a talk by Da Free John
November 22, 1985
Originally published in Crazy Wisdom Magazine April 1986
MASTER DA: You think of the seventh stage of life as an ideal, a goal of life, a status of some kind that glorifies your personality, your egoity. It is nothing of the kind. It is a matter of responsibility. The Teaching in its most radical form is a knife, or to use a traditional metaphor, a diamond cutter that slices through all of this bondage, displaces it, and allows you to exist in the context of existence totally. That is the seventh stage of life. The first six stages of life are not that. They are a school of progress through and beyond the ego. The ego ought to be cut through, undermined, cut off at its core, at its root, and you should Stand Free, functioning in the terms of the seventh stage of life. That is my Teaching. That is the Way in its fullest or most radical form. The Knee of Listening, as I indicated in the Testament, epitomizes that radical Teaching. It accounts for each of the progressive stages of life.
In the midst of your motives, enquire “Avoiding relationship?” or recognize contraction in the context of any moment in the first six stages of life, and you should be able to be Free. If your enquiry were true, you would cut through it all, instead of dallying stage by stage, as if you had forever to evolve and become responsible. If your enquiry were true, you would cut through it all rather readily. It is not an afternoon’s work – it is a Great Affair. However, it will not take lifetimes or even most of your life if you are truly serious about the matter. It should occupy you a finite number of years. Under the best of circumstances, you would begin to be prepared for this Realization from birth. Devotees should be functioning in the terms of the seventh stage of life in their maturity, in their late thirties or forties.
As I have indicated in the Dawn Horse Testament, there may be some individuals who demonstrate readiness for the seventh stage practice much more quickly, who move through the stages much more directly, so that even in their twenties or so they may function in the context of the seventh stage. Such great spiritual maturity is the basic human event. It is not something to plod toward while you spend your time giving yourself up to your egoity stage by stage. You should use this Teaching to cut through the self-contraction for the sake of everyone. You should assume such responsibility, such intensity of practice.
I take all of your impediments, tendencies, and demand for more time into account. Therefore, the Way accounts for all of the possibilities that human beings may introduce into this process. The Dawn Horse Testament is the summary of all that. As I indicated in The Dawn Horse Testament, however, this Teaching in its most radical form is epitomized in The Knee of Listening, and the Way in its most radical form is what you are called to, however it may work out in your case owing to your slowness or tendencies or mediocrity. The Way in its most fundamental conception is a razor, a cutting edge, that undermines the ego directly at its root. Therefore, you ought to be able to accomplish the Way in its fullness in a finite period of time. If all devotees did so, the culture of this Way would be profoundly transformed. If all of mankind did so, not only would mankind be established in the Great Culture of the Whole, of Reality itself, but mankind would then be able to take responsibility for all the terrible problems that it creates and suffers. Quite naturally, inevitably, such an Awakened Intelligence would immediately change the effects that mankind is creating in its adolescent exploitation of the world and of fellow humans. It would all cease.
For those who are up to truly listening to and considering the Teaching, the most radical principles of this Teaching are the core of their consideration. The Way in its summary description accounts for all the limitations that any individual may bring to this consideration, but in its most fundamental form the Teaching is radical and is about cutting through the limitations of this man-mind directly and even quickly. You all are proposing to spend lifetimes dabbling in spiritual life and are even willing to spend the rest of this life settling for something that does not amount to much more than civic religion, consoling beliefs – the sort of stuff that can pad this suffering egoity – whereas egoity itself must be undermined! Cut through! All the mind built on it must be transformed by that understanding.
I consider the progress of this practice stage by stage. On the other hand, you must look at yourself in any stage and pass through these stages – either simply surrender to the Divine Condition or, via understanding, enquiry, and Recognition, cut through them in this most radical sense. Either approach is fine. They are equally direct if they are done most profoundly. [Master Da snaps His fingers several times.] Pass through these stages just like that. Transcend the limitations of desire and attention and energy in each moment, in each stage. The stages are not there to be fulfilled, they are there to be transcended, but you become so enamored of the consoling experiences of each stage that you make a lifetime or lifetimes out of each one. That is what mankind is doing by tendency, you see, not merely all of you. My consideration with you is radical. Those stages through which mankind is slowly evolving, even as forms have evolved on earth, are not an end in themselves, are not the purpose of existence – they are there to be transcended, not to be fulfilled.
Therefore, if you practice the Way most directly and fully with great seriousness, you will transcend the motives associated with each stage directly and in a finite period of time. Thus, the movement from Friend of The Laughing Man Institute through the sixth stage of membership in The Free Communion Church should be direct and quick. Not a weekend, not a year, but a few years – that is all. Many of you have already been associated with me and this Way long enough that by now you could have taken up responsibility for the seventh stage of life. It is not a badge of status. You see the way the world thinks about religion – that is how you think about it as well, as if suddenly you are worthy of praise because you are an Enlightened personality. That is not the purpose or function or real result of Enlightenment, you see. Enlightenment is an end in itself. The clarification, the responsibility, the fullness of Transcendental enjoyment that it permits is its value, and these are not things that the ego attains. It is simply a matter of inherence in That which exists eternally, and which already exists conditionally. Enlightenment simply makes it possible for all of that to function, to be, and to be real. That is all that Enlightenment is. So few people enter such a stage of responsibility that whenever one does, or is reported to have done so, all the irresponsible people on earth want to make much of it, or make nothing of it perhaps, but it is thought of as a kind of attainment or as an anomaly, a badge of some sort.
When I speak of the seventh stage of life, I am speaking about the assumption of responsibility for what simply is the case even now. I am not speaking of an attainment for which you should be congratulated. Therefore, in my recent discussions with you I have been speaking primarily about this fault-the refusal to accept responsibility for what you have been given. I am not suggesting that all of a sudden people should claim advancement that is not true of them. I have criticized this tendency on the part of some people to imagine spiritual attainments, this need for attention that is typical of all egos. I am not suggesting that that is all right and that now you should all say you are FCC 6 or Crazy Wisdom Fellowship members, you see. I am calling you to examine your refusal to be responsible for what you are given and your refusal to apply the Teaching to the present moment of your existence. You must cut through the limitations of your present stage of life and practice literally cut through them, at the root, undermine them, be free of those limitations! It is not a matter of perfection. It is a matter of standing Free. It is not a matter of perfecting the body-mind. It is a matter of Communing with That which is already Perfect, Transcendental, and Free. It is a matter of responsibility. Everything that can grant you such responsibility is given for free. It is already there. The Grace is given. The Teaching is given. But what will you do with it?
You are tending to function like mankind at large, which is destroying the world, destroying human life and all life. That is how you are tending to function. That is what that mind is that you are always contemplating-constant thinking. That mind is destroying the world and making you unhappy. You must consider its expression everywhere, not just in mental terms, but emotionally, socially, physically, functionally, altogether-and cut through it, surrender beyond it, understand and transcend it by one or the other of the two basic approaches. You must transcend these limits of immaturity and self-possession. The Teaching is fundamentally a radical one. It is a radical consideration that enables you to cut through the limits of egoity in each of the first six stages of life.
If you are truly hearing Me, truly responding, truly serious about this matter, you will show the evidence of cutting through it. However, you are all waiting to be perfect examples of the first three stages of life, and then a perfect saint in the fourth stage of life, and then a perfect mystic in the fifth stage of life, an then a perfect sage in the sixth stage of life, and then someday in the distant future or in some lifetime, perhaps billions of years from now, you will be a perfectly Enlightened bodhisattva in the seventh stage of life, and go out the bright doorway at the end of it. You are adding time to the matter, and that is the business of egoity! It is not a matter of perfecting these conditional manifestations or stages of egoity, it is a matter of transcending the ego in the context of each of the stages. When you transcend egoity in the context of one stage of life, the next stage, the next level of phenomena, appears automatically. It is for this reason that I have said that when you have fulfilled the discipline of one stage you will already show some of the evidence of the following stage. This is among the kinds of evidence that should be observed when somebody is applying for a transition from one stage to another. The rite of passage from one stage to another is based on cutting through the limits of egoity in the context of an earlier stage of life. It is not a matter of having perfected yourself in that context. On the contrary – it is a matter of transcending yourself in that context. If you do so, certain kinds of experiences arise, and as they arise; you practice. Likewise in the context of your daily life.
True devotional recognition of Me is devotional Communion with Me As I Am. Merely to perceive Me as a physical Entity, and to be moved to respond to Me in some conventionally devotionalistic sense, is not true devotional recognition of Me. When you truly devotionally recognize Me, your devotional relationship to Me cuts through the root of egoity. Such is the radical devotional relationship to Me. And, by cutting through the root of egoity, the radical devotional relationship to Me leads directly (and in due course) to the only-by-Me Revealed and Given Perfect Practice of the Radical Reality-Way of Adidam Ruchiradam.
Aletheon
Whatever your stage of life, you will naturally maintain certain kinds of discipline without any effort. Certain kinds of signs will appear in your ordinary living. But they are not a matter of perfection. They are the evidence of one who understands, or one who is surrendered beyond the bondage of egoic dramatization. Therefore, cleaning up the planet requires much more than the interventions of government and technology. Mankind must awaken and respond to a greater view, transcend mind in its egoic ordinariness, transcend all of the culture and politics in society and technology created by the imposition of un-Enlightened egoic consciousness. That is a great project. Is anything like that likely to happen? Really? Do you imagine it is going to happen? Do you think there is going to be a community to consider this matter five hundred years from now on this Earth? You really believe so, eh? I think it is a throw of the dice, a possibility. The mass of those who call themselves human beings now may be working out their destiny in some other subtle space by then.
The ego is destructive. The ego is Narcissus. Make a whole world out of that and what do you think will happen? And that is merely in addition to the inherent suffering of conditional existence. Conditional existence is not one-sided. It is not just potential pleasure. There is always the opposite of everything. Pleasure is possible if you are lucky, but there is a lot more that is frustrating and painful, and it is all coming to an end. All of this is in place even before you begin making life complex with your human devices. Even in the case of Enlightenment you still exist for the time being in the framework of conditional existence, recognizing it, Free. You are Established in the Divine Nature, the Divine Self-Condition, yes, but the body is still a body in this space here, subject to all of its changes.
Look at what a bet you have made. Look at yourself in your clinging to conditional existence, your clinging to your human life. Why are you clinging to it, when even a moment’s consideration ought to enable you to realize that you do not truly exist in this form but Stand always Beyond it in the Transcendental Space of Consciousness? That Realization, most primitively grasped, could vanish your attention from everything gross and subtle and conditional, but of course you are not tending toward that Realization because your attention is already committed to this condition, this body that you have apparently been born into. Why are you attached to it? I would say it is sex. That is basically it. That is why I have had to consider it with you all for so long-not meaning sex merely in the sense of genital intercourse, although that is a major instrument you have for exercising this motivation-but the intense pleasure in the body that you are attracted to, and which you read in primarily sexual terms.
There is no other pleasure you experience in the body that holds a candle to sexual excitation and orgasm-not one. That is it! That is the primary pleasure, the principle of pleasure. It is exercised through the sexual mechanism, and that opportunity is the reason you are attached to the body. Of course, Nature has guaranteed this motivation for its own reasons. It is part of the reproductive mechanism for keeping forms duplicating themselves. You, however, read it as intensity of enjoyment. You even read it as happiness. As a result, you are always trying to re-achieve it. Well, that one commitment, that simple identification with the body for the teenager, but in infancy-has caused you to buy everything that the body can potentially experience. Thus, in order to be able to exercise this possibility of intense enjoyment primarily through sex, you have bought death, disease, old age, separation, pain, frustration, every imaginable obligation, every kind of inconvenience, convenience, all of it! You have bought it all. And really, the only reason you were interested in it to begin with was because you wanted to experience intense pleasure. That is really the only reason. If there were not the capacity for intense pleasure, who would be interested in persisting in this form? You would be easily moved beyond it.
There is a pulse, an energy, in the body, and while you are youthful and have various capacities to move about and so forth, in other words to exercise yourself through desire, you feel that this motivation toward pleasure is logical and can be accomplished. The longer you live, however, the more experience you have, the more the totality of things impinges itself on you, the less comfortable you become with this whole matter of being identified with the body, and at last you forget why you identified with it to begin with. Moreover, the survival needs of individuals, of groups, and of the State intervene, and propagandize all the time against that very pleasure. The very reason that human beings are attached to being in the body is exactly what the State opposes through all of its propaganda. The State, which is the voice of mankind’s collective survival motivations, is seeking survival through order, and therefore from the State’s point of view the principle of intense personal pleasure must be overcome. Therefore, survival demands at the most ordinary level are creating a voice in the world that constantly suggests to you that you must give up the motive of pleasure, of identification with the body, which is the only reason you are interested in surviving to begin with! And now for the sake of survival you are being asked to give it up.
In truth, yes, this motivation to pleasure must be observed, must be understood, must be transcended. It must be transcended, not eliminated in the strategic sense, but transcended in the Great Reality. The Great Purpose is the reason for intelligently addressing the matter of pleasure, or the matter of sexuality-whereas you have received negative suggestions of every kind all your life about pleasure, about sexuality, very often through the voice of religion, and you think all of that sex-negativity has something to do with God-Realization. It has nothing to do with it! As a result, you are very complicated about this matter of pleasure, and you are debilitated in your capacity to even observe this fundamental motive.
You are unable to dismiss the world as a dreamlike vision, which is really all it is. Why can’t you just fall out of it into God? It is because you are interested in this possibility of intense conditional pleasure. You are intensely focused on it. Yet all the purposes of survival are impinging on that purpose of enjoyment. You did not come here merely to survive, but having chosen to identify with the body, you bought the survival game also. Therefore, you have bought the taboos, the social impositions, the propaganda against pleasure-and have thereby undermined the very purpose for which you became identified with this body to begin with.
Since you are so interested in intense enjoyment, investigate the matter! What exactly is intense enjoyment? Find out exactly where there is intense enjoyment. Where is Happiness itself, fullness of Being, Free and Blissful? You are committed to that-that is why you identify with the body-but you have bought so much negativity along with it, are so bewildered by it, that you cannot even investigate this fundamental matter. And of course you must investigate it if you are to Realize the Truth. You likewise must participate, at the basic level of responsibility, in the survival motives of mankind, the motives of social order and so forth, which are reasonable enough up to a point. However, you must also go beyond that. You must enter into a much more profound consideration than the ordeal of collective survival. You are not doing that particularly well, because you are still functioning on the basis of this original, uninspected commitment, which is fundamentally sexual. Sex is the means whereby you acquire this intense whole body oblivion of pleasure. That is why you are frantically involved in it.
You are all homely human survivors, you see, being calmly married as if there were no great intensity involved in your motivations to have done that. But I know that is exactly why you are in these situations here. And you are not even all that successful in your choices to develop such enjoyment-you are always talking about all the problems of your personal sexual experiences-your problem, your spouse’s problem, all of it, you see.
You are always looking forward to the next intense pleasure. Even sex is a kind of eliminative pleasure. It is an eliminative exercise whereby you throw off body chemistry and energy. You relax the knots in the body-mind through orgasm, but in the process you merely deplete the mechanism and the knots return. Then you deplete them again, trying to empty yourself of the pain of desire. Well, carrying out that technique for a lifetime is one of the reasons that human beings die! There are many reasons individuals die when they do, but progressive depletion, emptying oneself without regeneration, without conserving one’s energy or bodily chemistry, is certainly one of them. Not only is the whole Earth in trouble because of all of its exploitation of the environment, but you are in trouble as an individual. You personally are in trouble, everyone is in trouble, and everyone has been in trouble all along. It is just that you have been desensitized to the reality of it.
Look at human beings and how they function. Do you think this is all a matter of decision? Intelligence? Conscious participation? Look at what everybody does! It is as automatic as what apparent beings do in a dream. It is just happening. There is nothing conscious or intentional about it ultimately. You are enchanted, the whole mass of beings here is enchanted, and humanity on Earth is enchanted in a unique sense. Enchantment is not exclusively associated with happy round-faced places full of flowers, you see. Enchantment is also associated with dreadful happenings-pain and sorrow, fear and anger. To be enchanted is to exist in an automatic state, a state that goes on and on and on, on its own. You think that you are participating in this state consciously and intentionally. I don’t believe it! It is just something you think. It is another characteristic of your mind, which is itself an automaticity, the result of an automatic gesture.
Everything is simply arising. You could be conscious, you could be intelligent, you could inspect it, you could become responsible, you could transcend it, but you are not tending to do that. Only the Native Being can respond and be quickened to the Divine Presence, to the Master and the Teaching. Then perhaps you can be Awakened, become conscious. That is my Purpose in my interactions with all of you, but you are not tending to hear Me. You are not tending to practice. You are willing to imitate religion and more or less automatically imitate certain features of the exercises associated with this Way, but I am talking about conscious participation in the Divine, cutting through these mechanical limitations directly, in every moment, literally cutting through them.
I was speaking of sexuality as a root motive, an expression of the fundamental motive toward pleasure in the body. I am not suggesting that you must become the enemy of sexuality, making a problem of it and spending your life trying to avoid it or eliminate it-no! Practice Divine Communion. Grant your attention to the Great Reality. You need not make a problem out of sex or any other Divine Communion and allow that Awakened Consciousness to shine in and relate to conditions, transform them. It is not a matter of perfecting them, nor is it a matter of strategically eliminating human functions, human experiences, even pleasurable ones, even sexuality. It is not necessary to make pleasure into an enemy. That is another dull, stupid human motivation, based on uninspected egoity, just another strategy of survival that the ego cooks up Narcissus in his hair suit. That is not it!
Perhaps none or very few of you will respond to this radical consideration. Nobody really has yet, so I am not all that hopeful about it. You have my Dawn Horse Testament, which is the total spectrum of consideration in summary and accounts for all kinds of people. Still, the essence of the Teaching is most radical. Will you be most radical in your application of it? That is the question, you see, and in my observation of everyone over the years, I have observed that that radical approach to this practice is not typical. Not at all. How do you think there got to be such a massive Teaching? Initially I wrote The Knee of Listening, opened up a storefront, and began to talk and sit with people. The original Teaching was presented in just that simple, most direct, radical form, but a larger, expanded Teaching, covering all possibilities and all details, developed over fifteen years in conversation with others. After that period I summarized the consideration in The Dawn Horse Testament, but my fundamental consideration with you has always been radical. I have observed that you do not tend to respond to that consideration, but I am not going to bury it. It is in the Testament itself, and I will always look for that rare individual who may move rather quickly through the stages. I will always look for people to truly understand me and bear down with this consideration and cut through these mediocre stages of semi-application of my Instruction that you call practice.
The Self-Nature is inherently pure, inherently Free. It does not need to be worked toward – it needs to be Realized directly. Realize it directly and you need not go about self-improvement, you need not plod through the six stages. You need not do any of that crap anymore. Wake up and stand Free and live on that basis. It is not a badge. It is not grounds for becoming a famous ego. It is nothing of the kind. It is Freedom itself. It is God-Realization, Transcendental Awareness, full Awakening to Reality Itself, transcending the illusions, the deluding power of mind, the illusions of conditional existence, the illusions associated with basic identification with the body, and the whole complex of illusory human mind. All of that must be observed and transcended in a flash of insight, not removed. In that flash of insight you Realize the Ground, the Nature of Nature, the Seat of it, the Condition in which it is arising. You do not eliminate these modifications-you Realize the Source of these modifications and Stand as That.
Religious people talk about God as reflected in the world, as an expression of the Divine – “God is the world” and so forth. If God is the world, God is you! Therefore, to Realize God you must Realize the Nature of Nature, the Source in place, the Source of your own presumptions, the Source of your own mind, of body awareness, the Source of Being, the Well of Being, the Consciousness in which this is arising and vanishing. Even mind is not a continuum, it is merely something arising and going away, arising and going away. Watch where it arises. Watch where it goes away. That is it! That is the Source of the Enlightenment of the Chinese Patriarchs1 – that Realization, that penetrating insight. On the basis of it you develop the expression of Enlightened existence, unless, having had a couple of moments of insight, you get caught up in all kinds of doctrine and purposes and more illusions and grant importance to that and become double-minded again with your preferences and your versions.
1. The Chinese Patriarchs were a lineage of Ch’an Buddhist Realizers that developed in China with the arrival of Bodhidharma from India around A.D. 520. Although Hui Neng, who died in A.D. 713, was the sixth and last of the formal Patriarchs, he had five great disciples who continued the lineage of transmission. Several of these Patriarchs and their spiritual heirs are among the “Great Individuals” mentioned by Master Da as His likenesses in The Dawn Horse Testament.
If you constantly Realize the Source and Stand as it, that is Enlightenment, Liberation. To do so does not move anything, it does not perfect anyone! It transcends all the stages of the progressive transcendence of the ego. It accomplishes them all in an instant. You must endure the progression of practice, with some of this insight serving you, for as long as it takes in your case. That is it. That is what you must do. But whoever you are and whatever stage of practice you are in, you could cut deeper. You could get to the Source more directly. You could practice more profoundly. You can always do that. Hearing me on this point does not mean that all of a sudden you are going to raise your hand and say you are ready for the seventh stage of life. No, it is a great matter, a profound Realization, and to Realize it means that you Realize that you Stand in a Place without a bottom or a top. It has no shape. It has no body or mind. It is utterly vanished of size and shape and relations. Some have called it a void, trying to suggest what it is like. There is nothing to stand on, nothing to hold on to.
The ego, the psycho-physical personality, does not want to hear anything about such a state. It is what egos think death is! You are not interested in death, and therefore you are not interested in Enlightenment really. You are not interested in Reality, because it is the same thing that you think death is and you do not want that. You are trying to build a great wall against death through experiencing, through identification with the body-mind, through thinking. You are trying to prevent yourself from enduring that apparent emptiness, whereas if you stepped beyond that through great insight, you would realize it is not a void, not a great emptiness. It is Fullness itself. All of this is It. It is Divine. It is infinitely, inherently Free and Blissful. You will not discover that, however, until you have no other alternatives, and you fall out of this illusion of thinking and practicing. Do you have any idea what I am talking about?
In the Vedanta Temple, the permanent Realization of That took place.2 It never changed after that. It has not changed since then. It is never going to change. It cannot change! It was essentially the same realization that had occurred many times in my life, but now the fullest awareness of it altogether was permanently Realized. The Divine Condition itself is the unique characteristic of this Realization, and it is permanent. It cannot change. It is not based on anything conditional.
2. Master Da is speaking of His entrance into Sahaj Samadhi, or unqualified identity with the Radiant Transcendental Being-Consciousness Itself, which took place in your consciousness corresponds. All of conditional existence, even your own body, persists, but it is all at the perimeter of this Infinite Well. Imagine that you are situated in a well, or in an immense space, and that that is your consciousness, and that your body is visible to you on the horizon. It is hard to say how far off it is – a mile? Twenty thousand miles? It is hard to say. You have such extraordinary vision and you still can perceive and sense it, but it is peripheral, it is just arising, and you in no way differentiate it from this Well of Infinite Being.
Since that perfect Awakening I have endured and experienced every kind of change in the body-mind, including profundities of a yogic nature. All kinds of extraordinary things have occurred in this body-mind and through it. Still, the Realization has never changed. The high matters, the ordinary matters, the ordinary thoughts, everything – none of it has changed that Realization. Nothing can change It. There is no identification whatsoever with the conditional state, absolutely none. Conditional states continue entirely on their own and are completely recognizable. They are not becoming perfect.
There are extraordinary things associated with this person you see before you, but on the other hand, there are hairy legs, and eyes, and all the rest of it. All that is arising, and it is simply, utterly recognizable. Conditions are not a limit that obstruct the Realization of Reality at all! Can you imagine such a Consciousness? I can make metaphors about it: Imagine existing in a formless space to which your consciousness corresponds. All of conditional existence, even your own body, persists, but it is all at the perimeter of this Infinite Well. Imagine that you are situated in a well, or in an immense space, and that that is your consciousness, and that your body is visible to you on the horizon. It is hard to say how far off it is – a mile? Twenty thousand miles? It is hard to say. You have such extraordinary vision and you still can perceive and sense it, but it is peripheral, it is just arising, and you in no way differentiate it from this Well of Infinite Being.
That is one way of describing it. It is something like that. What I am describing, however, is not something that is outside your experience. That Condition is exactly so for you now. Exactly so. You are exactly in that Place now and it is the same Place. It is not your own personal infinity. It is the only Infinity, the only Well. However, conditional perception still arises, and you are apparently, mysteriously, related to a specific individual form in the midst of this mess of positive and negative suffering, and interest, and pleasure. You sit in that same Space even now. It does not make any difference what arises, pleasurably or painfully, in the body or in the environment or in mind-you are aware of it, are you not? You are aware of all of it, then. There is no subjective portion of it that you are, and from which position are aware of everything. You are aware of all of it. You observe every thought. You observe the sensations in the body, pleasurable or painful. You observe the relations of the body, the relations of the mind. You observe these. Now what is that position? What is its nature? What position are you actually in now? Right now! You! Right now. What kind of state are you in, observing all of this? Experience that State. First notice that you are only observing everything, but then become aware of that State. How big is that State? Where is it? Who is it? What difference do all these words make? It is so! That is it!
All of your efforts and puzzling and questions and thinking are based on having identified with the periphery. Make that identification and then existence is complex. But it is an imaginary gesture, the kind of thing you may do in a dream. It is an enchanted occupation. In Reality, you are always in the same Position, and it is Transcendental, Infinite, and Free. It is all Energy and all Consciousness. Everything that arises conditionally is just an apparent play on It. There is not anything separate from it, not anything binding. Everything is inherently recognizable by Consciousness Itself. That is your very Position.
Perhaps in this moment you are having a satori of some kind about it or enjoying some sort of intimacy with it, but Realization itself, which is the origin of the seventh stage of life, is a matter of this Intuition becoming natural, inherent, and permanent, so that there is never any movement out of that Condition. Never! You cannot move out of it. How is it possible? That is just the way it is. It is the way it IS! You are always presuming a position based on enchantment, on another state. You blink at the horizon and the next moment you are standing there! On the horizon you leave the Well behind you. Instead, stand in the Well always. Clear your perception. See it as peripheral. Stand just There. In effect, without strategically making an effort in that direction, that is what practice is about-becoming established through Divine Communion in the Inherent Condition.
You are presently bound and deluded by your energies, your thoughts, and so forth, and as a result you tend to conceive of this practice as something that takes place in the context of the body mind. You conceive of the practice as a process that begins by listening and hearing, and receiving the Blessing of the Spirit Presence, then submitting to that Presence bodily, letting the Current be felt moving through the frontal line and then up the spinal line and so on. The progression of the stages seems natural to you, but by conceiving of it in those terms, you are like a person in a dream trying to run in sand while being chased by a monster. You think that you are going to accomplish all of those stages by persisting in the view you are presently holding on to, but in fact you do not accomplish the stages. You do not move at all! You do not progress through the stages. There is no effort that accomplishes the stages.
How, then, does a person make transitions between the stages? On the basis of submission, fundamental understanding, and intuition of the Divine Condition that makes it no longer a struggle to be associated with the previous conditions. Now there are new conditions, also new desires. You fumble around with them until this same position of inherence arises naturally, either through enquiry, re-cognition, or surrender. Until you have understood or surrendered fully to That which is Perfect, there is an endless stream of instruction, endless conversation. And when there is Realization itself, when these conversations have accomplished their purpose, then we can continue to talk with one another, but that talk is basically all small talk then. Even the highest dharma consideration is just “how do you do?” Don’t you think?
DEVOTEES: Yes.
MASTER DA: You do? Pity. You are always ready to resort to mind, always ready to pollute another river, always ready to throw another fart into the sky. All this progress, conceived either in terms of spiritual culture or in terms of technological worldly society-what is all this “progressing” doing anyway? It is polluting the world and confusing mankind. Well, you must understand that progress does the same thing in your own place. The Way is not about progress. It is about penetration of the insult of your own illusion. Don’t you see? There is nothing I can do about it. That is it. You will do it the way you want. If you want to take six billion lifetimes and six more stages that is your business.
Various forms of radical Teaching have been presented to at least some of mankind for thousands of years. It has not changed the world yet, and most people are not spiritual practitioners in any high sense at all. It is not that God selects a few to Enlighten-great Enlightened beings are God, are expressions of Divine Intervention. Beings in general are un-Illumined because of their own purposes. Illumination has been presented to you all night and day for a good portion of your life already, by me. In the case of many of you, it has been an option in every breath for the better part of a decade. Then why are you not Awake? It has something to do with you, not with me.
I presume my Teaching Work to be full, because there is no impediment in the Teaching, no impediment in me or my Work. If humanity is not Awake yet, it is not because the Teaching has not been given. If my devotees are not Awake yet, it is not because I have not Worked True in their company. It is simply the natural lag of egoity, and it is up to you to decide how important the matter is. I need not destroy myself to make a point. Either it is important to you or it is not. Either you will practice most profoundly or you will not. If you choose a mediocre life based on attachments and arrangements with conditions, then that is your choice. It is not damnation. It is just what it is-ordinariness, suffering in the midst of conditional existence. If you choose that, then that is what you get! God Bless you! In my view it’s a bad bet, but it is your business.
If you think there is some virtue in continuing to base your practice on identification with the body-mind, then that is your business. I have done everything I can and by merely persisting, merely Being, I will continue to do everything I can, but I see no reason to enter into that struggle by identifying with you as I have in the past. Now it is up to you. It is your responsibility to practice and it is the responsibility of devotees to maintain this Teaching consideration and this institution.