'There is a difference between Awakening and Deliverance: the former is sudden, thereafter deliverance is gradual. ... In fact what we mean by 'Sudden Enlightenment' is the perfect equivalence of phenomenal understanding with universal principal: this is not reached by any stages at all.' (SHEN HUI)
Has any Master left us a clearer statement? The sudden coincidence of relative comprehension with absolute apprehension, whereby the division of mind into subject and object is healed so that its wholeness supervenes, in a spontaneous absence of duration, throws open the way to deliverance from 'bondage' to our conceptual universe.
With such authority, so simply stated, what 'mystery' could remain, what could there be about which to argue?
We may continue to argue about the requisite preceding conditions, but the inescapable inference seems to be that relative perceiving and comprehending must lie open to absolute apperceiving and apprehending, for without the spontaneous im-mediacy of the apperceiving, the apprehension of unicity could hardly be assumed to supervene.
Temporality could never know intemporality, the divided know its wholeness, succession know eternality, and the totality of the Absolute cannot be supposed to cognise its temporal division. Only the sudden intervention of timelessness, an im-mediate and instant arresting of succession in duration, could be assumed to lay open the possibility of such integration, and no process or action subject to temporal succession could be supposed to produce such suspension of its own functioning.
Unicity is necessarily in-temporal and in-finite, and no temporal or finite interference should be either necessary or possible: it must supervene ineluctably at whatever moment in temporal and spatial extension a solution of successional continuity is presented.
Nor could such solution of continuity ever be volitionally produced in a context of duration: it could only occur as a temporal result of the maturity of the apperceiving and apprehending faculty which is inherent in all relative and sentient 'beings' in order that they may be such. This faculty may be assumed to develop, in a context of duration, according to its potentiality, whereby apperceiving that I am no 'thing' finds equivalence with apperceiving that I am all things, and integration supervenes.
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It has often been said, but perhaps never so simply and with such perfect adequacy:'Enlightenment, instead of altering our state, discloses what we have always been.'JOHN BLOFELD, Hui Hai, note 80.
