The
Enlightenment of the Whole Body
by Bubba Free John (Adi Da Samraj)
Chapters 4 (continued)
pp. 160-179
Enlightenment
of the Whole Body Full Index of Articles
THE BODILY PARTS AND
ILLUSIONS OF NARCISSUS
The political, cultural, and
psychological boundaries between East and West are rapidly
disappearing. Man needs a new understanding and Vision of
Life that will clarify the dissonant persuasions of the
times and enable him to live creatively and wholly, free of
both personal and cultural conflicts.
Even the great cultural and
religious traditions of East and West are vast social
dramatizations of the born individual’s onesidedness, or his
failure to be conscious as the whole body in Truth. The root
of our bodily imbalanced and self-divided life is the
principle of Narcissus, the archetypal activity of
self-possession and the avoidance of relationship. All human
beings who have ever lived, Eastern or Western, spiritual or
worldly, are committed to forms of Narcissism – with the
exception of the rarest few.
The Way of the Whole Bodily
Being
The way of the left side is to move
to the Condition at Infinity via separation from all finite
relations, conditions, and functions.
The way of the right side is to move
into all possible experience via exploitation of all finite
relations, conditions, and functions.
The Way of the whole bodily being is
to move to the Condition at Infinity via the sacrifice of
feeling-attention in all finite relations, conditions, and
functions.
Moving beyond the Techniques
of Eastern and Western Man
A talk given by Bubba Free John to
his devotees
BUBBA: Everything changes.
Everything disappears. Human beings suffer this life of
changes, which is obviously mortal. Thus, everyone acquires
a desire to find something that does not change and that
does not disappear. Everyone wants to realize the state that
will relieve him of the burden of all of this change and
disappearance, this mortality and all its troubles. Such
desire is paradoxical, because people also like the things
that exist in this moment and that ultimately change and
disappear. So they have two great desires: One is to find an
absolute, changeless, permanent happiness, and the other is
to find pleasure and happiness in all the things that
change.
As a result, a curious technique has
arisen that combines both of these desires. It is the
technique of trying to find what is absolute, changeless,
and perfect happiness through and in the form of all the
things that change and disappear! This is exactly what
people do. (You are perhaps familiar with the application of
this technique to your ordinary daily lives and the gross
human affair!) And we imagine, mainly because we do not have
much experience in the subtle, mystical, magical realm of
things, that even though it seems almost certain that we
cannot find ultimate, absolute, changeless happiness in the
world, still we feel that maybe we can. We are not
absolutely certain that happiness in this life is not
possible. We hope or presume that there is an Alternative
Reality that will bring lasting peace, or freedom from death
and suffering. We imagine and are led to believe that even
though happiness is almost impossible to realize in life, we
will certainly find it if we turn within and away from the
illusions and unnecessary suffering of the world and ascend
and become involved in the so-called Spiritual Reality of
subtle and psychic things, or phenomena that are not
fleshly, not gross, not subject to mortality. Almost
everyone at the present time is familiar with this
presumption, which is the foundation of most traditional
paths of esoteric spirituality throughout the world. This
reaction to life is the principal motivation in anyone’s
case for taking up spiritual practice, which is
conventionally conceived as a search for Truth
within.
But what we may find within, by
introverting attention, is no more absolute, changeless, and
immortal than anything we may find without, by extroverting
our attention. All that we find, wherever we turn our
attention, is changing. It is already disappearing. Not only
that – what we find by turning within is not something
ultimately outside, above, or apart, something in the
infinity of the universes. It is our own brain! The ancient
technique of introverting attention in order to escape from
gross phenomena is imagined to be a way of association with
an Alternative Reality, something supercosmic, beyond one’s
body. But, in fact, it is a way of associating with one’s
own mind, principally the higher and commonly latent centers
and potential functions of one’s own brain, one’s own
nervous system, automaticities in parts of the brain with
which we are not commonly familiar.
Thus, in the inward-turning,
“Eastern” religious or spiritual persuasion, when we seek to
become yogis or mystics, we move attention into one or
another function of the familiar body-mind, the breath, the
internal life current, certain kinds of thoughts, speech
itself, vision perhaps, hearing, tasting, smelling,
archetypes, cultic objects, mystical words-objects that lead
us to concentrate on a single functional part of the body.
And by concentrating on that functional process of the
bodily being to the point of absorption, we may follow the
lines of the nervous system back to the brain. Then
relatively involuntary experiences arise shakings of the
body, dreamlike phenomena, involuntary emissions of the
brain, flashes of light, and sounds. We may enjoy these
experiences for a while; then they pass, and we can only
return to our conventional gross awareness.
For thousands of years people have
been doing just this, especially in the East, but also in
Western esoteric cults. It is what yogis do. The
introversion of attention via the ordinary functions of the
bodily being is taken up as a solution to the dilemma, fear,
and mortality of our gross embodiment. And this procedure
does produce extraordinary effects, which are then often
proclaimed as transcendental truths. For instance, if you
focus on the process of sight, you will be led through the
structures of the brain to the terminal in the upper rear of
the head from which sight originates. At that point you will
have stopped seeing. You will also have withdrawn attention
from the currents of the body and basically you will be
aware of nothing whatsoever. And yet somehow you will be
conscious, because you are still embodied, still alive, yet
without any objects of awareness. You will feel the “great
unity.” You will say to yourself, “This is God!” When you
finally are successful at this internal strategy, this is
what happens. It is called “nirvikalpa samadhi, ” or trance
absorption without conception of form. Before you achieve
this final success, you experience trance absorptions that
include spurious emissions of the brain in the form of
flashes and images. That state is called “savikalpa
samadhi,” or trance absorption via mental forms.
You cannot escape this body-mind by
introverting attention. The ancient dogma, however, is that
you can, and it is fitted to the naive presumption that is
stated in the ancient formula “as above so below; as below
so above.” It is presumed that, if you can enter into more
subtle awareness of your own body, the subtle dimensions
within correspond to the subtle dimensions of the cosmos.
This is a purely naive presumption. It is a magical
presumption. It is not true in experience. Fundamentally,
what we experience by inverting ourselves upon the nervous
system are all the potentials of our own body-mind that
belong to the nervous system and the brain. And, yes, we do
see something about the subtler physics of things, but we do
not see anything directly, exclusive of the medium of our
own psycho-physical selves. There is no escape in such
absorption, nor any freedom. We are still looking at a part
of our own form. Human beings are not commonly familiar with
the full “anatomy” of the whole body, or bodily being, which
includes both gross and subtle centers and possibilities as
manifest extensions of the heart, or the prior and conscious
Nature and Condition of the body-mind. What is within and
above may be mysterious and exalted relative to our
ordinary, gross, waking consciousness, but it is not other
than our own form. Going within is ultimately just as
fruitless a technique for finding what is Absolute,
Unqualified, Perfect, and Unchanging as the extroverted
tendencies, the interests and desiring of daily life in
which ordinary people are involved.
The traditional process of
introversion is nihilistic, ultimately. It reduces the world
and manifold existence to nothingness. And in the process of
extroversion there is an ultimately eternalistic search. The
extroverted being, the typical “Western” man, exploits all
of the patterns of the gross, earthly realm. (The game of
extroversion is the characteristic cultural strategy of the
West, but it is of course represented in Eastern cultures
and Eastern individuals as well.) The extroverted
personality wants to attain objective things that are
desirable, and he wants them to remain his forever. He wants
to be fulfilled on the basis of the exploitation of gross
functions themselves (body, emotions, physical energy, the
thinking mind). He wants vital or earthly fulfillment to be
absolute fulfillment. He wants to create utopia, physical
immortality, unchanging relationships. Even his religious
impulse is toward a Perfect and Changeless World, either in
this life or after death (in contrast with the introverted
path, which ultimately leads to the annihilation of the
world and the manifest self). But, you see, the world never
does come to an end. It never does stop changing. Never.
Everything is always changing, and so the strategy of
extroversion is futile. It is not that we must worship
disappearance. Things also continue, and they constantly
reappear. There is an eternal cycle of appearance and
continuance and change and disappearance. But all that has
appeared or can appear is also changing and disappearing.
Our happiness must be based on this recognition.
Thus, the urge to find what is
changeless in the form of this endlessly changing pattern
within and without is frustrated at last. And this is the
truly spiritual discovery. This discovery is the moment of
Transcendental Awakening. It is the way into the life of
Truth. When there is the realization that Happiness, Truth,
God, Reality, or Eternal Blissfulness cannot be found on the
basis of the exploitation of any kind of experience,
internal and introverted, or external and extroverted – when
there is that discovery, then we have begun the true
inspection of existence. Not a single experience, within or
without, is hopeful, promising, or ultimately
liberating.
Paradoxically, it is in the moment
of perfect frustration of the search for Happiness that
there is awakening to the Principle that is Happiness. This
moment corresponds to the understanding that neither the
introversion nor the extroversion of attention, neither
internal nor external experience, ever realizes what is
Transcendental Happiness, or Perfect Enjoyment, but only
discovers temporary modifications and permutations of one’s
own mortal psychophysical condition. The internal
exploitation of life is a gesture toward everything that we
consider to be mind, leading toward the annihilation of
ordinary awareness. And the external, or extroverted,
exploitation of experience is a gesture toward everything we
call ordinary life, the “real world,” the body and its
pattern of relations. It is a gesture toward a perfect,
eternal body, an eternal world, eternal relationships. But
neither of these strategies is a gesture toward Truth. Both
are only reactions to life, tormented and fruitless searches
for true happiness and freedom.
The principal criticism offered in
this Teaching or Way of Divine Ignorance is the criticism of
the quality of life as Narcissus, the avoidance of
relationship, the self-possessed, self-oriented,
selfmeditative reaction to existence. In its introverted
form, this reaction becomes all the desires and desperate
striving for a glamorous inward life. In its ordinary or
common extroverted form it is simply the anti-relational
tendency of consciousness. The action and realization of
existence as Narcissus characterizes everyone, Eastern and
Western. People need not necessarily have an interest in a
deep inner life. Even the most exaggerated extroverted
activities of Westerners are still representations of this
same self-meditative disposition, the avoidance of
relationship.
Undoing this contraction, this
separation in the midst of Infinity, is what the Way of
Divine Ignorance is all about. And the initial aspects of
the process involve the transformation of your introverted
and extroverted Narcissistic life into a relational life, a
life of literal love. The core of the process is the
relationship to the Spiritual Master. The essential
discipline of religious and spiritual life is relationship,
principally in the ordinary life of service to others and in
the relationship to the Spiritual Master. The spiritual
process is relationship itself, the disposition of Radiance,
or love, not any form of extroversion or introversion of
attention. It cannot be described in terms of what you do to
yourself or your changes of state or belief. This relational
process involves, ultimately, the dissolution of every
vestige of the self-possessed contraction from Infinite or
All-Pervading Existence. It is a matter of breaking through
this self-possessed, Narcissistic movement of the being. The
characteristic dramatization of this movement differs from
person to person, culture to culture, and East to West, but
in all cases it is essentially the same recoil. And to break
it down, to penetrate it, to become a sacrifice to Infinity,
is profoundly difficult.
The Way of Truth, the Way of Real
Life, is not the satisfaction of internal or external
desires – not the fulfillment of this structure, high or low,
inside or outside – but it is the sacrifice of all of it,
through love, or the perfect yielding of all feeling and
attention to Infinity under all conditions, to and through
all relations, via every part or function of the whole
body-mind. The Way of Truth is neither the exploitation of
the external life, nor the exploitation of the internal
life, but the perfect sacrifice, or surrender, of one’s
independent body-mind, this illusion of independence that we
are struggling to glamorize and make survive. This Way is a
unique process, not like strategic introversion or strategic
extroversion. It is not self-manipulative. It is in fact the
sacrifice of self, of the whole body-mind. It is love in the
most literal and radical terms.
You become that upon which you
chronically or most essentially meditate. As long as you
persist in the meditation of your parts, you continue to
appear in those forms. When the gesture of existence becomes
sacrifice, the intuitive sacrifice or yielding of all
experiential conditions, then you are Glorified,
Transformed. In this Way, or Process, all of the functions
of the body-mind become ordinary. They no longer bear the
burden of Infinity. One can live an ordinary life without
inherent frustration or recoil. One can engage with humor in
the play of human relationships. It is only in the
traditional solution, the introverted path of life, that one
becomes strategically ascetic, trying to cut off the grosser
or physical part and entering into the subtler or mental and
supermental part.
But in the disposition of our Way,
the Way of Truth, there is no strategic orientation or
disorientation in relation to any of the parts of the bodily
being. There is, rather, a right relationship to every part
and function of the bodily being. We must have a right
relationship not only to things toward which we might
negatively orient ourselves by tendency, but also to those
things toward which we might be positively oriented. Such a
right relationship is essentially sacrificial in nature,
Radiant, founded in the Intuition of the Condition that is
Truth, rather than in self-possession. It is a relationship
of right and Lawful use, not of deluding and degenerative
use. Those who practice this Way assume the position of “no
prior restraint” toward all aspects of the bodily being,
including everything above and below, including sexuality
and the higher, intuitive centers of the brain, as well as
food and the verbal aspects of the brain. We have nothing
but a positive orientation to the whole body and all its
functions-but they must be lived in Truth.
In the course of this Way of Divine
Ignorance, there occurs the awakening of every center and
part of the bodily being, and the natural integration of
every center into the unified life of Truth. There is an
awakening, gradually, in due course, of a right relationship
to every function of the bodily being. One continues to live
an ordinary life, but one is obliged to transform it, to
make it an expression of this Law of sacrifice rather than
an expression of the need to be perfectly fulfilled by
something that is limited, changing, ultimately frustrating.
Therefore, to enter as total sacrifice, or love, into both
our ordinary human relations and the higher or
transcendental functions of life is the true form of
‘`asceticism,” or the process of transcendence. There are
dimensions of this practice in which the individual is
turned upon the traditional yogic, internal, or subtle
objects, but these things are not made an end in themselves.
They are a moment in the lesson whereby we come to make this
Sacrifice perfectly.
Thus, there is a functional
progress, via the stages of this practice, in the literal
sacrifice of the whole body-“I,” or the bodymind. It is a
progress that becomes more and more esoteric, or beyond
conventional understanding, and that, over time, includes
more and more of the subtler aspects, functions, and centers
of the body-mind. This sacrifice is not a kind of suicide,
you see. Suicide is a destructive gesture toward oneself.
There is no self-destructive motive in this sacrifice. It is
the yielding of the self through love, through functional
relaxation of the knot, the contraction of consciousness,
the avoidance of relationship. The final and ultimate stage
of this Way is a process in which even the cells of the
brain, even the nervous system, even the fleshy body, even
the whole world and all its relations are liberated into
their prior Condition. The realm of manifestation is
relieved of its solidity. It has become transparent, and it
ultimately dissolves.
So it is by the sacrifice of the
whole affair of this body-mind through perfect or radical
Intuition, Divine Communion, or sacrifice in the truest
sense, that we are literally translated into the Bliss or
Radiance that is Eternal and that Pervades all existence.
That Reality is not at the root of the nervous system nor at
the end of the world in time. It is Present. When we Realize
It, we are Dissolved in It. Ultimately, we vanish-not only
out of present sight, as in death, but out of the entire
space-time cycle of action and reaction, or illusion and
change. The Perfect Devotee not only Realizes the Inherent
Bliss of Existence, but he is Liberated out of the scheme of
souls in manifestation and Translated into the Scheme of
souls in God, beyond the World of Man.
Narcissus is the fundamental
archetype of all human suffering and illusion-but he takes
many forms, depending upon the unique qualities of the
individual, and also upon the cultural or social tendencies
of men in any time and place. In earlier ages the
vitalphysical body was the focus or seat of man’s waking
sense of identity. Now that locus is the thinking mind or
brain. Thus, Bubba Free John addresses our identification of
“I” with the thinking mind and our sense that “I” is in the
head and brain, within or even separate from the physical
body.
The key to our Awakening to the true
Condition of “I” is the integration and sacrifice of the
total psycho physical body in the heartfelt “hearing ” of
the argument of Truth and “seeing ” of the Spiritual Master,
who represents the ultimate evolutionary and Transcendental
Realization of Man. The Spiritual Master illumines not only
the conflict between the thinking mind and the lower, vital
body and desires, but also the lower mind’s suppression of
the higher psychic and intuitive faculties of the brain.
Thus, he heals the devotee of the torment of bodily
self-division, and he draws him into the clarity and
ecstatic wisdom of Radiant Ignorance, which transcends every
kind of Narcissism.
The Bodily House of
Narcissus
The true psycho-physical “root” or
“center” of the human body-mind is the entire body-mind
itself, rather than some center within the body-mind. Thus,
the reactive contraction that separates the body-mind from
the All-Pervading Life is the reactive contraction of the
entire body-mind, which curls upon itself in every part,
toward self-possession and problematic commitment to the
survival and fulfillment of the independent -U’
However, the characteristic signs of
that self-defining reaction to Life in the case of the usual
individual may be read in a specific organ and function
complex. Thus, the usual individual displays chronic
psycho-physical tension at the perineum, anus, genitals,
navel, solar plexus, heart, lungs, throat, mouth, face,
spinal line, and brain.
The bodily “base” or “floor,” which
includes the anus, perineum, and sex organs, is the common
functional “lock” that separates the individual or whole
body from the foundation that is Life. Likewise, the bodily
“ceiling,” which tends to be created by reactive “locks” or
chronic tensions at the mouth and the visual, verbal, and
speech centers of the brain, creates a continuous and
unpassable barrier to aspiration and intelligence. All the
rest of the body-mind composes the “four walls” of
self-enclosure.
Only when the “door” or “window” of
the heart awakens the whole and entire body-mind in the
intuition and spontaneous love of Life, or the Divine
Ignorance-Radiance, does this house and hedge of Narcissus
dissolve in the ecstatic Regeneration of Happiness.
The chronic disturbances of Man
separate us from our Real Condition of Divine Illumination,
Freedom, and Bliss. These disturbances relate to the three
primary functional dimensions of the human individual-that
is, the physical, the emotional, and the mental.
The chronic disturbances of the
physical being are reactive contractions, or recoil from
Life, in the form of disease and general ill health, pain,
toxemia, enervation, and obsessive desire for the
consolations of food, sex, company, and the objective goods
of human existence.
The chronic disturbances of the
emotional being are reactive contractions, or recoil from
Love, in the form of fear, shame, sorrow, guilt, anger,
jealousy, and so forth.
The chronic disturbances of the
mental being are reactive contractions, or recoil from
Faith, recoil from Absorption in the Absolute Personality of
God, recoil into doubt, deluded thinking,obsessive
mentalizing, and all the consolations of knowledge in
relation to experience.
Therefore, the Way of Divine
Ignorance, which is the Way of Eternal Fullness of Life,
Love, and Faith, is a matter of responsibility for all of
the chronic disturbances of Man, so that there may not be
the slightest difference between us and the Absolute Divine
Personality and Condition that is Reality and Truth.
Narcissus Is the Thinking
Mind
The usual man is trapped in a
loveless orgy of knowing what is. He must be liberated into
the moral and spiritual ecstasy of irreducible Ignorance and
Love.
The usual man is self-possessed and
self-divided. The two halves of his brain and of his body as
a whole are in conflict, even out of communication with one
another, like a divorced couple. Thus, his sense or
conception of life is one of inherent dilemma, as if the
universe were frustrated to the degree that it had become a
mortal self, and it fears to fall in love again.
The usual man conceives of human
existence as a problem, or a primal and irreducible dilemma,
and he seeks solutions by exploiting his own separate parts,
or all his capacities for experience. He is reactive, and
subjectively oriented. Yet, he is motivated toward
experience and repetition of experience in the functional
and outward realms with which he is already
familiar.
The usual man is in fear of the loss
or death of self, of defined body and conceptual mind. He is
bound to the solutions of Narcissus, or the habits of
self-possession, founded on self-division. Narcissus is
himself the waking state, the conscious or verbal mind. The
usual man is bound to this state of consciousness and
defends it with all sorts of rational nonsense. He feels
threatened by the nonrational dimensions below and above the
verbal mind, below and above the conceptual or knowing mind
that defends him against both the unknown and the
unknowable. He recoils from the subconscious and the
unconscious, the wordless realms of feeling and energy. And
he remains bound to his life of self-defense against the
powers outside verbal consciousness-so that he remains
unaware of the realms of superconsciousness and intuitive
ecstasy above and beyond the verbal mind and the knowing
self.
The usual man seeks knowledge,
solutions, and power-to control what is beyond knowledge and
beyond the waking or verbal states of mind. He is often
mean, righteous, rational, blithe, and apparently fearless.
He is always weak in love, in sacrifice, in sensual
sensitivity, and in understanding of the essentially
selfless or undefinable nature of the body-mind
itself.
If we can discriminate between our
mechanical and our truly ecstatic ways, if we can awaken
from our self-divided mental and bodily states, if we can be
shaken out of the subjective and selfdefining recoil from
the unknown and our own vulnerability, then we can be the
ecstasy of self-sacrifice and “see” the Vision of Eternal
Life. If we can be awakened from the inherent sleep of the
verbal mind, if we can identify with the formless fire below
the brows, if we can relax the tension at the brows and so
release the brain to the truly awakened mind above and
beyond thought, then we can feel we are not self or limits
but a living process moved to ecstasy beyond the
body-mind.
The usual, contracted, verbal man is
always asking questions, trying to find a way to be
comfortable in the chair of the body. His reveries are all
so correct, punctuated with symbols that gesture at great
matters. But he cannot rise or fall. He is frozen in the
dream of certainties, the mysticism of a rationality that
excludes what is above and below the thinking
mind.
The usual man seeks control by all
means, since he fears that he and even existence itself are
out of control. He makes sublime sighs whenever he sees
something orderly. But he does not understand that all order
is an arbitrary design, made of repetitions of like
things.
Order is Truth to Narcissus. He dies
for the sake of order. He dies because of order. He is
self-possessed, possessed of the duplication or repetition
of everything he wants to continue to be. He repeats
himself, literally. He is fixed upon himself, the symbol of
certainty. At last, unable to yield to what is more than
self, below thought, above thought, outside the thinker, he
contracts upon himself, imploded on the instant of
thinking.
There must be awakening to the
Condition in which we are appearing, and which always
exceeds our situation. We are born to ecstasy, or release of
belief in the independence of consciousness and existence.
We are obliged to awaken beyond our fearful defenses, the
motives and solutions of Narcissus. No matter what arises,
and no matter how familiar we become with any factor of
experience, we never know what even a single thing is. The
whole body-mind is the mind, and it is not conception,
knowledge, or selfpreserving certainty. It is Ignorance, the
ecstasy of participation in the centerless Consciousness and
limitless Radiance of the Real World.
The
Truth of the Whole Bodily Being
The Truth of the whole bodily being
is not to be found by appeal to the separate dispositions of
either the right hemisphere of the brain or the left
hemisphere of the brain, the right half of the body or the
left half of the body, the extroverting or the introverting
tendencies. Truth, or Reality, is not itself contained in
either the vital or the mental realms of the bodily being.
Rather, the Truth of the whole bodily being, or body-mind,
is intuited in the unified or balanced consciousness, in
which all the parts are in an harmonious equalization and
relaxed beyond their objects into the radical (rather than
extended or reductive) intuition of the Condition or prior
Intensity of all experience.
Therefore, the Truth is not
specifically within, nor without. No differentiated
experience or concept, high or low, contains It or is It.
Truth is intuited whole bodily, that is, through sacrifice
or yielding of the entire body-mind to the intuition of the
Real Condition. Such Truth is not a concept, a finite
objective experience, or anything past or future. It is the
prior or absolute Intensity that is the literal or Real
Condition of all arising phenomena. To abide in the
intuition of that Condition is to abide in or as that
Condition itself. And to abide in that Condition is to be
free of the limiting and deluding and motivating force of
all conditions, high and low, while at the same time to be
humorously and compassionately and creatively related to
whatever arises moment to moment.
The
Argument of the Whole Bodily Being
The argument of the right side, the
Occidental religious impulse, is directed toward the man,
the living human being, and urges him (or her) toward a
moral enlivening of his relations to others, to the world,
and to his own mysterious Source.
The argument of the left side, the
Oriental religious impulse, is directed toward the
consciousness in Man that precedes all his faculties and
relations, and the argument urges toward inwardness and
ascent toward transcendence and reductive Realization of
prior undifferentiated Oneness.
The right-sided view tends toward
multiplicity, dualism, exploitation of things in themselves,
and irreducible engagement in the mechanics of apparent
experience. It also promotes a mystical (mysterious)
consciousness in relation to events.
The left-sided view tends toward
singleness, monism, and separation from things and relations
and the mechanics of apparent experience, at least at the
gross level of the body-mind. It promotes a spiritual
(transcendental) consciousness in relation to
events.
The argument of the whole bodily
being, the impulse in Reality or Truth, is not a synthesis
of the left and right, East and West, but a radical impulse
that is free of the independent limitations of each side. It
is free of the illusions of things and relations in
themselves, as well as the inward faculties and the illusion
of independence of any form, condition, or Condition. It
stands Present in the form of the unqualified intuition of
the Condition of the whole bodily being, and thus rests in
transcendental Awareness. However, it is natively committed
to non-independence, or freedom from recoil and inwardness
relative to the Process wherein all conditions are arising.
This does not mean, however, that it is committed to
conditions in themselves. Rather, it participates or is a
Sacrifice in the Process of all arising. Thus, it abides in
Radiance or Bliss even as the world and all relations come
and go. It is moral and mystical, transcendental and
spiritual in the most perfect sense.
Awakening
from the Word
The conventional culture of
contemporary Man is primarily a culture of the verbal mind
and the discrete or discursive languages of the left side of
the average or common brain model. Thus, it is a culture
that tends to be dominated by verbal and other discursively
symbolic language systems (such as the potent visualism of
television and movie theatre, which make inverted use of
visual or spatial and right-brained phenomena in order to
serve the purposes of the verbal or discursive mind). The
contemporary individual is propagandized constantly by
exclusively left-brained appeals, powerful verbal
influences, promises of ultimate egoic glamorization and
fulfillment, and the parentlike authority of analytical
“knowledge.” Our experience and our understanding are
dominated and determined by these means-so much so that the
media of discursive mental culture, such as television, and
all other officially reported knowledge, are more
fundamental to us than what we experience in our living
relationships and our intuition of the ultimate Reality. The
“word” has finally become our Parent, and we are being eaten
alive.
The exoteric or common order of
verbal and left-brained culture is the daily “TV world” of
verbal conventions and commonly communicated “knowledge” or
“news.” But there is an esotericism or esoteric cultural
core that is tending more and more to dominate the lives of
individuals. The political and common social world of our
too-spoken lives is the exoteric level of the dominating
influence in our common culture. But the esoteric order that
is the inevitable extension of our verbal or left-brained
world is tending more and more to dominate us, whether
openly or more or less indirectly, like a secret and high
priesthood. And, like all high priesthood’s, the
Super-Church of our time is in league with the State, and
ultimately seeks to control the State.
The scientific, rationalist
intellectual, and technological core-culture of our social
order is the secret esoteric “Mother Church” of the
left-brained congregation of ordinary people. It is through
the growing and pervasive influence of this exclusively
left-brained esoteric or most highly developed core of our
verbal culture that the holistic, intuitive, psychic, or
right-brained communion with the conditions and the Reality
of our world is being gradually eliminated as a possibility.
In ancient times, the exoteric and esoteric influences that
dominated the daily culture were predominantly right-brained
and hallucinatory, and this exclusivity produced its own
symptoms of imbalance. But in a fully evolved human culture,
the right and the left, or the psychic-holistic and the
mental-analytical, aspects of the human potential must be
mutually integrated and balanced, and then the whole and
entire body-mind must be submitted to the All-Pervading Life
and Divinity that animates us. If human societies cannot
evolve into whole brain and whole body levels of adaptation,
then the human being and the human world will inevitably be
reduced to a mechanical and self-possessed destiny that is
mortal, loveless, and absurd.
It is not that the rigorous and
intelligent use of the verbal or discursive mind is not
necessary. It is indeed culturally necessary. And both
scientific and technological advances can do much to improve
even the political and economic as well as intellectual
estate of mankind. But the exclusivity of that influence and
its pervasive philosophical disposition toward the
contracted, analytical, and independent or analyzed-self
orientation are a negative extension of the egoic or
exclusive and self-possessed disposition of the individual
in his fear. From that exclusive viewpoint, the pattern of
totality may be analyzed, but the viewpoint itself cannot be
sacrificed into the pattern, nor can the ultimate and
All-Pervading Reality or Condition of the whole and of every
part become the dominant factor in the daily life of the
individual or the society. Scientism and the left-brained
predisposition can produce an age of analytical knowledge
but not an age of faith (in the highest sense). Therefore,
we must be culturally and personally awakened to the Mind
and Intuition that is obvious only to the whole brain and
the whole body-mind, or else the Parental Word will slay the
Radiant Children of our Mystery.
The Enlightenment
of the Whole Body – Full Index of Articles
