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Top of Page The Broken Bird
The chronic motivations that lead to our persistent embodiment are dramatized in the form of sex desire and anger. Through continuous sex desire we seek an eternal, consoling intimacy, and also a perpetual means of release. Through perpetual anger we demonstrate our inherent frustration and pain-alive in finite form, yet Full of an Infinite Energy.
Through the chronic dramatizations of sex desire and anger we constantlystrive toward ecstasy and victory, always possessed by the internal coil of motivation, the creative urge to solve the “problem of existence. “
The essential motive is to be universally attractive to others, loved by all, served by all, consoled by all. It is the desperate motive of power, the urge to manipulate self and others. It is all a symptom of fear-the failure to love beyond all limits.
But ecstasy is only Realized in self-transcending love, surrender, and Communion with the Radiant Absolute. Such love liberates us from reactive motivations, all of which lead to embodiment, experience, and the unending search for release, the futile effort toward Perfect Flight. Therefore, the only fulfillment of our motives is sacrifice of self, or Translation into the Eternal Condition, through Love-Communion and Transcendence of all experience in the Living God.
There is Liberation only in Ecstasy, or Absorption in the One Who is prior to mind, motivation, and all arising of differentiated self-awareness. The soul is Full only in such Absorption, not in the recoil toward self and all the loveless out-turning of mere desire. Therefore, transcend all present motivations toward experience, or else future embodiment and trouble are assured. Transcend the illusion of your own independent attractiveness, and yield into the One Who Is Beauty and Love Itself.
p. 294 Top of Page Sex and Enlightenment
The key to Divine Life is hidden in sex. The secret process hidden in the common knowledge of religion, spirituality, mysticism, magic, and all yoga is the Communion of the whole and entire body-mind with the All-Pervading Current, Force, and Presence of Life, or the Divine Spirit, that appears to be separated from us via the sex organs and the vital centers of the body.
What we feel and exploit as the Life-Force in the genitals is but a trickle of the All-Pervading Life. The entire body-mind is contracted upon itself, separating as itself by reaction to its borncondition. We are chronically and even bodily recoiled from Infinity, and thus we are self-possessed rather than God-Possessed.
This recoil of the entire body-mind is realized in the first and infantile stage of life. And as the infant feeds, it informs itself of its independence, its vulnerability, and its separation from any sense of an Absolute Sustainer-Reality. Thus, when the sense of bodily pleasure arises, it is accepted as the primary consolation or reward for egoic individuation. And that consolation by the personal or own-body pleasure of self is ultimately epitomized in the second or mid-childhood stage of life, in the form of sexual awakening.
The usual individual is fixed in this infantile and childish level of psycho-physical adaptation (or the failure of adaptation) to the All-Pervading Life in which we appear, continue and change for a time, and then disappear. Thus, each individual represents a chronic disposition, universal to all human beings at this stage of evolution, in which the body-mind is contracted upon itself at its elemental base. And each individual therefore consoles himself through fixation upon the primary bodily pleasures of food, sensation, and sex.
Even so, because of the root and fundamental contractedness of the entire body-mind, the Divine Life is not contacted directly and realized in its Fullness. Rather, the Divine Life is contacted and more or less hidden by the already contracted body-mind. Thus, even though the body-mind consoles itself through its own structural pleasure, and even though the primary bodily or structural mechanism of pleasure is felt at the genitals-the Force of Life is not felt or realized except as a relatively weak and private trickle of bodily energy.
People in general have no understanding of this and its implications. They live in an essentially mechanical, reactive, selfpossessed, confused, and degenerative manner. And either Life, or the Radiance of the Divine, is not acknowledged or there is no understanding of how to adapt the body-mind to the Power of the Living Divine.
I am not speaking of things I merely believe. I am speaking with the certainty of a complete experience of all of the psychophysical processes and signs of total Regeneration in God. And anyone can see the proof of all that I say if they will only consider this Teaching and take up the Way in my Company.
The usual body-mind enjoys only that trickle of energy that manages to pass through the reactive locks or closed doors of the genitals and the vital base of the bodily form. The limitless Power of Life cannot invade the body-mind and motivate its truly human and superhuman adaptation and growth. The process of such growth awakens only when the intuition of Life is regained, and the body-mind submits to the Spirit or Life in which it is appearing and by which it is sustained.
That process of whole bodily submission to Life is true religion and spirituality. It is most radically realized in the Way of Divine Ignorance, engaged in Communion with the Spiritual Master, through whom the Radiant Divine is Revealed most directly to human beings. And all of the practices in that Company involve literal and ecstatic, or self-releasing, love and surrender to the Radiant Divine. Such practices bring every function and feature of the body-mind into direct and disarmed contact with the Divine Life of the body-mind and the whole world.
Because of the primacy of the contraction generated at the bodily base, and most especially at the sexual center of the body, the release of these reactive contractions is the fundamental necessity for Whole Bodily Enlightenment, or Translation of the independent body-mind into Life. Such is the practical necessity of religion, spirituality, and all forms of higher human structural awakening in God.
The process of sexual communion, described in the book Love of the Two-Armed Form, is only one of many essential disciplines to be enacted in Communion with the Divine Life. But it is a primary process in the Way of Divine Ignorance, and it matures into a profound and esoteric capacity in the later stages of practice. Once the locks of the perineum, anus, genitals, navel, solar plexus, heart, chest, throat, mouth, face, spine, and the entire brain are all opened to Life, the bodily Revelation of God becomes a Glory that few have ever enjoyed. In the process of that Transforming Revelation, the body is sublimed into the Ecstasy of Light, and the mind is raised beyond mere soul into the transcendental Genius of Wisdom and Sacrifice, by which it passes beyond itself to God. May you be Blessed to Awaken in this Understanding.
Top of Page Sexual Activity Is neither an Obstacle nor an Obligation in the Way of Divine Ignorance
In the Way of Divine Ignorance the conversion of conventional sexual activity into the uniquely human process of sexual communion is essential. However, sexual activity is not itself necessary. It is only that the avoidance of sexual activity is neither useful nor necessary in this Way. And most people are likely to prefer to be sexually active, in spite of conflicts and difficulties, rather than choose the strategy of ascetic avoidance of sex. However, in some cases, either the force of sexual motivation is naturally weak or else the Force of Divine Communion itself dissolves the genital game.
In every case, the individual should be made thoroughly aware of the right and regenerative function of sexuality in sexual communion with Life. But some individuals may never enter into sexual intimacy or marriage, or else such an intimate relationship may include little genital-sexual activity, or even none at all.
In any case, whether the individual is sexually active or not, the Way of Divine Ignorance is the Way of total psycho-physical Communion with the All-Pervading Divine Life. And such Communion ultimately becomes functional Transformation by the Power of Life and literal Translation of the body-mind into Life. Therefore, only the Divine is necessary, and only the essential whole bodily disciplines are obligatory. The personal, moral, and higher psycho-physical disciplines that must be applied are the ones that are applied by the whole body-mind and through all the specific functions that are active in one form or another. Thus, genital sexual activity is not itself obligatory, since we can live in Fullness without it. But the sex function must itself be yielded into the Divine Life, and to the degree the individual is sexually active he must convert and adapt that activity into the process of sexual communion.
Any individual who is not genitally active can enjoy the full Realization of the Way of Divine Ignorance, just as any genitally active individual. However, any reactive obstructions that may be preventing or complicating such activity must be released. And the regenerative whole bodily disciplines in general must become the practice of every devotee. But the absence of sexual communion with Life through genital intimacy with a lover is not an inherent obstacle to this Way, since all of the other whole bodily, personal, moral, religious, spiritual, and esoteric yogic disciplines are themselves sufficient.
Top of Page The Lover of Mankind, and How Our Sexuality Is Transcended
The functional psycho-physical discipline of sexual communion, practiced by members of The Free Communion Church, is the process whereby our sexuality may become truly human. It is also the process whereby our truly or uniquely human sexuality ultimately transcends itself in ecstatic self-sacrifice into the All-Pervading Divine Life.
The transcendence of sex is the only truly human fulfillment of sex. That transcendence is not realized by problematic avoidance of sex or self-possessed mental and subjective manipulation of our sexual and bodily structures. It requires a positive, free, and human understanding of sex, and a reorientation of the sexual impulse as well as a readaptation of sexual habits of action. Then, through direct psycho-physical Communion with the Divine, and by specific sexual communion with the All-Pervading Life of the Divine, a true and literal transcendence of degenerative sexual adaptation may be realized.
Sexuality and food-taking are the most critical links in the bodily chain below the heart. Therefore, the casual satisfaction of sexual desire provides one of the principal consolations that bind us to ourselves and separate us from the Divine and Blissful Realization of Life. It must not be mechanically and self-consciously resisted, since that is fruitless and as much a matter of selfpossession as the exploitation of sex. But our sexuality must be transcended, and right sexual practice is a process that naturally and inevitably transcends sexuality itself. Such transcendence is a matter of the regenerative readaptation of sexual practice, leading to a wholly regenerative economy in practice, free of the chronic necessity of genital orgasm. Only then will degenerative and unillumined self-possession cease to create the conventional subhuman pattern of life that characterizes most men and women. Only in the transcendence of our sexuality, through regenerative fulfillment of our sexuality, does the Divine become our constant Occupation and our true Lover.
Top of Page Growth and Transcendence
To live by the Law is our worship, and Life itself is our God. Sexual communion is worship, or Communion with Life, through the love-transformation of the sexual function. Just so, all the devotional, personal, moral, and higher psycho-physical conditions or responsibilities of the Way of Divine Ignorance are forms of regenerative worship of Life, or sacrificial Communion between structure and Life.
Life, or the All-Pervading and Radiant Divine Reality, must be realized to be the Condition as well as the Content of the vital functional dimension of human existence. Then the human individual is released from the illusion of separation from Reality, and he or she may continue to grow, through true worship, or regeneration and ultimate sacrifice of the entire body-mind into Life. Such growth depends on the intuitive awakening of the heart, or the free and whole bodily response of love, to Life. And the human being grows through the acceptance of personal conditions for the functions below the heart, moral conditions for the whole bodily disposition of the heart, and higher psycho-physical conditions for the psychic and higher mental functions above the heart. But that growth, through personal, moral, and higher psychophysical adaptation, is always itself a matter of free participation in the Law of God, which is true worship, or the sacrifice of the whole body-mind into Life. Therefore, we ultimately transcend our own structural growth, through Translation into the very Divine.
Top of Page Every Kind of Action Must Be Engaged as Love-Communion with the Living God
Sexual communion is not about “cultic” attachment and obsessive fascination relative to one’s lover. It is about ecstatic or self-releasing Communion with the All-Pervading Force of Life, via every function of the body-mind, and via one’s lover. Neither one’s own body-mind nor one’s lover is the goal or ultimate object of sexual communion, but the Divine Life is itself the constant meditation of every part and moment. Therefore, self and lover are both sacrificed in the Divine Life in the process of sexual communion.
Just so, regenerative diet, health practice, and other personal and moral disciplines of the Way of Divine Communion are not merely about “health food,” the ideal of nonkilling, or any conventional economic, social, or political intention. All practices in this Way are about whole bodily ecstatic Communion with the All Pervading Divine Life. And through each particular discipline a different aspect or function of the body-mind is literally adapted to the All-Pervading Life. Ultimately, by all these means and more, the whole and entire body-mind is Translated or Dissolved into that Life and Divine Destiny.
Top of Page Bodily Transcendence and Sexual Communion
As the devotee matures in the stages of practice in the Way of Divine Ignorance, his practice of sexual communion also matures. Thus, at first he transcends reactive and self-possessed emotional and erotic motivations.
Then he realizes regenerative control over the orgasm, so that the energy awakened in the bodily thrill of sexual intercourse is directed toward the nourishment and enlivenment of the higher and the whole bodily functions. Gradually, a natural economy develops in his practice, so that its frequency coincides perfectly with the regenerative needs or patterns of the bodily being.
It can be said that motiveless celibacy is inevitable in the seventh stage of life-or the maturity of the Way of Radical Intuition. But permanent celibacy is only necessary and inevitable in the extremes of bodily transcendence, as in the approach to bodily Translation or bodily release at death. In practice, therefore, regenerative sexual communion may remain as part of the ordinary and humorous play of the individual in the seventh stage of life until the approach of death. (During the lifetime, periods of profound bodily transcendence are inevitable, and motiveless celibacy would, pertain during such periods-but sexual communion might be resumed at other, more ordinary phases of the bodily play of Life.)
Truly, to transcend the body is not to be bodily inactive. Rather, it is to be in a Disposition in which all bodily activity, including sexual activity, is engaged entirely as a form of Divine Communion, or Transcendental Sacrifice.
Top of Page The Way of Renunciation and the Way of Ecstasy
If anyone renounces sexual activity, he discovers the mind in its place. The mind is all desires. Even if all desires are renounced, the mind remains. The mind is attention itself. But even if attention is renounced, the mind is victorious. The mind is the root of attention. It is the ego, Narcissus, the self-enjoyer, who renounces every one and every thing, for the sake of his own immunity from the threat in all relationships.
But if anyone truly transcends sexual activity, then he also transcends the mind. He transcends all desires, every gesture of attention, and the recoil of self from Infinity. Such a one transcends the person and the motive of Narcissus. Such a one has chosen the Way of Ecstasy rather than the Way of Renunciation. Such a one is Awakened to the true Self, through Eternal Communion with the Master of Love.
Therefore, renounce no thing and no one, but transcend every thing and every one. Do not struggle with the Force of desire and self-definition. Rather, be Awakened. Be turned about in your attention, your feeling, and your action. Let every moment of attention, feeling, and action be a moment of Ecstatic LoveCommunion with the All-Pervading Radiance and Eternal Consciousness of the Living God, the true Self of all.
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Top of Page Love Is the Method of Sacrifice
The true man or woman yields to the process of experience as to a lover. Such a one does not enter into the realms of experience in a defensive manner-cranky, rigid, full of self and knowledge. Rather, such a one enters into the present moment of experience as an act of love.
Experience, whether positive or negative, coincides with ecstasy in the case of devotees of the Real. They are sacrificed in any case, spoiled with wounds, and ultimately eaten by a mysterious lover.
Lovers do not fear dissolution. Therefore, they are active as submission, feeling, and ecstatic awe. Unlike the knower, who does not make love but at best presumes to love, the devotee of the Real is engaged in the process of ecstasy. The devotee exceeds all knowledge through love and ecstatic self-surrender. For such a one, knowledge is only a convention of ordinary order and thinking, whereas love is the method whereby the secret purposes of the universe are fulfilled.
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Top of Page The Ascetic Problem and the Freedom of True Devotees
The world-renouncing ascetic considers his born existence to be a problem. He feels himself always confronted by two great alternatives: Sex and God. He feels obliged to choose one or the other. He struggles to choose God. But the God he chooses is only an aspect of his own experience, a modification of his own body-mind. It is the God who is the opposite of sex, the alternative to sex, at the opposite terminal of the body.
The ascetic suffers himself as a problem. He considers his own body to be structured like a problem. There is sex, or the experience of the world, at one end. And there is God, the inner and higher mind, or the brain in itself, at the other end. He chooses what is within and above, and he abandons what is below and without. He is at war with himself, and even what he chooses as God is only a part of himself.
But the self-transcending devotee of the Living God is Awake to the Truth that precedes all problems, all solutions, and all experiential choices. He enjoys insight into his own dilemma, his own motivations, his own strategic efforts. He is free of the alternatives that troubled ascetics see mapped in the body-mind. He has realized that the truly Great Alternatives are not two forms of experience or two aspects of the body-mind. The Great Alternatives that truly confront him are not Sex and God, but self and God. And the consideration of these Alternatives does not produce a dilemma or division in him. The two Alternatives are not within himself. Rather, they are the two possible orientations of himself. He may turn upon himself by exploiting his relations, for the sake of the pleasures of such experience. (Such is the choice of the libertine.) Or he may turn upon himself by strategically renouncing his relations, for the sake of the pleasures of inwardness. (Such is the choice of the ascetic.) But the ultimate Alternative to both of these choices is self-transcending Love Communion with the All-Pervading and Transcendental Divine. And such is the free choice of the true devotee.
The true devotee is free of the double-bind of problematic choices. He is not obliged to renounce the world, nor is he bound to exploit the world. Rather, he may surrender himself into God Communion via all of his true relations. Thus, the true devotee need not choose between Sex and God. Sex is ordinary to those who love God. The true devotee lives his sexual possibility as a form of Spiritual Worship, or self-transcending Love-Communion with the Living God. Likewise, all of his functional possibilities, high or low in the structure of the body-mind, are engaged or lived as forms of that same Love-Communion. The true devotee does not choose among his own parts. He does not suffer doubt of the world, or the body-mind, or experience. Rather, he is liberated by insight into his participation in the world, or the body-mind, or experience. Therefore, he neither chooses nor abandons the world, or the body-mind, or experience. He simply surrenders as the body-mind in the world, and via every kind of fundamental and right experience, to the Living God. He surrenders as himself. He does not renounce himself or any part of himself. He transcends himself through surrender, or Love-Communion with the Living God, via every function, through all his relations, under all conditions. Therefore, he is always already free-neither bound by the choices of the libertine nor deluded by the choices of the ascetic.
This Way of the true devotee is the Way of Divine Ignorance. And when that Love is Perfect in the seventh stage of life, then where is God and where am “I”? Where is a place? Where does experience happen? When all arising is Realized to be only an unnecessary and temporary modification of Radiant Consciousness, then even the motive is understood as That. Such is the Free Disposition in which even the body Shines with a mindless Shout and Dissolves in Happiness.
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Top of Page The Fullness of Life Dissolves Body and Mind
All attachment to degenerative sex must ultimately pass, or else the body-mind remains addicted to its own tensionrelease mechanism of self-consciousness. Just -so, all chronic stimulation of the independent and separate parts of the bodymind must pass, releasing the body-mind itself into the All-Pervading Current of Life. The “Sacrifice of Man,” or Divine Translation, occurs only when the body-mind is stabilized in both wholeness and fullness.
Thus, all reactivity, self-division, self-possession, tension, thought, and chronic obstruction or emptiness of Life must be dissolved. The Way of such dissolution is in regenerative practice (in which Life is constantly permitted to pervade the whole body rather than stimulate each part to a different degree), founded in awakened intuition (in which transcendental Ignorance constantly undermines the self-binding force of experience and knowledge).
The Way in which the awesome binding power of sex is dissolved is not through strategic detachment, suppression of sexdesire, or manipulation of thought. Just so, the chronically exclusive stimulation of any part of the bodily being cannot dissolve through self-manipulative strategies. Rather, the dissolution of the tendencies and the effects of partial bodily or psycho-physical stimulation of every kind occurs as a natural event, when the Fullness of Life is permitted to be continuous in the whole and entire body. When the Fullness of the Current of Life pervades the entire bodily being, without obstruction, contraction, or reaction of a mental, emotional, or physical kind, then every form of the partial stimulation of the body-mind relaxes and becomes gradually obsolete. The imbalanced or partial and chaotic stimulation of the bodily being gradually ceases as chronic fixation of Life, and attention in separate organs, parts, or functions relaxes. Ultimately, the conductivity6 of the bodily being becomes total, continuous, and profound, permitting radical sacrifice of self, or whole bodily Communion with the Radiant Reality that pervades the world. It is not a matter of inward concentration, strategic exclusion of bodily awareness, mental manipulation, suppression of sexual feeling (which is only Life felt more or less exclusively in the genitals), or suppression of feeling in any sense. It is a matter of total feeling into the Current of Life, and intuitive abandonment of attachment to every form of experience that arises as modification of that Current.
When the bodily being is whole, the Current of Life is equalized throughout the body, dissolving chronic thought, reactive emotion, and bodily tension. And the consciousness, in Ignorance, intuits the Current not to be within but to pervade in all directions to Infinity. Therefore, the self, or body-mind, yields to Life and becomes ecstatic as Fullness of Feeling to the degree of Infinity. In that case, the whole body-mind is Transfigured in the Radiance of Divine Ignorance, and thereafter there is only Transformation and Translation in God.
6. Conductivity is the specifically yogic or technical form of responsibility in each stage of the Way of Divine Ignorance. (Its counterparts, upon which it depends in every stage, are the various forms of the conscious process of unobstructed, transcendental intuition, or Divine Ignorance.)
In general, conductivity is the capacity of the body-mind to conduct, or be surrendered into, the All-Pervading Life-Current. Such conductivity or surrender is realized through love, or radiant whole body feeling to Infinity, and such love involves coordinated engagement of body, breath, and attention in alignment with the Universal Current of Life-Energy.
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Top of Page Renunciation and Transcendence
Renunciation is a strategic act, motivated by the problems of self, or the independent body-mind in its constant alternations between temporal frustration and fulfillment. But transcendence is a natural process, realized through right application or adaptation of our various functions. Such right application or adaptation is a matter of intuitive sacrifice, or submission to the All-Pervading and Transcendental Divine, via all ordinary activities. Such is the Law of God. Therefore, transcendence of our functions is a natural, necessary, and inevitable process or event, if we are Awakened to the Way of Sacrifice, which is the Way of Love and Eternal Life.
For this reason, it should be clear that the ultimate result or import of all functional practices of a personal, moral, or esoteric mystical kind that are engaged in the Way of Divine Ignorance is transcendence of all psycho-physical functions, practices, and results of practice.
This Way does not involve strategic renunciation, but it most certainly involves natural and progressive transcendence. This Way is the Way of transcendence and Translation of the separated self, or the disposition of the body-mind, into the Absolute and Eternal Divine, Who is the Transcendental Self and Radiant Person that Pervades and yet Transcends all manifest phenomena and all persons or beings in all worlds.
Thus, as devotees grow and mature in the stages of practice in this Way, they naturally demonstrate more and more of the signs of the transcendence of the separated or conditional self and its functions. This is made clear in my descriptions of dietary and sexual practice, as well as esoteric or meditational practice, relative to the four stages of the Way.
Thus, as devotees mature, their dietary practice first moves away from all gross forms of dietary indulgence-away from such food elements as animal flesh, alcohol, and tobacco. Then, as devotees enter into the later stages of practice, even the “earthier” food elements, such as milk, milk products, most cooked grains, cooked beans, nuts, salt, spices, and concentrated sweets (such as honey), are used either in moderation or only occasionally (and, in some cases, they are entirely avoided). Devotees thus enter into more and more direct association with the Primary Food Source, which is the All-Pervading Life of God. Eventually, in the Way of Re-cognition and the Way of Radical Intuition, the diet is naturally limited to those substances that serve as a most direct medium of connection or Communion with the All-Pervading Life, and that create the least tendency toward toxemia, psycho-physical imbalance, and enervation. Such is the most perfectly conservative and regenerative dietary practice.
Likewise, as devotees mature in their general practice, including adaptation to the self-sacrificial process of sexual communion, they naturally demonstrate the inevitable signs of the transcendence of eroticism (in thought, desire, and action), including gradual transcendence of the degenerative orgasm. In the Way of Re-cognition, the third stage of practice in the total Way, such signs provide a firm basis for steadiness of attention, breath, feeling, bodily disposition, and the bodily Current of Life-Force.
Thus, natural transcendence of the egoic sexual motive gradually produces a native economy in sexual activity, whereby its frequency is moderated and its effects are conserved. And that sexual economy continues in the Way of Radical Intuition.
Just so, the esoteric practices of a meditative kind, which appear in various and progressive forms from stage to stage in this Way, are themselves a form of self-transcending psycho-physical adaptation and sacrifice. Therefore, although various mystical and yogic phenomena are experienced by these means, they are instantly transcended via the conscious process (as remembrance of God, enquiry, re-cognition, and radical intuition). In this manner, the stages of esoteric practice are, like those of dietary and sexual practice, self-transcending. And, in the Way of Radical Intuition, all phenomenal exercises of the body-mind are radically transcended in Perfect Absorption in the Absolute Personality that is the Divine Master and Real Self of every individual.
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