RATTY, SOME EARLIER WRITINGS OF MY TEACHER (ADI DA) ON THE SAME SUBJECT:
The Structure of Illusion and Enlightenment
"I will describe the Structure in which we appear - since Awakening to this Structure is Enlightenment.
The Ultimate Reality or Truth is the Transcendental Person Infinite, Eternal Bliss, Prior to all kinds of relations. That Person is Radiant Consciousness, or Divine Ignorance Radiance.
The same Person, although One, is also Dynamic,expressed as an Infinitely Extended Process of numberless kinds of Manifest Play.
In that Play, self-consciousness arises in each specific process or apparent entity. And this self-consciousness within the Dynamic Play of Existence cannot know or experience the Divine Person over against itself. The Divine Person is a Unity, Who Transcends the Dynamic Play while also appearing to Pervade it and even to Be it. Therefore, to Realize the Divine Person, individual beings must transcend their manifest forms, or their independent existence in the Play.
The Divine Person does not appear as such to the independent conscious entities within the Play. Rather, the Ultimate Reality seems to be a hidden Transcendental Consciousness, over against the Universal Drama of all phenomena.
The entities intuit the Divine Consciousness through their own fundamental consciousness, which seems to be their essential or central condition of existence. Therefore, they may feel that God is Consciousness. But all of the phenomena of experience distract the entities and seem to bind them to what is not Consciousness.
Thus, the Divine appears to have divided Itself, becoming Consciousness on the one hand, and Dynamic Manifestation on the other. But, in Truth, the Divine is One, and this Self-Division in God is only an illusion, created by the presumption on the part of the entities that they are independently existing in a World of experience, separated from the Eternal Position of Transcendental Unity, or Bliss.
The living beings become convinced of their independence by virtue of the distracting power of manifest experience. They begin to turn from Intuitive Communion with the Divine Reality, and they turn toward the phenomena of the Play. Thus, experience continues, reinforcing the illusion of independence, separation from the Divine Condition, and necessary association with phenomena.
Entities thus develop desires and tendencies of all kinds, which trap them into automatic and uninspectable association with continued experience. They are launched on a space-time Tour of Possibility. But in that Process, the Bliss of God-Communion is replaced by inherent suffering, or self-possession.
Therefore, as experience develops, so also does the profound sense of bewilderment, despair, and the feeling of entrapment. The entity feels that it is an independent, conscious being with form in a World, and that it is necessarily associated with experiential phenomena. Happiness seems to require continued experience and improvement of experience. The Real, or God, is considered either to be perfectly interior to the World or else to be the Perfection of the World.
Such is the puzzle or dilemma of consciousness in the case of manifest individual entities, or souls in manifestation. The manifest soul, or entity, is an apparently independent consciousness (the manifest expression of the Divine Ignorance, or Perfect Consciousness), covered by or necessarily associated with a body-mind and an Infinite World of relations (the manifest expression of the Divine Radiance, or Perfect Bliss).
The only true "solution'' to this dilemma is an Awakening that inherently transcends every aspect or condition of the dilemma. Thus, the manifest soul must Awaken to the Realization that it is always already and priorly Free of all conditions of experience, or Radiance, the Absolute Personality, Who is the Person in the Play and the Person Who is Prior to the Play. Then all phenomena and every gesture of recoil from phenomena and toward Self Containment are Dissolved in Self-Sacrificial Communion with the Divine Person or Identity. And nothing is strategically excluded or included, nor may it be strictly said that the soul is either the same as God or separate from God.
There is only the Paradox of God, the Divine Person, and by virtue of Absorption in Bliss through that Paradox, the Eternal Self is Translated into the Eternal Domain of God, beyond all the illusions of separation and suffering."
Namaste!
Jim |
