Imbalancing Act – Eating Gorilla Comes in Peace

The three human types (vital,
peculiar, and solid) are a strategic play on life, or the
Life-Principle, conceived as dilemma or conflict. That is,
the natural play of the etheric (or LifeForce dimension) and
the elemental (gross physical dimension) has become a
strategic or obstructed dramatization. In each person or
strategy, the conflict is between the two conditions of
Life-Force and body. The vital person or strategy dramatizes
the conflict by irresponsibly exploiting the bodily
possibilities. The peculiar person or strategy dramatizes
the conflict by irresponsibly exploiting the emotional
possibilities, and the solid person or strategy does the
same by irresponsibly exploiting the mental possibilities.
All three strategies appear at one or another moment in
every individual, even though any one strategy may be
especially characteristic of him.

The key to all these
dramatizations is irresponsibility. That is, the conflict
between Life-Force and body has not been inspected to the
point of consciousness, humor, and responsible control of
the dramatization.
Only the mature individual enjoys such control. Only such a
one has become purified of the vital, peculiar, and solid
games of life and has begun, through love, stably to feed
upon the Transcendental Divine Life, or the Real and
Infinite Condition of our existence. And only such a one,
therefore, may enter into the fourth or truly psychic and
spiritualizing stage of life. First
there must be mastery of the negative dramatization of
embodied Life-Force.

Before we can grow into the higher
functions of the body-mind, we must become responsible and
balanced in those functions in which we already appear. By
presenting ways of recognizing and compensating for our
irresponsible vital, peculiar, and solid habits, Bubba Free
John has created a whole body psychology that radically
challenges all conventional psychological systems and
therapies. The conventional approaches only indulge the
individual’s problematic self-imagery through endless
subjective analysis and mental or conceptual insights. But
such approaches never do affect the vital-physical and
emotional roots of our dis-ease and lovelessness. In
contrast, the approach presented in this chapter-and
throughout this book-requires us to heal and harmonize the
body-mind through a practical change of action. Bubba Free
John asserts that “subjectivity follows action”: When the
body and energy are used in a new and lawful way, based upon
whole body insight, or inspection via true feeling, the old
interior patterns of self-possession and disharmony
gradually become obsolete.

One of the most important forms of
new action, in compensating for our strategic imbalances and
forms of self-possessed suffering, is a new, disciplined,
and wholly intelligent approach to diet. This is a radical
and also homely suggestion in the midst of today’s
conceptually sophisticated systems of mental health. In The
Free Communion Church, we have found that the single most
dramatically effective therapeutic measure for all
apparently mental, nervous, and psychological disorders or
chronic difficulties is a change of diet based upon the
observations and recommendations offered in this chapter. In
fact, by applying these dietary regimens within a total life
of practical, devotional, and moral disciplines, men and
women with significant social and psychological liabilities
have adapted to a balanced and productive life in the
culture of The Free Communion Church. Along with others
whose imbalances were more “normal” (or less exaggerated)
but who have experienced equally profound healing and
harmonization, such men and women have gone on to evolve in
experience and mature in true spiritual practice.

 

VITALS, PECULIARS, AND SOLIDS
AND THE PRIMAL QUALITIES OF
UNIVERSAL AND BODILY LIFE

Two basic qualities are constantly
in play in the manifest world – the contractive or passive
and inert quality of unmoving energy, and the expansive and
moving quality of the flow of energy. And there is a third
quality that may be added to these, the quality of balance,
or clarity, in which the contradiction or conflict between
the two opposite forces is brought into dynamic
harmony.

The qualities of unmoving energy and
of flow, of contraction and expansion, are the root of every
polar opposition or play of forces that we find in bodily
life and in the world itself. Thus, the quality of expanding
energy is generally associated with the lower elements
(earth, water, and fire), with the physical body, with the
lower part of the body, with the right side, and with
extroversion, action, the expending of energy, heat, and the
vital-physical orientation. The opposing quality of inertia
or passivity is associated with the element air, with the
upper body, and with introversion, inaction, conservation of
energy, coolness (low energy), and the verbal-mental
orientation.

 

A MOON, A HOLE, AND A
STONE

In general, the vital person or
tendency is a negative development, in human terms, of.the
quality of expansive energy. The peculiar person or tendency
is a negative development of the qual ity of balance, based
on an, inversion of both physical and mental tendencies. And
the solid person or tendency is a negative development of
the equality of inwardness, or passive inversion.

Bubba Free John writes:

The three basic strategies
(vital, peculiar, and solid) represent a chronic tendency to
fix attention in the gross physical (as in the case of the
vital person), the etheric or emotional sexual being (as in
the case of the peculiar person), or the lower mental (as in
the case of the solid person). However, each case is a play
upon all three capacities of the lower life-physical,
emotional-sexual, and mental. Each strategic way is equally
a mental, emotional, and physical reaction to the dilemma
found in manifest life when we persist in reaction to the
shock of birth and fail to recollect bodily the inherent
pleasurableness of our Condition in Truth. It is simply that
each strategy is generated via a characteristic emphasis of
one element of our ordinary functional
existence.

The three types are a play on
Life in which human existence is conceived, on the
unconscious basis of the shock
of being born, to be
a dilemma. The Real Condition may be described as the Sun.
Each of the three types or strategies conceives of the Sun
in limitation. The vital person conceives of the Sun as a
moon, a reflection of itself in fascinating vital forms.
Thus, he is always yielding to vital phases as if they were
delight, while always suffering in his independent, fleshy
mortality. 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 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 the verbal mind.

All three types or strategies
involve manipulation of the vital principle from the point
of view of mortal fear, mystery, suffering, and unconscious
motivation. 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, and the Way of
Divine Ignorance is a communication directed to that
one.

 

In the following quotes from Bubba
Free John’s talks and essays, and supplementary editorial
comments drawn from his instructions, the vital, peculiar,
and solid qualities are further described.

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.
Therefore, the vital person must awaken from mere desiring,
realize discriminative self-control, and manage his diet so
that the eliminative processes are constantly regulated and
supported. (The diet of such people should be eliminative
and nonstimulating, largely raw, mostly salt free, and
cooked starches, such as the more acidic grains, as well as
milk products should probably be minimized or even
avoided.)

Toxification is the result of the
enervating or Life-spending activities of the vital person,
but the same is typical of all men and women to whatever
degree they irresponsibly exploit their mere physicality.
Enervation and toxicity are the direct consequences of all
activities that strain the body’s functions:

• the misuse of stimulants,
drugs, alcohol, and tobacco

• eating devitalized or flesh
foods, eating irregularly, eating too much

• lack of proper exercise or
rest

• overwork

• sexual excesses or obsessive
preoccupation with sexuality

All these errors in action, whether
habitual or episodic, depress the bodily flow of energy and,
if not corrected, lead to physical disease and vital
collapse. In any case, these wrong uses of the body cripple
our capacity to love and to presume the native Fullness and
inherent enjoyment of bodily existence.

The chronic waste of energy, which
is the root of selftoxification in the vital person, does
not always result from too much activity. Bubba Free John
writes:

 

Enervation
is served just as well by inactivity. Enervation it and
every kind of inharmonious and low level of life-energy are
caused by the failure to participate consciously and moment
to moment, from the heart, in the cooperative process of
body, breath, mind, and universal Life-Force in the
All-Pervading Divine Presence or Radiance. Thus, enervation
is established more and more in one who is addicted to
conventional and exclusive exploitation of the possibilities
of either action or inaction.” (Conscious Exercise and the
Transcendental Sun).

 

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. Obviously,
if you consume conventional medical drugs, or social drugs,
or “junk” food, stimulants, tobacco, alcohol, and the like,
you will become toxic! (Peculiars have a predilection for
such stimulating “foods.”) But toxicity also results from
other kinds of negligence or malfunction in the practice of
diet and health:

• eating too much or too
fast

• poor digestion, constipation,
or sluggish elimination

• poor breathing
habits

• involuntary ingestion of
environmental pollutants

The signs of toxicity are low
vitality, digestive disorders, skin problems, headache, and,
of course, many kinds of degenerative diseases. Any
substance that the body does not need and that consequently
obstructs or weakens the flow of Bio-Energy is toxic. Eating
twice as much as you need of the most Life-supporting,
vegetarian food toxifies the body just as surely as meat,
alcohol, and tobacco!

 

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.

 

THE THREE FORMS OF
ACTION

by Bubba Free John

In the play of living we engage in
three fundamental forms of action. We begin things, we
continue to be engaged in things, and we bring things to an
end. We are each obliged to be capable of fulfilling these
three forms of action relative to every condition in our
experience. To suffer disability relative to any of these
three forms of action relative to any condition in our
experience is to accumulate a tendency relative to that
condition. Such is the way we develop our conventional
“karmas.” By virtue of such accumulations we are obliged to
suffer repetitions of circumstances, in this life and from
life to life, until we overcome the liability in our active
relationship to each condition that binds us.

In the manifest process of
existence, we and all other functions in the play are under
the same lawful obligation to create, sustain, and destroy
conditions or patterns that arise. The inhibition or
suppression of the ability to create conditions (or to
realize that conditions are your creation and
responsibility) is reflected as “tamas,” or rigidity,
inertia, indolence, and laziness. The inhibition or
suppression of the ability to sustain (or to realize that
the maintenance of conditions is your responsibility) is
reflected as “rajas,” or unsteadiness of life and attention,
and negative and random excitation or emotion. The
inhibition or suppression of the ability to destroy or
become free of conditions (or to realize that the cessation
of conditions is your responsibility) is reflected as
artificial “sattwa,” sentimentality, romance, sorrow,
bondage to subjectivity, and no comprehension of the mystery
of death.’

1. The Hindu Scriptures declare that
manifest existence is a complex variable of three qualities
or “gunas.” These are “camas,” “rajas,” and “sattwa.” Tamas,
or the tamasic quality, is the “left-sided” principle or
power of inertia, contraction, passivity. Rajas, or the
rajasic quality, is the “right-sided” principle or power of
action, motivation, and expansion. Sattwa, or the sattwic
quality, is the “central” principle or power of equilibrium,
harmony, and clarity. The manifest spiritual process is a
spontaneous or intended purification of the living being,
wherein it is first relieved of the limiting powers of Lamas
and rajas, so that it takes on the sattwic quality. Then
even the sattwic quality is released into the Unqualified,
Transcendental, and Divine Condition.

 

BEGINNING, SUSTAINING, AND
ENDING

by Bubba Free John

The vital person is physical and
bodily active in orientation. Thus, because of his elemental
tendency to motion, he is strongest in the element of
activity that begins things. He tends to be weak in the
capacity to sustain things, since he lacks emotional-mental
force to maintain attention and will. But the same
physicality and wandering of attention (distraction) make it
somewhat easier to bring things to an end-more from
forgetfulness and distraction than intention. Since he
cannot sustain or stay with existing conditions (like a bird
always in flight) he creates his conditions of satisfaction
again and again. He tends to withdraw his attention and
feeling from what he has created, and so he must recreate
his circumstances of pleasure again. For this reason, his
relations tend to be superficial and short lived.

The peculiar person is emotional in
orientation. Thus, he is strongest in the element of
activity that sustains things. That is, he is easily
attached emotionally, and in that sense willfully, to
conditions, and he tends to be childish, not consciously
responsible for creating the relations and conditions on
which he depends, and so he lives in fear of rejection,
separation, and loss. He tends, for that reason, to be weak
in the capacity to bring things to an end, and thus is
always critically subject to loss, sentimentality, tragedy,
and death. The same intense capacity for emotional
attachment makes it somewhat easier for him to begin or
create things, but more because of the tendency to
distraction or distracted involvement than true
attention.

The solid person is mental or verbal
and analytical in orientation. Thus, he is strongest in the
element of activity that intentionally brings things to an
end. That is, his capacity for the abstracted position
provides him with the ready point of view to separate
himself from conditions, or to separate conditions from
himself. He tends to be weak in the capacity to begin or
create things, because of his very detachment from the
motive and emotive powers. The innate powers of attention
and will in his case make it somewhat easier to sustain
things, since he is less subject to random distraction. But
his chronic lack of sympathy, or psychic, emotional, and
intuitive depth, empty the Life from his power to sustain
relations and conditions. Therefore he maintains relations
and conditions essentially through a rigid hold and
superficial mental domination.

To the degree you find any one or a
complex of these principal strategies in your own pattern of
living, you should consider these abilities and liabilities
and become the master of your events.

QUALITIES ARE
STRATEGIES

The vital, peculiar, and solid
exaggerations of character are so endemic to us, so accepted
and expected in common society, that they can be considered
to represent principal “types” of human beings. They are at
the core of what we commonly consider personality. We
usually and glibly interpret each person’s specific form of
self-division as a benign or relatively harmless quirk of
personal character. But in truth these exaggerations
represent the crippling and immaturity of character. The
vital, peculiar, and solid strategies are our ways of
actively presuming that there is no present Sustenance, and
of refusing to sustain others with the Energy of
Life.

Bubba Free John notes that there is
also a relationship between the three types of personal
strategy and the cycle of the stages of life:

The vital person is grounded in the
physical body and the vital center of energy in the body.
His inclinations largely characterize the first stage of
human life. The peculiar person is characteristically
grounded in the second stage of human development, the
emotional-sexual dimension, or the dimension of LifeEnergy.
The solid person is grounded in the third level, the verbal
and mental-intentional. Each of the `types’ is grounded more
or less exclusively in one of these three stages of
development, and therefore he tends to demonstrate an
aberrated relationship both to that stage and to the others.
Thus, these classic forms of strategy ultimately represent
aberration and retardation of character. That somebody has a
strong physical, emotional, or mental orientation is not in
itself negative. What is negative is the exclusive and
strategic nature of such character development.”

Very few people represent classic or
exclusive examples of any one of the vital, peculiar, or
solid strategies. Under conditions of stress, for instance,
a typically vital, energetic, physically active and bodily
oriented person may resort to a peculiar strategy of
emotional hysteria-and abandon all bodily connection to
Life. A solid person may do the same thing, especially if
the stress arises in the context of personal or intimate
relations, for which he or she has only the most latent or
suppressed capacity. And the peculiar may don a mask of
solidity at times, or even chronically, to hide and protect
his or her automatic and wildly exaggerated emotional
reaction to experience.

Each of the three types is also
particularly undeveloped or suppressed in one of the two
dimensions of experience for which he does not, by tendency,
feel responsible. The vital person is especially weak in the
mental dimension, the peculiar in the vital or physical
being, and the solid in the emotional, feeling nature. Thus,
in taking his or her characteristic liabilities into
account, each of the three types must consciously develop
the functions in which he or she is weak. And he or she must
integrate the whole body-mind and all its functions through
intuitive and felt faith and the regenerative action of true
prayer, or sacrifice of body, emotions, and mind into
heartfelt Communion with the Living God.

Bubba Free John has provided the
following summary table of the characteristic qualities of
the vital, peculiar, and solid types, including the specific
or exclusive functions, body parts, and universal qualities
of experience and action to which each is chronically
sympathetic:

THE VITAL, PECULIAR, AND
SOLID QUALITIES

===========================

============================

 

 

The Natural Disposition of
Man

 

p. 154

 

Therefore, the natural state of the
brain-mind is Faith, or relaxed and confident abiding of
brain and awareness in the Radiant Bliss of the Universal
and Divine Life-Power.

Chronic tension or stress is
contraction of the Radiant LifePower of the body. The method
of intentional relaxation of bodily tension or stress leads
toward ease-but mere ease is itself a form of contraction of
the Radiant Life-Power of the body. Therefore,
noncontraction of the Radiant Life-Power of the body is the
only right disposition. Such noncontraction of the Radiant
Life-Power of the body is a matter of participation in the
Ecstasy that precedes bodily limits, pain, fear, and
particularly the fear of death-since fear, the fear of
death, and the fear of pain and of the loss of
selfconsciousness are the essential and chronic signs that
appear when there is contraction of the Radiant Life-Power
of the body.

Therefore, the natural state of the
bodily being is Intense Life-Fullness, or expansive bodily
submission into the Radiant Bliss of the Universal and
Divine Life-Power.

Chronic emotional reactivity and
self-consciousness are contractions of the Radiant
Life-Power of the heart. The method of intentional surrender
of emotional reactivity and self-consciousness leads toward
emotionless self-forgetting-but emotionless selfforgetting
is itself a form of contraction of the Radiant Life-Power of
the heart. Therefore, noncontraction of the Radiant
Life-Power of the heart is the only right disposition. Such
noncontraction of the Radiant Life-Power of the heart is a
matter of participation in the Ecstasy that precedes the
withdrawal of love-since unlove is the essential and chronic
disposition or sign that appears when there is contraction
of the Radiant Life-Power of the heart.

Therefore, the natural state of the
heart is Love, or perfect permission of the heart in the
Radiant Bliss of the Universal and Divine
Life-Power.

Love, Faith, and Fullness of Life
are the right and natural disposition of Man. And, in any
moment, if all three of these concessions do not
characterize the individual in relation to the Infinite
Process of Existence, then the destiny, the suffering, and
the illusions of Narcissus confine him to what is not
Real.

II

COMPENSATING FOR THE VITAL,
PECULIAR, AND SOLID QUALITIES

Not until the Way of Relational
Enquiry (the second stage of spiritual practice) does the
devotee in the Way of Divine Ignorance take full
responsibility, in consciousness and life, for his
characteristic life-strategy. At that stage true
self-observation, or radical insight, becomes his primary
conscious discipline. Until that time, the principal
strategy we each represent should be identified through
natural and intelligent observation in the midst of ordinary
life, and then it should be made obsolete in practice
through responsible changes of action.

Such responsibility requires
compensatory or “balancing” action, which must take two
forms:

1. We must become alive as faith,
love, and unobstructed and free feeling-attention, or
present Communion with the Infinite Life of God. Such faith
depends upon real and continual “hearing of the Spiritual
Master’s criticism of our chronic subjectivity or
self-possession, and simultaneous intuitive awakening into
the natural Condition of Transcendental Consciousness. Faith
also depends on “seeing” the Spiritual Master in Truth, or
awakening into Feeling-Communion with the All-Pervading
Radiance of God.

2. We must continually refresh
ourselves in specific practical disciplines that purify,
harmonize, and intensify the whole body and serve its
natural, regenerative Condition of heartfelt Communion with
God. These secondary practices involve devotional activities
of prayer, moral activities of service, and also practical
personal disciplines in every dimension of daily life,
including religious study, exercise, and sexuality, as well
as the disciplines of diet and health recommended in this
book.

Thus, faith, prayer, moral activity,
and right personal discipline are the keys to the
purification and integration of the whole bodily being, and
its transformation and sacrifice to God.

Beyond these general practices, each
individual must make specific changes in his action to
counterbalance his characteristic personal
quality:

The vital person must “turn to the
Sun” and engage in service as a devotee. Bubba Free John
writes of the vital person:

“Like the moon, 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 the Spiritual Master and the Teaching and the Community
of devotees. He must turn his attention to the principal
Communication and Agent of Truth. This practice is his only
recourse. He must also understand his own liability-he is
continually fascinated with the vital force, which is only a
reflection of the Prior and Transcendent and Ultimate Life.
To the degree that he knows this liability in himself, to
that same degree and with even more force he must turn to
the Source, the ultimate and True Condition of all beings
and things, and only that turning will make obsolete his
fascination. Just as simply as he is embedded in vital
fascination, he must be simply involved in his practice, in
a life of Divine Communion. The vital person’s practice is
simply devotional. He must do very simple service. To the
degree that the vital person simply serves, the cycle of
vital fascination is made obsolete. It is undone through
non-use.”

The peculiar person must become
“grounded” in physical life through practical
action.

“The peculiar person must assume a
life of functional responsibility from the moment he opens
his eyes in the morning until he falls asleep at night. If
he abandons this discipline for just five minutes, he will
be hysterical before dinner. He must do very practical
things. He must integrate himself with the physical,
mechanical level of function and assume it as a discipline.
By doing ordinary, functional practice in the body, he may
regain the entire spectrum of existence, and the entire
physical, emotional, and mental functional order will come
alive in him.”

The solid person must surrender his
conceptual approach to life and learn to feel again in
intimate human relations and in Communion with
God.

“The solid person must understand
that he is locked into the

mechanisms that control his vital
existence, that there is nothing rising in him, no energy,
no lightness in him. He cannot let experiential life become
free and Divine until he falls out of the mental game (the
conceptual defense that he builds out of fear) into the
intuitive and feeling affair of devotional Communion. And
when he does, all of his concerns for staying on top of Life
become gradually obsolete and the Life-Force begins to move
in him again.”

It is interesting that both the
solid and peculiar types resist the bodily life, the solid
person by standing on top of it and being very mentalized,
and the peculiar person by leaping out of the bodily limits
all the time.

“The fundamental movement of all
traditions of spiritual seeking is the search for escape
from the body, escape from the present psycho-physical
condition. Peculiar and solid people represent the extreme
dispositions of the traditions in general. In every case it
is the body, the bodily condition, that is assumed in itself
to be the problem. Peculiar and solid people are addicted to
all kinds of asceticisms and moralisms, just as everybody
else is, but these types represent classic kinds of
resistance.

“The right practice for both these
types is one that reintegrates them with the natural process
of bodily life. Neither of these two types is interested in
such a thing by tendency. In fact, every man by tendency
resists the realization of his incarnation as the body,
because it is the symbol in which he reads his fear. We
identify the body itself, the psycho-physical condition
itself, with fear, limitation, delusion. We are always
trying to resist this hulk, escape it, stay on top of it.
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 two classic or characteristic
examples of what happens when you assume the body, the
psycho-physical condition itself, to be a threat and try to
escape it.”

ALLOW YOURSELF TO FEEL THE
LIFE IN ANOTHER AND IN EVERYTHING, AND SUDDENLY YOU STOP
THINKING

by Bubba Free John

The food of the mind is not thought
(which is only a product of mind) but Energy, or Light. It
is made to feed by turning as simple attention to feeling
(love) and through feeling to the degrees of Light (as
Life-Force, or Radiant Bliss, at the various stations of the
whole bodily being).

MODIFYING THE DIET FOR
VITALS, PECULIARS, AND SOLIDS

The principle of the regenerative
diet, in relation to the characteristic life-strategies, is
to compensate for partial body dramatizations and to restore
whole body balance and integrity.

1. The vital person should eat less
of the grounding, stimulating, and heat-producing foods:
grains, cooked foods, concentrated sweets (such as honey),
and acidic foods.

The diet of the vital person should
be strongly eliminative, emphasizing living and raw foods,
and minimizing earthy foods, perhaps eliminating earthy
foods altogether within a relatively short time.

2. The peculiar person should eat
more of the grounding, naturally physically stimulating,
heat-producing foods. Naturally (rather than artificially)
stimulating foods do not provoke “peculiar” dramatizations
of energy and emotion, but draw one’s energy and attention
more forcefully into the play of vitalphysical
life.

The basic diet for peculiar people
should include grains or cooked potatoes at least once each
day, perhaps decreasing to several times per week over time.
The diet should emphasize vegetables and grains, including
seeds and nuts, and raw goat’s milk and its products, and it
should de-emphasize fruit, which predisposes one to
exclusive “airiness.”

Raw food in general serves an “airy”
orientation. The peculiar person, therefore, may have to
retain cooked food (up to 25%) in the daily diet, perhaps
even taking some cooked food at every meal. But he or she
should retain a large concentration of living foods,
including living grasses, sprouted grains, and
seeds.

3. The solid person should simply
adopt a balanced, vitalizing diet, including all types of
natural foods.

Solid people often express a vital
or peculiar emphasis to their solidity. If you observe such
an emphasis or secondary life strategy, take it into account
by compensating with the diet according to the instructions
above.

The solid’s outward quality may be
one of calmness or relative balance, but it is not the
expression of religious or spiritual intelligence and
harmony. The solid does not have difficulty achieving
occasional calm in the vital-but he does tend to be
concentrated in the brain-mind at its gross levels. For this
reason, it is useful for the solid to purify his diet,
moving to a fully living and raw diet over time. This
compensation will help to break his conceptual fixation on
worldly affairs and to move beyond his suppression of
Life-Energy and feeling.

4. During any period or episode in
one’s life characterized by a vital, peculiar, or solid
strategy, any of these recommended dietary adjustments may
be made on a temporary basis.

VITAMINS AND SUPPLEMENTS FOR
THE VITAL, PECULIAR, AND SOLID TYPES

Like every other element of the
regenerative vegetarian diet, vitamins and food supplements
can be used consciously to help compensate for vital,
peculiar, and solid imbalances and thus to serve our whole
bodily orientation to God. Peculiar people, for instance,
are particularly served by regular, even large doses of
brewer’s or food yeast and B vitamins, especially niacin, to
strengthen the nervous system (these vitamins are also
present in grains-one of the reasons that grains are
recommended for peculiars); zinc, to stabilize the nervous
system, whether one is hyperactive or depressed; and calcium
and magnesium, to sedate the nervous system. Vitals, who
tend to be chronically toxic, may benefit from extra doses
of vitamins A and D, which strengthen muscles and bones and
aid digestion.

Do not, however, exploit the
compensatory property of vitamins-or of foods in general-as
a way to evade conscious responsibility for the tendency you
chronically dramatize. You will simply notice, when you have
already assumed responsibility for your tendencies in other
practical and responsible ways, that the use of compensating
foods and large doses of vitamins and food supplements aids
your resumption of the balanced, feeling point of view of
the whole body in ecstatic Communion with the Transcendental
Consciousness and All-Pervading Life that is God.

EATING IS A SACRIFICE FOR
THE SAKE OF THE BODY THAT EATS

by Bubba Free John

The following is excerpted from
Bubba Free John’s notes and talks to devotees on varying the
regenerative vegetarian diet according to one’s body type
and life strategy.

As one matures in the spiritual
readaptation of life, the tendencies toward imbalance and
self-indulgence (all of which are founded in old, loveless,
reactive adaptations to experience) weaken and become
obsolete. In the meantime, dietary dramatization of the
unbalanced and exaggerated tendencies of one’s living
character should be avoided, and the entire bodily being
should be consistently oriented, with positive feeling,
toward Lawful, sacrificial, or loving and appropriate
practices of diet and the general health of the whole bodily
being.

“The diet as it has been described
is essentially what everyone should eat from day to day,
with certain variations depending upon one’s bodily
characteristics. Some people would like to avoid all
responsibility for intelligent food management. They would
like to make their diet lighter and lighter, hoping
eventually not to be eating at all, or to be eating only raw
fruit and to be fasting most of the time. But this approach
to diet devitalizes the physical, breaks the connection
between the etheric and the physical, and overwhelms the
vital balance, so that Life is experienced exclusively
through emotional conditions.

“There are people who possess the
tendency to become associated very easily, even chronically,
with the emotional vehicle. Therefore, they must put a great
deal of attention on performing appropriate religious and
spiritual practice in the physical body, and on eating three
substantial meals from the recommended diet every day, not a
fruit diet of little, bird-food amounts. Because of their
tendency, eating three meals a day is part of their right
religious practice. On the other hand, there may be others
who do not have those tendencies, who can easily assimilate
and feel very good on a diet of raw food and more fruit than
is generally recommended. But if you get a fuzzy,
light-headed, `doped’ reaction to fruit, then have a baked
potato instead.

“The taking of solid food, after
all, is a grand, sacrificial act for the sake of the solid
or elemental vehicle, for the sake of the body that eats, so
that it may be Possessed by God.”

What is most important at all times
is intelligence, sensitive observation, responsibility for
the approach to food, and freedom from the demands of old
adaptations-physical, emotional, and mental. Within the
guidelines we offer there is much opportunity for personal
adaptation, before you even consider any radical
modification of the diet. Observe the effects of diet and
all life-practices on body, emotions, and mind, and then
intelligently adapt your practice to suit your needs-not
your cravings-and to counterbalance your liabilities. Become
the alchemist of your own conscious enjoyment, thereby
communicating a harmonious, feeling presence in the company
of all your friends and every living being.

 

ENLIGHTENMENT IS TRUE
HEALTH

A talk by Bubba Free John

BUBBA: The body-mind should be
viewed as a whole, as a single character, with two great
tendencies in play, or two sides of the body-mind, or two
hemispheres of the brain. The left side of the body and the
right hemisphere of the brain most commonly represent the
inverted, passive, or inward tendency, and the right side of
the body and the left hemisphere of the brain most commonly
represent the expansive, essentially vital-physical
tendency. The solid type of person more or less exclusively
emphasizes the left hemisphere of the brain, the verbal
dimension of the character. He is very orderly, very mental,
very verbal, but he is unable to be fully integrated with
the right-sided bodily characteristics of full
vital-physical enthusiasm without verbal control. The vital
type is just the opposite of that. The vital type
exaggerates the right-sided tendencies of the vital being.
He or she is all vital-physical, passionate, enthusiastic,
without self-control, without the left hemisphere of the
brain as balance. The peculiar person is unable to be fully
integrated with either the left or the right hemispheres of
the brain, or the left-sided or the right-sided bodily
tendencies. The peculiar person is locked in between, not
fully able to live with either left or right. The peculiar
person seems to be very emotional, a quality that would seem
to be desirable, except that the emotional quality that
characterizes the peculiar is fake. It is artificial
feeling. It is feeling based on imageries and illusions,
because the peculiar individual cannot fully participate in
the realities with which either the left or the right
hemisphere of the brain is in contact. Unable to be in
direct and present contact with the realities of the
vital-physical or the mental dimensions of his character,
the peculiar person is unreal, although apparently
emotional.

The emotional, or feeling, dimension
is the core, the center, the very Life-Current of the being.
The right and left aspects, or hemispheres, of the body-mind
surround this core. Each individual must observe himself or
herself in action, and see whether the right-sided tendency
or the left-sided tendency is exaggerated in his case or
whether he is locked in between, unable to function fully in
terms of either left or right. Having observed this tendency
or pattern that characterizes him, then he must live as the
whole body. Therefore, if the person tends to be expansive
and selfindulgent and vitalistic, physically oriented
without much consideration, he must sensitively bring the
responsible ordering of the left-sided dimension of the
body-mind into the play of his vitalphysical life, and he
must do it with feeling. Likewise, if he tends to be rigid
and verbal, he must make the vital-physical dimension more
prominent, with emotional force.

You cannot integrate the left and
the right simply by combining the two. The qualities of the
two sides must be lived whole bodily, that is, from the
feeling core of the body-mind. This is also the ultimate
responsibility of the peculiar, who is seated in the realm
of feeling, but who is unreal. He must bring the feeling
dimension into balanced integration with both the right- and
leftsided qualities of each moment. The task for every
individual is to be the whole body, to be both sides of the
body (or of the autonomic nervous system) and both
hemispheres of the brain in every moment, not to be a solid,
or rigidly left-brained; not to be a vital, rigidly
right-sided and physically oriented; and not to be a
peculiar, locked in between, unable to be physically alive
in fullness, unable to be mentally clear. We are each
obliged in every moment to live from the disposition of
feeling in God-Communion, and in every moment to integrate
the vital-physical and mental dimensions of
awareness.

By tendency, however, people have
learned programs of functioning that bring the left and
right sides of the body-mind, or the left and right
hemispheres of the brain, into strangely phasing
conjunctions. Thus, in people who are chronically
right-sided, or vital types, it appears that the left brain
is tending to be more or less asleep in the waking state.
Such an individual was likely made to feel stupid when he
was young, or he was told that he could not be intelligent
or responsible for himself. The intelligent side of him was
not awakened, not reinforced; perhaps it was even
suppressed. Likewise, there are other kinds of people-the
solid types-in whom the right hemisphere tends to be asleep,
who perhaps learned in their childhood that they should not
be freely active bodily, they should not feel, they should
not be outward, they should not be enthusiastic. They were
taught to be very selfcontrolled and verbal, always
thinking, always analyzing. Their capacity to integrate with
the visual and spatial or intuitive mind as well as the
feeling dimension of vital and physical existence was
suppressed. In them, the right hemisphere of the brain tends
to be asleep in the waking state, perhaps appearing in
dreams at night or in certain episodes of reactivity,
wherein the side of them that tends to be asleep is brought
to the surface by circumstance.

Thus, most people tend to have the
capacity to be either introverted or extroverted, either one
or the other, under one or another circumstance. They can
sometimes be very verbal, thinking and studying and
analyzing. And then at other times they can be very physical
and sexual. But the true test of the human being is a whole
body test, in which every aspect of the body-mind must be
made to function simultaneously and harmoniously in the
selftranscending gesture of love in God-Communion. The task
before each human being is first of all to observe himself
in action and then to become responsible whole bodily for
the total condition of experience. Whatever aspect tends to
be dominant must be balanced with the other aspect through
feeling, through GodCommunion, not through ordinary reactive
emotion, or any problematic self-manipulation, but in the
natural way of the devotee. The two sides of the body-mind
must be able to function simultaneously in the waking
state.

In our ordinary state, confused,
self-divided, and mechanically oriented, we are not aware of
the true Nature of our Condition. We generally presume, even
if we are left-brained and solid, that we are the physical
body. Every aspect of our experience is referred to the
bodily identity. If there is an energy dimension, an etheric
dimension, to our experience, it is the body that feels this
energy. That is why people use such strange language in
describing their intuition of their spiritual or ultimate
Condition. They talk about “my soul.” The “me” that talks
about “my soul” is the body. The physical body is the point
of view from which we tend to consider subtler things.
Whereas in fact the subtler conditions of our experience are
closer to our real Identity, and the physical body is the
more superficial aspect. The consciousness is the
fundamental identity, not the gross physical body in itself.
As we become more purified, awakened, and balanced, we begin
to realize this disposition in which the real Condition is
presumed. The body (or body-mind, the psycho-physical being)
as a whole becomes the “I,” and then the “I” realizes its
true Condition. In that mature awakening the individual no
longer uses such language as “my soul” or “my
life.”

When a person dies, we say that “he
lost his Life.” We think he is the physical body, and the
Life leaves him as the body. Whereas, the Life is itself his
identity. The body is “dropped” from the Life. We have lost
our body, not our Life, at death. But because of our
mysterious state of consciousness, this divided body-mind in
which left and right phase with one another and make it
impossible for us to stand whole-because of that, even our
thinking, our conscious consideration, is unclear, because
it is based in our inability to assume the other
half.

But when the entire body-mind is
awake and in balance, then the body itself, even the mind
itself, all of these conditions are realized to be secondary
modifications of the real Condition. We realize that the
physical body does not have a separate inner being. The true
being, the Consciousness, is of a transcendental Nature. It
is not within the body. The body is simply its modification.
Likewise, the mind is simply its modification. Both left and
right, you see, are equally modifications of this very
Consciousness, this transcendental Nature.

Thus, “I” is the whole body, left
and right, the total being. But “I” is not its own
Condition. The body-mind arises as a modification of our
true Identity, which is Transcendental in Nature, which we
cannot know or observe, because we are That. All that we
observe are the modifications, secondary and unnecessary, of
the very Current and Consciousness that we are. As we
Awaken, whole and in Truth, we no longer consider the
subtler and transcendental aspects of ourselves to be
somehow within or over against the “I” of the body. “I” no
longer have a soul. I am that very Consciousness and Life
that I refer to as soul when I have transcended my “I-ness,”
the body-mind qualities that hide me from my own
Awakening.

Therefore, true health, as I
consider it with you, is not just a matter of physical
well-being. It is a matter of Awakening to the real
Condition of your existence. The two primary aspects of the
body-mind must be balanced and they must be joined at the
center, at the heart, at the feeling dimension. When they
have been purified, balanced, equalized, clarified, then the
very Nature of which they are the modification Awakens or
Shines forth. That Nature is asleep now. It is only
permitted to reveal itself in states of consciousness that
you do not remember, basically during deep sleep. In deep,
dreamless sleep you enter into direct association with the
state that you are eternally, but you have no consciousness
at all. That association is only permitted in a state of
unconsciousness. But if in the waking state we become
responsible for the phases of the body-mind, and for this
curious idea we have of the body-mind as an independent
fleshy thing, and of our souls as independent, internal,
subjective, or mental things, we can become liberated from
illusions and stand as we are. And suddenly that
Consciousness which is otherwise revealed only in
unconsciousness Awakens during the waking state.

That true Awakening, prior to the
mechanics of the bodymind, is what I mean by “hearing.” It
is a moment of the breakthrough of one’s Identity, one’s
true Condition. It suddenly Shines forth, free of the
limitations of the left and right sides and the mechanics of
experience. It is pure Feeling or Blissfulness, pure
Consciousness or Happiness, without knowledge, without any
definition. It is free of all of the limitations of
experiential knowledge and conception. It no longer has any
such problems. Its fundamental Condition is obvious, but not
really speakable. From that point of view of hearing, or
Awakening, we are able to practice this Way of Divine
Ignorance, wherein all the aspects of our lives become
observable, and we can presume responsibility for them and
act whole bodily in our relations in every moment, as
GodCommunion. In such practice of Real Life, this body-mind
becomes purified, balanced, and clarified. It becomes
healthy in the truest sense.

True health is simply that
disposition of perfect Awakening in which the conditions of
the body-mind are no longer encumbrances, but they exist
essentially in their natural state, no longer having the
power to delude the consciousness or apparently separate it
from the intuition of the Truth of its own Condition. The
consideration of health is only secondarily about physical
wellbeing. It is primarily about God-Communion, or realizing
the disposition that is utterly free of the limitations of
the _mechanics of the body-mind, left and right and at the
center. It is essentially a matter of whole body Awakening,
in which the Transcendental Disposition stands free. That is
true health. It is also Bodily Enlightenment. Enlightenment
and true health are the same thing.

This book about diet and health is a
consideration essentially about responsibility for the first
three stages of life, the lower or the subhuman aspects of
our tendency. It is a consideration of how the body-mind is
corrupted or dramatized in ways that are not whole-the
vital, peculiar, and solid strategies, and all of the
strategies of infantile activity, including unintelligent
diet. Thus, the consideration of vitals, peculiars, and
solids is basic to this book, because the book is about the
whole body-mind, its left side and its right side, and how
these may be played against one another, either coordinated
with one another or made to phase in opposition to one
another. The practical consideration is about how we must
integrate the opposing tendencies of our human structure,
how we must appear single, whole, responsible in every
moment for all aspects of the functional body-mind, its
inwardness and its expansiveness, its verbal or mentalizing
quality and its vital physical quality. All of these
qualities must become our responsibility from the intuitive,
feeling point of view.

The three primary strategies or
types are forms of subhuman realization that tend to be
reinforced by subhuman social experience. In our movement
into the regenerative and truly human culture of the fourth
stage of life and higher, we become responsible for these
awful personalities that we have developed in the play of
subhuman society. Only when we come into the disposition of
the whole body, in which both sides of the brain are awake,
both aspects of the body-mind are awake, in which the heart
is awake, in which the feeling being is awake-only by being
fully awake and whole are we human. It is only then that
human nature acts and speaks and represents itself in
relationship. It is only then that the loving and conscious
spiritual nature that the human being represents in the
scheme of things appears in the Play of Life.

Spiritual life is a purifying force
that moves to purify and balance, equalize, transform, and
ultimately transcend the mechanics of experience. It is the
transcendence of the mechanics of experience that is health,
not physical immortality, not a gleeful
ninety-year-old-same-teeth-I-had-when-I-was-fifteen idiot.
That is not health in the truest sense, because it is not
human. It is purely physical, or lower than the heart. It
represents an ordering in the lower dimension of our
possibility. True health or sanity is Enlightenment,
Transcendental Awakening, Freedom. It is to be a human
being, not just a subhuman being with a healthy body. The
whole point of view of health fadism or health for its own
sake is something that I criticize in this book, because it
is a subhuman motive. The consideration of health is not
other than the consideration of Enlightenment or
God-Communion. They are the same thing, and they depend on
the same Awakening. And any condition of health that is not
a matter of Enlightenment or Awakening to the Divine
Condition is not true health. It is only another obstacle to
true health.