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COMPULSORY DANCING – Da Free John (Adi Da Samraj)
Part I: Emotional Surrender to God
The Only Cure of the Loveless Heart
DA FREE JOHN: The practice of heartfelt devotion to God
in relationship to the Spiritual Master is the true and
perfect Way of life. It is the only path that realizes the
fundamental understanding that, after all your searching
comes to an end and even during the entire effort of your
seeking, and even now in your most profound meditation, you
are emotionally turned away from the event of existence. You
are never in any moment emotionally satisfied. In order to
be free of this negative, reactive disposition, you must
realize what this gesture of emotional dissociation is
altogether. You must become responsible as the heart, or the
emotional, feeling core of your being. Everything else
follows from this practice, and everything that is necessary
for your existence and your spiritual practice will thus be
revealed to you by Grace.
I have already described to you how the process unravels,
and I could continue to describe all kinds of practices that
become natural and useful in moments here and there in the
process and that you will at some point simply assume as a
functional discipline-but fundamentally there is one
practice, one basic discipline. Contrary to common
presumptions about religious and spiritual life, that
practice is not to seek for God. The fundamental practice is
to confront and transcend this emotional dissociation right
now, and in every present moment. It is to surrender to God
as the One Living Personality, the Companion of ones heart,
and to allow that condition of surrender to be the Condition
of ones life. Thus, one is no longer Life-negative or
heart-negative, but one persists in love moment to moment,
and is ecstatic.
In order to be happy, you must know that you have
complete freedom to love and to be ecstatic in every moment.
Yet your whole life has been an emotional refusal of all
experience, of God, of relationship, of the Radiance of your
existence. You have been contracted upon yourself with
emotional force, and no amount of thinking, considering,
experiencing, desiring, exploiting, and manipulating
yourself in the world can affect that contraction. No
awakening of the kundalini touches it. It has nothing to do
with the kundalini. You can have kundalini experiences until
you are yawning with boredom, yet you will not have touched
this emotional recoil at all.
You tend to think of yourself in terms of your
limitations – your thinking, emotional reactions, bodily
sensations, and desires. You pursue your religious life as
well as your ordinary life while thinking of yourself as an
actor or a person defined by those limitations. You have
little certainty about anything beyond your thinking
consciousness. You feel physical desiring with great
certainty, but the idea that there is a Consciousness that
influences you or that is fundamental to you is relatively
alien, or at best occasional. You think about God, and you
feel that some day you will make up your mind about whether
or not there is a God, but what do you think you will do
differently then? Look at the people who claim to have found
God-they do not seem to have changed very much. They were
depressed, now they seem gleeful. But are they Enlightened,
God-Conscious, moral, compassionate, wise, sane, fearless,
and spontaneously happy at all times?
You must enter into a presumed association with God as
the intimate, heartfelt Associate or Companion of your life.
The creation of relationship with God certainly is a great
gesture. It is the only cure of the loveless heart and of
the whole life of suffering. In the process, you become
quite open to natural association with dimensions of
existence that you have not previously taken into account.
You begin to recognize that apart from your frantic,
self-possessed consciousness, in which the mind is not
released to God and the brain is not relaxed in the
Life-Current-apart from this obsessive, thinking pattern of
mind that you typically dramatize, there is a greater
dimension of mind that does not engage in the thought
process. Perhaps you also suddenly realize thoughts and
intuitions for which you previously have had no
sensitivity.
When you begin to presume an association with God,
observations of the world have new significance for you.
Perhaps you were not noticing previously, or perhaps now new
and very remarkable things simply do begin to happen. Now
you are trying very hard to acquire a dimension of mind and
knowledge, even literal practical knowledge, from or with
the thinking mind itself. If you can relax your thinking
mind into the higher mind, which is prior to thought, higher
psychic intuitions and even information will appear in your
patterns of thought. A higher understanding will come into
consciousness.
You will also notice then that your life is changing, by
virtue of this same heartfelt Divine Association. Just as
you observe changes in your consciousness or mind, in which
new dimensions appear spontaneously and intuitively, you
also notice that your vital, physical life, your ordinary
life of desiring, is beginning to change too. You become
much more effective, more capable of choosing to do
something and actually doing it. Many positive, remarkable,
and interesting things begin to happen to you.
Thus, the heart is the primal center of consideration.
Everything that is body and mind is the emanation of the
Divine, which we identify via the heart principle, or
Life-positive emotion, Radiance, love, prior to contraction,
self-possession, and fear. The effects of the gesture of the
heart must appear in your mind and body. The body-mind must
be Transfigured by love, by emotional self-transcendence.
Nothing less than this emotional practice is true or
sufficient. We are willing to do all kinds of things-even to
go into long periods of seclusion and to deprive ourselves
of bodily comforts and pleasures-just to experience
extraordinary effects in mind and life. We will engage in
all kinds of practices, you see, that are self-manipulative.
Some of those practices are creative in an ordinary sense,
but they are not this practice of the heart.
You have not committed yourself to the practice of love,
or emotional association with God and all existence. You are
still committed to emotional dissociation. Emotional
dissociation is Narcissus, self-possession, the ego. If you
would transcend the ego, you must deal with the emotional
gesture of the being from moment to moment. Transcendence or
dissolution of the ego is entirely an emotional matter.
Thus, there is no transcendence of the ego until love
appears, until there is self-transcendence via emotional
sacrifice of the body-mind to God, the Living Personality,
the All-Pervading Life-Current Who is expressed as
everything and Who absolutely transcends everything. You
must choose this sacrifice, this loving gesture. If you will
choose it, if you will make this emotional commitment, then
all experience becomes Divine Revelation to the point of
ecstasy and transcendence of everything in God.
You must “see” God truly. Then you must enter into right
association with the Spiritual Master and into right
practice in his Company. The mere sighting, the mere
association with the body-mind of the Spiritual Master, even
any form of Remembrance and association with the Spiritual
Master, is God-Contemplation. Practice association with me
in the truest spiritual sense, awakened in your
understanding that this body-mind is a “Murti” or Image of
the All-Pervading Principle, alive and conscious. If you
simply enter into ecstatic association with me, you will
always stand in a temple with me where ecstatic speech is
understood, where we are all whirling and can speak only the
Truth.
The ecstatic relationship to me is the key to practice.
Do this heart-practice in relation to me with heartfelt
attention, and use me as the Form, or Sacred Image, through
Whom to enter into Communion with the Personality of God. In
this way God-Communion can be realized very simply. All the
elaborations of spiritual life follow from this natural
devotion, which ultimately includes all of mind and all the
Mysteries of existence.
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