However, the usual person is not becoming responsible for the contraction that is the ego. They think the ego will dissolve when it is merged in the sahasrar, that they should go about increasing their experience, acquiring consoling experiences as people have done by taking drugs for instance. In this way people stimulate and glorify themselves egoically in their independence. But the spiritual process rests upon the moral foundation of responsibility for this egoic action of un-love, or the avoidance of relationship. Only when the heart is released from that egoic contraction, in real responsibility for the egoic dramatization that is separation, can human beings realize the true Communion with God, rather than the fake incident of independence. Only through responsibility may we continue to grow in our ordinary, evolutionary way and at the same time be God-Realizing in our disposition.
It is perfectly normal for the egoic presumption to persist in the third stage of life, but it is certainly not supposed to be the principle of your whole life! First, you must integrate with the gross functions, incarnate, and feel yourself independently. After the initial stages of growth, however, this lingering presumption becomes not only the sense of independent existence, but also the sense of separation from Infinity. In the case of the usual person, separation is the principle by which they act and by which they become associated with their potential. And that separation is sin. Sin is not forbidden pleasure; sin is to miss the mark. It is, regardless of the experience in this moment, high or low, to be possessed by the ego, to be separate, to be meditating on your own existence rather than living as a sacrifice to Infinity through love. This is the essential point that I want to make.
The third stage of consideration, culturalization, and humanization of the being is a necessary foundation in which to realize the fourth and truly spiritual disposition of the heart. On that basis, the being is set in motion and may grow again. If you do not pass through that transformation, it literally does not matter how much psychic experience you may acquire in the future or how intellectually clear you may feel about everything. You still must undo the disposition of the ego before you can grow fully into the next stage of life. Because these stages are spiritual stages, the true and eternal stages of life, they are not merely descriptions of the vertical dimension of human potential but of the synthesis of the vertical, or structural, development of the being with the horizontal dimension of the heart. They are inclusive descriptions of the whole body.
Before you move into the fourth stage of life, you must realize the spiritual foundation of responsibility for the action of un-love. If you simply continue to expand the levels of your experience in a vertical direction, through concentration an subjective disciplines and most people do not even do that, and you continue to meditation on the dilemmas below the heart, you will not ultimately realize a spiritual life. The acquisition of experience is not God-Realizing, not full of Bliss. It is working toward Truth or God as a goal, whereas the foundation of spiritual life is already Truth itself. The usual person persists throughout their life in the incident of the ego, which they have fully presumed by the end of the second stage of his life.
They continually dramatizes this early adaptation for the rest of their life in the form of all experiences. They do not spiritualize their life, because they have not realized the essential, moral responsibility. But those who begin to realize this responsibility in the third stage of life become fit to live within the true incident of Divine Communion, in which the ego is no longer the principle. People think that the ego dissolves when you realize Nirvana. But you must be responsible for the ego long before that! You must be morally responsible before you can spiritualize the higher stages of adaptation. Otherwise you engage all the consoling illusions, and spiritual life remains based in the ego. You start calling the ego the “soul.” You purify the sense of independent existence, perhaps, from some of its lower tendencies, but you continue satisfying that independent one with the consolations of higher tendencies.
People also think that tendencies, or karmas, are effective only below the heart. They are active above the heart as well. Karmas are the persistence of patterns of experience that are based on your adaptation. If you are adapting only to the lower dimensions of possible experience, then your karmas are of that kind. When you awaken to higher potentials of experience, then your karmas are of that kind. You have adapted, in that case. Thus, your “visions” become your karma. Most people are tending to bypass this third stage of life this transition between the egoic, ordinary, and essentially infantile and adolescent dilemma into the responsibility that is truly spiritual. At best, they are moving into the vertical dimension of potential experience. They are not living a spiritual life because the dimension of the heart is not their responsibility. They are locked in self-possession, the way of Narcissus. It does not make any difference what their experiences are. They are only serving the independent one.
There must be real growth, real adaptation, a real transformation of the body-being in all relations. It is not a matter of achieving a new level of understanding and then becoming spiritual. No, you must fully consider your practice and change what you do. You must fully re-adapt in the third stage of life, fully transform your orientation to the functions of life you have already developed, before you can move beyond them. It is a slow process. There is no way it can be done in a weekend. You must study the considerations relative to your ordinary life and observe yourself over time. Having observed yourself, you may become responsible for repetitive patterns of reaction. The third stage of life takes time, as it takes time for the physical body and the emotional life to grow. It need not take a long time, but it very well might, or even a lifetime. Most people for their entire lifetime dramatize the egoic disposition they gained in the first fourteen years of their lives for their entire lifetime.
Regardless of how positive the circumstances of a person’s life, they are obliged, by virtue of their structural nature, to define themselves in the first two stages. Some people learn the disposition of “you don’t love me” from obvious un-love or rejection in early childhood experience. Others are worshipped as children, yet they reach adulthood with the same disposition, the same egoic point of view, the same presumption, the same inability to love, the endless demand to be loved without any capacity for loving.
In order to consider these first two stages of life in any individual’s case, we must review not only the circum¬stances of the child’s separation from the parents in early life, but also the child’s own movement toward individuation. The child actually uses the circumstances of their life to justify his reaction of separation. Regardless of circumstances the child is involved in egoic self-definition at the level of emotional and physical life, and they are basically oriented toward experience as an independent person. That is natural enough. Even so, there are relatively good circumstances and relatively bad ones. Many people are forced into a very heavy egoic reaction because they feel suddenly cut off from the natural line of affection, the source of energy, food, and consciousness without dilemma.
There must be a culture in the first two stages of life, not just arbitrary experience. They must be brought into their incarna¬tion, allowed to feel their way into it, as loving beings. Then in the maturity of the third stage of life they must be obliged to be responsible for it. The incident with which a child is involved in the first two stages is their own independent existence. Narcissus, the separate one, develops in those first two stages. It is latently from the moment of birth. You are obliged to incarnate; you are obliged to be independent. Thus, the illusion of separate and separative consciousness appears on the basis of that obligation. It is in the third stage that you become responsible for that recoiling disposition and its effects of feeling separate from Reality, from the Divine, from the Light of existence. When you are fundamentally responsible for that disposition you may enter fully, consciously, morally, and spiritually into the true incident that is the foundation of spiritual life, the foundation of the fourth stage of life or the beginning of this Way of Divine Ignorance.
Real preparation and adaptation must precede the fourth stage. When you are responsible as love, then you may be initiated into the Way of Divine Communion. Divine Communion is not a belief structure, not the belief in a God that exists or does not exist. Such beliefs are all nonsense. Divine Communion is a real and literal whole body realization that appears when you are free from recoil at the center of the being, no longer forcing the parts of the body-being, top and bottom, left and right, in and out to be at war with one another. When this conflict is undone through real inspection in the third stage of life, it is quite natural to be drawn into the initiatory Grace of the Divine through the agency of the Spiritual Master and your response to his Teaching.
Becoming responsible for living as “I love you” is not just a subjective matter. You are the ego. You are the “I.” The whole body is the “I”. Thus, the whole body is adapted to the egoic disposition. Everybody is involved in the same schedule of adapting to the ego, Narcissus, or the dramatization of “you don’t love me.” Everyone’s life is based on the same, essential script, each with a different story line. It is the same adventure, fundamentally, for everyone. The variations in the story line are the experiences to which the individual may be reacting or the reactions themselves in time and space. Therefore, the practice in the third stage is a matter of functional readaptation, not just a philosophical change.
You must re-adapt your functions, as I have described, but you do not want to become responsible for the ego. You want to live in the sulk of un-love and turn inward into the subjectivity of your own pleasure, your own excitation, to the point of loss of life. You want to be saved or glorified without sacrifice, without real adaptation and growth. You do not want to accept the responsibility implied in the moral transformation of real spiritual life.
That is why the spiritual movement in this country is essentially a hype. It has fundamentally nothing whatsoever to do with the realization of the spiritual foundation of existence. It has to do with improving your situation by getting distracted. That has nothing to do with God, and as a result, the spiritual movement in America is an affair without honor. People treat spiritual literature like dime novels and then presume to be full of spiritual understanding, when in fact they have not even become responsible for their lower obses¬sive life. They organize their life around beliefs and cults and argue with one another. They condemn one another and show nothing but disrespect for true spiritual agents and other devotees who do not adopt their orientation. Altogether, such an approach dishonors the Divine cause. No sacred occasion is lived in that whole movement. There are only personalities without integral understanding of what everybody is really up—to and what this matter of spiritual life is about.
People do not want to go through the stages of preparation. They want to hear about “enlightenment,” come over and get their initiation, and then call themselves spiritual. But you must grow, to change, to prepare yourself, to struggle with all of those functions that you have adapted to arbitrarily. Your whole life is nothing but tendency and memory. People think that memory consists of the incidents that they can remember pictorially and mentally. That is incidental memory. But we are memory. Tendency is our condition, and tendency is simply the evidence of old adaptation, which we repeat again and again. The development of our old adaptation has been quite complex, obviously the effect of all kinds of influences. It is also separative, weak, reactive, bound to a disposition that feels itself to be separate, separated, vulnerable, mistrustful, unable to maintain a stable connection to Infinity, to the food line, to Light itself. Everything is in doubt.
But when you enter into the third stage of life and there is a real change, that is real preparation and that is when spiritual life begins. At that point, the Spiritual Master becomes your advantage. Until then, you may say that the Spiritual Master is necessary, but he is not. The notion that “I” was initiated by Umpty-ump, and now he is drawing me into the seventh place is a lot of nonsense. It is just not true. The Spiritual Master is a real function, a function that you realize is useful, that is an advantage, when you enter into the dimension of real spiritual life. You are initiated into that Company on the basis of responsibility for the ego, for un-love, for the avoidance of relationship. Then, you can see the advantage that the Spiritual Master represents. You see quite clearly the beauty and clarity of the true Teaching. Then you become free of your ambivalence, your egoic argument, your self-possession, your particular hedge.
We adapt the whole body to the points of view of each level of our experiential potential in vertical, or ascending, order. First we adapt to the physical, in the first stage, then to the emotional-sexual, in the second stage, and then to the mental, or “will,” dimension in the third stage. In the fourth stage the dimension of the psychic being as love, rather than as the contraction of independence, or Narcissus, awakens, making possible the integration of the whole body-being with the throat and rear of the head. In the later stages the kundalini-shakti, or lower psychic dimension, awakens,then the dimension’s of the midbrain, the higher psyche, awakens and projects itself upward toward the limits of the being.
We are viewing this development as a movement toward dimensions of experience beyond the head, beyond the crown, beyond the sahasrar and there is plenty to experience! But actually this movement is the development of the potentials of the brain and its ability to contact the more and more subtle ranges of its conditional existence. The awakening through the midbrain toward the crown and beyond is not sufficient in itself. There is a realization, even in the fullness of that subtle development, that “I” am watching this experience. The “soul” is the principle and also the limit of ascent. Once we come to rest as the samadhi, or highest ascended contemplation, we must become responsible for the principle of independence itself, even in those absolute terms. We must re-cognize the whole body as the ego. Self-realization is the realization of the Condition of the whole body-being. On the basis of Self-realization, the whole body-being is made a literal and specific sacrifice. Through the intuition of the Condition of existence, the whole body-being is given up in Radiance, beyond all knowledge, in perfect submission to the Ignorance of of our very Condition. This is perfect Bliss or Happiness. Thus, Self-Realization is the foundation of the Ultimate Sacrifice, which is the regeneration of Amrita Nadi.
The heart must be the principle of the whole affair of our adaptation, or we are not spiritual in our development. It is in the third stage of life that the child is initiated into the fullness of his existence, his spiritual potential, because he is brought to the point of becoming responsibile for his autonomy. Yes, he is an individual in conventional terms, but he must be free of the ego, of Narcissus, of the loveless adaptation that is contrary to Divine Communion. If you bypass the incident of Divine Communion, you may continue to increase your experienced vertically, through manipulations of your structures, but you will not realize Truth. Your life will not realize Bliss or Happiness. At best, it will be a search for it. But happiness or bliss must be the foundation of spiritual life, not its goal. Spiritual life is moral, or spiritual foundation in the heart for which we are responsible.
Many who are involved with wat they think are spiritual approaches to life attach themselves to extraordinary people, yogis, saints, and sages. But the experiential realizations of yogis, saints, and sages do not truly represent spiritual life. They represent the development of human potential. But clearly, these individuals also represent some spiritual realization. What is spiritual about them is the dimension of the heart that they bring to their experience. Thus, among yogis, saints, and sages, there clearly are God-oriented individuals, and perhaps some have entered into aspects of true spiritual realization. But the usual person who follows them remains egoically oriented, in part because the dogmas of these extraordinary individuals are no more spiritual than descriptions of how to build a rocket ship to the moon! They are no more spiritual than increasing experience, which is at base their motivation. But when you have realized the level of the human structure there is an infinity of potential structures in which to awaken and by which to experience all the dimensions of existence. Clearly the realization of this process is not simply to the awakening of human potential, which is infinite. The realization of this process is the spiritual orientation to our potential, the disposition of sacrifice relative to all experiencing.
This is the Way of Divine Ignorance. It is not the way of knowledge, not the way of human adaptation to the levels of vertical possibility alone that is simply our structural destiny. We must be free to grow in that structural destiny. The whole body-being must become a sacrifice to Infinity rather than simply fulfilling its destiny. To have experiences as a result of organizing the body-being around higher levels of attention is not God-Realizing in itself because in that way nothing is sacrificed. In that case you are still viewing experience, whether high or low, from the separate position. Our destiny in the spiritual sense is not simply the fulfillment of our structural destiny through vertical adaptation, through evolution, but to be the sacrifice of that destiny in whatever form it arises.
We must go beyond the merely human dimension. That is what the seventh stage of life is about. It is more than merging into subtle experience. It is discarding all that we are, whole bodily, to Infinity, beyond all knowledge, without knowledge, simply absolute non-resistance, non-recoil from Infinite blissfulness. Thus, we are translated out of the limited human form. Spiritual life is translation, not the acquisition of some yogic state or the glorification of the physical in itself. Such effects may occur, but they are purely secondary, just as all the vertical dimensions of our adaptation, though necessary, are also secondary.
The significance of the seventh stage is that we are transfigured in the perfect awakening of the heart, or absolute responsibility for the sense of independent existence, even as the body. We realize responsibility for the subjective ego in the early stages of development, but we become fully responsible for the body itself as ego in the sixth stage of life, in the stage of Self-realization, or Jnana Samadhi, which matures into Sahaj Samadhi. In that freedom the whole body-being becomes a sacrifice, and the body itself as ego is released into the Infinite. This sacrifice leads to transformation, the ultimate translation of the whole body-being, in its presumptions at any rate, into the Divine Radiance, beyond all ordinary human destinies.
In the final chapter of the Bhagavad Gita it is said: Abandon all dharmas, all supports, all gross, subtle, and causal principles and give yourself up to Me; rely on Me entirely. That demand is the principle of the seventh stage of life, and essentially the principle of the whole Way of Divine Ignorance. The destiny to be realized in this Way is the truly spiritual one. It is not exclusive ascent to higher levels of human potential nor remaining fixed in the lower levels. It is to become a perfect sacrifice to the Divine. If you raise your attention out of the lower dimensions you may have subtle experiences, and at the point of death you may be drawn into realms of experience that correspond to those higher levels of attention. But that phenomenon is not God-Realization. It is the realization of more subtle levels of manifestation. God-Realization occurs when the whole body-being and all of its content, all of its structural adaptation released into Infinity, is not held on to and is realized to be only the modification of That which is intuited to be the Real, prior to all conditions. No objects are held onto in the seventh stage. There is no light, no sound, not any phenomenon at all objectifying that is held on to as Truth. It is all understood. It is all sacrificed. Thus, in the seventh stage of life, we are translated into the Divine.
We have no archetype within the human structure to enable us to know in advance what that Destiny is. We only know in the completeness of this human structure, as the whole body, that That is the process in which we must be yielded. But there is no pre-vision of the Divine to guide us in that Translation. The Divine is revealed, but there is no way of containing that Realization within the structures of the human being, even in its highest and most subtle orientation. We are simply drawn to another Destiny beyond this cosmos of our human structure. There is no way to say anything about it except that we are obliged to make this sacrifice.
You can wait to do it at the end of aeons of time of involvement with the dimensions of experience predetermined by your structure. Or you can enter into it fully within this lifetime. Within a relatively very short period of time, you can be translated out of this human dream absolutely in its fleshy gross expression, its subtle expression, its higher, transcendent possibilities, and all the causal potentials that are invisible and silent in the heart. All of the structures of experiential or objective, subject-object destiny are made a sacrifice in the seventh stage. In the seventh stage, we realize true spiritual life. Everything before it is preparation for that perfect sacrifice.
Religion, or specific sacrifice, is learned through the testing and awakening of responsibility in the six stages of life. The realization of yogis, saints, and sages represent aspects of these six stages of life, none of which in itself amounts to Truth or spirituality. In those stages, we are prepared for the seventh stage of life. And the realization of the seventh stage of life is the essence of the Teaching and demonstration that I represent. That realization is the Way of Truth. The Heart is its foundation, and the Heart must be realized and made the foundation of the six stages of preparation! When we are prepared for the sacrifice in the Way of Radical Intuition, in which we move from Sahaj Samadhi into Bhava Samadhi, then Bhava Samadhi becomes more and more effective in the play of manifestation to the point of dissolving it so that our Destiny becomes Divine only, not Jany of the heaven worlds or the lesser worlds, nor any destiny for which we have the structural predisposition, but the Divine itself.
Further study
