Stress Chemistry and Whole Bodily Enlightenment – Adi Da Samraj

Stress Chemistry and Whole Bodily
Enlightenment (ADAPTED)Read
full talk

A talk by Da Free John

DA FREE JOHN: We live under stress, in a subhuman culture
whose populace is completely confused even in the most
elemental levels of existence. We are all involved in an
animal-like struggle for survival, without much intelligence
even at the level of the verbal mind. Such a circumstance
tends to stimulate a chemical profusion in the body that
enables it to function and survive under stress, but that
chemical design does not allow the higher psychic and subtle
centers of the body-mind to awaken. On the contrary, this
stress chemistry triggers the degenerative processes of
aging as well as all other forms of bodily degeneration, and
this same stress chemistry is generally empty of the
profound genetic signals that can trigger the higher
evolutionary functions of Man.

Until we have created a human order that is fundamentally
free of mutual threat, it will not be common for people to
live in a truly awakened and peaceful state, not only of
mind, but of body (or the total body-mind). The body-mind
must receive the signals that the stressful world has been
overcome, that we need not fear, that we presently have a
peaceful human society, not a society full of bombs and
benighted craziness. The evolutionary mechanism of the
bodily being is programmed to awaken its next higher centers
of function only when the chronic problems of its lower
functional centers have been solved and when the being can
live without chronically creating degenerative stress
chemistry. You can perhaps make yourself more comfortable by
becoming free of some of the anxiety of your ordinary daily
life, but you cannot thus become so peaceful that the right
hemisphere of the brain and the higher evolutionary
mechanisms of the body-mind as a whole are stimulated. To
enter into your higher human destiny, you must be altogether
“cured” in your deep psychic heart.

Basically, the human race is yet functioning within the
realm of the threatened existence of beings who are eaten by
other beings. We stressfully and chronically continue to
animate the urge to reproduce, because we feel that
everybody is in danger of being eaten! We feel, bodily, that
everyone is prey to someone else. In fact, we continually
witness the drama of hunter and
prey all over the world. Listen to the daily news! People
are being killed all over the Earth every day-simply
murdered in weird personal and social or political
conflicts. Such a dreadful circumstance is a natural part of
the unevolved and lower state of Man. Everybody asks, “Why
are we doing this?” But no broad social and political agency
has come up with any reason to stop doing it! We could just
as easily change our circumstances. Why dont we just change
them then? It is because the animal still lives in our
hormones, you see. Our bodily chemistry is yet stimulating
us to live like the vital-elemental creature. Thus, we must
have conflicts and opponents. We must eat and be devoured
ourselves.

Certainly, we would like the quality of our existence to
be different. But people in general are not yet moving
toward anything significantly different. Thus, the would-be
human world is yet a
lower-adapted, subhuman world. Perhaps some people are more
highly evolved-people who can live an apparently moral,
ecstatic, or spiritually devoted life but they are not
common. Most people are fixed in their adaptation to living
under stress, and they do not know enough to create human
and spiritual sanctuary for themselves.

To create a human sanctuary for higher adaptation and the
ultimate transcendence of Man is a true urge, even the
primal human urge. We inherently desire a human and natural
environment in which we can live without the chronic
production of stress chemistry. We want to be cured at the
heart of our mind and thereby transformed bodily. And we
know, deeply, psychically, that we cannot realize that
transformation until we can create a culture in which people
can live without degenerative stress. Thus, sanctuary, or
spiritual community, is the motive in Man that contains the
genetic secret of the next stage in human evolution.

This consideration of chronic stress, or confinement to
lower adaptation, is not simply a negative criticism of the
way we tend to live; it is also, unfortunately, a
description of the way most of us must live at the present
time. We must be stressful, politically and socially, to
protect the world and our own lives and families and
communities from the profoundly chaotic madness of this
subhuman global society. We are all struggling. We all have
our eyes on what happens in the daily world, in the news.
Thus, we cannot exist in anything like a blissful condition
all the time-and, truly, except in the case of profoundly
creative spiritual practice, we cannot enjoy the higher
bliss of Man even some of the time.

“We are threatened!” is the message of the news. It
reminds us of our chronic situation. The theatre of the news
is all about people who are threatening one another, either
with terrible violence or with just plain social nastiness,
exploiting one another to death. We constantly reinforce
loveless society in our associations with one another. We
teach each other and we pass on to our children all the
techniques for living as a stressful personality. We believe
bodily, stressfully, that our life cannot, even should not,
be long, that it is not good to be alive in the body, that
we are only supposed to go elsewhere. We have all these
ideas that are Life-negative in bodily terms, but the
ultimate way of Enlightenment is to become Life-positive in
bodily terms, which is just the reverse of what we are
tending to do. Human beings are living way down at the
bottom of their evolutionary potential. Nevertheless, if you
can personally, and with a few others, grasp the higher
realities of the mechanisms in which you live, then you can
practice a Way of life that stimulates and develops those
higher factors. You must have sanctuary, a relatively
protected world, in which to do that, because, if you are
going to rise above the civilization of the daily news, you
must live in a way that is superior to the way that people
in general tend to live.

How, then, will you come to that point of feeling totally
without anxiety, without fear, without any of the ordinary
mortal consciousness in the midst of your daily life? How
will you transcend that fear so that you can truly develop
the mystical and ultimate spiritual phenomena that I have
described, and that are effects of the stimulation of the
right side of the brain and the deep totality of the
body-mind? You can have a taste of those phenomena through
suspension of attention in the lower psycho-physical centers
while you are still under stress. But you cannot generate
such phenomena to the point that they become the principal
forms of your consciousness until you overcome the lower
evolutionary dimension of the body-mind, which is oriented
to a life of physical distress and the struggle to survive
bodily without higher consciousness. You cannot rest
naturally in a higher realm of consciousness until you are
able to manage the stresses of your daily life-including the
stress of feeling that you are mortal, that perhaps when you
die you are just plain dead. Until you enjoy a greater
consciousness, you can never be certain about the matter of
your death, you see.

When we first become involved in the possibility of
spiritual life, we tend to want to “turn within,” because,
physically, we are under stress. The first dimension of
higher human realization is indeed mental, subtle,
subjective, astral; it is realized to be “within” in a
certain sense. But there is a higher or greater level of
Realization, or true Enlightenment. Such is whole bodily
Enlightenment, in which the mind is transcended and the body
is realized to be simply Energy and Consciousness.

Can you feel that the body is only free energy right now?
You can feel a tension, an urge to want to hold something in
at your heart. But that is just your stress, you see, your
reluctance to relax, your suppression of radiance, of love,
of profuse happiness. Let that contraction go, and you will
feel the whole body radiate. The body is energy. An aspect
of it appears to be solid, but it is only a certain
frequency of vibration. There exist many higher and many
lower vibrations of the being. Beyond a certain point in
this great spectrum of vibrations we lose the visibility of
God, we lose track of the depth of Infinity, because our
physical stress attunes us only to this limited vibration of
apparent matter. But if we relax the stress, then we can
feel that energy and the physical body are the same.

The question is, how do you learn to persist as energy
all the time? You must develop the capacity to stimulate the blissful sensation that the
right side of the brain feels in its conventional
transcendence of the physical dimension of existence. Why
should you not exist with such good feeling? Why should not
that bliss be what human life is all about? You certainly
should be in at least such a state, but you must learn how
to adapt to it physically. The body must naturally produce
the higher chemistry of blissful radiance.

The play of energy that appears in our daily world is a
play on the threat of death. The ordinary games of energy
force the body to retain a subhuman level of chemical
awareness, the lower-adapting chemistry that is expressed in
the left side of the brain. The right side of the brain
remains, for the most part, negative, inert, not consciously
active. Thus, until you learn how to transcend the stress of
this world, you cannot seem to be blissful without
using some artificial and
degenerative means. Even yoga, mysticism, and all the rest
of the methodology of esoteric self-effort are just as
artificial to the body as drugs. They are simply ways of
“tricking” or deliberately stimulating parts of the
brain-mind. The only difference between taking a drug and
performing yogic disciplines is that the blissful bodily and
psychic state attained through yoga is realized through the
native capacity of the body-mind itself. Thus, such bliss
can eventually become natural and permanent, making all
effort obsolete.

At present, however, you do not know how to function in
the world and to be blissful at the same time. You are
distracted from bliss by stressful attitudes and games of
survival. Your creative being is asleep-not only mentally,
but also physically. You can still feel yourself tightening
up your chest and solar plexus, cant you? You have learned
to live with that constriction.
What do you think that constriction is doing? It is turning
off the more subtle chemistry and turning on the gross
chemistry that keeps you fastened in stressful survival
games, such as chronic sex obsession. What do you think
generates this intense sex drive? A hormonal signal in the
body constantly urges you to reproduce, because human bodily
life is so profoundly threatened. In other words, stress
chemistry keeps us profoundly attached to self. That stress
chemistry maintains the urge of the body to reproduce
without fail, independent of our consciousness or intention,
and that chemistry is being stimulated all the time.

Besides sex, there is also the stressful chemistry of
digestion and the entire obsessive ritual of food-the threat
that you will not get enough to eat, that you will not be
fed, that you will not be permitted to breathe, that you
will be snuffed out. There is the stress of all the games of
worldly life-of money, food, and sex. This stressful,
threatened consciousness is the frenzy in which you always
tend to function. You cannot afford to be blissful. That is
the truth of it. That is what
this evolutionary trigger in the brain is revealing to you
under stress. You may feel good for a moment now and then,
but you have not learned how to adapt to the point of
enjoying the highest level of feeling in the body-mind and
at the same time functioning effectively and sanely in
ordinary life. There are too many things that you must take
into account in your daily life. You must be under stress.
You must protect yourself. Survival is your impulse. That is
the reason you feel depressed, and that is the reason you
are struggling for life. And you will continue struggling
until you have conquered the game of the world at this
ordinary level of money, food, and sex.

Presently, most people can enjoy a relatively blissful
condition of experience only in extreme circumstances, such
as when under the influence of an intoxicating stimulant or
some profound outward success.
But if you were literally dying at this moment, you would
become a mystic so fast it would amaze you.

The whole affair of birth and experience and death is
primarily a matter of the evolutionary physiological
transformation of the body. It is not principally an affair
of the soul, or the inwardly conscious being, separate from
the body. The soul is the body at this moment. When you lose
this body, you will immediately attain another one of some
kind. You always have a body, until you dissolve in God. The
body, not the soul apart from the body, is the mechanism of
evolution. The soul simply becomes more and more conscious
and ecstatic via various kinds of embodiment. The soul is
gradually transformed, eventually becoming Radiant to
Infinity. The soul acquires all the faculties of God through
ecstatic surrender, and it acquires a more and more Divine
body. Such a Divine body is a body of Light, created from
the transformation of the physical into Light, or Radiant
Consciousness. That transformation is like an
atomic explosion. It is not a
matter of abandoning the physical, but of disintegrating the
physical through the identification of the physical (or
“matter”) with Energy and Consciousness. Such disintegration
or dissolution of the body-mind in Transcendental Light and
Consciousness is the secret of Enlightenment.

How are you going to become aligned to that ultimate
process? In order to realize the degree of freedom from fear
that it requires, you must conquer the little fear that is
causing stress in your daily life. Like everyone else, you
are afraid of death, and you are obsessed with food and sex
and every kind of self-fulfillment. You are aligned only to
the physical level of survival, so you do not have the
bodily sensation and subtlety necessary for higher
consciousness. You cannot become Divinely intoxicated, you
cannot become Enlightened, until you can simply live a happy, ordinary, human life,
free of these obsessions-the fear obsession, the food
obsession, the sex obsession. Therefore, we must transcend
our subhuman adaptation to food and sex as stressful
mechanisms of survival. We must signal the body that it need
not constantly gorge itself nor reproduce in thousands or in
millions in order for the species to survive. The body must
feel that it is alive with Divine Life itself, with
basically no inherent problems, or obstructions to Life.
That is why it is also important that we learn all about
health and longevity. We must turn off the stress mechanisms
that are threatened by death. We must overcome the fear of
death.

We must discover all the ways whereby we can minimize and
eliminate the stress factors in the bodys chemistry. Our
spiritual task must be understood in just these
physiological terms. You must understand that the processes
involved in the ultimate affair of esoteric religion and
spirituality are fundamentally a physiological, biological,
and evolutionary matter. True religious life is not devoted
to all the cosmological and mythological nonsense through
which popular religion is communicated in the world in
general. Religion is a psycho-physical matter,
fundamentally.

Therefore, we must judge our religion in
psycho-physiological terms, in factual terms, real, actual,
living, human terms. That is how you tell the difference
between true teachers or prophets or practitioners and mere
believers. What is their quality of existence? What do they
do? If you see people practicing some religious path and
they look happy, and they are healthy, and they are sane,
and they are also intelligent, and their experience is real
and also extraordinary, then naturally they are attractive
and there is value in listening to them and talking to them.
They must be doing something appropriate at some level if
they are in such a good state. But if you see a group of
crazy fanatical people, who call themselves true believers
but who have no clarity, no humanity, no love, no ability to
inspect and transcend themselves, then you can know that,
whatever they are doing, they are not practicing anything
more profound than mechanically feeling their own insides or
mumbling the usual belief in the Myth of Jesus. They are
performing a very modest physiological trick with their
religion, whereas we must associate with people who are
performing extraordinary physiological tricks with their
religion!

Anatomists can now identify many of the key physiological
factors in this affair of converting the degenerative
pattern of stress chemistry into the regenerative,
transformative, blissful chemistry of spiritual ecstasy. For
instance, the thymus gland, in the upper center of the
chest, is directly related to the subtle or astral heart, or
what has traditionally been called the “heart chakra.” The
thymus gland is a primary key to the whole bodys response to
stress. If the thymus is weak and contracted, we feel a
physical contraction in the heart and the solar plexus, even
throughout the entire body, and we are afraid. The depressed
thymus gland secretes a chemical message that triggers all
the rest of the glands of the body into a Life-negative,
contractive pattern. It triggers the total body to react to
stress, to attempt to survive, to reproduce endlessly, to
struggle for food, to continue to kill, and to animate the
distress of all the rest of our vital and elemental
motives.

This stress mechanism in the heart equips us with
negative, reactive emotions. Conventionally, therefore, we
associate the heart with emotion. Heart-stress triggers the
limbic system-the structures in the brain concerned with
emotion and visceral responses-and the other mechanisms of
the brain core that relate to stress. Then the body itself
receives all the signals that call for stressful reactions.
Thus, under stress, we are always ready with anger for
self-defense and attack, lust for reproduction, and cravings
of all kinds, and we are continually subject to sorrow and fear and guilt and
shame.

Since all of this is so, the thymus gland must become the
generative center of a new and Life-positive response to the
conditions of existence. You must get your heart to function
differently. You must awaken to the fourth or psychically
awakened stage of life, wherein the heart or deep psyche is
naturally free of the reactive patterns that cause the
stress-signalling biochemical secretions of the thymus gland
and all the other parts of the endocrine system. You must
realize the disposition of the heart that is in its native
state, free of the chronic tendency toward reactive
emotions. Then you can live in the Life-positive emotion of
love, or natural, whole bodily radiance. You accomplish or
realize this transformation in the fourth stage of life, so
that you can then enter into the fifth stage of life
equipped with a higher chemical
advantage that stimulates bodily blissfulness, interior or
astral forms of perception, psychic capabilities,
extrasensory perception, and the like.

We must create the conditions wherein to
realize our potential and stop fretting, wasting our
lives in stress. We are doing nothing but getting older.
Even if we are staying essentially healthy, we are still
just getting older. In other words, we are not evolving. But
if we are ever to Realize the Ultimate Divine Enlightenment
that is our true Destiny, then we must change our lives,
evolve, and become capable of the Translation of the very
body into the Light beyond all knowing.

Stress Chemistry and Whole Bodily Enlightenment
(ADAPTED) – Read full talk.