Whatever You Have Not Transcended, You Must Fulfill. That is the Law
Complied, edited and adapted by Beezone from the writings and essays of Adi Da Samraj
“In the traditions of religion and Spirituality it has been understood since ancient days that there are really two paths – the gradual path and the sudden path. You can surrender a little bit, be purified a little bit, and go a little higher in the planes of cosmic existence – a bit at a time, lifetime after lifetime after lifetime, in various forms, in various planes, and then eventually dealing with the Ultimate matter. You can deal with that process at the root-level and transcend conditional existence suddenly, by addressing it at the quick, at the source, rather than identifying with it at the periphery and going through a gradual process of purification. It is up to you.”
There is only one Truth, but there are two ways to realize it. Truth may be realized directly and absolutely, or it may be realized gradually. The disposition of God-Realization involves a single intuition or turnabout in our consciousness, in which we are moved to become a sacrifice through surrender, or Love-Communion with the Divine. But there are two paths whereby we become perfectly absorbed in the Divine. One is sudden or direct, and the other is circuitous.
There are actually two Ways, or two forms of the radical Way. One is founded in the conscious process of self-transcending insight, but it is also aligned to the process of adapting and growing toward maturity, stage by stage, until the Realization of full maturity in the seventh stage. The other or alternative form of the Way is a practice founded from the beginning in the mature or Awakened disposition of the seventh stage.
This way is fulfilled by Grace, not by personal efforts. But the reception of Grace depends upon the responsible fulfillment of the Law, or sacrifice. Thus, life and attention must be wedded in the form of every action, so that these become an intentional counter-action to the action that is suffering.
The human Guru is a special combination of the eternal Divine Process and a human entity in the last stage of its manifestation. The final karmas of such a human individual are benign and fit for this service. While rested in the most intimate and profound intuition of the Divine, the human Guru embraces living beings in a mutual sacrifice of Divine distraction. The Guru accepts whatever is yielded to him and, while discarding it in its appropriate realm through his spontaneous and spiritual power of sacrifice, replaces it in the life of his devotee with his own Condition, Form, and Nature. The more the devotee yields in action and intelligent recognition, the more he intuits the eternally communicated Divine in Truth
I tell you this so that you will know clearly how I comprehend my own work. The more truly you realize the forms of sadhana served by my Company, the more you will also see the proof of this Teaching and of my Presence.
Once the spell of self-definition, other-definition, and separation or unlove is broken, there may be direct release of feeling-attention from the contractions of independent being into the radical intuition of unqualified being. Such is the direct Way into prior being. It is the Way of Divine Ignorance, since it does not proceed by knowledge of the independent being but by radical intuition of unqualified prior being.
The Condition of Being is Not Within
The direct Way or sudden path of Enlightenment, the Way of God or the Way of Truth, has nothing whatever to do with the destinies of attention, the destinies of the ego or the separated consciousness. It is the Way of insight into the very gesture of attention itself, it is the Way of engaging in the natural process of God-Communion, which is surrender of attention.
Sudden or Gradual Enlightenment – from The Whole Body of Enlightenment
It is only…the one who is oriented to God rather than to the features of attention, who transcends all possibility. He transcends all the realms of phenomena, not by acts of will or acts of attention toward objects and possibility, but through Awakening to the source of attention, the true Condition of consciousness.
Sudden or Gradual Enlightenment – from The Whole Body of Enlightenment
Over time, it became clear that I would have to engage them in a total religious and cultural process, whereby they could mature toward the radical Realization of Truth. Thus, I engaged them in a theatre of instruction and gradually developed a religious, moral, and disciplined structure of cultural participation and experience that would serve them in their need. And the culture in which we now consider and practice is a full one based on the conception of the seven evolutionary and progressive stages of human adaptation.
The gradual path of enlightenment is a way of moving through the levels of phenomena, through the chain of Creation, ultimately to Realize the Divine Condition, but, in general, not in this lifetime. It is a matter of progressing by stages, first transcending this gross birth of the ‘covered” soul, and then moving on to transcend the subtle births of the soul. This roundabout path, this “Great Way of Return,” involves first of all hearing the argument about our ultimate Destiny, and then taking up a life of renunciation.
Sudden and Gradual Enlightenment – The Whole Body of Enlightenment
The stages of practice in this Way are not stages of the perfection of any experiential condition. They are stages of responsibility for the conversion of consciousness, in which a natural order is established in the psycho-physical being. That order is without urgency, without self-exploitation, and the individual rests more and more profoundly in surrender into the All-Pervading Current (rather than the internal current of the body-mind) and the very Consciousness that Eternally Transcends the body-mind.
Sudden or Gradual Enlightenment – from The Whole Body of Enlightenment
The Way of the Heart is a radical Way of observation, understanding, insight, and intuition. Its simple, direct, and ultimate consideration or insight is this: Conditional existence is an unnecessary apparition created by the self-contraction. The Way is to observe the self as contraction, and re-cognize all the forms of the self-contraction, until the Transcendental or Divine Condition stands out as the Obvious. Thereafter, it is simply a matter of Abiding in and as that Condition, tacitly and continually recognizing self and not-self in That. The practice may necessarily be associated at the beginning – and for a long time – with disciplines of the active and functional body-mind-self—but all of that is a “yoga of consideration” that gradually releases energy and attention from the binding concerns of the first five stages of life and even the sixth stage of life.
Nivanasara – Insight, Intuition, and the Heresy of Progressive Enlightenment