|
3.
THE LAW OF SACRIFICE: THE FORM OF
ALL THE WORLDS
3.1
What is it that you mean, that you
are signifying and pointing to, when you say or feel you are
suffering, unhappy, not at ease? You are pointing to your
own action and finding it as the experience of separation,
contraction, pain'. But it is the compulsive and 3.1
presently not-conscious avoidance of relationship, relative
to the Divine Presence, and relative to all arising
conditions. When this action becomes your responsibility,
then these experiences and concerns will become obsolete by
degrees in the action of God Communion, and then in the
intuition of your true Condition.
3.2
You are not, fundamentally,
suffering what is happening or has happened or will happen
to you. Your suffering is your own activity. And you are
suffering from what you are doing. Thus, you also suffer
from what happens to you. Release comes by Grace in the
Company of the Divine, initially by absorption in the true
or God-Condition via a new or true action (the Way of Divine
Communion) that makes the old action of suffering obsolete,
and then, more perfectly, by radical, intuitive insight (the
Way of Relational Enquiry and the Way of Re-cognition),
wherein you come to abide perfectly in the prior Condition
or Only God (the Way of Radical Intuition).
Since suffering is not itself a
matter of your conditions, or what has happened, is
happening, or will happen to you, but a matter of your own
present activity, which is contraction of the field of the
heart or of attention (which is felt-Radiance of the whole
undefined body), or self-definition, the avoidance of
relationship, release is not a matter of a change in your
conditions or circumstances. Liberation or salvation
involves, principally, not a change in your conditions but a
transformation of your relationship to or participation in
forms of action. Bondage or suffering is identical to a form
of your own activity. Liberation or salvation is release
from the force and implications of all action.
In the more mature stages of
practice one moves by a process of critical insight toward
the intuition of the Divine and prior Condition. Prior to
that, in the Way of Divine Communion, one duplicates from
the outset a form of action that is perfect or true by
design, and it is, by degrees, made perfect and true by
Grace. But all four stages of the Way of Divine Ignorance
are essentially founded in this true action or Divine
Communion from the beginning, since all individuals must,
via an intelligent, intuitive, heart-felt, and practical
response, become God's devotees in order for spiritual life
to begin and to be fulfilled.
This true action is devotion, or
continuous return of self and all its contents and
circumstances to the Divine Condition. Such realized
devotion is itself Samadhi, Bhava, perfect Intuition, Love,
and Bliss. It is the perfect fulfillment of the Law, which
is sacrifice. Each must turn to me, making the constant
natural effort of self-giving and loving service, and I
become his or her servant in return. And each, in the due
order of his appropriate practice, will realize his
sacrifice more and more perfectly as
God-Realization.
The Way of Divine Communion, which
is the foundation and ongoing principle of the entire Way of
Divine Ignorance, involves a counteraction or other action,
wherein the action that is suffering is made obsolete by
non-use. The two middle stages of practice, the Ways of
Relational Enquiry and Re-cognition, involve critical
insight and technical responsibility for the action that is
suffering and delusion. The action that is suffering and
delusion dissolves at last, and there is only the no-action
of the Way of Radical Intuition (Sahaj Samadhi and Bhava
Samadhi), which is prior establishment in Only God or Real
Consciousness. Salvation or liberation is not, then, itself
a kind of action in the conventional sense. It is not
identical to any "act" of devotion. In perfect devotion
there is no actor (no defined self or self-position) and no
Object. The Condition that is Divine Ignorance itself must
be realized from the beginning in the true case of such
intuitive devotion. The course of practice involves forms of
action or conventional responsibility. But the Realization
itself, which is the Condition of Divine Communion, is prior
to action and re-action. Realization is not the action of
love, but the intuition that is Love, or Conscious Bliss,
the Condition of all conditions.
Such Realization becomes your
enjoyment in this moment not by exclusion, separation, and
escape into some other condition. Realization or release in
Truth is not any solution in conflict with the whole of what
arises or any condition that arises. Rather, it is a matter
of realizing the true nature of whatever presently arises.
All that arises is only a modification, not other than your
present, real, true, and eternal Condition. There is only
God. In this Realization in the present there is no
conflict, no fascination, no separation, no self, no
knowledge. There is no interest in any implication or
alternative or condition in itself. One fulfills the
conventions and even lives with great intensity,
but there is only God, and attention is dissolved in
Consciousness.
3.3
There is no god that is
God.
There is no God, no Objective
Creator or Source, that is God.
There is no God to be known over
against the world or the self.
There is only God.
God does not stand over against and
independently. God is not an alternative to any thing or any
one. God is not other, or Other. God may not even, in Truth,
be turned to at last, for such a God is other and conceived
by an other. The Presence of God is not apart from self but
is the Condition of self. In true contemplation of the
Presence, the self is lost.
God is Paradox, Only
Reality.
When all childish considerations of
God as Parent and all adolescent considerations of God as
Principle are understood and cease to be used, then God is
realized by the mature man, who is undermined by the
onliness of God.
God is not identical to any
location.
God is not apart from any
location.
God is not identical to within, nor
without.
God is not shown or realized
independently, in any body, realm, or experience.
God is not merely above the body,
the mind, and the worlds. God is prior to the body, the
mind, and the worlds.
God is not in fact the Creator, but
the Paradox in which all appearances are released from the
power of implications, high and
low.
God is the radical Nature and
Condition of consciousness under the present
conditions.
God is the world. God is prior to
the world. God is only. This is the Paradox: The Existence
is everything, beyond all harm, and I-am-the-body is
Love.
3.4
There is one Truth: Unqualified
Ignorance, which is the Heart and the Mind.
There is one Life: Unqualified
Radiance, or Bliss-Fullness, which is the Body.
There is one Way: Unqualified Love,
which is the Law of Sacrifice, the Form of all
worlds.
3.5
Ego is not an entity by an
activity. It is contraction of the field of Radiance. That
contraction is "read" as realms, worlds, or environments,
bodies (particularly one, which is one's present face, form,
and life), desires, emotions, thoughts, perceptions, all
knowledge, and all known phenomena, high and low. But the
contraction is single, universal, present, and utterly
deluding, through the binding force of implication. The
native Condition in the midst of conditions is unqualified
heart-felt Radiance, or undefined whole-body Radiation,
which is Love.
Ego, and all suffering and
delusion, is simply contraction of Feeling. Liberation is
Realized via return to the Condition of Feeling-Radiance
(unqualified Relationship) in the midst of conditions, high
or low. Such is Sahaj Samadhi. On this basis, there is also
Radical Intuition of the Real, prior to all objectification
of subjects, objects, and relations, which is Bhava
Samadhi.
In the Way of Divine Communion, the
ego position of contraction (as self, thoughts, reactive
emotions, habits of activity and knowledge, and the like) is
undermined via heart-felt relational attachment to the
Presence awakened in the Company of the Spiritual Master.
The more this heart-felt relational attachment absorbs or
involves the elements of the born, contracted, and usual
individual, the more the form of contraction relaxes, and
the more the being comes to rest in the native Condition,
which is heart-felt Radiance, or Love, prior to every aspect
of egoic contraction.
The transition from contraction to
Feeling Radiation must be total. It is not merely bodily,
vital, and emotional. It is utter Release of the position of
separate self and every form of knowledge, experience,
thought, perception, or implication, high or low. Thus, the
Way is not perfected in the stage of Divine Communion, but
it progressively matures, in the case of the relentless
devotee, until it becomes Sahaj Samadhi (the Equanimity of
Native Radiance, or Love) and Bhava Samadhi (the Equanimity
of Undifferentiated Happiness) in the Way of Radical
Intuition.
3.6
The ego, all thought
(conception-perception), the body, all conditions, whether
apparently subjective or apparently objective, are a single
Process of spontaneous present arising. They are all forms
of tendency. The ego is simply the presumed center of such
tendencies, as the world is the presumed conditional
boundary and God the presumed unconditional boundary of such
tendencies. But ego, world, and presumed or believed God are
themselves only conditions (conceptions) arising. They are
versions of the same tendency or Process of spontaneous
present arising. The ego (self or soul) is not something in
itself, but is only the process of tendencies, as is the
body and every thought. There is no center, no self then,
but only spontaneous present arising.
This is clear in Ignorance, when we
have become so free in attention that forms of body and mind
cease to distract and the Condition of our very existence
may be pondered. Such pondering is instigated by the
Teaching of the Spiritual Master. When true hearing has
awakened on this basis, then the Presence of the Spiritual
Master may itself be felt. It becomes clear in devotion to
the Presence, so Communicated, that no self, or mind, or
body, or world, or God apart, but only the Presence,
unspeakable and all-pervading, is true and Truth. Submission
to the Grace that is the Presence is thus the only true Way,
and every stage of practice and Realization in the Way is
awakened in this manner.
3.7
Life or mere birth is not for the
purpose of God Realization, but for the purpose of
experience or manifest play. Life becomes engaged to the
possibility of God-Realization only once the inherent
conflict and suffering of the play of experience, high and
low, has yielded to the insight and impulse upon which the
transitional or cultural way of life (the Way of Divine
Communion) depends. Life is fitted to the purpose of
God-Realization only via such conscious adaptation to the
true spiritual path.
3.8
Real spiritual practice is a manly
or truly human occupation. The action of such practice is a
manly or mature human action. That is, such action is done
for its own sake, and its enjoyment is inherent, a form of
present contemplation. The action of the child or the usual
and childish man is done for the sake of reward, or
something that follows as a result. Childish action is the
action of seeking in dilemma.
3.9
The childish strategy in a man
insists that he be cured of his tendencies before he will
stop dramatizing them. Thus, he exploits all his conflicting
impulses in a complex life, and always, by this, is asking
to be relieved of the whole affair. But the childish way is
the way of no responsibility, which assumes the Real to be a
kind of Parent-Force. True manliness is to take one's life
in hand, in lieu of any cure, and bring it under the
discipline of right action, so that no other man is
disturbed or threatened by one's existence, but, rather,
disciplined, helped, and humored in his own life. One who
thus abandons his (or her) childishness soon enjoys insight
into the play of things and, by insight, is mastered by the
Law (which is sacrifice).
The non-dramatization of our lives
is our own responsibility, and this responsibility must
certainly be realized, or else the world is inherited by mad
children and overwhelmed by births and deaths.
3.10
The conventional view of our lives
focuses on the motivating self-image, the "case," or
interpreted problematic identity, which is to be transformed
or overcome by prescribed or discovered remedial
actions.
The effort to transform the "case"
is made by the interiorized Parent or Deity, in the form of
a conceived higher self-image. It is to take on the role,
relative to one's own poor life, of the
Parent-Deity-Transformer. The "Doctor-Deity" must analyze
the individual as a "case," but if the individual is to be
truly and actually healed, he or she must only accept
practical responsibilities, not a self-image made of
disease.
In true life-practice, including
one's own healing, the principle of transformation cannot be
active as reflected self-image, the motivating problem-ego.
Rather, one must take on practical responsibilities that
take one's circumstances and tendencies into account, but
self (ego, the action of the avoidance of relationship) must
be made obsolete by the action of sacrifice, of Divine
Communion, founded in intuitive Understanding (prior
Ignorance), not of self-image. The ego must be undermined
and replaced by the intuitive response of sacrifice (release
into the Real Condition), rather than any remedial and,
ultimately, self-preserving re-action to the problematic
self-image or self-presentation. Such a conventional
strategy is itself egoic, however sublime its goal. The
re-action that is self or ego (the "case" or problematic
self-image) must be replaced by the intuitive action of
sacrifice, or Communion with the Divine Reality. Such is the
Way of Ignorance, or Radical Understanding.
This Way is not realized by
reaction to one's self-image or "case" but by response to
the offering of the Grace of Communion made by the Divine,
through the agency of the true Spiritual Master. One
responds to this offering not by rejection of self as
"case," or life functions in general, but by Understanding
and becoming responsible for all resort to the principle of
ego-self, the motivating "case," the principles of
self-image and remedy, the whole action of the avoidance of
relationship. When this Understanding appears in the midst
of confrontation with the Teaching and the conditions of
life in the service of the Spiritual Master, then the whole
being of the individual begins more and more to turn
intuitively and consciously into Communion with the
Spiritual Master in God. Only such intelligent and intuitive
Communion is true spiritual practice. Only such Communion is
the principle of transformation in which separated existence
is Realized in God or the Condition of Truth. All other ways
are forms of conventional remedial strategy founded in the
view of self as "case," and as such are only extensions of
the binding egoic path of karmic and cosmic life.
The effective principle of the Way
of Divine Communion is not that you are a "case" to be
transformed by some means, but that you do not know what a
single thing is, even the "case" you might try to transform
by effort.
3.11
Truth or God is not a Condition to
be realized by willful esoteric or super-scientific efforts.
Such Happiness is truly and permanently realized only on the
basis of the complete moral or sacrificial transformation of
the apparently individual and human consciousness. It is not
a matter of merely relaxing life or body and sending the
attention elsewhere by exercises of esoteric meditation. It
is a matter of the undermining of the whole principle of
one's ordinary and extraordinary actions and forms of
knowledge.
Few are willing to endure such a
process. Therefore, illusory and consoling ways have been
created by compassionate, clever, and deluded men. But the
scheme of all the universes, mortal and immortal, high and
low, with its endless times of birth and death, and its
numberless kinds of learning, is itself the way and the
destiny of all ordinary and extraordinary men. Only those
who weary of the usual way become willing to engage the
Divine Process, in which their very life consciousness is
sacrificed in its own Condition and Nature. All others, high
and low, are devoted to their own unending path, from which
there is no perfect relief, except on the day all worlds,
ages, and heavens dissolve in the sleep of God.
3.12
My Teaching is a living practice
with people. Those who only spend time with me, watching,
thinking, and imitating, serving their image of private
consciousness, and then move on, are in conflict with my
Teaching. They believe they have completed the Way in my
Company, but in fact are now only indulging a partial
philosophical point of view and an independent,
self-possessed way of life. They simply cannot maintain a
permanent spiritual responsibility. Everything that I am
doing is a way of being instructive in living terms with
people. Particularly in the past, when I was more
theatrically involved with individuals, there were all kinds
of changes in my manner of dealing with people, all kinds of
lessons, all kinds of arguments in the form of my play with
people, and in the form of my speech, or consideration. But
the Teaching has been and is essentially always the
same.
The Knee of Listening and other
books that have been in print for some time now still
communicate the essential point of view. The Paradox of
Instruction, Breath and Name, and other books yet to come,
are all intended to serve the same Understanding. The Way of
Divine Communion is, like all practice in my Company in the
past, a Way of life begun on the basis of having considered
my argument. That argument is based on and expressed through
all the play and consideration that has gone on in my
Company.
In order to take up the Way of
Divine Ignorance, including its first stage, the Way of
Divine Communion, that argument must be effective. Its
essential point must be presumed, its lesson must be
presumed. That lesson can be stated in all kinds of ways,
but it has been communicated by me in the past through the
image of Narcissus, the separate and separative motive, the
seemingly involuntary contraction of the field of awareness.
The Way of Divine Communion is founded, in the case of each
individual, on his or her having heard that argument, having
responded to it, having seen in his or her experience what
in fact life is. Each individual is self-possessed,
mind-possessed, body-possessed, world-possessed. Each is
involved in chronic reaction or contraction of the being
that disposes each and all to the destiny of the usual life.
Only on the basis of conviction by this argument may anyone
take up this path, this greater Way, which is essentially
the Way of the dissolution of the habit and path and destiny
of Narcissus, the separative principle.
If we live independent of the
undoing of that separative principle, we realize the destiny
of unconsciousness, dis-ease, death, disharmony, illusion,
delusion, suffering. If we take up a Way of life that is the
undoing of that whole path and principle, this world does
not become a paradise-although hopefully things improve,
depending on your characteristics altogether-but certainly
the being enters into lawful participation in this arising
here. Lawful, however, means sacrificial. So the transition
remains difficult, obliging us to creative
participation.
And our Realization is radically
transcendental. It has nothing whatsoever to do with this
world or any world, even though these present conditions and
other conditions may appear to arise. The Realization is
prior to all arising, just as it is prior to the separative
destiny lived by Narcissus. The individual in the Way of
Divine Communion, having responded to the argument of the
Teaching, enters into a process of transition from the usual
conventional adaptation, the way of Narcissus in all its
forms of possession, into the way of submission to Grace.
The whole Way of Divine Ignorance is the way of submission
to Grace. The way of Narcissus is the independent way.
Narcissus is the one who survives against odds on his own
for his own sake, ultimately realizing only his own illusory
destiny.
3.13
In the Way of Divine Communion
there is the Realization that the vulnerability that is
separateness is fundamentally an illusion, and one that is
created by one's own action or presumption.
3.14
Our suffering is single, but so
true of us it is everywhere and universally displayed. We
are each one possessed of a lie, believed from our
experience. Our experience, however factual, is not Truth.
The lie is not merely subjective, but seems to be proven
even in the structures of this solid world, the dream in
which we are all involved. Until we awaken, the worlds of
all arising, within and without, oblige us by this lie and
stand forth as the very theatre of this lie.
The lie is single, irreducibly true
of us in the dream. It is the belief each of us has that "I"
is my Condition, that the Truth of me is within, in the form
of an inner or subjective self, existing prior to and
presently or even eternally independent of all other selves,
objects, and conditions, and not in any sense arising as a
dependent function of relations, like a shape or a thing,
but separate, deep, shapeless but unique, and inside, like a
bird in a cage. Such a belief also implies a necessary
destiny. It is a picture of dilemma. It is not merely
separate. It is separated, separative, and even believed or
known by an act of separation. It is a belief that makes us
eternally anxious. It motivates us always to escape. It is
plight, an opportunity of many possibilities, but,
nonetheless, a torment, a limiting condition on the
Absolute. It is suffering. The dream of life has an aura of
Absolute, but Absolute is not found. The Absolute is always
conceived somehow within us, or sought outside us, whereas
our Ignorance is the only Way to Realize it.
We are not Truth in ourselves.
Truth is our Condition, and that of all arising. But Truth
is not found outside, nor is it within. It is, rather, in
the Mystery of Ignorance. All these selves that imagine
themselves Absolute inside are no more Absolute within than
hand or foot. "I" is the whole body talking (gross, subtle,
causal, transcendental), and "I" is a dependent product of
relations, of this whole Pattern arising, high and low. "I"
arises out of Mystery, the Real, but "I" itself is not
independent or Absolute. "I" is dependent, unable to exist
or to realize itself independent of any other "I" or even of
a single molecule or event in the endless worlds, high or
low, spiritual and material. "I" is unable to exist except
in terms of relations. It is the present body. When the
present body dissolves, a new "I"-presentation arises among
new relations. There is no Absolute "I." What is within is
not Truth, not our Condition, but it is simply a play or
stream of considerations of the Pattern of
relations.
Because we conceive of our
Condition as "I," as within and independent, we are bound to
a tormented destiny, an adventure in dilemma, a dream of
escape and fulfillment. We are trapped in subjectivity, in
wordless pondering and in thought, while at the same time
the subject feels eternally trapped in self, in thoughts, in
feelings, in desires, in energies, in bodies, in worlds. The
bird is always in flight for its life, for escape, but there
is no escape, because our conception of our Condition is a
lie that perpetuates a single, eternal destiny or dream of
existence, incident by incident, concept by
concept.
The Way of Truth is the Way of
Ignorance. In this Way, there is release from subjectivity,
from the lie of the inward Absolute, the outer Limit or
death, and all the archetypes by which we and the world and
the Divine become meanings, like "I" and "Earth" and "God
who made us."
There must be liberation from
subjectivity and the subject. Our resort is not within.
There must be liberation from the independence of the self
as Absolute. Our existence in the realms of experience is
not one of eternally prior, relationless independence of
self. Our life is a play of relations. Our subjectivity is a
reflection of relations, and itself a pattern of relations.
We are played, and yet we struggle to win. We play at
independence like an Absolute, but our very existence in the
play is dependent on relations.
Our way of life must represent what
we are. We must be submitted to the Law, which is sacrifice,
or the discipline of relationship. This discipline confounds
our subjective independence, and when we are thoroughly
confounded by the Law, which is the Pattern itself, then the
Truth, which is our only resort, becomes obvious, so that we
are awakened, translated out of the dream into the
Real.
Our perfect awakening is in the
radical Samadhi or Real Condition of uncaused Intuition.
Such is the Enjoyment of devotees in the Way of Radical
Intuition. But every devotee, at every stage of practice, is
awakened in moments and in his or her fundamental certainty.
Therefore, devotees in the Way of Divine Communion, who are
given up to the Presence which impinges itself upon them and
attracts them by Grace, are also one with
this Ignorance, and their Understanding coincides 3.14 with
Truth rather than subjectivity and the flight of self from
Grace and all relations.
Return
to Breath and Name index
|
