CHAPTER 13
Transcend Reactivity, but Do Not Lose the Virtue of
Your Emotion
SRI DA AVABHASA: There is an exoteric religiosity in the
world that falsely requires people to have no emotions –
never to feel guilt, never to feel sorrow, never to be
afraid. It is true that through submission to the Divine
Being human beings must transcend chronic and reactive fear,
anger, guilt, sorrow, irony, and the rest. But there are
moments when any of these responses is completely
appropriate, just as the physical body has reactions that
contribute to its survival, such as pain. If you could not
feel pain when touching something hot, you would not be able
to protect yourself. Just so, you are emotionally equipped
with survival mechanisms in the form of responsive
emotions.
* * *
Perhaps in an instant a reaction cannot be avoided. If a
tiger jumps out of a bush, fear occurs-fine. But to make
life out of such reaction, even when the tiger disappears,
that is the dramatization of reactivity.
Fear is perhaps the appropriate response to the attacking
lion, and even then one’s response should not be prolonged
and debilitating fear but sudden and great strength. Fear is
not intended to be your chronic state.
* * *
Love is a wound, a sorrow, a gesture beyond the separate
and separative self. To love is to be wedded to the other,
not just in the man-woman relationship but in all
relationships. It is to be beyond oneself, even to be beyond
the other, to go beyond the other’s limitations, to exceed
even sorrow but without excluding it.
The best thing that could possibly happen to you is that
you become a raw nerve-end, a broken heart, unconsolable,
with sorrow on your face – and ecstasy as well.
To be fiercely angry sometimes is good and necessary and
right. It is part of your creative capability to deal with
things in this world that must be changed. On the other
hand, chronic and petty anger, anger that is not rising on
love and that manifests in a life that is not otherwise
Divinely Enlightened, must be transcended. But anger cannot
be transcended through mere suppression. Anger is
transcended only through love of Me, through understanding
yourself in feeling-Contemplation of Me, through hearing My
Wisdom-Teaching of Truth, and through practical
responsibility. When you become truly responsible at the
heart and whole bodily, then all of your potential emotions
attain their natural form and occasion, as do all of the
functions of the body-mind.
Yes, overcome your petty reactivity, but do not lose the
virtue of your emotion. Communion with Me is enacted through
feelingintuition. To be manly, whether man or woman, you
must remain sensitive to how things are in the world. The
parental message of the world is always that you stop being
difficult, that you suppress the emotions that create an
unpleasant atmosphere. If human beings become overwhelmed at
some point by the great Parental State, it will be because
human beings will have renounced emotion, ceased to be
angry, ceased to be even capable of anger.
You must be able to transcend your anger in Communion
with Me. You must also be capable of anger, of sensitivity,
in the face of the utter stupidity of the subhuman society
at large in which you live. If you fail to maintain your
understanding, your right appreciation, your right emotional
response to the world as it is-and to yourself as you tend
to be-then you will not grow. You will become benighted
through the loss of emotion. You will look at the world, and
it will all seem fine.
Things in the world need not be wonderful before you can
be Happy. You must Realize the Happiness That I am always
Transmitting, Which is Transcendental in nature, Which is
LoveBlissful, and Which is your fundamental capability, and
the fundamental capability of all human beings, if they will
respond to Me, no matter what the circumstances.
I refuse to be angerless. One who is angerless is
exploitable. One who is angerless gives himself or herself
up to the Parent-State, to the influences that control and
exploit individuals arbitrarily. Part of the right
disposition of My devotee is to remain appropriately angry,
to remain fiery. All the conventional nonsense about
angerlessness, lustlessness, emotionlessness, and
lifelessness has been borrowed from exoteric oriental
religion. In the Way of the Heart, you must be capable of
emotion, and you must likewise transcend all
self-destructive and other-destructive aspects of emotion
through the creative life of devotion to Me.
The Spiritual practitioner does not cooperate with what
kills human beings. But not to cooperate with destructive
forces does not lead one to become an ascetic or a killer in
one’s own right or a revolutionary righteously snuffing
people out. Spiritual practice has nothing to do with any of
that, either. To practice the Way of the Heart is to find a
place for real religious and Spiritual practice at the human
level, in the miniature scale of intimate existence, but it
is also to not cooperate with the negative features of human
society.
As My devotee, you are not called to support negativity,
and you should not do so. Do not be like the snake who heard
a little bit of wisdom and would not even hiss.* Do not
submit to being destroyed, but love others, cooperate with
others, live with others, communicate with others. This is
what I advise you to do.
* Here Sri Da Avabhasa refers to the
traditional story of a venomous snake that hissed at people
and bit them until a sage tamed it, admonished it for its
evil ways, and then taught it to repeat a sacred mantra and
not to harm anyone. The snake practiced these disciplines
diligently-so much so that some boys, emboldened, beat it
nearly to death. Later, when the sage found it in ill health
and heard the story, he said, “You are such a fool! I asked
you not to bite, but I didn’t forbid you to
hiss.”
* * *
You notice that, habitually, whatever arises, you feel in
relation to it either appropriately or inappropriately. If
you see a gorilla chasing you, the appropriate emotional
response is to be afraidand also to run, hopefully. And the
inappropriate response is to laugh and start telling the
gorilla stories about your childhood. If a person goes to a
funeral, the appropriate response is to weep or feel
sorrowful and be somber, and an inappropriate response, at
least from the conventional point of view, is to laugh and
do a tap dance, in effect to deny the fact of death. What I
am suggesting is that appropriate response, or what one
might call “appropriate affect”, at best is only a logical
style of limited emotion relative to some apparent fact. It
is not Feeling without limit. It is the limitation of
Feeling, even though it is appropriate. And, likewise,
inappropriate emotional responses are limitations on
Feeling, clearly. In other words, no matter what arises,
whether you tend to react appropriately or inappropriately
from a conventional point of view, you always present
yourself as a limit on Feeling. And this, as you might
gather, from My “Point of View” is inappropriate!
In other words, you must do more than feel afraid when it
is appropriate to be afraid, and sorrowful when it is
appropriate to be sorrowful, and gleeful when it is
appropriate to be gleeful. You must Feel completely, without
obstruction, in which case you will not merely be afraid, or
angry, or sorrowful. You will feel anger, sorrow, fear, and
that which is causing or suggesting to you to be angry,
sorrowful, fearful. And by being completely free to feel
these feelings, you will not merely dramatize these
feelings, although you might tend also to continue to
dramatize them to some degree, but you will simply feel. The
feeling of the appropriate emotion will become Feeling
Itself. Eventually, it will become Feeling simply, or
Feeling without obstruction.
Remarkably enough, the reason you are so disturbed about
the facts of life that might make you fearful, sorrowful,
and angry is that whenever something arises that you might
appropriately be angry, fearful, or sorrowful about, you do
not feel it completely. You limit your feeling of even these
reactions. And you certainly limit your feeling of the
circumstance, or the condition, that is arising. You are
always exhibiting the evidence of limited feeling,
obstructed feeling. If feeling becomes limitless, if you do
not contract, then feeling becomes Being Itself-no reaction,
no contraction, Feeling without limit. That Feeling goes
beyond fear, sorrow, anger, and conventional happiness and
loving attitudes.
What is It? It is Love-Bliss. It is the Self-Existing and
Self-Radiant Force of Being, Who I Am, without the slightest
obstruction. It is Divine Enlightenment. It Divinely
Transfigures the body-mind and becomes a Power, a Great
Power, and-because now you are looking at manifestation
through this color, this “one flavor”, this Free Force or
Free Energy-It even allows you to interpret everything
differently. Now you will not be saying that manifested
existence is evil or suffering or sinful, or that others are
unloving, that you are mortal, that you are going to die,
that it is a terrible life, and so forth. Instead, you will
regard all of manifested existence to be pervaded by My
Love-Bliss. Not merely Bliss coming at you from every
direction, but Love-Bliss, Self-Existing and Self-Radiant,
Radiating from every direction in the Place where you Stand,
as you, and everywhere, altogether. I have no center, no
bounds, no limits. My Love-Bliss is Happiness Itself. And,
when you Realize Me Most Perfectly, you Realize My
Love-Bliss Itself, Happiness Itself, and you are Free to
feel without limit, not obstructed in your attention.
When, by Grace of My Spiritual Heart-Transmission, your
attention is without limit, it is Divine Consciousness
Itself, just Consciousness. When, by Grace, energy is
without limit, it is LoveBliss Itself, or Happiness Itself.
When there is no limit on energy and attention, there is
only Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Divine Being, without
limit-and even the whole world becomes obviously That. And
you, in the form of the manifested personality, become
someone who is active as the Divinely Transfiguring Power
that is Inherent in the realm of conditional Nature and that
Transcends it also.
Love is more than fear, sorrow, and anger. It is not less
than these. Thus, the love by which My true devotees move in
relationship to Me and thereby to all beings, processes, and
things is not the weak, desiring, and inward
feeling-conception of the usual man or woman. It is full, it
is free action, it is strong. The love which is the active
principle of real Spiritual life in all realms, high or low,
is alive only where fear, sorrow, and anger are presently
and fully encountered and transformed in the individual.
Love is alive only in one who is completely in touch with
his or her own fear, sorrow, and anger. One who cannot
permit, encounter, and face these tendencies in the
contracted body-mind cannot transform them at the heart.
When, in the Way of the Heart, self-transcending
responsibility characterizes the individual, the
self-defining, contracting, tensing effects of experience
will become less and less profound. And, in that case, daily
existence will cease to be a constant effort to overcome
obstacles and purify or save the egoic self, but it will
instead become ecstatic self-sacrifice through practice of
the -Way of the Heart in My “Bright” Company.
Such an individual is profoundly responsive and alive.
And he or she transcends the frustrating and
reaction-forming power of experience by intensity of
participation rather than unresponsive coolness. Such a
person is not weak, but strong. Such a person’s freedom is
shown in his or her aggressive, self-yielding resort to
feeling-Contemplation of Me under all circumstances. Such a
person is not passionless. Rather, that one’s passion is
pressed to Me.
* * *