Originally published in Crazy Wisdom magazine, February 1984, Vol 3. No.2
A Talk by Da Free John on frontal reception of the Spirit-force as it relates to well-being.
August 11, 1983
MASTER DA: I speak about the discipline relative to the descending current. The descending current is the dimension of this process of conductivity that must be realized and practiced first, for all the reasons that I have discussed. It is also important to apply that descending process relative to health.
Of course, the descending cycle relates to healing another because to hear another you must keep this, channel open in yourself. But an unobstructed descending channel is also important for your own health, because the descending current, which is felt through the frontal line of the body, is most directly associated with all the kinds of consciousness we associate with the waking state of bodily existence. It is associated not only with the physical body, but with emotional, psychic, and mental states. If you observe yourself in the course of daily living, in the midst of all your circumstances, you will notice that you continually register different qualities in the frontal line. Perhaps the most typical one is the sensation of a knot over the solar plexus, just below the heart, or in the abdomen.
Everyone experiences this knot at least from time to time. It is generally associated with the feeling of anxiety, but it is a key to health and well-being altogether. It is associated with physical and emotional conditions. If we do not achieve a capacity to be responsible for this frontal current, we will not experience or exhibit the signs of well-being altogether in life. Our relationships will complicate us, and we will be complicated in those relationships. It is important, therefore, to monitor this current and the signs we observe in the frontal line of the body.
If you observed this frontal current for a few days, just agreed to keep your attention on it quite regularly, you would observe certain symptoms relative to the energy in the frontal line of, the body. You would observe that these symptoms change from hour to hour, change in different circumstances, change in the presence of different individuals, and so on. When this channel is open, as it is supposed to be, characterized by full in-breath, full bodily relaxation, full feeling, then we are tending to be in a state of well being.
If we kept that channel consistently open, and of course observed various intelligent practices in life, we would maintain a general state of psycho-physical well-being. But by tendency we do not maintain such a full, open in-breath. Instead, the egoic contraction, the self-contraction, tends constantly to contract and limit the descending force.
Think of the descending current as a garden hose running from the top of your head to your feet or to the base of the body, with water running through it. When you pick up a garden hose and twist it, the water stops. Release it a little bit, and the water runs a little bit. The channel is supposed to be simply open, but by tendency it is constricted to one or another degree under the various circumstances of life, whether those circumstances are acknowledged to be external to you or internal and local to the body. This line of force is tending to be constricted to one degree or another, and it is rarely simply open.
When it is simply open, you feel good, and not just physically, but emotionally, altogether. You have a sense of well-being. When you have a sense of well-being, this current that registers itself in the frontal line of the body is open. When you do not feel completely well, it is constricted to one degree or another. And when you feel rotten, it is as if you had tied a knot in the garden hose, you see. You can feel that knot throughout the frontal line. You will perhaps especially feel it over the solar plexus.,If you are no Happy in your feeling, not given over to the living and Ultimate principle, then perhaps you will notice that you experience a more or less chronic sense of contraction over the solar plexus, and a feeling of weakness also, as if you had a hole in your navel. In that case, there is weakness, there is tightness there is a cramp, there is discomfort there is disorientation altogether a sense of being out of balance.
All these symptoms are the results of a very simple mechanism of contraction in the frontal line of force. The contraction is registered especially over the solar plexus because the battery of the body is the great region of the solar plexus, including the lower abdomen. You must therefore become sensitive to how this frontal mechanism works, how it changes in reaction to external circumstances and local or internal circumstances.
You must hear me first of all. You must awaken, through hearing, to self-observation, self- insight, awareness of how you operate as a contracting personality. Then you must see You must become emotionally converted. You must, with the total feeling of the being or the submission of the total body-mind, enter into sympathy with That Which is Transcendental and All-Pervading, and begin to practice on the basis of hearing and seeing. In other words you must live or animate the body-mind in all its relations and functions in such a way that the living force is permitted to course freely in the body-mind without obstruction.
This practice of conductivity is a great art. Therefore, the practice develops over time as you magnify this hearing and seeing in the form of an effective life-practice. But in terms of what there is to observe about it locally, the ultimate change that develops through that practice of conductivity is a change in your capacity to be responsible for the full openness of this frontal line of your manifest existence. Until you become fully responsible for it, feeling open, surrendering to this living current, you are always experiencing symptoms of one or another kind, chronically. Not just local, physical, and emotional symptoms, but symptoms in the form of all your relations and your complicated living.
In other words, through hearing and seeing, or submission to the Ultimate principle, the Spiritual principle, the Spiritual Reality, the Divine, you must achieve the capacity for well-being, which is fundamentally an emotional capacity. Secondarily, or by effect, it is a capacity for well-being in the upper and lower coils, or in the mind, the psyche, and the body, and therefore also in the plane of all relations.
Relative to health, then, the most fundamental responsibility is the responsibility for hearing and seeing. As a mechanical matter, at the level of the body-mind itself, health is fundamentally a matter of becoming freely responsible for the living current in Its descending or frontal mode. Healing another is fundamentally a matter of working on this frontal current, helping to bring the person, not just physically, but in every way, into a condition of openness to the living current, so that there exist no relational, physical, emotional, psychic, or mental obstructions or reasons for contraction that limit the flow of force.
Of course, there is no ultimate well-being without submission to the Ultimate. There may be temporary well-being that serves someone temporarily by bringing him or her into a state of openness, through the effect of our good company, the kind of attention we give to one another. Many healing practices work through just such means. Any attention we eve to somebody that makes him feel he is being given attention by someone who is congenial who cares for him to some degree will tend to have a healing effect, Why? Not merely for psychological reasons, but because of this fundamental structure of the manifest personality, this descending frontal current, which is rooted in the feeling dimension of the living personality. Thus, any approach to an individual, that brings him into a feeling of openness will tend to heal him, temporarily at least. It will have positive effects.
If, however, you could bring the individual to the point of hearing and seeing and submission, rather than mere sympathy with somebody else whom he feels good about, then most perfect healing will tend to occur. There is no ultimately perfect healing, because we cannot eliminate all limits in a world such as this, whose very structure is limitation. Nevertheless, basic well-being can generally be restored to anyone who will, hear and see and be whole bodily submitted to the living principle, in-breathe It, and release the force of contraction emotionally, in his or her feeling, physically and psychically.
All healing efforts are based on this one principle. Ultimately, the best thing you can do to heal someone is to guide the individual into the whole affair of hearing and seeing, so he can be responsible not merely for his life in spiritual terms, but altogether, as a result of a changing his life-course.
Those of you who are practitioners should already know how important it is to monitor, be sensitive to, and be responsible for this frontal mechanism. All your episodes, difficulties, and physical problems are related to the self-contraction in the most directly manifested, phenomenal terms in the structure of the body-mind-in other words, in this frontal course. Rather than putting angular, problematic attention on your contraction, if you would simply be naturally sensitive for a few days to the knot over your solar plexus, you would quickly get a very realistic sense of how you operate, how the knot changes, how it is affected under the ordinary or extraordinary circumstances of daily living. Observe, how much time you actually spend being cramped up there, experiencing physical, emotional, and mental effects.
You spend a great deal of your time in those effects. To the degree you are spending your time in those effects, you are being irresponsible. You are not practicing. You are not living on the basis of hearing and seeing. You are looking forward again to hearing and seeing. If you would simply observe how much time you spend being cramped up, then you might understand why you do not feel brilliantly alive and radiantly Happy. and you could also appreciate, perhaps, how you must intensify your practice.
Perhaps you think, because of your mental, more or less left-brained state from hour to hour, that you are doing something like practicing. If, however, you observed the real, feeling, physical, living dimension of yourself, you would observe that you are much more contracted than you might surmise from your mental point of view. And what is there to do about it? Practice the three, parts of conductivity based on hearing, and seeing, but practice as a devotee moment to moment, in spite of all the causes that exist, internally, locally, or externally, moment to moment. If you were to practice this discipline of conductivity with full feeling, then you would not only eliminate this cramp but all the kinds. of evidence associated with it in the upper and lower coils of the body-mind, in all its relations, and in your dramatized existence. Your, entire. life, apparently, internal and apparently external, would become changeable by you.
It is not changeable by you without hearing and seeing and real practicing, and that practice must take the form of well-being. It must take the form of this free flow of the descending current. That is why I recommend in The Dreaded Gom-Boo, or the Imaginary Disease That Religion Seeks to Cure that this process of reception and release in terms of the frontal line be the first dimension of responsibility you develop relative to the whole affair of conductivity. The free flow in the frontal line is the Most basic practice. Only after you have mastered that practice can you really become involved in the total circuit, not merely the full circle, but the dimensions of conductivity that belong, to the higher esotericism of our practice.
You must practice conductivity fiercely. You cannot be gentle with it. You must breathe. You must give it up. You must relax. You must submit yourself.
Where do you think the Siddha-belly comes from on this body and on the bodies you see in photographs of certain yogis who developed the art or science of the Life-current? It appears because the frontal line is fully opened most of the time. It swells up the body. It actually makes physiological changes – not merely the external sign of the abdomen growing very large, but changes in the hormonal system, the nervous system, and the psyche.
August 11, 1983
“There are two ultimate dimensions to the Divine Reality. The one is that Power by which all appearances are created, which is the Radiant, All-Pervading Life Energy, or Current, the original Light or Radiance or Vibration of which everything is a modification, a temporary, changing, passing illusion.“
‘Enlightenment of the Whole Body – Adi Da Samraj
Further Reading:
1. An Aspect of the Frontal Yoga of Adi Da Samraj
2. Beezone Study – Sutra 45 – The Dawn Horse Testament
“The gross (physical) body, the subtle body (which includes the etheric, or “pranic”, or life-energy body, and the dual astral body, consisting of both the lower mental, or lower psychic, body and the higher mental, or higher psychic, body), and the causal body (of individuated bliss) are the functional bodies (or conditionally manifested functional sheaths) that proceed from the heart and are contained in the unqualified Being of Reality.”
3. Chapter 19 – The Knee of Listening
4. What Is the Conscious Process?