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Chapter 2
God Is Not an Alternative Reality
BUBBA: Recently, one of the members of our Church was
asked to write an essay about her practice. I happened to
see this essay a few days ago. Although she was not very
much aware of the implications of what she was describing, I
thought that a couple of things she wrote were very
interesting. And now I am about to make a mountain out of a
mole hill, make something really profound out of it, you
see!
In her essay, our friend wrote that from her childhood
she has been involved with fantasy, not with just the usual
sexual fantasies, but with an unreal and altogether interior
world. When she remembers the past, she changes the memory,
theatrically plays back the past so that it is more
desirable. Or, in confrontation with some circumstance in
life, she imagines, dreams about, thinks about the different
ways it could be and rehearses more ideal circumstances in
her mind.
The other thing that is interesting is that whenever she
wrote about the mind in this essay, she spelled "mind" with
a capital M.
Whenever anyone speaks to this young woman about
spiritual life, generally she talks very enthusiastically,
even ecstatically, about it, about her spiritual experiences
and about energies and visions and dreams, about all the
exotica of spiritual life. And she is fascinated by things
like astrology, palm reading, flying saucer stories,
mystical news. She is very enthusiastic about the
possibility that something will drop out of the sky to make
life more interesting.
People in general love hype, stimulation. We love to be
made enthusiastic again, in order to get away from our
ordinary state in which we are mulling things over inside
and being subjectively oriented in general. It is a tendency
that appears in all of us, reflected in our inwardness and
fantasies. Everybody fantasizes in one form or another, but
there is a profoundly significant orientation that develops
in us by reaction to experience, and our life of fantasy,
even in its playful form, is a reflection of it.
To return to the case we have been discussing, at one
point in her essay, our friend described herself as being
subject to two influences in her life: the mind and her
external activity. Clearly, in her consideration about
herself she sees two realms in which she operates. One is
the realm of activity in the environment of relations, and
the other is the realm of the mind. She is not unique in
this disposition. Since everybody functions mentally,
therefore everybody has the capacity to interiorize
attention, to dream and think and fantasize, and even to
have visions. But there is a tendency in us, particularly
remarkable in certain types of people and in certain
cultures of the world, to divide the experience of the being
into two realms-the physical, active, so-called outer world
and the internal, subtle, mental, visionary world-and to
make this distinction absolutely. It is this tendency,
acquired by reaction to the things of bodily experience,
that creates magic and mysticism and traditional
spirituality.
In the description some people may give you of
themselves, as with this young woman, for instance, you can
see how this psychology of dual existence becomes
philosophy. When she discussed her external activity, she
wrote with small letters. But when she wrote about the mind,
she used a capital M. Not only does she perceive a division
between her physical, active self and her mental self, but
the mind is reality, the more true, or higher, or more
potent dimension.
If you are born in the West and at least socially
oriented toward outer activity and fulfillment of your
functional life, then to perceive the mind and the so-called
internal life as Reality fosters a kind of social
schizophrenia. If the mind is the more real side of life to
you, then you find yourself unable to deal directly and
creatively with the so-called outer, functional, relational
level of life. Such people become involved in neurotic
self-possession, turning in on themselves, living in a world
of fantasy, unable to function or to see,their situation
clearly. Thus, our friend's description of herself and her
social dilemma is a description of the kind of neurosis that
is typical of Westerners.
But even more than that, she is also reflecting the point
of view that characterizes the left-sided culture of the
Orient and spirituality as it is traditionally conceived.
This reaction to ordinary life that she describes is
precisely what traditional spirituality and the motive
toward conventional spiritual experience is all about.
Through the shock of our ordinary experience we tend to
become divided in ourselves, essentially self-possessed and
subjectively oriented, and this dilemma disturbs our
harmonious living. Furthermore, this reactivity tends to
establish a metaphysical or philosophical understanding in
which we divide the internal world from the relational,
functional, formal, or bodily realm of experience. And not
only do we make this division, but we assign reality
exclusively to the inner or mental dimension. This is how
mysticism develops.
The reaction to the gross realm occurs first, then it is
followed by the division of experience or awareness into two
dimensions, one above the heart and one below it; one
apparently outer and one apparently inner; one right, one
left; one below, one above; one that is the effect of causes
and the one that is cause. The view of the cosmos therefore,
the view of Reality, is that whatever is presently appearing
is the effect at the end of a long chain of events that
proceeds from the subtle or mental or higher dimension. The
logic of life, then, is to detach yourself from outward and
lower functional orientations in order to internalize or
invert attention and feeling and to return along the chain
of causes, along the thread of the inner life, toward God,
Truth, Reality.
This approach to manifest existence characterizes
traditional Eastern spirituality altogether, but it also
characterizes Western religion and the psychology of Western
man, whose essentially religious personality precedes this
technological age in which we now live. Western religious
psychology also assigns Reality or Cause to what is above,
subtle, and mental. God is in that direction, within, above,
and beyond. But the psychology of the West is not
left-sided, as is that of the Orient, where one attempts to
abandon everything and return to the Source and identify
with it. The Western religious psychology still gives
predominance to what is above and subtle, but it does not
attempt to return to the Source or to become identical with
it. Rather it seeks to establish right or useful and magical
relations with that Reality through prayer, incantation,
righteous and moral activity, and ecstasy.
The left-sided approach, the Oriental approach, attempts
to return along the chain of causation and to become
identified with the highest and most subtle. The Western
approach is also to turn toward That which is the cause, and
which is highest and most subtle, not to return to it but
rather to surrender to it, submit to it, open to it, do what
is necessary in order to receive blessings from it. Thus,
somewhat different practical orientations characterize East
and West or left and right, but they are based in the same
two-sided conception of experience and of our condition.
You all find it quite natural to respond to
philosophical, religious, or spiritual ideas that call for
going within, going up, having visions, hearing voices,
getting signs, getting proofs, getting knowledge from an
alternative dimension of reality that lies within and
mindward, beyond concepts perhaps, but still in that inner
and mental direction. The notion of the Divine within seems
basically logical. And, although you find it very difficult
to absolutely take up the way of life that this approach to
God implies, the notion sounds familiar and comfortable to
you.
Of course, you cannot altogether commit yourself to
actually lead a life of moral and religious piety and
righteousness or to take on the disciplines of purification
and the inversion of attention or to assume the practical
way of life implied by these activities, because you are not
classic Western-born people-you are Western-born people who
live in the twentieth century. Thus, you cannot make the
naive response to this logic that would have been relatively
easy a few centuries ago. In some sense it still seems
logical that the Truth is within and above and that the
Cause is in the subtle direction. It seems logical to turn
in that direction through disciplines of the physical being,
through disciplines of feeling and attention, through
ascetic and emotional and mental inversion. It seems
logical. On the other hand you do not have the will to do
it.
Discipline in itself is difficult. It is working against
inherent motions or tendencies. But not only is it
difficult, you are also psychologically indisposed toward
such a life. Your indisposition is a different thing
altogether. In times past people had difficulty with
disciplines. There were some who could be religious and some
who could not, but in general the psychology of people then
was more disposed toward religious discipline. To express
that psychology in simplistic terms, if you found yourself
incapable of the discipline, you knew you were going to go
to hell! Or you depended on mercy. The psychological
disposition toward a life of discipline was strong, but it
was a struggle to actually live such discipline.
In this time and place it is also difficult, not only
because discipline in itself is difficult, but also because
the psychology of inwardness and the assignation of Reality
to what is within and above are not wholly logical to us.
And furthermore, I am also here to remind you that even if
you were able to do it, what you find by going within and up
is not God. It is not Reality at all. But the proposition of
the traditional argument is that Reality is within and above
and at the end of a chain of causation or at its origin. The
ancient notion is that the Deity is the Creator or first
Cause, and everything is at the end of a chain of events
that begins in the most subtle dimension and becomes
reflected in the levels of manifestation appearing here in
the grossest form.
Now, there is some truth to that consideration in the
physics of things. Grosser manifest events do in some
genuine, processional sense appear as a result of subtler
causes. There are also gross causes responsible for certain
permutations as well, but Reality is not at the end of that
chain. The Deity, the Very Reality, or Happiness, Bliss, is
not at the "cause" end of the chain any more than it is at
the "effect" end. This chain of causes and effects is simply
physics. It is science, not philosophy! The origins of this
psychology-which, as we see, typifies both Eastern and
Western people, even though they have different
characteristic practical responses-are in reaction to
experience, actually to the single experience of having been
grossly born.
In her essay about herself and her problems, our friend
described herself in a classically typical fashion that has
profound philosophical significance. For her, the mind, the
inverted inner life, the subtle, invisible, "alternative
Reality," is, in her feeling, the direction of Reality, the
direction of God, the direction of Truth. Therefore, to
recoil from the world has justification, not just in the
rottenness of the world, but in the truth of within. The
next thing to do, you see, is to shave your head, put on a
cheap outfit, and find some piece of unowned real estate
where you can sit in private. This is not the country in
which to do that everything here is owned! But you can do it
Western style, become very pious and religious and
visionary, involved in constant prayer, appealing inward and
upward for help, for blessing, for happiness, for good
feeling.
What this young woman represents in her psychology is not
something she has invented. She is typifying the psychology
that characterizes us all, since we are all traditionally
born. We are still infected with the ancient psychology,
although we no longer enjoy the disposition to fulfill it in
the ancient manner, through most strict religious and
spiritual striving. As twentieth-century Westerners, we have
some interest in this psychology, in this destiny or way of
life, but we want to make profound modifications in how we
will live on the basis of it. And when it comes down to it,
we basically do not live this left-sided way of life at all.
It is too much for us. Not only is it too much for us, but
we cannot find the strength of purpose to do it. And that is
not altogether because we are weak, but because this way of
life is not true of us.
We are living in a moment in human time when it is
becoming obvious that Truth is not. within, although the
implications of that fact are only vaguely apparent at the
present time. There is just the barest intuition of it. This
Teaching, this Way of Divine Ignorance, is a voice, an
expression, of this new realization.
The ancient conception is that Truth, or Reality, is an
alternative dimension of experience. God, the Divine,
Heaven, is an alternative dimension of experience that is
found by inverting attention, going within and up. How that
is done varies from village to village and culture to
culture. But usually morality is the way of disciplining the
outer life with physical and relational practices, moral
injunctions, including all kinds of social peculiarities
that are expected of the individual, and formal religious
obligations, sacrifices, observances, rituals. And ascetic
practices are an even more personal form of this fundamental
inversion of attention.
Every religious person, at least from time to time,
engages in conventional observances that are symbolic of the
practices of the ascetic, such as observing silence,
refraining from ordinary pleasures and work, or honoring
religious occasions. But those who are moved to pass beyond
the ordinary level of the conception of happiness that is
communicated through religious rituals and social
obligations take up this practice of inversion most
conscientiously. They perform ascetic practices most
intensely. Usually the conventionally religious person does
not approach this process of inversion on the
psycho-physiological level that the yogi or ascetic does.
The conventionally religious person projects this psychology
on the cosmos-thus heaven is above, behind the stars, and
Jesus goes up into the clouds. But those who pass beyond the
naive and outer dimension of traditional psychology are
committed to the search for God through a process of the
inversion of attention, perhaps at first through moral and
ascetic religious disciplines, although many who become
ascetics abandon the religious life as a purely outer and
symbolic discipline (unless they have taken the vows of some
religious order, as did Saint Seraphim, for example, a great
ascetic who maintained the outward observances of the monks
of the Eastern Orthodox Church).
Thus, professionally ascetic individuals involve
themselves more or less in private experimentation. Their
disciplines are not moral in the conventional social sense.
Such individuals step outside the relational plane of
things. And now we begin to see the true significance of
this logic-it is the avoidance of relationship. It is the
recoil from Infinity. The professional ascetic in general
abandons relational life and retires into solitude, even
retires from his own functions. He performs ascetic rather
than moral disciplines. This practice particularly
characterizes the Eastern or left-sided approach, which is
completely oriented to passing back toward identity with the
first cause, or mind, whereas the Western orientation
generally involves a magical relationship to that cause.
Western religious practitioners generally maintain moral and
religious disciplines in their way of life, whereas yogis,
Oriental ascetics, throw all of those disciplines away and
have a great deal of humor about all moral and ritual
observances-they, burn the images of the Buddha! Saint
Seraphim, in contrast, created little buildings out of mud
and sticks so that he could "walk around Jerusalem" in his
forest retreat and recite the liturgy as the priest that he
was.
Thus, when you begin to grasp the logic inherent in this
traditional psychology and become professionally and
intentionally oriented toward a practice that seeks Truth as
a result, you involve yourself perhaps in moral and
religious disciplines, but certainly in ascetic disciplines
of the inversion of feeling. You take up practices of
heart-felt remembrance of a Divine name, mantric
repetitions,' devotional practices, prayer, intense
generation of feeling, and bodily attention toward what is
within and above and subtle and the end and origin of the
chain of causes. When physical and emotional functions or
tendencies become relatively quieted, the Essential
principle is the inversion of attention.
All these practices finally depend upon the essential
matter of withdrawing attention from the outer, gross,
descended level of functions, turning attention within, and,
having brought it within, sending it up. There are
innumerable practices, not only for turning inward the
attention or the course of energy in the consciousness of
the being, but also for sending it up once it is collected
from without. These practices include everything from prayer
to pranayama2 and physical manipulation of the
nerves through contact with a potent influence (some yogi or
some remarkable presence or object or visionary influence),
and all the methods of conventional meditation, including
turning attention in on the audible life current and its
light phenomena, and turning attention toward the midbrain
into visions, voices, blisses.
The principle at the core of all these methods is that if
you do this with enough intensity, if you submit yourself to
it absolutely, then you will ultimately realize God, or
Truth, or Reality, or Bliss, or Perfect Knowledge, because
that Reality, whatever name it is given or whatever concept
is associated with it, is within and away from outer or
formal or gross manifestation and up beyond concepts, at the
end of a chain of causes that originates beyond even the
most subtle level of appearances. Therefore, if you can turn
attention in that direction and pass through all the levels
of your bodily, mental, and psychic awareness, you must
inevitably come to the first Cause.
If God, Truth, Reality, Happiness, Nirvana,' is within
and above, then you all are in a great deal of trouble! You
can see that what you are up to is not essentially going to
realize that Happiness or Divinity. You are not making much
of an effort in that direction. And, according to this
psychology, every time you do something in order to enjoy
yourself blatantly, every time you engage the functions of
ordinary life, not ultimately irresponsibly, even with some
humor, but without the slightest thought of an alternative
reality-every moment in which you involve yourself in such a
way of action, you are moving closer toward the ultimate
destiny of the pit!
If you do not go in and up, then you are tending to go
down and out, and you are going to realize a destiny that is
also down and out, more down and out all the time. Such a
destiny is damnation, separation from God, who, in the
traditional view, is all the way at the other end. The more
down and out you go, the less association you have, even in
your sympathy, with what is at the origin of that chain, the
ultimate inwardness and the ultimate mind.
There has been a great deal of enthusiastic
propagandizing throughout human history to convert people in
their feeling-attention and in their actions to this
principle of inversion, so that we will at least assume it
in the religious sense, get saved, get religious, go to
church, or take up one or another yogic or mystical or
magical path in order to be blessed, and so that we will not
suffer the destiny that our outward-oriented attention seems
to imply.
We are really very vulnerable to this argument and very
childish in our response to it. We are full of fear and
guilt and sorrow and anger and doubt. When circumstances are
the most difficult, we tend to be most vulnerable to this
psychology of inversion, which is like a leech on our
nervous system. We are leeched by these archetypes. We are
not able to live the way of action they imply, and we
constantly suffer that disability. We have no humor in the
face of this life and its circumstances and its mortality.
We are not strong in our relations-we are weak and
vulnerable. And this weakness is reflected in our phasing,
our childish disposition, our reactivity, our subjective
orientation, our lovelessness. It is also reflected in our
philosophy, our metaphysics, our spirituality, our religious
consciousness, our imageries. We are still dominated by the
concept of the alternative reality. When we are most weak,
most childish, most vulnerable, we tend to reflect the
domination of this concept in our anxiety, self-possession,
fearfulness, our crazy religious beliefs, our willingness to
submit to the winds of doctrine.
All the teachings that flood this earth are forms of
propaganda, an argument for this psychology and this
conception. And we do have the possibility, you see, to take
up a way of life based on this logic. There are countless
traditional ways of doing it. But perhaps we are free to
consider whether or not it is necessary or fruitful because
we, in our time and place, in our disposition, are not
tending to fulfill the ancient path.
None of you in this room is really tending to fulfill the
path of inwardness. You entertain it, and in your neurosis
you certainly reflect the old psychology, but in your habit,
strength, intention, and desiring you are not disposed
toward it at all. Perhaps the alternative Reality is
Truth-we will consider whether or not it is. But let us
first consider how this psychology originates in our
experience, and see if the almighty God within and above is
actually only the creation of our own fear, our own
reactivity.
Profound philosophical considerations are part of the
modern mind with all its language, but actually philosophy
comes from a much more primitive logic than the abstract
mind. It is in our neurosis, in our fear, in our
disturbance, in our dilemma that we find the purest origins
of philosophy, not in abstract thinking. Philosophy and
matters of greatest importance come out of experience, out
of vulnerability, not out of mechanical logic.
In our birth into apparent, or functional, independence,
in the relational play of manifestation, we become afraid.
If you consider your history, your past and present
emotional adaptation to life, you will find that from the
beginning you have been recoiling upon yourself, reacting,
feeling betrayed, feeling unloved, collapsing in on
yourself. As we move into adaptation to the elaborate
complexity of a born human life, we adapt to our various
functions through this mood of reaction, recoil,
self-attention, self-protection. Our very existence is a
dilemma, because we exist and we are also mortal.
From the very beginning, out of our sense of independence
by birth, we become opponents. In reaction to all the forces
in experience we become engaged in strategies of offense and
defense, rightsidedness and left-sidedness, masculinity and
femininity, aggressiveness and passivity, self-exploitation
and self-protection. We become Narcissus, the self-possessed
one, by reaction to experience. We recoil in fear to protect
ourselves from our necessary ending, our necessary
mortality.
And when in our mediocrity we begin to think about all of
this, when we become capable of thought, language,
abstraction, it is then that we begin to talk about God and
what is within and what is above. It is then that we begin
to abstract our inwardness and our mentality from our
physicality, our life-force, and our relational activities.
It is then that we begin to say that Truth, Reality, the
Divine, Bliss, is at the other end, the origin of manifest
events.
In our later life we may become involved in a religious
or spiritual or magical discipline. But even early in our
life we are already involved in self meditation, inwardness,
fantasy, thinking, as a random, habitual activity or
tendency. As we mature and enter into the play of life more
directly, we extend this habit into the more sophisticated
activity of the inversion of attention for the sake of
happiness, escape, fulfillment, peace, bliss. Thus, we can
be restored in our humor if we can see that the impetus to
the inversion of attention originates in our childishness.
See our children doing it, and we can see how we got to do
it! We can see how ridiculous all of this so-called
spiritual activity really is, that it is really an
expression of our fear, our inability to engage in the play
of relations without recoil.
If we are most oppressed by the circumstances that we
encounter in our formal existence, in relationship, then we
tend to be most profoundly convinced of the Reality of what
is within, or we tend to feel most consoled by association
with what is within. And once we hear all the propaganda, it
is very difficult to determine what about it is true,
because we tend to submit in one or another mediocre fashion
to religious and spiritual attitudes of a conventional and
traditional kind. But if we can investigate that tendency in
our sympathy, and see how it is related to our emotional
adaptation to living, then we can penetrate the propaganda,
penetrate the argument of inwardness, and be completely free
of it. It is through penetrating insight into that tendency,
that psychology, that we become free of the mind, you see,
not by struggling with the mind. And it is likewise by
penetrating insight into that psychology that we become free
of the whole destiny, the whole demand, of conventional
religion and spirituality. It is through insight into our
own activity that we become free of the idol of inwardness,
the deity propped up at the origin of causation, the origin
of effects, within and above.
Contrary to the traditional opinion, God-Realization is a
matter of just such penetrating insight and liberation.
God-Realization is not at all a matter of the inversion of
attention. The argument that leads to the inversion of
attention belongs to the childish and primitive level of
human awareness, when the dramatization of the recoil from
Infinity, or reaction to experience, vulnerability, and
death, informed the whole life.
Therefore, in ancient times the division between left and
right and out and in and below and above was true. It was a
true characterization of human beings at that time. But in
our time the whole world-is intercommunicative, the whole
body is intercommunicative, both sides of the body have an
equal voice, both ends of the universe have an equal voice.
Eastern cultures and Western cultures are meeting one
another. All the cults that once survived in relative
independence are now confronting one another.
Thus, if the whole body is conscious, if left and right
are equalized in the argument of experience, if you can
experience a moment or enter into a moment of relative
freedom from fear or recoil and inwardness so that you can
see the whole pattern, left and right, in and out, up and
down-in other words, if you can be present as the whole
body-being in an instant of insight-then you can be free of
the traditional destiny of man and enter into a new moment
in human realization and evolution. From the point of view
of the whole body, God is not the inward, invisible,
original, alternative reality to be found only through
inversion. God is not an alternative experience to your
present experiences. The alternative reality only seems
hopeful to you when you are in fear, when you are stuck in
recoil, identified with only half of the body, caught in its
passivity, its doubt, its vulnerability.
When you are simply free, without motion in yourself,
then you realize the eternal Reality, the absolute God, Who
is not other than any experience at all, not other than any
condition whatsoever. Reality or Bliss is the Condition of
present conditions, the Reality of present conditions. It is
not elsewhere, not inside in the form of a light, a sound, a
voice, a vision, an idea, a place. The Realization of the
Divinity does not involve the slightest subjective
orientation, not even the slightest. On the contrary, the
Realization of God is a matter of total, absolute freedom
from recoil, contraction, and inwardness. God-Realization is
not the inversion of feeling-attention-which is just a way
of saying the recoil or contraction of feeling-attention
-but the complete release of feeling-attention to Infinity
via all of these functions, relations, conditions.
Standing in a position of no recoil in the midst of all
conditions, you intuit the Reality and are happy. There is
tacit certainty of Happiness in that Realization. It does
not necessarily carry with it any experience or any
knowledge of what happens after death or what other worlds
there are, gross or subtle. Such experience or knowledge may
arise, but in themselves they can create no certainty or
happiness or love. Quite independent of such knowledge or
such experience we may be completely happy and free in any
moment. When we are free of the inversion of attention, free
of the recoil of feeling-attention, free of the
self-directed tendency in relations and in the pattern of
experience, when we are so equalized, so fully conscious, so
free of reaction and recoil, then we are completely free of
the argument of inwardness, of mind, of the belief that
Reality is an ultimate cause to be found only through
turning within. That whole automated program is lifted from
us and becomes totally unnecessary.
This Realization is the significance and the core of this
Teaching of the Way of Divine Ignorance. Those who consider
this Teaching appear with the fragments, the leftovers, the
artifacts of the ancient psychology of the two-sided man,
the childish individual who like a vulnerable child is
consoled by inwardness and recoil and is turned away. Just
as we perceive that recoil to be a neurotic motive in a
child, we must also perceive it to be neurosis at the level
of philosophy or the conception of Reality.
We are no longer, in our time, naively identified with
one side or the other, not just because of the events of
appearing technologies, but also because of the event of the
total communicativeness of human societies, human cultures,
human politics, and human beings. We are as much persuaded
that the outer life of relations is true and real and
ordinary as we are that the inner life of thinking and
inwardness and invisible dimensions is true. When we stand
present, whole bodily, we are not convinced that Reality,
Truth, or Bliss is in either of these two directions. We
become motionless, and in that motionlessness, that
standstill, we may enjoy the intuition of God.
People who come to me and consider this argument want to
hear the traditional point of view vocalized, argued, and
professed. But I am always countering it and criticizing it.
The event of hearing the argument of this Teaching is the
event of coming to that point of stillness, of
motivelessness, in which the arguments of left and right are
no longer convincing in themselves. Happiness is not simply
a matter of the self-possessed exploitation of functions in
order to acquire pleasures and goods in the outer life. Nor
is happiness a matter of turning within and meditating by
fixing your attention in subtle places, either in your own
consciousness or your own body-being. It is true that the
stages of this path involve moments of experiential
discipline in which you are associated with all kinds of
experience, both in the outer, relational, descended, and
gross play of things, and also in the psychic, inner, and
subtle direction, as in the traditional spiritual passage.
But the point of view of the Way of Divine Ignorance and the
disposition of the devotee in the midst of these stages or
developments of experience are not the ancient psychology,
but rather the disposition of true hearing, true freedom,
which awakens a conscious intuition or disposition that may
penetrate experience. Thus, it is the conscious process, as
it is revealed in each of the four stages, that is the
principle of this Way.
The Way of Divine Communion (the first and preparatory
stage of this whole Way of life)4 is not
association with the cause that is within and above, but
intuitive association with the real and present Divine,
which is without qualification and which is not an
alternative reality but the Very Reality, the Condition of
the present experience. Thus, you are drawn into the
samadhi5 of happiness in the present that is not
a result of any kind of exploitation, outward or inward. It
is stillness, fullness, unreasonable Happiness.
That intuition, that disposition toward the present
Reality that is awakened in the Way of Divine Communion, is
then extended in the more mature forms of the conscious
process, in the later stages, not only in the midst of the
play of outer or gross phenomena, but also in the midst of
subtle, yogic experiences, psychic awakenings, and visions.
These phenomena are not grasped as God in the course of this
practice or Way, but rather penetrated, obviated, their
power undone, so that Intuition is not a tendency toward the
inversion of attention in the classic sense, nor is it the
mediocre consciousness of the ordinary, outer-directed
personality. Rather it is the perfect disposition toward
absolute Sacrifice into the Reality, freedom from recoil
from Infinity, and absolute rest at Infinity through
feeling-attention, without recoil or obstruction.
1. A mantra is a word or sound-symbol repeated vocally or
mentally, in order to induce meditative or mystical states,
or to concentrate and purify the mind.
2. Pranayama is an ancient technique for balancing,
purifying, and intensifying the entire psycho-physical
system by controlling the currents of the breath and the
life-force. The term literally means restraint or regulation
(yama) of life-energy (prana).
3. Nirvana is a classical Buddhist term for the
extinction or "quenching" of all qualities of suffering, of
ego, of birth and death, and entry into the transcendent
realm of -Unqualified Reality.
4. The Way of Divine Communion is the first stage of
religious and spiritual practice in the whole Way of Divine
Ignorance, or Radical Understanding. It marks the transition
from commitment to the life of Narcissus, or
self-possession, to commitment to the Way of Divine
Ignorance, or radical surrender to Grace. The Way of Divine
Communion is followed by three higher stages of practice:
the Way of Relational Enquiry, the Way of Re-cognition, and
the final, ultimate, God-Realizing stage, the Way of Radical
Intuition.
5. Samadhi is spiritual Consciousness or Equanimity,
Balance. Samadhi is also used, conventionally, to refer to
trance states, spontaneous ecstasies, yogic blisses in
meditation, or extremely subtle or sophisticated
realizations of the nature of ordinary conscious states.
Most traditional samadhis are phenomena of the vital and
subtle life-force, and, as such, are temporary, symptomatic
experiences that occur when there is a peculiar
intensification of one's energy field and circuitry. The
highest and only true samadhis are those of Consciousness
itself: Jnana, Sahaj, and Bhava Samadhi, the three stages of
God-Realization.
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