Daily Reading
Adi Da Samraj: 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. This childish view of the world is a vision of dependency. It is not an enlightened vision. It is one of dependence with an archic subhuman vision of life represented in various forms of inverted belief in traditional ‘knowledge” passed on from generation to generation. Such persuasions include the religious ideas of “Evil”, the “Devil,” and the ”Divine” taboos against the human attainment of higher wisdom.
Higher human cultural initiation and adaptation are the means hereby 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.
This spell of childish and subhuman persuasions must be broken if there is to be a future, and necessarily mature, humanity. They must be awakened from true childhood visions of fearful dependency, and the adolescent ways of egocentric exploitation of independent and private experience.
The superior or mature human being must become the goal of our adaptation and, thus, of all the educational influences. We must oblige one another to a new and higher level of adaptation or evolution.
The higher level of adaptation or evolution 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 we are culturally 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.
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 communications 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.
Thus the myths and stories we have inherited such as, 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 Ancients, of the transcendentally Awakened Agents of the Real must somehow be made effective as the common Principle of human societies.
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 responsibility 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 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 sufficiently 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 a part 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.
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 technologies 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.
read full talk, The Taboo Against the Superior Man