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Question: Are there any devotees who are never less than perfectly happy?
I have been seriously considering the argument of the Spiritual Master for decades. My
interest is not academic. The whole argument presupposes the ability of the Spiritual
Master to transmit happiness.
 Chris
Tong: Virtually all of the stories and articles on this site are testimonials
to Adi Da's Transmission of Perfect Happiness. That, in fact, is the primary reason
we put this site together: to not just communicate Adi Da's teaching (other sites
do that, as do Adi Da's books), but to provide a huge body of evidence about Who
He is, and its impact on His devotees. There are now hundreds of people
contributing such evidence on this site. Perhaps
the single best way for you to find out more about Adi Da's Transmission is to
read the extensive material on our site.
One of the things that becomes
clear as you read through this body of evidence is the huge distinction between
the nature, reliability, and effectiveness of Adi Da's Transmission, and devotees'
ability to realize Perfect Happiness themselves on the basis of that Transmission,
which is limited by their egoity (and not by any limit in the effectiveness of
the Transmission Itself).
At the same time you are in My Company you are separated from My
Company, you are dramatizing the act of self-contraction right now! Therefore,
merely to be in My Company is not enough. How often has it been regretfully said
in the traditions that even though people were given access to [Spiritual] Realizers
of one degree or another, allowed to be in the Company of the Realizers, [Who
were] serving them all the time, most of these people got nothing or very little.
Why is it so, then? Since My Radiant Presence Is sufficient, and since all you
have to do is come into It, why do you not feel altogether good? Why are you not
sublimed to the Perfect Degree right now?
Of course, such sudden Realization
is eminently possible, but the reason it is not happening is that you are engaged
in a particular act right now, here in My Company, as you are at all other times.
You are enforcing that action constantly and making a life out of it. Therefore,
you are doing it right now, and you are also feeling it and all its results and
all its impositions on you.
Avatar Adi Da Samraj |
In reading all the stories and articles, you'll discover that Adi Da's
Transmission is utterly unlimited and always available, and is Itself always Perfect
Happiness. I have literally experienced this transmission thousands of times in
Adi Da's physical company, and untold number of times every day throughout the
day, whenever I "tune in" on His Transmission. It is 100% reliable and 100%
available. But Divine Enlightenment — "Perfect Happiness" in every
moment, as you described it — requires not only the availability of the
Transmission of Perfect Happiness, but (over time, via intense practice) the complete
transcendence of the ego on every level (gross, subtle, and causal) on the part
of the devotee. It is the most profound "creative accomplishment" humanly possible,
as Adi Da has described it, and it hinges on personal responsibility. Some
people who romanticize Spiritual Realization might imagine a "truly effective"
Transmission should be able to wipe out the ego permanently, in something like
a "weekend enlightenment" (irrespective of how much or little a person is willing
to sacrifice of themselves). But that's just "consumer mentality" talking: "There's
'fast food', so why not 'fast enlightenment', in the easiest, most 'fun' way?"
But such thinking completely ignores the actual historical track record. All
the genuine saints and yogis of past centuries knew what a profound self-sacrifice
had to accompany the gift of Transmission they received from their Spiritual Master,
in order for they themselves to Realize anything great Spiritually.
As consumers, we want to be entertained, so a teacher must be entertaining
these days to attract students. We like to hear interesting stories told in an
amusing way, and we want new and fascinating teachings. When we hear the same
teachings over and over we get bored and set out to find something new and different.
. . . Consumer mentality insists on instant gratification of our desires.
In the spiritual life we say we want a close relationship with a spiritual mentor,
but when that mentor's spiritual guidance challenges our desires or pushes our
ego's buttons too much, we stop going. At the beginning of our practice, we profess
to be earnest spiritual seekers, aiming for Enlightenment. But after the practice
has remedied our immediate problem upset from a divorce, grieving the loss of
a loved one and we are happier, our attention shifts once again to seeking happiness
from possessions, romance, technology or career, and spiritual interest fades. Today's
consumer expects things to be easily obtainable without much effort. . . Receiving
lengthy teachings or doing complex spiritual practices takes time that modern
consumers seldom have. Our time is taken up with families, jobs, hobbies and sports;
spiritual practice should not impinge on those pleasures and responsibilities.
So we ask our teachers to 'modernise' the practices, to shorten and simplify them
so that they will fit conveniently into our lives. As consumers functioning in
a world of supply and demand, we take our business elsewhere if our wishes are
not satisfied.
Stephanie Kaza
Hooked!
Buddhist Writings on Greed,
Desire, and the Urge to Consume
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It's something like wanting to become a Navy SEAL (a member of a "SEa, Air, and Land" team, the United States Navy's premier special operations force). It's no fault
of the Navy SEAL program that most applicants don't become SEALs — most
who try out simply aren't up to it! It was the applicant's limitation, not the program's.
Fortunately, unlike the Navy SEALs, the Way of Adidam doesn't "kick you out",
if you can't Realize Divine Enlightenment in a single lifetime. There is no time
limit, and the practice still works across lifetimes, if its basis (the devotional
connection to Adi Da) has been firmly established.
If we look at what percentage of saints
there are among Catholics in general, it's going to be very low! Out of curiosity,
I once did a "back of the envelope" calculation:
Imagine evaluating the subjective success rate of Catholicism solely
on the basis of how many saints it had produced. Currently there are about 1.1
billion Catholics. If we were to try to estimate the total number of Catholics
over the last 2,000 years, we'd have to place the figure at many billions (let's
say 5 billion, for the sake of argument that's probably an underestimate.) So
far as I can determine, the total number of saints and beati so designated
by the Catholic Church is a little over
10,000 (with the saints comprising over 5,000 of those). So if you are a Catholic,
what are your chances of becoming a saint (or at least being beatified)? The math
works out to .0002%, or 1 in every 500,000 members.[1]
Chris
Tong
Getting
the SUBJECTIVE Facts Straight
About New Religious Movements
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Now, because Divine Enlightenment requires not only the fourth to fifth
stage degree of self-transcendence that saints demonstrate, but perfect, complete
self-transcendence — you can't permanently realize what you described as
"perfect happiness" without perfect "self"-transcendence — we would expect
the "statistics" to be even lower for Divine Enlightenment. Who knows what they
will turn out to be: 1 in every million? Since we currently have a couple of thousand
devotees, we wouldn't necessarily expect to find any Divinely Enlightened
devotees yet. Of course, the power of Adi Da's Transmission mitigates the
statistics, somewhat — and that is why there are two devotees practicing
in the levels of advanced practice just short of Divine Enlightenment. People
who don't understand the extraordinary nature of this accomplishment might think
"two" is a dismal figure. But in reality, two is truly astounding.
Adi Da puts the matter this way:
It has been suggested to Me that some people may be reluctant to
take up the Way of Adidam because they do not already see the larger gathering
of My devotees moving far ahead in practice. Do people refuse to join the Catholic
church because its members are not showing the requisite signs for official sainthood?
Do people refuse to join other religious communities because the members are not
yet Realizers? Then why should such a measure be placed on this community? I
am the necessary and complete Realizer here with My devotees. If some who practice
in My Company become involved in the advanced and the ultimate stages of life,
that is also great and remarkable, but, as is also the case in all other religious
communities, most practitioners of the Way of Adidam are (at least at the beginning)
ordinary. If (as is most often the case) their practice is of the more
ordinary kind (and, thus, marked by a tendency for them to limit themselves, to
one or another degree, via lesser life-choices and more ordinary aspirations),
practitioners of the Way of Adidam will not, unless and until that limiting tendency
is purified and gone beyond, become Realizers (in the [ultimate] sense), or even
truly advanced practitioners, in this lifetime. However the case may be, what
even all practitioners of the Way of Adidam must first accomplish is the basic,
but also truly profound, conversion from egoic worldliness to a truly authentic
God-Communing life. Therefore, the authenticity of the general gathering of My
devotees does not depend on the movement of the entire membership into the advanced
and the ultimate stages of life, but it depends only on the general establishment
of a truly God-Communing Way of life in My Company.
Avatar Adi Da Samraj
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I can testify to this point — I
am profoundly grateful to be associated with a Transmission and a Way that will
eventually realize Divine Enlightenment, and which gives me the taste of That
(and the confirmation of that Ultimate Destiny) every moment of the day that I
engage the practice of the Way of Adidam, and submit myself to Adi Da and His
Transmission of Himself and His Divine State. The Transmission is self-authenticating.
Anyone who actually does this practice, and has been given the gift of being able
to tune in on Adi Da's Transmission, knows: - that the Transmission
is perfect;
- that the only thing limiting it in any moment is one's own
ego;
- that the permanent Realization of Perfect Happiness is certain,
if one persists in the submission to that Transmission.
It may take
lifetimes for some of us — and much less, for others — but it's a
guarantee, authenticated by the Revelation granted in any moment of re-tuning
in on that Transmission. Some readers may balk at the "lifetimes" timespan
that it may take for most of us, and without considering it more deeply, casually
conclude that it doesn't matter how many lifetimes it takes, if it takes more
than this one lifetime, then that's too long and it's not worth even beginning
in this lifetime. But — if you can truly feel how much suffering is possible
in a single lifetime; how in one's future lifetimes one is not guaranteed to be
in circumstances as fortunate as one may find oneself in this lifetime; and how
the whole planet may be in for a much lower quality of life for increasingly more
people as time goes on, and resources become increasingly scarce — then
you'll appreciate the difference between being Enlightened in, say, ten or a hundred
lifetimes, and a billion lifetimes:
The conditional cosmos is structured in such a way that, in spite
of all errors and egoity, all beings will ultimately be purified. But if you know
that even though this is so, you still might have to go through billions upon
billions of lifetimes under all kinds of dreadful conditions, including spending
uncountable spaces of time in hells of suffering [between lifetimes], then there
is no consolation in the knowledge that everyone will ultimately be Liberated.
Therefore, you must know how you can cooperate with the Liberating Divine Principle
so that you are not reinforcing egoically "self-possessed", disturbed, painful
conditions of existence, but are rather advancing toward and entering into more
and more of the profundity of Perfectly self-transcending God-Realization and
the Ultimate Destiny of life in the Divine Self-Domain. This is what you must
devote yourself to, what you will devote yourself to if you understand, if you
hear Me and see Me and Awaken Spiritually through My tangible Spiritual Baptism.
Then your life must become cooperation with that Liberating Force.
Avatar
Adi Da Samraj, "This Liberating Impulse", Easy
Death
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Plus, it's not like taking up the Way of
Adidam leaves you in utter misery between now and Divine Enlightenment! The quality
of one's living is completely transformed by the intuition of Divine Enlightenment
that is given by Grace in every moment of practice of the Way of Adidam. It is
ecstatic!
Even those devoted to Most Perfectly self-transcending God-Realization
suffer, but they suffer in the peripheral vehicles of the conditional self. In
Communion with Me, you contact the inherent Love-Blissfulness of existence, and
those aspects of your existence that are conditional, in which you are suffering,
or even experiencing pleasure, become literally peripheral. You can enjoy that
Fullness, then, even prior to Divine Enlightenment. It is simply that in the passage
between the sixth stage of life and the seventh stage of life, the Fullness of
Divine Self-Realization becomes permanent, no longer conditionally Realized.
Avatar
Adi Da Samraj, "This Liberating Impulse", Easy
Death
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It should also be noted that the process
of growth in the Way of Adidam is not linear in its difficulty. In a real sense,
the hardest period is right at the very beginning, which is the obvious reason
why there are so many beginners in the culture of devotees at the present time:
The most difficult stage is the one of transition from Lawless, subhuman
existence to the responsible beginning of spiritual life in the Way of Adidam.
After that, the whole affair is more creative and freely voluntary. Thus, in the
earliest stages of life, where personal, moral, and religious preparation is developed,
much attention still remains in reactive and self-indulgent physical, emotional,
and mental patterns. But as the stages of true practice of the Way develop, there
is less and less of the mechanical and self-conscious attachment to the structures
of the body-mind. As the Way of Adidam develops, the entire lower body-mind
becomes Awake in the prior Fullness of the Divine. Thus, social, dietary, sexual,
and other areas of habit and obsession gradually relax and are sublimed through
ecstatic Communion with the Divine. As a result, by the time the devotee makes
the transition to the advanced levels of practice, there is no longer any overriding
need to indulge such habits, and he can easily and naturally maintain a daily
practice that is wholly regenerative, moderate, and free of the accumulating effects
of enervation, toxicity, distraction, reactivity, doubt, and unlove.
Avatar
Adi Da Samraj, "The Most Difficult Stage"
The Enlightenment of the Whole Body
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Therefore,
for those of us who are not already Divinely Enlightened (or "never less
than perfectly happy", as you put it), what we can focus on is strengthening
our connection to Adi Da — our resort to that Transmission — to the
point where, when we die, the connection persists, and in future lifetimes, we'll
be able to continue deepening that connection and more profoundly Realize the
Revelation with which we are Graced in every moment of practice.
Spiritual life is about Realizing utter Love-Bliss, greater Bliss
than is realized through sex or any other conditional experience. Such Love-Bliss
is available before, during, and after any conditional experience. If you Realize
It, if you devote your life to the Realization of That, then That is what you
get a life devoted to the Realization of That, a life of Communion with That.
Then you will link your present life with What is Prior to this life, whereas
if you devote yourself to the human conditions of existence for their own sake,
you do not link yourself to What is Prior to this life. You link yourself to the
same thing again. You perpetuate it, through reincarnation or simply through repetition
in one form or another after death. . . . If you merely use up your life,
indulging mind as it already is, as you accumulated it while alive, then the after-death
states will be conventional, mediocre, relatively unpleasant, perhaps dreadfully
unpleasant, until another embodiment. If you use your life for the sake of transcendence
and change mind, purify mind, release yourself from its limits, move into a higher
consciousness, a higher mind, and, as My devotee, move even beyond mind to the
point of complete Divine Enlightenment and relinquishment of conditional existence,
Divine Translation is the Destiny you will Realize. But even if you do
not fulfill the course of self-transcending practice to that ultimate degree,
after death you will at least be associated with the ascended realms, the higher
frame of mind, rather than the hells, the purgatories, the lesser states, where
people rattle against one another like they do here. Time in those hellish realms
is even longer, but it does exhaust itself eventually, so that there is new embodiment
in a form such as this or something that fulfills its characteristics in a similar
fashion, thus giving you the opportunity to transcend the mind but in a more profoundly
purified condition. Re-embodiment is then associated with a capability to link
up with the Spiritual Process in its advanced stages.
Avatar
Adi Da Samraj, "This Liberating Impulse", Easy
Death
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Because the Way of Adidam Ruchiradam is
a seventh-stage Way based on immersion in Adi Da's Divine State of Perfect Happiness
from the start, we don't need to be already Divinely Enlightened to know that
That is the ultimate Realization of our continued practice; we just have to be
able to tune in on His Transmission of Perfect Happiness in any moment. And all
devotees can do that, to varying degrees (depending on their own karmic, egoic
patterns, the degree of self-understanding to date, etc.); so all devotees are
in a position to already confess their Ultimate Destiny, through the Grace of
Adi Da Samraj. * * * So in answer to your question:
there is a vast body of evidence (some of it already available in the stories
and articles on this site) that demonstrates the extraordinary nature of Adi Da's
Transmission, and Its absolute reliability and availability. My strong
recommendation to you is this: after you consider this evidence, move forward
yourself . . . from "seriously considering the argument of the Spiritual
Master for decades", to combining yourself with Adi Da's argument by taking
up the practice of Way of Adidam. "Perfect Happiness" will then
cease to be merely an "argument" or a "teaching" for you.
It will enter the realm of experience and Revelation. |
