To Exercise the Heart-Principle Is the Fundamental Test
AVATARA ADI DA: As I suggested earlier, this conversation so far must be bringing up things in you about emotional-sexual matters, or whatever else. What about it? Bring things up to Me, and maybe I’ll cover some more of the things we discussed in these eleven days.
MICHAEL: Beloved, one thing that You Instructed us again during this past eleven days is that sexual energy in and of itself is nonproblematic. It’s a natural occurrence in the body, and it’s just like any other energy in the body. It’s that we go to mind with it, and that’s where we divert our attention from You. And that was very useful, again. Somehow it made more sense to me this time, because I could feel just the movement of mind itself as contraction, no matter what stimulated it—sexual energy or whatever. And it seemed like what was the context for so much of our sexual complication was just mind, and understanding that, dealing with it there as simply contraction of mind.
AVATARA ADI DA: Even what you all call “sexual energy”, you see, is about five watts. Yes, I used the simile of taking the force of Niagara Falls and running it through a garden hose and tying some knots in it, you see. There’s just a trickle there, because you have a great deal of complication. But in terms of being in the unguarded position of experiencing sexual energy, you have almost no experience of that at all, and therefore no real sexual awareness, no profound sexual awareness. Therefore, in the general case, you’re not going to do any profound Yoga relative to sexuality. Hm? You will deal with emotional-sexual matters to the degree you allow yourself to experience it, which is relatively minimal, compared to what it is ultimately. And it’s basically a process of transcending it, rather than perfect
ing it or bringing it to some point of ultimate manifestation, you see.
MICHAEL: Well, that was what was clear. It’s just like the energy of fear or anger or any energy. You’ve Instructed us to feel it and feel through it to You, and not suppress it, not try to avoid it, but recognize it just as one of the things that’s going to arise.
EILEEN: One of the exercises You had us do one evening was just to experience perceptual awareness.
AVATARA ADI DA: Mm-hm.
EILEEN: And You really required each of us to drop out of mind into feeling, into just the feeling. And then when you do that, you feel, you do get in touch with sexual awareness. And it was a really useful “consideration” to see how immediately you want to go to mind with it, rather than stay in the perceptual awareness of it. And what it served in us in this matter of being celibate renunciates, that staying in the perceptual awareness, you do feel sexual awareness, but if it just stays in the feeling, you know, it’s life, it’s energy, it’s not about being a celibate. Therefore, you suppress this or you become an ascetical idealist. But if it’s allowed just to be a feeling-dimension of being, rather than immediately going to mind and associating it with mind when all kinds of sexual objects or aberrations occur, that exercise of just feeling, to be completely open bodily in the whole matter of reception of Your Transmission, is essential in the practice of celibate renunciation. A person can’t cut off or deny any part of the being.
AVATARA ADI DA: In this perceptual disposition, then, the fundamental discipline is “conductivity”. You register sexual awareness, sexual sensation, sexual energy because it’s knotted there, become confined there by various kinds of adaptation. You don’t introduce mind (all your wandering about it, complications, memories, and so on), but are simply, fully, perceptually aware of the body, practicing the “conscious process” of this devotion. Then relative to the sensation or energy itself, you practice the discipline of “conductivity”. And by such exercises, you see, you move the energy, you release the knots, you circulate the energy. And then it becomes, so to speak, universal to the body-mind. And it’s not locked in any function. And therefore it’s not locked in sexuality, or sexual awareness itself.
And what is the purpose of all of this, you see? Not merely that experience. It’s simply an aspect of the discipline that is God-Realizing, that is , Liberating, that is ego-transcending. . Therefore, the purpose of it is this
Divine Communion Itself, allowed to mature stage by stage, to the point of , Ultimate Realization. For there to be such Ultimate Realization, however, there must be the liberation of energy and attention.
ABEL SLATER: Beloved, what was most remarkable about that exercise that You Guided us through was that You made it very clear that our involvement with sexuality is mostly our involvement with mind.
AVATARA ADI DA: Mm-hm.
ABEL: That it’s a self-involved experience. And most of our promiscuity and projections towards others and whatever, it’s just all of this involvement with egoic self and doesn’t really have anything to do with sexual force altogether.
AVATARA ADI DA: Mm-hm.
ABEL: That was something that was very profound, very revealing.
AVATARA ADI DA: So celibate renunciation in the Way of the Heart is not about ascetical idealism or suppression of sexuality. It’s a commitment to a certain kind of practice which steps aside from “bonding” games and so on, of an emotional-sexual kind. Various disciplines are assumed, but it’s not an anti-sexual practice, or what could be called “ascetical idealism”, which views sexual energy, sexual feeling as itself an evil of some kind to be eliminated. Hm? So the participatory, free disposition is associated with celibate renunciation as every other practice of the Way of the Heart. It’s not anti-sexual. These sensations, forms of awareness, and so forth are not suppressed and avoided. There is full awareness of sexual energy, and a profound selftranscending practice is associated with it.
ABEL: But You helped us to really see that for celibate renunciates sexual energy could be present, but there was no necessity whatsoever to have any kind of problem orientation toward it. It was just the life-force. . . .
AVATARA ADI DA: Mm-hm.
ABEL: . . . manifesting. And that could be experienced and . . .
AVATARA ADI DA: But to be aware of it as such, you have to present yourself in this disposition of equanimity. Maintain the “conscious process”, this devotion, principally, but also the various aspects of your discipline so that you maintain it, even perceptual equanimity. So, as sexual feeling arises, you don’t then go to mind—mind is supposed to be surrendered in this devotion, you see—you don’t go to mind and want stress-release through orgasm, you don’t go to mind and want coupling with who-knows-who. Instead, you just are aware of the sensation itself. You make this submission in your devotion. You practice “conductivity” of the energy itself, you circulate it, you see. You constantly maintain the disposition of equanimity. That’s the discipline, then.
But as soon as you are diverted from Me, become full of mind about any desire or disposition or tendency, then you start talking about it, thinking about it, dwelling on it, you see, and forget to practice Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga. And then you think you have some problem you’ve got to bring up in your next sadhana group, you see, and bother the hell out of everybody about it, and require lots of attention on yourself, even weeks and months on end, you see. And all it was about anyway was the relinquishment of the practice of Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga.
DEVOTEES: Right!
AVATARA ADI DA: Really, a lot of years of this with you all, you see, I haven’t seen anybody get transformed greatly by any understanding of anything.
DEVOTEES: It’s true!
AVATARA ADI DA: Go through a long process of looking at your tendencies and your complications, your problems, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, you know. And “Oh, yes, yes, I understand that.” Everybody says, “Blah-blah.” And you have My Word, I have My Blah-Blah in it—Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. And finally it becomes summary: “Yes, I know that blah-blah.” And it still doesn’t change a damn thing.
It’s not that no such exercise in understanding is useful at all, but it is basically fruitless, apart from the constant exercise of this devotion.
DEVOTEES: Yes. Da! Thank You, Beloved.
AVATARA ADI DA: If you don’t forget to practice this devotion, then such “considerations” are not grandly problematic. And a little bit of understanding here and there—yes, that’s clarifying. The only understanding that is most clarifying is most fundamental self-understanding, which is simply heart-conversion.
Anything else about emotional-sexual business?
STEPHEN: I’ve been considering what you said about, you know, the small child who makes all these naive assumptions. And I was “considering” my own case, how these assumptions that I made and that I’ve based my whole life on are not really founded on anything that’s true. They’re completely wrong. And there’s no basis for them.
AVATARA ADI DA: Your mother probably refused to have sex with you right? [Uproarious laughter.] In most cases it’s so. I presume it was probably true in your case. Is that it?
STEPHEN: That’s right, yes.
AVATARA ADI DA: But you took that to be rejection. Where it has nothing to do with rejection. It was about her love of you as her son, you see, and not there to complicate you in any way. It was also about her love, her sexuality, whatever, however it may have been, with her husband, your father. It had nothing to do with rejection of you. But you necessarily, emotionally, psychologically, misinterpreted it as being rejection of you, Because you were experiencing naive early-life sexual self-awareness, male awareness, gender awareness, and weren’t in a position to act on it. But in this view of the parent situation, your first knowledge of sexual self-awareness was rejection, what you interpreted to be rejection. And that’s the basic subject anybody ever brings up when they’re dealing with their emotional-sexual this and that. It’s all about this feeling of being betrayed, being rejected, “maybe I’ll be rejected, maybe I won’t, maybe I am”. All this wondering about being rejected. It’s the fundamental subject matter of everybody’s emotional-sexual life.
And it’s not necessarily about what you’re doing in your actual intimacy, if it exists, at the moment, you see. It’s not so much about that any way. It’s primarily about your naive assumptions from your childhood, where you interpreted the situation to be one of rejection, whereas in fact it had nothing to do with it.
DIANE: Beloved, even when there were incestuous relations or actions between parents and children, it’s still the same interpretation of rejection, the same misinterpretation. It just comes down to the same thing.
AVATARA ADI DA: It’s just that it’s enforced by extreme complication. I mean, those who have actually had that experience are much more complicated and disturbed in fact. So it’s a deeper suffering. And very often such people are not even inclined to deal with it, or find it certainly very difficult to deal with it.
DIANE: But to understand that fundamentally it just comes down to the same thing, this interpretation that you’ve been betrayed and that ultimately it’s not really true. It’s just not really true.
AVATARA ADI DA: Yes. For every female, just the fact that her father did not have sex with her means that she was rejected. And likewise for every male. Just the fact that your mother didn’t have sex with you means that you were rejected. So your first awareness of sexuality is—you were rejected. And it hangs on you for the rest of your life until you get straight. So all of your emotional-sexual wanderings and trials and experiments and commitments and so forth were always complicated by this feeling of rejection, this fundamental feeling of rejection, in and of itself.
Any emotional-sexual relationship is about being rejected, by virtue of its existence alone! To be sexually aware with an other, to be emotionally aware with an other, means immediately, first of all, and most deeply that you are personally rejected. So all this emotional-sexual business you’ve been up to has not been about union and great love and sexual Yoga and all the rest of it. It’s been a dramatization about rejection! And it’s been utterly unsatisfactory, hasn’t it! Even in, you know, the ordinary pleasantries of it, seeming ordinary working out of it, it’s still about this. It’s never satisfactory. And can’t be satisfactory, except in individuals who persist in it to the point of going beyond themselves profoundly.
DOUGLASS: Beloved, I just feel this retreat process has cured me of my particular setting You up as the daddy figure as You explained it in this oedipal complication that we all have with You and with each other. I just praise the immense devotion that opens up, that’s opened up in me, that’s opened up in all of us via this retreat process of communing with You constantly, in the course of day in and day out. It’s opened my heart and allowed me to feel that I don’t have to relate to You anymore as father. I sat with You first in 1979 and never felt free even to speak to You. I realize now it’s this bullshit oedipal relationship that I no longer have to assume, that I’ve been cured on this retreat of that limitation and I’m so grateful to You for this devotional response to You.
AVATARA ADI DA: Yes, mommy rejected you by not having sex with you, but daddy rejected you because he did have sex with her, and became your rival ever since.
DOUGLASS: Yes. Yes.
AVATARA ADI DA: So you can’t heart-feel altogether, you see, for any male because of this conflict, this competitive urge, this insult that you’re suffering, you see. Well, you obviously have to go beyond much, then, to relate to Me righdy. What you’re describing is about relating to Me rightly, you see. But in some fundamental terms you are dealing with this naive complication of your early life by practicing this devotion for real.
DOUGLASS: Thank You, Beloved, for this great Gift of devotion to You.
AVATARA ADI DA: Tcha.
See, I’m not your rival, I’m not competing with you. I’m here to actually wake you up and liberate you.
DEVOTEES: DA!
AVATARA ADI DA: And bring you to the point of Realizing Me. I’m not here to suppress or destructively compete with anyone. By that I exclude you. I don’t regard anyone, you see, to be non-deserving of Blessing. In the traditional setting people are measured, “Who’s ready for blessing, who should get the blessing, only the good guys,” you see. That’s not My point of view. Everybody needs for everybody to be Blessed. So I can’t ride on any of that kind of business, you see. If I weren’t free altogether, I couldn’t serve you. Because I would simply reenact the universal drama of separativeness, and deny you Liberation thereby.
DOUGLASS: Your Blessing is Perfect, Beloved.
AVATARA ADI DA: So I Play with you in all kinds of ways, but never in any disposition to suppress you or bind you up. Not with anyone. Well, you can see what a difficult situation I’ve always been in, then. You describe it as Me being vulnerable, you see. Yes, it is, a very infinitely vulnerable Work. It must be so. Utterly harmless. Cannot be done by the ego. You can’t compete with Me and win. You can’t duplicate My Life, My Work, My apparent Sadhana, you see. You can’t duplicate any of it. You can’t duplicate My Sign. If you’re trying to, you see, then you’re not practicing the Way of the Heart, really. You’re competing with Me.
What else, then?
MICHIEL: Beloved, I can see that my tendency to withhold energy, withhold my heart, is out of fear of rejection. And I feel so strongly that just by putting my heart on the line, by giving my heart constantly to You, that I go beyond that. And that is the only cure.
AVATARA ADI DA: Right.
MICHIEL: And it is so simple, but it is such a profound practice. I am very happy to understand that puja and do that in any moment to You.
AVATARA ADI DA: You know, people say they love something or someone. People love all kinds of things, you see. They love ice cream, they love good weather. The word “love” is misused in this sense. That’s another one of the things we discussed recently in these eleven days. You’re using the word “love”, but you’re not doing love. What you’re saying is that you’re not being rejected, you’re being liked, you’re being pleasurized by association with something or other, or someone or another. Of course this is the principle content even of most intimate relationships, then. To the degree they console one another, they say they love one another. But that’s not in Love, and that’s not most profound love, and that’s not what devotion is about, you see.
Real love goes beyond your feelings of rejection, past, present, or potential. It doesn’t expect, demand, or occur only in the circumstance where you are seeming to be loved. It is ego-transcending, heart-giving. It doesn’t dramatize anything about rejection. Therefore, it doesn’t really even fear it, then. But by tendency, ego games, you see, are all about associating yourselves with what congratulates you, what makes you feel not rejected, what makes you feel pleasurized, comfortable and so on. You want to make a whole life out of it. You do that as much as possible. You get a little bit of that, you’re trying it all the time so you try to do as much of that as you can every day, day after day after day. Of course it fails a lot but nonetheless that’s what you are persisting in. That’s your doctrine. And then someday you drop dead.
You see, you propose this utopia every day of your life, but you’re going to drop dead anyway, and then what? It’s a false philosophy, and it realizes nothing but temporary consolation, looks for temporary consolation.
The heart-principle must be exercised in all of your bashfulness or fear about it. It’s your problem. But that’s the test of life, to exercise the heart-principle, and it’s the fundamental test of sadhana, then, the fundamental test of devotion, then. And that’s the difference between fidelity and infidelity.
MICHIEL: Because You Incarnate love so humanly it makes it easier to completely embrace You, in Your humanity.
AVATARA ADI DA: Tcha. The vehicle of My Manifestation in gross terms—Franklin—is just like you, ordinarily born, ordinarily complicated. I wasn’t born under remarkable circumstances of being loved, coddled, wealthy. There was no utopia where I grew up, just all kinds of difficulty, all kinds of ordinary stuff, you see. So I’m the inheritor in This Body of all of that. No breaks, just that. This is My Submission, to Submit even to this grossest part, you see. To Serve you, to Do My Work, I had to Transform this vehicle in that Submission, and endure much, to the point of oblivion, you see. But this vehicle is necessary for the Work I Do here, and to establish the basis for all the Work I am to Do, even beyond this physical Lifetime.