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COMPULSORY DANCING – Da Free John (Adi Da Samraj)
Part II: The Sacred Emotional Commitment to Sexual
Love
The Mood of Betrayal
DA FREE JOHN: You are associated with sexuality as
a self-generated, self-possessed, universal impulse. By
“universal” I mean that almost anyone and anything can
become the object of this impulse. Anything can become
erotically interesting to you because your attention
radiates in all directions, self-generated, self-possessed,
and self-possessing. Ultimately, desire is something that
you are doing to yourself. Thus, it does not make any
difference with whom or with what you have stimulating
sexual association. You are doing it and you are doing it to
yourself. As long as you remain in this self-possessed
condition, generating sexuality for the sake of your own
sense of pleasurable immunity, your attention is simply
radiating in all directions through this interest. You
casually associate sexually with anyone who comes along. At
the same time you try to be married despite this emotional
problem (which is a spiritual problem). You try to be true
to one another, to have loving, undistracted attention for
one another. Yet neither of you is involved with sex as
anything but a self-generated, self-possessed, universal
desire-and you cannot confine a universal desire.
This dilemma is an expression of the Narcissistic
character, the self-possessed, self-defensive, vulnerable,
threatened personality, the one who knows he can be
rejected, that he can suffer from separation, and that he
can die. That one, that emotional problem, separate from
God, feeling alone, feeling threatened altogether, is also
involved in sex. That one is you in your unillumined
position, and the person with whom you are most intimate is
in exactly the same position. He or she too is
self-possessed, trying to protect himself or herself,
fearing to love and surrender, fearing the loss of his or
her lover, feeling the potential betrayal that the other
represents. Thus, in the usual person the motive of sexual
love is never fully satisfied or concentrated in a single
relationship, and his or her sexual interest remains
universal, casual, self-possessed, and self-generated, never
truly expressed in relationship and never a free impulse,
always associated with self-possessed or self-possessing
fear.
If you will honestly discuss your sexual relationship,
you will find that each of you is fundamentally suffering in
the mood of betrayal, of having been betrayed and always
feeling that you are about to be betrayed. You will discover
in your discussion with one another that both of you in some
very essential way are promiscuous characters whose
emotional maturity is equal to that of very young, reactive,
adolescent, or even infantile personalities. Therefore, you
cannot really trust one another, nor do you really trust
yourselves altogether. Somehow you sense that love cannot be
what this relationship is fundamentally all about.
The closer you look at one another in this discussion of
your sexuality the more anxious you will become, the more
you will exaggerate your characteristic negative reaction.
You will go on and on and on in your discussion-and you
really must go through it to the end; you must talk about
all of your promiscuous thoughts, actions, and feelings,
past, present, and possibly future. You must confess all of
that to one another. But after you have gone on with this
confessing and essentially come to the end of your
information, what are you going to do? By that time you may
have completely disturbed and aggravated one another with
all this negative content. You may have no sympathy at all
for one another anymore! You will certainly know that you
are both weak characters, obviously sexually fascinated with
other people, seeming to be entirely committed to your
negative cycle of emotional reactivity and your
self-protective games. And now you are confronted with all
of this information, the whole problem, this situation that
does not justify love and surrender to one another.
You have probably also begun to become a little weirdly
fascinating to one another. Even though you do not want to
be betrayed or abandoned by your mate, you begin to imagine
him or her in sexual encounters with other people. Your
situation begins to take on the quality of an erotic movie.
There is something you like about the promiscuous energy of
your mate, even though you do not like its ultimate
implications. You may even start to play off one another
sexually in this consideration. Your sexual consideration
might go on endlessly in this fashion without ever becoming
conclusive. What are you going to do? You could say, “We
will not do this anymore.” And you may even try the
traditional solutions: “I will wear a veil whenever I come
into the room.” But such solutions are not ultimately
effective.
Thus, you must be able to carry the consideration beyond
this point. You are dealing with this matter as if it were a
sexual problem, but it is fundamentally an emotional
problem. Once you are emotionally straight, once you are
converted at the heart, then sexuality becomes something
entirely different. Therefore, your emotional conversion
must be the next point of your discussion. Perhaps you must
abandon the sexual discussion for a while and talk to one
another in emotional terms. You must tell one another what
you feel your basic emotional state is from moment to
moment. You must feel and confess that you are basically a
fearful person, afraid of rejection, that the emotionally
negative and reactive state is essentially characteristic of
you. Until you are cured in your heart, any discussion about
sexuality will drive you mad.
As a result of your adaptation and experiences, you are
all in an emotionally wounded state. Since you are
emotionally weak, subject to emotional reactivity and all
kinds of self-possessed motives, there is no way that you
can have a pure and free and loving marriage. There will
always be a promiscuous dimension to it, a casual, erotic
quality of association, that will always exist as a threat.
In other words, in your present disposition love will never
be simply true of you, and you will never be healed at the
heart. This sexual problem will persist because you are
self-possessed, and sex unillumined by love is simply a
universal urge. It is only when the heart and therefore the
whole body-mind is healed in true emotional conversion to
the love relationship to God that you can accept the
body-mind as the form of your manifestation and live all of
its functions sanely and happily and with a will.
We each want our lover to be able to say to us, “I love
only you and desire only you forever. I have never desired
anyone the way I desire you. I have never felt this way
about anyone other than you.” Yet knowing that it cannot be
true makes you feel a little negative, even terribly
negative, about life. It confirms your reasons for despair.
Anyone can have pleasurable sexual relations with anyone
else, and with almost any thing, for that matter. If you
were to simply live in your emotional problem, just given up
to universal desire, you might try to have pleasurable
sexual relations with everyone and everything in the world.
Those you would not actually take to bed you would want to
take to bed. And you would be obsessed and tormented
constantly by your own sexual habit.
Fundamentally, you must be changed in your being, in your
heart, in your feeling. Until then you are not only weak and
reactive, but you never even learn the lesson about the
will. Until then you waver in your practice, and your
attention wanders casually everywhere, randomly distracted,
fascinated, and stimulated. Promiscuity is what you all have
practiced until now, you see. You have given yourself up to
forms of weak-willed practice. As a result you represent
only weak-minded patterns and you are possessed by your
various functions and inclinations. You use every one of
them as a way to dramatize neurotic, self-possessed motives
and all the qualities of a threatened personality. Thus, you
must become capable of practicing love with a will, of
concentrating energy and attention in relationship, and of
making changes in your action and your circumstances. But
you cannot willfully become changed in your feeling. Feeling
is primary, greater than the will. Therefore, you must be
healed in your feeling being. You must be converted in your
feeling. Love must be true of you.
To the degree that love is not true of you, that love of
God is not true of you, you will realize only your sinful
life. You will continue in your wavering of attention, your
fearful, threatened, self-possessed life. It will be
necessary, therefore, that you experience a great
philosophical circle before coming to the simple recognition
that there are two things that you can do in any moment. You
can either contract in the midst of what arises, or you can
release. There are only those two actions. You are never
involved in anything else-either the knot of self-possession
or surrender, the avoidance of relationship or love. There
is nothing else.
Yet in your marriage you want to carry on a mad debate
with one another. You blithely imagine that your spouse
could communicate to you that he or she is without casual,
erotic thoughts. What do you really think your spouse is
like? Your spouse is just like you. Neither one of you is
free in your heart. Neither one of you is truly converted to
God, essentially given up to God-love from moment to moment.
You are self-possessed, reactive, threatened, afraid of
rejection, afraid of death, and afraid of separation. You
are suffering. People who suffer are liable to make all the
destructive decisions that sinful, self-possessed people
make. Therefore, your spouse is never going to have anything
perfect to tell you about himself or herself. Neither of you
will be able to confess love unless you can be healed in
your emotion, prior to the will and thinking and
experiencing and all the rest of it.
You must be healed in your fundamental nature. You must
be healed of this contraction, this recoil, this fear, this
threatened sense of self, in which you exploit yourself to
give yourself whatever feeling of pleasure you can acquire.
You will betray everyone for that sensation. Thus, in some
sense, even though this recoil or dissociation may not
appear in some exaggerated way in a given moment, it is
certainly arising in the most fundamental sense in your
consciousness, body, and heart moment to moment. You are
recoiled from Life, Life-negative, Narcissistic,
self-possessed.
You will never satisfy one another with statements like,
“I love only you and I desire only you.” That line of
discussion never comes to an end. Somehow, by the end of
this consideration, you must became expressed to one another
as love for one another, which is senior to tendencies and
sensations and impulses. Thereafter, that love will be the
focus of your concentration in life with one another. From
the point of view of that love, there is no question of
promiscuity or anything like it, because the association of
love is the true and constant form of your intercourse with
one another. You must come to that point. If you cannot, you
personally are still possessed by an emotional problem that
you cannot transcend.
DEVOTEE: When my husband and I come to rest with one
another, when we can simply look at one another without all
our other personal complications, I feel a profound
connection to him. The problem is that I continually return
to my usual pattern.
DA FREE JOHN: The profound connection you feel in that
moment is the only sense whatsoever in which you are
married. There is no other portion of your entire body-mind
or emotion that is married to your husband. He is just
another moment in your whole game of associations.
DEVOTEE: Such moments keep me attracted to him.
DA FREE JOHN: What a pity that you feel that only at
times! Marriage is the practice of abiding in that emotional
commitment in every moment. You cannot do that until you are
free in your emotion. Your “hearing” of the Teaching must be
an emotional awakening, and your “seeing” of the Spiritual
Master must be an emotional realization, not the reading of
intellectual and ordinary verbal signs. True life is a
matter of the heart.
DEVOTEE: It seems that such a Way of life can be realized
only through practicing a feeling relationship with the
Divine Person.
DA FREE JOHN: Yes, but is the Divine Person altogether
obvious to you?
DEVOTEE: No.
DA FREE JOHN: Well, then! How can you practice this
feeling relationship with the Divine Person? What you are
describing is like falling in love with your wife before you
ever see her!
You are in a mood of bad faith. You have fallen out of
love with everything-out of love with God, out of love with
the Divine Reality. Your experiences have impressed you
gravely, you see. They have made you self-conscious and
doubtful. Thus, you have only minimal energy for love and
positive association because you have despaired. Yes, you
can practice aspects of the disciplines of this Way with a
will. But that effort will be always relatively superficial
in its effects until you have been transformed in your
feeling consideration of your very existence, until you have
fallen out of this pattern of bad faith relative to the
totality of things, until you have stopped avoiding
relationship or contracting upon yourself and are simply
released to the Living Reality. You will not be able to
transform the relative mediocrity of your relationship with
your spouse until you deal with this contraction. Until you
are healed emotionally, simply, you will not be able to
enter into right emotional relations with other beings.
There must be a fundamental restoration of natural love,
trust, openness, surrender to the Living World, the Living
Reality, the Living Being. Such love must become natural to
you. Now what is natural to you is to be contracted, to be
afraid. You are emotionally upset already. Is that the way
it is supposed to be? You had better find out altogether,
not just intellectually but in your feeling. Until you are
free in your feeling, you can never be trusted in
relationship, you cannot concentrate in relationship, you
are scattered everywhere in your attention.
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