Do Your Relations Some Good
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Did you have a problem with your father?
DEVOTEE: I think it is fair to say that my father represents all the tendencies in myself that I am most disturbed by and . . . .
ADI DA SAMRAJ: [Laughing.] You hated your father–is that what you are trying to say?
Apart from your father’s personal qualities, which presumably were ego–bound and difficult to endure, you must understand that he is also your inheritance. He was the stream of influence in your early life that would have made you a man, that would have helped you to invest yourself in masculine responsibility.
And all you feel about it is complication, hatred, dis–ease, dislike. Whatever there may be in his character or signs or actions to justify it, you are denying yourself your initiation into manhood. You are refusing to invest yourself in manly responsibility. You are denying yourself your maleness, your male humanity, your own masculine responsibility, your own husbanding obligations.
You cannot hate your father forever. You must understand him. You must understand yourself. You must forgive him. You must accept the male inheritance and allow it to be balanced, if you will, in relationship to a woman. But if all you are going to do is dramatize your entire life about a disinclination relative to your father, you are not only expressing a reaction to him but you are denying yourself your own male humanity, because he is the stream of your inheritance of that obligation.
Fathers are how men get to be men. And if, somehow or other, there is a complication in that–you become too attached to women, you become effeminate, you may become homosexual (there are many reasons to be homosexual, of course, including biological ones, but this is psychologically part of how it may arise). You may develop along with all kinds of male weakness, fear, anxious life–then you cannot imagine yourself being a man or husbanding another. If you think your father was such a jerk, you are denying yourself your own inheritance and obligation.
This is why love and forgiveness must come about in all children. Eventually, sooner or later, you must accept the most positive inheritance of the male and the female and overcome your psychological problem about it. Your parents are the only ones you have. They are your seeds of humanity. And you must straighten out your relationship to them, if only for your own sake and for the sake of everyone else you are relating to as an adult.
You must deal with your reaction to your parental inheritance, whatever may have occurred in your life with your parents. What occurred there are the acts of nature, the reactivity of egos, the natural and ordinary human signs. And you cannot hate all that forever without destroying yourself.
DEVOTEE: The way I have done this, my Lord, is just by maintaining a very superficial relationship with my father, in which I do not express …
ADI DA SAMRAJ: The main way you have done it is by your own reactivity and by the design of life in which you have invested yourself because of it. There is a psychological truth in the traditional admonition that you must overcome the reaction to your mother and your father, so that you may live a life free to invest yourself in the Divine Source of existence.
If you do not overcome this psychological complex, you invest yourself in impediment and in a destiny with which you will curse your life. It is important for the sake of your parents–and it is also important for your sake and for the sake of all those to whom you are related–that you overcome these reactions, these difficulties, of your early life.
What you have principally inherited through your parents are the male and female signs. If your parents were limited, you must still overcome your reaction and forgive them and–”meet some other people”, you know? Get out of the house, meet some other men and women, become a man, become a woman. And, as My devotee, yes, find Me out.
To deal with this emotional–sexual complication or problem, you must deal with your mother and father. Your emotional–sexual complication is not just a matter of what you do in intimacy or in sexual intercourse. It is a matter of the mind, the emotional–sexual mind, the origin of which, in your present lifetime, is in your experience with your mother and father.
You have been patterning your life, since birth, on the basis of your imitation of your mother or your father or both, and on the basis of your reaction to them. And you always thought you would never live like them! But you are living exactly like them, because of your imitation of them and your reaction to them.
Therefore, so that you can deal with your emotional–sexual problem, I Call you to investigate, observe, “consider”, confess all the signs of your early life, your reaction to your mother and father, whatever happened. Work out the matter of forgiveness and love expression with them. By this you purify yourself and all your future relations and all your present relations, and you purify your parents as well.
This is a necessary service, and a necessary part of growing in the religious life. Without it, there is no growth in religious life, and there is no growing up in emotional–sexual terms. As long as you harbor your problems with your mother and father, you will never straighten out your emotional–sexual life. Mark My Words! Never!
Do not just harbor these reactions. Your model of emotional–sexual intent, desire, seeking, interest, the way you relate to males, females, all that is based on your primitive origins in your childhood household, or whatever the circumstance of your infancy and childhood. It is entirely based on it. You must deal with it. You have no choice. You cannot be straight with anyone until you do.
Anyone, or almost anyone, can function sexually. Almost everyone can. That you are sexually active does not mean that you have straightened out your emotional–sexual life. You think that maybe that is so, because of the message of orgasm and the consolations associated with it. But why all the dramatizations in these relationships? And why all the things you do with male others, female others? Where does it all come from? Yes, there are all the inherited karmas of presumed previous existence, previous to this lifetime, whatever the form of your previous existence. But you can readily observe the origin of your dramatization in the sign of your childhood, your relationship to your parents, your reactions to them, and the whole psychology and all the visions, thoughts, patterns, and so forth, you have inherited from that reaction.
You are never going to make Yoga out of your intimacies, or straighten them out in the ways I have told you to straighten them out, until you deal with this, the fundamentals of your emotional–sexual character. You are not free to be a man, if you are male, until you have dealt with your problems with your father.
You are not free to be a woman, if you are female, until you have dealt with your problems with your mother. You are also not free to be a man until you have dealt with your problems with your mother. And you are not free to be a woman until you have dealt with your problems with your father.
You must deal with this. Your entire life is patterned on it. You must become sensitive to it. Without such understanding and purification, all of your emotional–sexual life is a dramatization–all of it. That is why I Call you to the most serious investigation, “consideration”, and confession of your origins in this lifetime in relation to your parents, the circumstance of your early life–everything thoroughly confessed, understood, in the context of devotion to Me, all forgiven, letters written, telephone calls made, visits–it is your business. And, by the way, giving short shrift to your mother and father on the telephone is not dealing with it.
There must be forgiveness, assumption of your own maleness, femaleness, responsibility for your relationship to male others, female others. This is the clarity necessary for a renunciate or for My devotee of any maturity. It is absolutely necessary.
DEVOTEE: In fact, Sri Gurudev, I am intending to visit my father on my way home from this retreat.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Whatever he does or says, make sure that what you say and do is full of love, full of tears too.
DEVOTEE: Ten years or so ago, I went to him with this intention, and I began expressing my love to him. We were riding along in a pickup truck, and he was obviously embarrassed by what I was saying to him.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: So what? You do not know how much of a conversion he will go through when you get straight with him. You have an obligation to be straight. Endure his embarrassment. Whatever is necessary for you to say, feel, express, and weep about, you be sure you do it. You may never get another opportunity.
Do him some good. Do yourself some good. Do all your relations, including your intimate partner, some good. Make sure you handle this business.