INTRODUCTION
(page 3 of 8)
"But where does the entire Truth lie?
What is unqualified Divine Enlightenment?"
In The Mummery Book, Raymond does not find that Consciousness in the room! And, so, his adventure is the challenge of "how to put It, there ". In other words, "Raymond's " consideration is about True Enlightenment — or the Realization of That Which Transcends the "room ".
The great issue of Avatar Adi Da's early Life was His enquiry: What is Consciousness?
This question sometimes took the tangible form of an image that would rise up in Him. He would see a great black stone set in what felt like a sacred enclosure — with a gathering of people, including Himself, seated in front, quietly gazing at it.
The stone, to Him, seemed to be a symbol for Consciousness, the Mystery of Being — which He felt, on the one hand, to be the Ineffable Source of the arising world, and, yet, somehow also directly connected to everything.
What was the relationship between Consciousness and phenomena? This was what He wanted to know. But there was no "answer " in this vision. While the Stone (or Consciousness) remained apart, the world of mere phenomena (or the conditional manifestations of Energy) was without meaning.
As Avatar Adi Da discovered during His early Life, this puzzle was exactly the motivator of the religious quest. God, or Truth, or Reality is felt to be absent, or apart, from the living world of energy and objects — and so this or that path is developed in an attempt to attain God, or Truth, or Reality.
Some esoteric traditions, as He discovered, try to resolve the matter by seeking for Consciousness via Energy, through practices such as Kundalini Yoga. In some other traditions (such as Advaita Vedanta), the practitioner is called to Realize Consciousness directly, eschewing the search for Enlightenment via the objects and energies of the phenomenal world.
But where does the entire Truth lie? What is unqualified Divine Enlightenment?
Part One of The Knee Of Listening is the story of the Sadhana (or Spiritual practice) engaged by Avatar Adi Da in His search for this unqualified Enlightenment, the Condition He already knew in His infancy as the "Bright".
His effort to recover the "Bright" was an immensely difficult human and Spiritual trial, in which He suffered all the limits, doubts, and struggles of an ordinary human being. At the same time, none of the ordinary (or even extraordinary) "answers " to life were satisfactory to Him.
Below outer awareness, He was always being led by the "Bright", responding to what He later called a "fierce, mysterious impulse " at the heart of His being. Driven by this hidden Grace, He Submitted to the Unknown and lived His unique Ordeal without any advance knowledge of what it was about or how it would turn out.
On the one hand, He was engaged in a profound process with Energy — while, on the other hand, He was absorbed in the deepest questions about Truth and Reality.
And so there is an intriguing double strand, a play of opposites, shaping His entire Sadhana. And these opposites — which He calls, at times, by different names, such as Awareness and Energy, or Consciousness and the Shakti, or the Heart and the Light — were always intimately connected.
The final stroke of the Divine Avatar's "Sadhana Years " is His complete Spiritual Realization of Consciousness-and-Energy as One Non- Dual Reality — or "Conscious Light ". The story of how this Realization finally emerged in Him is one of the most magnificent parts of the book. It is a unique Confession in the records of Spiritual Realization.
By the end of Part One of The Knee Of Listening, Avatar Adi Da has fulfilled the first part of His Avataric Divine Work — to regain the full, permanent Realization of His native "Bright" Awareness. At this point in the odyssey of the Ruchira Avatar, Consciousness has been restored to the "room ", and the relationship between Consciousness and objects resolved.
Decades later, in the following Discourse to His devotees, He explained this profundity very graphically:
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: If you examine objects more and more profoundly, sooner or later you get down just to Energy Itself, Light Itself. Similarly, if you go within, beyond all the outward functions, you get to Consciousness. Those are the two "extremes " of the One Reality. But they are not, in fact, separate realities — they are only presumed to be such, from your point of view. And this is the nature (or pattern) of un-Enlightenment.
Energy Is the Radiance of Consciousness Itself. Consciousness Is the Source-Position of Radiance Itself. Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Consciousness Is Love-Bliss Itself — Unconditional Feeling, Radiance.
When Consciousness (without limitation or dimensions) is Realized As Is, to Be Infinitely Radiant, One with Its own Radiance (or Energy, or Light, or Shakti, or Love-Bliss), and That is the (so to speak) "Point of View " with regard to objects that arise — then, in that case, all objects are (Inherently) Divinely Self-Recognizable.
Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Consciousness (or Fullness of Being) Divinely Self-Recognizes all phenomena in the Context of Itself — as transparent (or merely apparent), and un-necessary, and inherently non-binding modifications of the Self-Radiance of Consciousness Itself, the Divine Conscious Light Itself.
When there is this Awakening, it is obvious. In every moment, Natively, Inherently, It Is simply the Divine Conscious Light — the Infinite, Dimensionless, Uncaused, Eternal "Brightness " of Being (Itself).
— March 29, 1998
