“I” IS THE BODY OF LIFE
“Spiritual Maturity” From I Is the Body of Life
Author(s): Adi Da Samraj
“I” IS THE BODY OF LIFE
Chapter Three: The Life of Ignorance
STUDY AND MEDITATION
Spiritual Maturity
(1) There is no dilemma or problem-conception that
provides the real and appropriate basis for the Way of
Divine Ignorance or Radical Understanding. The Way begins on
the positive basis of the Transcendental Intuition of Divine
Ignorance and the basic exercise of self-transcendence (or
freely self-transcending understanding of the Narcissistic
mechanism that is the body-mind-self). And the Way proceeds
on the basis of life-positive disciplines that maintain an
energy-conserving and attention-conserving equanimity of the
body-mind. In this manner, the Way proceeds, until a true
spiritual maturity emerges.
(2) Spiritual maturity is founded on the conservative
equanimity of the body-mind, and its principal evidence is a
profound availability of free energy and attention (released
from automatic involvement in the conditional states and
objects of the body-mind-self when natural equanimity is
fully and stably realized). Thus, when the Way has been
practiced to the point of true spiritual maturity, energy
and attention are free to Realize their Source, Identity,
and Condition.
(3) The disposition of practice from the point of view of
spiritual maturity is one in which the real facts of
conditional existence are clearly observed, understood, and
transcended. In that disposition (which is a free
intelligence, matured beyond the beginners mind in which the
Way has its original basis), there is a clear appreciation
of the conditional body-mind-self that bears some of the
marks of a “negative view,” but which is not the expression
of a negative or problem-based consciousness. From this
point of view, all objects and states of human awareness are
forms of knowledge or experience, and all forms of knowledge
or experience are objects or states of attention.
Conditional existence as a human individual is, therefore,
merely a play upon attention. Attention arises spontaneously
from the prior Condition of Divine Ignorance, Love-Bliss,
the Source-Identity, or Radiant Transcendental Being. And
attention is the motion of Consciousness, arising first as a
contraction of Itself (into individuated, separate, and
separative self-consciousness) and then proceeding toward
cognition or experience of various objects or states. The
motion of the proceeding of attention is desire, or the will
toward objects and states, and all objects and states are
the results of attention (and thus the consequences,
positive or negative, of desire). The will or desire that is
attention is always accompanied by (and identical to) a
subjective feeling of pain, dis-ease, suffering,
un-Happiness-the primitive sense that is the first evidence
of the Forgetting of Happiness, or the Eternally Sufficient
Condition of Radiant Transcendental Being. (Such becomes
evident when feeling-attention, which is the composite or
single force of energy and attention, is free to observe and
fully appreciate the mechanics of self.) And every gesture
of attention is a motivated search for release from the pain
of un-Happiness. Attention is (in the factual or
conventional rather than the ultimate sense) un-Happiness
and the search for release from un-Happiness.
(4) Therefore, attention is constantly moving, like a
great cat trapped in a small cage. And it is constantly
becoming associated with conditional objects and states-some
of which grant a temporary feeling, whether great or small,
of release from un-Happiness (and thus temporarily restore
the Intuition of the native Happiness at the root of
attention), and most of which only frustrate the search and
deny the release. Every object and state is, as a matter of
fact, nothing more than a condition with which attention has
become associated (whether intentionally or unintentionally)
in its desire or search for release from un-Happiness.
Objects and states are nothing more than energy, conceived
or imagined and experienced as a symbol for ultimate
Happiness. But our association with objects and states is
based on a previously conceived un-Happiness-the
self-contraction that perpetually desires or seeks release.
The search for release (or the act of attention) is a ritual
automaticity in the Radiant Transcendental Being. The
self-contraction actually seeks release from itself as a
means or method of re-attaining the Happiness that its own
existence has caused it to Forget. Such is the paradoxical
futility of attention, desire, seeking, and all conditional
knowledge or experience.
(5) Happiness is never attained via this process. It is
glimpsed or intuited in moments and then lost again as
attention moves on. Happiness Itself is the Divine
Condition. It cannot be known or experienced, since It is
not any “object” of attention. It can only be Realized. And
Its Realization is a matter of the understanding and free
transcendence of Narcissus, the self-contraction, or the
ritual of manifest attention. The arising of attention is,
at base, a contraction of the Radiant Field of Love-Bliss
(or Happiness) of or in the Transcendental Divine Self.
Thus, at its base, attention is first the sense of
independent and conditional self-consciousness. And that
self-consciousness (or self-contraction) is itself an act of
Forgetting-the Forgetting of the Source, Condition, and
Identity in which it is arising. Therefore, all manifest
beings are apparently unconscious of the Divine or
Transcendental Self-Condition. They are not Happy. They are
seeking release into Love-Bliss through the attainment of
states of knowledge and experience. But they are bewildered,
tormented, and ultimately confounded in this search.
(6) The power of understanding is set free in spiritual
maturity. Thus, it is able to comprehend and transcend the
mechanism of the self, or the ritual of attention. It is
only such understanding that permits freedom from this
fruitless ritual of egoic existence and re-Awakens the
Intuition of the Source, Identity, and Condition that is
prior to the conditional self (or the self-contraction).
(And when this Intuition is Perfected, or Awakened most
profoundly, the conditional self and all its forms of
knowledge and experience become transparent, unnecessary,
and non-binding, to the degree that they are ultimately
Outshined in the Radiant Happiness of Transcendental
Being.)
(7) Attention and its world of objects and conditional
states are not the “enemy,” to be suppressed and destroyed.
An enterprise based on that presumption is itself a ritual
of desire, and it, therefore, cannot succeed. Rather,
attention itself is to be understood, and naturally
transcended at its root through Awakening to its Identity,
Source, and Condition.
(8) Attention is the evidence or effect of the
base-contraction, which is the conditional self. In the
usual man or woman, the self is lived as the ritual life of
Narcissus, pursuing and suffering objects and states without
ultimate understanding. But in those who begin to understand
and who discipline themselves toward spiritual maturity, the
ritual of Narcissus is eventually superseded by the supreme
Way of ultimate or radical understanding (or Divine
Ignorance). When such maturity is the case, attention
becomes observable in its moment or process of origination
(rather than merely at the point of association with
psycho-physical objects and states). The conditional root of
attention is the self-contraction. Attention is not finally
controllable by effort, but it (or its binding power)
naturally dissolves if the self-contraction is presently
observed, tacitly understood, and transcended. (Such present
observation and transcendence are the fundamental exercises
of the conscious process in the Way of Divine Ignorance or
Radical Understanding.)
(9) It is the self-contraction that produces and
constantly maintains the gesture of attention and,
therefore, the constant or chronic flow of thought and
experience in the body-mind. Therefore, we are never at
rest, nor free to be established in true Happiness. But if
the self-contraction is transcended, attention and its
objects and states are instantly cut down, or transcended in
their Origin, which is Happiness or Radiant Transcendental
Being.
(10) The transition to the seventh stage of life
necessarily requires (or is the expression of) spiritual
maturity. It is possible only when self-transcendence has
become psycho-physical equanimity and the free Intuitive
ability to pass beyond the root-contraction of self into the
Source, Identity, and Condition in which the
self-contraction, attention, and the objects, conditions,
and states of the body-mind arise (all as apparently
subjective or apparently objective modifications of the
Radiant Transcendental Being). Therefore, the seventh stage
of life is a matter of continuous Occupation with that very
exercise (or the direct Intuition of the Source-Identity and
Condition in which the self-contraction, attention, and the
objects or conditions of attention are arising).
(11) The ultimate or seventh stage practice of the Way of
Divine Ignorance or Radical Understanding is associated with
membership in the Free Renunciate Order. However, such
practice is not a “renunciate” practice because it is
associated with conventional ascetical vows, but because it
cannot even begin until spiritual maturity, or until the
body-mind is responsibly and naturally maintained in a
conservative state of equanimity, and thus no longer
obsesses or controls attention. (The practitioner in the
seventh stage of the Way is at least eventually
characterized by a relatively simple habit of existence.
Some individuals may even appear in a typically ascetical
manner, especially when Sahaj Samadhi enters its late phase,
but not because of any conventional motive to separate from
the body or the world. And until the time when such simple
or even ascetical “renunciation” becomes naturally evident,
the individual may live and act in a relatively ordinary but
generally conservative manner. Some may develop apparent
signs of simplicity and relative asceticism even in the
early stages of practice, since the Way is self-transcending
rather than self-fulfilling. Others may develop the
disciplines of the Way stage by stage, maintaining a
conservative sexual practice and a significant life of
service in the world, until the inevitable development of
more simple or even apparently ascetical habits in the later
phase of the seventh stage of life.)
(12) The direct exercise of the present understanding and
transcendence of the self-contraction and the conditions of
attention (which are themselves made to seem to be
conventions of the same contraction) continues until Sahaj
Samadhi, or “open eyes” (the transition from the sixth to
the seventh stage of life). Then the process becomes the one
of native Self-Abiding (or prior inherence in Radiant
Transcendental Being, Consciousness, Happiness, or
Love-Bliss), tacitly recognizing self, attention, and all
objects or states as transparent, unnecessary, and
non-binding modifications of That. When Sahaj Samadhi itself
enters its late phase (of profoundly Blissful Transcendence
of the play of attention in and through the body-mind-self),
then there is entrance into the final phase of conditional
embodiment.
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