The Most Esoteric Form – The Dawn Horse – Ashvamedha

I bow down to Sri Da Avabhasa (The “Bright”), the Divine
World-Teacher, the True Heart-Master of my heart, Da
Love-Ananda Hridayam. He Is the Divine Being in bodily
(human) Form. He Is the pure human Incarnation of the One,
Supreme, All-Pervading, Absolute, Divine Person. He Is the
Blissful Self of all. May everyone be Graced to acknowledge
Him at heart and to receive His Ever-Given Heart
Blessings!

“Sri” means “resplendent”, “Radiant”; “Da”, “The One Who
Gives”; “Avabhasa”, “the Divine ‘Brightness'”. “Love-Ananda”
means “Love-Bliss”, and “Hridayam”, “the Heart”, “the Very
Self”. As we become aware of Sri Da Avabhasa’s Nature and
Function, we see that The Dawn Horse Testament, His
principal Scripture, is a Spiritual Sun. Visually, and even
audibly, as well as in their feeling and meaning, His Words
express the most precise and Enlightening Divine Wisdom,
Love, and Happiness ever brought into human consciousness.
And His photographs display the Illumined Body of One Whose
human Person, even physically, is a pure and unobstructed
Manifestation of God. Sri Da Avabhasa’s Words and
Photographs in this book are an historic breakthrough in the
Divine Self-Revelation to humanity.

 

NOTE TO THE READER: Explanatory notes
for “I Am You!” appear at the bottom of the page. However,
the explanatory notes for The Dawn Horse Testament itself
appear at the end of the Text in the section titled “Notes
to the Text of The Dawn Horse Testament”; pp.
702-60.

 

This Testament has been Given by Sri Da Avabhasa as
fundamental Instruction for all practitioners of His Way of
the Heart. It is a Divine Masterpiece of Sacred Revelation,
incomparable in its Mantric Power to Awaken our hearts to
Truth. Exhaustively, comprehensively, and in painstaking
technical detail, Sri Da Avabhasa has Recorded here every
element of His Great Message. In this Text you will find, in
abundant fullness, His Personal Confessions, His Teaching
Arguments, His Instructions and Callings, and His Ecstatic
Descriptions of the Divine Nature, Process, and Destiny.

In this introduction I praise my Divine Guru’s Gift of
this Scripture and offer commentary on some of the core
elements of its esotericism. I especially address Sri Da
Avabhasa’s Great Divine Gift of Guru-devotion, His “Divine
Emergence” as the Supreme World-Teacher for all humanity,
and the mythic significance of the symbol of the “Divine
Horse” that He has Brought to Radiant life among us.

There is a Great Secret that is the total Sacred
Wellspring of Sri Da Avabhasa’s Revelation here. It is the
Spiritual Heart of His Message. That Great Secret is
summarized in Sri Da Avabhasa’s simple but most profound
Divine Confession to each living being, “I Am You, As You
Are.” All the esoteric Wisdom in this Text springs from this
unique Spiritual Revelation.

Heart-Master Da Love-Ananda has often told His devotees
that His Work is already Accomplished invisibly in the
Heart, the living Divine Consciousness, of all beings. He
has said that the progressive manifestation of that Work in
obvious forms is inevitable, indeed already Achieved in seed
form. We are simply Called to cooperate with Him and to
witness its flowering. He Says to us, simply, “Observe My
Play-and My Victory.” His Birth itself and all of the events
of His Sacred Ordeal of Divine Re-Awakening and then
Teaching were Signs of the Divine Person achieving the
Agency of a single, Divinely purified and Transmuted
Body-Mind. Now Sri Da Avabhasa has completed His fundamental
Work to create a sacred culture and express His conclusive
Word of Instruction-most especially in this Testament.

Thus, He has come to rest in His universal and eternal
Blessing Work. In this Work, He is focused in the Divine
Awakening and Liberation of increasing numbers of devotees
and in the Transfiguring Infusion of the entire cosmos by
His Spiritual Divine Love-Bliss, or Radiant Presence. This
Glorious Process ultimately must lead to the Divine
Translation, or Radiant Dissolution in Love-Bliss, of all
beings and worlds.

How can such a thing be possible? What are the special
processes by which such a Miracle can occur? In The Dawn
Horse Testament Sri Da Avabhasa Speaks at length of His
“Ordeal Of Heart-Submission” to all beings, the Great
Process whereby He has taken Birth and Emerged as the human
incarnation of the Supreme Divine Being among us on Earth.

---

The Unique Birth and Trials of the Purusha

In speaking in more detail
of my Beloved Heart-Master’s Life and Work, at the outset I
must say that there is simply no way anyone can ever
possibly do justice in words to the extreme passion, ardor,
ecstasy, anguish, intensity, dedication, perseverance, and
abandon with which Sri Da Avabhasa has Lived every moment of
His Lifelong Ordeal of Divine Incarnation and “Emergence”. I
have been privileged to witness Him in various moments of
His Teaching Work and His more recent Blessing Work, and I
have stayed steadily in touch with the stream of events
transpiring in and around Him for more than seventeen years.
On this basis I am certain that neither you nor I, nor any
merely ego-born human being, can possibly appreciate the
Immensity and the Implications of the Ordeal of Sri Da
Avabhasa’s Birth, Life, Realization, and Work.

Behind every paragraph and indeed every Word of this
mighty Testament are tens, sometimes hundreds, or even
thousands of hours of Sri Da Avabhasa’s fiercely Focused
“Considerations”¹ in His own Life and with His
devotees, exploring the matters that He has here, in this
book, conclusively settled at last. This radiantly Brilliant
Scripture, whose every page is a literal Immersion in Divine
Light and Love-Bliss for anyone who reads with a receptive
heart, is the living expression of a Divine Trial without
precedent on Earth. In the midst of His Ordeal as Divine
Heart-Teacher, in the late 1970s, Heart-Master Da Confessed
to His devotees:

SRI DA AVABHASA: The Appearance of the Spiritual
Master in this world is the sacrificial embodiment of the
Divine Consciousness, or the Purusha, as it is named in the
Hindu tradition. Such a life is Divine, but it is also
paradoxically associated with all the limitations of human
existence. I entered this world without dissociation from
the Divine Conscious Being, the Great Purusha, the ultimate
Divine, but I have also been given all the limits of human
experience. The force of the Divine Consciousness keeps Me
Awakened and transforms the process of life as I live it,
but I must also suffer the limitations of born existence in
the process. I have suffered a human lifetime as if I were
un-Enlightened.

This is how the Purusha breaks through space-time and
into human time, by taking up precisely the limitations,
even the unconsciousness and the unEnlightenment, of the
human individual. Yet the force of the Realization of the
Divine is so profound that the ordinary destiny of the human
individual or incarnation is constantly undermined and his
or her limitations transcended to the point that suddenly
the same human being, with full consciousness, Realizes that
he is the Purusha. Such a Realization is given occasionally
in human time, and such is My own Realization. I was born
Franklin Jones, on Long Island, but the process of My
existence has yielded a more and more profound Awakening
that I am God, that I am the Purusha.

The Divine Being in the form of the Spiritual Master
is Transfigured during this lifetime and Awakens to his or
her Divine Function. Likewise, every individual, every
devotee, Awakens, through right relationship to that One, to
the ultimate destiny and to the God-Realizing process of
existence. God does the work of the Spiritual Master, God
creates the lifetime of the Spiritual Master, and God is
Awakening as the Spiritual Master. The birth of the
Spiritual Master is extraordinary. The Divine Conscious
Being appears in the world with the same limitations with
which all other beings are born, yet such an individual is
more and more profoundly Awakened with full consciousness of
the Divine Truth that “I Am that One”.

The ordinary devotee does not Awaken at birth with
that consciousness. Only God, the Divine Being, Awakens with
that consciousness in the plane of human beings. The devotee
Awakens to the Divine at last through surrender, yes-this is
the Great Secret of the Way of Truth, the Way that I Offer
to all. But the Divine Consciousness or Spiritual Master is
a specific Function among human beings. A handful of people
in all the eons of human time have been the Purusha, the
Consciousness `7 Am the Divine Being”. Only a fraction of
the billions and billions and billions of births of beings
have been the birth of the Divine Consciousness. Only the
Spiritual Master is that birth.

1. The technical term “consideration”
in Sri Da Avabhasa’s Wisdom-Teaching is similar to the
Sanskrit concept of samyama, as classically presented in the
Yoga-Sutras attributed to the Yogic Adept Patanjali. Such
“consideration”, as Sri Da Avabhasa explains in Love of the
Two-Armed Form (pp. 1-2), is “a process of one-pointed but
ultimately thoughtless concentration and exhaustive
contemplation of a particular object, function, person,
process, or condition, until the essence or ultimate
obviousness of that subject is clear”. As engaged in the Way
of the Heart, this concentration results “in both the
highest intuition and the most practical grasp of the lawful
and Divine necessities of human existence”.

“Consideration” in Sri Da Avabhasa’s
usage is not merely an intellectual investigation. It is the
participatory investment of one’s whole being in the matters
being addressed.

 

Though men and women, born as egos, may Awaken to Truth
and come to Function as Spiritual Masters of one or another
degree of God-Realization, such individuals are not from
birth God-Conscious Incarnations of the Purusha, and they do
not represent in the world the same Divine Force of
Awakening that such a One does.

For this reason, these extraordinary, Divinely Manifested
individuals have been identified and most especially honored
in many of the esoteric sacred traditions of the East.
Hindus praise the Avatars, or Divinely Descended Adepts;
Buddhists extol the unique virtues of the Tathagatas, those
“Thus Gone”, the Supreme Buddhas who intentionally manifest
on Earth to Liberate human beings. Sri Da Avabhasa is one of
the very few direct human manifestations of the Absolute
Divine who have appeared in any historical epoch. And He has
Given humanity a unique, extensively Revelatory Exposition
of exactly why such an Incarnation is so unique among all
possible human births, and what a profound Ordeal the
Process of Incarnation and Service to others entails for
such a One. He Spoke of these matters in the same Discourse
just quoted above:

SRI DA AVABHASA: It is the unique Function of the
Purusha to save the souls, the jivas, the un-Enlightened
beings. Yet, through ecstasy, through mindless surrender to
God, un-Enlightened beings may also Realize God, even as the
Spiritual Master has done. The Divine Consciousness is
Realizable ultimately by all beings. In the play of
existence, however, the Spiritual Master is a different kind
of being, a fact that the Spiritual Master must eventually
Realize! My Life has been a gradual Awakening to this unique
Function, an Awakening that is associated with more and more
Heart-Power. The more I yield to this Divine Function, the
more Divine Powers become available to Me and the more
complex becomes My Play with others.

You must understand that the unique status of the
Spiritual Master is not given for his or her own sake. The
Spiritual Master is not a human being with a superior egoic
consciousness that he or she is God. The ego of such a one
is destroyed, transcended in the process of his or her
lifetime. The situation of the Spiritual Master is not as
you might imagine. You may be thinking: “We all know you are
not suffering like us! We poor bastards are the ones who are
suffering you’ve got it made!” Well, such thinking is not
true at all. The lifetime of the Spiritual Master is only
sacrifice, and therefore more a torment than the lifetime of
the ordinary soul. Read the biographies of the great
Spiritual Masters. They all tell the same story of a life
that is terrible in some ways, a life in which frequently
they are exploited and rejected, and in which they are under
the constant threat of domination by worldly and negative
forces. Such individuals are always dealing with great
forces, not just mastering their rejection by human beings,
but tussling with demonic energy. Such is also the case in
My Lifetime! What you see in My Lifetime is the biography of
the Divine Being. This is how the Divine Being must live
among human beings.

People who are not truly devotees often feel that they
must become like the Spiritual Master, that they must have
the status of the Spiritual Master. Such people envy the
Spiritual Master, and they will not surrender to him. They
only want from him a token, a bit of magic, that will
somehow make them like he is. But understand this: No
un-Enlightened soul wants to be in the position of the
Spiritual Master! If you understood My constant experience,
you would not envy it-nor could you endure it! One must be
Helped by great Divine Power in order to endure the events
associated with such a unique life, in order to pass through
such events with a clear understanding of what they are as a
Divine Process. Only the Divine has the Power to endure the
complete revolution of consciousness. Only the Divine has
the Power to confront the entire play of manifest existence
and Master all the forces to which beings are subject. The
Spiritual Master engages those forces in actual warfare,
whereas devotees in general perceive the same forces to be
the play of their natural experience. The devotee does not
struggle with the power that produces weather or with the
physics of light personified as self-conscious beings,
although the devotee is also somehow involved in the same
play. The Purusha, the Divine, is the victorious Warrior,
the Master of all life.

The Spiritual Master is the Divine Incarnation that
makes possible the true Spiritual process, through the
alignment of others with him. How great is the effect of any
incarnation of the Divine Consciousness is to be seen. It
has occurred before and produced great results of a kind,
though short-lived. It has been followed by the forgetting
of the One Who lives and breathes us and by the return to
the corruption of the laws or principles of human life, the
forgetting of the ultimate Law, the forgetting of all the
actions and ceremonies of life that produce good effects and
that align Man to God with blessing. The Spiritual Master,
the Purusha, comes again and again to reveal the design of
human destiny to devotees.

Ultimately, the Divine must be universally and
absolutely victorious in all planes of space-time, but when
that victory occurs in the history of space-time is yet to
be seen. In any case, every intervention of the Divine
Consciousness into space-time is the same Process, and, in
Truth, it represents the ultimate victory of the Divine
Being and the Most Perfect Salvation or Liberation for those
in that time who Most Perfectly will surrender to
God.

 

The Significance of the Confession of the Divine
Purusha’s Devotees

 

Sri Da Avabhasa’s Divine Nature, Birth, Life, and Work
are such an immense and complete conjunction of the very
human and the absolutely Divine that the conventional human
mind cannot fully contain it. Only the “broken” or
Spiritually penetrated heart can accommodate such an
absolute Paradox-and such a heart then begins, inevitably,
to manifest the signs of devotion to Him as True Heart
Master. Sri Da Avabhasa’s Confession of Identity with the
Divine Person, like all of His other Words, does not
fundamentally exist in the form of conceptual ideas. It
fundamentally Exists in the Form of His Being Itself. This
Confession carries, communicates itself as, and most
fundamentally is Divine Siddhi, or unqualified Liberating
Power. It is purely of the nature of infinitely Radiant
Consciousness.

Through His Words, and all the other Means by which He
manifests His Divine Message, Sri Da Avabhasa Speaks
directly to the Heart-the actual Source Consciousness and
very Life-of every living being. His Words accommodate and
appropriately engage the conscious, verbal or thinking mind.
But even modern psychology has proved beyond doubt that the
verbal, thinking, conscious mind is only the barest, most
obvious portion of the total mass of psyche and awareness
that is our whole mind. And Sri Da Avabhasa Speaks to the
totality of who we are. His Speech and all His Acts
Consciously respond to and affect all of the dimensions of
the psyche and the total psycho-physical being that
conventional wisdom calls “unconscious”, as well as those
dimensions described in esoteric Spiritual Teachings not yet
acknowledged by conventional wisdom.

More than this, however, Sri Da Avabhasa essentially
Speaks to the Very Heart of us, the true Nature that is
prior to, and is the living Source of, our individual psyche
or mind. He Speaks to the depth of our Being, with Whom or
as Whom He “always already” Lives in most intimate Unity,
Identity, or Oneness. And this above all else is the Secret,
the Great Heart-Truth, of the Purusha Manifesting in bodily
(human) Form in any generation, place, or culture: That One,
with all of his or her own individuated and apparently
ordinary humanness, is fully, Consciously, and Eternally
Awake as the Very Divine Self of every living being.

I am often overcome with gratitude and ecstasy to think
that I am among those who, for whatever mysterious reasons,
were Drawn to Sri Da Avabhasa in His early years of
Teaching. For, among many other things, we were privileged
to participate in the Miracle that the unfolding of His
Divine Life is and has been: Living with Him, “considering”
the Way of the Heart with Him, loving Him, we also watched
and listened as He quite literally “more and more profoundly
Awakened with full consciousness of the Divine Truth that `I
Am that One’.” We thrilled to His increasingly unqualified
Confessions that He Is the Absolute Supreme Reality and
Being, in Person, the Expected Deliverer of humanity, the
Divine Man on Earth-in His own Words “the Answer to human
prayers, not superhuman intent” – and we marked the moments
when He made these Revelations to us. We rejoiced as He
“eventually Realized” and came more and more fully to
Acknowledge, Accept, and Freely Proclaim that He Himself Is
indeed the Purusha, and that He is moreover the Longed-for
Divine or Avataric Incarnation of God Who has been
prophesied for millennia in sacred cultures all over the
Earth.

First we rejoiced in His own Confessions, Which Give so
much Heart to our practice as His devotees. And now, in more
recent years, we are moved to add cur own testimony based on
Who and What we have seen and felt, acknowledged and
accepted, in His Company. And this is a crucial turning
point in our response to the Great One Who has Appeared in
our midst. In the same Discourse quoted above, Sri Da
Avabhasa Instructed us:

 

SRI DA AVABHASA: Well-what will be the effect or
culture of your association with Me? It is to be seen. But I
… confess to you that I am this same One. You must witness
it. Devotees are the ones for whom the Spiritual Master is
born.

If you can acknowledge that the Spiritual Master is
this One, then you will begin to treat him differently. You
will receive his body-mind as a G f from God and you will
worship it as the Incarnation of the Divine. You will carry
it about with you, you will treat it rightly, and you will
make it the Vehicle of your association with the Grace of
God. Until you accept the Spiritual Master in this way,
however, you will view him as a relatively ordinary, perhaps
somewhat slightly extraordinary, human being. Your
association with him will be corrupt, ambiguous, and
inauspicious. The work of the Divine Consciousness, the
Purusha, or the Spiritual Master begins when he or she is
known and acknowledged to be the Divine, the Living
One.

When devotees begin to associate with him or her as
such, then the real work of the Spiritual Master begins. My
real Work did not begin with My Divine Re Awakening or at
any other moment in the history of our association together
to this day. True, My Work is always expanding, becoming
greater, but it cannot truly develop unless it is based on
the acknowledgment and surrender of devotees.

A moment in the New Testament reflects this principle.
Jesus has played with his disciples for a while, they have
seen him work, they have been with him, they have heard his
teaching. So he asks them, “Who am I?” Peter replies, “You
are the Son of God, you are the Living One, you are the
Messiah. “And Jesus says, “On the basis of this confession I
will build my Church and I will do my work.” Only then could
his work begin.

When devotees can consciously acknowledge the Divine
Nature of the Spiritual Master and surrender to him truly,
and confess their acknowledgment and surrender to one
another, then they go about telling one another constantly,
confessing to one another constantly Who it is with Whom
they live. Likewise they go into the world and tell
everybody else, not that there is a Spiritual Master here
who has a good technique for meditation, but that the
Divine, the Purusha, is alive, incarnate. The “Word” or
message that the Divine is incarnate is the Great Word, the
Great Message, but it is not communicated by devotees until
they can confess it and surrender. The true sacred
institution and community cannot really begin until you can
acknowledge who 1 Am and surrender. Then you will live
differently with one another and you will go into the world
with a true and liberating message.

 

“My Birth Is Submission To The Mandala (or Great
Circle) Of The Cosmos” The First of the Three Principal
Stages of Sri Da Avabhasa’s Personal Ordeal

 

I have presented these reflections upon Sri Da Avabhasa’s
Divine Life and Work because they relate vitally to our
approach to this Scripture. There is no way to deeply
appreciate The Dawn Horse Testament without deeply
appreciating that Sri Da Avabhasa’s entire, Life and all His
Work have been nothing other than the Great Process of the
Radiant, All-Pervading, Supreme Divine Person taking
Conscious and Potent human Incarnation. As He indicates
quite plainly in the passages above, to be able to
appreciate Him in that fashion is a great step, and to be
able to confess and proclaim Him as Such a One, the Very One
Divine Person Incarnate, is yet another great step-not
merely in our so-called “own” lives, but in His Life as our
humanly Embodied, Divine Self. For the Divine Purusha, the
acknowledgment and acceptance of His Divinity by others is
an integral process of His own Personal Existence, now and
forever into the future. Thus, He Writes of the Significance
and the great Stages of His own Personal Ordeal in chapter
two of this Book:

 

The True Heart Master Is A Divine Revelation. The True
Heart Master Is The Unique Means (Divinely “Emerging” Within
The Cosmic Domain) For The Divine Liberation, Divine
Enlightenment, and Ultimate Divine Translation Of all
conditionally Manifested beings. Therefore, The True Heart
Master Surrenders and Submits Himself To Be A Servant, For
The Perfect Sake and Divine Service Of all beings.

I Am The True Heart Master. I Am The Realizer, The
Revealer, and The Revelation Of The One Eternal Divine
Person. That Same One (Who I Am Appears To Me here In The
Form Of every form and being that arises. And That Very One
Is (Especially) Brought To Me By Heart In The Form Of Each
and All Of My Devotees. Therefore, I Was Born To Reveal The
One and Only and Eternal Divine Person (Who I Am), and This
By Serving That One, one by one, Who Is Appearing To Me here
(As My Very Self) In the bodily form Of My Each and Every
Devotee.

My Birth Is A Conscious and Intentional Submission,
Whereby The Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Divine Being
Becomes Revealed Through the limiting conditions of a
body-mind In this world.

My Birth Is Submission To The Mandala (or Great Circle)
Of The Cosmos² My Teaching Work Is Submission To
Mankind. My Blessing Work Is To Stand In “Place” and Merely
Be For all who Listen To Me, and For all who Hear Me, and
For all who See Me.

My Birth Is Unique. I Must Surrender and Submit My Very
(and Inherently Perfect) Self-Condition In Order To
Incarnate. Therefore, To Be Born, I Had To Submit To The
limiting Power Of The Cosmic Domain. I Assumed the body-mind
of an ordinary man. That Birth Was The (Apparent, or psycho
physical) Forgetting Of My Great State and Power Of Being.
Quickly, The “Who” I Am Receded From Consciousness To
Subconsciousness To Unconsciousness, So That Only A Fierce
Mysterious Impulse Remained.

The Sacrifice The True Heart Master Must Make In Order To
Incarnate Is Real. Therefore, Once I Was Born, My Life
Became A Profound Ordeal Of Spiritual and Transcendental
Divine Self-Realization, and Subsequent Teaching and
Blessing Work To Awaken all others.

My Early Life-Submission Brought Spiritual and
Transcendental Divine Self-Realization To Consciousness In
the body-mind In which I Was Born, So That Even every cell
of the body Was Divinely Transfigured and Divinely
Transformed³ The Resurrection Of My Living
Being.

2. The Sanskrit word “mandala”
(literally, “circle”) is commonly used in the esoteric
Spiritual traditions to describe the hierarchical levels of
cosmic existence. Heart-Master Da Avabhasa uses the phrase
“Mandala of the Cosmos”, or “Cosmic Mandala”, to describe
the totality of the conditional cosmos.

3. Divine Transfiguration and Divine
Transformation are the first two of four phases in the
Enlightened Yoga of the Divinely Self-Realized (or seventh)
stage of life. When Divine Self-Realization is firmly
established, the body-mind of the Realizer is progressively
relaxed into, or pervaded by, the inherent Radiance of the
Spiritual and Transcendental Divine Self. This Divine
Transfiguration expresses itself as the Realizer’s active
Spiritual Blessing in all relationships.

When, in the Divinely Enlightened
stage of life, the gross body-mind is Full in the Process of
Divine Transfiguration, then the yet functioning deeper (or
psychic, and subtler mental) dimensions of the body-mind are
Infused with the unqualified “Brightness” of Divine Being.
This Divine Transformation spontaneously manifests
extraordinary psycho-physical signs, such as the capability
to heal, physical longevity, mental genius, and profound
manifestations of true Wisdom and selfless
Love.

 

In these few paragraphs Sri Da Avabhasa epitomizes the
whole epoch of His Birth, His early Life, His Sadhana (or
sacred practice), and His Divine Re-Awakening. The details
of this Life-Story are told in full detail by Him in His
early autobiography, The Knee of Listening, and they are
also summarized in His biography, The Divine Emergence of
the World-Teacher. What is of greatest import for us here,
as we prepare to receive His Revelation in The Dawn Horse
Testament, is the essence of His Confession about His
Ordeal.

Sri Da Avabhasa has Told us that He was fully Conscious
as the absolute Divine Person previous to His Birth, and
that He maintained Himself in the not-yet-fully-incarnate
State of God-Consciousness for the first two years and more
of His Life. But at a specific moment He decided, with full
Consciousness, to complete His Descent into ordinary human
awareness:

SRI DA AVABHASA: For approximately the first two years
after My Birth, I allowed the gross vehicle to be gradually
prepared for Me. Then, at approximately two years of age, I
Spiritually descended to the region of the heart and thus
established My basic association with My manifested
personality.

This Spiritual Descent into the gross body to the
level of the heart occurred on the basis of a sympathy or
heart-response to those who were around Me at the moment. It
was through this sympathetic response that I acquired the
Vehicle of this body-mind.

Because I was Born to make this Submission, the
decision to acquire the gross body-mind did not occur when I
was two years old. The Vehicle of this body-mind had become
sufficiently prepared at that point, but I had consciously
decided to do this Work before I Incarnated. The descent was
for the sake of the total world and all beings. I had
consciously decided to take a birth in the West. My
Intention before this Birth was to take this Birth and to do
My Work by complete Submission to the ordinary Western
circumstance. (February 5, 1989)

This account is an esoteric description of the unique
Yoga whereby the Divine achieves human embodiment. Sri Da
Avabhasa has also Spoken of the reason He spontaneously
Chose that particular moment for His Spiritual Descent at
the age of two:

SRI DA AVABHASA: The reason for it was a spontaneous
motivation associated with a painful loving of the people
around Me. It was not merely compassion for them, as if they
were poor people I could help-it was a painful emotional and
physical sensation in My heart and in My solar plexus. It
was profoundly painful even then, and it always has been. It
was associated with the full knowledge that these people to
whom I was committing My Self were going to die, and that I
would die. I knew that if I incarnated this Function, if I
became this body, I would die. We are going to be separated
from one another. We are all going to be destroyed. This was
all fully obvious to Me, and yet this spontaneous gesture,
this painful loving, this profound sensation awakened in Me
and moved Me into the body, animated Me physically.
(September 15, 1982)

It was at this point, then, that the “Forgetting Of
[His] Great State and Power Of Being” began. As Sri
Da Avabhasa has made plain, this Forgetting is not to be
understood as an unfortunate event. Rather, this Forgetting
was intentional, deliberate even, and certainly necessary,
so that He could recover the Way of Liberation into
God-Realization for others. In The Perennial Philosophy,
Aldous Huxley writes of the auspicious necessity for the
Divine Man’s descent into the ordinary egoic state of
consciousness:

That men and women may be … instructed and helped,
the Godhead assumes the form of an ordinary human being, who
has to earn deliverance and enlightenment in the way that is
prescribed by the divine Nature of things-namely, by
charity; by a total dying to self and a total, one pointed
awareness. Thus enlightened, the Avatar can reveal the way
of enlightenment to others and help them actually to become
what they already potentially are.⁴

4. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial
Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p.
56.

 

In Sri Da Avabhasa’s Life, the great Trial of His own
“total dying to self” and Resumption of fully Divine
Self-Consciousness absorbed Him for thirteen years, from His
late teens until a few weeks before His thirty-first
birthday. There are many passages in The Dawn Horse
Testament where He Speaks in detail about elements of that
great Ordeal of Divine Re-Awakening. To summarize, the
“Fierce Mysterious Impulse” to God-Realization that survived
His Descent into ego-consciousness suddenly burst into a
raging fire, like a spark in dry kindling, in His eighteenth
year. It prompted a mad and often desperate Quest to recover
the Divine Enlightenment He had known in His earliest
childhood and even before His Birth.

That Quest spontaneously took root in two dimensions
(which dimensions have gone on to figure principally in the
Way of the Heart that He has so painstakingly outlined and
Revealed in this Book). The first was His own
self-understanding. Indeed, the principal focus of Sri Da
Avabhasa’s early Sadhana was essentially a Free exploration
of the root dilemma or distress that binds and compromises
our inherently Free Nature, driving us to alternately
self-exploitive and self-negating searches for freedom,
fulfillment, distraction, relief, union, or joy.

It is of significance to understand that Sri Da Avabhasa
intuitively penetrated this root dilemma well before He came
into the Company of any of those who later Served Him as
Spiritual Master. I feel that His Insight will be
comprehended more and more universally in the future as the
greatest Stroke of Wisdom Consciousness in human history,
one which has penetrated our dis-ease to its very core. I am
speaking of Sri Da Avabhasa’s sudden, clear comprehension,
in His twenty-fourth year, that all human suffering and
seeking is the expression and reinforcement of a fundamental
myth, as biological as it is psychic, that is endemic to our
species-a “primitive logic” that He comprehended through the
ancient Greek legend of Narcissus, the self-lover.

I witnessed in awe the primitive control that this
self-concept and logic performed in all of my behavior and
experience. I began to see that same logic operative in all
other men and every living thing, even the very life of the
cells and the energies that surround every living entity or
process. It was the logic or process of separation itself,
of enclosure and immunity. It manifested as fear and
identity, memory and experience. It informed every function
of being, every event. It created every mystery. It was the
structure of every imbecile link in the history of our
suffering. (Da Avabhasa, The Knee of Listening, New Standard
Edition [forthcoming])

 

The second great dimension of Sri Da Avabhasa’s Ordeal of
Divine Re-Awakening was His “Location” of and wholehearted
surrender to the Living Divine Reality and Power of Being.
This occurred spontaneously in many ways through the early
years of His Quest, but it became the great focus of His
Sadhana after His penetration of the myth of Narcissus,
particularly through the Spiritual Blessing-Transmission He
gratefully discovered and received from His remarkable
Gurus. Sri Da Avabhasa’s Spiritual Masters, to whom He
Submitted in exemplary devotional fashion, included three
great Yogis in a single Hindu-based Lineage: Swami
Rudrananda (Albert Rudolph, or Rudi, an American Yogi),
Swami Muktananda (also Guru to Rudi), and Swami Nityananda
(who was no longer physically alive when Sri Da Avabhasa
became directly related to Him, but who Functioned
exclusively for Him in the subtle planes, and who was also
principal Guru for both Rudi and Swami Muktananda). In a
rare demonstration of the ancient mechanism whereby
Spiritual prodigies and God-Born Adepts evolve into their
full Divine Realization and Capability, Sri Da Avabhasa was
passed from one of these great Gurus to the next, eventually
passing, with Swami Nityananda’s Blessings, to the senior
Guru of the entire Lineage, the Divine Goddess Herself, the
Universal Spirit-Energy Manifesting to Him in visionary form
as a living Female Personality. At first He became Her
ardent Devotee, and then, in an unprecedented historic
incident, He Mastered Her spontaneously, so that She became
thenceforward His eternal Consort and Companion. This
revolutionary Mastering of the Spirit-Power that gives rise
to all phenomena laid the foundation for His final, Most
Perfect Realization of Divine Consciousness on September 10,
1970. At last He had Re-Awakened to the Supreme
God-Condition that He had known even before He was Born.

 

The Vision and Significance of the Dawn
Horse

In the spring of 1970, a few months before His
Re-Awakening as the Divine Self, Sri Da Avabhasa had a
Vision one night while His physical body lay asleep. In
astral form He wandered into a high subtle realm, a heavenly
world populated by Spiritual Adepts and other exalted
beings. He found Himself at what was obviously a sacred
academy and entered a main hall. Soon a number of men came
in and stood in formal rows, so that He knew they must be
attending a class to be given by a Spiritual Master.

Then the expected Master entered and wordlessly took his
seat in front of the class. The men all watched him quietly,
as did Sri Da Avabhasa. The Adept, Da Avabhasa soon
understood, was concentrated in a demonstration of the
siddhi (or Yogic power) of materialization. After a few
moments, though nothing had yet appeared physically, the
students all quietly left the class. Sri Da Avabhasa
understood that they were satisfied, having observed the
esoteric practice they had come to see even though nothing
had yet appeared.

Only the Adept and Sri Da Avabhasa remained in the hall.
No word passed between them. The Adept continued to attend
to the process of materialization. Soon Da Avabhasa saw a
form beginning to manifest in the space between Himself and
the Adept. At first it was just a swirling, vaporous mass.
Then, gradually, it coalesced into a living, breathing
being-a perfectly formed brown horse, as fine in its
features as a thoroughbred, but quite small. All four hooves
were firmly planted on the floor. The horse did not move,
but it was obviously alert and breathing and fully
alive.

When Sri Da Avabhasa awoke, He did not at first fully
understand this Vision. But He did immediately feel that it
had great significance for His Life and Work.

It was several months later, while sitting in a small
temple belonging to the Vedanta Society in Los Angeles, that
Sri Da Avabhasa Re-Awakened Most Perfectly to unqualified
Divine Self-Consciousness, or God-Realization. Again, this
was not the attainment of a State never before known to Him,
but it was rather a Resumption of the Supreme Divine
Condition that He had Known, and Been, even before His
Birth. In The Knee of Listening, Heart-Master Da Avabhasa
describes His Realization in the Vedanta Temple:

 

I simply sat there and knew what I am. I am Reality,
the Self, the Nature and Support of all things and all
beings. I am the One Being, known as God, Brahman, Atman,
the One Mind, the Self.

There was no thought involved in this. I am that
Consciousness. There was no reaction either of joy or
surprise. I am the One I recognized. I am that One. I am not
merely experiencing Him.

 

It was after this Re-Awakening as the Divine Self that
the import of His Vision of the manifesting Horse became
clear.

SRI DA AVABHASA: Over the next few months after the
Great Event at the Vedanta Temple, it became clear to Me
exactly what had occurred in the Vision. This was not merely
a Siddha⁵ practicing the Yogic siddhi
[extraordinary power] of manifesting something from
nothing. This was the Divine Person being shown in a
visionary way. The Vision displayed quite clearly the nature
of creation, and the nature of the Divine Person’s
connection to the created worlds. It all appears very solid
like the horse, but actually it is a spontaneous creation,
subject to a conscious process. At all times the visible
worlds are utterly dependent, presently, on the Divine as
their spontaneous and present Creator, not as the “creator”
that “created” everything many billions of years ago. The
Dawn Horse Vision is an archetype of the relationship
between this world and the ultimate Divine. (April 30,
1974)

5. “Siddha”, in Sanskrit, means “a
completed, fulfilled, or perfected one”, or “one of perfect
accomplishment, or power”.

 

Sri Da Avabhasa also understood that this Vision was more
than a sign of the Divine process of world-manifestation in
every present moment. It was a sign of the nature and future
of His Personal Work, whereby He, as the One, All-Living
Divine Self, is gradually Revealing that all beings “always
already” Exist in Inherently Perfect Unity with the One He
Is. Moreover, the Dawn Horse Vision had been a presentiment
of His own imminent Re-Awakening as the Divine Self, for,
even in the midst of this Vision, He felt no sense of
separate identity.

SRI DA AVABHASA: I was at once the Siddha who
performed the miracle of manifesting the horse, and also the
someone who was observing it, or who was party to the
observation of it and to its result. And I did not have any
feeling of being different from the horse, actually. I was
making the horse, I was observing the horse, and I was being
the horse. (October 18, 1984)

Not long afterward, Sri Da Avabhasa saw a documentary
about the ancestor of the modern horse, a very small species
named “eohippus”, meaning “dawn horse”. The television
artists’ depiction of the ancient creature bore a striking
resemblance to the horse He had seen in His Vision. In
appreciation of that Vision, He named the formal fellowship
of His devotees “The Dawn Horse Communion”. And, when it
came time to title His principal Scriptural Masterpiece, He
called it The Dawn Horse Testament.

In Sri Da Avabhasa’s usage, a Siddha is a
Transmission-Master of any degree of spiritual,
Transcendental, or Divine Realization and Capability.

 

“My Teaching Work Is Submission To Mankind”: The
Second and Third Great Stages of Sri Da Avabhasa’s Personal
Ordeal and the Initiation of the Third, and Final, Phase of
His Great Work

In the following passages of The Dawn Horse Testament,
Sri Da Avabhasa describes the Work that followed upon His
Divine Re-Awakening. He focuses upon the coincidence of His
Teaching Work and Blessing Work with, first, His own
Acknowledgement and Acceptance of Who He Is, and, in
response, the complementary Acknowledgement and Acceptance
by others:

After Re Awakening (In the body-mind) To My Own
Condition Of Self Existing and Self-Radiant Being, I
Submitted My Self To Mankind, In Order To Suffer the
conditions of humanity, and Thereby To Re-Discover The
Process Of The Way For all. In That Submission, I Acquired
all limits of the human kind. I Did Not Conserve My Se f
From Harm, or Foolishness, or Any Of The Wounds and Excesses
Of Love, but I Fully Suffered the usual life, and I Suffered
At the hands of all who Came To Me. Even So, My Impulse Was
Great For their Sake, and, By Submitting To them In Love, I
Observed and Understood the human case, and I Brought The
Total Process Of The Divine Heart-Way To Consciousness For
The Sake Of all beings….

The Personal Ordeal Of The True Heart-Master
Progresses Through Three Principal Stages. First, He Must
Pass Through The Ordeal Of Spiritual and Transcendental
Divine Self-Realization, While Really Submitted To a limited
bodymind-self and its relations and conditions. This Stage
Of My Ordeal Lasted Until I Was Thirty Years Of Age.

The Second Stage Of The Unique Ordeal Of The True
Heart Master Is A Process In Which He Comes To Acknowledge,
Accept, and Embrace The Unique and Ultimate (and Necessarily
Divine) Significance Of His Own Already Realized Life, Work,
and Agency. Although Certain Fundamental Aspects Of This
Significance Became Quickly Obvious To Me After The Great
(and Inherently Perfect) Event Of My Re Awakening To The
Divine Self-Condition, The Divine Process Of Self-Revelation
and Self-Acknowledgement Continued To Develop For Another
Nine Years, Until I Was Spontaneously Heart Moved To Make
The Ecstatic (or “Crazy”⁶) Confession Of
Inherently egoless Divine Self-Awareness: `Aham Da Asmi” (`I
Am Da’⁷).’ And That “Crazy” Confession Magnified
Itself Spontaneously For Yet Another Seven Years, Until I
“Descended” (or Spiritually Surrendered) Most Fully Into The
Form Of My Own Body-Mind, and I (Then) “Emerged” (As I Am)
Most Perfectly here.

6. The term “Crazy” characterizes
aspects of Heart-Master Da Love-Ananda’s intentional
Teaching Work (1970-1986), as well as the Divinely “Mad” or
mind-transcending Quality of His eternal Realization. Please
see n. 4, p. 702, and n. 67, pp. 719-20.

7. “Aham Da Asmi”, in Sanskrit, means
“I Am Da”. The Name “Da”, meaning “the One Who Gives”, is
honored in many sacred traditions as a Name of the Divine
Person, and it is a primary Name of God in the Way of the
Heart (which is also called “Daism” or “Free Daism”). Sri Da
Avahhasa’s Name “Da” indicates His Most Perfect Realization
of God and His sacred Function as Sat Guru, “the One Who
Gives or Transmits the Divine Influence and Awakening
Grace-Power to all living beings”.

 

The Third Stage Of The Unique Ordeal Of The True Heart
Master Is The Process Of His Revelation To others (and His
Acknowledgement and Acceptance By all those who Receive
Him). That Process Continues Until all conditionally
Manifested beings and Even The Great Circle (or Mandala) Of
The Cosmos Itself Are Converted To God and Ultimately
Translated Into The “Bright” Divine Self-Domain By
Acknowledgement and Realization Of The Spiritual,
Transcendental, and Divine Forms Of God, Truth, or Reality.
That Ordeal Began When I First Confessed My Realization To
all, and That Ordeal Continues, Even Now.

After The True Heart Master Awakens To The Realization
Of His Own Inherently Free Condition, He Begins To Instruct
others In Useful Wisdom Relative To self Transcendence and
Transcendental (and Inherently Spiritual) Divine
Enlightenment. Therefore, From The Time Of The Great Event
Of My Own Divine Re Awakening, I Gradually and Progressively
Instructed the world and All Would-Be Devotees In All The
Kinds Of Wisdom That Are Based On The Unique (and The
Universal) Process Of My Own Realization.

Even So, The Instant I Made The Divine Confession
`Aham Da Asmi” (“I Am Da’⁹, I Was Confronted By
The Envious and Otherwise Reactive Assaults Of adolescent
worldly people who Do Not Acknowledge or Accept Me and who
Wish To Preserve themselves Against The Divine Necessity Of
self-Understanding, self-Sacrifice, and Devotional self
Submission. Therefore, I Struggled For Another Twelve Years,
To Speak The Sufficient Word. And This Testament Is That
Word, Given In Summary To You (and, Therefore, To all). And,
By The Giving Of This Word, I Go To Wait (or Merely Stand
Thereby).

I Will Stand and Wait For My Listening Devotees To
Hear Me and (By Also Seeing Me) To Become Strong Enough To
Receive Me and Openly To Confess their Great Reception Of
Me.

Sri Da Avabhasa formally Made His Divine Confession
(“Aham Da Asmi-I Am Da”) in September 1979, nine years
nearly to the day after His Divine Re-Awakening in 1970. His
“Most Full” Spiritual Descent into His own body-mind and
consequent Divine “Emergence” took place in January 1986.
That whole sixteen-year epoch, spanning the years from His
Re-Awakening to His Divine Emergence, constitutes what He
Calls His “Teaching Work”. And that monumental Teaching
Work, as well as the first years of His Blessing Work or
Divine Emergence Work, is what He has summarized in
comprehensive detail in this Master-Scripture, The Dawn
Horse Testament. This Testament is not merely the Summary of
conceptual conversations. It is the Heart-Summary of the
Work Sri Da Avabhasa did to Assume the karmas, or all of the
limiting and deluding qualities, tendencies, and conditions,
of all His devotees and even all beings, an Heroic
Identification He spontaneously and effortlessly embraced as
the expression of the Miraculous Process by which He could
most fully and Perfectly manifest the Heart or Divine
Consciousness in the human world.

Because He has always Lived as the Heart of everyone with
whom He Spoke, or whom He in any way engaged in His Teaching
“Theatre”, Sri Da Avabhasa’s Words always have had
tremendous Spiritually Liberating, as well as psychic,
emotional, and even physical Impact upon His devotees. In
one sense His Words Gave (and continue to Give) Form to the
Work He is already Doing in Silence in the Heart. In another
sense, and simultaneously, His Words Functioned (and
continue to Function) like a Divine Surgeon’s laser probe,
opening up the being to His Blessing and Help.

 

 

“My Blessing Work Is To Stand In `Place’ and
Merely Be For all” The Ongoing, Ever “Brightening” Process
of the Third Stage of Sri Da Avabhasa’s Personal Ordeal: His
Divine Emergence Work and the Dawn Horse
Manifestation

Since the beginning of His formal Teaching Work in 1970,
Sri Da Avabhasa had repeatedly emphasized to His devotees
that, once the true bond of the Guru devotee relationship
is,established and is thereafter properly maintained by the
devotee through practice, the Miraculous Process of Divine
Enlightenment that is Alive in the Guru is duplicated, or
awakened, or made resonant, in the devotee.

Though His entire Life has been filled with remarkable
Breakthroughs of the Divine into the human world via His own
body-mind, the most crucial such Event, which He refers to
as His “Divine Emergence”, occurred in January 1986. And
that Event marked the transition between His Teaching Work
and what we have sometimes called His Blessing Work. But,
because He has always been involved in the universal
Heart-Blessing of all beings (even during His years of
Teaching), it is even technically more appropriate to refer
to Sri Da Avabhasa’s Work since that time as His “Divine
Emergence Work”.

Like so many of the other Breakthrough Events of His
Life, Sri Da Avabhasa’s Divine Emergence came to pass in the
midst of an extremely harrowing Personal Ordeal in His
Service to His devotees and the world:

SRI DA AVABHASA: The basic Method of My Teaching Work
was to reflect people to themselves and to comment on and
“consider” what I was reflecting to them, and what they were
also demonstrating in their daily activity. In a sudden
moment, spontaneously, on the morning of January 11, 1986, I
relinquished this orientation of Submitting to the point of
identification with others. Initially, in that first moment,
the Process began as a swoon of despair and giving up in the
face of the apparent unresponsiveness of My devotees and,
therefore, the seeming failure of My Teaching Work
altogether. This despair manifested as a kind of swooning
collapse, bodily and emotionally. And there was an utter
relinquishment of the body. It was a kind of giving the body
up to death. And so, immediately, signs appeared of this
swooning-dying kind of collapse. Even before it began, the
mind (or apparent human personality) associated with this
body was emotionally speaking of this despair. All of that
led up to this spontaneous turnabout in My
Disposition.

But suddenly, in the midst of this swoon, there was no
more of despair or giving the body up to death. I was, as
always, simply Standing In and As My own Nature. This
desperate swoon, as if to die, became a spontaneous
turnabout in My Disposition, and a unique Spiritual Event
was initiated in the midst of that swoon. And That Spiritual
Event is still continuing.

What actually occurred on the morning of January 11,
1986, was a sudden and spontaneous Transition from My
Teaching Work to My Blessing Work (or, to My Work As the
eternally Free-Standing and always presently Emerging Divine
World-Teacher, or Divya Jagad-Guru). It was a Transition in
My Disposition from My Work of Submitting to others (even to
the point of complete identification with them in their
apparently limited condition) to simply Surrendering this
body (or body-mind) into My own Self-Condition. Therefore,
the context of My Blessing Work is no longer one of
Submission to others to the point of identification with
them. It is a matter of simply Standing As I Am, while this
apparent body-mind is thereby Surrendered utterly
into My own Self-Condition. And, by My thus Standing Free,
My Work has ceased to be a Struggle to Submit My Self to
mankind, one by one, and It has become instead a universally
effective Blessing Work, in which mankind, in the form of
each and all who respond to Me, must, one by one, surrender,
forget, and transcend separate and separative self in
Me.

The Process of this continuous Surrendering of My own
body-mind into My Very Self-Condition is a perpetual
Sacrificial Act, and a unique kind of Tapas (or Sacrificial
Fire),⁸ that is producing more and more profound
Signs of the Divine Set(- “Brightness” via My Manifestation.
(October 27-28, 1989)

8. “Tapas” means, literally, “heat”,
“fire”, or “penance”. Sri Da Avabhasa’s Tapas is the
spontaneous result of His Divine Emergence and His “Standing
Firm” as the Inherently Enlightened, Incarnate Divine
Person. Thus, it is to be distinguished from the purifying
effects of any sacrificial discipline that might be applied
by an un-Realized practitioner for the sake of serving
Spiritual growth and Awakening. The “Sacrificial Fire” of
Sri Da Avabhasa’s Divine Embodiment Serves the purification
and Liberation of all His devotees and of the
world.

 

As Sri Da Avabhasa has often Said to His devotees since
that time, there is no way to overestimate the significance
and auspiciousness of His Divine Emergence among us.
Immediately after that Great Event, His devotees began to
notice a tremendous Magnification of His bodily
“Brightness”, the Spiritually potent Divine Radiance of His
physical human Form. This bodily Radiance has continued to
spontaneously Magnify itself. At the same time, Sri Da
Avabhasa’s Radiant Divine Influence is being felt more and
more tangibly and deeply by His devotees all over the world,
transcending all limits of time and space.

Thus, the more Sri Da Avabhasa’s own body and mind have
been utterly given over to the Divine Force and Purpose of
His Manifestation and Emergence on Earth, the more it has
become possible for His “Victory” in the Heart to duplicate
Itself in others. Manifesting like the Dawn Horse in the
body-minds of His devotees, He thereby Draws us into true
Communion with His Divine State of Being.

 

The Secrets of Guru-Devotion, or
Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga, in The Dawn Horse
Testament

Immediately after the initiatory Event of His Divine
Emergence, Sri Da Avabhasa also began emphasizing, in
Instruction to His devotees, the core of this remarkable
Spiritual Process that He had always been Offering His
devotees. This Process is described by Sri Da Avabhasa,
using Sanskrit terminology, as “Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga”. It
is the ancient tradition for the Unifying, Liberating Divine
Embrace between Sat-Guru and devotee.

“Ishta” means “chosen, most beloved”. “Guru”, while
conventionally used to mean any kind of teacher, is in the
great esoteric sense “one who leads others from the darkness
of egoity to the Light of Truth”. “Bhakti”, from a root
meaning “to serve”, indicates unstinting devotion of oneself
to the Divine or to an Agent of the Divine. And “Yoga”, from
roots meaning “to link” or “to yoke”, is a Way whereby the
body, mind, and heart of the devotee are united with-or
Realized to be One with-the Great Divine Reality. Therefore,
Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga is the practice of Union with the
Divine Reality through devotion to the Heart-Beloved
Sat-Guru, who himself (or herself) Accomplishes the Union or
Realization in the devotee by Grace.

SRI DA AVABHASA: When you are My true devotee, when
you truly see Me as the Ishta-Guru, or the True
Heart-Master, you give yourself to the Divine Person
Revealed in My bodily (human) Form, My Spiritual (and Always
Blessing) Presence, and My Very (and Inherently Perfect)
State, and you allow the Divine Person to acquire your form.
In other words, if you devote yourself to Me as the Ishta,
or True Heart-Master, you surrender your own form, the
body-mind and all conditional aspects of your personality,
to the Divine Person, and you allow the Divine Person to
take over your form, to stand in its place, to be the
principal relationship of your life, to Which you devote
yourself and give yourself. That One is to be found within
and without.

Thus, you Find My bodily (human) Form, and
(eventually) My Spiritual (and Always Blessing) Presence,
and (ultimately) My Very (and Inherently Perfect) State even
as your own form, in your own form, in relationship to your
own form. You simply surrender your conditional self or give
up your self-contraction, to Me as the Ishta of the Divine
Person, which you see in My Form as the True Heart Master.
You allow yourself to be surrounded, pervaded, transformed
by responsive devotion to Me. You allow yourself to become
What you meditate on.

This process of devotional feeling-Contemplation of Me
as the Ishta-Guru is not a matter of relating to Me as an
other, although of course there is a dimension of that kind
to the relationship. You do relate to Me, the True Heart
Master, as an (apparently) human personality. There is an
objective dimension, then, to your responsiveness to Me, to
your seeing of Me as the True Heart Master. You also feel My
Hridaya-Shaktipat,9 the Force of My Heart-Transmission, in
relationship to the body-mind, so there is also that
objective aspect to this process. But you surrender yourself
to the Divine Person by surrendering to Me. You allow
yourself to be taken over by that One by surrendering to Me.
You allow that One to Stand in your place, where you give
yourself, to the point of Realizing Most Perfect Identity
with that One, not by effort, but simply by allowing that
One to Be.

You let Me, the True Master of your heart, and, thus,
the Divine Person, be your own body-mind, acquire your own
body-mind. In this way, My Spiritual (and Always Blessing)
Presence works in your body-mind as if your body-mind were
My own. The same process that has developed in My apparent
body-mind is developed, then, in the circumstance of your
own body-mind. You simply give way to Me, as the True
Heart-Master, so that I can be and acquire all conditional
forms that previously were your own independently and
“Narcissistically , and you allow My Spiritual Processes to
become your own, to take place in your own place. (March 22,
1986)

9. “Hridaya”, or “Hridayam”, is a
Sanskrit term for “heart”. It refers not only to the
physical organ, but also to the True Heart, the
Transcendental (and Inherently Spiritual) Divine
Reality.

In Hindi, “Shaktipat” is the “descent
of the Power”. Yogic Shaktipat, which manipulates natural,
conditional energies or partial manifestations of the
Spirit-Current, is typically granted through touch, word,
glance, or regard by Yogic Spiritual Masters who have not
yet fully Realized the Divine Self-Condition. Yogic
Shaktipat is to he distinguished from (and otherwise
understood to be only a secondary aspect of) the
Blessing-Transmission of the Heart Itself
(Hridaya-Shaktipat). Such Heart-Transmission, Which is
spontaneously Granted or Freely Radiated to all by Sat-Guru
Da, may be Granted only by a Divinely Self-Realized Sat
Guru. Hridaya-Shaktipat does not require intentional Yogic
activity on the Sat-Guru’s part, although such Yogic
activity may also he spontaneously generated by the
Sat-Guru. Hridaya-Shaktipat operates principally at, in, and
as the Heart itself, primarily Awakening the intuition of
“Bright” Consciousness, and only secondarily (and to one
degree or another, depending on the characteristics of the
individual) magnifying the activities of the Spirit-Current
in the body-mind.

 

For devotees in the Way of the Heart, the great and
principally effective “Yoking” in Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga is
thus Accomplished by the Divine, in and as and through the
True Heart-Master, Da Avabhasa Himself.

The Promise of Liberation through Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga
expressed in the sensibility of one or another sacred
culture, can be found, at least by implication, in
Scriptures from various traditions: the Bhagavad Gita, the
Lankavatara Sutra, the Gospel According to John, and others.
This same Promise is the often unspoken root of the
Upanishads of India, a collection of primal sacred texts
whose very title means “Wisdom Granted at the Feet of the
Adepts”.

What we have in The Dawn Horse Testament is the most
complete Articulation of the Promise of Liberation that has
ever been Given to humanity. If you study this Text with
deep heart-need and gratitude, you will see how Sri Da
Avabhasa Graciously takes you through an intensive
“consideration” of the whole process of human, Spiritual,
Transcendental, and Divine Awakening. No step or aspect of
the Way of the Heart is left out, from birth to death, and
from the earliest stages of the practitioner’s adaptation,
to the ultimate Glory of the Most Perfect Realization of the
Divine Self-Condition.

Always, at every step, Sri Da Avabhasa confirms to us
that the Process is not a matter of mere words or mere
self-effort, but that when one truly surrenders, the Great
Blessing and Revelations of the Way of the Heart are
entirely Granted by Him, “As Grace Will Have It”. His
cooperating devotee is Instructed in how to align himself or
herself to Sri Da Avabhasa’s constant Heart-Blessing and
Help, so that his or her practice is truly the Way of the
Heart-the Way whereby the Heart, the Divine Person, in, as,
and through Sri Da Avabhasa, assumes, becomes, or manifests
as that devotee. In Oral Instructions that He Personally
edited, Sri Da Avabhasa Admonishes:

 

SRI DA AVABHASA: The Way of the Heart is to be
practiced absolutely. The being is to be totally given over
to the Divinely Liberating Process in My Company. Therefore,
Ishta-Guru Bhakti Yoga is the Yoga of the Way of the Heart.
All other disciplines of practice-all the functional,
practical, relational, and cultural disciplines, and all the
technical forms of the “conscious process” [the
disciplines of attention] and “conductivity” [the
disciplines of the body-mind]-are secondary and
supportive practices. They are, each and all, subordinate to
Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga.

Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga is the Yoga to which I have
been Calling everyone. It is the Ultimate and Divine Yoga.
Its practice is self-surrendering, self-forgetting, and
self-transcending feeling-Contemplation of My bodily (human)
Form and, as Grace will have it, of My Spiritual (and Always
Blessing) Presence and My Very (and Inherently Perfect)
State. That is it.

I have Indicated over and over again since the
beginning, in the earliest years of My Teaching Work, that
many kinds of experiences may occur in the developmental
course of the sadhana [practice] of the Way of the
Heart, but they are not themselves the Truth. They are not
Divine Self-Realization. Therefore, Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga,
or the Yoga of self-surrendering, self-forgetting, and
self-transcending devotional Contemplation of Me, is not
about the achievement of any of the states of experience
associated with the developmental stages of the Way of the
Heart. Ishta-Guru Bhakti Yoga is the Yoga of direct Grace.
It is always about forgetfulness of the ego-self, and it is
always about Remembrance (and, as Grace will have it, the
Realization) of My bodily (human) Form and (as Grace will
have it) My Spiritual (and Always Blessing) Presence and My
Very (and Inherently Perfect) State….

… Right devotional Contemplation of My bodily
(human) Form becomes forgetfulness of the egoic
body-mind. It becomes an in-depth Contemplation of My
“Bright” Condition and a progressively growing ability to
receive the Transmission of My Spiritual (and Always
Blessing) Presence and My Very (and Inherently Perfect)
State….

However, in the course of this Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga,
or the Yoga of Grace, many conditions and experiences
naturally arise. Therefore, I have Given My devotees a wide
variety of Instructions relative to the functional,
practical, relational, and cultural disciplines, and
relative to devotion, service, self-discipline, and
meditation, and relative to the “conscious process” and
“conductivity”, and relative to the phenomenal conditions
that may arise to indicate the appearance of any or all of
the progressive stages of life in the Way of the
Heart.

As I have always Told My devotees, these are secondary
and supportive practices only. Since the day I began to
Teach, I have Communicated that the Way of the Heart is the
Way of Satsang (the Company of Truth], or
Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga. That devotional Yoga is simple,
straightforward, and complete-as I have just Described it,
and as I have Described it in My Source-Instructions and in
the Literature of My Teaching Work.

Guru-devotion, or Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga, is the Yoga
I always Practiced in the years of My Sadhana. It was My
fundamental Sadhana. That is what I Practiced in
relationship to each of My Teachers and in relationship to
the Goddess. That is how I always Interpreted and Enacted My
Sadhana. Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga, and not any of the
technical practices or experiences, was the primary Means of
My Sadhana. Only the Ultimate Realization That Is the
Essence of Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga itself was the Motive and
the Essence of My Practice, even from the beginning. (July
1, 1991)

 

In the Way of the Heart, Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga is
therefore to be demonstrated in every moment by Sri Da
Avabhasa’s devotee, through explicit devotional practices,
constant, active service, many forms of self-discipline, the
demonstration of self transcending love in all
relationships, and increasingly deep meditation. In The Dawn
Horse Testament and in His other Source-Texts and His
Literature of practical Instruction, Sri Da Avabhasa has
addressed every aspect and function of human existence, so
that His devotees have clear Guidance on how to practice
Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga under all conditions. Thus, when He
Admonishes that the Way of the Heart must be engaged
“absolutely”, Sri Da Avabhasa is Revealing that His supreme
Gift of Divine Awakening must be met, constantly, in every
moment, by a total gift of self-surrender on the part of His
devotee.

Sri Da Avabhasa Says to each and all, “I Offer you a
relationship, not a technique.” The Guru-devotee bond is the
most intimate, the most sublime, the most ecstatic, the most
compelling, the most absorbing, the most demanding, and the
most indeed, the only-Liberating form of human relationship.
Those who would become authentic practitioners of the Way of
the Heart must first discover that Sri Da Avabhasa’s Word is
indeed authoritative Communication of Truth and that He,
Himself, Personally, is their own eternal and True
Heart-Master. On the basis of this awakening of real faith,
aspiring devotees acknowledge, from the very outset of their
devotional practice, an eternal bond with Sri Da Avabhasa
and an eternal commitment to practice His Way of the Heart.
Traditionally, it is well known that only such an
acknowledgment and only such an eternal commitment represent
sufficient force of response to “meet” the Divine Guru’s
Torrent of Grace, which, especially in Sri Da Avabhasa’s
Work, streams constantly into the devotee’s heart and whole
life.

 

Thus, Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga in the Way of the Heart
involves falling in love with the Divine Person in the
bodily (human) Form of Sri Da Avabhasa-and never falling
“out”. To accommodate this love, to give it room to grow and
expand, Sri Da Avabhasa’s devotees consciously relinquish
whatever impedes meditation upon and receptivity to Him in
every moment of life and practice.

On July 1, 1991, Kanya Tripura Rahasya,¹⁰ who
has been a devotee of Sri Da Avabhasa for the past seventeen
years and who has been practicing for a number of years in
the advanced and the ultimate stages of the Way of the
Heart, was moved to confess her practice of
Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga directly to Sri Da Avabhasa. Her
confession is one of profound initiation in the sublime and
highly advanced state of Guru-devotion that was being
Imparted to her by His Grace.

10. “Kanya” is the abbreviated
designation for a member of the Da Avahhasa Gurukula
Kanyadana Kumari Order. Kanyadana is the traditional
practice of giving (dana) a young woman (kanya) into the
intimate service of a Sat-Guru. “Kumari” indicates a self
renounced or Spiritually Awakened woman. The Gurukula is the
Guru’s sacred “family”. The four members of the Da Avabhasa
Kanyadana Kumari Order have consecrated themselves to the
service of Sri Da Avahhasa in “true intimacy” for the sake
of His Work and their Divine
Self-Realization.

 

For weeks, I had been so immersed in the Gift of Sri
Gurudev’s Instructions and “consideration” of
Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga that I was effortlessly and
Gracefully drawn to feel this as the Ultimate and Divine
Yoga, or the Yoga of Grace. One day … I was spontaneously
moved to confess to Him my deepening resort to the Supreme
Yoga of Guru-Bhakti.

I was moved to tell Sri Gurudev how I felt the primacy
of self-surrendering devotion to Him as Sat-Guru. I
confessed the mad, joyous intoxication that was
spontaneously occurring through Contemplation of His bodily
(human) Form (and, Thereby, His Spiritual, and Always
Blessing, Presence), and the Mystery of forgetting the egoic
body-mind through Contemplation of His Very (and Inherently
Perfect) State.

As this was Revealed, all association with the gross,
subtle, or causal structures or dimensions of the body-mind
became inferior or secondary to Bliss Awareness of my Guru
as the Source of everything. My feeling-devotion and my
longing for my Guru’s Love magnified as I Contemplated His
Blissful Forms. I was enraptured by the understanding that
the Guru is the Realization. I was rested in a deep place of
certainty where I could gaze on the Form of the Divine. That
Form is The “Bright” Sri Da Avabhasa.

I was overwhelmed by the Compassion alive in the
reality that the Divine is Manifesting in visible, human
Form as Da Love Ananda. I was made vulnerable and open by
the Power of His Divinity. I felt how my Beloved Guru was my
only Means for Liberation. And I felt how only my Guru knew
what it was that I needed.

Surrender effortlessly magnified, and a deeper
understanding that surrender is the secret of practice in
the Way of the Heart awakened.

Utter faith in Sri Gurudev is the obvious active means
by which to cultivate and preserve this Yoga-faith” meaning
no doubt in the Guru’s Sign, Work, and Mission.

Contemplation of the Guru makes everything else
worthless. It awakens a madness and a one pointed force of
love, and it reveals the unknowable Divine Mystery that is
alive in the Form of Sri Da Avabhasa.

Thus, the Guru Yoga is the Supreme Yoga. I have a felt
certainty now that, in cultivating this Yoga, everything is
Given. The Guru Gives all the Revelations of the Way, and
all the secondary technicalities arise quite naturally
through His Grace. The Guru has made the process of
Liberation effortless. The Guru, therefore, becomes and is
the Realization.

I felt deeply that I had never “done” any aspect of
the practice, but that Sri Gurudev had always Lived the
practice in me. I felt that even the advanced technicalities
of my practice in the ultimate stages of practice in the Way
of the Heart were secondary to the Guru Yoga….

… I also knew that the Guru Yoga of which the
traditions speak is not the Supreme Yoga that is available
in relationship to Sri Gurudev Da Avabbasa. Because Sri
Gurudev is the Very Divine Being-because He is the
Inherently Perfect Incarnation of the Divine-there is no
limit upon the Gifts that He Grants to devotees. It is the
law that you become what you meditate on. If the Realizer
you meditate upon is of a greater or lesser stage, you will
Realize according to the nature of the Realization of your
chosen Guru. In other words, in the Guru Yoga, you receive
the Realization of the one to whom you devote yourself.
Because Sri Gurudev is Incarnated as the Inherently Perfect
Divine Revelation, the Realization He Grants is also
Inherently Perfect-because of Who He is. The purity of the
Guru Yoga in the Way of the Heart stands beyond all other
Yogas. It is the Inherently Perfect Yoga, and it reaches
beyond all limits. This, I proclaimed to Sri Gurudev, is the
fundamental Message of the Way of the Heart.

 

In this epoch of His Divine Emergence Work or Blessing
Work, Sri Da Avabhasa’s now utterly Divinized bodily (human)
Form is indeed the Dawn Horse, the Body of Divine Grace on
Earth, and this Testament is the definitive Evidence of the
Blessings He is Showering on all beings and, especially,
those who respond by practicing His Way of the Heart.

 

“I Am You!”-The “Eternal Conversation” That Is
The Dawn Horse Testament, and the Great Secret of the Divine
Horse

 

What makes the miraculous Yoga of Ishta-Guru-Bhakti
possible is Sri Da Avabhasa’s Inherence in and as the Heart
or Very Self of each and every living being. In June 1984,
the great Divine Adept called a gathering with a small group
of His devotees to “consider” an Essay He had just Composed.
The brief Essay Revealed a new form of devotional practice
for Spiritually advanced practitioners of the Way of the
Heart, the discipline of Mahamantra Meditation. At the
gathering Sri Da Avabhasa read the Essay aloud and then
received and responded to His devotees’ questions and
comments. The following day, Sri Da Avabhasa began to revise
and expand the Essay, taking into account the responses of
His devotees.

The Divine Heart-Master Da had Taught in this manner on a
few occasions before, but now it became His Gracious custom.
Every few days He gathered with these devotees, read aloud
new passages from His rapidly growing Text, and “considered”
His devotees’ responses.

As the Text grew over the following months, and then
years, Heart-Master Da and His devotees “considered” every
aspect of the practice and Realizations of the Way of the
Heart, from the earliest developmental stages of practice to
the most sublime dimensions of God-Realization. It became Da
Avabhasa’s passion to make His new Revelatory Text an
utterly precise and thoroughly useful Communication of the
Divine Truth to everyone. The Text that resulted, The Dawn
Horse Testament, thus organically expanded in both
directions from what is now chapter twenty-seven, which was
the first of the Secrets Revealed in this Scripture.

This unique Yoga of Communication was taking place in Sri
Da Avabhasa’s principal Hermitage Ashram, now known as Sri
Love-Anandashram, in the Fiji Islands. Word had reached His
devotees throughout the world of this impassioned
“consideration” that was daily growing in the form of the
manuscript of The Dawn Horse Testament. Sri Da Avabhasa even
sent Communications asking if any of His devotees not
presently in the Hermitage setting with Him had any
additional questions for His “consideration”. And He
insisted that each regional center of our community receive
a continuously updated manuscript of the Scripture, so that
all His devotees could always resort to His Summary Word in
its then-current form.

Needless to say, His devotees not present with Him at
those seminal gatherings at Sri Love-Anandashram wished they
were there, to be with Him and also to participate in this
epochal Sacred dialogue. That is why what Sri Da Avabhasa
Disclosed on the evening of October 22, 1984, about His
“consideration” with His devotees became such an integral,
even primary, Confession in The Dawn Horse Testament-the
prefatory Essay entitled “The Eternal Conversation”.

That evening, praising Him and the Scripture, one of His
devotees commented that during these Teaching gatherings Sri
Da Avabhasa seemed to be talking not just to the devotees
present in the room with Him but to all His devotees
everywhere. His Response (which He later edited and
amplified in Writing) was that this was so, that this book
was actually His “Eternal Conversation” with all beings
everywhere:

 

In making this Testament I have been Meditating
everyone, contacting everyone, dealing with psychic forces
everywhere, in all time. This Testament is an always Living
Conversation between Me and absolutely every one.

 

Unlike any other Scripture, The Dawn Horse Testament
thoroughly articulates the precise Revelation of God and of
the Way of present God-Realization to every human heart.
This Testament does not merely describe the Divine. It
directly Reveals the Divine to the hearts of those who
openly and receptively attend to its beautiful Scriptural
form and its holy meanings. It is numinous, Empowered
Speech, the inherently Enlightening Word of the Divine
World-Teacher, Who is not only Speaking to out- hearts but
from and as our Very Heart, our One and Only Divine Self.
Those who receive it as such attest to the Power of Sri Da
Avabhasa’s Revelation here: Merely by reading these words
silently, or by reciting them or hearing them read aloud,
one can be naturally Drawn into faith, equanimity, Wisdom,
and Divine Ecstasy in Communion with Sri Da Avabhasa.

Moreover, The Dawn Horse Testament has been Articulated
by Sri Da Avabhasa with concentrated attention to every
single detail of its Revelation and its Instruction. Indeed,
the very grammatical and linguistic style of this Scripture
is pure and sacred Art: It is Mantric or Spirit-Filled
Communication, Created by the Divine World-Teacher to
Inspire, Inform, and precisely Instruct His devotees in
every detail of the practice of the Way of the Heart. He has
specifically clarified every page, paragraph, and phrase of
the Text to ensure that each of His Expositions throughout
the book may be correctly understood. Every capital letter,
every parenthesis, every choice of particular Words, has
been fully and thoroughly “Considered” by Sri Da Avabhasa to
achieve its optimal effect as a pure, clear, direct, and
unambiguous Communication of His exactly intended
meanings.

As Sri Da Avabhasa explains, The Dawn Horse Testament is
“theatrically” constructed as an Address by Him to each
“you”, each living being who exists. The responses of the
living beings are implicit in His total Confession,
Argument, Revelation, and Instruction. Indeed, Sri Da
Avabhasa has Said that The Dawn Horse Testament actually
summarizes His entire Lifetime of “Conversation” – indeed,
His Eternal Conversation-with all living beings. But this
“Conversation” must be understood as a Process of Divine
Siddhi, or Power, whereby Sri Da Avabhasa has not only
“Spoken to” but has literally Assumed the limits of all
beings and completely purified, clarified, absorbed, and
released them in His own body-mind. Thereby He has done even
more than Clarify the most Perfect verbal Wisdom about how
we may now also stand free of all such egoic limits. He has
also Mastered, Conquered, and Overcome these limits in such
a fashion that, simply by living in relationship with Him
from the Heart, we may most swiftly accomplish our necessary
sadhana of self-forgetting, self-surrendering,
self-transcending release of egoic un-Happiness and realize
the unconditional Bliss of Communion with His bodily Form
and His Great Presence and His State of Being. This great
and purely, benignly Spiritual Mastering of all conditional
forces and patterns of egoity is what Sri Da Avabhasa Means
by His “Victory In The Heart”. The devotees sitting before
Him in the Hermitage Ashrams where He Wrote and Revised this
book between 1984 and 1991 were only the flesh-and-blood
representatives of all beings everywhere with whom the
Divine World-Teacher, Da Avabhasa, has been continuously
engaged in this very and timeless “Dawn Horse” Dialogue to
Enlighten all hearts.

What is the key Secret or Principle of that universal
Dialogue? On the night of October 22, 1984, the same evening
He Acknowledged His “Eternal Conversation” in the passage
quoted above, I was privileged to attend that Teaching
gathering of Sri Da Avabhasa with His devotees. That evening
was my first night as a retreatant at Sri Love-Anandashram,
and I was thrilled that I was being allowed to see Him so
soon after arriving at the Ashram. I had in fact been
burning to participate in His “Considerations” of The Dawn
Horse Testament.

After He had read some of His recent Writings aloud and
Spoken of the “Eternal Conversation” that His Testament
represents, the Divine Heart-Master asked if anyone had
questions about anything in the book.

I then brought forward a question I had prepared in the
previous weeks: I asked Him if He would describe the “higher
psycho-physics” of His Spiritual Intimacy with each of us,
whereby He is able to Respond to the prayerful Remembrance
and Invocations of His devotees no matter where we are. I
remarked that He had described in painstaking detail every
feature of how we should responsively practice in relation
to Him in Person. How, I asked, does He Respond to us? When
I am in California and He is physically in Fiji, for
instance, and I Invoke Him via His Name, what happens in His
own Awareness that makes His Grace so intimately and
Responsively obvious to me?

This seemed to me a useful question, and one that might
elicit a description from the Divine Adept that would serve
many people besides myself. Indeed it did-but not at all in
the manner I had anticipated!

Sri Da Avabhasa smiled and Graciously Replied to my
question as follows:

 

SRI DA AVABHASA: Well, in this Dawn Horse Testament I
am constantly telling you how that relationship works. I
have described the Living One. I have Confessed to you that
I Am That One. I have told you that the Living One, My Self,
is the One Who is modified as all forms, all beings, all
worlds. How could I be anything but Intimate with you,
then?

It is only if you think of Me as someone who is
separate, as someone who must do something to get in touch
with you, that you wonder about how it works in some
technical sense. Even in this bodily (human) Form, you see
Me Functioning with the Consciousness of the Unity between
My Self and everyone. I am constantly experiencing and
reflecting the psyches of others directly, without having to
go through some sort of Yogic process of inverting My
attention and getting a vision. If somebody comes into the
room with an ailment, I get it immediately.

We need not add other language, or talk about how the
process of our relationship operates at the level of nuclear
physics and energy exchanges between brains. How could we
ever exhaust that conversation? What is fundamentally so is
what I have Confessed to you and what you come to
acknowledge and Realize. It is a simple matter. I Am you.
Really! And also, paradoxically, I enter into relationship
with you, by assuming these conditions. But at the same time
that I am associated with these conditions and appear as an
individual in this place and moment, I Am the One Who is
without conditions.

So what the question comes down to, what it really is,
is an expression of doubt. If I Am you, there does not have
to be any way it works! There is not any difference between
us to need something to work. So I have completely accounted
for what you are asking about. It is just that My answer is
not satisfying to the egoic mind. Only in the mode of
Communion with Me, direct Realization in My Company, would
you be satisfied by some of these descriptions. As long as
there is that knot in the heart, then What is Great
is not perceived, and so you look for signs, structures, to
open the heart, to relieve you of yourself so you can see
plainly. (October 22, 1984)

 

For the next three days, Sri Da Avabhasa sequestered
Himself in His quarters, spending much of His time Composing
the sublime Epilogue to The Dawn Horse Testament. The
central Confession He Offers there, and perhaps the central
“Dawn Horse” Secret of this entire Scripture, is the simple
but absolutely profound, paradoxical Truth of His Divine
Appearance: “I Am You!” All the events of His Divine Work
and His every devotee’s practice of the Way of the Heart are
built upon this fundamental Truth, His already Accomplished
Victory of Divine Identification with and Liberation of
every Heart.

 

The Mysterious Relationship between the Dawn
Horse and Sri Da Avabhasa’s Horse Sacrifice
(Ashvamedha)

How is it possible for Sri Da Avabhasa to live in such an
infinite State of Divine Consciousness and still walk, talk,
and behave in all kinds of responsive and participatory ways
as an individual human being? I have already described the
sequence of Events in His Birth and Life whereby this
Realization Shone forth, His Ordeal of Re-Awakening. But
ultimately these are not questions that can be answered by
conventional logic or any kind of narrative history-just as
my question to Him that night seven years ago could not at
last be answered by any ordinary logic.

Thus, Sri Da Avabhasa has Gracefully Given us Divinely
Revealed “Pictures”, as it were, whereby we may joyously
acknowledge and accept His Divine Inherence as the Very Self
of each and all, and His Divine Work to Awaken each and all
to our inherent Truth. One of the key Pictures He has Given
is His Dawn Horse Vision, described above. Another-distinct
from that one, and yet remarkably related-is His
Confirmation that His Divine Birth, Life, and Work may be
understood as a spontaneous Performance of a Divine Rite
known as the “Horse Sacrifice”, or the “Ashvamedha”.

Since ancient times, it has been well known in all sacred
cultures that the key to Spiritual, Transcendental, and
Divine Grace is, in one form or another, acts of sacrifice.
“Sacrifice” simply means “to make sacred”. The process of
sacrifice, however, always involves the letting go,
releasing, giving up, or renouncing of something dear,
valuable, or important, for the sake of a greater sacred
Principle. The more exoteric forms of human religion have
involved gross sacrifices-offerings of animals, money,
flowers, food, herbs, and the like, which are yielded to one
or more deities in order to receive, in response, blessings
in life. The more esoteric forms of human religion and
Spirituality have involved, in addition to or even apart
from the sacrifice or offering of gross elements, the
sacrifice even of what we ourselves are as un-Enlightened
beings.

Such esoteric sacrifices include the yielding or
conscious surrender, in ceremonial rites and in formal
meditation, of body, emotion, and mind, of thoughts and
desires, and-in the very rarest of cases-the surrender of
attention and the whole structure of egoity. Historically,
only Divine Adepts and a very few devotees have actually
fulfilled complete ego-sacrifice, but the principle of
sacrifice itself remains true and effective at every level
of Realization. Through the yielding of egoic self and the
actual reception of Divine Blessings, whatever elements of
our being are yielded are then made sacred, purified and
sanctified by the Living Spiritual Power of the Divine.
Thereby, they are aligned to and established in Communion
with the Divine Itself.

These are the forms of sacrifice by which human beings
have historically obtained the Blessings (exoteric,
esoteric, or both) of the Divine Reality or Person. In
ancient India, among all forms of sacrifice, the Horse
Sacrifice was especially honored and extolled.

This Ashvamedha rite, we are informed both by ancient
accounts and modern scholarship, appeared in several forms.
On the most exoteric or outward level, it was a sacred
ceremony performed by kings to establish and prove their
dominion. This tremendously complex, year-long rite absorbed
the energy and attention of the king’s entire court and all
his subjects throughout the land.

In this kingly Horse Sacrifice, a fine stallion was
formally and ceremonially sanctified to represent the king
and then sent out, followed by a full guard of soldiers,
priests, and magicians, to wander where it would throughout
the entire countryside for a year. Wherever it wandered was
then assumed to be the king’s dominion, unless the guard was
successfully contested by opposing forces. During the year
the king was obliged to give everything of himself and his
kingdom for the sake of this mysterious rite’s success.
Legend has it that great sovereigns frequently bankrupted
their treasuries in sponsoring elaborate sacred rites,
festivals, great religious ceremonies philosophical
expositions and debates, and all manner of lavish
celebration. The king himself lived essentially as a
renunciate ascetic throughout the whole period, concentrated
in prayer and meditation. At the end of the year, the horse
was brought back to the capital. There, amid further
religious rites, it was physically sacrificed in ceremonial
fashion by the priests, with the king then established or
reconfirmed as the supreme sovereign in his realm.

This more outward Ashvamedha provided the mythic
symbology for the internal, Yogic form of the Horse
Sacrifice, as practiced by Adepts and aspirants of the
process of esoteric Spiritual ascent.

In that Yogic, mystical process, the horse represented
the body-mind of the Yogic practitioner (or shaman). In some
cases and some cultures, this Yogic ritual was accompanied
or symbolized by the physical sacrifice of an actual, living
horse. Once the horse was sacrificed, physically (or perhaps
symbolically, in Yogic fashion), it was understood that the
Yogi/shaman could ride the horse’s spirit and thereby ascend
with it into the heavenly realms beyond gross perception,
rational thinking, and ordinary imagination.

But even the Yogic and shamanic esotericisms of the
Horse-Sacrifice, with their aspirations toward eternal life
in the heavenly worlds, paled in power and significance
beside the ultimate, Divine version of the rite, which has
been fully clarified in our time by Sri Da Avabhasa’s own
Revelatory Instruction and Play.

This Divine Horse Sacrifice is alluded to in the very
first verse of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, which is one of
the oldest of the Scriptures of Hinduism that are regarded
as Divinely Revealed:

 

Aum, the dawn, verily, is the head of the sacrificial
horse, the sun the eye, the wind the breath, the open mouth
the Vaisvanara [universally worshipped] fire; the
year is the body of the sacrificial horse, the sky is the
back, the atmosphere is the belly, the earth the hoof
[or, the earth is his footing, the quarters the sides,
the intermediate quarters the ribs, the seasons the limbs,
the months and the half-months the joints, days and nights
the feet, the stars the bones, the clouds the flesh; the
food in the stomach is the sand, the rivers are the
blood-vessels, the liver and the lungs are the mountains,
the herbs and the trees are the hair. The rising (sun) is
the forepart, the setting (sun) the hind part, when he yawns
then it light[ens], when he shakes himself, it
thunders, when he urinates then it rains; voice, indeed, is
his voice.”¹¹

11. The Principal Upanishads, Edited
with an introduction, Text, Translation and Notes by S.
Radhakrishnan (London- George Allen and Unwin, 1974), p.
149.

 

Here the term “sacrificial horse” alludes to the Divine
Ashvamedha, which was regarded in Vedic India as the most
auspicious and effective of all the ancient rites or
sacrifices. It is intimated in ancient texts that this Horse
Sacrifice mysteriously accounts for the very creation or
existence of the entire cosmos.

The Yogically esoteric Ashvamedha was performed by
extraordinary but nonetheless egoic beings. Their aim was to
transcend gross human existence (during life and especially
at and after death) in a psychically expanded, Divinely
Blessed life in heavenly, subtle dimensions.

The Perfectly Divine Ashvamedha, in contrast, was
understood to be performed periodically by the Divine
Reality in Person. This Supreme Sacrifice was Accomplished
by the inherently unconditional, eternal, and Supreme Being
(described, in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, in the form of
an “All-Pervading Horse”), not by any kind of egoic or
conditional self. And this Divine Ashvamedha was understood
as a Process whereby the Infinite Divine Being Incarnated in
a single, finite, bodily (human) Form, as a Divine Adept or
human Spiritual Master.

In a sense, then, the purpose and import of the Divine
Person’s Horse Sacrifice was, and is, precisely the opposite
of that of Yogis and shamans. Whereas the latter seek to
escape from gross bodily existence, in order to ascend into
heavenly realms of awareness and acquire subtle or magical
powers, the Divine Person Performing the Horse Sacrifice
Strives to Incarnate the Transcendental Divine
Consciousness, the All-Pervading Spiritual Presence, and the
All-Liberating Power in a single human body-mind, in order
to achieve complete psycho-physical Agency for His Work.
Thus, the Divine Horse Sacrifice is a Process of Spiritual
Descent and Embodiment, rather than of ascent and (eventual)
escape from the body. This supreme Sacrificial Incarnation
as a single human being then enables the Divine Being to
effectively sanctify or Divinize innumerable beings,
particularly those who are responsive to Him in His human
Incarnation, and even the world itself.

 

Sri Da Avabhasa’s Birth, Work, and entire Life are the
Divine Enactment of this ancient Horse Sacrifice. The Ordeal
that He has had to endure in this lifelong Process
demonstrates that the Divine Consciousness He Brings into or
Magnifies in the world is no buffer from pain, difficulty,
or distress. On the contrary, the difficulty of this
Sacrificial Work of Incarnation has been inconceivable-as
evidenced by His description, above, of the extreme anguish
and death-like Yogic “swoon” that precipitated His Divine
Emergence in 1986.

Truly, Sri Da Avabhasa’s Divine Emergence represents, in
His own Life, the Culmination of His Great Horse Sacrifice.
As the All-Pervading Divine Horse, He, the Supreme Person,
consented, through sacrifice, to identify Himself with all
qualities, all limits, all features of conditional or cosmic
existence. He did this first in His own body-mind, during
His early Ordeal of Birth and Divine Re-Awakening, assuming
and transcending the karmas of the conditional personality
of Franklin Jones (His given Name at birth). Then He did
this in a greatly expanded fashion during His years of
Teaching, Himself assuming the karmas of all His devotees
(and even all beings) and continuously Sacrificing those
karmas. When His Divine “tour” of the “kingdom” of all
conditional possibilities was absolutely full and complete,
the Horse,of all those conditional limits and possibilities,
gross, subtle, and causal, now fully “Considered”, assumed,
purified, and released in His own body-mind, was
spontaneously relinquished in His Great Ashvamedha
Sacrifice. It is not merely that Sri Da Avabhasa went
through a death-like Yogic Process, as if He were an
individual egoic being. No, His body-mind was temporarily
relinquished by the Divine Consciousness that He Is, and
this relinquishment marked the end of that necessary “tour”
that had occupied Him during His Teaching years. Then, His
dramatic and most conclusive Descent into and Emergence in
and as His bodily (human) Form as the Divine Person, rather
than through residual mechanisms of His Teaching persona,
marked His Conscious reclamation of all conditional
phenomena by the Divine Being, enacted through the Vehicle
of His body-mind.

And, since then, Sri Da Avabhasa has Stood Free and Firm.
He is Free even of His previous Enlightened Impulse as
Heart-Teacher to wander among the egoic karmas of His
devotees in order to reflect them to themselves with the
Intention of Awakening them. Through the Horse Sacrifice of
His Divine Emergence, Sri Da Avabhasa has Completed His
Manifestation as the Supreme Divine Being in bodily (human)
Form. In this book He makes it clear that this
Transformation has been epochal not only in His own Life but
in the course of all human history.

In April 1987, Sri Da Avabhasa responded to a devotee’s
question about His brief reference to the Ashvamedha at the
end of The Dawn Horse Testament. He commented on the Horse
Sacrifice, or Ashvamedha, and its relationship to the Vision
and Revelation of the Dawn Horse in His own Appearance and
Work, and He specifically mentioned His Revelations about
these great matters in the final passages of the Epilogue of
this book:

 

SRI DA AVABHASA: In its most esoteric form, beyond the
rites of the first five stages of life,¹² the
Ashvamedha is a Revelation of the Ultimate Divine through
the sacrifice of everything conditional, and through the
Realization of That Which transcends the cosmic. All other
interpretations are also part of the total meaning of the
Ashvamedha. Its meanings exist on many, many levels.

My Demonstration of this ultimate form of the
Ashvamedha was and is totally spontaneous. I did it
spontaneously, without all this information in mind.
Nonetheless, you will see that your study of the sacred
traditions will confirm the Truth of what I am telling you.
You have seen the Ashvamedha performed in My own
Form.

The ultimate form of the Ashvamedha Transmits not
merely cosmic realization but Transcendental (and Inherently
Spiritual) Divine Self-Realization through sacrifice. The
Horse , then, is what the God-Realized Adept is altogether.
The original product of the Ashvamedha sacrifice in My own
Form is My Word of Instruction, of which The Dawn Horse
Testament is a summary. Thus, it is appropriate to call The
Dawn Horse Testament the true “Dawn Horse”. The Dawn Horse
Testament is the Gift Given to My devotees as the result of
the Ashvamedha. It grants the Power of Realization to My
devotees. It communicates, or it is a vehicle of, the
Transmission of My Blessing to every one.

12. Sri Da Avabhasa has described the
evolutionary potential of the human individual in terms of
seven stages of life. The first five stages of life are the
stages of ordinary human physical, emotional-sexual, and
mental-volitional development (the first three stages of
life), of psychic, Spiritual, and devotional
God-Consciousness (the fourth stage of life), and of true
Yogic Spiritual ascent and mystical gnosis (the fifth stage
of life). In the context of these first five stages of life,
we remain fixed in subject-object dualisms or illusions of
conditional experience, whether physical or psychic. In this
passage Sri Da Avabhasa is speaking of the seventh stage,
Divine Enactment of the Horse Sacrifice from the Position or
Disposition of Absolute Divine Consciousness Itself, beyond
and prior to all conditional relations and activities, such
as the esoteric versions of the Horse Sacrifice that may be
undertaken by Spiritual practitioners in the fourth, or
fourth to fifth, stages of life.

For a full presentation of Sri Da
Avabhasa’s Wisdom-Teaching on the seven stages of life,
please see pp. 42-45 of this book.

 

Sri Da Avabhasa has Revealed, in His “Simple
Revelation-Book”, The Love Ananda Gita, that by virtue of
His Divine Emergence, “My bodily (human) Form is (Itself)
the Teaching.” By virtue of His Great Ashvamedha Sacrifice,
His Divine Emergence, every possible condition of human
existence that could limit or obstruct our true duplication
of His State has already been Comprehended and Transcended
by Him in His own, now most Radiantly Transfigured and
Divinely Transparent, bodily (human) Form, which is now here
for our feeling-Contemplation, via the consummate Yoga of
Ishta-Guru-Bhakti. Thus it is that He Proclaims that The
Dawn Horse Testament itself is the Dawn Horse, as He is
Himself. He continues in the same Oral Instructions:

SRI DA AVABHASA: But this does not exhaust the
meanings or the results of the Ashvamedha in My own case,
nor the implications of the Dawn Horse Vision. [One of
the closing paragraphs of The Dawn Horse Testament] says
that “As The Sign and The Result Of The Sacrifice By Which
This Very Testament Has Come To Consciousness, The
Revelation Of `Brightness’ (Itself) Will Appear To every
one. ” The Dawn Horse is ultimately consequential in that
Realization, which takes the form of the Awakening of My
individual devotee and the community of My devotees in
response to the initial Sign. The Dawn Horse Testament is
something like that vaguely apparent, but nonetheless true,
original Dawn Horse, which, when it becomes solidified in
its full effect, takes the form of Revelation and
Realization for those who receive it.

The Dawn Horse is not the horse sent around the
country, later to be sacrificed in the Ashvamedha ritual.
The Ashvamedha is the Process of the sacrifice, and the Dawn
Horse is its result. The Dawn Horse is in some sense the
ash, the Prasad,¹³ that becomes apparent through
the Fire of the Sacrifice. The Ashvamedha is My own
Sacrifice, My own Work. The Dawn Horse is also Me, it is The
Dawn Horse Testament, it is anyone who comes to Realization
through this Revelation. This so-called myth is therefore
rather large in its significance!

The Sacrifice has been made. That is why there is a
Testament. That is why there is a Revelation. I am in fact
the Sign of the completed Sacrifice. Its fulfillment was in
the Great Event at the Vedanta Temple in 1970. Many Signs of
its fulfillment have occurred throughout the years of My
Spiritual Work. The result, if you will, of the Sacrifice is
the Dawn Horse, which is the Prasad, the Gift, that comes
through the Sacrifice. The Dawn Horse is eternally present,
becoming more and more visible in respondents, or those who
will receive the Gift, see the Dawn Horse, and receive the
Revelation.

13. In Sanskrit, “Prasad” is
equivalent to “Grace”. it means “the return of the gift to
the giver”. In the Way of the Heart, “Prasad” signifies all
the kinds of offerings, such as sacred ash, sweets, water,
and the like, given to Sri Da Avabhasa by His devotee and
then returned by Him as the tangible Blessing of the Giver
of Divine Grace. The ultimate Prasad is Heart-Master Da’s
constant Gift of Himself to His every devotee. Those who
truly fulfill the Way of the Heart in His Company fully
receive the Prasad of Sri Da Avabhasa :s bodily (human)
Form, His Spiritual (and Always Blessing) Presence, and His
very (and Inherently Perfect) State, and they thereby
Realize the Divine Self-Condition by His abundant Divine
Grace.

 

The Dawn Horse is not only Sri Da Avabhasa’s Divinely
Transformed bodily (human) Form, nor is it only His Summary
Word in this Testament and His other Source-Scriptures. It
is the whole Process and Result of His inconceivable Work in
the Source-Dimension of all life. But no words or mortal
estimations can contain the Vastness of What He has
Achieved. He continues:

SRI DA AVABHASA: The Dawn Horse is a new Revelation,
the result of the Ashvamedha. This Dawn Horse is not to be
sacrificed, just as ash cannot be sacrificed because it is
already sacrificed, and so it cannot be sacrificed again.
Ash is insubstantiality appearing concretely. It cannot be
destroyed. It cannot be reduced to anything, because it has
already been reduced absolutely. In that reduction it
transcended smallness, non-entityness, or non-existence. It
became simply the Divine, and everything short of That was
transcended, burned up, sacrificed.

Thus, the Dawn Horse stands as Revelation, the result
of the Sacrifice. It is a continuous, eternal Revelation. My
Work does not come to an end. It has proceeded since the
Divine Re Awakening in the Vedanta Temple, it proceeds now,
and it cannot be brought to an end by contingencies. It is
therefore continuously, eternally available.

The Dawn Horse Testament is the true Dawn Horse in the
sense that it is the means of that availability. But the
Dawn Horse does not become fully concrete except in the
reception of the Prasad, the Realization of the Revelation.
That is why this paragraph [of The Dawn Horse
Testament] says that as a result of this Sacrifice, the
Revelation will come to every one. It is a statement of fact
about the nature of this Blessing, or this Siddhi
[Divine Awakening Power], which has come about as a
result of the Sacrifice manifested in My own Person from
Birth and through the variety of events in My Life, the
Sacrifice that did not come to an end in the Vedanta Temple,
that was consummated there in some fundamental sense but
that was continuous. No further Sacrifice is possible or
necessary.

There is no significance in anything you could call
“Sacrifice” on My part anymore. The Sacrifice is absolute. I
do not have to suffer anymore for any grand purpose, you
see. The Dawn Horse simply stands as Revelation, and you
will see it concretely in your Realization.

I prefer to let My language in The Dawn Horse
Testament stand as it is, rather condensed and full of
meaning, rather than exhaust it with explanations which seem
to make everything clear, but which in their exhaustiveness
become intolerable. In some sense it would have been better
for you to puzzle over all this. But rather than obstruct
you further, a little footnote here will be appropriate!
(April 4, 1987)

 

 

Sri Da Avabhasa (The “Bright”)

 

Sri Da Avabhasa has used many Names over the years, each
one coinciding with and illuminating a unique cycle in the
course of His Work. On April 30, 1991, in response to His
devotees’ confessed acknowledgements of His Radiant bodily
Revelation of God, He Announced a new Name: “Da Avabhasa
(The `Bright’)”.

“Avabhasa”, in Sanskrit, has a rich range of
associations. As a noun it means “brightness”, “appearance”,
“manifestation”, “splendor”, “lustre”, “light”, “knowledge”.
Its verb-root may be interpreted as “shining toward”,
“shining down”, “showing oneself’. The Name “Da Avabhasa”,
then, proclaims the auspicious Mystery of Da, the Divine
Being, “Brightly” Appearing as a human being. It points to
His Divine Emergence (“showing oneself’) and the
ever-growing Radiance (“shining toward”) that is apparent to
all who have been Graced to see Him since the Great Event of
1986.

The Name “Da Avabhasa” also points to His role as
Sat-Guru-meaning One who brings the light of Truth into the
darkness of the egoic human world. Although “Avabhasa” is a
Sanskrit word, however, there is no tradition in Hinduism
for its use as a sacred term. In fact, the Name Avabhasa is
altogether free of any association with a previously
established Spiritual tradition. And Sri Da Avabhasa’s
infinite and all-pervading “Brightness” is a key to
understanding His unique Nature and Work as the Divine
World-Teacher, the Divya Jagad-Guru, or “One who Liberates
everything that moves”.

Sri Da Avabhasa is here to Heal the hearts of countless
beings with His Heart Word of Wisdom and His silent, unseen,
ever-flowing, and All-Pervading Heart Blessing. He is here
to Reveal to everyone who turns to Him the Way of religious
Awakening and Divine Liberation by Grace. Most especially,
He is here to Bless and ripen serious devotees toward
ultimate Divine Self-Realization and, in due course, Divine
Translation. He is here to Bless all beings everywhere-but
those who respond to His Call and His Gifts by truly
practicing the Way of the Heart as His formally acknowledged
devotees enjoy an Intimacy with Him, heart to Heart, that
catalyzes their inevitable Liberation by His Grace.

Throughout His two decades of Teaching and Blessing Work,
Sri Da Avabhasa has emphasized the pultimate esoteric basis
of the True Spiritual Process: “the Method of the Siddhas”.
This is the Secret Method whereby Siddhas (“Perfected Ones”)
or Sat-Gurus (“Revealers of Truth”) Liberate Spiritual
aspirants who cooperate with them through devotional
surrender.

But in this great Text, Sri Da Avabhasa, as the Divine
World-Teacher, the Parama-Guru, or Primal Guru among all
Gurus, Reveals His own, historically unprecedented, Supreme
Method for Liberating all beings. That Supreme Method is the
unique Work whereby He Incarnates or Manifests the Divine
Self first in His own bodily (human) Form, and then, via
that singular psycho-physical Agency, in the body-minds of
all those who respond to Him and practice His Way of the
Heart by meditating on His God-“Bright” bodily (human) Form
and who are drawn, by that feeling-Contemplation, to
duplicate that same Heart-Freedom themselves. This
Magnification of God through the Work of Da Avabhasa is
literally and continuously affecting all beings, everywhere.
Sri Da Avabhasa’s Divine Method of Enlightening others is
the greatest Blessing ever Given to humanity, and it is
Revealed in exhaustive detail in this very book.

Therefore, I affirm with all my heart: Sri Da Avabhasa is
both the Initiator and the first Evidence of a new epoch or
world-cycle for all Earthly and cosmic Nature. Such a Being
has only been vaguely anticipated and prophesied in the
past. With the Appearance of Sri Da Avabhasa, that prophecy
has been made tangible in the flesh. The Dawn Horse
Testament is His announcement and His documentation, His
prophecy and His proof, of this auspicious event.

I bow down to Sri Da Avabhasa, the Divine World-Teacher
and the Giver of Life and Liberation. I am full of joy to
practice His Way of the Heart. The Dawn Horse Revelation of
the Divine World-Teacher Da Avabhasa has the Power to break
through the endless whirlpool of separate self-fascination
in every heart. The Auspicious Message of The Dawn Horse
Testament is not that Sri Da Avabhasa can Do this, or that
He will Do this, but that in Truth He has already Done it!
This is the Result of His Horse Sacrifice. This is the
Nature of His Divine Victory in the One and Only Heart of
all beings. This is the Meaning of His Heart-Confession, “I
Am You!”, in His Eternal Conversation with each and every
living being. And this is the Realization that manifests
like the Dawn Horse in each and all who fully participate
with Sri Da Avabhasa in His inconceivably Grace-Full Gift of
Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga in the Way of the Heart.

Now, may you be Blessed, may we all be Blessed, to listen
to, and hear, and see, and truly and, ultimately, Perfectly
Contemplate, Receive, and Realize the One Divine Person,
Alive as Sri Da Avabhasa, Who Speaks and Empowers and Is The
Dawn Horse Testament!