God has no body. God needs no body. God is beyond all bodies. All bodies have come from God and will dissolve back into God at some point in time. The brightest, whole and complete, Mohan as well as the unfathomable, is God. This God can only be known through experience. And once we experience, there is no us, there is no one who experiences. There is only God. Just like when a river loses its individual identity when it merges with the ocean, we lose ourselves completely when we merge with the pure bright God energy.
God is energy. God energy is within all creations, and without the God energy, no creation can sustain itself. God is pure brightness, brighter than a million suns. God is non-interfering It is beyond flavours or gunas such as sattu, rayas and tamas. God is a witness while being an activator but not an enjoyer. God exists in everything but enjoys nothing, like the electricity or petrol in our car. God can never be known or understood. God is unknowable with human senses and mind. God can only be experienced. God is just an experience.
If we understand this, then we will realise that aradbutas are the same. Aradbutas are walking Gods. They represent the absolute nature of God. They are beyond boundaries. They are unpredictable. They are unorthodox. They do things only for the larger good of a person or their society. They do not wait to enjoy the fruits of their actions. They have no expectations. They cannot be defined.
They walk the earth like ordinary people. They perform no action for their gratification as they are beyond senses and their mind.
avadhoota-sadaananda-parabrahma-svaroopine videha-deha-roopaaya dattaatreya namo'stute The avadhuta, eternally blissful, your nature is the supreme reality; Manifested in the form of a body without body-consciousness-Dattatreya, we bow to you.
I bow down to Lord Dattatreya, who is the essence of existence as well as everything that appears in any dimension.
I bow down to Akkalot Swami Samarth Maharaj, who is one of the perfect manifested blessing-forms of Lord Dattatreya.
I bow down to Guru Mohanji and the Datta Guru Mandala, who have blessed me to live a life of serving consciousness as consciousness.
To explain how this book came into being, I would first of all like to thank Mathangi Balaji for giving me the amazing opportunity to work on this book. I know that she would give all credit to Shri Swami Maharaj for this. However, in order for such divine forces to operate, there has to be pure vessels to carry out their work in the world. Mathangi is such a vessel for the work of Datta Prabhu in the world, and I also aspire to be the same way.
The lilas of Lord Datta are still ongoing. We cannot put the lilas of Datta, as expressed through any of his incarnations, into a box and classify them as being mere history. The essence of Datta is lila-it is the playful emergence of pure consciousness in its own self-manifested world of apparent limitations. Since the time of writing Aradhuta Gita: The Reality-Path of Lord Dattatreya, I have been immersed and swimming in Datta Prabhu's lila-ocean.
My connection with Mathangi is a connection born of lila, born within the blueprints for the full emergence of the Datta Tradition in the Western world. First she translated my book to Tamil and now I have rendered this masterpiece into English.
For me, there were a number of lilas involved in this project. First of all, at the time when I expressed to Mathangi my desire to work on this book, I also knew that I wouldn't have time to work on it due to other very time-consuming commitments that I had at the time. I put this fact out of my mind and asked my editing team to do an initial readthrough and clean up of the roughy translated book.
In the meantime, during February 2024, I had the opportunity to visit many of the sacred places located in this book including Akkalkot itself, Ganagapur, Pandharpur, Narasobawadi and Alandi. During that trip, we also formally released the Tamil translation of Avadhuta Gita at the birthday celebrations of the great Datta Master, Mohanji. Being able to travel to India from the UK at that time was itself a blessing that was only made possible with the grace of unexpected financial assistance and a release from my hectic work schedule.
Anyway, in the way that all good lilas come together, by the time my editing team had finished their initial work of tidying up the the text, I, A) had a far looser work schedule and thus had time to really work on the book, and B) had actually visited many of the places mentioned in the book and thus could relate to the text, and the life of Shri Swami, in a far more immersive way.
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