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VISION MOUND
Volume 1, Number 2
AUGUST 1977
You Must Become Responsible as Feeling-Attention in Every Moment
By Bubba Free John
From a Talk to His Devotees June.
The discipline of this practice begins with the exercise of feeling, with the presumption of responsibility for withholding, withdrawing, and reactive manipulation of the feeling dimension of the being. This discipline is what service is all about, what recollection of the Presence of God is all about, what the Breath of God is all about. It is the awakening of the heart and the various stages of practice are the stages of the maturing of the realization of the heart as the feeling core of the being. The ego is simply recoil of feeling, the collapse of intuition that occurs when we move out of Communion with our true Condition and identify with the born reaction. When feeling becomes free and unobstructed, when it becomes perfect love, that Intuition is God-Realization or Sahaj Samadhi.
When you recoil from feeling-intuition you collapse into identification with the body, and thus you suffer the illusion that you are inside it. At birth you were simply the body and the body enjoyed the condition of perfect communion, feeling or intuition, of its true Condition. But the shock of birth caused a reaction or recoil. That shock or recoil affects all of your behavior, all of your development in the future until you penetrate it. It is the sense that you are inward to the body, that you are subjective, that you are a point, an independent awareness, not a feeling diffused condition, but a specific feelingless particle of awareness located somehow inside the body or subjective relative to it. Thus you suffer all the usual emotional, mental, and psychic disabilities as you develop. As the various functions of the body-being grow and mature, you adapt through this recoiled position, the original reaction of birth. And all of the shocks that you accumulate from the unenlightened, unloving, and unfeeling actions of others, from the apparent feelingless activity of the environment, and from the horrors of the world – all of these reinforce the recoil from feeling.
Therefore, you must become rooted in your natural disposition and presume again the position of the heart or the feeling being. Now you feel yourself to be isolated as a separate awareness, surrounded by flesh and thinking. But that perception will begin to break down once you have adapted to this Way by presuming the feeling position again by pervading the mental and the physical dimensions with feeling, by becoming responsible for feeling-attention in every moment. Then the whole affair of spiritual practice becomes simply the maturing of that response.
SATSANG
Likewise, you must prepare yourself for this meeting with me. You must be unobstructed in your feeling. You must approach without obstruction, without recoil, without self-reference. Simply be present in my Company, and the Presence of the Divine will establish itself. You must be able to feel in spite of the effects of reactions, self-possession, inwardness, thinking, and all the rest that you tend to become involved with and you must abide as feeling-attention completely, not only on the formal occasions of our being together, but characteristically, constantly, ultimately.
It may very well be in your contact with me that effects are generated in the energies of the body and their movements – these will attract your attention. Just so, you may experience the awakening of mental and emotional reactions. All the adaptations you represent may be awakened, moved around, or set aside, and some other relatively private sensation, emotion, or thought may take its place, such as kriyas and visions and that sort of thing. The matter of spiritual practice in Truth, though, is to feel through all these effects, to pass beyond them, to let them be whatever they are and to let them rise and fall without any concern. When you abide as feeling-intuition, in that natural relationship, the Presence of God is shown as it truly is. And it will draw you into Communion. It will not leave you in self-possession, surrounded by the artifacts of your own living. These are not God and therefore they pass. Everything native to you or established as you through adaptation dies!
The usual man needs exaggerated conditions in order just to feel, to have a sense that he is experiencing pleasure. Thus he becomes addicted to excesses because he does not already live in the condition of pleasure, happiness, or fullness. Such people cannot feel, in other words. If you cannot feel emotionally then you cannot live a life of love, you cannot be intimate. If you can not feel with the head, you can not enjoy clarity of mind, and you can not consider things as they truly are. If you can not feel, if the core of the being, the heart, is not operative, not active, then at the physical level you must be self-indulgent.
Thus, feeling must be awakened from head to toe and from toe to crown. It must become natural to you. It must become your discipline. You do not by tendency live by feeling from the heart, so you have adapted to the obstruction of feeling, to the recoil of the ego. You do not by tendency have the ability to live a feeling life or a life of love. Your tendencies are of another kind – they are obstructed and separative. Through true hearing of the Teaching of the Spiritual Master you realize commitment to the discipline and the obligation of love.
Part of the discipline of the Way of Divine Communion is not to be concerned about the continuation of your old adaptation, the physical, emotional, and mental signs of your old way of living. Allow them to come and go, rise and fall, without concern, without dramatization. Live the discipline of love, physically, vitally, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. By living that commitment as a discipline, you will see the old adaptations fall away and become unnecessary and obsolete. New adaptations of existence naturally come into being when you change your act. It is as simple as that. But you must persist in this discipline. You cannot indulge in playing with yourself and falling back constantly. You must become stronger in your hearing of the Teaching so that you do not fall and then collapse under concerns and low-grade dramatization. You must be stronger than that to bring feeling-attention into the present. Do not be concerned when subjective stuff arises. It eventually disappears, if you only persist in feeling-intuition.