The State Beyond All Contradiction

"It took me many years to understand that revolution in my living being. It marked the rising in me of fundamental and Non-conditional Life, and it, in its moment, removed every shadow of dilemma and ignorance from the mind, on every level, and all its effects in the body."

— Avatar Adi Da Samraj
The Knee of Listening

While the experience itself passed, a knowledge arose from it, which Adi Da Samraj calls "radical" understanding:

I saw that the Truth or Reality was a matter of the absence 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 Non-conditional Knowledge and Power that is Reality. This was the first aspect of that sudden Clarity.

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.

— Avatar Adi Da Samraj
The Knee of Listening

The Columbia experience took place in 1960, when Adi Da Samraj was only twenty years old. And so, even before He had fully Re-Awakened to the "Bright", or "Perfect Knowledge" of Reality Itself, He had understood the ego as self-contraction, and seen the worlds of seeking that it generates.

He had made the "radical" discovery that the very search for Truth is the obstruction to Realizing Truth, because seeking is always based on the presumption and activity of separation from That Which Always Already Is.

As Adi Da Samraj has always Taught, human beings in the general case simply want to fulfill their ego-search, at whatever level of reality they are focused — gross, subtle, or causal. The disposition of "radical" understanding is to transcend the root "clench" in consciousness that is generating the search at every level.

Adi Da Samraj sometimes refers to the first six stages of life (or the stages previous to the Unconditional Awakening to "Perfect Knowledge") as the "psycho-biography" of the ego, because these stages represent all the potential that the apparent persona can experience or achieve, by "playing" its structural mechanism — gross, subtle, and causal.

In the midst of that vast range of possibility, however, the fundamental ego-activity, the motivated search, remains the same. At the causal depth, all that is left is the root-ego, the barest sense of separateness, just the awareness of "I" and "other", and the effort to resolve that last duality.

That is the place where the greatest Sages have, to one or another degree, "leaped off" the edge into the Non-dual Knowledge of the Transcendental Self, or the Nirvanic Truth.

That is the place to which the youthful Adi Da Samraj would spontaneously return in His periodic revery of contemplating the great stone. He knew intuitively that the Truth lay in understanding the mysterious coincidence between the Transcendental Reality and the apparent world.

But none of His experiences, none of His Teachers, could explain this.

The Answer came, in the end, through the force of His own "radical" self-understanding — which enabled Him to transcend all the partial messages of Truth delivered through the psycho-physics of the body-mind and to Re-Awaken to the "Bright", the Inherently egoless Condition, beyond all seeking and all "difference".

Next: The Twofold Practice of "Radical" Devotion
from the Introduction by Carolyn Lee, PhD