CHAPTER 22 Do Your Relations Some Good SRI DA AVABHASA: Did you have a problem with your
father? DEVOTEE: I think it is fair to say that my father
represents all the tendencies in myself that I am most
disturbed by and … SRI DA AVABHASA: [Laughing.] You hated your
father – is that what you are trying to say? Apart from your father’s personal qualities, which
presumably were ego – bound and difficult to endure, you
must understand that he is also your inheritance. He was the
stream of influence in your early life that would have made
you a man, that would have helped you to invest yourself in
masculine responsibility. And all you feel about it is
complication, hatred, dis-ease, dislike. Whatever there may
be in his character or signs or actions to justify it, you
are denying yourself your initiation into manhood. You are
refusing to invest yourself in manly responsibility. You are
denying yourself your maleness, your male humanity, your own
masculine responsibility, your own husbanding
obligations. You cannot hate your father forever. You must understand
him. You must understand yourself. You must forgive him. You
must accept the male inheritance and allow it to be
balanced, if you will, in relationship to a woman. But if
all you are going to do is dramatize your entire life about
a disinclination relative to your father, you are not only
expressing a reaction to him but you are denying yourself
your own male humanity, because he is the stream of your
inheritance of that obligation. Fathers are how men get to be men. And if, somehow or
other, there is a complication in that – you become too
attached to women, you become effeminate, you may become
homosexual (there are many reasons to be homosexual, of
course, including biological ones, but this is
psychologically part of how it may arise). You may develop
along with all kinds of male weakness, fear, anxious life –
then you cannot imagine yourself being a man or husbanding
another. If you think your father was such a jerk, you are
denying yourself your own inheritance and obligation. This is why love and forgiveness must come about in all
children. Eventually, sooner or later, you must accept the
most positive inheritance of the male and the female and
overcome your psychological problem about it. Your parents
are the only ones you have. They are your seeds of humanity.
And you must straighten out your relationship to them, if
only for your own sake and for the sake of everyone else you
are relating to as an adult. You must deal with your
reaction to your parental inheritance, whatever may have
occurred in your life with your parents. What occurred there
are the acts of nature, the reactivity of egos, the natural
and ordinary human signs. And you cannot hate all that
forever without destroying yourself. DEVOTEE: The way I have done this, my Lord, is just by
maintaining a very superficial relationship with my father,
in which I do not express … SRI DA AVABHASA: The main way you have done it is by your
own reactivity and by the design of life in which you have
invested yourself because of it. There is a psychological
truth in the traditional admonition that you must overcome
the reaction to your mother and your father, so that you may
live a life free to invest yourself in the Divine Source of
existence. If you do not overcome this psychological
complex, you invest yourself in impediment and in a destiny
with which you will curse your life. It is important for the
sake of your parents – and it is also important for your
sake and for the sake of all those to whom you are related –
that you overcome these reactions, these difficulties, of
your early life. What you have principally inherited through your parents
are the male and female signs. If your parents were limited,
you must still overcome your reaction and forgive them and –
“meet some other people”, you know? Get out of the house,
meet some other men and women, become a man, become a woman.
And, as My devotee, yes, find Me out. To deal with this emotional-sexual complication or
problem, you must deal with your mother and father. Your
emotional-sexual complication is not just a matter of what
you do in intimacy or in sexual intercourse. It is a matter
of the mind, the emotional-sexual mind, the origin of which,
in your present lifetime, is in your experience with your
mother and father. You have been patterning your life, since
birth, on the basis of your imitation of your mother or your
father or both, and on the basis of your reaction to them.
And you always thought you would never live like them! But
you are living exactly like them, because of your imitation
of them and your reaction to them. Therefore, so that you can deal with your
emotional-sexual problem, I Call you to investigate,
observe, “consider”, confess all the signs of your early
life, your reaction to your mother and father, whatever
happened. Work out the matter of forgiveness and love
expression with them. By this you purify yourself and all
your future relations and all your present relations, and
you purify your parents as well. This is a necessary service, and a necessary part of
growing in the religious life. Without it, there is no
growth in religious life, and there is no growing up in
emotional-sexual terms. As long as you harbor your problems
with your mother and father, you will never straighten out
your emotional-sexual life. Mark My Words! Never! Do not just harbor these reactions. Your model of
emotional sexual intent, desire, seeking, interest, the way
you relate to males, females, all that is based on your
primitive origins in your childhood household, or whatever
the circumstance of your infancy and childhood. It is
entirely based on it. You must deal with it. You have no
choice. You cannot be straight with anyone until you do. Anyone, or almost anyone, can function sexually. Almost
everyone can. That you are sexually active does not mean
that you have straightened out your emotional-sexual life.
You think that maybe that is so, because of the message of
orgasm and the consolations associated with it. But why all
the dramatizations in these relationships? And why all the
things you do with male others, female others? Where does it
all come from? Yes, there are all the inherited karmas of
presumed previous existence, previous to this lifetime,
whatever the form of your previous existence. But you can
readily observe the origin of your dramatization in the sign
of your childhood, your relationship to your parents, your
reactions to them, and the whole psychology and all the
visions, thoughts, patterns, and so forth, you have
inherited from that reaction. You are never going to make Yoga out of your intimacies,
or straighten them out in the ways I have told you to
straighten them out, until you deal with this, the
fundamentals of your emotional sexual character. You are not
free to be a man, if you are male, until you have dealt with
your problems with your father. You are not free to be a
woman, if you are female, until you have dealt with your
problems with your mother. You are also not free to be a man
until you have dealt with your problems with your mother.
And you are not free to be a woman until you have dealt with
your problems with your father. You must deal with this. Your entire life is patterned on
it. You must become sensitive to it. Without such
understanding and purification, all of your emotional-sexual
life is a dramatization – all of it. That is why I Call you
to the most serious investigation, “consideration”, and
confession of your origins in this lifetime in relation to
your parents, the circumstance of your early life –
everything thoroughly confessed, understood, in the context
of devotion to Me, all forgiven, letters written, telephone
calls made, visits – it is your business. And, by the way,
giving short shrift to your mother and father on the
telephone is not dealing with it. There must be forgiveness, assumption of your own
maleness, femaleness, responsibility for your relationship
to male others, female others. This is the clarity necessary
for a renunciate or for My devotee of any maturity. It is
absolutely necessary. DEVOTEE: In fact, Sri Gurudev, I am intending to visit my
father on my way home from this retreat. SRI DA AVABHASA: Whatever he does or says, make sure that
what you say and do is full of love, full of tears too. DEVOTEE: Ten years or so ago, I went to him with this
intention, and I began expressing my love to him. We were
riding along in a pickup truck, and he was obviously
embarrassed by what I was saying to him. SRI DA AVABHASA: So what? You do not know how much of a
conversion he will go through when you get straight with
him. You have an obligation to be straight. Endure his
embarrassment. Whatever is necessary for you to say, feel,
express, and weep about, you be sure you do it. You may
never get another opportunity. Do him some good. Do yourself some good. Do all your
relations, including your intimate partner, some good. Make
sure you handle this business. Also see: Go
beyond early childhood suffering The
Oedipal Strategy – Description and references to
articles on the Beezone The Mother-Force and the
Father-Force
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