‘When a man goes mad, he becomes a saint.
When a saint goes mad, he becomes an avadhuta.
When an avadhuta goes mad, he becomes God.’
These are the words that Mohanji opens his foreword to Avadhuta Nadananda’s Autobiography of an Avaduta with. He ascribes this phrases to Avadhuta Nadananda himself.
Why must a man go mad not once but twice to become an avadhuta?
A man is in the world. He is lost in the world. He is pushed and pulled by the world. He adores the world and he may be adored by the world. He may torture the world and he may be tortured by the world. You cannot take the man out of the world. In a way, man and world are one.
When a man becomes a saint, he finds a space beyond the world. He finds a space within himself that the world can no longer touch. In a way, he has become free of the world.
So, what needs to happen for a saint to turn into an avadhuta?
A saint, even though he has awakened to the essence of existence within himself, has still not expanded that essence to include everyone and everything. Or rather, that essence itself has not expanded functionally within him to that extent. If the realisation of a saint were to expand that much, he would lose himself, his identity, his world, his everything—totally.
If a saint is someone who dwells in the state of turiya, the fourth state, where he has recognised the substratum awareness that sit behinds the three states of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep, the avadhuta is the one who has gone beyond turiya into the state turiyatita—the state beyond the fourth state.
In the state of turiyatita, all definitions lose their meaning. There is no longer any turiya because the memory of there being any discrete state of consciousness except turiya has dissolved along with everything else.
The avadhuta has no borders with himself at all. He is everywhere. He is everything. And thus, he no longer belongs to himself. Who does he then belong to? He belongs to what he has realised himself as—everything, everyone, the world, the universe. For the avadhuta, these are not just vague words. This is how he actually lives his life. The avadhuta doesn’t just speak about cosmic consciousness, he lives his life as if he were one with the entire cosmos.
When I first read Avadhuta Nadananda’s Autobiography of an Avadhuta, I was a little disappointed. I expected something that spoke more about lofty non-dual realisations and displays of siddhis. What I discovered instead was the story of a young man with a big heart, who walked a path of sadhana and seva intertwined, and whose heart eventually expanded to include the entire universe. If Avadhuta Nadananda practised sri vidya sadhana in order to become a saint, it was seva, and the very disposition of selfless service, that led to him becoming an avadhuta.
It is impossible to separate the state of avadhuta from seva—from service, and from helping people and being available to people. Why? Because seva is the direct, tangible demonstration of the state of unity consciousness that the avadhuta is established in.
As a man evolves into a saint and then begins evolving into an avadhuta, he begins to witness the boundaries of his identity dissolve. It becomes simply impossible for such a man to live a life solely based around his own self-gratification and the gratification of those closely tied to him. Why? Because inside of himself, he no longer experience himself as that man. He has first discovered himself as the soul, the essence of existence, and then, later, he has realised that he is the same soul that is in absolutely everything. As this realisation crystallises, his way of living in the world must also change. He can no longer say no to helping people. He can no longer turn away from the suffering of others. How can he? Where will he turn?
People usually turn to distractions that are invented by their own mind. But where will the avadhuta, who is established in the state of no-mind—to what kind of distractions will he turn? The avadhuta has absolutely nowhere to run because he is already everywhere.
Thus, the main difference here between the saint and the avadhuta is that the saint has tasted his essence as the ocean of existence, and maybe he can talk about it to some degree—but he has not actually lost himself as the drop in that ocean and began to live the life of the ocean.
How can those who live their life as mere drops understand the life on an ocean? ‘The world’, in the words of Avadhuta Nadananda, ‘may not understand a saint who exists to wipe the tears of the world despite his own pain. Only when one is capable of doing that, he becomes complete.’
How can people understand the one who lives simply to wipe the tears of the world?
We cannot understand it until we become it.
How do we become it?
We cannot.
Avadhutas are made by life.
Avadhutas are like diamonds that are produced inside the depths of the Earth itself. They are forged from pressure.
Pressures brings their essence to the fore. Even when their essence has come to the fore, pressure perfects and polishes that essence so that it may shine in the world and help bring many more essences out.
This is what I have understood from walking the avadhuta path. If there is a state beyond this that requires another revolution of madness—a God-state indicated by the quote at the beginning of this article—then it is far beyond my understanding at this time.
Mohanji once told me: ‘An avadhuta is existence personified.’
It is one thing to nod our head in intellectual agreement with such a statement. It is another thing in entirely to become that—to discover the essence of our existence and gradually lose ourselves in it whilst simultaneously learning to live our lives in the world as an expanded consciousness that has no real concern for the personal life of its own projected character.
I offer this article—a humble jotting down of an ordinary man’s incomplete realisations—to the feet of all the great avadhutas of past, present, and future.
With love, Jack.
__________________________________
Original article by Jack Barratt
Thumbnail image courtesy of @alex_andrews on Unsplash.
