INTRODUCTION
(page 4 of 8)

"Divine Enlightenment depends on the Awakening
of the most esoteric root-structure of the body-mind"

The Inmost Secrets of Divine Enlightenment

At the end of Part One and in Part Two of The Knee Of Listening, Avatar Adi Da "considers " the vast implications of What He has Realized.

By virtue of His absolute Realization of Reality as Conscious Light — beyond all limits of "point of view " — He is able to look at humanity's esoteric Spiritual traditions and comprehend them as a whole.

Through the living experience of His "Sadhana Years ", it became obvious to Him that Spiritual Realization is directly connected to the deep psycho-physical structure of the human being. Realization is not merely philosophy.

Thus, He makes sense of the otherwise bewildering array of different approaches to Enlightenment by showing how each approach (or school) is associated with the awakening of particular esoteric centers of the body-mind.

Divine Enlightenment, or the Realization of Conscious Light, depends on the Awakening of the most esoteric root-structure of the body-mind — a structure that has hardly even been observed, and never before fully defined in Spiritual literature.

Indeed, as Adi Da shows, this profound and original depth of the human structure cannot be fully Awakened merely by intense Spiritual practice or even by the Grace of the greatest Adept-Realizers. His Divine Intervention is required — not only to Reveal the inmost secrets of Divine Enlightenment, but to Awaken and Empower that living process in human beings.

After the narrative of His early Life and related journal entries, which comprise Part One, Part Two takes the form of a series of Essays, all of which refer to great individuals whom Avatar Adi Da describes as His "Adept-Links " to humanity's "Great Tradition " of Spiritual Realization.

Thus, His discussion of the esoteric traditions is not abstract, but developed in relation to the confessions of Enlightenment made by some of the greatest Realizers of modern times. Each one of them contributed, in a unique way, to His Life and to the process by which He came to understand the Spiritual significance of His Person and Work.

Two of these Realizers, Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, both of whom the Divine Avatar acknowledges as His "Forerunners ", played an ineffable role in His Incarnation. The mystery of His relationship to them gives the clue to the "pre-history " of His Appearance in this world, and what it took to draw Him down into human Form.

"Avatar" and "Incarnation"

The Eastern idea of an Avatar is one who comes to restore all to the Divine by re-establishing Spiritual law and giving a true Way of God-Realization. This understanding is reflected in the prophecy of Upasani Baba, who speaks of the coming Avatar as the supreme Dharma-bearer.

It is likewise expressed in the Bhagavad Gita that the Divine appears in human form in order to re-establish "righteousness ", or the right human and Spiritual order of things.

In the West, there is a different concept of Divine Intervention. The Western notion of an Incarnation (focused primarily on Jesus of Nazareth) has less to do with the giving of a Liberating Teaching and more to do with the Divine saving humankind by identifying, unreservedly, with the sufferings of humanity.

In His commentary on these two traditional notions of "Avatar " and "Incarnation ", Avatar Adi Da observes that, taken together, the traditions of the East and of the West point to the qualities that would be required in a truly universal God-Man, or "Avataric Incarnation ".

The "Avatar " tradition and the "Incarnation " tradition are complementary to one another. That is to say, properly speaking, neither tradition can rightly be said to represent a mythology (or a Truth) that is superior to that of the other.

Indeed, it is only by combining the basic (esoteric and exoteric) elements of the descriptions contained in both the "Avatar " tradition (and the total God-Man tradition of the East) and the "Incarnation " tradition (and the total God-Man tradition of the West) that a basically complete (traditional) description of the Ultimate True God-Man (or the God-Man Who may uniquely be described as the "Avataric Incarnation " of Real God, and Truth, and Reality) may be found — and that basically complete (traditional) description is the one that must be understood to be the one and great (collective — and, heretofore, relatively hidden) description of a true God-Man that is to be found in the Great Tradition of mankind as a whole.*

— Avatar Adi Da Samraj
The Truly Human New World-Culture
Of Unbroken Real-God-Man

next: Submission to Humanity

*Adi Da Samraj, "'Avatar' and 'Incarnation':
The Complementary God-Man Traditions of East and West ".

Avatar Adi Da wrote this Essay in response to two books — one by Geoffrey Parrinder,
Avatar and Incarnation: A Comparison of Indian and Christian Beliefs
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)

...and one by Daniel E. Bassuk,
Incarnation in Hinduism and Christianity: The Myth of the God-Man
(Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1987).

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