Love of the Two-Armed Form
by Bubba Free John
Chapters 1 – 4
pp. 1-59
Prologue – This Book Is My Confession of Sexual Wisdom, by Bubba Free John
Chapter 1 – I Am the Body of Love
Chapter 2 – The Taboo against the Superior Man
Chapter 3 – We Have Not Sinned in Eden, but We Have Been Born
Chapter 4 – The Transcendental Diet of Man
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Prologue: This Book Is My Confession of Sexual Wisdom
The matter of sexuality is so profoundly structured into our infantile and adolescent adaptations that it persists not only as our most obsessive interest as individuals but also as our most significant and consistent social or interpersonal problem. When I began to enter into relationships with devotees for the sake of their spiritual Awakening, it became more and more clear that no one who came to me was yet prepared for the true spiritual process, which is total bodily responsibility for Truth or Life itself. Rather, all were essentially trapped in obsessions and problematic orientations to the vital and, particularly, the sexual dimensions of experience. I knew it would be necessary for all first to come to a level of interpersonal and cultural maturity relative to the vital play of life before the spiritual process could be fully introduced into the adaptive play of their lives.
The method of my Teaching Work with devotees is not common, although there are many traditional or ancient precedents for it. It is not merely a subjective, internal, or even verbal activity, but a matter of intense, full, and total consideration of any specific area of experience, in living confrontation with others, until the obvious and Lawful or Divine form and practice of it becomes both clear and necessary.
I have compared this method to the higher yogic technique of “samyama,” described by Patanjali 2 in his Yoga Sutras. In brief, that yogic technique of “samyama” is a process of one-pointed but ultimately thoughtless concentration and exhaustive contemplation of a particular object, function, person, process, or condition, until the essence or ultimate obviousness of that subject is clear. Only in that case does the yogi enjoy native intimacy and understanding, or power, relative to that subject.
I have called my own Teaching method “consideration. ” Whenever a particular area of life, or experience, or spiritual and bodily Enlightenment has been given to me as a clearly necessary matter or subject of instruction for the sake of devotees, I have entered into “consideration” with them. Such “considerations” were never only or merely a matter of thinking and talking. They always involved a period in which individuals were permitted to live through the whole matter and to be tested to the point of change. Those who entered into any “consideration” with me were obliged to commit themselves to their own elaborate and concentrated play of life in those particular terms, until the whole matter was clarified and the Truth became clear in terms of the subject.
Such “considerations” required a willingness on the part of each individual to engage and explore many very ordinary areas of human experience, and also to understand and adapt to each new level of revealed responsibility as it was clarified, so that the “consideration” would develop as concrete change and growth (rather than as a mere “change of mind”). Only a “consideration” entered as such a concrete discipline can proceed all the way to its true end, which is right adaptation and freedom, or natural transcendence, relative to its functional subject.
All of the spiritual and practical Teaching of Bubba Free John is the product of such “considerations,” done in the processes of his own body-mind and in communicative and instructive play with devotees. And these “considerations” have been “samyama” in the highest sense, involving every aspect of body and mind, high and low, and resulting in both the highest intuition and the most practical grasp of the Lawful and Divine necessities of human existence.
This book is one of the products of the more than six initial years of trial and mutual society between myself and hundreds of aspirants to the radical spiritual Way that I Teach. During that period, we engaged in “considerations” relative to every area of our human possibility, from diet and sex to esoteric meditation and bodily Transfiguration by the Radiance of God. In the case of sex, we gave ourselves up to “consideration” of this whole matter, this whole immensity, in such a way that every aspect of the matter would be made clear, and every participant would be obliged to change his “act,” and to mature and grow beyond the subhuman tendencies of conventionally learned desire.
Promiscuity and random desire in general are typical of our contemporary and subhuman interest in sex. And such interest at first typified the common “wisdom” of those who came to me. As time went on, however, their “consideration” became more and more mature, responsibility increased, emotional insight became more typical, and sexual intimacy became a matter of loving commitment and choice, in relationship to the Radiant Divine Life within which all our functions appear and operate. Thus, our “consideration” became a meditation on the truly human, religious, higher psycho-physical, and regenerative dimensions of this most basic, fascinating, and agonizing motive of mankind.
This book attempts to make a full communication of the mature results of this whole experiment and “consideration.” It establishes responsible personal, moral or interpersonal, social, and higher cultural principles that do not represent arbitrary or negative views toward the subject itself. Sex is not itself in doubt in this Teaching. It is not presumed to be “sin,” or an experience that necessarily draws us away from God or Enlightenment. On the contrary, it is or must be realized to be a part of the self-sacrifice or ecstasy of Enlightened or Divine Life. No self-conscious and self-serving asceticism is communicated in this Teaching. Nor is there the embrace of any equally self-conscious and self-serving program of functional, social, or yogic exploitation of sex for some purpose that is itself an illusion. Rather, there is the assertion of right and Lawful or mutually sacrificial participation in full and human emotional-sexual adaptation, and the obligation to yield to the ultimately regenerative structural purpose of the sexual function in both men and women.
It is my intention that the material presented here represent a unique, complete, and exhaustive “consideration” and manual of instruction relative to the single subject of human sexuality. There is no way to go beyond the low level of adaptation we represent in our mere thinking, reacting, sexing, and eating without coming to the point of responsibility in action described here. The spiritual practice of life is not possible without prior and real maturity in emotional-sexual life. Therefore, this book is offered as a gift to all who suffer from the usual problems of sexuality and who also would realize both higher structural growth and spiritual transformation of their living.
Man is the “Two-Armed Form” of God. And regenerative, self-released practice of the sexual embrace is a process in which Man, in the form of individuals who are responsible in love, is sacrificed into Communion with the All-Pervading, Transcendental, Formless, and Infinite Divine Reality. The true and higher human function of sexual embrace is a form of Worship, or whole bodily surrender to the Divine. And such practice represents a positive adjunct to the total Way of Life that is religion and spirituality in the highest sense.
The sexual process described in this book is not even remotely like the self-indulgent infantile eroticism that provides the basic “problem” of most men and women. It is, rather, a form of higher human adaptation that functions as a means of psycho-physical regeneration and spiritual pleasure in the fullest bodily sense.
The truly human sexual process is itself a form of “consideration,” or “samyama” on the All-Pervading Divine Life. And it is that form of participation in the sexual function that permits us to transcend sex itself, and all forms of emotional and bodily reactivity, including conventional orgasm. Sexual communion with the Radiant Divine, via the love relationship with a human partner, is, when joined to a total life practice of personal, moral, higher psycho-physical, and radically intuitive disciplines, an expression of true religion, or sacrifice of self in God. True religion is total psycho-physical Communion and even bodily Sacrifice of self in the Radiant Divine Reality that Pervades and Transcends the World. Only when such Communion and Sacrifice typifies our emotional and sexual functions as well as our thinking, our moral disposition, and our personal habits in general, have we begun to Worship God, who is the Radiant Power and Transcendental Truth of all beings, things, and worlds of experience.
Sexual communion is the technical term used by Bubba Free John to describe the process whereby the emotional-sexual functions of the psycho-physical being are first yielded into Communion with the Current of All-Pervading Life and then sacrificed or transcended in perfect God-Commnion.
As a technical term, “sexual communion” would normally be italicized, according to literary convention. However, because Bubba uses it frequently throughout the book, often many times on a single page, such use of italic type would be a distraction rather than an aid to understanding. Therefore, we address the term here, in order to call your attention to its special, technical use, so that you may understand it within the context of Bubba Free John’s essays on the subject.
We wish to stress that sexual communion is not to be interpreted from any conventional point of view. Sexual communion is not merely a traditional yogic method for seeking one’s own higher psycho-physical awakening through exploitation of the sex fuction, nor is it a conventional means for seeking pleasurable release of genital tension. It is a natural practice, founded in positive adaptation to human emotional and sexual intimacy, and it is a sacrificial or devotional discipline, in which body, mind, self-sense, the loved one, and the sexual experience itself are surrendered in direct, present Communion with the All-Pervading Life that is God.
The process of sexual commnion is both self-transcending and sex-transcending. It develops in three stages. The first stage is the period of transitional struggle to move beyond conventional eroticism and degenerative orgasm and to become established in constant, regenerative Life-Communion during sexal play, without need of chronic orgasmic release. The second stage involves the relaxation of the strggle to avoid genital orgasm and the spontaneous “inversion” or conversion and transcendence of orgasm in the whole bodily thrill of Communion with the All-Pervading Current of Life. When this “inversion” of the orgasm stabilizes, the truly regenerative or Life-enhancing function of sexual communion begins.
The third stage of sexual communion involves the transcendence of the sex function as a necessary means for whole bodily Communion with Life. In this phase, sexual activity is spontaneonsly economized in the midst of a profound and constant enjoyment of spiritual Love-Communion with the Living God. As the devotee continues to mature spiritually, he passes through periods of motiveless celibacy, or unsought transcendence of the sex function. In some cases Love-Communion with God becomes so Full and constant that motiveless celibacy becomes permanent, and specific exercise of the sex function is no longer necessary or useful, except perhaps for the occasional purpose of producing a child. In other cases, sexual activity continues, but it is naturally economized by the devotee’s spontaneous, blissful bodily Communion with the Divine.
The Regenerative Principle: Liberation and Transformation of the Emotional and Sexual Connection to Life
The Song of the Heart of God, an epitome of the Bhagavad Gita 3 and the Way of Divine Ignorance, freely rendered by Bubba Free John
Listen to Me and hear Me. This is My Secret, the Supreme Word. I will tell you what will benefit you the most, because I love you. (18:64)
2. If you will surrender to Me, if you will become a sacrifice to Me, if you will constantly yield your attention to Me through love and service, then you will attain Me and come to Me. I promise you this, because I love you. (18:65)
3. Abandon the principle in all your concerns and all your strategies. Abandon every experience that may be attained as a result of desire and effort. Abandon your search for what may be gotten as a result of the various kinds of strategic action. Engage every action that is appropriate for one who loves Me, but simply perform every kind of action as a form of direct and present Communion with Me. Relax all of your anxiety. Be free of sorrow and fear. When you abide in Love-Communion with Me, the natural results of your various activities no longer have power to separate or distract you from Me. (18:66)
4. The soul that is born into the Realm of Nature, or the worlds of action and experience, advances from childhood to manhood, old age, and death, while identified with the same body-mind. Then the same soul attains another body-mind as a result. One who is truly intelligent is not troubled by all of that. (2:13)
5. All of that is simply the natural Play of Life, in which the two sides of every possibility come and go in cycles. Winter’s cold alternates with summer’s heat. Pain likewise follows every pleasure, since every appearance is followed by a disappearance. There is no permanent experience in the Realm of Nature. One who is truly perceptive simply allows all of this to be so, and he does not add his own distress to this inevitable round. (2:14)
6. Realization of the Eternal Destiny is only possible when a man has ceased to defeat himself by reacting to the Play of Nature. Such a one is steadied by his own understanding, seeing that the cycle of changes, both positive and negative, is inevitable in the world of experience. (2:15)
7. Those who see the Truth of things acknowledge that what Exists Eternally never changes. And whatever does not Exist Eternally only changes. (2:16)
8. Such seers of Truth also Realize that the entire Realm of Change, even the body-mind, and even the soul itself, is Pervaded, each and all, by That which Exists Eternally. (2:17)
9. I am the Eternally Existing, All-Pervading, Transcendental Divine Person, the true Self of all. And My Power of Creation, whereby individual beings are made to live and change, is Eternally Active as the Universal, All-Pervading Life-Energy of Nature. (8:3)
10. I am the Divine Person, Who Pervades even the Realm of Nature, and within Whom every individual being is arising. I am Realized by self-transcending love, wherein every action is engaged as a form of direct and present Communion with Me. (8:22)
11. Men and women who are without faith in this Way of Communion with Me do not Realize Me. Therefore, they remain associated with the Changing Realm of Nature, the round of psycho-physical experience, and the repetitive cycles of birth and change and death. (9:3)
12. Such fools already have Me in every human form, but they do not notice Me. They do not Realize Me in My Transcendental Nature, the Master of everything and the true Self of all manifest beings. (9:11)
13. But if anyone will live in Communion with Me, surrendering himself to Me in love, then even if his love is shown with nothing more than a leaf, or a flower, or a fruit, or water, I will always accept the gift, and Offer Myself in return. (9:26)
14. I am situated in the heart of all beings. (15:15)
15. The Divine Master of all beings is literally to be found at the heart, wherein the soul observes the changes of experience. Every experience rises and falls at the heart, spontaneously generated by Eternal Activity, the Universal Life-Energy, as if the soul were fastened helplessly to a perpetual motion machine. (18:61)
16. Therefore, do not surrender the heart to experience, as if you were in love with your own body-mind. Surrender the heart to Me, and to no other. I am the Divine Person, the Eternal Master, the Radiant One, Who Pervades the Machine of Nature as the Blissful Current of Life-Energy, and Who Transcends all experience as Infinite Consciousness, the true Self. If you will surrender your self-consciousness into My Transcendental Consciousness, and if you will yield your experience into My All-Pervading Current of Life, then I will also become an Offering to you. You will be Given the Gift of Perfect Peace, and an Eternal Domain for your heart. (18:62)
17. Now I have Revealed My Mystery to you. Consider it fully, and then choose what you will do. (18:63)
I Am the Body Is Love
The confession “I am the body” is love. Free feeling-attention or love, is the spontaneous response that is the sign of “hearing” the Teaching of Truth. It is love, the awakened response of the whole bodily being, that reintegrates all the latent and apparent functions and makes them a single sacrifice or Realization.
Lovers must also be devotees, or persons engaged in life as spiritual sacrifice. Devotees in the Way of Divine Ignorance are awakened from the ancient illusions and divisions and distinctions. They are awakened from the internal dualism of the bodily being, which is expressed as a conflict between left and right, inner and outer, up and down—and also projected as conflicts in the world, between man and woman, cult and cult, Heaven and Earth, State and State, and between all beings or conditions that may be separately identified and known. Such devotees are free of the ancient distinction between “Spirit” and “flesh,” “God” and “Man.” They are relieved of the psychology of exclusive inwardness and the dualisms of “soul” or “mind” versus the “body” and the “world.” True and awakened devotees no longer believe that the body and the world are “material,” but that they are each and at once a total spectrum of manifestation, spread between visibility and invisibility, swooning and changing in the Infinite Light of Life. Thus, true devotees of God, who is Truth, are confessed whole bodily to one another, to the whole world, and to the All-Pervading Radiance of Divine Life.
“I” is the whole body—whatever that is altogether. And “I” do not know what the whole body or any other condition is, no matter how much “I” know about it. “I” is not an independent point of view toward or relative to the body and all experience. “I” am the whole body and all experience. This is the confession of lovers who are also devotees.
This does not mean that we presume the body-“I” is our limit, our Condtion. No, for in radical intuition of the identity of “I” (which is simply the name or self-reference of the whole bodily being and not any independent inward part) there is the simultaneous Realization that not only the inward mentalization or feeling of “I”, but the whole and entire bodily being, the true identity of “I”, is all only a modification of the Transcendental Current and Radiance that is the Support and Consciousness of the body-“I” and all other conditions that are arising as experience or knowledge.
Therefore, our confession is the sign of Liberation in Truth. “I” is the whole and entire bodily being. And “I am the body” is not the confession of mortality, self-possession, “fleshy” self-indulgence, and fear. “I am the body” is love. It is Divine Communion, or surrender to Life. This confession is the sign of true devotees, who are presently happy and free, rather than eternally troubled and seekng release by every means. This confession is the mind of those who transcend themselves through love, rather than defeat themselves through both self-indulgent and ascetic strategies.
The Bodily Confession of the Human Self, or the Conversion of Sexuality to the Law of the Heart
I is the whole and entire bodily being. But “I,” even as the confession and harmony of the whole bodily being, is not the Truth. The Truth of “I”, or the whole bodily being, and of the world and all relations, is the prior or Real and Divine Condition of all conditions. That Condition is Realized through functional, esoteric, and total psycho-physical sacrifice, or love. Thus, true bodily and sexual existence and confession is Communion with the Real Condion at Infinity, which is All-Pervading Life-Radiance and Transcendental Ignorance, or Unqualified Consciousness.
Sexual communion is, thus, at first a process of transcending the dualism, dilemma, and conflict of mind versus body. This is done through whole body confession: ” ‘I’ is the body.” Once this free disposition is stabilized in understanding and action, the necessary process is the one of transcending the whole body, the psycho-physical being, the body-mind, or defined existence itself. The confession ” ‘I’ is the body” is love, or sacrifice of the independent self-body into the Infinite. Such is the Law.
This is the foundation Principle of the specific and higher human process of sexual communion, which is the primary subject of this book, and it is also the foundation Principle of the whole of life, which is the general subject of this book. Sex is not properly an end in itself, but a unifying, ecstatic process that ultimately transcends itself in the Divine. First, subjectivity is sacrificed to (confessed as) the whole bodily being, and then the whole bodily being is sacrificed, through Divine Communion, or ecstatic love, into the Infinite, Prior, and Real Condition.
Therefore, there are two stages or aspects contained in every moment of sexual relationship and every occasion of sexual communion. And these two dimensions of the true sexual process simply duplicate the two ultimate dimensions of the true and radical spiritual process as a whole.
The first dimension is that of confession, incarnation, or communication of the total and bodily identity of our human individuality. That confession or gesture of incarnation is expressed in the realization that “I” is not within and independent of the whole body (physical, vital, sexual, emotional, mental, etheric, psychic, astral, supramental, and egoic), but indeed is identical to the whole and entire body. “I” must be realized to be identical to incarnation and relationship rather than independent subjectivity and chronic separativeness and inwardness. This true “confession” is made not by the mere conceptual mind but by the whole body (or bodily being), in the form of bodily self-sacrifice, which is relational love, or free and unobstructed feeling-attention, communicated to Infinity (or to the Infinite degree) via all functions, in all relations, under all conditions. This transformed activity is what is meant by “hearing” (rather than merely listening to and conceiving) the Teaching of the Spiritual Master.
This whole bodily and active confession is the beginning of human moral and spiritual transformation. But it is not an end in itself. The manifest bodily being is not itself Truth or true Destiny. Not even the so-called “higher” parts of Man are Truth or eternally true. Truth is our Condition, and that Condition is our true and ultimate Destiny—the Destiny, therefore, of the whole bodily being. “I” is not within and apart. “I” is the whole bodily being itself, as whatever total form it appears in any moment. But Destiny or Truth is not the psycho-physical and experiential body itself, or the world itself, high or low. Rather, the Destiny of the whole bodily being is to be a sacrifice into its Condition or Truth.
Therefore, the second dimension of sexual communion and the radical spiritual process in general is the Realization of the sacrifice of “I” (as the whole bodily being) into the prior or Divine Condition of all arising conditions.
In practice, the first dimension of the process is realized through the full exercise of free, unobstructed, non-reactive feeling-attention, or loving and total or whole bodily service to one’s lover—not only on the occasions of sexual embrace, but during every moment of the relationship itself. The second dimension of the process is realized in the practical conversion of genital energy and orgasm into a fully diffused whole body ecstasy, radiant and relaxed as love, or unqualified Feeling, to Infinity.
Because there are two great and essentially simultaneous dimensions to this “consideration” and process of sexual communion, the whole affair of instruction and practice must be engaged in two stages, in order that adaptation be realized in a fully integrated and conscious manner. Therefore, the material in this book will be presented in two parts. The first pertains especially to the matters of vital-physical and emotional-sexual adaptation, the structure and process of self-possession, and transcendence of the ambivalent disposition, characterized alternately by motives of dependence and independence, in its warfare with the true responsibility of love, or free feeling-attention. The second part of this sequence of study and practice pertains to the specific process of whole bodily conservation and conversion of the big-energetic and chemical superfluity stimulated through sexual polarization and genital sexual intercourse.
God Is the Transcendental Consciousness and Radiant Life That Pervades the Body, the Mind, and the World
The entire world, and every living individual, is pervaded by a Transcendental Consciousness and Radiant Energy that is the single Identity and Ultimate Source, Sustainer, Mover, Transformer, and Destiny of every thing and every one. That is God, the Divine, the Real, the All-Pervading, Transcendental, Bliss-Full Ignorance-Radiance.
The individual body-mind is a temporary and dependent extension, reflection, and modification of the Very and Living Divine. The individual does not in any way create or sustain itself, or determine its ultimate Destiny. The individual is wholly and always presently dependent on the Divine, which is alive as all beings. Only cooperative, conscious, and self-released participation in the Divine by the individual body-mind permits the Divine to Sustain and Determine a benign or ultimately positive and transforming individual life-cycle, and to draw the individual into the Destiny that is Divine. But if the individual recoils from the Divine Life and Identity, then the life-cycle degenerates, and reactive experiential destinies bind the individual to illusions, until he is Awakened from self to God.
The Divine as All-Pervading Radiance spontaneously individuates as the bodily form, and pervades that form as Life, whereas the Divine as Transcendent Ignorance eternally transcends all forms as Unqualified Consciousness. The Life-Radiance is expressed, or spontaneously modified, not only as the bodily form, but also as its states of feeling and mentality. The range of experiential states—bodily, vital, emotional, and mental, as well as unconscious, subconscious, conscious, and superconscious—is broad and complex, ordinary and extraordinary. But no experiential state, however high in the structural scheme of our born possibilities, is itself the Realization of the prior Divine Condition or Absolute Truth of the body-mind. And unless that Condition and Truth is Realized in the present moment of experiencing, experience itself, no matter how extraordinary, is self-binding, deluding, degenerative, and an instrument of separation from the Bliss of God.
Individual existence in a world is a riddle and a torment, unless it may be established in right Relationship to the Radiant Reality that is its Life, or Energy, and in right Identity with the Transcendental Ignorance, or Unqualified Consciousness, that is its very Self. And the Way in which we may live in such right Relationship and Identity with the Divine Reality, free of fear and illusion, is in conversion, or the “turnabout” of every aspect of the body-mind, from self-possession to Ecstatic God-Communion.
All the religious and spiritual “Ways” that have been communicated among men are historical gestures toward the self-sacrificial or Ecstatic Communion of the individual with the One and Ultimate Divine Reality. The Way of Divine Ignorance is simply a most radical, summary, and completely considered form of this necessary obligation of Man.
Communion with the Radiant and Transcendental Divine is ecstatic sacrifice of the whole and entire body-mind into the Radiant Energy that pervades it and the Unqualified Consciousness with which it is Identical. And the process of such Communion assumes a particular character in the case of the human individual, because the structure that must yield into the Divine is constructed or fabricated according to a specific complex design.
Clearly, the common characteristics of human individuals are bodily, vital, emotional, and mental. Therefore, the most rudimentary form of Divine Communion is the intuitive turning of all bodily, vital, emotional, and mental functions, conditions, experiences, and relations into forms of functional surrender to the Radiant Divine Life. Such is the whole bodily religious obligation presumed in the Way of Divine Ignorance by members of The Free Communion Church. In that process, the Living Power of God is permitted to pervade, enliven, sustain, transform, and Awaken the entire bodily being. And the primary instrument of that process is the whole bodily disposition of ecstatic or self-releasing sacrifice into the Divine. That disposition is the one of total, profound, and free feeling-attention, or relaxation of the entire body-mind into the All-Pervading Life through love. The means of this sacrifice includes devotional practices, forms of personal functional discipline of a wholly regenerative kind, and a continuous moral orientation to others through heartfelt service and clear-minded intelligence.
As the individual matures in Communion with the Living and Transcendental Divine, the unique and specific design of his own structural condition becomes more and more apparent. Therefore, the process of Sacrifice in God begins to take on more of the “esoteric” form of a highly sophisticated yogic exercise. And growth in this Way begins to include higher psycho-physical awakening to the structural design by which the individual body-mind mediates the Radiant Energy and Unqualified Consciousness of the Divine.
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Human energy must be radiated, through free feeling attention (in love, or service), in all relations under all conditions, to Infinity. Otherwise, that energy will accumulate or define itself in our finite shape and demand eliminative release. Therefore, both our energy and our responsibility will increase over time. Ultimately, we are obliged to serve all beings with the total life of feeling-attention and to the degree of Infinity.
The Taboo against the Superior Man
Dracula and Frankenstein: The Ancient Superior Man as Scapegoat for the Modern Inferior Man
The roots of human inversion and failure are in the childhood of Man, and in the solutions to the problems of life that the subhuman or growing individual creates in the conceived world of his childhood. The child is dependent and vulnerable, surrounded by great natural forces and parental human forces. He is weak, unadapted, without functional facility and power, and without conceptual and intuitional understanding of his experience or his ultimate situation. Thus, to the degree that he makes solutions to the dilemmas he finds in the failures of what he depends on to protect and fulfill him, the child inverts within himself and resorts exclusively or negatively to himself. The unrelieved fears of childhood dependency and vulnerability leave the childhood vision of the world intact. Thus, unless higher adaptation is made possible through the help of mature others and through initiation into higher human wisdom, the individual remains more or less childish throughout his entire life.
This is generally the case, and, therefore, most people remain possessed by an inverted or self-possessed, subjectively oriented disposition, in which functional and bodily relations with the human and natural dimensions of the world are at best complicated. The truly human obligation is for relational adaptation. But the childish solution, created wherever fear dominates the force of adaptation, is toward inversion and the pleasures that may be realized within or on one’s person, both subjectively and bodily.
The childish view of the world is the vision of vulnerable dependency. It is not the heroic or enlightened vision of the mature individual. Just so, the childish or subhuman vision of life is also represented in various forms of inverted belief or “knowledge” passed on from generation to generation. Such persuasions include the ideas of “Evil,” the “Devil,” and the “Divine” taboos against the human attainment of higher wisdom and of ecstasy (or self-release) through relational sexual love.
Higher human cultural initiation and adaptation are the means whereby individuals and societies may move beyond the inverted visions and solutions of childhood and into the higher functional responsibilities of truly human maturity. Such cultural influences are a human necessity, although, for the most part, modern societies tend to be bereft of and even antagonistic toward such influences. Industrial civilizations acquire greater and greater mechanical facility in relation to the physical universe, and, therefore, must likewise give evidence of mature responsibility for the personal and universal display of natural forces. But these same societies also continue to carry the childish and timid and also the adolescent and casually rebellious visions and solutions to life. Therefore, industrial societies tend to develop individuals who are sophisticated in their general familiarity and exploitation of the natural world, but who are inherently indisposed toward responsibility for natural forces (either in themselves or in the world).
This spell of childish and subhuman persuasions must be broken if there is to be a future, and necessarily mature, humanity. This means that individuals must be instructed, initiated, and obliged to adapt to the higher human wisdom and its ways. They must be awakened from the childhood visions of fearful dependency, and the adolescent ways of egocentric exploitation of independent and private experience. My Work in the world is, at base, an initiatory influence of this kind.
The superior or mature human being must become the goal of our adaptation and, thus, of all the educational influences we promote. True, tested, human and spiritual wisdom must be represented by the religious, spiritual, and even secular institutions of our common culture. Therefore, we must purify ourselves, our fellows, and our institutions, so that we are free of the vision of childishness. We must oblige one another to a new and higher level of adaptation or evolution.
“Count Dracula” 4 and “Doctor Frankenstein” 5 are modern literary examples of how the childish vision of life may be superimposed on the possibilities of true and mature humanity. Each of these archetypal characters is made to appear evil, necessarily doomed by his primal “sin. ” Thus, each must die or fail in order to satisfy the childish vision of the way the world works.
“Doctor Frankenstein” is simply our human obligation to accept responsibility for our individual lives, the life process, the Life-Force, the bodily structures, and the natural domain. But he and his “monster” are made to suffer and fail, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, as if the presumption of such responsibility were an offense rather than a natural and sacred obligation.
Just so, “Count Dracula” is simply our human obligation to accept responsibility for the sexual process and the higher, truly human, or ecstatic and regenerative purpose of both sexuality and the living mechanisms of personal life. But he is made to appear as the incarnarion of Evil, the Devil, the Anti-Christ, so that he must be suppressed and destroyed.
The problem is that “Doctor Frankenstein” and “Count Dracula” are each even today, in the person of each human individual suppressed, mutilated, and made a scapegoat through the lies of childish, irresponsible, and subhuman views of life. The literary characters and stories themselves belong only to the realm of amusing and terrifying fairy tales. But the significance of these tales is in the neurosis of modern human societies, which still support and to a degree depend upon the subhuman masses, controlled by antisexual taboos and manipulated by fears of responsibility for great matters in general. But if the human race is not permitted to rise up in the scale of evolution, the masses and their parental controllers will eventually destroy one another.
The priestly influences of official subhuman society are found in a hierarchy, beginning with the super-parental influences of conventional religion, official science, and the unresponsive political powers of the State. These high priests are then served locally by communcations media and educational institutions, on down to our personal Mom and Dad. Such agents are parental and negative influences to the degree they do not responsibly communicate, permit, and even oblige the general population toward responsible free adaptation to higher and mature human levels of functional life. Where people are not obliged toward incarnation of the superior man, then “everyman” makes a chaos of absurdity out of the human world.
Thus, “Count Dracula” and “Doctor Frankenstein,” along with the “Devil,” and “God,” and “Jesus,” and all the other realities that have been fictionalized and degraded by the irresponsible and childish visions of mankind, must be liberated in our minds and from our minds. The Wisdom of the transcendentally Awakened Agents of the Real must somehow be made effective as the common Principle of human societies.
In the traditions of older societies there is commonly a convention or taboo that requires women to avoid the general company of men, and the intimate company of their husbands, during the monthly menstrual flow. The foundation of this requirement is the observation that, during the time of her periodic flow (and even during a number of days preceding it), the woman is out of balance in her energy and chemistry, as well as her emotions, her general physical state, and in her relationship to sexuality. It was felt that, in the case of most ordinary people, the force of the male could not equal or balance the female’s force at that time and, since that was so, he must avoid the woman during certain of her critical days, or else he would be in danger of losing his own vital strength through association with her.
This notion was based on profound sensitivity to the process of sexual association during the woman’s periodic flow. It was observed that the natural sympathy and effort of desire on the part of the male always moved to establish an equal or balancing intensity relative to the female. But this effort needed to go beyond equality during the menstrual time, and thus proved to be enervating to the male, creating an imbalance in his own case.
The regulation of contact between the sexes established by this principle was not at all antisexual, but a purely practical expression of sexual wisdom. It was intended to preserve harmony and pleasure between the sexes. However, in more recent, complex societies, encompassed by “civilized” demands on the individual, certain antisexual taboos and conventions have been made to proliferate in our lives and obstruct our sensitivity to natural bodily processes. At the present time, particularly in industrial Western societies, the prohibition against social and sexual contact between the sexes during the woman’s flow is barely perceived. But the general antisexual taboo is pervasive in its force.
In the progress of Western societies that led to the present state of affairs, men and women have moved from sexual sensitivity, and a valuation of both the relations and the relative independence of the sexes, to sexual insensitivity, or the general inability to inspect and be responsible for and engage the sexual process with free delight. Ths loss or suppression of sexual sensitivity has also been accompanied by a general devaluation of sexual relations (which came to be regarded more or less as “sin,” or at best as a vulgar personal indulgence) as well as a devaluation of the relatively independent character and way of life that pertains to each sex. As a result, we have produced a society where the norm is casual relations (both social and sexual) between the sexes, an almost total absence of understanding of the higher or uniquely human function of sex, a persistent sense of the wrongness or vulgarity of sex in principle, an equally persistent obsession with personal or self-oriented sexual exploitation (“unseen” by the parentlike enforcers of sexual taboos), and a general tendency toward reversal of sexual roles (in either heterosexual or homosexual relations) as well as an androgynous equalization of the sexes in general (without the realization of higher and bodily evolution and Enlightenment, which is the necessary pre-Condition for the transcendence of sexual polarization and playful differentiation in the human world).
Clearly, we must realize a responsible level of awareness of human sexuality, free of the antisexual bias. However, we must likewise awaken to an understanding of the higher and often esoteric functions of the sexual mechanism (or the generalized bodily mechanism touched upon by our sexual practice). Such responsibilities do not characterize childish people or subhuman societies, but practical wisdom of this kind has been exhibited by superior men and women and by higher human cultures since ancient times.
The present book is an effort to help this full transition in our personal understanding of human sexuality. In the process, we must awaken from our gothic fears of sexuality, and our religious disinclination toward bodily existence.
The “Devil” is nothing more than the Divine Reality in its Function as the Destroyer and ultimate Destiny of the sacrifice of all beings and worlds. He is “Siva,” the image of the Divine Person carrying a trident. 6 The free religious or spiritually awakened individual is not only himself restored to God, but his higher understanding restores aspects of God or the Godhead to Itself. When “sin” is forgiven, or when self is purified of its separative motivations, what was previously the “Devil’s work” (by virtue of egoic, fearful, and self-possessed fascination) becomes a matter of ordinary responsibility and sacrifice.
In modern literature, one of the most potent Satanic images is that of Count Dracula, in the novel by Bram Stoker. But the pervasive evil of this character and his deeds is itself only an expression of an inverted sense of the sexual function in Man. And, curiously, the story itself represents a cultural memory of the whole taboo against the association between the sexes during the menstrual flow of the female.
In earlier times and places, men generally avoided social and sexual contact with women during the days of the menses. However, those who were mature and representative of the higher human type were often initiated by the elders into methods for transforming various “negative” sexual indications into positive and regenerative means. Such methods are reflected in the descriptions of sexual communion in this book. Among such methods or approaches was one regarding contact with a woman during her monthly flow. The man who was truly prepared could embrace a woman during the time of menses and not only avoid enervating imbalance but actually benefit from the increased available force of the female (or the feminine, relatively passive, or “negative” and “left-sided” 7 pole in the polarized play of sex).
Male individuals trained in the greater arts and sacrificial responsibilities of sex knew not only how to compensate for and benefit by social and sexual relations during the menses of women and wife, but also how to use the force of the female in general, for regenerative purposes in the male body. And initiated females likewise knew how to use the force of the male for regenerative purposes in the female body. This yoga was common to certain classes in China, India, and elsewhere in more ancient times. In general, it was most often men who were trained in these methods, but there were frequent cases of women who were also trained in the positive regenerative sexual association with men. Whether ideal sex relations were considered to be polygamous or monogamous, the regenerative or Life-conservative practices related to sexuality were common throughout the ancient world.
In modern times, the positive, regenerative, higher, and esoteric approach to sexual relations and the sexual mechanism has become obstructed by dualistic and childishly inverted views of human life. The war of “flesh” and “spirit” has brought the world of mankind close to oblivion, and the last quarter of the twentieth century is perhaps going to be the ultimate test of our capacity to liberate ourselves from this profound lie and disturbance. The self-divided man is one in whom the psycho-physiological mechanisms of the left and right sides of brain and body are opposed to one another rather than polarized toward one another. Such a one originates Gods and Devils, Worlds and Heavens and Hells from his Own body-mind, and he lives his sexual character, male or female, as a principle of conflict with others and of independent satisfaction of self.
Thus, Count Dracula, the “Devil,” is the product of our antisexual, inverted, self-divided psychology. In him, the ancient superior man is made to wear the guise of Evil, and our conventional psyche rejects him and all that he represents to us, both consciously and unconsciously. But if we understand ourselves and cease to be self-divided, antisexual, alternately at war with the body and with “Heaven,” then we may also see the superior and even Divine qualities of Man underneath the superimposed vulgarities of Dracula.
Dracula—apart from the disgusting and negative disguise given him by the modern mind—is simply an ancient type of the superior man. He is a man who is free to embrace a woman during her time of menstrual imbalance, or greater force. He appears in the form of a bat—a blackened or evil inversion of a bird, a dove, the mind or “soul” of Man. He embraces his lover with passionate intent, as a life and death matter—and mysteriously, suddenly, like the Holy Spirit descending on the future mother of an Incarnation of Truth. But he is made to kill, rather than to give and to receive Life in the positive sense. He seeks the vulnerable place of life and blood, at the throat, in the manner of an animal. But, truly, this is only an inverted acknowledgment of the yogic passageway between the trunk and the brain, and the necessity for the sexual force and the higher blood chemistry to rise to the brain and to the entire body of the regenerated individual. The white canine teeth, the eye teeth of Dracula, penetrate the vulnerable throat of his lover, again in animal fashion, but symbolizing in an inverted way the act of sexual intercourse. The pervasive presence of blood, the association of penetration or sexual intercourse with blood, is a sign of the ancient yogic practice of coupling during the menses. Dracula’s own bloody mouth with white phallic teeth exposed, duplicates the image of the sexual scene, while also symbolizing his own harmonization of opposites within himself, thus giving him the power of regeneration or relative immortality. And Dracula is given life every time he enters into embrace so that he even becomes perfectly regenerated, or immortal, as long as he continues his habit of sexual love. All the rest of the story is a pseudo-Christian accretion that mainly serves the whole notion of anti-sex and anti-Life.
Modern man, in the conventional guise of “Everyman,” fears the idea of taking responsibility for his own life, and the Process of Life itself, as it is altogether and everywhere displayed. Thus, another Gothic tale, by Mary Shelley, about the Frankenstein monster, manages to express the same psychology that inverts the ancient superior man into the “Monster,” Dracula. Doctor Frankenstein, in the ancient manner, takes bold responsibility for life, and, by acquiring the lightning power, or Life-Force, of a storm, enlivens a corpse. But Doctor Frankenstein is made monstrous, along with his “Monster,” by the inverted, antisexual and childish, subhuman mind of modern Man.
Truly, we must awaken to the ancient responsibility for sex and all the ordinary powers of Life in our own bodies. We must do this fearlessly, and return to the culture of a superior humanity, organized via a moral and esoteric order of physical and superphysical sacrifices of the individual. We must again accept our responsibility for life and death, and fearlessly embrace the bodily process of our existence, so that we may live humanly, and so that we may Realize the true Destiny of Man, which only comes through literal sacrifice and Translation of the whole and entire and individual body-mind into the All-Pervading and Transcendental Divine Radiance wherein we all appear.
In the Old Testament it is suggested that Man exercise dominion over beasts and growing things. This is an acknowledgment that Man, in the form of every human individual, is not only functionally or structurally more and greater than anything else in the natural or elemental world, but that his happiness and even his survival depend on his acceptance of responsibiliry for everything in himself that is common to the rest of the natural world.
Thus, it is not merely that he is naturally superior to cattle, snakes, vegetables, and the elements, and, therefore, should force all such things into degraded submission to his own aggressive and stupid will to eat and use and do everything, and wait for understanding to come in the future, while the Cosmic Parent meanwhile keeps everything in order. Rather, the superiority of Man is in his responsibility to acknowledge that he is not merely a natural or vital creature, like the rest of the natural world. Man is structurally more and greater than the vital processes, and, therefore, he must understand, and accept responsibility for a right and Lawful relationship to what is merely vital, in himself as well as in the world.
If the individual does not accept active responsibility for his vital-physical and emotional-sexual functions, then he is reduced to these. And if he is not responsible for these functions in his own case, he will inevitably deal irresponsibly and destructively with all vital creatures and the natural domain itself.
Our science, technology, politics, and social experience bear this out. Mankind is, at this stage, generally still in the subhuman levels of adaptation, wherein responsibility for the vital functions and the vital domain is largely absent, because men and women have not aufficiently differentiated themselves from a sense of exclusive identity with the vital and elemental dimensions of themselves and the world. It is not that we must, as religious and spiritual cultists generally suggest, identify exclusively with what is not at all vital and elemental. Such would lead us into subjectivist illusions. However, we must realize that we are structurally more and greater than what is merely vital and elemental, even while we also realize that what is vital and elemental is apart of us, and the very part for which we must assume immediate and intelligent responsibility.
In our subhuman and childish condition, more or less exclusively identified with vital and physical experience, we tend to fear and avoid responsibility for the lower aspects of experience and of the world itself. Hence, we “play” with everything, but we cannot fully control our effects. We slaughter, exploit, poison, and spoil. We achieve power over great natural forces in the environment, but we cannot be the loving master of sex, or population, or industrial wastes, or international politics. Therefore, we are a destructive influence in the natural world, where beasts and elements consistently demonstrate an instinctual economy and harmony that puts our human vulgarities to shame.
The old orders of religion are the cults of this same childish irresponsibility. They support fear, dependence, and subhuman levels of adaptation and awareness. They do not do this altogether intentionally, but they do so effectively, by making consolation, mythical belief, child-parent imagery, and personal survival the core of the religious way, rather than self-sacrifice, radical spiritual intelligence, and higher adaptation.
Thus, higher or superior Man is present in this world only in the case of the rare individual, rather than in the form of the human world as a whole. And such an uncommon individual is regarded suspiciously by all. The responsibilities and the Vision he presumes make him appear like a “mad scientist” or an “evil” man of mysterious powers, in league with the “Devil.” All of this because the usual man refuses to be responsible for all that he must master if he is to be truly human and pass on to his Divine Destiny.
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Sexual taboos and the generalized sense that antisexual views and habits are humanly and even cosmically obligatory and correct are passed on from generation to generation by many means. The most influential means are those of the withholding of bodily and sexual communications. We only show and tell our children what we ourselves are not afraid to be and know. The rest is hidden behind the withholding of bodily and emotional intimacy as well as the absence of positive verbal communication about the whole affair of incarnate human experience, including sexuality.
The entire social and cultural game of antisexual, “spirit against flesh” education is so monstrous, so opposed to incarnate happiness and human responsibility, as well as the ultimate transcendental sacrifice of the individual body-mind though moral and spiritual processes, that it must be considered the primary social and even philosophical issue of our time.
We must all awaken from our loveless one-sidedness. The deluded religious and spiritual cultists are perpetually at war with the bodily life, choosing the brain-mind as if it were the Infinite. And the equally deluded anti-religionists, salt-of-the-earth political fanatics, and worldly humanistic social mechanics or scientific technocrats are perpetually at war with the higher, psychic, and spiritual dimensions of human experience.
Children of parents of the “spirit” are deprived of the energy of their incarnation, fastened to inward nonsense and the vision of a self-divided mortality that has no pleasure except away from here. And children of parents of the “flesh” are deprived of the powers of higher adaptation, fastened to cycles of endless work and reproduction, and the vision of utopian solutions that only serve those who happen to be alive when the great Future State comes.
We must awaken and adapt to the conditions of the whole and entire body-mind, and to the Way of truly human existence, which is made through personal, moral, and higher mental or spiritual sacrifice, or love. Then we will not only live in Truth, but we will withhold nothing from our children, who must always be permitted a complete bodily understanding that corresponds to their level of functional awareness, and who must be included in a culture of truly human adaptation, in which not exploitation but gradual responsibility is the key to human growth.
We Have Not Sinned in Eden, but We Have Been Born
The play of sex is simply a special version of the play of whole body feeling-attention that should characterize all human activity. There is no justification for assigning any unique negative evaluation to the sexual potential of the bodily being any more than to breathing, digestion, or any other potential. Indeed, if we do conceive of sexuality in problematic terms, via attitudes of guilt, self-consciousness, and the like, a suppressive contraction appears in that function and affects not only our sexuality but the whole form and state of the body, emotion, and mind. There must be a characteristically positive and pleasurable attitude relative to all the functional possibilities of the whole body. And we must be naturally and stably capable of unobstructed whole body feeling-attention via the rhythmic relational play of all our functions.
Therefore, the sexual function is right, pleasurable, and free in principle—and it must, on that account, have a right or appropriate and Lawful use. That is the use described in this book. It is sexual communion, founded in a full, present, and ongoing relational response rather than any subjective, self-possessed, reactive mental or emotional obsessiveness. It is sexual relationship, founded in the sacrifice of subjectivity.
The Right Religious, Spiritual, and Human Discipline of the Sexual Function
The advocates of the various spiritual traditions commonly recommend that the sex impulse be controlled. Indeed, they most often warn that if the sex impulse is not controlled, there is no way to progress by any or all of one’s other spiritual or life practices. But what is “control” of the sex impulse? Is it merely to do without sexual intercourse? If it is, then the dead, the impotent, and the naturally uninterested would be the first if not the only ones to realize the Truth and the One Life.
The strategy of celibacy is only factual nonperformance of genital sexual acts. Even if there is also restraint of hidden thoughts and feelings of sexual desire as well as casual speech about sexual matters, the “control” of the sex impulse thus established is merely nonperformance. Nonperformance of the sexual act is not in itself control of the sex impulse in the sense that makes the difference in a life of religious and spiritual discipline. Rather, true control means nothing more nor less than responsibility for the sexual function, and, therefore, right, regenerative, and self-transcending participation in sexual activity rather than self-possessed and degenerative exploitation of the urge of the genitals.
The call to “control,” or responsibility for the sexual function, is a call to Man—so that he may turn from “sin” (or missing the mark through misdirected intention of motion) to “righteousness” (or right intention of the functional motion of living existence). Therefore, we must learn and practice right or Lawful (sacrificial) application of the whole body to all its functional obligations and possibilities. The Law of human life is conscious sacrifice, or love, as a discipline of the whole bodily being or the totality of our functions, in all relations, under all conditions. We are not obliged to sacrifice what is not one with us. We are obliged to be sacrifice. And the sacrifice of the whole body (elemental physical, etheric or living emotional, mental, supermental, and egoic) is not realized by killing any or all of its parts, but by coordination of all the parts and functions into the single radiance and release that is love in all relations, under all conditions. And love is unobstructed feeling-attention. It is human relational intensity—free of the recoil of self-possession or self-meditation, reactive or negative emotions, and absorption in the subjective stream of thoughts and images.
Our Lawful obligation in Truth is to be love as the whole body—to be unobstructed feeling-attention, or radiant happiness, in all our relations, via all our functions, under all conditions, from birth to death and beyond.
The Way whereby this Lawful obligation becomes realizable by ordinarily adapted human beings has been described as the Way of Divine Ignorance in The Enlightenment of the Whole Body, The Paradox of Instruction, and other books. The present book is intended to describe the manner of right use or participation in the play of sexuality.
Many advocates speak of this matter in prudish and problematic terms. They see all sin and violence inside their underwear. Such people are in a dilemma relative to this bodily appearance whereby we are communicated to one another. They are striving to go elsewhere by identifying with the subjective part and denying or separating from the living and elemental aspect of the whole body. Such an inclination is a form of conflict, in which the natural polar opposites at play in all worlds and bodies are felt to be antagonists—light versus darkness, “God” versus “Devil,” male versus female.
In Truth, we are not the mind to a greater degree than we are the flesh. “I” is the whole body, high and low, within and without. There is no separable inwardness. The whole body is obliged to be a sacrifice to Infinity—to be Radiance without a center.
Therefore, the true Way is not founded on the conflicts created by the inwardness of experience or knowledge. Rather, it is founded on the freedom of absolute, unqualified, prior, and present Ignorance. No matter what arises as experience and presumption founded on experience, “I” do not know what even a single thing is. Existence is not inspected, nor is it ultimately defined. We have no option within. We are obliged to exist as Mystery and to be and act free of all inwardness, all subjectivity, the whole egoic illusion or recoil into meditation on the notion of independent, defined existence or consciousness, its finite destiny, and its numberless desires or hopes. The argument of the Teaching of Truth is communicated to us in our problematic self-possession. And that Teaching obliges us to fulfill the Law—to be free of self and subjectivity, and to be love, free of qualification by any reaction, and expressed through all functions. The whole body must be a perfect sacrifice to Infinity, or else we only forever create an illusory destiny, in mental and physical realms, until Awakening comes.
The advocates of the avoidance of sexuality imagine the sexual functon to be unique relative to the rest of the body. They think it especially “evil” in comparison to other functions. But it is only a particular functional version of the same life process that is elsewhere particularized as breathing, walking, eating, sleeping, feeling, and so forth. If there is a necessity to avoid the sex function, then all the other functions, including the inwardness of higher mind and psyche, must likewise be abandoned. All functions are expressions of the same life. Therefore, if this logic holds, all functions must be abandoned as the same evil. And such, indeed, is the extreme ascetic view at the root of conventional spiritual advocacy.
But this view is obviously false. When its logic is followed to the end, it demands an absurd profession. In Truth, the whole body stands in Light. It is not in any part condemned or evil. It is simply that it is obliged by a single Law, which is love, or self-transcendence, in presumption and in practice.
Under the Law, no functional dimension of the whole body is false or evil in principle. Therefore, guilt is only a superficial and childish reaction, founded in the primal fear at the root of our birth. We have not sinned in Eden, but we have been born. Our ultimate fault is not any act within the world, but the primal act or presumption of independent, separate, and separative consciousness—the attitude and strategy of Narcissus. Our ultimate healing and happiness is not in outward or cosmic forgiveness for outward or cosmic actions. No amount of granted forgiveness or personal effort can work perfect purification or release from the effects of our actions and presumptions. We must be perfectly released, and thus priorly and radically free of the principle that underlies our actions, which is the egoic presumption, the independent “I,” and the fear of vulnerability and death. If we are not free of the illusion of confinement to a separate and mutable existence, then we will miss the mark and be obsessed in our dilemmas forever.
The Wisdom of the Way of Divine Ignorance is the Awakening from separation, metaphysical independence, dilemma, doubt, guilt, anger, sorrow, fear, and the strategies of fear. It is the Awakening from the illusions of subjectivity, of knowledge, of separate experience, unique consciousness, and the powers of the independent self. It is not annihilation or persuasion toward the sleep of salt-of-the-earth collectivism. It is Bliss. It is love and transcendental Awareness. It is an entire life of whole body sacrifice, radiant as love to Infinity, wherein the born being is translated from this dream of parts and persons into the Divine Domain beyond all knowing.
What then is “control of the sex impulse”? It is whole body responsibility, as love, in relationship to a true lover (one to whom one is intimately committed in time and space) and in Communion with the Radiant Life of God. It is the same as love under any functional conditions. Love is “conscious exercise” 8 of the body-mind, in all relations and under all conditions. And such love is the Lawful establishment of the whole body in a right, living, regenerative, or radiant functional order.
The right play of genital sexuality is occasional—however frequent. That is, it is not continuous, as is the breath or heartbeat. Nor is it casual, as is the stream of thoughts. But the occasional incident of genital sexual play is an incident within what is otherwise a continuous rhythmic cycle or display of experience. Such is the relationship or polarized play of feeling-attention between lovers. The relationship is continuous. But the incident of genital play is an occasion, appearing at random, founded in the rhythms of the vital evidence of love-desire.
Thus, lovers occasionally move to genital embraces. And this is an unexplainable pleasure or ecstasy. It is not an end in itself, nor does it ever have an end. It is merely evidence the shown Life—of their continuous polarization or pleasurable and playful opposition to one another. Love is expressed via functional incidents of all kinds. Sex is no more evil than the polarizations or rhythms of Life itself. Sexual play is right, good, human, and a Divine inspiration.
Then why is there so much controversy relative to the genital theatre of man? Above all, it is because of fear and the presumed knowledge that each of us is an irreducibly separate, finite, or vulnerable consciousness, self, person, or soul. But, in Truth, such separation is only a conventional appearance in this dream of Life. It is neither a true nor a necessary point of view, as devotees in the Way of Divine Ignorance realize through hearing, initiation, and Direct Revelation. But when men in general suppose independence, vulnerability, and fear, they recoil upon themselves. They suppress and mutilate the flow of feeling-attention, or love. They accumulate habits of self-indulgence and consolation based on separation, vulnerability, and suppressed love. And they organize their collective existence in ways that seek to control, manipulate, suppress, and otherwse make our separate and individual actions predictable wthin a formal scheme that permits very little variation, ecstasy, or original insight.
Therefore, religious ecstatics and innocent lovers are a threat to the political order of our fears. We are usually busy protecting ourselves from one another, whereas ecstatics cross the barriers of all worldly knowledge. They commune with unity where the worldly-wise find parts and sequences and endings in a humorless void of fleshes and atomic slime.
When men renounce fear and childishness and accept the Law of love and egoless Communion with the Real, then they begin to make truly human lives and human culture for their generations. It is for the sake of such humanity that this book is written. It is about the human realization or right use of the process of love in the play of sexual polarization.
Not all madmen are enjoying the Divine Intuition. Nor are all who lie down together enjoying the ecstasy of selfless Communion with the Real Condition of all conditions via intimacy with their lovers. The difference is in the foundation: Is it fear and self-consciousness, or is it intuition of the Real Condition of self, subjectivity, body, world, and others? Where there is the foundation, through hearing the argument of Truth, then all our functions come under the obligation of the Law, and our span of manifest existence becomes a discipline of functional sacrifice. Thus, lovers become the servants and advocates of one another. And they cease to embrace one another in the conventional manner. Rather, they become a “yoga” of one another, a mutual sacrifice, wherein all subjectivity is yielded as free feeling-attention to one another, and the whole body of each and both is yielded as a sacrifice or Radiation of feeling to Infinity.
Thus, control, responsibility, or right use relative to the sexual function is a conservative process of Life-Energy, in which the bodily (or more solid part) and the mental (or more subtle part) are both yielded via unobstructed feeling into the Infinite plane of Life, Light, Bliss, or Consciousness. This means that conventional obsessions, loveless meetings, private indulgences, and even the orgasm itself, must be naturally disciplined, replaced, transformed, and transcended, through feeling, via a regenerative or Life-conserving and Life-conducting process, rather than a degenerative or Life-discharging process.
The purpose of this book is to describe the spiritual import and technical details of the Life-conserving, regenerative, even rejuvenating process of sexual communion. It is intended primarily for married or intimate devotees (heterosexual or homosexual) in the Way of Divine Ignorance, who enjoy mature responsibility for the life of whole body service, and who stably maintain right practices of work, daily association, diet, and so forth. However, the book may be studied with profit by anyone. It should nevertheless be mentioned that, apart from a whole life of practical devotional discipline and primary insight, the technical process of sexual conservation described in this book is only a limited or conventional functional observance. Anyone may apply this discipline with some benefit to their human maturity, but only true devotees may fulfill it in Truth and as a spiritual discipline.
Marriage and the Positive Sexual Destiny of Man
There is a presumption in the usual mind that bodily pleasure is, in some deep and fundamental sense, wrong. And, for this reason, sexuality is problematic. The reasons for the anti-pleasure presumption and the problematic attitude toward sexuality are cultural, philosophical, and broadly social. They all belong to the subhuman, even anti-human, levels of persuasion, and they are largely due to popular misinterpretations of the ancient Holy Wisdom.
The ancient and most Holy Wisdom is neither subhuman nor anti-human. The subhuman persuasions of Man are all his motives toward self-indulgent physical excesses, including all forms of libertinism and casual or worldly indulgence of the gross bodily aspect of the individual. The anti-human persuasions of Man are all his motives toward inversion, subjectivism, asceticism, and otherworldliness. These two kinds of persuasion combine in the popular mind and culture to produce emotional self-division, physical self-doubt, chronic but disturbed self-indulgence, and addiction to romantic illusions, bizarre entertainments, fanciful or “popular” religions, and all the absurdities of conventional politics, crime, and anarchy.
But the truly human persuasions of Man constitute a whole bodily disposition, a total and single psycho-physical disposition, in which Man is naturally and positively aligned to the Divine Person, the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness that is the Real Condition of all experience.
Therefore, from the whole bodily point of view, the right orientation of Man is not self-indulgent and self-possessed, but self-transcending and ecstatic. However, that orientation, or Way of Life, is neither anti-human and ascetic (or body-renouncing) nor subhuman and bodily self-indulgent (or psychically and psychologically destructive and irresponsible). Rather, the Way of Life for Man involves physical, emotional, mental, psychic, higher mental, and spiritual responsibility, freedom, and ecstasy.
Man is not to be negated, but he is to be transcended—not only ultimately but in every moment. But if the individual lives in a responsible and self-transcending manner, he is also made whole and free, and his psycho-physical existence is Transformed and Translated in the Radiant Energy of Divine Ecstasy.
Thus, a right understanding of our conditions of existence and experience draws us into a truly human and spiritual orientation to the Transcendental Divine. And, in turn, the Living Divine Reality releases us from self-doubt, self-division, self-indulgence, self-glorification, and self-negation.
From that Liberated and truly human point of view, bodily pleasure, or any other natural form of human psycho-physical enjoyment, is not wrong in principle. Nor, as an extension of such self-doubt, is sexuality inherently problematic. But sexuality can be problematic in fact—if irresponsible, self-possessed, or self-negating tendencies are allowed to interfere with the right emotional-sexual process of Divine Communion.
The clearest sign that sexuality has become a problem for human individuals is the evidence that sexual pleasure has been divorced from the generalized, relational, and inherent pleasure of the bodymind in God-Communion and has become an obsessive, temporary, and localized pleasure, associated with the genital region of the individual. And this evidence is, indeed, commonly displayed in the sexual experience of most people today.
Truly human sexual activity is not self-divided, or in doubt of bodily pleasure, nor is it self-indulgent and obsessive. Rather, it is positively self-transcending, or ecstatic. It is a form of direct psycho-physical participation in the relational condition of human existence and in the Transcendental Life or Bliss, which is Itself the only inherent pleasure of the body-mind.
Therefore, right human sexual activity is a process of full emotional and bodily sexual surrender, feeling, and pleasure. It is personal submission to Life via the bodily love-relationship to one’s lover.
So much of conventional sexual energy is wasted in anxiety, guilt, loveless self-indulgence, and the avoidance of the truly emotional and whole bodily profundity of pleasure. We must understand all of this and transcend our self-limitations and our cultural limitations. We must Realize the Truth and the Real Character of God.
The conventional, self-indulgent, and self-doubting rituals of sex are implemented by many kinds of mental, emotional, gross physical, and mechanical devices that reinforce the genitally localized and superficial nature of sexual experience. We tend to busy ourselves defending the superficial sexual experience of genital stimulation and discharge. And we tend to be childishly disposed toward sexual experience that is self-indulgent, erotic, promiscuous or casual, and without consequences or effects beyond the moment of genital pleasure. To be sexually “mature” tends simply to mean that one has become “cool” relative to erotic stimulations, but true sexual maturity is a matter of awakening to the true profundity of sexual experience, so that what is superficial is transcended in the Divine commitment of the whole body-mind.
The casual commitment to self, superficial or genitally localized pleasure, and freedom from profundity and consequence in sexual activity is reinforced by the improper use or subhuman exploitation of birth control devices, erotic entertainments, abortion, divorce, casual relations between the sexes, and so forth. We may put birth control devices and methods to right and responsible use within marriage. Erotica may occasionally have some instructive right use. Abortion may have its occasional right medical application. Divorce may, in cases where one or both partners are committed to worldly rather than spiritual demands, be occasionally appropriate. And, apart from the right formalities of the general relations between the sexes, there is an appropriate and passionate playfulness between married individuals, and there should also be a right, feeling, and often humorous quality in the relations between friends and intimates of both sexes.
However, the conventional disposition toward sexuality is self-divided and uses all mechanical and social devices, as well as all aspects of the psycho-physical being, to reinforce a superficial indulgence of genital pleasure, rather than a profound participation in relational, whole bodily, emotional-sexual communion with the Living Reality. Thus, birth control devices, erotic entertainments, casual relations between the sexes, abortion, divorce, promiscuity, fetishism, masturbation, emotional defensiveness (or absence of feeling-surrender), orgasm, and so forth are all commonly used as strategies of self-defense against the true and ecstatic profundity of human sexuality.
The process of sexual communion is the truly human emotional-sexual process. It is a matter of the transcendence of sexual superficiality and self-possession. It is a matter of profound emotional and bodily Communion with the Living Reality. The localized genital orgasm cycle of stimulation-release is transformed (not suppressed) through prior release of mental, emotional, and physical tensions, so that the orgasm becomes a whole bodily thrill, more or less continuous throughout the period of sexual play, and occasionally heightened within the period of sexual play.
The process of sexual communion is profound emotional-sexual, whole bodily, or total psycho-physical and relational submission, in the human sexual relationship, and to the Living and Radiant Transcendental Reality. It is a process that is the privileged enjoyment of committed or married lovers, who are mature in their understanding of the Condition and Process of Man.
And marriage is the seal of that profundity, for it is a positive social act, rather than a merely private act. Marriage is the outward or social confession of responsibility and intimacy. It is the proper forum for sexual communion, because sexual activity has not only a personal but also a social role. The prior act of marriage transforms every subsequent act of sexual intercourse. The truly married couple, as exemplified by devotees in The Free Communion Church, not only choose sexual intimacy (which can be a superficial indulgence of personal bodily pleasures), but (1) they choose to confine their sexual intimacy within marriage, (2) they choose sexual intimacy in the form of sexual communion, (3) they choose the responsibilities of householders, or socially adapted human beings (rather than self-possessed sociopaths or secluded ascetics), (4) they acknowledge the higher or regenerative emotional-sexual and spiritual purpose of their relationship, and (5) they acknowledge the reproductive or generative function and responsibility of heterosexual marriage.
Heterosexual marriage is the generally or commonly appropriate form of human sexual commitment. (Homosexual marriage is also a true possibility, but only in cases where heterosexual marriage is naturally or biologically and emotionally inauspicious. Homosexual marriage is not appropriate when determined merely by negative emotional or neurotic and psychologically sociopathic tendencies. )
Unmarried young people may, for the time being, be somewhat frivolous and variable in their emotional-sexual commitments, if they do not indulge in sexual intercourse. If they do begin to engage in sexual intercourse outside the marriage commitment, then they begin to become vulgar. But once true marriage is presumed, then neither husband nor wife should any longer be frivolous or vulgar. Marriage is the condition wherein right sexual intimacy can appear. And right sexual intimacy is profound. The right role of true lovers is not frivolous, or self-defensive. It is self-surrendering, bodily and emotionally. And it is even bodily profound. The pleasure of sexual play is raised up from its problematic and vulgar localization or isolation in the genitals, and it is radiated to the entire body-mind and all of its relations. Just so, that bodily profundity or profound sexual role of married lovers is also founded in the acknowledged obligation of timely reproduction, or the birth and upbringing of human individuals of the highest human type.
Moving beyond Subhuman Sexuality
a talk given by Bubba Free John to his devotees
BUBBA: Be aware that without having become truly responsible for the conventional reactive disposition of the body-mind you should not entertain the consideration of the esoteric matters of human sexuality. You may like the idea of applying esoteric principles to your sexuality, but it is complete nonsense. You are not responsible, not truly human. You will simply be using these techniques as a way of reinforcing the self-possessed motives of your ordinary and unillumined life. The esoteric sexual practices respected since ancient times are given to introduce the body-mind into the process wherein it is transformed through Communion with the Absolute.
All true religion and spirituality are about this Communion. They are not about ideas and subjectivism, but about adapting the body-mind literally to the All-Pervading Current and Consciousness that is the Divine. And religious and spiritual life is about practice. It is about what you do. It is about changing your action and adapting in a new way. These ecstatic and evolutionary adaptations do not involve the brain centers only. They involve bringing one’s bodily life, one’s vital life, one’s sexuality into confrontation with the Absolute. Standing off at the level of the brain and watching one’s genitals rise and fall is subhuman. Animals and other lower beings rise and fall with the genitals. We must realize truly human existence by bringing the whole and entire body-mind into Communion with the All-Pervading Life.
The Spiritual Master is not only an instrument for the Teaching about this Process, but he is also an Instrument of the Life Itself. His Function is to communicate the absolute Force, the consummate Radiance, of the Real to those who are prepared. Thus, he is an Instrument of the Divine physics of evolution and ultimate Transcendence. He communicates the Force of Life in order to quicken the process of transformation in those who are prepared and who approach him properly, so that ultimately they may realize their lawful Destiny, which is sacrifice or ecstasy in God rather than any self-preserving, self-possessed destiny that they might manufacture in their fear.
A person is not considered fit to enter into spiritual relations with the Spiritual Master for the sake of regeneration in God until he or she has become responsible, through insight, for the reactive, self-possessed, self-divided patterns of ordinary living. To the conventional mind, you see, it seems an immense transition, tantamount to Enlightenment, to have realized such responsibility. But it is not. It is only the ordinary obligation to become human. The propagandizing that appears in our common society seeks the continuation of subhuman ways. Thus, anything that is more than subhuman is considered extraordinary, and only a few great men, who are considered accidents of Nature, are permitted the Realization of Absolute Life.
Only a few can become stars in our society. But the purpose of the Spiritual Master and all truly spiritual communications throughout human history has not been to glamorize the unique state of a few individuals, but to communicate the truly human process that anyone may enjoy. The Spiritual Master is also the Agent of the Divine Power, and he Communicates that Power in his sacrificial relationship with those who will also sacrifice themselves, so that other individuals than the Spiritual Master himself may enjoy the Process and Illumination of Divine Life.
All of the forms of personal and moral and religious preparation must be realized before the individual is prepared to make use of the Spiritual Master in this truly spiritual sense. Making use of the Spiritual Master is not simply to feel a little glow in the body or listen to inspiring talks in his Company. It is to become responsible for the submssion of specific psycho-physical functions, specific structures of the body-mind, to the All-Pervading Life, so that the All-Pervading or Divine Life can transform the whole and entire body-mind. The Infinite degree of that Realization is the moment of Transfiguration, or Divine Translation, in which the independent body-mind is itself no longer necessary.
The body-mind is self-transcending when it enters into sacrificial Communion with the Divine. Just as sexuality is ultimately transcended within the context of the body-mind, the body-mind itself is transcended in God-Realization. It is Translated. It Dissolves. It ceases to be necessary. The body-mind is Transfigured, Awakened into the Divine Existence. One’s human life may persist for a time, just as sexuality may persist for a time. Even after sexuality becomes unnecessary for the sake of higher human realization, it may continue as an ecstatic expression of Divine Communion, until there is perfect self-transcendence in God. Just so, after Transfiguration in God, the devotee may continue to exist in the manifest plane. He or she may continue the transformation of the body-mind, and then show the signs of the Divine Force in the body itself, signs of Super-Regeneration, ultimately perhaps even to dissolve in Bodily Translation, leaving no physical or mental remnants to be contacted within or without by anyone. Once the realization of Transfiguration has occurred, the body-mind is obsolete, and death will occur whenever it will. 9
That is the Divine Realization in its highest form, and it makes the repetition of any expression of the body-mind obsolete, unnecessary. This Realization is what is meant, therefore, by bringing the cycle of birth and death to an end. The cycle of incarnation is literally brought to an end by making the body-mind obsolete through Translation into God. It is not by suppressing tendencies that you cease to be born or cease to be bound to repetitive cycles of self-possessed experience. It is by sacrifice into the Living Divine that these patterns come to an end.
The process of truly human sexuality is a form of responsibility that is part of the cycle of Divine Transformation and Translation. It is also the key to the beginning of human evolution. Now creatures of the world are essentially subhuman, and Man is new. The Force of Life is locked in his animal orientation, his horizontal orientation, his generative sexuality, and his unconsciousness. Having stood up, he must now Awaken the Force of Life from its entrapment, or the reactive, vital contraction of the bodily being itself, which is preventing the whole bodily communication of Life in him.
This Awakening is what spiritual life is about. It is not the warfare of spirit against flesh conceived in the self-divided view of Man. We are evolving, and in order to evolve we must unlock the genitals. We must unlock the vital center from its unconsciousness and its devotion to merely vital experience. Until we do that, we are aberrated and half-made. We are neither Man nor animal. We are self-divided. On the one hand, we want to fly beyond the body into the realms of the mind, and on the other hand, we want to become completely immersed in continuous sexual and personal bodily stimulation. This unique conflict is the sign that we are in transition from the animal dimension to the human dimension. In order to evolve into the truly human dimension, we must unlock, or bring to consciousness, the energies in our vital centers. We must become responsible for all the forms of recoil, reactivity, self-division, and contraction upon our separated selves, to which we awaken in our infantilism, when we feel vulnerable, separate, like Narcissus, devoted to self-protection rather than ecstasy.
Thus, the evolution from animal to Man does not depend on cutting off the animal part. It depends on awakening the lower bodily functions to Life, rather than allowing them to continue as a form of reactive separation from Life. Until we awaken, sexuality is going to be obsessive and a problem. We will alternately deal with it either positively or negatively, and always in the conventional ways that characterize Man previous to his Divine Enlightenment. But when we awaken to the Truth of our sexual problem and our subhumanity, then we can enter directly into Communion with the All-Pervading Life through the mechanisms of the body-mind. Only in that process of Life-Communion do we realize the human stage of our structural potential. Only then can we begin again to evolve, because the Life-Force has become magnified in the body-mind. Then we can go on to grow through the structural responsibilities of this Way of Divine Ignorance, until everything Dissolves in Radiant Bliss.
The Transcendental Diet of Man 10
The bodily being of Man is constantly sustained by the Eternal, All-Pervading Force of Life. In our infantile recoil, reaction, and psycho-physical contraction toward self, we separate from the Eternal Reality and become self-possessed. Thus, we begin to starve and suffer. The body-mind becomes a field of tensions, devoted to the search for consoling experiences that release tensions pleasurably. Such experiences include pleasures of eating and sex, willful control of life circumstances, the acquisition of mental knowledge, and the mental contemplation of abstractions. Such pleasures preoccupy and degenerate the usual man, until he is restored to Life.
The All-Pervading Divine Life Itself lives as the individual body-mind and sustains it. If only the body-mind will open into the Current of Radiant Life, with full feeling and without thought, it will be liberated from the self-possessed games of tension and release of tension. Then there is only Fullness of Life. Such psycho-physical opening into the Current of Life is “faith” in the highest sense. It is bodily confession of dependence on Life, prior both to fear and belief. It is bodily cooperation with the Real, prior to all subjectivity and problem-centered efforts.
Our Food is Life itself, which we may breathe—but only when breathing is combined with unobstructed Feeling of the All-Pervading Force of Life. We must feed on Life, through feeling breaths, relaxing the entire body, including the brain, into that Current of Force. We must receive that Life through inhalation to the vital organs of the lower body. And then we must release that Force, through exhalation, to the entire body, and via the entire body to Infinity.
This is our native “diet. ” We are always eating and sustained by Life, through every truly and openly feeling breath. But if we contract in our feeling, we also contract bodily and mentally. Thus, we become self-possessed, suffering reactive emotions, bodily tensions, and chronic mentalizing. Through the “conscious exercise” of the wholly feeling breath, we are fed and sustained and healed and transformed by the Radiant Divine Life. This is the secret of Life and of the transcendence of all experience. This is the true and highest “regenerative diet.” And all other dietary disciplines are simply extensions of the feeling breath of Life.
The right and regenerative solid and liquid diet of Man is one that is most perfectly aligned to the reception-release 11 cycle of the feeling breath. Whatever we eat must be taken with the feeling action of receiving Life. Therefore, only that food should be chosen which is pure and vital and not toxifying. The usable or Life-granting elements of the diet must be such that they can be easily and quickly assimilated. And, the unusable or waste elements of the diet must be such that they can be easily and quickly eliminated. (The high natural carbohydrate, low animal protein, wholly regenerative vegetarian diet is the best general dietary plan for human beings.)
Only a benign, pure, vital, and complete diet can serve the body’s Communion with Life. Even the solid and liquid diet must be a feeling cycle of reception-release in the All-Pervading Current of Life. But our true and right and ultimate Diet is in moment to moment, unobstructed whole bodily Feeling-Communion with the All-Pervading Force of Life—enacted via the breath cycle.
End of Chapter 4 – p. 59
1. When Love of the Two-Armed Form was written and published in 1978, Adi Da Samraj went by the name Bubba Free John. It was also reprinted in 1985, with his name at the time; Da Free John, on the cover (the text itself still refers to Bubba). While the basic dharma has not changed since then, Sri Adi Da has continued to work extensively on the “sexuality consideration”. While this text (out of print) remains extremely valuable, the consideration has evolved and this should be taken into account and supplemented with the rest of the evolving consideration.
2. Patanjali (1st century A.D.) is the reported systematizer of the eightfold yoga system of Hindu philosophy. The principal text accredited to him is the Yoga Sutras.
3. The Bhagavad Gita (literally, “Divine Song”) is one of the most revered Scriptures of the Hindus, and a religious text of universal appeal and profound esoteric significance. Vyasa is traditionally presumed to be the author, and it was written perhaps as early as the 5th century B.C. (but with its roots in the oral tradition of even more ancient days). Most scholars agree that it may have been revised and expanded considerably over the years.
The Gita is a portion of the great ancient epic and spiritual allegory, the Mahabharata, which is the story of a great fratricidal struggle between two royal families in northern India some 4,000 years ago. It is the purported dialogue between the God-Man Krishna and his devotee Arjuna, Commander-in-Chief of the army of the Pandavas, for whom Krishna serves as Charioteer.
Arjuna, faced with the prospect of having to kill friends and cousins in an imminent battle, wishes to shirk his duty as a warrior. Krishna refuses to allow him such self-indulgence. He engages Arjuna in a Teaching conversation that continues for seven hundred verses and presents a philosophical summation of the Nature of God as the Supreme Self, a critical exposition of the many ways of esoteric spiritual practice, and a declaration of the supremacy of the Way of devotional Communion with the Supreme Divine Person in the Form of the living Divine Master—in this case, Krishna himself. His entire spiritual Teaching to Arjuna is summarized in his instruction for the forthcoming battle: “Remember Me, and fight.”
4. Count Dracula is the central figure in the nineteenth century novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. Possessed of supernatural powers, Dracula derived his strength from the blood of beautiful women, which he obtained by biting them on the neck. In the popular lore that has developed around him, Dracula is depicted as a powerful but hideous figure who often takes the shape of a bat, which, like Dracula himself, avoids the sunlight and is active only at night.
5. Doctor Frankenstein, from the nineteenth century novel by Mary Shelley, is an eccentric scientist who harnesses the electrical energy in Nature in order to bring to life a “monster” of a man whom he assembled from human cadavers. Like Dracula, Doctor Frankenstein and his monster are popular archetypes of fascinating but threatening heroes—the hidden and conventionally unacceptable self-images of Man.
6. In the Hindu Trinity, Siva is the Destroyer aspect of the One Divine Person. (Brahma is the Creator aspect and Vishnu, the Sustainer.) The trident is associated with Siva, as it is also with Satan. (There is also a higher or perfect interpretation of Siva, as the Radiant Existing One, the Absolute Divine, Who Includes and yet Transcends the Trinity of Divine Functions.)
7. The “left side” of the bodily being expresses and corresponds to the inward-turning upward-moving, passive, receptive, emotional-psychic, quality or force of bodily life. It is in opposition or play with the “right side,” which expresses and corresponds to the verbally or analytically motivated, outward-turning, downward-moving or life-oriented, active penetrative, vital-physical, expansive quality or force.
The left side is controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain, the locus of the psychic, spatial, nonverbal, holistic-intuitive mental functions (whereas the left hemisphere which controls the right side of the body, is the locus of the intellectual, linear, verbal, analytical-deductive mental functions).
Bubba Free John criticizes both the objectively oriented ways of Western religion, philosophy, and culture and the subjectively oriented ways of Eastern religion, philosophy and culture as imbalanced expressions of the whole body of Man.
8. Conscious exercise is the natural coordination of body (form) and feeling-breath (energy) through free and steady attention (mind). Thus, it is the science of the responsibility to be love, or unobstructed feeling-attention as the whole body. The principles and practices of conscious exercise are given in Conscious Exercise and the Transcendental Sun, by Bubba Free John.
9. In this paragraph, Bubba refers to the three kinds of supernormal signs or psychophysical evidence of Divine Translation, the ultimate stage of God-Realization: Transfiguration, or pervasion of the body-mind by Light; Super-Regeneration, or the appearance of prolonged longevity, psychic or healing powers, mental genius, etc.; and Bodily Translation, or literal Disappearance of the body-mind in Light.
10. If or diet, or the process of taking food, is consciously lived in Divine Communion, then the functions of emotion and sexuality begin spontaneously to harmonize and stabilize; they come under natural, easeful control. But the food process only secondarily involves eating solid and liquid elements. Our principal food is Love, or the All-Pervading Bio-Energy of Life.
Therefore, before engaging the emotional and sexual disciplines presented in Love of the Two-Armed Form, devotees must be firmly established in the Divinely Lawful practice of “conscions exercise” of feeling, breath, attention, and action in Communion with Life, as described in Conscious Exercise and the Transcendental Sun. Likewise, they must be proficient in the regenerative and Life-giving practice of diet and true health as presented in The Eating Gorilla Comes in Peace.
11. In Conscious Exercise and the Transcendental Sun, Bubba explains “reception-release” in terms of expansion and contraction, the two principal movements of the body and all phenomena in the cosmos. And he shows how this process operates in terms of breath and feeling:
In the simplest terms, the living body is an expression of two tendencies, uses, or currents of life. And, again in the simplest or most basic terms, these tendencies are the two motions of contraction and expansion, or reception and release. There is a negative or exclusive and unbalanced expression of each of these tendencies. When reactivity, or reaction to experience, becomes stronger than the force of Life and unobstructed or free feeling-attention that we commonly bring to experience, then reception and contraction disable us. We become self-possessed, confined to subjectivity, negatively emotional, vitally weak, and self-defeating in action. Then expansion or release is confined to patterns of mere self-indulgence, so that we are constantly emptied until death.
But there is a positive or true functional development of each of these motions, when they are in balance, and when attention and bodily form and action are controlled by full central communion or feeling into the universal environment of the Life-Force. In that case, even each breath becomes a balanced cycle of reception-release, conrraction-expansion, in the constant field of fully felt intensity or Life.
It has already been considered how the inhalation of breath, or Life, is associated with reception, infilling, and natural conductivity or movement toward the whole body Likewise, the exhalation is associated with release of the wastes, the accumulated contents or old circumstances and adaptations of life (not the release or emptying of Life itself ), and natural expansion, which is conductivity or movement from the whole body outward.