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Adi Da > Chris Tong > Prologue
Prologue

| This is the Prologue to Chris Tong's book, Finding the Divine In Person and Waking Up From the Dream. | |
What would your existence be like if you could exist forever, and be completely happy in every moment, forever? Including beyond death?
You would be completely free! You wouldn't need anything. You would no longer be devastated by anger, fear, sorrow, any threat, or any concern about survival. Existence would be a bliss ride! It would not matter what happened. . . you would remain completely happy.
That destiny and potential, and the practice that grows one into that destiny ever more fully is the subject of this book.
* * *
To enter into Divine Communion and disappear in Happiness
is my daily spiritual practice.
In Divine Communion,
the bliss of the Beloved fills my head. . .
often glowing in the head's center like
an electric heating element,
often dripping down like nectar
from the Eternal Sun infinitely above,
often causing the head to bow.
The happiness of the Beloved fills my heart,
and radiates outward as love in all directions,
blessing the world.
My whole body is vibrating with God.
My whole body is breathed by God.
My self is dissolved in God,
the Beloved of my heart!
* * *
The happiness that replaces the ordinary awareness of my body is located in a parallel dimension: the Source Dimension.
That Divine Dimension coincides with this dimension.
It coincides with my body, and Emerges into this dimension, so entry into It requires no lengthy process of changes in the material world, just a simple, inter-dimensional shift that is like walking through a portal. One simply invokes It with one's heart, invites It to Emerge, and, when it does, one shifts into that parallel dimension in an instant.
And so gladly! . . . entered as one is into the Dimension of Pure Happiness, instead of continuing to suffer the physical pains, knotted emotions, and endless ruminations of the limited body-mind-self separated from the Divine.
That Divine Domain is not merely a Dimension but a Person — the Divine Person, our True Self.
For this reason, access to the Divine Dimension requires the finite being to enter into relationship with the Infinite Being (that is not separate from the finite being, and that includes the finite being). It is a devotional relationship in which the limited, mortal, “little self” is happily, lovingly yielded — gloriously sacrificed in, dissolved in, and replaced by the Great One. God is not in us, nor is some part of God in us (a “Divine Spark”). Rather, we are in God. And all it takes to commune with God is to let go of the barrier of separation from God that we are creating. Our “self” is that barrier, and we must let it go in order to enter the Divine Domain. That yielding, that sacrifice of the "little self", is what ultimately allows us to go beyond identification with a limited body altogether and permanently, Realizing the Great One in Divine Enlightenment.
This is Divine Communion — the great freedom that is possible in every moment.
This is Divine Communion — which I am learning to do ever better, whole body immersed in that One.
Divine Communion gives the Divine access to our body-mind. This, in turn, enables the Divine to make evolutionary-scale changes to the body-mind that allow us to outgrow identification with the body-mind altogether. In so doing, Divine Communion grows into God-Realization — Divine Enlightenment, the complete Awakening from the dream of mortal, limited, unhappy existence.
Divine Communion is the running theme of this book. This book is an invitation to the reader to enter into Divine Communion. That invitation is sent straight to your heart, which always already knows what I’m talking about.
* * *
As I look back over my life, I see that that life has demonstrated a special talent for ferreting out and linking up with great breakthroughs, long before they become apparent in a big way to many others.
Because of that special talent for locating great breakthroughs ahead of their time, I chose Artificial Intelligence as my field of specialization back in 1980, when I was a Ph.D. student at Stanford University — 42 years before AI exploded onto the world stage in 2022 (in the form of ChatGPT), and everyone the world over became aware of its significance, and use of AI has become commonplace. I would go on to become a professor of Artificial Intelligence at a major university, and a leading researcher in my area of AI,[1] assisted in that research by my own Ph.D. students.
And because of that special talent for locating great breakthroughs ahead of their time, I became a devotee of Adi Da in 1989. (I will say much more about Adi Da shortly, and throughout this book.) Through Adi Da, I became tangibly aware (to my great astonishment) that the parallel, but long inaccessible Source Dimension of the Divine is now literally breaking through and Emerging into this conditional universe fully and finally — long before (and maybe even centuries before) this will become anything like common knowledge.
Even so, my purpose in writing this book is to let you in on this extraordinary secret, in its early days! The more people make use of the now fully available Divine and enter into Divine Communion for real, the more the world will be transformed by the Divine in the most wonderful ways.
* * *
So let's start at the beginning.
Let's not start our story at the dismal, outer edges of the Cosmic Mandala, where most residents are generally fixated on survival and obsessed with getting a little more money, attention, health, life, love, peace, and happiness.
Let's instead start with what is Always Already Great, Unlimited, Eternal, and Infinitely Happy.
Let's start at the Source.
Let's start with the Great Beloved.
Let's start with God.
FOOTNOTES
| [1] |
"Knowledge compilation"
is a subfield
of Artificial Intelligence in which researchers develop
program-writing programs called "knowledge compilers":
programs that are given knowledge about some task and how
to do it, and which then automatically create ("compile")
programs for doing that task, that drew upon the knowledge
we had provided. For example, we might give our "knowledge
compiler" a lot of knowledge about the task of creating
architectural floorplans for a house; the knowledge compiler
would then automatically write a program that would actually
perform that task (and perform it efficiently). For details,
see:
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