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 Spiritual Maturity 1981 There is no dilemma or problem-conception that provides the real and appropriate basis for the Way of Divine Ignorance or Radical Understanding. The Way begins on the positive basis of the Transcendental Intuition of Divine Ignorance and the basic exercise of self-transcendence (or freely self-transcending understanding of the Narcissistic mechanism that is the body-mind-self). And the Way proceeds on the basis of life-positive disciplines that maintain an energy-conserving and attention-conserving equanimity of the body-mind. In this manner, the Way proceeds, until a true spiritual maturity emerges. Spiritual maturity is founded on the conservative equanimity of the body-mind, and its principal evidence is a profound availability of free energy and attention (released from automatic involvement in the conditional states and objects of the body-mind-self when natural equanimity is fully and stably realized). Thus, when the Way has been practiced to the point of true spiritual maturity, energy and attention are free to Realize their Source, Identity, and Condition. The disposition of practice from the point of view of spiritual maturity is one in which the real facts of conditional existence are clearly observed, understood, and transcended. In that disposition (which is a free intelligence, matured beyond the beginner's mind in which the Way has its original basis), there is a clear appreciation of the conditional body-mind-self that bears some of the marks of a "negative view," but which is not the expression of a negative or problem-based consciousness. From this point of view, all objects and states of human awareness are forms of knowledge or experience, and all forms of knowledge or experience are objects or states of attention. Conditional existence as a human individual is, therefore, merely a play upon attention. Attention arises spontaneously from the prior Condition of Divine Ignorance, Love-Bliss, the Source-Identity, or Radiant Transcendental Being. And attention is the motion of Consciousness, arising first as a contraction of Itself (into individuated, separate, and separative self-consciousness) and then proceeding toward cognition or experience of various objects or states. The motion of the proceeding of attention is desire, or the will toward objects and states, and all objects and states are the results of attention (and thus the consequences, positive or negative, of desire). The Will or desire that is attention is always accompanied by (and Identical to) a subjective feeling of pain, disease, suffering, un-Happiness - the primitive sense that is the first evidence of the Forgetting of Happiness, or the Eternally Sufficient Condition of Radiant Transcendental Being. (Such becomes evident when feeling-attention, which is the composite or single force of energy and attention, is free to observe and fully appreciate the mechanics of self.) And every gesture of attention is a motivated search for release from the pain of un-Happiness. Attention is (in the factual or conventional rather than the ultimate sense) un-Happiness and the search for release from un-Happiness. Therefore, attention is constantly moving, like a great cat trapped In a small cage. And it is constantly becoming associated with conditional objects and states-some of which grant a temporary feeling, whether great or small, of release from un-Happiness (and thus temporarily restore the Intuition of the native Happiness at the root of attention), and most of which only frustrate the search and deny the release. Every object and state is, as a matter of fact, nothing more than a condition with which attention has become associated (whether intentionally or unintentionally) in Its desire or search for release from un-Happiness. Objects and states. are nothing more than energy, conceived or imagined and experienced as a symbol for ultimate Happiness. But our association with objects and states is based on a previously conceived un-Happiness the self-contraction that perpetually desires or seeks release. The search for release (or the act of attention) is a ritual automaticity in the Radiant Transcendental Being. The self contraction actually seeks release from itself as a means or method of re-attaining the Happiness that its own existence has caused it to Forget. Such Is. the paradoxical futility of attention, desire, seeking, and all conditional knowledge or experience. Happiness is never attained via this process. It is glimpsed or intuited in moments and then lost again as attention moves on. Happiness Itself is the Divine Condition. It cannot be known or experienced, since It is not any "object" of attention. It can only be Realized. And Its Realization is a matter of the understanding and free transcendence of Narcissus, the self-contraction, or the ritual of manifest attention. The arising of attention is, at base, a contraction of the Radiant Field of Love-Bliss (or Happiness) of or in the Transcendental Divine Self. Thus, at its base, attention is first the sense of independent and conditional self-consciousness. And that self-consciousness (or self-contraction) is itself an act of Forgetting - the Forgetting of the Source, Condition, and Identity in which it is arising. Therefore, all manifest beings are apparently unconscious of the Divine or Transcendental Self-Condition. They are not Happy. They are seeking release into Love-Bliss through the attainment of states of knowledge and experience. But they are bewildered, tormented, and ultimately confounded in this search. The power of understanding is set free in spiritual maturity. Thus, it is able to comprehend and transcend the mechanism of the self, or the ritual of attention. It is only such understanding that permits freedom from this fruitless ritual of egoic existence and re-Awakens the Intuition of the Source, Identity, and Condition that is prior to the conditional self (or the self-contraction). (And when this Intuition is Perfected, or Awakened most profoundly, the conditional self and all its forms of knowledge and experience become transparent, unnecessary, and non-binding, to the degree that they are ultimately Outshined in the Radiant Happiness of Transcendental Being.) . Attention and its world of objects and conditional states are not the "enemy," to be suppressed and destroyed. An enterprise based on that presumption is itself a ritual of desire, and it, therefore, cannot succeed. Rather, attention itself is to be understood, and naturally transcended at its root through Awakening to its Identity, Source, and Condition . Attention is the evidence or effect of the base-contraction, which is the conditional self. In the usual man or woman, the self is lived as the ritual life of Narcissus, pursuing and suffering objects and states without ultimate understanding. But in those who begin to understand and who discipline themselves toward spiritual maturity, the ritual of Narcissus is eventually superseded by the supreme Way of ultimate or radical understanding (or Divine Ignorance). When such maturity is the case, attention becomes observable in its moment or process of origination (rather than merely at the point of association with psycho-physical. objects and states); The conditional root of attention is the self-contraction. Attention is not finally controllable by effort, but it (or its binding power) naturally dissolves if the self-contraction is presently observed, tacitly understood, and transcended. (Such present observation and transcendence are the fundamental exercises of the conscious process in the Way of Divine Ignorance or Radical Understanding.) It is the self-contraction that produces and constantly maintains the gesture of attention and, therefore, the constant or chronic flow of thought and experience in the body-mind. Therefore, we are never at rest, nor free to be established in true Happiness. But if the self-contraction is transcended, attention and its objects and states are instantly cut down, or transcended in their Origin, which is Happiness or Radiant Transcendental Being. The transition to the seventh stage of life necessarily requires (or is the expression of) spiritual maturity. It is possible only when self-transcendence has become psycho-physical equanimity and the free Intuitive ability to pass beyond the root contraction of self into the Source, Identity, and Condition in which the self-contraction, attention, and the objects, conditions, and states of the body-mind arise (all as apparently subjective or apparently objective modifications of the Radiant Transcendental Being). Therefore, the seventh stage of life is a matter of continuous Occupation with that very exercise (or the direct Intuition of the Source-Identity and Condition in which the self-contraction, attention, and the objects or conditions of attention are arising). The ultimate or seventh stage practice of the Way of Divine Ignorance or Radical Understanding is associated with membership in the Free Renunciate Order. However, such practice is not a "renunciate" practice because it is associated with conventional ascetical vows, but because it cannot even begin until spiritual maturity, or until the body-mind is responsibly and naturally maintained in a conservative state of equanimity, and thus no longer obsesses or controls attention. (The practitioner in the seventh stage of the Way is at least eventually characterized by a relatively simple habit of existence. Some individuals may even appear in a typically ascetical manner, especially when Sahaj Samadhi enters its late phase, but not because of any conventional motive to separate from the body or the world. And until the time when such simple or even ascetical "renunciation" becomes naturally evident, the individual may live and act in a relatively ordinary but generally conservative manner. Some may develop apparent signs of simplicity and relative asceticism even in the early stages of practice, since the Way is self-transcending rather than self-fulfilling. Others may develop the disciplines of the Way stage by stage, maintaining a conservative sexual practice and a significant life of service in the world, until the inevitable development of more simple or even apparently ascetical habits in the later phase of the seventh stage of life.) The direct exercise of the present understanding and transcendence of the self-contraction and the conditions of attention (which are themselves made to seem to be conventions of the same contraction) continues until Sahaj Samadhi, or "open eyes" (the transition from the sixth to the seventh stage of life). Then the process becomes the one of native Self-Abiding (or prior inherence in Radiant Transcendental Being, Consciousness, Happiness, or Love-Bliss), tacitly recognizing self, attention, and all objects or states as transparent, unnecessary, and non-binding modifications of That. When Sahaj Samadhi itself enters its late phase (of profoundly Blissful Transcendence of the play of attention in and through the body-mind-self), then there is entrance into the final phase of conditional embodiment. |
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