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by David Samnga-Lastri (Author), Marty Glass (Foreword by)
We have here a collection of what the author called "affirmations." I am satisfied that that they could only have emerged from direct experience, and this also is the author's claim. What is this "direct experience"? The term is widely employed in the Eastern traditions and refers to an unmediated experience of the divine reality, a vision of that reality in which the world and the meditator are transfigured, revealed for what they truly are and were all along, attained, or "received," as a gift of grace, in that higher state of consciousness, in the Hindu tradition called turiya, or "the fourth state," which is the goal of meditation. The quality of direct experience is a bliss, peace and love perceived without doubt as infinite and eternal and as the very essence of our humanity and the universe, and an ecstatic certitude of being in the presence of, and one with, absolute truth or reality: God. The permutations of this experience are inexhaustible, as the recorded words of the great sages implicitly testify and explicitly proclaim. And the experience - a very important point - occurs in its fullness only within the framework of a revealed doctrine, a spiritual tradition. In the present case, the religion of India, Hinduism. The affirmations in this book "came to" Samnga-Lastri roughly between December 2004 and December 2005; he had been a practitioner of Hinduism for over thirty years. At first he wrote them down without thinking of them as the content of a book, but to preserve them for future reference as a means of awakening and recovering the experience they described and from which they emerged. In time, of course, it became clear to him that they could serve an analogous function for others. This book is being published in the hope that it may facilitate that goal.
