That was more typing than I thought. I hope I haven't lost everybody
yet. It must have been the sixth time that I read those essays, but they are
just as shocking and delightful as the first time I discovered them. Every
time I am reminded of the phoney and superficial air of tolerance and
discrimination and faked spirituality that I tend to putting on. It seems to
me that Da Avabhasa is saying that real tolerance and discrimination are
attributes of Enlightenment, and yet the very things that are supposed to be
the end results are demanded from the very beginning!

As a student beginner of the Way of the Heart, I can tell you that we are
literally busting our ass in meeting our Guru demand to understand, to be
conscious, and to function in every aspects of our life, beginning from
money, food and sex. I am not sure how the hell I got myself into this mess.
I have not much inclination and capacity to take up any form of discipline,
but one day I found myself madly in love, crazily in love, and that's the
beginning of the end....

Yee.