Stress Chemistry and Whole Bodily Enlighenment


 

Chapter 7: What Is Wisdom?

Stress Chemistry and Whole Bodily Enlightenment

 

A talk by Da Free John

Part I

DA FREE JOHN: We live under stress, in a subhuman culture whose populace is completely confused even in the most elemental levels of existence. We are all involved in an animal-like struggle for survival, without much intelligence even at the level of the verbal mind. Such a circumstance tends to stimulate a chemical profusion in the body that enables it to function and survive under stress, but that chemical design does not allow the higher psychic and subtle centers of the body-mind to awaken. On the contrary, this stress chemistry triggers the degenerative processes of aging as well as all other forms of bodily degeneration, and this same stress chemistry is generally empty of the profound genetic signals that can trigger the higher evolutionary functions of Man.

In response to the stress of the usual worldly life, practitioners of traditional mysticism and yoga found ways to evolve into the consciousness of the higher states of mind, particularly those awakened in the right hemisphere of the brain. These practitioners commonly went out into the wilderness and used esoteric “tricks,” such as fasting, prayer, and techniques of brain-stimulating meditation, to encourage the body not only to stop producing the chemistry of stress, anger, sexual desire, and fear, but to start producing another and superior kind of chemistry. They were thus able to awaken certain aspects of the brain that will be naturally and commonly awake only in the future evolutionary stages of mankind.

Until we have created a human order that is fundamentally free of mutual threat, it will not be common for people to live in a truly awakened and peaceful state, not only of mind, but of body (or the total body-mind). The body-mind must receive the signals that the stressful world has been overcome, that we need not fear, that we presently have a peaceful human society, not a society full of bombs and benighted craziness. The evolutionary mechanism of the bodily being is programmed to awaken its next higher centers of function only when the chronic problems of its lower functional centers have been solved and when the being can live without chronically creating degenerative stress chemistry. You can perhaps make yourself more comfortable by becoming free of some of the anxiety of your ordinary daily life, but you cannot thus become so peaceful that the right hemisphere of the brain and the higher evolutionary mechanisms of the body-mind as a whole are stimulated. To enter into your higher human destiny, you must be altogether “cured” in your deep psychic heart.

Basically, the human race is yet functioning within the realm of the threatened existence of beings who are eaten by other beings. We stressfully and chronically continue to animate the urge to reproduce, because we feel that everybody is in danger of being eaten! We feel, bodily, that everyone is prey to someone else. In fact, we continually witness the drama of hunter and prey all over the world. Listen to the daily news! People are being killed all over the Earth every day-simply murdered in weird personal and social or political conflicts. Such a dreadful circumstance is a natural part of the unevolved and lower state of Man. Everybody asks, “Why are we doing this?” But no broad social and political agency has come up with any reason to stop doing it! We could just as easily change our circumstances. Why dont we just change them then? It is because the animal still lives in our hormones, you see. Our bodily chemistry is yet stimulating us to live like the vital-elemental creature. Thus, we must have conflicts and opponents. We must eat and be devoured ourselves.

Certainly, we would like the quality of our existence to be different. But people in general are not yet moving toward anything significantly different. Thus, the would-be human world is yet a lower-adapted, subhuman world. Perhaps some people are more highly evolved-people who can live an apparently moral, ecstatic, or spiritually devoted life but they are not common. Most people are fixed in their adaptation to living under stress, and they do not know enough to create human and spiritual sanctuary for themselves.

To create a human sanctuary for higher adaptation and the ultimate transcendence of Man is a true urge, even the primal human urge. We inherently desire a human and natural environment in which we can live without the chronic production of stress chemistry. We want to be cured at the heart of our mind and thereby transformed bodily. And we know, deeply, psychically, that we cannot realize that transformation until we can create a culture in which people can live without degenerative stress. Thus, sanctuary, or spiritual community, is the motive in Man that contains the genetic secret of the next stage in human evolution.

We do not live a life of love and blissfulness and peace and harmony, in which the basic requirements of ordinary physical and social life are mutually granted. Yet, such is the state of evolution or adaptation that mankind must enjoy in order to experience spiritual and bodily bliss both significantly and continuously. And it will not be natural or common for people in general to exist in such a condition, until the human world is profoundly changed in a very practical way.

This consideration of chronic stress, or confinement to lower adaptation, is not simply a negative criticism of the way we tend to live; it is also, unfortunately, a description of the way most of us must live at the present time. We must be stressful, politically and socially, to protect the world and our own lives and families and communities from the profoundly chaotic madness of this subhuman global society. We are all struggling. We all have our eyes on what happens in the daily world, in the news. Thus, we cannot exist in anything like a blissful condition all the time-and, truly, except in the case of profoundly creative spiritual practice, we cannot enjoy the higher bliss of Man even some of the time.

Because we believe that we are not easily surviving, that we are indeed under constant mortal threat, we die early. We think it is extraordinary to live to the age of seventy or eighty. Our expected life span is better than it was even a few decades ago, but, even so, our lifetime is no time at all. And we live under stress the whole time! Very little tends to be accomplished in such a span. Therefore, we are always dropping the body and having to begin again. You must find the ways to overcome the stresses of lower adaptation, to transform the chemistry of the body-mind literally, so that you can live your daily life without personal, social, cultural, and chemical stress. Such a life is not possible for a group of people until they manage to create sanctuary with one another-a mutually protected, stable, basically unthreatened way of life.

“We are threatened!” is the message of the news. It reminds us of our chronic situation. The theatre of the news is all about people who are threatening one another, either with terrible violence or with just plain social nastiness, exploiting one another to death. We constantly reinforce loveless society in our associations with one another. We teach each other and we pass on to our children all the techniques for living as a stressful personality. We believe bodily, stressfully, that our life cannot, even should not, be long, that it is not good to be alive in the body, that we are only supposed to go elsewhere. We have all these ideas that are Life-negative in bodily terms, but the ultimate way of Enlightenment is to become Life-positive in bodily terms, which is just the reverse of what we are tending to do. Human beings are living way down at the bottom of their evolutionary potential. Nevertheless, if you can personally, and with a few others, grasp the higher realities of the mechanisms in which you live, then you can practice a Way of life that stimulates and develops those higher factors. You must have sanctuary, a relatively protected world, in which to do that, because, if you are going to rise above the civilization of the daily news, you must live in a way that is superior to the way that people in general tend to live.

Part II

DA FREE JOHN: How, then, will you come to that point of feeling totally without anxiety, without fear, without any of the ordinary mortal consciousness in the midst of your daily life? How will you transcend that fear so that you can truly develop the mystical and ultimate spiritual phenomena that I have described, and that are effects of the stimulation of the right side of the brain and the deep totality of the body-mind? You can have a taste of those phenomena through suspension of attention in the lower psycho-physical centers while you are still under stress. But you cannot generate such phenomena to the point that they become the principal forms of your consciousness until you overcome the lower evolutionary dimension of the body-mind, which is oriented to a life of physical distress and the struggle to survive bodily without higher consciousness. You cannot rest naturally in a higher realm of consciousness until you are able to manage the stresses of your daily life-including the stress of feeling that you are mortal, that perhaps when you die you are just plain dead. Until you enjoy a greater consciousness, you can never be certain about the matter of your death, you see.

When we first become involved in the possibility of spiritual life, we tend to want to “turn within,” because, physically, we are under stress. The first dimension of higher human realization is indeed mental, subtle, subjective, astral; it is realized to be “within” in a certain sense. But there is a higher or greater level of Realization, or true Enlightenment. Such is whole bodily Enlightenment, in which the mind is transcended and the body is realized to be simply Energy and Consciousness.

Can you feel that the body is only free energy right now? You can feel a tension, an urge to want to hold something in at your heart. But that is just your stress, you see, your reluctance to relax, your suppression of radiance, of love, of profuse happiness. Let that contraction go, and you will feel the whole body radiate. The body is energy. An aspect of it appears to be solid, but it is only a certain frequency of vibration. There exist many higher and many lower vibrations of the being. Beyond a certain point in this great spectrum of vibrations we lose the visibility of God, we lose track of the depth of Infinity, because our physical stress attunes us only to this limited vibration of apparent matter. But if we relax the stress, then we can feel that energy and the physical body are the same.

The question is, how do you learn to persist as energy all the time? You must develop the capacity to stimulate the blissful sensation that the right side of the brain feels in its conventional transcendence of the physical dimension of existence. Why should you not exist with such good feeling? Why should not that bliss be what human life is all about? You certainly should be in at least such a state, but you must learn how to adapt to it physically. The body must naturally produce the higher chemistry of blissful radiance.

The play of energy that appears in our daily world is a play on the threat of death. The ordinary games of energy force the body to retain a subhuman level of chemical awareness, the lower-adapting chemistry that is expressed in the left side of the brain. The right side of the brain remains, for the most part, negative, inert, not consciously active. Thus, until you learn how to transcend the stress of this world, you cannot seem to be blissful without using some artificial and degenerative means. Even yoga, mysticism, and all the rest of the methodology of esoteric self-effort are just as artificial to the body as drugs. They are simply ways of “tricking” or deliberately stimulating parts of the brain-mind. The only difference between taking a drug and performing yogic disciplines is that the blissful bodily and psychic state attained through yoga is realized through the native capacity of the body-mind itself. Thus, such bliss can eventually become natural and permanent, making all effort obsolete.

At present, however, you do not know how to function in the world and to be blissful at the same time. You are distracted from bliss by stressful attitudes and games of survival. Your creative being is asleep-not only mentally, but also physically. You can still feel yourself tightening up your chest and solar plexus, cant you? You have learned to live with that constriction. What do you think that constriction is doing? It is turning off the more subtle chemistry and turning on the gross chemistry that keeps you fastened in stressful survival games, such as chronic sex obsession. What do you think generates this intense sex drive? A hormonal signal in the body constantly urges you to reproduce, because human bodily life is so profoundly threatened. In other words, stress chemistry keeps us profoundly attached to self. That stress chemistry maintains the urge of the body to reproduce without fail, independent of our consciousness or intention, and that chemistry is being stimulated all the time.

Truly human sexuality is not a matter of tolerating the constant stress of sexual desiring and anxiety. Truly human sexuality is a matter of coming to the point bodily, not just sexually, but altogether, of not living under the Life-negative emotional stress of the erotic. Eroticism is an expression of threatened or Life-negative bodily chemistry. Erotic fascination stimulates our reproductive drive and thus our stress-reinforcing chemistry. Eroticism is related to the chronic and stressful urge to orgasm, which is an expression of bodily chemistry that is vitally important for producing children, but that does not enlighten you. Therefore, you must create another chemistry, higher or more subtle than the one that moves you to orgasm, in order for the body to become blissful. Only when the Life-Current is inverted, or polarized toe to crown, rather than crown to toe (as in the degenerative display of conventional orgasm), is the higher-adapting activity of the brain stimulated. Therefore, if you keep the chronic emotional and physical stress of sex in your life, then you are always working against the benign transformation that must ultimately be initiated in the higher brain. Sex and emotion must become free of stress, but very few in the modern world show the signs of living without emotional-sexual stress. Our entire lives tend to be expressions of such emotional-sexual stress-not only in the problems we have in our actual personal sexual intimacy, but in the stressfulness of being promiscuously and constantly driven by emotional reactivity and sexual obsession or mere sexual desire itself.

Besides sex, there is also the stressful chemistry of digestion and the entire obsessive ritual of food-the threat that you will not get enough to eat, that you will not be fed, that you will not be permitted to breathe, that you will be snuffed out. There is the stress of all the games of worldly life-of money, food, and sex. This stressful, threatened consciousness is the frenzy in which you always tend to function. You cannot afford to be blissful. That is the truth of it. That is what this evolutionary trigger in the brain is revealing to you under stress. You may feel good for a moment now and then, but you have not learned how to adapt to the point of enjoying the highest level of feeling in the body-mind and at the same time functioning effectively and sanely in ordinary life. There are too many things that you must take into account in your daily life. You must be under stress. You must protect yourself. Survival is your impulse. That is the reason you feel depressed, and that is the reason you are struggling for life. And you will continue struggling until you have conquered the game of the world at this ordinary level of money, food, and sex.

Presently, most people can enjoy a relatively blissful condition of experience only in extreme circumstances, such as when under the influence of an intoxicating stimulant or some profound outward success. But if you were literally dying at this moment, you would become a mystic so fast it would amaze you. That is what happens, you see. That is what death involves: the passing of attention upwards via the sensory currents into the right hemisphere of the brain, and then into the separable astral being, the subtle body of manifest energy. This mechanism is the source of all those experiences that people report when they have been clinically dead for a period of time and have then come back to physical consciousness and the downward-outward motor impulses of the left hemisphere of the brain. The extraordinary experiences reported in such cases are basically phenomena of the right hemisphere of the brain, where the sensory currents are collected upwardly and inwardly, permitting temporary identification with the astral or subtle dimension of the body-mind without yet requiring permanent dissociation from the physical body. Even so, once ordinary physical consciousness resumes, the suddenly awakened higher consciousness generally goes to sleep again, just as we forget to dream once we awaken to the gross physical world. Therefore, people who have “died” and then revived report this remarkable experience they once had-they usually talk about it for the rest of their lives-but they generally never have anything like the same experience again, until they actually die. At death, then, this profound change in the brain-mind occurs, and it throws the being into the astral body, or “star body.” However, yet possessing the accumulated tendencies toward the stressful experience of lower adaptation, the subtle individual is eventually reborn, reassociated with this vital-elemental plane of possibility. Thus, we continue to be reborn under stress until we evolve beyond this realm of experience.

The whole affair of birth and experience and death is primarily a matter of the evolutionary physiological transformation of the body. It is not principally an affair of the soul, or the inwardly conscious being, separate from the body. The soul is the body at this moment. When you lose this body, you will immediately attain another one of some kind. You always have a body, until you dissolve in God. The body, not the soul apart from the body, is the mechanism of evolution. The soul simply becomes more and more conscious and ecstatic via various kinds of embodiment. The soul is gradually transformed, eventually becoming Radiant to Infinity. The soul acquires all the faculties of God through ecstatic surrender, and it acquires a more and more Divine body. Such a Divine body is a body of Light, created from the transformation of the physical into Light, or Radiant Consciousness. That transformation is like an atomic explosion. It is not a matter of abandoning the physical, but of disintegrating the physical through the identification of the physical (or “matter”) with Energy and Consciousness. Such disintegration or dissolution of the body-mind in Transcendental Light and Consciousness is the secret of Enlightenment.

How are you going to become aligned to that ultimate process? In order to realize the degree of freedom from fear that it requires, you must conquer the little fear that is causing stress in your daily life. Like everyone else, you are afraid of death, and you are obsessed with food and sex and every kind of self-fulfillment. You are aligned only to the physical level of survival, so you do not have the bodily sensation and subtlety necessary for higher consciousness. You cannot become Divinely intoxicated, you cannot become Enlightened, until you can simply live a happy, ordinary, human life, free of these obsessions-the fear obsession, the food obsession, the sex obsession. Therefore, we must transcend our subhuman adaptation to food and sex as stressful mechanisms of survival. We must signal the body that it need not constantly gorge itself nor reproduce in thousands or in millions in order for the species to survive. The body must feel that it is alive with Divine Life itself, with basically no inherent problems, or obstructions to Life. That is why it is also important that we learn all about health and longevity. We must turn off the stress mechanisms that are threatened by death. We must overcome the fear of death.

All of this means that you must simply let death happen. Now you feel the threat of death in every moment. If you yield to it, you will find the body acting differently. At some time you will also literally and physically die, but you must die in every moment, as it is said in all the Scriptures. Death must happen in every moment, for me and for everyone. It is not that you must try to work on your fear of death. In that case you conceive yourself to be other than your fear. Do not work on the fear of death. Simply die. You are presently threatened. You have the fear already. You are already reacting to the possibility of death. Thus, you need only yield, even bodily, and relax beyond fear. That yielding in the body signals the physical being that it is unqualifiedly alive, and so the body will begin to function at a higher evolutionary level. To surrender in every moment, even to the degree of permitting death, is thus the highest of the traditional spiritual disciplines. It is self-transcendence, ecstatic love of the Living God, Divine Communion. We must constantly fall into Life without resistance to death. In such surrender we do not stressfully overcome fear or even wonder or think about death.

Part III

DA FREE JOHN: We must discover all the ways whereby we can minimize and eliminate the stress factors in the bodys chemistry. Our spiritual task must be understood in just these physiological terms. You must understand that the processes involved in the ultimate affair of esoteric religion and spirituality are fundamentally a physiological, biological, and evolutionary matter. True religious life is not devoted to all the cosmological and mythological nonsense through which popular religion is communicated in the world in general. Religion is a psycho-physical matter, fundamentally.

As a human being, you are always basically dealing with the structures of your own body-mind, your brain, your nervous system. Therefore, whatever you call religion should be examined in terms of what it does to your brain, your nervous system, your emotional state, and your body itself. Religion is a specific activity which, if it is actually practiced, transforms you into a benign personality. If you are not in this moment a benign personality, you are not practicing religion. You are only consoling yourself in some conventional fashion. If you are not becoming a more radiant, loving, benign, happy person, you are not practicing religion. If you are not bringing order to your life, if you are not becoming tranquil and more capable of existing in a higher, pleasurable state, then you are not practicing religion, because religion is about literally transforming the body-mind in the process of love-surrender to the Living Divine.

Therefore, we must judge our religion in psycho-physiological terms, in factual terms, real, actual, living, human terms. That is how you tell the difference between true teachers or prophets or practitioners and mere believers. What is their quality of existence? What do they do? If you see people practicing some religious path and they look happy, and they are healthy, and they are sane, and they are also intelligent, and their experience is real and also extraordinary, then naturally they are attractive and there is value in listening to them and talking to them. They must be doing something appropriate at some level if they are in such a good state. But if you see a group of crazy fanatical people, who call themselves true believers but who have no clarity, no humanity, no love, no ability to inspect and transcend themselves, then you can know that, whatever they are doing, they are not practicing anything more profound than mechanically feeling their own insides or mumbling the usual belief in the Myth of Jesus. They are performing a very modest physiological trick with their religion, whereas we must associate with people who are performing extraordinary physiological tricks with their religion!

Anatomists can now identify many of the key physiological factors in this affair of converting the degenerative pattern of stress chemistry into the regenerative, transformative, blissful chemistry of spiritual ecstasy. For instance, the thymus gland, in the upper center of the chest, is directly related to the subtle or astral heart, or what has traditionally been called the “heart chakra.” The thymus gland is a primary key to the whole bodys response to stress. If the thymus is weak and contracted, we feel a physical contraction in the heart and the solar plexus, even throughout the entire body, and we are afraid. The depressed thymus gland secretes a chemical message that triggers all the rest of the glands of the body into a Life-negative, contractive pattern. It triggers the total body to react to stress, to attempt to survive, to reproduce endlessly, to struggle for food, to continue to kill, and to animate the distress of all the rest of our vital and elemental motives.

This stress mechanism in the heart equips us with negative, reactive emotions. Conventionally, therefore, we associate the heart with emotion. Heart-stress triggers the limbic system-the structures in the brain concerned with emotion and visceral responses-and the other mechanisms of the brain core that relate to stress. Then the body itself receives all the signals that call for stressful reactions. Thus, under stress, we are always ready with anger for self-defense and attack, lust for reproduction, and cravings of all kinds, and we are continually subject to sorrow and fear and guilt and shame.

Since all of this is so, the thymus gland must become the generative center of a new and Life-positive response to the conditions of existence. You must get your heart to function differently. You must awaken to the fourth or psychically awakened stage of life, wherein the heart or deep psyche is naturally free of the reactive patterns that cause the stress-signalling biochemical secretions of the thymus gland and all the other parts of the endocrine system. You must realize the disposition of the heart that is in its native state, free of the chronic tendency toward reactive emotions. Then you can live in the Life-positive emotion of love, or natural, whole bodily radiance. You accomplish or realize this transformation in the fourth stage of life, so that you can then enter into the fifth stage of life equipped with a higher chemical advantage that stimulates bodily blissfulness, interior or astral forms of perception, psychic capabilities, extrasensory perception, and the like.

We must adapt and evolve in our yogic and mystical use of the right hemisphere of the brain, as well as in our verbal-conceptual use of the left hemisphere. But we must ultimately evolve beyond Man. Thus, we have to do more than evolve mystically, you see. We must realize the Energy itself of which we are now composed. We must release ourselves into the Condition of Energy. We must transform even the physical body into Light, through surrender, through relaxation into and beyond fear, into and beyond the threat of non-existence. We must be Enlightened bodily. The final stage of Enlightenment is the Translation of the body into pure Energy, or the Realization that the body is identical to Infinite Energy, fundamental Energy, the White Energy, the Transparent Energy, the Radiant Form that is identical to Consciousness itself, the Living God. We are destined to Realize and thus become Translated into that very Identity. We are more and more profoundly transformed in the midst of the process that leads toward Radiant Transfiguration and Translation, and in the ultimate moment of literal bodily Translation into Light we become perfectly identified with the Absolute Energy of the Room, the Domain, the Transcendental Being, the Divine Person in Whom the entire manifest universe is appearing.

What destiny lies beyond that? It is beyond comprehension. We realize so much that is extraordinary long before such Bodily Translation. Therefore, so much of what you may now imagine to be Enlightenment is really just a moment on the Way. The explosion that occurs when the physical body is Translated into Light is larger than the universe. No single individual may attain such Translation while alive without destroying the universe. Therefore, the attainment is secret, a matter of esoteric Realization in a state of Transfigured Bliss. The devotee in the final stage of Enlightenment is a Paradox in the Realm of Nature. He is exploded, and yet everything appears to continue.

QUESTIONER: Does this consideration relate to the present level of our understanding of nuclear energy-nuclear bombs and atomic fission?

DA FREE JOHN: Yes. The splitting of the atom is an expression of the law involved in Bodily Translation, or the Translation of matter into energy. The considerations of natural science have not yet understood the human implications of nuclear processes, and mankind has not yet adapted psychically to the level of understanding implicit in the practical theories of modern physics. We have not developed a real human, cultural and bodily sensitivity to the atom and its potential, and so it is frightening, you see. Truly, however, the explosion of the atom is our own future. We must split the atom in our own person. Man, in the form of every individual, must enter into the space of the atom, even as now we enter bodily into the outer space where Earth and all the stars are mysteriously moving.

If each of us could exist at a level of energy equivalent to that of an atomic explosion, we would be altogether different people! Now we are all short-lived, like five-watt light bulbs. The wind comes up and we collapse. We are wasting time in the unconscious recycling of ourselves from life to life, instead of deciding to opt for what is true of us and creatively determining a life in which we can live the Enlightened existence of both the mind and the body. Those who are involved in spiritual techniques of one or another kind are generally looking toward the enlightenment of the mind. The traditions of that search and its techniques are very old. But the most ancient spiritual tradition is the one that leads to Bodily Enlightenment, which is beyond ordinary psychic comprehension and beyond the next higher stage of psychic and mystical evolution. The possibilities we represent are immense.

The body is the last principle, and it is also the vehicle, of the entire process. All of the levels of Enlightenment are realized bodily in some fundamental sense. The bodily being is even now identical to Light, but it seems to be present in a state in which it is not yet awake and functioning as Light. It is still differentiated from Light in its apparent existence as “matter.” Thus, the urge in us, based on what we are fundamentally, or atomically, is to transcend the differentiation of the self, of the mind, and of the body from Light. This is Realized through direct and radical psycho-physical Translation of all that we seem to be into the Realm of Perfect Light. All limits must be transcended. We must die completely, but we must die into the Light, not away from Light into the unconsciousness of ordinary bodily death. We must give ourselves up to the Life-Principle from the deep psyche or heart.

The Condition of Dissolution in Light is a latent disposition in our own nervous system, in our own endocrine system. It is potential in every part of the body. All the cells are ultimately moving toward Illumination and Translation. We must cooperate with that native disposition of the body, of the cells. If the cells are put to another task, then we postpone true Enlightenment. Therefore, we must stop living under stress. We can feel a little yogic or mystical energy for a moment, but we cannot enjoy it continuously, we cannot be alive, until we awaken to the Divine Radiance of Life. We must create the conditions wherein to realize such Energy and Consciousness. Now we are wasting our potential in fretting, wasting our lives in stress. We are doing nothing but getting older. Even if we are staying essentially healthy, we are still just getting older. In other words, we are not evolving. But if we are ever to Realize the Ultimate Divine Enlightenment that is our true Destiny, then we must change our lives, evolve, and become capable of the Translation of the very body into the Light beyond all knowing.

 

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