The function of the Guru is first of all to make the student a devotee through the process of understanding, until he comes to the point of surrender. Then the Guru enters where he surrenders, and that one becomes a devotee. That is the entire yoga of this Way.
***
The Bodily Location of Happiness, pp. 37-38
The Dawn Horse Testament
Chapter 23
The Testament Of Secrets Of The Divine World Teacher and True Heart-Master, Da Avabhasa (The “Bright”.) November 1991
The following work by Beezone is a ‘outline study sheet’ on Chapter 23 of The Dawn Horse Testament, highlighting and emphasizing its main points. The words and sentences are those of Adi Da Samraj exactly in the order he wrote them, though some are separated into lines and put in outline form. Beezone has made some changes to His sentences (written style) by removing some capitalization and parentheticals so as to make the sentences more easily used as a teaching (and learning) tool. The additions Beezone has made to the original text are in parenthesis and italicized and given in most cases, given a hyperlink to use as further study of the topic discussed.
Index of Contents
Seeing Stage – Spiritual Neuroses – What Did Milarepa Build? – The Solid Person – The Peculiar Person – The Vital Person – No Remedy – The Three Qualities of Life – Vital Shock
read original chapter 1991 edition – read 2004 edition (Sutra 44)
Observe (Observation vs. self-Watching) Your Separate and Separative Self.
Understand your separate and separative self, and freely surrender the ritual of your separate and separative self.
“We are controlled by the mechanics of attention. We are already identified with lesser states by virtue of the habit of attention.”
Easy Death – Cosmic Mandala
The first actually seeing stage of the Way of The Heart (seeing stage) requires a profound exercise of the frontal personality that:
1. Submits,
2. Opens, and
3. Rightly polarizes, purifies, balances, and infuses the frontal or human character.
“The ‘yoga’ of the frontal personality takes place in the context of the fourth stage of life. It is a matter of the submission of the “gross body” and the total “frontal” personality to the heart-principle.”
“There are a number of things that you must be responsible for. There is diet, exercise and the taking of good, strong breaths, function or work, the spontaneous attitude of strength, the whole intensity of understanding in Satsang. There is a conductivity necessary to life, a conductivity of force. People ordinarily are only rejecting, becoming empty all the time by various positive and negative strategies. But there is this natural conductivity, downward, through the frontal functions of the psycho-physical life, and up the spine. This full circle is the law of manifest life. That should be spontaneous, simple. That is health. It is also sanity. That is the human cycle, the psycho-physical circuit.”
Money Food and Sex – Method of The Siddhas
In that process, the human and spiritual limitations of the frontal character are to be:
1. Constantly encountered and surrendered
2. Via directly and effectively self-transcending devotional and spiritual communion with Me.
This real process of encounter and self-surrender inevitably produces many kinds of phenomenal signs.
Even some signs related to the ascending spiritual process may spontaneously appear.
(The tangible experience of whole bodily Communion with Me allows the body to be Carried to Me in a Yogic Swoon-and that is what is shown by all the (potential) phenomenal signs.)
But the significant signs that are specific to the first actually seeing stage of the Way of The Heart are associated with the descending process.
The significant phenomenal signs at this developmental stage include:
1. Psycho-physical openings and releases everywhere in the
1. Frontal line,
2. Spiritually relieving egoic mental, emotional, and physical patterns, reactions, and blocks in the hierarchical structure,
3. From the head to the bodily base.
The self-contraction shows itself, in the context of the frontal line, in a hierarchical pattern.
Progressing from the head to the bodily base via a range of specific emotions and bodily and mental states that generally prevent spiritual communion with the divine love-bliss that is native to existence itself.
In the first actually seeing stage of the Way of The Heart, my devotee must be already equipped (LISTENING & HEARING) to immediately and directly transcend these various states that generally prevent spiritual communion with the divine love-bliss.
Therefore, in the first actually seeing stage of the Way of The Heart, the spiritual process of such self-transcendence is primarily engaged relative to patterns of self-contraction that
1. Merely diminish, (RESPONSIBILITY is ESTABLISHED in previous stages) rather than prevent, direct communion with the divine love-bliss.
HEAD = DOUBT
The head is associated with mental patterns that reflect the emotional and physical conditions below, and, in the context of practice in the first actually seeing stage of the Way of The Heart, my devotee discovers that the primary mental sign of the self-contraction, whereby spiritual communion with the divine love-bliss is diminished, is the habit or tendency of non-specific doubt.
THROAT = SORROW
Immediately below the head is the region of the throat. The self-contraction registers in this region as tendencies either toward the
1. Diminishment of psycho-physical equanimity or toward a degree of suppression of bodily energy and human aliveness.
HEART = BOREDOM
The general region of the heart is associated with emotional patterns that reflect conditions everywhere in the body-mind.
The self-contraction is displayed emotionally as every kind of chronic and key emotion, or pattern of emotional reaction, including
1. Fear,
2. Sorrow,
3. Anger, and un-love.
But the maturing spiritual practitioner of the Way of The Heart, in whom hearing, seeing, and the advancing spiritual process of Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga have already purified the heart in its average of moments, discovers that the primary emotional sign of the self-contraction is boredom.
“Be mindful and responsible relative to any tendency to exploit yogic or mystical pleasure-states of the body-mind during devotional practices and meditation. Exaggerated movements, self-conscious breathing, intentional revery, indulgence of thought patterns, and so forth, tend at times to be done merely to create a self-glorifying sense of mystical distraction, or to satisfy the need to have an “experience,” when in fact there is only a self-meditative emptiness and boredom. Such strategic indulgence of psycho-physical patterns is self-possessed, not God-Possessed.”
Be Responsible for Yogic and Mystical Phenomena of Body and Mind
If heart-boredom is suffered, the objectless doubt is also made to seem (AS IF the absence (or separation) were present).
The self-bound or self-contracted being is always under stress. And this stress, shown as object-dependency, is always generating physical discomfort, boredom (and all kinds of emotional reactivity), and doubt (or all kinds of mental agitation). Therefore, the self-contracted and dependent being is always seeking all kinds of knowledge and experience, in order to achieve objective distraction, consolation, and conditional release from boredom, doubt, and discomfort.
The Dreaded Gom Boo – Chapter 9
DOUBT, BOREDOM and DISCOMFORT
If the doubt appears, heart-boredom is likewise suffered.
If the mind of doubt and the heart of boredom are suffered, the entire body-mind is expressed by either chronic or variously ranging signs of discomfort.
Therefore, in the case of spiritually awakened devotees in the Way of The Heart, these three are the always simultaneous moods and signs that may tend to appear.
TRANSCENDENCE
The devotee in the first actually seeing stage of the Way of The Heart discovers that the ordinary struggle with concrete doubts, negative thoughts, emotional reactions, and grosser bodily discomforts is superseded by the true spiritual ordeal of frontal communion with my spiritual presence of self-revealed “bright” love-bliss, and by the grace-given process of feeling beyond the primary signs of doubt, boredom, and discomfort.
EQUANIMITY – (see more on Equanimity)
Therefore, even though the true devotee in the first actually seeing stage of the Way of The Heart may sometimes be obliged to transcend the lingering “grosser” resistance of the body-mind, the primary and constant ordeal is the ordeal of direct and immediate spiritual communion with me, and this is done on the basis of true and basic psycho-physical equanimity.
Index of Study Contents – by topic
The characteristic mood and the basic character of the egoic individual in the first three stages of life are developed in terms of what I call
1. “Vital“,
2. “Peculiar“, and
3. “Solid“
Personality patterns (strategies).
(The usual man or woman is in motion (searching) toward objects, unaware of the motivating contraction (discomfort and dis-ease). Therefore, the usual man or woman is full of desires, motivations, impulses, attractions, attachments, strategies, and so on. This is what there is to observe in the early phases of sadhana or spiritual practice.)
These patterns correspond, respectively, to reactive strategies of either a characteristically
1. Vital kind or a characteristically
2. Emotional kind or a characteristically
3. Mental kind.
VITAL
The dominant characteristics of the “vital” character are
1. Obsessive and compulsive
2. Vital-physical self-expression and the
3. Chronic, excessive, and even degenerative dramatization of bodily self-indulgence.
The “vital” character is also associated with
1. Diminished emotional capability, and it is generally represented by either
2. Mental dullness or a
3. Chaotic display of the conceptual function.
THE VITAL PERSON
The vital person is obsessed with submission to the energy or vital force of bodily Life. He exploits or yields to the physically oriented power and desires of the vital being, the navel. When his ‘moon’ is full, the vital person may be hyperactive, gleeful, negative, violent, self-conscious, obsessed, self-indulgent relative to food, sex, and casual speech. He communicates these qualities with force, from the navel. There is no true humor in him, only irony or hysteria or vulgar enthusiasm. He becomes completely absorbed in the aspect of his vital life that happens to be presently in phase. As his moon phases, he may even take on apparent qualities of solidity and peculiarity, but they are only a play in him that further demonstrates the underlying power of his fixed vital strategy.
The vital person is not simply inert and identified with the physical to an absolutely exclusive degree. The vital person or strategy is generally active in physical, emotional, and mental ways. It is simply that the focus of such an individual’s attention and self-image is the gross and vital-physical dimension, or the whole force of descending life, which moves toward and is epitomized in the gross physical or bodily experience. Therefore, his mental life tends to be dulled, or at least undeveloped in the more intellectual sense, and his emotional-sexual being tends to reflect gross, worldly, and physical inclinations and moods. Such people generally do not reflect much of `refined’ and aesthetic emotions, and they phase between superficial `good guy’ moods and negative emotions of frustration, alienation, and self-pity. However, they generally appear to be physically strong and `vital.’
Vital people are chronically toxic. The vital person’s principal liability is self-toxification. If it were not for the fact that his level of energy seems almost inexhaustible, he would also be chronically enervated. His thorough exploitation of physical possibility often leaves him spent, exhausted, and temporarily empty of Life. But he is usually blessed with a strong physical constitution, and his force of enthusiasm for physical enjoyment grants him a positive and usually rapid recuperative ability or tendency. He is generally strong in emotion and body, but weak in discrimination, positive self-control, and the entire dimension of mental and eliminative force. Thus, his self-exploitative or Life-spending activities tend to produce not chronic enervation but impurity, or toxicity, which eventually produces symptomatic diseases, particularly degenerative diseases of the lower body and the eliminative organs.
more…The Imbalancing Act
(see more on the Vital Personality Type)
PECULIAR
The dominant characteristics of the “peculiar” character are
1. Excessively “romantic” and idealistic expectations and
2. The loss of balance via chronic emotional hypersensitivity and the dramatization of exaggerated “mood swings”.
The “peculiar” character is also associated with
1. Diminished conceptual or intellectual capability, and it is generally represented by either
2. Suppressed or chaotically displayed vital-physical functions.
THE PECULIAR PERSON
The peculiar person is one whose principal focus of attention and dramatization is the emotional-sexual being. Such a one tends to physical weakness, alienation from gross functions and requirements of life, and sympathy with egoic satisfactions in emotional and even psychic forms. The peculiar person may reflect the apparently `higher’ and aesthetic range of emotional life, and he may exhibit interests and tendencies in mystical and yogic developments of experience. The peculiar person is, thus, in his negative reaction to the gross physical, tending to project himself into the more ascended or ascending ranges of experience, which move toward or are epitomized in psychic and psychological dimensions of a subtle, subconscious, or dreamlike variety But these seemingly higher interests, tendencies, and projections of attention are untrue. They are strategic attempts to escape the gross or vital conditions of ordinary human life. They are based in fear, not in love. And thus they lack the intense energy and expansive freedom of attention and feeling that are natural and native to the bodily being when one begins to enjoy genuine ‘ascent’ or subtle repolarization of the bodily Current of Life and the attention toward the higher range of conscious awareness. Such ascent can occur only in a life that is already founded in the constant discipline of love, or unobstructed feeling-attention via all functions, in all relations, and under all conditions – in other words, in a life that is already free of the vital, peculiar, and solid strategies.
Peculiar people phase between superficially `spiritual’ moods of higher fulfillment and negative emotions of psychological alienation and rejection. They are also easily subject to illness and weaknesses in the physical and emotional being. The peculiar person is usually more capable (by tendency) of intellectual development than the vital person, but the mind is always subject to the more intensified emotional being and its romantic illusions about self and desire and inwardness.
In the peculiar person there is more or less exclusive attention, or subjection, to the movement out of the gross physical plane of Life. The peculiar person has a hole in his navel: He is weak in his stability relative to experiential life. He is attracted to all apparently ecstatic possibilities, but they occur in him as functional liabilities and delusions, just as they occur in the psychotic. The peculiar person is not, in general, psychotic, but the same self-division that makes psychosis is evident in him.
Peculiar people read all the religious and spiritual books and sympathize with everything that releases them out of this world into some so-called spiritual dimension that is free of the body. They are subject to these illusory ecstasies and mysticisms with almost no outside stimulation at all, simply by yielding to their own ordinary patterns of subjective distraction.
It is interesting that the traditional communications about spiritual life, particularly those of a mystical, esoteric, or yogic variety, seem to favor the peculiar person. In their view, the more peculiar you are, it seems, the more spiritual you are, because these traditions are rooted in the problem of gross physical experience and are trying, by every kind of exotic means, to get beyond it. Thus, they exploit some of the peculiar patterns that are also evident, though more dramatically, in schizophrenia. These traditions do not ultimately intend that you become mad like a schizophrenic, but all their symbology and all their recommendations seem to demand these exotic patterns of madness. The peculiar type will therefore find a great deal of literature that seems to justify his madness. That is why he must understand how this liability is effective in his own case.
Peculiars are chronically weak and self-destructive. The principal liability of the peculiar person is obstruction of the flow of Bio-Energy and emotion into the plane of real or direct physical and mental experience of the gross or elemental plane of the world. This obstruction manifests as enervation and toxicity in the bodily being, and a tendency, during chronic phases of such toxified weakness, to psychological patterns of the double-bind, or selfsuppression and self-destructiveness.
The usual man, whether peculiar or not, is unaware that his emotional dramatizations are always creating negative physical symptoms. In the peculiar person, this syndrome is dramatically evident. His or her emotional life is erratic, reactive, often hysterical. He is weak in the physical, exaggerated in his emotional reactivity, and deluded by fixed ideas, romantic illusions, and a dogmatic mentality that depends on parentlike authorities rather than direct and clear mental consideration. Since his connection to physical experience is weak (or phasing between weakness and strength), his relations with the physical realities of the world tend to be indirect, founded on illusory presumptions, and tentative, “picturesque,” or romantic. This condition chronically creates and reinforces blocks in the bodily currents of Bio-Energy and emotive force. These blocks combine with the highly stimulating and minimally nutritious diet preferred by the peculiar, and with his or her other habits that exploit energy and emotion, to cause a literal poisoning and chronic weakness in the body. Thus, his emotional disturbances hamper or suppress both assimilation and elimination, and he tends toward “bad days,” chronic physical problems, and a constant struggle with emotional negativity.
For this reason, peculiars are often obsessed with curing their chronic physical and emotional illnesses, but in fact they are emotionally and strategically committed to ill health and separation from Life and Food! The peculiar person is not by tendency interested in becoming stably present in physical life and ordinary relational activities. He is not positively alive as love, and so he rarely feels inherent pleasurableness in the conditions of his natural experience. He is addicted to toxicity and vital weakness-and, therefore, he is always tending to feel bad, and needing to stimulate himself into feeling good again.
Toxicity and enervation, or general constitutional collapse, including emotional collapse, are thus the specific liabilities of peculiars. Therefore, such people need to awaken from emotional self-possession and Narcissistic self-protectiveness and become positively responsible as love. They need to become fitted to a real and discriminating mind, and they need to enter into a positive physical orientation. That orientation is made practical through constant application of a right and fully nutritious diet and a sufficient period of complete rest each day.
The signs of the distress that plagues the peculiar person (including nervous disorders, heart trouble, respiratory problems, and disorders of the sexual and reproductive organs) also become evident in anyone who turns away from responsible management of the physical and emotional dimensions of life and succumbs to exaggerated displays of reactive, self-possessed emotions. Such is the result of many habits of poor health.
more…The Imbalancing Act
(see more on the Peculiar Personality Type)
SOLID
The dominant characteristics of the “solid” character are
1. Hyperactivity of the conceptual mind and the
2. Chronic dramatization of a profound and even suppressive need to control the psycho-physical self, and others, especially via the efforts of the conceptual mind and the effects of merely conceptual expression.
The “solid” character is also associated with
1. Diminished or suppressed vital-physical activity or capability, and it is generally represented by a
2. Suppression of emotional expression.
THE SOLID PERSON
The solid person is one in whom the verbal-mental or willful and conceptual functions are the focus of Life and attention. Thus, he stands on or chronically controls the emotional, sexual, energic, and gross physical dimensions of his being with complex mental structures that rigidify his psyche. Such a one chronically assumes the position of the verbal mind in the midst of the descending and ascending pattern of Life. He is usually willful, and through force subdues and controls the pervasive influence of emotion, sex, and physical experience. He phases from absolute rigidity (unreceptive and uncreative) to varying degrees of emotional and physical sympathy. He feels excessively vulnerable to emotions and threatened by all demands on his feeling and psychic being, including pain, pleasure, and mortality, and so he generally tends toward a rigid, verbal-mental, and self-conscious pattern of self-presentation. The solid person’s principal reaction is to the energic, psychic, and emotional-sexual dimension of his being. He tends to be constitutionally stronger in the physical than the peculiar person, but he also tends to be neglectful of the physical.
“It is very difficult to interest the solid person in Life. He is afraid to let the Life-Force move. He thinks Life is a raving gorilla, so he is always standing on top of the navel. The solid person is suppressing Life. He is always cool, on top of it, superior to all profundity.”
Solids are chronically dead to Life. The solid person may think he enjoys an ordinary vital life, with all its attendant play of emotion-but that is what he thinks! In fact, the solid’s characteristic stance relative to all experience is always verbally mentalized. He does not directly engage the body or express emotions, but he rigidifies, minimizes, manipulates, and suppresses the body and emotions. He enjoys no true harmony, no balance. He is essentially strong in body and mind, and he is characterized by a generally imperturbable or emotionless quality. His physical and mental powers of elimination are generally strong, and this tends to keep him in good health in spite of himself. But he is weaker in the powers of assimilation, adaptability, change, and growth. And his chronic lack of sympathy or feeling for Life, dominated by the presumptions of the verbal mind, prevents his psychic awakening and his higher or spiritual adaptation.
Generally the solid person is strong in the vital-physical body, since he does not abandon it emotionally in the manner of the peculiar. But he does not tend to assume truly intelligent and sympathetic responsibility for health. He may worry about diet and health now and then-the solid is chronically concerned-but his basic impulse is to keep body and emotions in line so that he can get on with the really important matters, which, to him, are the matters of the thinking mind! His strategy leaves him vulnerable to the liabilities of both vital and peculiar people. If he indulges himself, he becomes toxic. If he overworks himself, he feels enervated. He needs to awaken from the mind and open to the psychic and bodily depths of love and intuition.
more…The Imbalancing Act
(see more on the Solid Personality Type)
Index of Study Contents – by topic
Even though many individuals may seem to express themselves in a complex fashion, combining two or more of these chronic egoic strategies, every egoic individual is basically dominated by one of these three reactive designs.
The characteristic mood or effort determined by each design dictates the characteristic expression of bodily energy and human aliveness via the region of the throat.
The physical heart is the epitome of the entire physical body. And the states of consciousness, or psyche, associated with the general region of the physical heart, epitomize the entire consciousness of the human individual.
Thus, the lower section of the physical heart corresponds to the range of physical functions just below and above the physical heart-the solar plexus or “manipura chakra” (which is also directly associated with the anus) and the region of the throat (or the “vishuddha chakra”).
The lower section of the heart lies to the left of the median of the chest. And the state of consciousness associated with the lower section of the heart is the ordinary “waking” state, including the living and responsive gross body consciousness (associated with the solar plexus) and the verbal mind (associated with the throat and the mechanisms of speech and discursive thought in the brain). The state of waking consciousness is felt to be associated with the heart in the left side of the chest, because it is actually associated with the lower section of the heart (which lies on the left side of the median).
The Enlightenment of the Whole Body
Thus, the
1. “solid” character tends toward suppression of bodily energy and human aliveness.
2. The “vital” character tends toward a chaotic expression of bodily energy and human aliveness.
3. And the “peculiar” character tends to swing between chaotic and suppressive expressions of bodily energy and human aliveness.
Insofar as these egoic strategies simply represent the ordinary and spirit- preventing efforts associated with the first three stages of life, (See more on The Seven Stages of Life) they must be observed, understood, and transcended during the three periods of intensive listening and hearing practice, and the capability of those egoic strategies to prevent heart-communion with the living spiritual divine is finally undone in the eventual awakening of true seeing.
However, insofar as these egoic strategies represent only the spirit- diminishing tendencies of the humanly adapted frontal personality of the spiritually awakened devotee, they may continue to be responsibly transcended and released in the truly and fully spiritually active practice of the Way of The Heart.
SUBTLE, DEEPER HEART
Deeper than the head and the throat, and central to the body-mind as a whole, is the heart.
In the case of the seeing devotee practicing the Way of The Heart in the fully established “basic” context of the fourth stage of life, the left and the middle regions of the heart are functionally evident, but the right side of the heart is only latently evident in the egoic individual previous to the transition to the sixth stage of life.
see more about The Three Hearts
The heart-region of the egoic individual functions as the primary seat of functional emotion and of spirit-energy.
The heart-expression is retarded by the self-contraction, so that it becomes characterized by a range of non-spiritual and diminished spiritual signs, from the absence of spiritual awareness to the spiritual “disease” of diminished spiritual delight.
As the individual matures…, more and more sophisticated inspection and responsibility arise relative to the structural and bio-energetic core of experience. However, that bio-energetic core is not Truth, nor is any experiential modification of that core a form of God-Realization. Rather, that core itself must become the ultimate Sacrifice in God. The experiential core of the body-mind is secondary to the Divine Disposition or Ecstatic Sacrificial gesture of the whole body-mind itself. Therefore, at every stage of practice in the Way of Divine Ignorance, structural responsibilities of either a functionally extended or a primal variety are awakened, but all experience of the body-mind is re-cognized, or yielded into the very Divine. Thus, the whole bodily disposition of the heart is senior to the primal structural core of experience, whose primary seat is in the upper rear of the brain core and in the crown as a whole. The body-mind itself is secondary to Love, or the Ecstatic Sacrifice of the body-mind.
The Enlightenment of the Whole Body
The self-contracted heart is also characterized by a range of emotions associated with un-love, or non-love, or ego-based and superficial pseudo-love, or diminished love.
The spiritual yoga of devotional self-submission of the frontal personality is
1. First to purify,
2. Rebalance, and
3. Regenerate the head, throat, and heart regions of the frontal line.
In that initial (seeing) process,
1. Chronic doubt, boredom, and discomfort, love-bliss-diminishing aspects of
2. “Vital”, “peculiar”, and “solid” character-strategies, love-bliss-diminishing suppression or chaos of bodily energy and human aliveness, and love-bliss-diminishing emotional expressions of un-love and non-love and pseudo-love and diminished love,
3. And all other forms of diminished heart-expression and heart-delight are to be progressively released,
4. And these are responsively to be replaced by the mind of Sat-Guru-Praise and God-Aware happiness,
5. And by spiritual equanimity,
6. And by fullness of both human aliveness and spirit-life,
7. And by the heart-radiant disposition of self-transcending love.
Index of Study Contents – by topic
ROOT or SUBTLE PERSONALITY
“break the navel” (see Vital Shock)
Once the initial spirit-work of the Way of The Heart has become significantly effective in the frontal line of the body-mind, the spiritual yoga of devotional self-submission of the frontal personality can then “break the navel”, and, thus,
1. Spiritually purify, rebalance, and regenerate the deeper or base regions of the frontal line.
The deeper or base regions of the body-mind are associated with the root-reactivity of the born personality.
That root-reactivity is represented by
1. Anger,
2. Sorrow, and
3. Fear.
Feeling is either obstructed and reactive or unobstructed and non-reactive. Reactive emotions, such as fear, sorrow, and anger, are forms of recoil. They contract the mechanisms of the whole body, and obstruct or attenuate the conductivity, and thus the responsibility, of the whole being. When there is simple, direct, and native participation in the state of life, there is no reactivity, but a pleasurable, relational force and radiance. This is love, or unobstructed conductivity. In that case, the responsibility of the whole body-being is optimum, and Communion with the Real Condition or Truth of all conditions is possible, and even native to that instant.
The Internal “Locks” of the Whole Body
These great and base reactions are not commonly experienced in the daily course,
In your present stage of life or evolution represent the argument between what is traditionally called the middle self and the low self. In your present moment of life this middle self is basically under the control of the mind.
The low self is the subconscious and unconscious vital being, which has its own brain in the solar plexus, which doesn’t have thoughts but it represents specific urges beneath consciousness.
The middle self, the thinking mind, the waking mind, is complicated, at the present time in your case, it’s adolescent. You move with your desires. Your desires are constantly complicating your life. You can think clearly for a moment and in the next moment you want to be completely irrational, motivated by urges that haven’t been fully considered.
You’ve got to become mature at this middle self, this conscious mind, which means that you must realize the relationship between this middle self and this lower self that’s something like that between a true parent and its child. You must become the parent. You must come to an understanding of this vital life, and cease to be without arms, constantly complicated, motivated by childish subconscious, unconscious urges that relate to the realm of your ordinary vital-physical, emotional-sexual life.
Right Practice Depends on Hearing
and, therefore, in general, they
1. Do not directly and effectively either prevent or diminish spiritual communion with the divine love-bliss.
The more superficial patterns, including occasional and lesser expressions of fear, sorrow, and anger, are commonly indulged, but the great base reactions are commonly suppressed, even though they are at the root of all superficial reactivity and all conventional patterning.
Spiritually untouched anger, sorrow, and fear are the dark or hidden side of the heart,
“It is time to grow up! The Truth can become obvious to human understanding, and the cultural situation of humankind can become harmonious and benign. It is a matter of entering into the yet hidden (or esoteric) domain of awakened intelligence, “self”-restraint, acceptance of life-positive disciplines of physical, emotional, and mental activity, and conversion from the separative and ego-possessed disposition to the truly ecstatic moral and Spiritual disposition of ego-transcending devotional Communion with the Divine Self-Nature, Self-Condition, Source-Condition, and Self-State of all beings and things. Only the life of Divine Communion permits the child to grow into maturity. That Way of life is the ego-transcending Way that is hidden within (or natively built into) the psycho-physical structures of the human being.”
The less aggressive expressions of fear, sorrow, anger, un-love, non-love, pseudo-love, and diminished love, as well as the ordinary chaos or suppression of bodily energy and human aliveness, and also even chronic doubt, boredom, and discomfort are the commonly dramatized side of the heart.
In the Way of The Heart, it is only when
1. The deep reactive base of the heart is invaded by my baptizing, purifying, rebalancing, and regenerative spiritual presence
2. That the frontal personality is most fully restored to superior equanimity,
3. And to optimum clarity of awareness,
4. And to constantly capable feeling-responsibility for mental, emotional, and physical negativity,
5. And to truly fundamental love.
This process of total frontal invasion by the spirit-current of love-bliss does not itself require the most debilitating revelation of base fear, sorrow, and anger.
The process directly involves and requires the deep opening (below the navel) of the base regions of the frontal line of the body-mind to my spirit-presence of love-bliss itself.
And the fullest restoration of the frontal personality to the divine love-bliss itself is the primary sign that is to be realized in the fully established “basic” fourth stage of life in the Way of The Heart.
Only when the degrees of ordinary anger, sorrow, and fear that prevent heart-communion with the living spiritual divine are also spiritually released can it be said that the fourth stage of life has truly and fully begun.
Therefore, practice of the Way of The Heart in the spiritually responsible context of the “basic” fourth stage of life cannot be truly and fully established until, by grace, chronic fear, sorrow, and anger are transcended, and until, by grace, true seeing is awakened or established.
Index of Study Contents – by topic
FEAR
Fear is the primary mood of separation.
Fear is especially associated with the first stage of life and the vital shock of birth.
It is signaled by the gaping mouth, as if the mothers teat were suddenly torn from the infant lips.
The three principal neuroses are the ways whereby the self-contraction is expressed when the individual finds it impossible to realize a lawful, right, spiritual connection to existence. When you do not enjoy this disposition of equanimity, then you become “vital,” “peculiar,” or “solid.”
Spiritual Neuroses, “I” Is The Body of Life – Da Free John (Adi Da Samraj) – 1981
Awakening to the Spiritual Reality or Principle is the Way beyond these three neuroses, but that Awakening depends on observing and understanding yourself, coming to the point of responsibility by entering into the Company of the Adept, entering into association with a community of sane people, hearing the instructions, and eventually not being bound up in childish and adolescent patterns so that you can consider yourself.
Solid Character
Fear is also the principal motivating mood of the “solid” character. Paradoxically, the obsessively self-controlling and other-controlling “solid” character is founded on a fear of being controlled by others. And that fear is originally developed in the years of infancy, childhood, and adolescence, generally in a passive and rather infantile reaction either to the feeling or to the actual experience of being too much controlled and threatened by others, especially adults.
SORROW
Sorrow is the primary mood of the rejected individual. Sorrow is especially associated with the second stage of life, the loss of self-security, and the loss of power over others on whom one depends. It is signaled by the grimace, the down turned and puckered mouth, as in the eliminative anal grunt, the end-game of oral dependency.
Peculiar Character
Sorrow is also the principal motivating mood of the “peculiar” character. The alternately idealistically self-controlled and chaotically self-indulgent “peculiar” character is founded on a basic and sorrowful feeling of being neglected. The chronic sorrow of the “peculiar” character is a yearning to be effectively touched, or loved. It is a call and even an hysterical need to be controlled, or restored to balance by a positive controlling influence. And that sorrowful need is originally developed in the years of infancy, childhood, and adolescence, generally in an hysterical and rather childish reaction either to the feeling or to the actual experience of being neglected, denied love, and denied a positive controlling influence.
ANGER
Anger is the primary mood of reaction to all that seems to justify fear and sorrow. It is especially associated with the third stage of life, the adolescent struggle with the motives of dependence and independence, and the aggressive effort toward genital victory. It is signaled by the tortured mouth with gnashing teeth, the facial display of genital shapes and genital agony. Everything of the first three stages of life is displayed in common egoic anger. Even egoic sex is full of rejection and anger, threatened by loss and sorrow, and convinced of fearful separation.
See more on The Seven Stages of Life
Vital Character
Anger is also the principal motivating mood of the “vital” character. The “vital” character is characteristically self-indulgent, vitally, or physically. The mood of this pattern is always rather rebellious. Indeed, even the most apparently carefree, self-pleasurizing “vital” character is dramatizing resistance and refusal. The “vital” character is founded on an angry reaction to controls and demands. The characteristic behavior pattern associated with the “vital” character is a chronic effort to resist, refuse, or avoid the controlling influence of others on the personal bodily existence of the conditional self. And that angry mood is originally developed in the years of infancy, childhood, and adolescence, generally in an aggressive and rather adolescent reaction either to the feeling or to the actual experience of being too much controlled and threatened by others, especially adults.
Truly human and adult maturity requires transcendence of the chronic and obsessive character patterns developed in the years of infancy, childhood, and adolescence.
Truly human and adult maturity is the achievement of a balance between the motive toward control of the psycho-physical self and the motive toward motion or excitation of the psycho-physical self.
Truly human and adult maturity requires self-control and a willingness to be even physically affected, emotionally touched, mentally influenced and thus, to a significant degree, controlled by others.
Likewise, truly human adulthood or maturity requires the constant exercise or excitation of the motive of real freedom.
Index of Study Contents – by topic
NO PROBLEM
The tendency to perceive existence as a problem, or to conceive and suffer an inherent conflict between control and freedom, must be transcended in wisdom.
The father-force and the mother-force must both be discovered, accepted, and integrated into the psycho-physical patterns of your own real existence. When that integration is real and stable, so that the human pattern of your own body-mind is basically balanced, intelligent, self-disciplined, and also directly communing with spirit-life, then the transition to practice of the Way of The Heart beyond the limits of the first three stages of life has really been completed, and practice of the Way of The Heart in the spiritually responsible context of the “basic” fourth stage of life has been granted a full and stable foundation.
See more on The Seven Stages of Life
Therefore, it is this both human and spiritual foundation that must precede the transition to the formally acknowledged first actually seeing stage of the Way of The Heart.
There is no fullest integration of the frontal or ordinary human personality until the divine spirit-presence fully infuses the surrendered body-mind with love-bliss.
Therefore, by grace, the wandering and self-contracted heart must find its own true father and mother.
Even the total body-mind must cling to the divine life-light, calming breath and mind in love-bliss, if the ego-self and others are to be sublimed, all well. Therefore, by grace, the wandering and self-contracted heart must find its own true husband, the father-revealing and mother-revealing son of the only source of all and all.
The heart must surrender itself in listening love to the husbanding “bright” companion, and this love-surrender must become a truly hearing and seeing yoga of devotion.
The heart that hears and sees must meet the husbands spirit-mark, and many signs must appear before the work is “bright” and done.
Index of Study Contents – by topic
No Remedy
No Remedy An Introduction to the Life and Practices of the Spiritual Community of Bubba Free John.
Compiled & edited by Bonnie Beavan and Nina Jones in collaboration with Bubba Free John.
First edition: 6/75
Part Three: The Complications of Sadhana
THE THREE QUALITIES OF LIFE
Every moment in life is a strategy relative to vital shock, that contraction of the life-force which is felt as a cramp in the solar plexus, in the vital center, and which is effective through subconscious and unconscious influence. It is at the level of vital life that we cognize our existence most intimately, and it is in the area of life, of vitality, that we experience suffering and dilemma most directly.
The student stage of sadhana in the way of Understanding is the stage in which the phenomena of the gross physical or vital life are inspected and their effects obviated in consciousness. Everything that arises is a response to the life-force, whose qualities or manifestations in the gross dimension of existence have been negatively developed in the usual man. What you observe as the content of your life is actually a reaction to the force of life itself, to the literal fact and energy of being alive. And as the process of self-observation awakens in you, you will begin to see patterns of reaction that define your own participation in the process of life
Because of vital shock, the usual man resists the process of life, which Bubba calls conductivity. The life-force emanates from the God-Light, its Source above the body, the mind, and the world, and moves into the psycho-physical being down through the frontal functions and up the spine.
This full circle is the law of manifest life. That should be spontaneous, simple. That is health. It is also sanity. That is the human cycle, the psycho-physical circuit.
The usual man does not participate in this blissful circuit, though if it ceased for even a moment he would die! Instead he reacts to it, resists it, tries to escape it, suppress it, or empty himself of its energy. His very birth is a contraction of that process, and so he adapts his life to contraction rather than to the lawful process of conductivity. Thus, he aligns his life with the effects of the life-force rather than to its Source and spends his life, either consciously or unconsciously, looking for ways to rid himself of the sensation of dilemma.
The extent to which an individual participates in the conductivity of the life-force has been described in the scriptures of the Hindu traditions in terms of the three qualities of life, or gunas: tamas, rajas, and sattwa. Tamas is the degree of available life-energy prior to motion. Rajas is flow or movement. And sattwa is clarity, intelligence. These qualities, which simply describe the qualities of life as they are manifested in every human being, are nevertheless negatively developed to a greater or lesser extent in everyone. Thus the negative development of tamas, or the degree of available life-energy, appears as inertia, enervation, emptiness, and absence of force. The negative development of rajas, or flow, manifests as obstruction, emotion, agitation, disturbance. And the negative development of sattwa or clarity appears as aberration, suppression, and concern.
Now there can be no doubt about it: Everyone who comes as a devotee to Bubba Free John is nothing but a “usual man.” Every one of us represents some odd, karmic, negative development of these three qualities of life, some personal variation on a life of vital shock. If you remain in the way of Divine Communion, this particular, gross aspect of your life as Narcissus is undone in the course of the maturing of the first three stages of practice.
If you go on, however, to include the disciplines of the way of Understanding, then this gross avoidance fundamentally becomes a matter of responsibility in the student stage, and these three functions of vital existence are transformed during that period of sadhana.
The three qualities of life are also identified with specific functions and dimensions of vital existence. Tamas is identified with the vital center and physical life. Rajas is associated with the heart center and the emotional-sexual dimension of existence. And sattwa is associated with the mind and the mental dimension.
In the process of self-observation, quickened by contact with the Siddhi of Satsang with the Guru in God, the strategies by which you dramatize the qualities of life are undermined, and you begin to include the qualities of life that you have been excluding and to align the functions of your existence with their Source. Thus, as a mature student, you enjoy intensity where there was enervation, harmony where there was disturbance, and clarified intelligence where there was aberration. You become human.
Bubba describes three “types” of people (or strategies of people) who embody the three general forms of play on life conceived as dilemma. He has named these “types” the solid person, the peculiar person, and the vital person. These three types represent the three fundamental strategies by which men seek to escape the pain and destiny implied in vital shock. Each one represents a different play on life as dilemma. Therefore, each represents a fundamental liability that must be understood and transcended.
These strategies are karmic, binding one to a ritual of avoidance. Until you take into account the liabilities represented by the types you may see in yourself, your sadhana will not be fruitful. You will always be fulfilling the conditions of sadhana from a false point of view, because you are not accounting for your fundamental game. So you should consider the qualities, the resistance, represented by these types and observe how you tend to dramatize these strategies in your own life.
Index of Study Contents – by topic
THE VITAL PERSON
The vital person has a “moon” in his navel. He exploits or yields to the descending power of the vital (which is strengthened by his refusal to be at odds with it either through the conscious minds resistance or by urges to escape its manifest conditions via ascent). As his moon phases, he may take on apparent qualities of solidity and peculiarity, but they are only a play in him which further demonstrates the underlying power of his fixed strategy. Just so, the peculiar and solid strategies may reflect one another, becoming temporarily exchanged, in order not to be subject to consciousness
The vital person characteristically dramatizes the negative development of tamas, the degree of available life-energy.
He is obsessed with submission to the vital force. Just as the moon is the reflection of the light of the sun, the vital person must turn to the sun itself and become a devotee in sunlight. His recourse must be to the Guru and the Teaching and the Community. He must do the sadhana of attention to the principal communications and agents of Truth. This is his only recourse. He too must understand his own liability, how he is continually going through this cycle of fascination with the vital force, which is only a reflection of what is prior and transcendent and ultimate. To the degree that he knows this liability in himself, to that same degree and with even more force he must turn to what is the source, the ultimate and True Condition of all of that, and only that turning will make obsolete his fascination.
When his moon is full, the vital person may be hyper-active, ironic, gleeful, negative, indulging compulsive habits of speech or eating, violent, self-conscious, obsessed, all qualities which anyone may manifest at any time. But the vital person communicates these qualities with force, from the navel. There is no humor in him, only irony or hysteria. He becomes completely absorbed in whichever aspect of his vital life happens to be in phase
The vital person is usually a very simple, lively person, very strong, earthy, energetic, even apparently enthusiastic, but also crazy, always reacting to the endless cycles.
With that same intensity and more he must turn to the sun, not out of any motivation, not out of any simple obedience, but based on his understanding of what his liabilities are. Just as simply as he is imbedded in vital fascination, he must be simply involved in his sadhana, in a life of Satsang. The vital persons sadhana is simply devotional, not in the emotional sense only, although he may be emotional. He must do very simple service. He must continually be turned to that dimension of Truth which appears as the Dharma, the Teaching itself, in the person of the Guru as well as the Divine Nature which is itself the Guru. And he must be turned to the Community, which is the living manifestation or process of the Dharma and the Gurus influence. The vital person must do very simple service to the three principal forms of the Truth as it is communicated (the Guru, the Teaching, and the Community). To the degree that the vital person simply serves, the cycle of vital fascination is made obsolete. It is undone through non-use, just as anything is undone that is limited.
Index of Study Contents – by topic
THE PECULIAR PERSON
The peculiar person has a “hole” in his navel. He exploits the ascending power of the vital (which is weakened in vital shock and thus made capable of abandonment of the descended conditions by a refusal to reflect them to the conscious mind). He dramatizes the negative development of rajas, or flow, movement. This type finds it difficult to meet the conditions of ordinary life, preferring instead the exotic or extraordinary experience. He finds it difficult to be ordinary. He is always tending to drift out of life into illusory attachments. The peculiar person characteristically dramatizes the negative development of flow, of movement of the life-force (rajas).
In the peculiar person there is more or less exclusive attention, or subjection, to the ascending movement, the movement out of life. The peculiar person has a hole in his navel. He is weak in his stability relative to life and is tied to these ecstatic possibilities. They occur in him as functional liabilities just as they occur in a psychotic. The peculiar person is not, in general, psychotic, but the same thing that makes psychosis is evident in the peculiar person.
Those who are more or less peculiar tend toward dingbat religious and spiritual bullshit. They read and sympathize with all the books and are inclined to say that it is all true and right. They are generally unstable at the level of life, vitally weak in various ways. They sympathize with all that gets them out of life into some twinkle spiritual dimension that is free of the body. So they are subject to ecstasies and mysticism’s of an illusory kind, with practically no stimulation at all, by yielding to the pattern of subjective distraction which is their karmic quality.
The special demand or discipline for the peculiar person is that he direct his attention to the practical affairs of life at every moment. He must function in practical ways, by working with speech and body, by truly listening in his encounters with others, by turning to life instead of “spacing out” of life. The peculiar person often tends toward unusual interpretations of the life-conditions, involving himself in extraordinary business schemes, justifying part-time work, endlessly modifying his diet, and romanticizing sexual relationships.
The peculiar person is one who has to assume a life of functional responsibility from the time he opens his eyes in the morning until the time he goes to bed at night, and if he cops out for just five minutes, he will be crazy before dinner. So he has to do very practical things. No illusory airy-fairy crap. He has to really do something that is physical, mechanical in nature. He has to integrate himself with that level of function and assume it as a discipline.
Because he is weak in the vital, the peculiar person frequently manifests chronic physical dysfunction’s, and he may spend a very long time indulging his physical weakness with exotic treatments. In many, if not most, cases of people who manifest the more extreme tendencies toward peculiarity, these tendencies are founded in an organic disorder of some kind, an organic karma, a physical liability. So the peculiar person should have a medical examination, and his physical dysfunction’s should be handled in a very matter-of-fact way, without lingering involvement in therapies of various kinds. He should follow a very strict and simple diet and harmonize the chemical aspect of his peculiar liability. (The peculiar person tends to become enervated, and so he must not indulge his tendency toward super-ascetic diet, prolonged or frequent fasting, long hours of work with little sleep, etc.).
Above all, the peculiar person should understand the liabilities of his constant “heights” and ecstasies, the special resistance’s that his “spirituality” represents.
An interesting thing about the traditional communications about spiritual life, particularly those of a mystical, esoteric, or yogic variety, is that they seem to favor the peculiar person. The more peculiar you are, it seems, the more spiritual you are, because these traditions are rooted in the problem of life and are trying exotically to get beyond it. So they exploit some of the peculiar patterns also evident in schizophrenia. They don’t ultimately intend that you should become mad like a schizophrenic, but all their symbology, all their recommendations, seem to demand these exotic patterns of madness. So somebody who is peculiar will find a great deal of literature to justify his madness. That is why he must understand how this liability is effective in his own case.
Unlike the solid person, who tends to hold the life movements in place, especially those that are ascending, mystical, and expansive, the peculiar person exploits the movements of the life-force. The intuitive plane of consciousness, which is not something the peculiar person is, by tendency, very much involved with, does not tend to break through in his case. By not indulging his tendency toward the ascending movement of life and by stabilizing the center of life-consciousness at the navel, he becomes more sensitive to the conscious process, which is even prior to mind (although it does not exclude it), and is capable of doing real sadhana.
What I am criticizing in the peculiar type is his exclusive and strategic involvement with the ascending life-energy. By doing ordinary, functional sadhana, he may regain the entire spectrum of his existence, and the entire functional order will come alive in him—descending, ascending, transcendent, and prior. If he does not engage in sadhana relative to his strategy, he wont grasp the fullness that he represents
Apart from his strategic involvement, what he does represent is part of the full realization of existence. The ascending life process must, indeed, be realized, and it is the purpose of one area of your sadhana ultimately to fully realize the life-dimension. But, before it can be realized in Truth, your strategic and exclusive involvement with it must be understood. The student sadhana, by requiring that you not dramatize or indulge the tendency in itself, serves the crisis of that understanding. Then, in the disciple stage the ascending energy is regained in another form, and, coupled with other dimensions of this process, it retains its humor and fullness and does not involve the exclusion of other dimensions of existence.
Index of Study Contents – by topic
THE SOLID PERSON
The solid person has a “stone” in his navel. He stands on the vital with the conscious mind, which remains subject to vital shock, and suppresses the activity of the vital, which is founded in dilemma and is full of complexes (fixed contractions)
The solid person dramatizes the negative development of sattwa, clarified intelligence. He manifests concern. He is the organizational type who conceptualizes and mentalizes life. He tends toward philosophies, mental structures, the practical ordering of existence. Basically he is afraid of the vital, so he suppresses his vital life in favor of the mind. He is always operating from the head, although he is continually subject to the invasion of emotions. Indeed, his “cool” or mental strategy is the product of a debilitating emotional reaction to life.
It is very difficult to get the solid person interested in the life movement. He is afraid to let it do what it is going to do. He thinks it is a raving gorilla or something, so he is always standing on top of the navel. It is difficult to get him interested in letting life become free and Divine until he falls out of the mental game, the defense that he builds out of fear, into that more intuitive affair. And when he does, all of his concerns for staying on top of life become gradually obsolete and the life movement begins in him again
The solid person is suppressing the life phenomena. He is always cool, on top of it. So the life movement above and below that stone in his navel does not occur in him by tendency. He must do a natural sadhana that releases him from attention to the purely mental faculty so that he moves into that intuitive life, a life free of constant concern, of standing on the stone. The life movement will begin again in him at the same time that he stops fixing in mere mentality out of fear and moves into a more natural (emotional-vital) and intuitive consciousness.
The solid person must do sadhana under very functional, ordinary conditions, as everyone must. But he must do it without concern, without righteousness. The Guru has no problem getting the solid person to function. The solid person usually works very efficiently. But the Guru may work with a solid person by changing his functions a little bit, so that his functions are not so serious (or are not acknowledged to be so serious), and then he may do all kinds of things to upset the solid persons expected routine. It is also useful for the solid person to function in ways that do not require him to stand on his navel, that require him instead to see what he is doing. As Bubba says, “If all you have to do is cook dinner and wait on tables, and you are creating a universal philosophic system out of it, it becomes pretty clear to you what your game is.
Breaking down the expected flow of the solid persons life serves the crisis in him. The solid person freezes out everything below the mind. He freezes out or mentalizes vitality, sexuality, energy, everything robust and emotional. So if this pattern of suppressing vital life is confused or interrupted in such a one, the solid person finds himself living in these functions and feeling alive in them. And one of the first things to awaken quickly is his emotional life.
The solid person tends to be aggressively ordinary. He rarely, if ever, experiences kriyas or other exaggerated and ecstatic “spiritual” phenomena. Yet he is always hoping that he will have a spiritual experience. He is always waiting for the grand spiritual event to happen to him. For this reason, the peculiar person, who has these experiences all the time, is an offense to him. In the company of a peculiar person, the solid person feels that he should be experiencing something that he is not experiencing (or is afraid to experience).
The solid person must become interested in the practical affair of the life of understanding. He has to understand that he is packed into the mechanisms that control his vital existence, that there is nothing rising in him, no lightness in him, and that his need to have experiences is just a reflection of the whole body of his concerns. So, rather than looking for a proof of the spiritual process in his own life, for these grand events to occur, rather than waiting for a kriya or a vision, he should understand what the life of understanding is in his own case. He should understand that extraordinary experiences are not even necessary. They simply occur when it is appropriate. The spiritual process occurs in consciousness, for all persons, so the solid person should look for that level of spiritual life as anybody else should. But he will not realize the conscious process by exclusive reliance on the strategy of mind. He must first become established in a non-exclusive, open, relational condition of life, in which he is also alive in the emotional-vital dimensions of his psycho-physical being.
Bubba has discussed the implications of the solid and peculiar strategies relative to the descended life-process:
It is interesting that both of these types ultimately wind up resisting the descended life-process, the solid person by standing on top of it and being very mentalized, and the peculiar person by leaping out of the body all the time. The fundamental movement of all traditions of seeking is the search for escape from the body, escape from the psycho-physical conditions. Peculiar and solid people represent the extreme dispositions of the traditions in general. In every case it is the body, the bodily condition, the function of descended life, that is assumed in itself to be the problem. There are all kinds of asceticism’s and moralism’s that peculiar and solid people are addicted to, just as everybody else is, but these types represent the classic kinds of resistance.
The sadhana in both of these cases is one that reintegrates them with the natural process of the descended life vehicle. Neither of these two types by tendency is interested in such a thing. In fact, every man by tendency is resistive to the realization of the descended life because it is the symbol in which he reads his fear. We identify the body itself, the psycho-physical condition itself, with fear, limitation, ignorance.
We are always trying to resist this hulk, escape it, stay on top of it, do all kinds of things to it. But, it is the conventional implication of the body that we are suffering. The conventional assumption we make about the body is the root of our fear in functional terms. And in the peculiar and solid persons you see the classic examples of what happens when you assume the body, the psycho-physical condition itself, to be ignorance or threat and try to escape it in the two unique strategies that peculiar and solid people represent
There are peculiar and solid traditions, too. The whole human adventure is made up of this arbitrary split between the dimensions of energy (or life) and mind (or functional consciousness). The exploitation of the strategies of one or the other dimension is essentially and exclusively based on this prior fear, this conventional assumption that the descended life is a threat. If you read the traditions you will see how occupied they are with dealing with the body itself, and with desensitizing you to all the possibilities of having experiences at the level of ordinary life. The traditions are filled with such notions, and they are founded in ignorance. They are founded in this principal mood of fear in which we contract and make the conventional assumption of separate existence.
When that conventional assumption is no longer made, the descended life is free to be a game from the point of view of Truth. It is no longer a threat. It is no longer necessary to encase it in moralities, no longer necessary to stand on top of it, to conform it to any of the cultural and social cultic games that the world requires you to conform to. So in the man of understanding, life (inclusive of mind and energy ), which is suppressed and manipulated from the usual point of view, is liberated when known from the point of view of prior Consciousness in Truth.
The three types are presented here as classic examples of the extremes of resistance. Most people cannot be classified as one type. Almost everyone represents one of these types at some time or another. The average person is a mixture of these possibilities. So it is useful for every individual to become familiar with all three types in order to know the liabilities of his personal strategies.
Each of these types represents an extreme or classic form of resistance to sadhana. However, the perfect form of the solid, peculiar, or vital strategy is rare. Everyone manifests all of these strategies, to a greater or lesser degree, in his approach to life. Therefore, the particular qualities presented by each type should be understood so that you can recognize them when they arise in your own case. It is not necessary that you try to determine which type you are. You probably dramatize the strategies of more than one of these types. But recognize them when they arise and apply the appropriate functional conditions.
The three types are a play on life in which life is conceived, on the unconscious basis of vital shock, to be dilemma. The three types are simply three characteristic or karmic strategies, each distinct and different from the others. The Real Condition may be described as the Sun. Each of the three types or strategies conceives of the Sun in limitation. The solid person conceives of the Sun as a stone (dead life which is always threatening to reawaken), and he stands on it with the armor of mind. The peculiar person conceives of the Sun as a hole in space, and he is always taking flight from the world through the exit of his own vital weakness. The vital person conceives of the Sun as a moon, a reflection of itself in fascinating vital form. Thus, he is always yielding to vital phases as if they were delight while always suffering in his independent soup.
All three types or strategies are a seekers manipulation of the vital principle from the point of view of fear, mystery, suffering, unconscious motivation, and vital shock. Thus, each strategy is itself a continual meditation upon the felt sense of dilemma, and such ways realize only suffering in spite of their achieved distractions.
These three ways are the strategic characteristics of Narcissus. The way of Understanding is a communication directed to that one.
Someone asked Bubba if it is important for each person to know what type he is. Bubba replied:
There is no appropriate strategy for determining what type you are. The Dharma is always present to confound you and confuse you and break down the position that you have already assumed. So it does not appear in the form of a simple formula or an easy solution to your problem. In fact, you are not supposed to solve the problem of what type you are. These descriptions are given to you only so that you can account for what you have already observed and thereafter be a little more intelligent in your own life. Your observations should lead to the taking on of conditions that are appropriate to what you are really all about. Apart from that genuine insight into yourself that reveals the nature of your characteristics, it is not important to know what type you are. There is no way to know what type you are apart from the real confrontation with the Teaching. So stay with the Teaching as the core of your study and your day-to-day occupation with sadhana. Student sadhana is stated clearly and is the center to which you should always be returning All that you need to know will always be revealed in its appropriate form.
As we mentioned earlier, there is no need for any student to become concerned about discovering what “type” he is—the Community will reveal it to him soon enough! The play between these three general types of people is taken very seriously in the world. Flighty, mystical poets don’t hang out with athletes, and neither of these types care particularly for egghead intellectuals—thats how it is! But in the Community, which has its fair share of each classic type, along with all sorts of exotic personal mixtures, the play of life takes on another quality entirely. A solid may find a vitals earthiness downright disgusting and a peculiars emotional hysteria simply unnecessary, but neither of them will let him get away with his lack of warmth and his pretentious head. So the vital type might grab him around the waist or tickle him, while the peculiar pokes fun at his mind. Neither of them, however, is any less offended by the other than they are by their heady friend. So the play goes round and round, and, in the course of time, each type of person is very naturally served in the realignment of all the dimensions of his humanity by this humorous play of qualities in the Community.
In every case, whatever characteristics you discover in yourself, their transformation is mainly a matter of reassociating with the aspects of life that you exclude. It becomes a practical matter then. When you begin to notice these things about yourself, you begin to take on little practical conditions that essentially associate you, combine you in practical terms, with the aspects of your ordinary life that you tend to exclude. The process is not a cure. It is just a very ordinary, practical responsibility that will intensify the crisis, as well as, in some ordinary way, generally improve your common life.
But you must do it! You tend to be very childish, neglecting things and refusing responsibilities. That is why it is of great value to do this sadhana within the Community, because then you can be continually served by others to the point of responsibility, unless you hide yourself completely (and a lot of hiding goes on). But as soon as you begin to show your qualities and live them, then the Community will make demands of you, and you should also make them of yourself. Your sadhana will always intensify then, becoming more than a nominal cultic involvement. Your sadhana must be sustained eternally, and it cannot be sustained eternally if your approach to it is mediocre and childish. It must be continually regenerated and intensified.
Because of the tendency of individuals to be irresponsible then, the Community is made the fundamental condition within which the practical activity of sadhana takes place. Hopefully, the condition of community can magnify the sadhana of everyone. But to do it requires your real presence, your real involvement, real insight on your part, real awareness of what it is that you are doing.
Index of Study Contents – by topic
What Did Milarepa Build?
The human body is a sacred mound, a stupa, a temple-not merely in the sense that, by virtue of mere birth, it houses the Divine Spirit, but in the sense that, during one’s lifetime, it must be consciously converted, related, oriented, and surrendered to and into the Spirit-Person of the Transcendental Divine.
The usual or un-Awakened man or woman is self-possessed, not God-possessed. Therefore, each of us must understand ourselves completely in psycho-physical terms, and so bring the will (or free energy and attention) to convert the body-mind into a sacred vehicle of ecstatic or self-transcending God-Communion.
Prior to such conversion, the body-mind is a structure of neurotic or self-possessed reactivity, designed or oriented to seek self-satisfaction and release of tension. That contracted structure may be viewed as a mound or pillar of self-idolatry. The body-mind may be rightly conceived as a vertical structure consisting of seven primary centers of psycho-physical (or physical, emotional, and mental) functions and reactions. In the un-Awakened or self-possessed configuration, that structure may be viewed, from base to crown, as a composite hierarchy of qualities, as seen in the diagram below.
Once there is self-understanding and the Awakening of attention and energy to the Living Spiritual and Transcendental Divine, the will must convert this mound or pillar of Narcissus into a true and living temple of God-Communion. Thus, fear must be converted into the will to free surrender as bodily existence; sorrow must be converted into the will to present relationship; anger must be converted into the will to forgiveness, compassion, and self transcendence; the withholding of love must be converted into the will to love; Life-depression and negativity must be converted into the will to Life-positive feeling, action, breath, and speech; doubt and confinement to fixed ideas and illusions must be converted into understanding and the will to free attention; and bodily separation inherence in the Living or Radiant Transcendental Divine Being. Only when all of this is done have entered into that disposition and Condition in which “karma,” or negative tendency and guilt for past negative activity, can be transcended. Negative tendencies, guilt feelings, and actual guilt are a complex dis-ease of the total structure of the body-mind, and all of that can be released or “forgiven” only in the event of the conversion of the total body-mind from the negative pillar of self-possession to the living temple of surrender and inherence in the Present, Eternal, and Living Spiritual or Transcendental Divine.
This “making of the temple” is the original or preparatory work necessary for the esoteric fulfillment of the Way, or Enlightened Realization. Before Marpa’ consented to give Milarepa’ the esoteric Teaching, he required Milarepa to build a temple, a stupa, through the disciplined work of self-transcending effort. Before I was able to fully introduce this body-mind into the esoteric Fullness of Realization, I was required to do this same work under the direction of Rudi. This was and is the required preliminary discipline, which must be fulfilled before there can be open access to the Way and the Master of the Way. Otherwise our own obstructions deny us such access, even if the Way is given to us in writing in advance and the Master lives with us in our own house. Therefore, understand yourself, practice the conscious process, conduct or surrender into the Spirit-Power bodily, and adapt the body-mind to the Life-positive disciplines of free and mature human existence. Do this quickly, and constantly resort to this Fellowship for Good Company and further instruction.
Index of Study Contents – by topic
Spiritual Neuroses
SPIRITUAL MASTER: The three principal neuroses are the ways whereby the self-contraction is expressed when the individual finds it impossible to realize a lawful, right, spiritual connection to existence. When you do not enjoy this disposition of equanimity, then you become “vital,” “peculiar,” or “solid.”
Awakening to the Spiritual Reality or Principle is the Way beyond these three neuroses, but that Awakening depends on observing and understanding yourself, coming to the point of responsibility by entering into the Company of the Adept, entering into association with a community of sane people, hearing the instructions, and eventually not being bound up in childish and adolescent patterns so that you can consider yourself. And the consideration of Narcissus ultimately becomes the consideration of the three types of spiritual neurosis. You not only observe the self contraction, but you also observe how it works in your case. Before you can even see the self-contraction, you must somehow, basically at least, free attention from its childish and adolescent patterns, so that you can observe yourself. When you gain the capacity to observe yourself and understand, then you gain the capacity to observe yourself in more detail.
Vital, peculiar, and solid tendencies are all strategies that prevent the bodily confession of self-transcendence. The bodily transcendence of “I,” or surrender into the Living Divine Principle, is something of which the person is chronically incapable, and, therefore, he or she develops vital, peculiar, or solid personality traits and strategies. None of them represents a spiritual point of view, you see. All three represent the absence of that point of view, and all three are expressions of a childish or adolescent disposition.
The vital, peculiar, and solid are not constructed of life as it is or of spiritual life. They are made of childish and adolescent qualities. The failed case of the first three stages becomes vital, peculiar, or solid. But when the person awakens to the spiritual Reality, he or she ceases to be motivated by childish or adolescent orientations and can, therefore, understand the vital, peculiar, and solid strategies and transcend them. Instead of being vital, peculiar, or solid, the individual becomes a devotee, a functioning human being, responsibly practicing the disciplines of spiritual life. Such a person functions vitally, emotionally, and mentally, but he or she is not a vital, peculiar, or solid.
See more on The Seven Stages of Life
The fact that you think does not make you a solid. The fact that you express yourself emotionally does not make you peculiar. And the fact that you are physically active and alive does not make you a vital. Each of the types is a particular strategy relative to the fundamental functional dimensions of the being. Each is a strategy founded on the self-contraction. We become devoted to the self contraction when we do not outgrow childish and adolescent failures or the childish and adolescent attitude. There is a time to be an infant, and a time to be a child, but if we become neurotic as infants or as children, then we become chronically dependent. We express our self-contraction through fear, separation, and the search for immunity or release.
We can become involved in a more ambiguous, two-faced adolescent quality when we intensify our neuroses by adding the strategies of adolescence. Then we professionalize our childish adolescent game in the form of vital, peculiar, or solid roles, which we play for the rest of our lives.
In playing those games we may try to become religious because we like the idea of consoling ourselves with the feeling that there is something greater. We may even practice mystical techniques or stimulate mystical phenomena with drugs and psychological techniques and biofeedback, but we are still locked into the neurosis that grows out of the failures of the first three stages of life. To practice spiritual life truly is a different matter from merely assuming the ideals or artifices of the later stages of life beyond the third. You must overcome the neurosis of the first three stages of life. You must become a human being, not a childish or adolescent personality, not a vital, peculiar, or solid personality, but a stable individual, free of the neurosis associated with self-contraction, and capable of growing.
Perhaps the ultimate significance of neurosis is that it is a personality structure that prevents growth. You do not change, you remain the same, you repeat yourself constantly. When we go beyond our third stage failure, we become capable of growing again and we enter the later stages of life. When we have realized that principal stability wherein we are capable of growth, then we can also respond to the wisdom of the ultimate stage of life, and we are not locked in that neurosis. We are capable of growing to the later stages, but we are also capable of responding to the ultimate wisdom, letting it awaken and guide us in the process of future growth.
People who are neurotically bound in the third stage of life cannot grow. They eat religion. They mutilate it, they wear it, they abuse it, they indulge themselves in it, but they do not practice it, because they cannot grow. They are in fear, they are self-possessed, they are Narcissus in a very complex fixed pattern. You must break out of your pattern. Therefore, practice the Way until you can be responsible for the neuroses of the third stage of life.
See more on The Seven Stages of Life
For all adult practitioners of the Way of The Heart , the student-beginner stage of the Way of The Heart , the first three practicing stages of the technically “fully elaborated” form of the Way of The Heart , and the listening stage, the hearing stage, the would-be-seeing, or progressively seeing, stage, and the first actually seeing stage of the development of the technically “simpler”, or even “simplest”, “lay congregationist” form of the Way of The Heart involve the practice of disciplines which are associated with the first three stages of life, and which are progressively associated with heart-surrender into the context of the fourth stage of life.
Chapter 17 – The Dawn Horse Testament
Index of Study Contents – by topic
Vital Shock – (excerpt) Method of the Siddhas – Chapter 4
Adi Da Samraj: I’ve talked about how the force of consciousness operates in life through a structure or pattern of conductivity, a clockwise circle of descending and ascending force. The special point of view of “life” or vitality is an epitome or center in the midst of the body, in the general area of the navel, this lower body area. This center, or this aspect of the larger circle of force, is in the frontal and descending pattern of life. It is most intimate to us. And it is in the area of life, of vitality, that men experience most obviously, most directly, the nature of suffering. It is at the level of vitality that men cognize existence for the most part. The whole ascending life, the subtle life, is more obscure than this vital life. In fact, when men pursue spirituality, they are not responding to something “spiritual.” What makes them seek is not a spiritual motivation, not a subtle motivation. What motivates them is suffering, and essentially suffering in the vital, in the life.
The usual man lives in what I have called “vital shock.” This shock ultimately includes more than the vital. It operates even on a very subtle level. But its most obvious and motivating form is the sense of shock in the vital being. Ordinarily, the vital, at its chief center in the midst of the body, is contracted, and a man continually feels it, even physically. He may feel a kind of cramp, this tension in the midst of the body. And every man tries to relieve it continually through various experiences, pleasures.
This vital center is like the shutter in a camera. Like the shutter in a camera, it curls in on itself in order to close, or else unfurls in order to open. It is like your hand. If you clench your fist and hold it together as tightly as you can, it begins to become painful. Just so, this vital center is alive, sentient, and when it contracts, like your hand, it creates a sensation. Not only does it create a physical sensation, but also many other reflections in life and consciousness. Therefore, when this contraction occurs in the vital, we not only get a cramp in the stomach, we have a whole life of suffering.
Every aspect of vital existence is controlled by this image, this state, this vital shock. The patterns to which men become addicted are simply extensions of this contraction. For instance, here in Satsang, you may go through a period of obsessiveness, when its very difficult for you, when you are continually obsessed with various kinds of desires, feelings. At the beginning of that period, something occurred. Something in life, somewhere, suppressed or appeared to suppress the vital. And all of the patterns, the rituals, the strategies that began to come on to you were reactions to that suppression of the vital. The sensation or cognition of that suppression or “blow” is the form of vital shock that currently obsesses you. But even before you began the present episode, the vital shock was already your condition. There is a continuous vital contraction.
In fact what people are suffering is not their peculiar life-patterns or strategies in themselves, but this original shock, in the form of a primary reaction, this contraction of which I speak. Men seek through all kinds of means to become free of their various symptoms, their various strategies, including the cramped sensation in the midst of the body. But if a man understands or re-cognizes this contraction itself, this activity, this drama, at the present, he doesn’t have to deal with all the endless extensions of it. True spiritual life, radical life, is to deal with this fundamental, present activity, this contraction, not with the search that is an expression of it. It is not to deal with the symptoms, not with the strategies that it manifests, but with this activity itself, presently. This primary activity, this contraction, is the root and the support and the form of all the ordinary manifestations of suffering, all of the patterns of life that men acknowledge to be their suffering. This contraction, this “avoidance of relationship,” is, fundamentally, a mans continuous, present activity.
A person can be set into a whole period of dramatizing his suffering by some simple event in his life, a frustration of some kind, a threat, a loss, whatever—a vital shock. But release is not a matter of looking into your memory and discovering the various sources or incidents of these shocks in the past. You know, the day your father hit you, the day your dog died, and all the rest. Those are only past instances of this same process. The process itself is always instant, present, spontaneous. It is a reaction to life itself. Life is its own shock. The awakening of consciousness into the form of life is that shock. Birth is that shock, not merely the original physical event that may be remembered, but every moments cognition of being alive. All the events within life are just extensions of that life-shock.
In The Knee of Listening I mentioned an experience I had at one point, where I remembered, even relived my prenatal state, my awakening into the body. There was a kind of gloriousness about it, a fantastic form of energy, shaped, as I described it then, “like a seahorse.” That was the original awakening of the kundalini, if you will. But in the same instant there was intense sorrow. The shock was life itself, the shock of embodiment. The “seahorse” is already contraction. The spinal form is already this curve. The ordinary life is already this tendency, this compulsive qualification of consciousness, this unconsciousness. Everyone, “after birth,” develops a peculiar drama of this shock. Peculiar experiences occur during every life, and each individual develops a peculiar pattern of reaction to that. So everyone is living the drama and strategy of suffering in a peculiarly unique way, a peculiarly complex, individual way. But in every case there is one fundamental activity. One thing is the suffering. It is an activity, this activity, this contraction, this avoidance of relationship, this differentiation, this separation. Wherever it occurs, that is suffering.
All ordinary suffering is only a cramp. It is this contraction. Wherever there is this contraction, there is obstruction to the flow of force. There is also the tendency in consciousness for there to be the sense of separate existence. If you cramp the hand together in a fist, there is a sensation in the hand, as the hand, that is different from the space around it. When the vital itself is contracted in this way, the center of the “hand” is the ego, the “me,” the separate self sense. The mind of this “me,” like its form, is separate, separative, compulsively differentiating. So the whole drama of seeking that is a reaction to this contraction or reaction to life, always begins with this “me.” “Me” is the core of this experience. It is the center of the “fist.” Every person seeks by every means to be relieved of his suffering, but the suffering cannot be relieved, this contraction cannot be uncoiled without the “me,” which is its center, dissolving. The whole affair, at the level of life, of vitality, involves the dissolution, not only of the physical manifestation of this contraction, not only of the life drama, but of all its qualities, all of its peculiar psychology, all of its mentality, all of its assumptions. Spiritual life involves the undermining of the whole point of view of vital shock.
Index of Study Contents – by topic
read original (with Capitalization and Parentheticals)
The Dawn Horse Testament – Table of Contents