“The occidental mind fears death, or the loss of self. The oriental mind fears attachment to the self, or the lifetime of the self. These two habits of mind have traditionally dictated the two unique and opposite paths of mankind.”
Chapter 4: The Culture of Eternal Life The Two Ideas of Fear Scientific Proof of the Existence of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House!
COMPULSORY DANCING
Da Free John (Adi Da Samraj)
Talks and Essays on the Spiritual and Evolutionary Necessity of Emotional Surrender to the Life-Principle. (1980)
Beyond Fear
DA FREE JOHN: You know how frightened you could become at this moment. A little uncovering of the unconscious would make you go bananas with fear. In fact, you would be adding fear to the experience, which would only be whatever it would be. But you absolutely do not want such an incident to take place. Yet you must become accustomed to passing through and beyond fear and death as a matter of course. You must release the heart from this stranglehold of fear, whereas in your conventional round of consolations you are keeping yourself out of touch with fear. Your consciousness is relatively superficial. It contacts experience and fear only superficially, but the emotional problem of your self-division is the root of all suffering and delusion. You are not relaxed at the heart. You are not relaxed altogether. You are not tuned in to the subtle force of the All-Pervading Life-Current.
You are uptight!
The more enemies, obligations, and worldly struggles you have, the less sensitive you are to the real Condition. The only ultimate, future, and sublime culture is one in which people may live with that deep sensitivity even in the midst of ordinary responsibilities. If you understand that this sensitivity is necessary, then you must simply practice it.
You must provide yourself the occasion to practice and Realize this Disposition perfectly. You must manage your ordinary life responsibly, but simplify it. Eliminate its conflicts. Live serenely, but also with strength of will to practice effectively whenever you must encounter and overcome obstacles creatively. Practice this surrendered Disposition regularly in formal devotional exercises, both with others and by yourself. If, from time to time, you can also enter into a condition of total isolation within the spiritual community, that is also an excellent circumstance in which to practice. Whatever circumstances are possible for you, you must have the occasion in life to enter constantly into Communion with the Transcendental Being, and through that Communion to awaken to all the qualities of the Manifest Personality that is God.
You can practice this Communion only by transcending fear, by actual, literal, heartfelt surrender beyond all fear of death and madness into the Transcendental Reality. To do this you do not have to die or become mad, but your fear must be surrendered in love, in ecstasy. You must simply renounce your fear, give up the luxury of it, and presume surrender as your attitude under all conditions. When that attitude becomes true of you, you realize that fear is not inherent in the act and the moment of emotional surrender. Therefore, abide in surrender perfectly and you will not be involved with fear, madness, or death in the conventional forms that we fear and try to avoid.
Heartfelt release of fear is the secret of passing through the spiritual process without going mad. To the degree that you are full of fear, you limit your experience – and if experience is forced upon you, then you have no ability while fearful to view it sanely, to relax and surrender within it. You cannot surrender by relaxing and trying to feel better. You can surrender only by giving yourself up, relaxing your self-hold, surrendering your mind altogether to the Transcendental Consciousness in which it arises, and yielding your body to the All-Pervading Current of Life, of which it is but a temporary modification. You must surrender wholly and constantly to the Transcendental Being, not merely to its physical and mental forms of self-possession and separateness.
You are not very profound, you see, in your consciousness. You are basically fixed in your terrified conscious mind, providing no entrance into the play of life for what is superconscious and obstructing the illumination of what is subconscious and unconscious. You cannot view yourself directly because you are so afraid of the consequences of being yourself. Merely to be yourself is negative and hopeless, because everything you can see about yourself is dying in one way or another. You will find no peace until you have realized love, sacrifice, and self-surrender. You must surrender to God literally and release your fear. Such surrender is the foundation of religious life and spiritual practice.
Everyone who prepares to enter this Church is considering the emotional problem of fear and self-possession and all its qualities, mechanics, and effects. As that problem is overcome in Divine surrender, the fear that arises in every area of life becomes a matter of his (or her) responsibility. His wholeness and integrity must show itself before he is permitted to enter the Church. He must bring the fruits, the gifts, that are yielded in the fulfillment of this initial level of Enlightened or God-inspired practice. The most important gift the individual must bring, the essential sign that must be demonstrated, is a sane, whole personality, in a state of fundamental equanimity, founded in surrender of self and all fear to God, the All-Pervading Radiance and Consciousness. Only such a person provides a living foundation for higher practice of this Way, as I have described such practice to you. You cannot practice the higher and Transcendental dimensions of the Way in a superficial mental fashion. You must give up deeply, bodily. You must surrender physically, psychically, mentally, emotionally, and altogether. You must give up all fear. You must give yourself up in Ignorance to the very Condition in which we are appearing. You must have faith. You must trust the fundamental Situation in which we appear, exist for a time while always changing, and then inevitably die.
Borrow the Book
“I wanted to talk to him about my own sadhana because of a series of phases that I felt I had been going through since I entered Bubba’s house and left Bubba’s house some of which was communicated in the “god and the goddess” fear experience that would periodically arise and then disappear.