Emotion and the Ordeal of Self-Understanding – Adi Da Samraj

You
must commit yourself bodily, beyond your fear and reluctance
in dealing with your emotional life. This occurs at the base
of the body, at the base chakra. Strong feelings are rooted
there, feelings you are not in touch with, unconscious. When
you do get in touch with these feelings they will come up,
feelings like sorrow and fear, anger also. But at the base
the feelings are sorrow and fear and when these feelings
arise you will want to stop this process
altogether. 

The principle mood at the root of
your emtional life is fear. Fear arises in and as separation
or individuation. As soon as the first impulse feeling of
identification with the body is sensed individuation,
separate from the source. In the infant the source is the
mother, out of the womb and now individuated as a body. This
feeling is prior to mind and prior to thought. Mind hasn’t
developed yet, not as you now understand it. This is the
shock of birth. If this shock of birth is not observed (in
any moment), understood and transcended it will be a the
core of your life, uninspected, as you grow into an
adolescent and adult. And it will control you life without
you understanding your true motives in life, what is driving
you.

In this basic fear your manifest
personality may develop as a very controlling person or one
who needs to be controlled by others. Security may be a
dominant and aggressive trait of your personality and
therefore your psychology. You may need to dominate others,
control others or be controlled by others to avoid feeling
this underlining fear. You may develop as a very passive
individual basically asleep needing always to consol
yourself with food and experiences in the vital arena. You
may develop as a couch potato or a bungie jumper all in
reaction to your basic underlining fear. Becoming numb or an
adrenaline junkie are two extremes in this type of
personality development. Another unconscious strategy in
dealing (or avoiding) this basic underlying emotion is more
of a mental approach one that shows itself as a strong
intellectual or mental type of person, book worm, a
scientist a scholar. A type of person who basically cuts off
this root feeling by existing only in the mind.

Below is a chart designed from the
teachings of Adi Da. Adi Da observed and described three
distinct character types, or ways in which individuals tend
to dramatize egoity in the first three stages of life. He
calls these three strategies “solid”, “peculiar”, and
“vital”.

The chart below outlines the
attitudes of each of these three strategies.

see
more on the three
primary characteristics of the Solid, Vital and Peculiar
personalities

Above these frontal-line emotions is
the heart, or love. And there are greater energies beyond
that, and of course there is a greater participation beyond
the frontal line.

This sequence of dramatizations is a
very natural, even ultimately mechanical, sequence that you
can observe and point out in others. This does not mean, of
course, that you just go on to love from anger. You could
drop back into sorrow, and drop back into fear. However,
when emotion becomes anger, you feel that everything has
come to an end.

The root of this dramatization of
reactive emotion is the feeling of love itself. All these’
emotions are a play upon a basic feeling of affection, a
love feeling. Having put love on the line, you are afraid,
you get sorrowful, and then you are angry. You tend to drop
down from anger into sorrow and wanting to hold on
again.

If you are ever going to establish a
firm intimacy with anyone, you must deal with all these
emotions and become emotionally clarified. In your egoity,
you rarely get in touch with the core of true feeling, or
love. Your capability for detachment and lovelessness is
exactly what you must deal with. The realization of actual
love changes all these egoic complexes.

Further reading and
study:

Vitals,
Peculiars, and Solids and the Primal Qualities of Universal
and Bodily Life

The
Frontal Line – The
descending current

Discriminative
Intelligence and The Seven Stages of
Life – Laughing Man Magazine

Observe Your Pattern –
Adi Da Samraj, January
30, 1996

*
What’s interesting and
useful about noticing a pattern early in your life is to see
that the pattern is right now.

*
It’s not that you have to
struggle with something that happened early in your life –
if you see it there then you can see something about the
pattern which you are enacting right now. And that’s what
you can change.

*
The more fully you are aware
of the pattern in which you are apparently in motion,
certainly the more intelligent, perhaps the more effective
your transcendence of it in every moment

*
It’s the being set straight
that’s the important part,

*
Then functioning in that
straightness, directly, moment to moment, rather than with a
lot of verbal instructions which you have to organize and
rehearse every other moment.

*
The sadhana must become
straightforward.

*
It’s not about building up a
massive structure of mental calculations.

*
It’s a matter of freeing up
the intelligence from confusion and bondage and uninspected
entanglement.

1. The three human
types (vital, peculiar, and solid) are a strategic play on
life, or the Life-Principle, conceived as dilemma or
conflict. That is, the natural play of the etheric (or
Life-Force dimension) and the elemental (gross physical
dimension) has become a strategic or obstructed
dramatization. In each person or, strategy, the conflict is
between the two conditions of Life-Force and body. The vital
person or strategy dramatizes the conflict by irresponsibly
exploiting the bodily possibilities. The peculiar person or
strategy dramatizes the conflict by irresponsibly exploiting
the emotional possibilities, and the Solid person or
strategy does the same by irresponsibly exploiting the
mental possibilities. All three strategies appear at one or
another moment in every individual, even though any one
strategy may be especially characteristic of him.

The key to all these dramatizations
is irresponsibility. That is, the conflict between
Life-Force and body has not been inspected to the point of
consciousness, humor, and responsible control of the
dramatization. Only the mature individual enjoys such
control. Only such a one has become purified of the vital,
peculiar, and solid games of life and has begun, through
love, stably to feed upon the Transcendental Divine Life, or
the Real and Infinite Condition of our existence. And only
such a one, therefore, may enter into the fourth or truly
psychic and spiritualizing stage of life. First there must
be mastery of the negative dramatization of embodied
Life-Force.

Before we can grow into the higher
functions of the body mind, we must become responsible and
balanced in those functions in which we already appear. By
presenting ways of recognizing and compensating for our
irresponsible vital, peculiar, and solid habits, Bubba Free
John has created a whole body psychology that radically
challenges all conventional psychological systems and
therapies. The conventional approaches only indulge the
individual’s problematic self-imagery through endless
subjective analysis and mental or conceptual insights. But
such approaches never do affect the vital-physical and
emotional roots of our dis-ease and lovelessness. In
contrast, the approach presented in this chapter-and
throughout this book-requires us to heal and harmonize the
body-mind through a practical change of action. Bubba Free
John asserts that “subjectivity follows action”: When the
body and energy are used in a new and lawful way, based upon
whole body insight, or inspection via true feeling, the old
interior patterns of self-possession and disharmony
gradually become obsolete.

One of the most important forms of
new action, in compensating for our strategic imbalances and
forms of self-possessed suffering, is a new, disciplined,
and wholly intelligent approach to diet. This is a radical
and also homely suggestion in the midst of today’s
conceptually sophisticated systems of mental health. In The
Free Communion Church, we have found that the single most
dramatically effective therapeutic measure for all
apparently mental, nervous, and psychological disorders or
chronic difficulties is a change of diet based upon the
observations and recommendations offered in this chapter. In
fact, by applying these dietary regimens within a total life
of practical, devotional, and moral disciplines, men and
women with significant social and psychological liabilities
have adapted to a balanced and productive life in the
culture of The Free Communion Church. Along with others
whose imbalances were more “normal” (or less exaggerated)
but who have experienced equally profound healing and
harmonization, such men and women have gone on to evolve in
experience and mature in true spiritual practice.

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