“The definition of the sublime rests on tacit
intuition“
Nicolas
Boileau-Despréaux (1636 – 1711) French poet and
critic.
“The heart of the process of
becoming-aware…leads to a letting-go and ends in a
tacit intuition characterized by an openness to
oneself.”
The Gesture of
Awareness – Natalie Depraz – College Internationale de
Philosophie
One night in 1960, Franklin Jones
(Adi Da Samraj) while a student a Columbia University sat at
his desk, feeling that he had exhausted the possibilities
experience, he was overtaken by crises in consciousness, he
suddenly obsessed his whole search in summary form and saw
it as an endless, fruitless drama of contradictions. And at
the very moment that he surrendered to this
intuition, a vast, ecstatic energy rose in his body
and poured through him in waves, forcing him to flee his
room and run through the city streets transported with
joy.”
adapted from the
The
Knee of Listening
Intuition in the Teaching Of Adi Da Samraj
Avataric periods are the spring-tide of creation. They bring a new release of power, a new awakening of consciousness, a new experience of life not merely for a few, but for all. Qualities of energy and awareness, which had been used and enjoyed by only a few advanced souls, are then made available for all humanity. Life, as a whole, is lifted to a higher level of consciousness and geared to a new rate of energy. The transition from sensation to reason was one such step; the transition from reason to intuition will be another. In intuition the opposites are resolved.
Meher Baba –Chapter 7 – Avatar – God to Man, Man to God
The right understanding of ‘intuition’ and how Adi Da Samraj uses the term is based on tacit and practical realization. How Adi Da uses the term can and often is, misunderstood. Because of this fact, Beezone has complied a number of excerpts from various writings and talks by Adi Da Samraj which show how he uses this concept in a multi-faceted manner.
The excerpts that follow will reveal many nuances ‘mere intuition’ has in his teaching. Adi Da uses the term in the simplist and most sophisticated abstract manner, which easily can confuse the reader. As in all the teachings of Adi Da Samraj, understanding his word must be guided by the magnification of ones own tacit intuition of a prior condition which he is ALWAYS addressing.
“The ego is always assuming one side or the other. Maybe at some point it’s resting in the whole but not identifying and not understanding it’s own activity, itself as an obstacle. In other words, not realizing that which is prior to it. To realize what is prior to the whole and the self-contraction is what I call hearing. It is an intuitive realization. It stands prior to mind. And once that realization occurs something happens in consciousness. It’s similar to realizing you’ve been pinching yourself and you stop. You begin to witness your own activity.”
Beezone
The following are excerpts from the teachings of Adi Da Samraj:
“The Teaching of the Way of Divine Ignorance is not truly either exoteric or esoteric. Rather, the Way involves Transcendental Awakening, or radical intuition, from the beginning. That intuition, or the Realization of Divine Ignorance, is Awakened through “hearing” or truly understanding the argument of the Teaching of Truth, and “seeing” or truly surrendering into the Company or Presence of the Spiritual Master.
Once this hearing and seeing are true of the devotee, the Way begins. And the beginning of the Way involves the transcendence of self through application to exoteric disciplines of a religious, moral, and personal kind. But these very disciplines are engaged from the point of view of true understanding, or prior Awakening to the Disposition of Divine Ignorance and direct surrender into the Transcendental Current of Life.”
The Enlightenment of the Whole Body
“Self-Realization is the intuition of the independence or prior Freedom of the soul, the conscious, self-contained Life-Light that Radiates in the heart of the psycho-physical being. In the case of such Self-Realization, the soul Intuits that it is temporarily but not necessarily associated with the body-mind, and that it is not identical to the body-mind. Therefore, the Free soul, intuiting its Identity with the Transcendental Self, determines to abide in its own prior, exclusive State of inherent Bliss and Unqualified Consciousness.”
The traditional searches are an attempt to return to the simpler origin. When they turn inward in the waking state, away from desire, this is religion.
When they turn inward from subtle life and dreams to forms of subtlety or light beyond mind, this is spirituality or yoga.
The intuitive methods of the would be Jnani or Buddha turn beyond life and subtlety into the causal ground.
The entirely awakened intuitive life and from that point of view Reality understood. Of the intuition of the divine.
There are ways in which the Divine Siddhi draws him to that perfect intuition, but he must actually live the sacrifice. It is not magic. He must live it. That demand always pertains. So the conventional dilemma of the body is not permanently taken away by the dramas of experience in Satsang. Eventually, the individual must realize the Divine through the intuitive process of real intelligence, even while alive in “the body.”
Understanding is reality In its fullness. It is the perfection That is reality Prior to intuition, symbol and search. It is radical truth.
The foundation of spiritual life Is the intuition of your real condition, The intuition of the divine nature Of this moment.
The moment to moment intensive demonstration of the preliminary “Perfect Knowledge” Listening-process of “Transcendental Root-Standing” Is the “Radical Intuition” of the “Root”-Position of Consciousness Itself As Intrinsically ego-Transcending, anegoic, “causeless”, actionless, Intrinsically not bound, and (therefore) Free of any impulse to seek.
Spiritual life is moral transformation through love, through Intuition. It is not a matter of gaining knowledge. All knowledge passes…You will never acquire any ultimate certainty through the means of knowledge…you will not become certain of (Reality) through any egoic pursuit of certainty, knowledge, or information.
The Way of the Heart is a radical Way of observation, understanding, insight, and intuition.
Truly, it can only take place when there is already the intuition of Real-God in the Heart, as the Heart, and the regenerated intuition of the God-Light. And these things are given as a Grace in the process of Satsang.
It is true that our own consciousness – that which is at the root of attention – is ultimately, even inherently, identical to the Transcendental Being. But it must be Realized to be so. And it cannot be Realized to be so until energy and attention are free for that most profound and radical intuition.
The conscious process is the process which is generated from or at the most fundamental level of awareness itself. And, at each stage, that process is generated as intuitive understanding and immediate transcendence of the self-contraction (or the suggestion of independence and limitation that arises every moment as experience, or the states of the body mind).
The Life-Power is simply the Transcendental Reality, unqualifiedly Radiant, and identical to Consciousness, wherein the entire world of differentiated events and processes rises and falls as a spontaneous inevitability, without Ultimate Necessity. In that Radiant Consciousness the Truth is always tacitly obvious, and it is Perfect Ignorance, or the intuition beyond all knowledge.
What I call the Heart is consciousness. It is called Atman, the very Self or Nature of the apparent individual. It is not a separate organ or a separate faculty. It is identical to what is called Brahman, the formless, absolute, omnipresent Divine Reality. It is very consciousness, absolute bliss, unqualified existence. It is intuition of unspeakable God. Anything secondary that we could call “mind,” body, or brain, any function at all, is contained within the “Heart” like an event in a universe.
I am at war with the lingering childhood of Man. I make Holy War in the midst of our dreadful and universal preoccupation with Man himself. For it is only when Man is surrendered in the Transcendental Reality that he can grow up into his own higher consciousness, and only then may he truly and finally Intuit his Identity with what is prior to Man, which is the Transcendental Reality itself.
The Direct intuition of Being (or of Existence Itself) Demonstrates (To and In Consciousness Itself) that non-Being (or non-Existence) is an illusion (or a myth of possibility), generated by fear (or false knowledge). And fear itself is the result of clinging to forms – without Understanding the Process of forms, and without Real (Participatory) Observation of Primal Energy, and without Perfectly Direct (or Native and Non-objective) intuition of Being (Itself).
The point of view from which our work is generated as that of …the Form of Reality, the Form of God, and the entirely awakened intuitive life, which is the foundation of all manifest existence. The foot of that Form, the root of that Form is, of course, the Heart. And that Foot, that root of the mind, is what the Advaita tradition means by the Self. What I mean by the Heart, by the Self, is the Form of Reality, the very Self, the very Form, inclusive of the bright.
There is only one Truth, but there are two ways to realize it. Truth may be realized directly and absolutely, or it may be realized gradually. The disposition of God-Realization involves a single intuition or turnabout in our consciousness, in which we are moved to become a sacrifice through surrender, or Love-Communion with the Divine. But there are two paths whereby we become perfectly absorbed in the Divine. One is sudden or direct, and the other is circuitous.
Egoic consciousness in all of its forms must be transcended as a necessary precondition of the radical intuition of the Transcendental Being.
Founded in the process of free feeling-attention, or mere intuitive observation of the whole process of the present arising of gross, subtle, and causal objects to present awareness. The conscious process in each stage is a version of this native disposition
Paradoxically, the attitude of observation, or the intuitive rather than the intentional disposition, is not in itself a sufficient practical foundation for Realization of the whole Way of Divine Ignorance. In this Way, intuitive observation is always linked to and presently combined with various forms of responsible concentration of the whole bodily being. Thus, in every stage of practice, free feeling-attention, or mere observation, is linked with Lawful concentration, or appropriate and responsible activity of the whole bodily being. This dynamic combination of observation and concentration is the natural process wherein the whole bodily being is economized, or turned to its Lawful, sacrificial form, and also utterly or radically transcended or obviated at the same time. There is no appropriate element of irresponsibility at any stage of the process. It is always from the beginning, a matter of radical responsibility for the whole affair of arising experience, through responsible intention or concentration, and intuitive responsibility for attention, or mere observation.
“Hearing,” or spontaneous intuition, in which the pattern of subjective motions is interrupted and its prior Condition revealed.
Dynamic process that characterizes the Way is itself necessarily founded upon radical intuitive insight into the incident of differentiated or egoic experience. That intuition is the presumption of Ignorance itself, granted through “hearing.” It coincides with the tacit re-cognition that all subjective motion, the whole play of subject and object, is an unnecessary recoil, an unnecessary but primal action from which all conventional actions emanate as reactions by force of implication. The intuition of the prior Condition of all actions, reactions, and conditions is awake in the moment of the presumption of Ignorance. That presumption, including the tacit re-cognition of the non-necessity of all independent or differentiating and subjective motion, is the necessary foundation of the whole Way.
Once the spell of self-definition, other-definition, and separation or unlove is broken, there may be direct release of feeling-attention from the contractions of independent being into the radical intuition of unqualified being.
Such is the direct Way into prior being. It is the Way of Divine Ignorance, since it does not proceed by knowledge of the independent being but by radical intuition of unqualified prior being.
We may have some intuition of That which goes beyond the limit of self-contracted consciousness, but we cannot realize our identity with It apart from the fullest development of spiritual practice. Therefore, it is a heresy to claim that Atman and Paramatman are the same, or that Atman and Brahman are the same, until you have Realized it. It is a heresy to declare that Nirvana and samsara are the same. It’s a ridiculous claim except in the case of Realization.
The process of Satsang is the original form of the Guru-Disciple relationship. As the intuitive stages develop in meditation Satsang becomes unnecessary. The Understanding which is then activated and alive as the Heart becomes the principle of Satsang. The religious and social order of the Guru and Disciple change form an intimate bodily association to a spiritual one. The association with the Guru or Man of Understanding is transcendentally available to all. He is the Real. He is already with them.
The devotee is constantly given the intuition of the Absolute. But because he, or she, adheres to the ego and to apparent divisions of the body-being, he/she does not recognize fully the significance of his intuition of God. It is too ordinary an experience. He may feel a little relieved, a little blissful, but still he is unable to be completely given over to the translating Force of the revelation of the Spiritual Master. Therefore, his practice is a matter of growth in the Divine Company of the Spiritual Master. The initiation into Communion with God is given constantly, but it is not fully realized by the devotee. He is initiated piece by piece.
The foundation of all right, true, and progressively unfolding First Congregation practice of Adidam Ruchiradam, there is “Radical (or Tacit, Perfectly Prior, and ‘At-the-Root’) Reality-Intuition“, progressively demonstrating (and Acausally Self-Magnifying) all of the implications (and the eventual “Perfect Practice” and, finally, the seventh stage Most Perfect Demonstration) of Always Prior Self-Establishment in the actionless, Acausal, and Intrinsically egoless Self-Nature, Self-Condition, and Self-State of Reality Itself.
By means of engaging the preliminary “Perfect Knowledge” Listening-process, there is a tacit “Radically intuitive ” awareness (or intrinsic observation) that it is the body-brain-complex-rather than any kind of “separate inner self” (or, otherwise, Consciousness Itself)-that generates (or “causes”) thoughts and actions.
Thus, it is observed that the ego-“self” (and not Consciousness Itself) is, altogether, the source of identification with the body-mind-complex, and (therefore) with the brain-process in the context of the body.
The ego-“self” is an illusory “I”.
The illusory “I” is not the basis for practice of the “Radical” Reality-Way of Adidam Ruchiradam.
In the sixth stage of life, the body-mind is simply relaxed into the Life-Current, and attention (the root or base of the mind) is inverted, away from gross and subtle states and objects of the body-mind, and toward its own Root, the ultimate Root of the ego-self, which is the “Witness” Consciousness (when attention is active) and also simple Consciousness (prior to objects and self-definition). The final result of this is conditional Self-Realization or the intuition of Radiant Transcendental Being via the exclusive self-essence (inverted away from all objects).
In the seventh stage of life there is native or radical intuitive identification with Radiant Transcendental Being, the Identity of all beings (or subjects) and the Condition of all conditions (or objects). This intuitive identification (or Radical Self-Abiding) is directly Realized, entirely apart from any dissociative act of inversion.
Everything about you that falls short of the seventh stage of life is simply an expression of bound energy and bound attention. And in order to observe, understand, be responsible for, and transcend the mechanism of the binding of energy and attention, you must enter into profound self-study. This is a great discipline. It cannot be by passed. No superficial magic or blessing can be given that would enable you to by-pass this process. You must endure it, and you will endure it only if you are truly responsive and enjoy the impulse toward Realization based on tacit intuition.
From this point of view, this “Primary Duality” must, first of all, be understood (by observation and intuition) to be actually (or Really So). Then Purusha (or the conscious self, which, according to the characteristic, and paradoxical, traditional point of view of “Primary Dualism”, Is Ultimately, a Perfectly Subjective, or Non-conditional, but also specific, independent, and individual, Self) must separate itself (basically, by willful ascetical discipline) from Prakriti.
Primary Dualism – Fifth an Sixth Stage Point of View
From this point of view, this “Ultimate Absolute” (or this Non-conditional, and, As Such, Inherently Perfect, and Perfectly Subjective Reality) must, first of all, be understood (and directly intuited) to be actual (or Really So), and then Perfectly (or Utterly) Affirmed (By direct Identification with Consciousness Itself).
Ego, soul, inner self, or separate, defined consciousness is not an entity, an actor. It is simply another version of the same universal activity in which every form and function in manifestation, or manifest experience, high or low, participates. It is the single activity of contraction, which shows itself as the complex of objective definition, differentiation, independent form, separation, opposition, subjectivity, and contradiction or dilemma. The illusory ego is not even a unique or more primitive form of this activity. It is simply that, from the point of view of any apparent, functioning, conscious individual, it is the root action (not the root of action, not an actor, not different from action), because of its intimate and foundation relationship to his subjectivity. Experience appears to imply the inner, independent witness-self and actor, but it is only an idea and it falsely objectifies the Mystery in Ignorance. When the fundamental activity of which the ego is a species is undermined in the tacit intuition of the Condition in which all conditions arise, then not only the force of the ego-illusion, but the force (or implication of necessity) of every convention-all experiencing, every world, and even the extraordinary assumption and objectifying knowledge of God apart from or over against the ego and the world-the force of all that arises is dissolved and dislocated in the prior Condition or Truth. Such is Liberation, Happiness, and true God-Realization.
From The Knee of Listening
Late one night in the middle of my junior year. I had rented a small room from an old woman named Mrs. Renard. It was several blocks away from the college campus. When I was not in class, I spent most of my time in, that room reading, thinking and writing.
On this very special evening I sat at my desk late into the night. I had exhausted my seeking, so that it seemed there were no more books to read, no possible kind of experience that could radically exceed what I had already embraced. There seemed no outstanding sources for any new excursion, no remaining and conclusive possibilities. I was drawn into that interior tension of my mind that held all of that seeking, every impulse and alternative, every motive in the form of my desiring. I contemplated it as a whole dramatic force, and it seemed to move me into a profound shape of energy, so that every vital center in my body and mind appeared like a long funnel of contracted planes that led on to an infinitely regressed and invisible image. I observed this deep sensation of conflict and endlessly multiplied contradictions, so that I seemed to surrender to its very shape, as if to experience it perfectly and to be it.
Then, quite suddenly, in a moment, I experienced a total revolution of energy and awareness in myself. There was an absolute sense of understanding that opened and arose at the extreme end of all this consciousness. And all of the energy of thought that moved down into that depth appeared to reverse its direction at some unfathomable point The rising impulse caused me to stand, and I felt a surge of force draw up out of my depths and expand, filling my whole body and every level of my consciousness with wave on wave of the most beautiful and joyous energy.
I felt absolutely mad, but the madness was not of a desperate kind. There was no seeking and no dilemma within it, no question, no unfulfilled motive, not a single object or presence outside of myself.
I couldn’t contain the energy in my small room. I ran out of the building and through the streets. I thought, if I could only find someone to talk to, to communicate this thing. The energy in my body was overwhelming, and there was an ecstasy in every cell that was almost intolerable in its pressure, light and force. But it was the middle of the night. There were no lights coming from the rooms. I could think of no one to awaken who would understand my experience. I felt that, even if I were to meet a friend, I would be unable to express myself, but my words would only be a kind of uncontrolled poetry of babbling.
My head began to ache with the intense energy that saturated my brain. I thought, if I could only find someone with some aspirin or something to tranquilize me. But there was no one. And at last I wore myself out wandering in the streets, so that I returned to my room.
I sat down at my desk and wrote my mind in a long, ecstatic essay. I tried to contain all the significance of my perception. until finally I became exhausted in all the violence of my joy, and I passed to sleep.
In the days that followed I tried to communicate these events to a few friends. But no one seemed to grasp its importance or consider it more than some kind of crazy excitement. I even read aloud to one friend the things I had written, but it became clear as I went on that it was only a collection of images. He only laughed at my excitement, and I thought it would be impossible to communicate that experience itself.
As it happened, it took me many years to understand that revolution in my being. As you will see, it marked the rising in me of fundamental and unqualified life, and removed every shadow of dilemma and ignorance from the mind, on every level, and all its effects in the body. But I would have to pass through many years of trial before that understanding became the stable constant and premise of my being.
Even so, in the days and weeks that followed I grasped certain basic concepts that arose in me at that time and which stood out in the mind undeniably, with a self-validating force. Two things in particular stood out as fundamentals.
I had spent years devoted to forceful seeking for some revolutionary truth, some image, object, reason or idea whose effect would be absolutely liberating and salvatory. My seeking had been motivated by the loss of faith, the loss of the Christ-object and other such reasons for joy. But in that great moment of awakening I ::new the truth was not a matter of seeking. There were no reasons for joy and freedom. It was not a matter of a truth, an object, a concept, a belief, a reason, a motivation, or any external fact. Indeed, it was clear that all such objects are grasped in a state that is already seeking and which has already lost the prior sense of an absolutely unqualified reality. Instead, I saw that the truth or reality was a matter of the removal of all contradictions, of every trace of conflict, opposition, division or desperate motivation within. Where there is no seeking, no contradiction there is only the unqualified knowledge and power that is reality. This was the first aspect of that sudden knowledge.
In this state beyond all contradiction I also saw that freedom and joy is not attained, that it is not dependent on any form, object, idea, progress or experience. I saw that we are, at any moment, always and already free. I knew that I was not lacking anything I needed yet to find, nor had I ever been without such a thing. The problem was the seeking itself, which created and enforced contradiction, conflict and absence within. Then the idea arose that I am always already free. This was the second aspect of that fundamental awareness.
That sudden understanding was the obviation of all striving, and this I knew to be unqualified truth. I had been striving for some truth or joy to replace my loss, but this striving was itself the source of contradiction in me. Now I knew there was no entity of truth, and perfect freedom was always already the case. It exists as life, not when it is created or sought, but where there is this fundamental understanding. In that moment of understanding I had simply turned out of the context of my dilemma. I was possessed of the mature cognition of the “bright.”
In the years that followed I would find many analogies for my experience in the spiritual literature of the East and West. I could call that revolution in myself “enlightenment,” “liberation,” “realization of the Self,”or “union with God.” I would pursue the sciences of that realization in religion and yoga, in ancient Scriptures and modern therapeutic techniques. But always, as you will see, I returned to the simplicity of that understanding, free of all concepts, which, although they seek to express it in a communicative symbol, in fact serve to limit the state itself and recreate the milieu of seeking.
But I was not at that time living in a spiritual community. And the mind of the university, bound as it was to the subtle doctrines that enforce our dilemma, served only to counter my experience, just as when a child I no community of the “bright.”