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Dimension 3:
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God can be Realized. Thus, God seems somehow to become effective in the world because God acquires agency through our responses. But where there is no response, there is no agency. Now, there is always some level of responding. In all the bits and processes of the universe, of the cosmos, and of all beings, there is a level of responding. Therefore, the Divine always has agency of some kind and is therefore also changing things somehow in the midst of this Mystery. Yet the response is not sufficient to create great and wholly positive agency. Only when the response is great does the Divine seem to be creative and active in a very positive way. The Divine can become very active and creative in the lives of individuals who do respond and yet seem to be wholly, profoundly absent from the world otherwise, because it is the response that gives the Divine agency. Without the response, it can seem as if there is no God or as if God is impotent. Thus, we develop all kinds of childish views about God in the absence of our own response and the response of others to the Divine. . . What is the seventh stage? It is simply that disposition in which our response to the Divine is complete. What are the stages previous to that? They are just stages of less than complete response, wherein certain dimensions of our existence are still somehow locked, contracted, unopened. There is only one Way and that is to surrender and respond completely to the Divine, depend absolutely on the Divine, inhere completely in God without any concerns whatsoever. Through our complete surrender every aspect of ourselves becomes an agent, a place of Divine Activity and Divine Influence. Therefore, surrender itself is sufficient. Everything else is done by Grace. Until we respond and give the Divine agency, nothing seems to be happening, everything seems to be difficult, and God is in doubt. Avatar Adi Da Samraj, "The Law is Absolute", 1982 |
It is true: the Force of the Divine in principle is an "All-Accomplishing Power" (Adi Da's phrase for It). But one of the main points of Adi Da's life story is that that Divine Power can't just manifest with a snap of an omnipotent God's finger. (There is no such omnipotent God.) It is a potential, not an already manifest fact. A profound sacrifice
involving an incarnation of the Divine in the conditional realm is required to manifest the Divine Power in the conditional realms, break the spell of egoity, and enable ego-transcending God-Realization for all. And then, once that possibility exists here, a further profound sacrifice on the part of each individual is required to break the spell of the ego in each one's case.
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My Physical Human Lifetime Of Avataric Incarnation here . . . Is A Constant Act Of Identification With Man . . . In Order To Learn Man . . . In Every Respect, and, Having Learned Man In Every Respect, To Teach and To Bless and To Liberate Man (and all, and All), In Every Respect (and Most Perfectly). Avatar Adi Da Samraj, verse 30, "Aham
Da Asmi" |
For a period of time after His Own Re-Awakening in 1970, Adi Da was incredibly optimistic about the potential of the teaching and practice He offered all, even suggesting (very early on) that an intelligent reader might be Enlightened after one reading of His autobiography, The Knee Of Listening (the only available book at the time). As it turned out, no one who came to Him at the time could come up to that, or even was able to fully practice the radical Way that He offered.
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The Knee of Listening is an esoteric textbook of the highest type. It is a Transcendental manual. If you studied it truly, considered it fully, you would bypass all of the first six stages of life and enter directly into the seventh. If you were truly intelligent, merely one reading would be sufficient to move directly into the seventh stage of life, not merely into the play of the origins of the seventh stage of life but into the Translation stage. But I understand fully where I am and where you are and what your stage of preparation represents. That is why I am here, to develop a culture of association with the possibility of Translation and account for all the motives of mankind, all the stages of transition toward Enlightenment and Translation. Avatar Adi Da Samraj, "Introduction", The Dreaded Gom-Boo |
So in 1974, acknowledging the force of egoity in general, and the particular form it took among Westerners in particular (in which all attention and energy was bound by preoccupations with money, food, and sex), Adi Da entered into the period of His work now known as "The Teaching Years", in which He took an indirect approach: fully engage egos as a sympathetic "brother" (Bubba) in their preoccupations, obsessions, and addictions; and then get them to see very directly that none of it was God-Realization. In principle, a full consideration of every area (and fascination) of egoic life should expose the limits of egoity, even as such a consideration had served the same purpose in Adi Da's Own early years of sadhana, and serve to free up devotees' energy and attention more fully, so it could be focused on the Divine. But devotees tended to get stuck in their egoic fascinations, rather than getting the more profound lesson about the limits of these fascinations, and the Greater Alternative. This ultimately led Adi Da to despair of this approach altogether, and then led to His Divine Emergence, in which the Divine was so fully integrated with (and manifesting through) His body-mind that His bodily human form itself could become the focus of the teaching and the practice.
Adi Da's work with devotees looked like a recurring alternation between a breakthrough on His part — in which the Force of the Divine would be made available in a fuller form, and Adi Da would be very optimistic about the increased possibility for devotees to realize the Divine on this new basis; and the discovery over time that, even with this greater Divine Opportunity, most devotees still couldn't take advantage of it to the degree of a significant advance in their practice:
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God is great. Unfortunately for you, bullshit is greater! Avatar Adi Da Samraj, The Baptism of Immortal Happiness, 1982 |
As each such phase would unfold, Adi Da would typically shift from an initial optimistic view that His newly magnified Revelation would be sufficient in Itself to overcome the force of egoity, to a view which increasingly emphasized the importance of right life and self-understanding, as the necessary companions of devotional response to His Revelation.
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I started Communicating this Wisdom-Teaching, rather bright-eyed, more than a decade ago already, and I am still struggling with the same lack of response in people that I encountered when I began. I have seen the usual, gleeful, sitting around-at-a-lecture attitude with which people respond to movies and TV. People are used to being sold everything, as if they can just have it at a cost they can comfortably afford. People are adapted to the psychology of the consumer. If something exists to be desired, you can have it just by coming into contact with it, or by going to a store, by picking up a book, and by going someplace for a weekend. Everything is supposed to be instantly consumable. Realization is not a consumable product. Spiritual Teaching cannot be presented as a consumable object. Because the world has gotten into such a bad state, and because the science of communication has advanced, the secret stream of human evolution and higher Teaching has become more public. As a result, the secret Teaching became part of the domain of business and superficial culture. All people want to be just as they are, and they want to enjoy themselves just as they are. Such is the common motivation to be exactly as you are and to enjoy yourself. If people had half a wit, The Knee of Listening would have changed your life! It has been in print since 1972, but you simply do not like the implications of The Knee of Listening. It suggests that you must change, you see. It suggests that you cannot enjoy the consoling religious ideas, you must have a fundamental understanding now, and if you live on the basis of that fundamental understanding, you will change your life. Your whole life will be taken up by disciplines, meditation, and God-Realization, but you do not want it. There is nothing I can do to make you understand. The Bodhisattva vow or any other vow does not really work, not in any ultimate sense. Nothing one individual can do in one lifetime is going to make the ultimate or absolute difference for mankind as a whole. Because of the nature of this material bondage that is humanity, the real implications of Spiritual Wisdom are not grasped. Look at the history of the traditions, the Truth is always difficult to communicate because the Truth is about waking up from the presumption you are making on the basis of manifest existence. The basic teaching and the practice of this Way is the understanding of this fundamental error. You cannot merely believe something positive and develop a true religious or Spiritual life. Enlightenment is not simply a matter of believing in conventional religious ideas that motivate you to be better. All such ideas must be understood. You must be found out and understood. You must enjoy this Awakening, this insight. You must hear the Teaching Argument. Avatar Adi Da Samraj, October 18, 1981 |
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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, "Self-Understanding", April 8, 1993 |
That devotees would not respond and grow even given His magnified Divine Revelation would bring Adi Da to a point of despair (or bodily disturbance, due to the backing up of the Divine Force in His body, through lack of devotees' drawing upon it) so profound that He would even die from it; but He would then return from that death, with the Divine integrated in a new and even more effective way with His body-mind, enabling an even more profound Revelation of the Divine, which would renew Adi Da's optimism, and begin the next phase of His work.
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