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Part IV: Basic Practical Instructions
CHAPTER 22
Do Your Relations Some Good
(1) SRI DA AVABHASA: Did you have a problem with your
father?
(2) DONOVAN TRAIN: I think it is fair to say that my
father represents all the tendencies in myself that I am
most disturbed by and …
(3) SRI DA AVABHASA: [Laughing.] You hated your
father-is that what you are trying to say?
(4) Apart from your fathers 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.
(5) 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.
(6) 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.
(7) 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.
(8) DONOVAN: 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 …
(9) SRI DA AVABHASA: 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.
(10) 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.
(11) 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.
(12) 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.
(13) 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!
(14) 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.
(15) 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.
(16) 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.
(17) 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.
(18) 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.
(19) DONOVAN: In fact, Sri Gurudev, I am intending to
visit my father on my way home from this retreat.
(20) SRI DA AVABHASA: Whatever he does or says, make sure
that what you say and do is full of love, full of tears
too.
(21) DONOVAN: 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.
(22) SRI DA AVABHASA: 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.
(23) Do him some good. Do yourself some good. Do all your
relations, including your intimate partner, some good. Make
sure you handle this business.
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