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Unlike
a mere experience, a Spiritual Realization of any degree involves
What is your sense of Reality right now? Odds are that, in spite of any "spiritual experiences" you may have had at one time or another in your life, the direct and tangible awareness of God or a Greater Reality is not your experience in this moment, and is not your constant or even regular experience. If this is so, then regardless of all those meditation classes, regardless of all the spiritual reading you've done, it has not amounted to a Spiritual Realization — that is, a fundamental and permanent shift in your sense of reality, and all your conclusions about it. Every experience has its limit, because it doesn't fundamentally change the experiencer. This is not to say that most people open to the possibility of growth don't experience some kind of shift in their sense of reality. For example, thinking of one particular friend of mine, perhaps one used to feel most people were idiots, and now one feels much more compassion for people (in part having seen one’s own liabilities, but perhaps also just because of a general increase in one’s sensitivity to one’s own suffering and the suffering of others). This is good! And it is a realization of a kind (a small "r"), if it takes the form of a permanent, positive shift in one’s relationship to others. But as good and necessary as human maturation is (and it is indeed a necessity at the beginning of genuine spiritual practice), why settle for little "r" realization alone? Big "R" Realization is available to you as well! The shift in sense of Reality that is a Big "R" Realization is profound. It is literally a shift in Identity. All the realizations associated with being merely the physical body are still little "r" realizations. But you are also Spirit (as is everything and everyone). And you are the Consciousness in which the universe is arising. This is a very useful yardstick by which to measure our current realization, and our own life goals! Does anything we are engaging in now have the purpose of Realizing Perfect Happiness? Even close? Probably not. The genuine Spiritual process is all about Spiritual Realizations, permanent shifts in one's sense of Reality. Such Realizations are the milestones by which one can mark one's actual progress in the process, and the process culminates in the Ultimate Realization of Most Perfect God-Realization. It should be noted that there are profound cultural and religious taboos against God-Realization. Simply put, these stem from the misconception of God as "Creator", rather than God as "Source". In the former view, anyone who says "I Am God" is committing sacrilege, because built into the viewpoint is an unbridgeable gap between Creator and creature. Even mystics speaking of "communion with God" has been risky business throughout the course of the Great Tradition, but most of them survived that confession without torture or excommunication for heresy, and a few were even officially recognized as saints. It's worth considering for a moment the common uses of the word, "realization". Two common uses are worth looking at. |
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uses of the word "realization": The first use is defined by the dictionary as "bringing into concrete existence". "She realized her goal of earning a million dollars" is an example. A second use is as a reference to a mental insight of some kind, often sudden in nature: “He suddenly realized that he had left his hat in the car.” |
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The sense in which we are using "Spiritual Realization" has something in common with both these senses, but also cannot be reduced to either. Spiritual Realization is very "concrete" in the sense that it is a fundamental, permanent, and tangible shift in one's sense of Reality. But unlike the "million dollar" example, what is Realized is not something that wasn't the case before; rather, like the "hat in the car" example, what is Realized was (and is) already the case. Spiritual Realization is more like awakening, like opening the eyes, than like achieving a goal. Reality is always already the case. But "Reality Itself is no small matter!", Avatar Adi Da Samraj has quipped. And "Realizing Reality" is by no means some kind of merely mental insight, or mental shift in viewpoint, because Spiritual Reality is not merely mental. As we will see, the actual Spiritual process even requires a profound conversion of the entire body-mind, even at the physical, cellular level: |
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Avatar Adi Da Samraj, The Divine Physics of Evolution |
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Divine
Enlightenment is a literal change of the whole body. When you
have acquired the human form, the literal change that must occur
in the body is not really so much in your outward appearance,
because you already have the necessary structure. The changes
that must occur are literal psycho-physical changes, just as literal
as if you were to acquire more legs and arms, except that the
most dramatic changes occur in dimensions other than the shape
of the body. Certainly changes occur in the flesh and the elemental
structures of the body, but those changes do not really alter
the body's outward shape. The changes are as literal as evolving
from a dinosaur to a human being, and they are as dramatic as
that, but they principally occur at more subtle levels of the
physics of the conditional being. There are literal changes in
the nervous system, literal changes in the chemistry of the body,
literal changes in the structural functioning of the brain.
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All excerpts from the works of Avatar Adi Da Samraj and and pictures of Avatar Adi Da Samraj © 2003 The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as trustee for The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam. All rights reserved. Perpetual copyright claimed. |
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