The following essay was compiled from a collection of essays and talks by Adi Da Samraj (over a 40 year span of time) edited and adapted by Beezone. This essay is NOT in any way connected or associated with the level of practices as described by Adidam.
“In the Way of the Heart, the frontal Yoga, for instance, is not merely you, self-bound, experiencing some Energy I put out coming into your body. No. You surrender all along. You surrender completely. You give yourself up completely, forget yourself completely, are brought to nothingness by Divine Communion. That is when the frontal Yoga is true. That is what it is in My Company, not just you dealing with some separate energy that may have been put out and that you do not even necessarily have to feel is Me.” Adi Da Samraj
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“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…”
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The knots and mechanism in the frontal line are conditioned by the habits of egoity over a lifetime, even over many lifetimes. They are themselves a form of self-contraction, and you therefore are not simply available to receive My Baptism or Force. You must understand your impediments to receiving My Spirit-Baptism. You must see these knots and understand the mechanisms of the mental self-contraction, the emotional self-contraction and the physical self-contraction.
In The Way of the Heart what the individual first becomes tacitly aware of his or her habits of seeking, desiring, doubting, believing, manipulating, betraying, and always returning to the same distress and want. This is what I address in The Lesson of Life where one sees that all seeking is being motivated by a constant feeling of distress, which is the result of “self”-contraction in the face of all relations and conditions. This understanding is the beginning of what I call the ‘frontal yoga’.
LATE-TIME and DOUBT
We live in late-time or dark epoch which doubt reigns supreme. Doubt and suspicion of anything at all beyond mortal existence is more and more pervading the entire world, and the interest of the separate individual self, his or her nation and religion is more and more regarded to be the ultimate principles of life. Tribal life has become Global life.
In the adolescent stage of development, the mind is on an unrelenting search for the success, “self”-fulfillment, unthreatened security, immunity, healing, extreme longevity, immortality, and ultimate salvation. The ego, “self”, or “soul” is the primary presumption of the adolescent – just as “God-Apart”, or That on which all depends, is the primary presumption of the child. Therefore, in the usual human being, who is embedded in the adolescent conception of existence, the idea of “God” or “Truth” fall into doubt, or is chronically resisted.
Doubt is the first form of the self-contraction and is one example of how the self-contraction manifests. It is felt in the head and what we call doubt is a rather a mental and emotional way of noticing the self-contraction. It’s just that, self-contraction, it’s not doubt of something, it’s just self-contraction. My devotee discovers that the primary mental sign of the self-contraction, whereby spiritual communion with the divine love-bliss is diminished, is the habit or tendency of non-specific doubt. Doubt in the adolescents mind form is chronic and pervasive. It is continuous with the conceptual and perceptual mind and forms a ‘world view’ that is fearful, sorrowful, threatened and aggressive.
How would you go about understanding this adolescent mind form of doubt? You transcend it. You transcend doubt not by believing in something but by observing doubt as self-contraction. Observing that it is something added to reality, added to Nature, recognizing it is something YOU ARE DOING. When you thoroughly understand and realize the non-necessity, the stupidity, the mechanical nature of your own bondage, the self-contraction is naturally released. Humor is restored and you naturally respond to That which is greater than the self-contraction, That which is simply Existing. In that transcending practice of self-understanding the conditional “root” and foundation of Transcendental Spiritual life is seen and felt at the bodily apparent heart.
Discriminative Intelligence and The Heart
DEVOTEE: Beloved, we were “considering” discriminative intelligence, and I just never had heard quite so clearly Your description of the effect of Your Transmission, and the essential component of discriminative intelligence.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Mm-hm. If I Crash down through the top of your head, I’m going to get there first, you see? [laughter] So how can you receive Me in this frontal Yoga without the awakening of discriminative intelligence and a will that can function on the basis of it?
DEVOTEE: I was reading one of Your Essays, Beloved, and You were saying that one of the signs of true hearing is the capacity for free functional attention.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Yes. Because its not bound in the rituals of self-contraction, you see? Attention is freed by this conscious process. Instead of being caught up in the mechanics of the body-mind.
The development of discriminative intelligence, and the will that functions on the basis of it, is the business of the third stage of life. The third stage of life is the stage of moving out of the parented state, whether that parented state is a ‘parent’, ‘state’ or ‘resource power’. To do so, you have to replace the faculties previously assumed by the parents and everything, then. And those specific faculties are the ones of discriminative intelligence and will. Without discriminative intelligence followed with the will, one is a sort of soupy and self-indulgent adolescent.
You must understand yourself and you must hear me. You must awaken, through hearing, to self-observation, self- insight, awareness of how you operate as a contracting personality. This is done first in life level terms. Then you must see Me and 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.
Give yourself up bodily, surrender the body, throw it into Me, into My Spirit-Presence, discard it, discard the mind, not merely feel My Spiritual Presence in the body-mind but discard the body-mind. This is the practice of the frontal Yoga in My Company.
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The real beginnings of the Way of the Heart are about a conversion of life, beginning with handling life-business, setting it straight, understanding yourself most fundamentally. Another way of describing that process is that it is a matter of coming to terms with your life of seeking, or in other words your effort to avoid death. In some fundamental sense, then, true hearing is the acceptance of life as the death process, so the body and the mind and the self-knot itself have voluntarily submitted to Divine Communion. You are equipped then, to allow the Descent of the Divine Force and your submission to It, so that all the manifested personality gives way, is dissolved.
To submit and receive the Spirit-Force you must breathe It, inhale It and receive It through the frontal mechanism. The capacity to receive the Spirit-Force through the frontal line through inhalation is not only a matter of breathing, but it is a matter of learning how to open the mechanisms of the frontal line so that they will not chronically contract. If this capacity is not developed, then the exercise of release of the Spirit-Current or the Life-Force, from the base of the body upward via the spinal line, will weaken and delude you and will be at most only a weak exercise.
My frontal Yoga is not merely about openings in the body, experiences in the body-mind, feeling energies in the body. It is about submitting to My Spiritual Force in the context of the entire body-mind, submitting the entire body-mind, so that the self-contraction in that form is utterly given up and replaced by the Divine Presence, the Divine Consciousness.
Therefore, the frontal personality associated with the body must be submitted into the Spirit-Current until the Spirit-Current stabilizes at the heart. If you truly hear and see me, this practice associated with the frontal personality will not occupy you for a great long time. You ought to be able to make this evolutionary transition in a reasonably short period of time if you are truly serious.
The physical body associated with food is the practice of “frontal Yoga” (or “right” devotional submission of the “frontal” personality), and one many people have a hard time adapting to. Of all the practical, functional, and relational disciplines that serve this adaptation, the conservative discipline and control of diet is the most basic. Dietary practice controls or determines the state of the “food’ body” and the frontal personality. It controls the state and general activity of the physical body and also determines the controllability of social, sexual, emotional, mental, and all other functional desires and activities.
The gross or food body depends on the various levels of the subtle, or ethereal body which depend on one another. The frontal personality or “gross” bodily person is rooted (or “grounded”) in the abdominal region, or the general region of the navel (including all functions below the navel). Therefore, the “frontal Yoga” that is the beginning of practice (once “hearing” and “seeing” are established).
Frontal Yoga is a matter of the submission of attention to the Spirit-Current, so that it may pass (as the Spirit-Current naturally does) from the navel to the center of the heart region.
FONTAL and ASCENDED Yoga
Once the “gross” or “frontal” personality is under control (via a complex of disciplines associated with “money, food, and sex“, or life-relations, diet, and sexuality), and once the “gross frontal” dimension of the Spirit-Current is submitted (or followed) to the center of the heart (and steadied at the feeling level or “heart chakra”), then practice of The Way of the Heart has moved fully from the “frontal (or descending) Yoga” to the “spinal (or ascending) Yoga”.
There is no spiritual maturity without the capacity to conduct the Spirit-Force in the full Circle. That capacity is not associated with any kind of fascination with or even exaggerated experience of subtle phenomena, although there will necessarily be such, but it is associated with intimacy with the Spirit-Force Itself and the capacity to engage in the conscious process, which is a process that moves beyond the objects potential in the frontal and spinal lines of this Current.
The frontal line leads toward phenomenal states in this world, and the conscious process moves beyond them. The spinal circuit leads toward association with subtle visionary phenomena and other expressions of ascension into the Cosmic Mandala, and these are also then transcended via the conscious process.
In the Way of the Heart, the frontal Yoga is not merely, you, self-bound, experiencing some Energy I put out coming into your body. No. You surrender all along. You surrender completely. You give yourself up completely, forget yourself completely. You are brought to nothingness by Divine Communion. That is when the frontal Yoga is true. That is what it is in My Company.
This is the task of the “frontal Yoga” and the total Process associated with the fourth stage of life. This is what the transition from the first three stages of life are all about, which are always in the Primary Asana, “Samraj Asana”
“Samraj Asana” Is the Primary Asana, the Asana of Divine Communion with Me, the Right Asana of the whole body. Any disturbed or negative or concerned state in ordinary day to day life in the frontal yoga is simply a collapse from that Primal Asana.
Once you have Realized this then the Process becomes one of constantly devotionally maintaining It, in the same searchlessly Me-Beholding manner.
In that case, instead of merely continuing in the patterns to which you have previously adapted-the ego patterns of reaction, all the various “asanas” of ego-ordinariness – you maintain the Transcendental Spiritual Asana of devotional Communion with Me.
Then the apparent power of events to undermine devotional Communion with Me is both intrinsically transcended and more and more effectively diminished and undone.
Such is the Purifying Process of the Transcendentally Spiritually Fully Activated (and, Transcendentally Spiritually, fully technically responsible) frontal Yoga of the only-by-Me Revealed and Given “Radical” Reality-Way of Adidam Ruchiradam.
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
pp 13-16
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 you 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
What Is the Conscious Process?
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