Extraordinary Evidence > Other Entities and Realms > Benign Subtle Realms

About the Benign Subtle Realms

Leroy Stilwell

Leroy Stilwell has been a formal devotee since 1976. He is one of the founders of this website. You can read his biographical information in the About Us section.

Avatar Adi Da has spoken about the subtle realms as benign places or dimensions of existence where the sense of separate self is hardly noticed, thus they are “places” of apparent limitless joy and bliss. However, He points out that from the “perspective” of the Seventh Stage Realization, even this most refined state of existence, as full of joy and bliss as it may be, is still a condition of suffering, of non-Realization, albeit nothing like the most gross physical and emotional suffering potentially experienced by human beings.

Because the subtle realms are characterized by diffuse recognition (or even non-noticing) of the separate self, experience in them is typically free of fear. Also, because one is not so bound to the separate self identity and bodily imposed limits, one is freer to notice and participate in the inherent nature of Existence Itself — Self-Radiant Love-Bliss, Consciousness and Light. The experience of pervasive and indescribable Joy, Love, Radiance, and Awareness is characteristic of the subtle realms.

Even in the midst of such potentially magnificent experience, however, for the devotee of Adi Da, their practice remains the same: contemplate Him, and simply allow experience to be whatever it is, for in the beholding of Adi Da one is drawn even beyond all experience into the absolute prior condition of utter non-difference that is Reality Itself.