The Divine Descent

by Kiara Windrider

What is the difference between an enlightened person and a Christ?  What gives a person the ability to lie in the extraordinary state of compassion that Buddha exhibited?  How could Jesus heal with a glance or a touch?  How did St. Francis develop his remarkable kinship with wild animals?  What allowed Ramana Maharishi to hold such a profound state of silence that people were transformed by simply entering into his presence?  What gave St. Germaine the ability to wield such a powerful political influence in 17th century Europe and America?  How did Ramalinga Swami, Babaji, and the siddha masters learn to transform their physical bodies into bodies of light?

An enlightened person is no longer controlled by his or her ego.  There is a difference, however, between the state of non-attached emptiness that an enlightened person experiences, and the fullness of presence that a God-realized person radiates.  The deepest experiences of God-realization cannot happen unless one is first enlightened, but becoming enlightened does not automatically lead to God-realization.

The difference relates to what Sri Bhagavan is now referring to as ‘induction’, or the descent of divine beings into the body.  Some traditions refer to this process as being ‘overshadowed’ (or ‘overlighted’) by the Masters.  Some speak of it as ‘initiation’.  Others refer to it as a ‘baptism of fire’, or the ‘baptism of the Holy Spirit’.  Others simply refer to it as a ‘divine walk-in’.  What is this phenomenon?

It begins with an understanding of the ‘self’.  Before enlightenment, most of us identify ourselves as a ‘self’, as an entity fixed in time and space, with a history, personality, and individual memories distinct from any other.  Upon enlightenment, we begin to discover that this sense of a fixed or permanent self is an illusion, that we are simply a witness to a series of personalities that come and go.

Induction takes this one step further.  There are memory tracks and emotional states connected with each of our human personalities.  As divine personalities start descending, we begin to dissolve many of these human personalities that govern our existence.  We become more and more identified with these divine personalities that take over our lives and destinies.

Who or what are these divine personalities?  There are certain primordial energies, or aspects of God, that have pre-existed since the beginning of creation.  In different traditions these primordial energies are identified as Christ, Shekinah, Maitreya, Shiva, Mehdi Imam, or Kalki.  Many masters and avatars through the ages of human history, have been overlighted or merged with these primordial energies in varying degrees.  Following his baptism with John the Baptist, Jesus the man became Jesus the Christ, and eventually became indistinguishable from this primordial energy as Jesus Christ.  “I and the Father are One”, was his daily experience of Self.  It was no longer a human named Jesus who had somehow merged with the divine, but the divine spirit as Christ embodied through Jesus.

Bhagavan’s latest project is to initiate this descent of the divine spirit for people through a process known as ‘induction’.  For most people this is a relatively gradual process as the human personalities give way and the divine personalities take over. As the divine personalities merge with the ‘antaryamin’, or the indwelling God-presence, a state of permanent God-realization results – with all the splendour, grace, power, and brilliance that goes with it!

This is very different from the phenomenon of ‘possession’.  Induction occurs only by permission, and only when there is a sacred intent on the part of the human self to be used as a vehicle for divine consciousness on Earth.  It is a potential that exists for each of us now. We can each become a Christ, Maitreya, Mehdi, or Kalki.  It is when there are 60,000 such divine beings walking the Earth that the phenomenon of mass enlightenment will take place.  This will be the second coming of Christ, the return of Quetzacoatl, or the descent of Kalki consciousness!  This is when the Golden Age will begin!

Many traditions speak of gods who walked on Earth in previous golden ages.  As we begin our transition into the next Golden Age, the same possibility is opening up once again.  The human being is a transitional species.  A new species is now being birthed in our midst.  The induction process is preparing the way for what Sri Aurobindo referred to the divine human.  Through the generations, and as we fully enter into the Golden Age, this will give rise to a ‘supramental’ species as far beyond the current state of humanity as we are now beyond the cosmic soup of amino acids we first emerged from!