1 ... Return Today and anciently, developed societies mark transitions between stages of life with ceremonies anthropologists call rites of passage. We are familiar with these transitions:

from gestation to birth,
from childhood to adolescence,
from adulthood to marriage,
from senility to death, etc.

There are also transitions between the callings of life and between stages within those callings:

from student to ruler,
from apprentice to journeyman,
from journeyman to master, etc.

All of these passages apply to the career of the body, which is an inanimate thing entirely depending on the Spirit for vivification.

St. Francis referred to his body as 'my Brother the Ass.'

Rites of passage are imposed on a person from outside themselves. Some person or group of persons decides that at such and such a time some type of person will undergo such and such a rite of passage. The timing of the rite and the passage it marks reflect community will, not the opinion of the subject.

Again, rites of passage are anachronistically applied. The person may or may not be undergoing the passage the rite aims to mark. Plenty of Bar and Bat Mitzvah's are imposed on persons not yet undergoing adolescence-adulthood, and, some are imposed on persons who entered adolescence-adulthood long before the Bar or Bat Mitzvah occurs.

And finally, rites of passage may not reflect the individual condition of the person upon whom they are being imposed. Persons are certified capable of this or that activity when they are not, or, for some, when they are capable of doing more than the certification recognizes.

Rites of passage, as usually meant, are superficial ceremonies relating to what is just a corpse, a bag of urine and feces, the body. They are imposed from without, regardless of whether their subject deserves them.

The significant passages are those involving the Spirit, that aspect of the personality that is truly alive, because of its being self-animate, or, independent.

The passages undergone by the Spirit are defined by experience and have no other source. They are deserved. They cannot be imposed from without. They occur when they occur, according to the destiny of the person undergoing them.

Passages of the Spirit almost never have rites associated with them. They are so internal and their timing is so undetectable and ineluctable that, besides their subject, only the greatest Sages, and of course, Avathars of the Lord, can know when they are occurring and what rites are appropriate at the moment they occur. Any rite of passage for the Spirit would be a rare event, indeed. In this realm, the passage, not the rite, is important.

The phrase, rite of passage, was developed by anthropologists to indicate ceremonies associated with the career of the body, which is what anthropologists take a person for. Since our subject is passages of the Spirit, we shall have regard to experience, which is the domain of Spirit, and mean by this that persons are experience, or, Spirit.

2 ... Return There are three primal experiences which the Spirit undergoes. Each is a transition (passage) from one condition to another. The conditions are epistemological sets, manners of seeing.

The first primal experience (passage) of the Spirit is Turning Godward.

The second primal experience (passage) of the Spirit is Crucifixion of the ego, or, destruction of self-centeredness.

The third primal experience (passage) of the Spirit is Emergence in the Absolute.

Now, before we discuss these three primal experiences, we need to conduct some preliminary investigations. We need to establish a few lemmas.

3 ... Return Just before the third passage, there remain in the person,

experientially
(existentially),

one or two minuscule vestiges of the sense of distinction. The word Spirit indicates, ultimately, just this condition, which is a purity nearly but not absolutely perfect. The word Spirit, juxtaposed as it usually is against the words body and mind, implies a faint presence of the sense of distinction, or, separation. Purity is freedom from this presence, this sense of separation. It is indistinguish-ability (distinctionlessness). When we use the word Spirit, we imply a taint of impurity, a slightest attenuation of this freedom.

During the passage from Spirit to Absolute, Spirit looses all taint of impurity and stands forth as what It really is, namely, the Atma, the Absolute, the One-Without-A-Second.

Spirit, really speaking, is Atma. Not until this final passage has occurred does Spirit stand forth as such. Prior to undergoing this passage, Spirit, although It is the principle of non- duality (Atma), yet,

experientially
(existentially),

It bears a faint taint of the sense of distinction. This is why we call It Spirit. When no taint is present, we call It Atma.

How often we fob off our name as Mark or John or Betty or April when our real name is Atma!

4 ... Return The word life refers not to the life of the body but to the Life of the Spirit. The Spirit is that component of the personality (body, mind, Spirit) which survives the body's death and the mind's demise and gets wrapped in successive body-minds, or, births.

The mind's demise takes longer than the body's death but ends, equally, in extinction or non- being.

The Life of the Spirit comprises many lives in the ordinary sense of 'life of the body.'

This phrase, 'life of the body,' is an oxymoron. The body is a corpse.

The baby has a new body, but its Spirit is very old and its mind may be aged also, although, like the body, it may be new.

When we speak of Life, therefore, we should specify which life we speak of. The body's life is not self-sustaining. The mind's life is not so temporary as the body's life is, but it has a terminus ad quo and a terminus ad quem, and it is not self-sustaining. The Spirit's Life, on the other hand, is beginningless and endless and is self-sustaining.

Properly, the word Life refers to the Life of the Spirit. This Life is One and continuous, whereas the lives of bodies and minds are, at least seemingly, many and desultory.

The Johannine phrase, Eternal Life, indicates the Life of the Spirit and especially so after the Spirit has undergone the second of the three primal experiences (passages) mentioned above and discussed below.

5 ... Return Now, what is important to understand is this: usually, these primal experiences (passages) occur over a period that includes the careers of more than one body or mind. Usually, these primal experiences (passages) are spread out over the careers of many bodies and not a few minds. This phenomenon should be grasped. The discussion that follows has to be taken in this sense.

6 ... Return Not all buds blossom. Some fall off. Some are picked off. Some wither when the branch that sustains them is injured or broken.

Again, not all blossoms bloom. Some are eaten. Some are picked for decoration, others for medicinal or cosmetic uses. Some are killed by weather.

Again, not all blooms fruit. Some are not pollinated. Some fall off. Some are injured.

And finally, not all fruits ripen into delicious, life-giving food. And, not all ripe fruits get enjoyed.

Between the bud and imbibing the sweet essence (nectarine juice) of the fruit, many things can happen, and do. There is a myriad of steps between a seed and its fulfillment, a seed-bearing fruit taken for nourishment. At any point, fate can disrupt or cancel the teleology of the seed.

The wonder is that animate nature, life exists at all. So much there is that can overwhelm it. What real chance did the first virus have in the volcanic-electrical maelstrom that was its earthly abode?

Years ago, devotees were hoping that Swami Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba would do a materialization (miracle) for their entertainment and vanity (so they could preen themselves: 'I saw Swami materialize ....'). Baba turned on the party in a hot fury: 'Miracle! Miracle! You want miracle! You are My miracle!'

The odds never favor life, not its beginning nor its sustaining, only its ending. Life is the only game that beats the house. The reason, as Teilhard demonstrates, is the interior nature of the house.

But, no gamer chances upon interiorities, imperceptibles. Only the house does that -- because they control them. And this is why gamblers are fools: they don't face facts.

Notice, please, that fruit has two components, purposes: nourishment for others (pulp and, especially, juice) and perpetuation for self (seed). These components are equally important, and they are integral. Together they comprise a metaphor of Life:

external aspect
sustain others with love
(food);

internal aspect
propagate self with construction
(self-satisfaction).

External and internal aspects are of One Life
(Fruit).

7 ... Return The three primal experiences (passages) undergone by the Spirit rarely occur during the career of one body. It is possible that they could but not ordinary that they do. Usually, these primal experiences occur over the course of a set of earthly, bodily careers numbering into the thousands or even millions. We are looking, therefore, at spans of time that include many, many years. Æons is an appropriate word.

Ordinarily, spiritual progress is a very long, step-by-step procedure. Contact with the good or great shortens the term considerably. Contact with an Avathar shortens it immeasurably. Around such personages, people feel [their] karma speeding up. This is why adepts seek the company of Saints, Sages and especially Avathars more fervently than they seek anything else in life. And conversely, this explains why a person who takes a charlatan for a guru -- and most seekers today are doing this -- is committing suicide.

8 ... Return We are looking at earthly careers that are not all in human form. Most are in sub-human form, including rock. 'Organic' and 'inorganic' 'matter' differ in concentration, not in nature. They are the same ontos.

We are not necessarily looking at careers of continuous evolutionary progress, rock to plant to fish to animal to human. The teleology of events (in other words, Providence) is not so tidy as 'Science' presumes. Very great persons take birth next as a cow or a fish or some other or any other form and with no disapprobation or loss of stature. The standards and actions of Providence are not those of ordinary humanity. Ordinary humanity can no more understand Providence than ants can the Ocean. The reason: Providence sees the past, the present and the future, entire, at once; ordinary humanity sees none of these things, not together, not ever.

9 ... Return The order of causality should be understood. Body is controlled by mind. Mind is controlled by intellect (Buddhi) immediately and by Spirit ultimately. Spirit is uncontrolled, being, for purposes of our discussion, uncaused.

Remember, please, that it is Atma which is uncaused. Atma is Spirit sans any vestige of qualities. Atma is a grammatical Klein Bottle.

10 ... Return We may ask: if Spirit is uncaused, how can it undergo the three primal experiences we are going to discuss; if it is uncaused, is it not also unaffected?

Indeed, it is so. Spirit as Atma, that is to say, Spirit after the third primal experience (passage) we are going to discuss, does not undergo experience, either ordinary or primal, and is not affected by the same.

But, prior to that third primal experience (passage), which we are going to discuss and after which it is proper to say that Spirit is Atma, Spirit seems to undergo experience, both ordinary and primal, and seems to be affected by the same.

This seeming appears both to the subject of an [any] experience and to observers of it. It goes on for æons in countless earthly careers. The seeming seems, appears to be real. It is not, of course, but until very late, mature stages of spiritual discipline (or, formation in the fine, old monastic/Pietistical phrase), it has to be treated as real.

11 ... Return An example. There is a large wall that is by nature pure white in color. (Meaning, it is a perfect balance of all colors.) People have thrown some things at the wall. From a distance, we cannot see where the wall has been discolored by contact with these thrown objects. The wall appears as its native white.

Closer in, however, the spots are visible and the wall's natural color appears adulterated, impure.

Standing very close to the wall and using a magnifying glass, we see the wall as very disfigured, its color severely adulterated. Huge blotches mar its color.

The closer we get, the more serious the adulterations appear, the more these blot out the purity of the wall altogether.

12 ... Return This phenomenon is instructive.

Each birth is a fired crucible. Its purpose is to burn off the dross of downward-dragging tendencies so that the effulgence of pure gold, which the person really is, shines forth.

The more pure a person becomes, through the fired crucibles of successive births, the more any residual impurity in them seems like a serious flaw. Or in other words, one faint taint in an adept appears to be far more deplorable that a thousand black crimes in a novice.

The reason for this seeming irony is in our perspective. A novice is examined from afar and looks good. An adept is examined at point-blank range with a powerful magnifying glass that makes any taint horrifying. This is as it should be.

13 ... Return Spirit undergoes more experiences in the early than in the later stages of spiritual discipline, formation. This is because early on it bears the quality of torpor from animal and sub-human, dæmonic careers and has to be shaken awake by the goad and spur of life, 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.'

Outrageous indeed! Deserved.

Later on, Spirit bears the subtle quality of calm, gained through many careers of intense sadhana (spiritual discipline) in the crucible of life, and this quality tends towards being quality-less, that is, towards revealing Atma (Self-to-Self). In this condition of calm, Spirit requires very little experience because it is properly served by body, mind and intellect, which are obedient, strong and vigilant, respectively.

14 ... Return So, Spirit does not undergo experience of any kind but must be treated, almost to the end, as if It does. Nearer the end, which is the third primal experience (passage) we are going to discuss, the truth is more and more told and seen:

Spirit is Atma,
uncaused, unaffected,
unknowable,
and,
Atma is Self.