Transcendence – A Beezone Study based on the teaching of Adi Da Samraj



This is a
Beezone adaptation and edit from three talks by Adi Da Samraj Beezone essay

Transcendence

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The following is a Beezone article composited from various
talks and essays by Adi Da Samraj edited and adapted.

 

What does transcendence (n) or transcend (v) mean? Does transcendence or transcend mean to go beyond the limits of, to triumph, overcome or be prior to or be beyond and above something? I beleive these are the common understandings and unfortunately limited as to their true meaning.

Transcend is an act and Transcendence is a state and together their true meaning can not be found in any manipulation of mind, language, thought, feeling or body. All these attempts to define and understand (so as to act) represent a matter of seeking. An attempt to abandon or to merge experience, seek higher knowledge, or be released from temptations of pleasures, avoidance of pain or seek some form of release or union.

Transcendence does not mean to become the enemy of Life or to merge into something greater than life. Self-transcendence is not the effort of getting outside yourself or beyond yourself or working on yourself and struggling with yourself. Most of all it does not mean going somewhere else. All of these are abusive passions, an unliberated craving, in which the primary effect of that self-possession, seeking, fear, anger, and despair is the only certain attainment.

Self-transcendence is the natural force of Life, it is inherent in the nature of the world. Transcendence, self-transcendence, is to reside without effort, freely, in the Condition of Existence or Free Being. To transcend this world and it’s limitations you do not leave it, and you certainly do not try to escape from it in the fearful and self-possessed manner of yogis, saints and mystics. Transcendence is not the goal to be attained. There is no way to self-transcendence, since all progress or change is only a modification or that which is seeking or wanting transcendence. That which seeks transcendence is a continuation of confinement to separation, limitation, and the unsolvable dilemma of craving for union or release. Experience or knowledge cannot satisfy or release the self from itself. Only self-transcendence is release from self. And, because the self is created, defined, and limited by the composite of mind/body experience and knowledge, the secret of self-transcendence is founded upon insight into the necessary egoic-confinement that is the inherent result of psycho-physical experiencing and knowing, high and low.

Transcendence is in your awareness, in consciousness, in your feeling-awareness. Transcendence is inherent in this Present moment and condition. God, Truth and Reality is the only Fact of the world and the body-mind of Man and Woman. We rest in the in that Condition in which the entire domain of experience, high and low, is transparent to the Transcendental Reality. Whatever arises is completely transparent in God, Truth and Reality. And there is only one thing preventing this from being realized, in any moment. And I hope you can get hip to what that is!

The actual process of transcendence and insight reveals the factuality of reactive self-confinement and the fruitlessness of the search for salvation, release, or perfect fulfillment. True transcendence is the radical insight in itself, in the very moment of self-transcendence.

 

“Adherence to this principle of transcendence is the firm conclusion of my life”
Adi Da Samraj

 

Your self-possession is your own concern. It cannot be relieved magically. Thus, the ultimate gesture of transcendence is necessarily yours. Grace attracts you to Itself with great force, but if you are repelled, if you do not surrender, then you will take a great deal of time to become free. And that ‘long time’ is eternal dissatisfaction, is the “I” within “me,”. It is fear, sorrow, desire, and anger. Separate, alone, unfinished, incomplete, and threatened forever.

The confrontation with experience is inherently binding, self-limiting, or stress-inducing, and this indicates that the process wherein we realize freedom is not in the realm or pursuit of experience itself but in the dimension of the transcendence of experience. This fruitless adventure in search for ultimate satisfaction, union, and release is the necessary destiny of the relentless ego. “I” is Narcissus, the self-centered body-mind. “I” is inherently committed to the failure of its own search, to separation from all relations, beings, things, and events. The commitment or will to release via experience and knowledge is a sham. It is idol worship. It is nothing more than self-embrace. Its results are never more than frustration, tension, and bewilderment.

We must understand experience itself and ourselves, or else we will never be truly free. And if we observe and understand experience and ourselves, we see that stress, tension, the sense of suppression, or a limiting compressive force on the being is always an essential component of every moment of psycho-physical experience. There is no experience that can be attained that is inherently free of the limiting conditional force that we identify as painful stress. We may pursue and attain an experience that temporarily distracts us from some present condition of painful stress, but in another moment the very experience that was first felt as relief becomes a limitation.

 

Attention and Mind

 

“The act of attention is the conditional Essence of mind. The act of attention arises Spontaneously, like the total body-mind and the total world, in every moment of conditional Awareness. The act of attention arises toward others, objects, and conditions of every kind, whether subtle or gross.”
The Dawn Horse Testament

 

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. No independent act of attention arises to associate with phenomena or to cause experience in the unnecessary and changing Realm of Nature.

Mind and attention are the subtle or inner subjective personality, made of all of the acquired tendencies of attention, or urges toward experiences of all kinds. These tendencies and urges are the results of the proximity of the soul, or the Eternal Core of the body-mind, and the Realm of Nature, or Change. Through casual association with subtle states, the soul becomes distracted, and differentiates itself from its Eternal Condition. Such differentiation is the act of attention itself. Differentiated and differentiating attention is the fundamental structure of mind. Once it arises, the soul is projected into an Infinite Spiral of causes and effects, leading high and low within the structures of possibility. Therefore, the subjective being acquires tendencies of attention through irresponsible experience. And that process is without beginning or end. It is an Eternal Bewilderment, a Prison of Fascination and Doubt.

Unless the act of attention is inspected, controlled, and ultimately transcended, our existence cannot be anything but a sequence of experiential and conceptual events. Adherence to this principle of transcendence is the firm conclusion of my life. My work over these years has been to argue that Principle to people and to offer them forms of instruction, forms of practice, forms of association with me that would help them to realize the certainty of this same Principle in their own lives.

Our Way is the transcendental Way of ultimate Realization, of Divine Ignorance or the Eternal Self, prior to all contraction, and Radiant Love-Bliss prior to all phenomenal conditioning, limitation, and egoity. Adherence to this Principle of transcendence is the firm conclusion of my life. My work over these years has been to argue that Principle to people and to offer them forms of instruction, forms of practice, forms of association with me that would help them to realize the certainty of this same Principle in their own lives. It is as clear to me now as it was at the beginning, that the Way is to transcend phenomenal existence, to understand the mechanism of attention, the process of contraction, and the nature of knowledge and experience.

 

Further Reading:

Then what is the Way? Just as interest in the Way is founded upon insight into the necessary egoic-confinement that is the inherent result of psycho-physical experiencing and knowing, the actual process of the Way is also a matter of insight, or direct and immediate intuitive understanding, in every moment. Insight reveals the factuality of reactive self-confinement and the fruitlessness of the search for salvation, release, or perfect fulfillment. And radical insight is itself the very moment of self-transcendence.

And what is that radical insight that is itself self-transcendence, or release of the mood and motivated effort of self-confinement? It is the native Realization or Intuition that no matter what “I” may experience, or reflect, or know about the apparent realm or process of subjective and objective phenomena, “I” do not know what even a single thing is . “I” am inherently and eternally Ignorant. What is “I”? What is the world? What is energy or Life? Neither limited nor complete experience or knowledge could ever modify or dissolve the inherent Ignorance that is the fundamental Condition of the experiential and knowing psycho-physical self. By maintaining stressful or motivated interest in more and more experience and knowledge (or subjective reflection of the world of phenomena), “I” may postpone confrontation with the ultimate Fact and Consequence of inherent Ignorance. But this confrontation is both necessary and ultimate, and the Consequence of that confrontation is immediate and wholly Liberating.

The Restoration of Laughter

 

True wisdom implies a self-transcending participation in the conditions of experience. The native motive of self-transcendence is the law revealed to us by experience itself. Experience and knowledge are not the basic purpose of our existence. Rather, we are mysteriously involved in a process of conditional experience in which we are inherently and constantly obliged either to transcend ourselves or be corrupted and destroyed.

Those who will not establish themselves in the wisdom or true intelligence of the being are obliged to suffer their lifetime of experience, bound to the conditional self-limits of their circumstances, and otherwise striving for release through desperate programs of degenerative self-indulgence and all the fitful politics whereby human beings seek to dominate and perfect their circumstances in the Realm of Nature. But if true wisdom awakens, then our commitment ceases to be directed merely to experience itself, but to the process of self-transcendence (or moment to moment liberation from experiential confinement) in the midst of the arising play of conditional experience.

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The “consideration” and revelation of the self-transcending Way of The Heart developed over the many teaching years on the basis of my response to the needs and limitations and heart-necessities of those who were moved by my heart-given word and by the spiritual presence, transcendental condition, and divine person always spontaneously revealed in, by, and as my even bodily heart-company. And the real course and ordeal of self-transcending practice must not be bypassed in the Way of The Heart, even though the ego would prefer to do so.

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