Enlightenment of the Whole Body - Adi Da Samraj (Bubba Free John)

What Is True Devotional Practice, or Direct Service and Sacrifice to God?

The Living Divine is Transcendental and All-Pervading. True sacrifice is the surrendering, to God, of the total self, or the whole body-mind-rather than only those things that are objective to oneself. Just so, God is not to be exclusively or magically Equated with anything that is not identical to "Himself" in his Totality or Person.

Therefore, devotional activity of the highest kind is not cultic or liturgical, but personal and whole bodily. It is not essentially a matter of the cultic glorification of a Divine "Name, " or a Temple, or a Holy Image, or a Concept. Rather, it is a matter of the Transcendental Spiritual Process, engaged through esoteric orientation of all the various aspects of the psycho-physical being, toward the All-Pervading Current, Radiance, and Consciousness of the Living Divine.

In that Process, the Spiritual Master is also a Living Agent, not a cultic object, and the Spiritual Master thus has unique significance in the true devotional Path. Just so, the more spiritually mature the general Community of devotees becomes, the more the Community becomes a Living Agent of the Divine Influence, much the same as the Living Spiritual Master. (For this reason, the Living Community of devotees is the principal Agent that the Spiritual Master develops during his lifetime, to succeed him after his death.)

True devotional service to the Divine is also performed through personal and moral disciplines, heartfelt service in relation to others, surrender of attachments and possessions, application to study of the written Teaching, and loving Remembrance of the Living Divine through Invocation and Prayer and the formal offering and acceptance of Gifts in the Divine Company. But these activities must be understood as only a necessary human foundation for higher or Transcendental and Radical Spiritual Activities, or the esoteric psycho-physical disciplines that are to be engaged in meditative contemplation. It is only by the addition of such esoteric means that the living body-mind is ultimately or radically submitted to the Living Divine, and so Transformed and Translated beyond itself into the Ecstasy of the Absolute Personality.

Top of Page

WE ARE DEFINED AND CONTROLLED BY ALL THAT WE HAVE NOT TRANSCENDED

The Essence of Practical Living

The Bhagavad Gita, chapter seventeen, verses five, six, and eight, and chapter six, verses sixteen through eighteen, freely rendered by Bubba Free John

Desperate men are often austere, but always loveless and unwise. Since they are possessed by themselves, rather than by the Radiant Divine Self, they suffer profound attachment to every kind of urge to experience. Therefore, they struggle to detach themselves from desire and the body by force of will. But they succeed only in tormenting the body-mind. And their efforts do not acknowledge, love, or Realize Me, the One who is even in the heart of the body, the true Self of the inner soul. Such people are daemonic, and a threat to what is Alive.

The Way to the Radiant Self is in the Middle of everything. Therefore, it is not found by one who eats immoderately, but neither is it found by one who strives to eat nothing. It is not found by one who would avoid activity, making sleep his Method! But neither is it found by one who spends his time in a mental struggle to stay awake, wasting himself in the avoidance of unconsciousness. The Way in Truth is to abide always in Love Communion with Me. Do this naturally, under all circumstances, rather than by unnatural or strategic efforts, whereby actions themselves become the subject of controversy and stressful motivations toward freedom and fulfillment. Simply surrender into Me Commune with Me, whether you are awake, or asleep, or dreaming whether you are temporarily active or temporarily in repose.

Practice of the Way is a matter of right, balanced, regular, orderly, and moderate activity, always done as a form of Love Communion with Me. It is a matter of natural and motiveless fulfillment of all actions that are appropriate and necessary to maintain the body-mind in constantly submissive Union with the All-Pervading Life and true Self of the World. All functions come under natural control when they are committed to Life Itself, rather than to efforts that only waste or avoid Life.

Therefore, act and also rest, in a manner that always surrenders the body-mind into the All-Pervading Radiance of Life. And also eat what serves the relationship between the body and the Life upon which it depends. Always choose what is pure, fresh, and wholesome, providing a medium for Life. Choose what increases Fullness of Life, health, vitality, and longevity. Choose what is pleasant to the body, and altogether compatible with its cycle of assimilation and elimination. Choose Life through every choice, every function, and every act.

In this manner, Life will Awaken the native Enjoyment of the soul in the body, and you will be Absorbed in Eternal Life itself, rather than the passing phenomena of Life, which are all of the experiences of the body-mind, the illusions of those who are self possessed and bereft of Divine understanding.

"Nothing serves the steadiness, strength, and clarity necessary for an enlightened life of spiritual practice more than a 'sattwic' diet, or one that is pure, whole, moderate in quantity, free, as a matter of daily practice, of stimulants, toxins, and enervating substances, and intelligently maintained from the beginning of one's sacrificial commitment to the Spiritual Master and the Way. If the diet is true, then all other habits of action, association, sex, emotion, and mentality tend to re-adapt to their own lawful disposition with natural ease. " (Bubba Free John)

In the first stage of life (or in our readaptation to the first stage of life), we incarnate as the living, vital physical body. The principal processes to which we must adapt are reception and release, or assimilation and elimination. We need to learn how to eat, how to breathe, and how to Commune bodily with the All-Pervading Life. If the diet is too stimulating, or stupffying, or toxic, or enervating in any way, then body, emotions, and mind never can be restored to their native balance nor sacrificed to God from the heart. Thus, 'food" (including right exercise as well as right diet and practice of health management) is the key to practical discipline for those beginning the Way of Divine Communion. (The disciplines of conscious exercise are fully presented in Conscious Exercise and the Transcendental Sun, and those of right diet and health practice in The Eating Gorilla Comes in Peace.)

Having developed as the body, in the second stage of life (or readaptation to it), we naturally expand into relational feeling. We become sensitive to emotional and sexual polarization. At this stage we need to practice "right association, " which takes many forms. One of the most important is right association with the opposite sex, and right adaptation to sexuality itself as the principal emotional and relational expression of our ordinary humanity. Through nonrelational habits of association and sexual activitypromiscuity, erotic titillation, and orgasmic self-indulgence we contract the feeling dimension of the being, thereby preventing body, emotions, and mind from coming to rest in the intensity and freedom of heartfelt God-Communion. Thus, right association and proper sexual adaptation are also a principal practical discipline of the Way of Divine Ignorance.

In the essays in this chapter Bubba Free John refers to the practice of sexual communion. (He does not offer instructions in this practice here, but does so at length in Love of the Two-Armed Form, the text on emotional and sexual practice and adaptation in the Way of Divine Ignorance.) Sexual communion is the mature, regenerative practice of sexuality, which is the obligation of all sexually active devotees in the Way of Divine Ignorance, once they have become stably responsible in the preparatory stages of the Way of Divine Communion for all emotional reactivity. Sexual communion transcends the motives of self-exploitation and compulsive Lifedischarging orgasm, which commonly characterize the sexual play of most men and women.

Thus, sexual communion becomes possible and appropriate only when the individual is already mature in the third stage of life and is entering the fourth-when body, emotions, and mind are already integrated in the heart's devotional Communion with God. Then the practice ofsexual communion with one's husband or wife serves to intensify one's heartfelt, whole body Communion, and to prepare one to meet the Divine Master in sacred, formal meditation.

Top of Page

The Transcendental Diet of Man

The bodily being of Man is constantly sustained by the Eternal, All-Pervading Force of Life. In our infantile recoil, reaction, and psycho-physical contraction toward self, we separate from the Eternal Reality and become self-possessed. Thus, we begin to starve and suffer. The body-mind becomes a field of tensions, devoted to the search for consoling experiences that release tensions pleasurably. Such experiences include pleasures of eating and sex, willful control of life circumstances, the acquisition of mental knowledge, and the mental contemplation of abstractions. Such pleasures preoccupy and degenerate the usual man, until he is restored to Life.

The All-Pervading Divine Life Itself lives as the individual body-mind and sustains it. If only the body-mind will open into the Current of Radiant Life, with full feeling and without thought, it will be liberated from the self-possessed games of tension and release of tension. Then there is only Fullness of Life. Such psycho-physical opening into the Current of Life is "faith" in the highest sense. It is bodily confession of dependence on Life, prior both to fear and belief. It is bodily cooperation with the Real, prior to all subjectivity and problem-centered efforts.

Our Food is Life itself, which we may breathe - but only when breathing is combined with unobstructed Feeling of the All-Pervading Force of Life. We must feed on Life, through feeling breaths, relaxing the entire body, including the brain, into that Current of Force. We must receive that Life through inhalation to the vital organs of the lower body. And then we must release that Force, through exhalation, to the entire body, and via the entire body to Infinity.

This is our native "diet. " We are always eating and sustained by Life, through every truly and openly feeling breath. But if we contract in our feeling, we also contract bodily and mentally. Thus, we become self-possessed, suffering reactive emotions, bodily tensions, and chronic mentalizing. Through the "conscious exercise" of the wholly feeling breath, we are fed and sustained and healed and transformed by the Radiant Divine Life. This is the secret of Life and of the transcendence of all experience.

This is the true and highest "regenerative diet." And all other dietary disciplines are simply extensions of the feeling breath of Life. The right and regenerative solid and liquid diet of Man is one that is most perfectly aligned to the reception-release cycle of the feeling breath. Whatever we eat must be taken with the feeling action of receiving Life.

Therefore, only that food should be chosen which is pure and vital and not toxifying. The usable or Lifegranting elements of the diet must be such that they can be easily and quickly assimilated. And, the unusable or waste elements of the diet must be such that they can be easily and quickly eliminated. (The high natural carbohydrate, low protein, wholly regenerative vegetarian diet is the best general dietary plan for human beings.)

Only a benign, pure, vital, and complete diet can serve the body's Communion with Life. Even the solid and liquid diet must be a feeling cycle of reception-release in the All-Pervading Current of Life. But our true and right and ultimate Diet is in the moment to moment, unobstructed whole bodily Feeling-Communion with the All-Pervading Force of Life-enacted via the breath cycle.

Top of Page

The Principle in Practice

The practical affair of the whole Way of Divine Ignorance is a matter of the progressive relaxation-release of all forms of congestion and contraction at every level of psycho-physical attention or experience.

Top of Page

Social Celebration and Spiritual Maturity

Those who are beginning to adapt body, emotion, mind, and will to a truly religious and moral practice of life may from time to time celebrate their common humanity with one another. Religious and devotional celebration, both private and communal, should be part of the daily and regular practice of devotees. But there may also be occasions of mutual social celebration of the pleasurable sacrifice that is human existence itself.

On such social occasions, the traditional "sacrifices" may be made. The ancient rituals of celebration included killed food, rich and elaborate meals, alcohol, tobacco, song, dance, and mutual amusements of all kinds. Devotees who are beginning to adapt to the radical Way of Divine Ignorance are free to participate, if they choose, in such occasional and brief celebrations with one another.

However, the casual use of the "sacrifices" or occasions and methods of social celebration should be eliminated from the life practices of all devotees. The occasions of intentional celebratory use should be infrequent, and they should be maintained for but a short period of hours, perhaps two to four times a year. No degenerative habits or casual attachments to the dietary accessories should be developed or indulged. The motive for celebration should be celebration itself-or expansive, ecstatic self-giving in the company of intimates. And, therefore, such celebration should be made only in the intimate society of one's close friends in the community of devotees. Those who do not accept the "spirit" of celebration, and who cannot celebrate in this manner without forsaking the truly religious and spiritual understanding and discipline of life, should not indulge in the dietary accessories and expansive company that such celebration involves.

Just so, the accessories of celebration should not be indulged to the point of significant degeneration of one's health, vitality, or capacity for creating intimate, pleasurable, loving company with others. And a period of physical purification should immediately follow, even as a period of physical purity or good health should precede such occasions. Some may even prefer, for reasons of general health and well-being, to avoid all forms of the dietary accessories of occasional celebration, although they might celebrate such occasions in a purely social manner, without the traditional accessories.

In any case, as practice in the Way of Divine Ignorance matures, the condition of the individual body-mind becomes gradually transformed, via all of the conditions of practice. The reactive physical, emotional, and mental characteristics that may have been present when practice of the Way began gradually relax into the prior Fullness of the Divine Life. The self-possessed, selfdivided disposition, full of chronic tensions and motives toward degenerative release, gradually relaxes into a disposition that is ecstatic, loving, and happy in its native state. Thus, as practice matures, the use of traditional accessories of celebration, along with all attachment to casual degenerative habits, gradually falls away.

Those who apply for lay membership in The Free Communion Church5 must be able to live with only very occasional, intimate, and Life-positive use of the accessories and methods of social celebration (excluding social drugs and hallucinogens, which are too dramatically deluding to be included within the framework of true religious and spiritual practice). They must be free of all commitment to casual self-indulgence of all kinds. And those who apply for membership in the esoteric order of the Church must freely abandon all use of traditional dietary accessories, except perhaps for rare occasions, with the permission or under the direction of the Pastoral Service Order. (Thus, as a general rule, mature devotees abandon all use of killed food, eggs, unnatural or "junk" food, alcohol, tobacco, and coffee, as well as the previously abandoned social drugs and hallucinogens, and they make only occasional or right use of conventional tea, such as black or green tea.)

The later stages of practice in the whole Way of Divine Ignorance require the body-mind to be consistently stable in its regenerated native state, free of degenerative physical, emotional, and mental reactivity. There must be freedom as well from the effects of both the casual and the occasional self-indulgences that typify the habits of men and women who are not adapted to the truly human and higher human functions of Man. The higher psycho-physical disciplines of the Way of Re-cognition and the superhuman Transformations of the Way of Radical Intuition require the highest degree of psycho-physical balance and Intensity of Life-Fullness.

The chemistry of blood and breath, and the processes of all the various bodily systems, must be developed to a degree that permits the subtlest and most highly evolved mechanisms of the body-mind to perform their ultimate tasks.

Therefore, as devotees mature in the stages of practice in the whole Way of Divine Ignorance, they must demonstrate the signs of mature and higher adaptation of every aspect of psycho-physical existence in human form. The Transformation and Liberation of Man is not merely a subjective matter. It is a matter of literal change and higher adaptation of the body-mind and all forms of its activity. Only the Man who is Awake and Whole can be a true and holy Sacrifice in God.

5. For a discussion of the levels of involvement in The Free Communion Church, including lay membership and the esoteric order, which are referred to in this paragraph, please see "An Invitation'' at the end of the text.

Top of Page

The Broken Bird

The chronic motivations that lead to our persistent embodiment are dramatized in the form of sex desire and anger. Through continuous sex desire we seek an eternal, consoling intimacy, and also a perpetual means of release. Through perpetual anger we demonstrate our inherent frustration and pain-alive in finite form, yet Full of an Infinite Energy.

Through the chronic dramatizations of sex desire and anger we constantlystrive toward ecstasy and victory, always possessed by the internal coil of motivation, the creative urge to solve the "problem of existence. "

The essential motive is to be universally attractive to others, loved by all, served by all, consoled by all. It is the desperate motive of power, the urge to manipulate self and others. It is all a symptom of fear-the failure to love beyond all limits.

But ecstasy is only Realized in self-transcending love, surrender, and Communion with the Radiant Absolute. Such love liberates us from reactive motivations, all of which lead to embodiment, experience, and the unending search for release, the futile effort toward Perfect Flight. Therefore, the only fulfillment of our motives is sacrifice of self, or Translation into the Eternal Condition, through Love-Communion and Transcendence of all experience in the Living God.

There is Liberation only in Ecstasy, or Absorption in the One Who is prior to mind, motivation, and all arising of differentiated self-awareness. The soul is Full only in such Absorption, not in the recoil toward self and all the loveless out-turning of mere desire. Therefore, transcend all present motivations toward experience, or else future embodiment and trouble are assured. Transcend the illusion of your own independent attractiveness, and yield into the One Who Is Beauty and Love Itself.

p. 294 Top of Page

Sex and Enlightenment

The key to Divine Life is hidden in sex. The secret process hidden in the common knowledge of religion, spirituality, mysticism, magic, and all yoga is the Communion of the whole and entire body-mind with the All-Pervading Current, Force, and Presence of Life, or the Divine Spirit, that appears to be separated from us via the sex organs and the vital centers of the body.

What we feel and exploit as the Life-Force in the genitals is but a trickle of the All-Pervading Life. The entire body-mind is contracted upon itself, separating as itself by reaction to its borncondition. We are chronically and even bodily recoiled from Infinity, and thus we are self-possessed rather than God-Possessed.

This recoil of the entire body-mind is realized in the first and infantile stage of life. And as the infant feeds, it informs itself of its independence, its vulnerability, and its separation from any sense of an Absolute Sustainer-Reality. Thus, when the sense of bodily pleasure arises, it is accepted as the primary consolation or reward for egoic individuation. And that consolation by the personal or own-body pleasure of self is ultimately epitomized in the second or mid-childhood stage of life, in the form of sexual awakening.

The usual individual is fixed in this infantile and childish level of psycho-physical adaptation (or the failure of adaptation) to the All-Pervading Life in which we appear, continue and change for a time, and then disappear. Thus, each individual represents a chronic disposition, universal to all human beings at this stage of evolution, in which the body-mind is contracted upon itself at its elemental base. And each individual therefore consoles himself through fixation upon the primary bodily pleasures of food, sensation, and sex.

Even so, because of the root and fundamental contractedness of the entire body-mind, the Divine Life is not contacted directly and realized in its Fullness. Rather, the Divine Life is contacted and more or less hidden by the already contracted body-mind. Thus, even though the body-mind consoles itself through its own structural pleasure, and even though the primary bodily or structural mechanism of pleasure is felt at the genitals-the Force of Life is not felt or realized except as a relatively weak and private trickle of bodily energy.

People in general have no understanding of this and its implications. They live in an essentially mechanical, reactive, selfpossessed, confused, and degenerative manner. And either Life, or the Radiance of the Divine, is not acknowledged or there is no understanding of how to adapt the body-mind to the Power of the Living Divine.

I am not speaking of things I merely believe. I am speaking with the certainty of a complete experience of all of the psychophysical processes and signs of total Regeneration in God. And anyone can see the proof of all that I say if they will only consider this Teaching and take up the Way in my Company.

The usual body-mind enjoys only that trickle of energy that manages to pass through the reactive locks or closed doors of the genitals and the vital base of the bodily form. The limitless Power of Life cannot invade the body-mind and motivate its truly human and superhuman adaptation and growth. The process of such growth awakens only when the intuition of Life is regained, and the body-mind submits to the Spirit or Life in which it is appearing and by which it is sustained.

That process of whole bodily submission to Life is true religion and spirituality. It is most radically realized in the Way of Divine Ignorance, engaged in Communion with the Spiritual Master, through whom the Radiant Divine is Revealed most directly to human beings. And all of the practices in that Company involve literal and ecstatic, or self-releasing, love and surrender to the Radiant Divine. Such practices bring every function and feature of the body-mind into direct and disarmed contact with the Divine Life of the body-mind and the whole world.

Because of the primacy of the contraction generated at the bodily base, and most especially at the sexual center of the body, the release of these reactive contractions is the fundamental necessity for Whole Bodily Enlightenment, or Translation of the independent body-mind into Life. Such is the practical necessity of religion, spirituality, and all forms of higher human structural awakening in God.

The process of sexual communion, described in the book Love of the Two-Armed Form, is only one of many essential disciplines to be enacted in Communion with the Divine Life. But it is a primary process in the Way of Divine Ignorance, and it matures into a profound and esoteric capacity in the later stages of practice. Once the locks of the perineum, anus, genitals, navel, solar plexus, heart, chest, throat, mouth, face, spine, and the entire brain are all opened to Life, the bodily Revelation of God becomes a Glory that few have ever enjoyed. In the process of that Transforming Revelation, the body is sublimed into the Ecstasy of Light, and the mind is raised beyond mere soul into the transcendental Genius of Wisdom and Sacrifice, by which it passes beyond itself to God. May you be Blessed to Awaken in this Understanding.

Top of Page

Sexual Activity Is neither an Obstacle nor an Obligation in the Way of Divine Ignorance

In the Way of Divine Ignorance the conversion of conventional sexual activity into the uniquely human process of sexual communion is essential. However, sexual activity is not itself necessary. It is only that the avoidance of sexual activity is neither useful nor necessary in this Way. And most people are likely to prefer to be sexually active, in spite of conflicts and difficulties, rather than choose the strategy of ascetic avoidance of sex. However, in some cases, either the force of sexual motivation is naturally weak or else the Force of Divine Communion itself dissolves the genital game.

In every case, the individual should be made thoroughly aware of the right and regenerative function of sexuality in sexual communion with Life. But some individuals may never enter into sexual intimacy or marriage, or else such an intimate relationship may include little genital-sexual activity, or even none at all.

In any case, whether the individual is sexually active or not, the Way of Divine Ignorance is the Way of total psycho-physical Communion with the All-Pervading Divine Life. And such Communion ultimately becomes functional Transformation by the Power of Life and literal Translation of the body-mind into Life. Therefore, only the Divine is necessary, and only the essential whole bodily disciplines are obligatory. The personal, moral, and higher psycho-physical disciplines that must be applied are the ones that are applied by the whole body-mind and through all the specific functions that are active in one form or another. Thus, genital sexual activity is not itself obligatory, since we can live in Fullness without it. But the sex function must itself be yielded into the Divine Life, and to the degree the individual is sexually active he must convert and adapt that activity into the process of sexual communion.

Any individual who is not genitally active can enjoy the full Realization of the Way of Divine Ignorance, just as any genitally active individual. However, any reactive obstructions that may be preventing or complicating such activity must be released. And the regenerative whole bodily disciplines in general must become the practice of every devotee. But the absence of sexual communion with Life through genital intimacy with a lover is not an inherent obstacle to this Way, since all of the other whole bodily, personal, moral, religious, spiritual, and esoteric yogic disciplines are themselves sufficient.

Top of Page

The Lover of Mankind, and How Our Sexuality Is Transcended

The functional psycho-physical discipline of sexual communion, practiced by members of The Free Communion Church, is the process whereby our sexuality may become truly human. It is also the process whereby our truly or uniquely human sexuality ultimately transcends itself in ecstatic self-sacrifice into the All-Pervading Divine Life.

The transcendence of sex is the only truly human fulfillment of sex. That transcendence is not realized by problematic avoidance of sex or self-possessed mental and subjective manipulation of our sexual and bodily structures. It requires a positive, free, and human understanding of sex, and a reorientation of the sexual impulse as well as a readaptation of sexual habits of action. Then, through direct psycho-physical Communion with the Divine, and by specific sexual communion with the All-Pervading Life of the Divine, a true and literal transcendence of degenerative sexual adaptation may be realized.

Sexuality and food-taking are the most critical links in the bodily chain below the heart. Therefore, the casual satisfaction of sexual desire provides one of the principal consolations that bind us to ourselves and separate us from the Divine and Blissful Realization of Life. It must not be mechanically and self-consciously resisted, since that is fruitless and as much a matter of selfpossession as the exploitation of sex. But our sexuality must be transcended, and right sexual practice is a process that naturally and inevitably transcends sexuality itself. Such transcendence is a matter of the regenerative readaptation of sexual practice, leading to a wholly regenerative economy in practice, free of the chronic necessity of genital orgasm. Only then will degenerative and unillumined self-possession cease to create the conventional subhuman pattern of life that characterizes most men and women. Only in the transcendence of our sexuality, through regenerative fulfillment of our sexuality, does the Divine become our constant Occupation and our true Lover.

Top of Page

Growth and Transcendence

To live by the Law is our worship, and Life itself is our God. Sexual communion is worship, or Communion with Life, through the love-transformation of the sexual function. Just so, all the devotional, personal, moral, and higher psycho-physical conditions or responsibilities of the Way of Divine Ignorance are forms of regenerative worship of Life, or sacrificial Communion between structure and Life.

Life, or the All-Pervading and Radiant Divine Reality, must be realized to be the Condition as well as the Content of the vital functional dimension of human existence. Then the human individual is released from the illusion of separation from Reality, and he or she may continue to grow, through true worship, or regeneration and ultimate sacrifice of the entire body-mind into Life. Such growth depends on the intuitive awakening of the heart, or the free and whole bodily response of love, to Life. And the human being grows through the acceptance of personal conditions for the functions below the heart, moral conditions for the whole bodily disposition of the heart, and higher psycho-physical conditions for the psychic and higher mental functions above the heart. But that growth, through personal, moral, and higher psychophysical adaptation, is always itself a matter of free participation in the Law of God, which is true worship, or the sacrifice of the whole body-mind into Life. Therefore, we ultimately transcend our own structural growth, through Translation into the very Divine.

Top of Page

Every Kind of Action Must Be Engaged as Love-Communion with the Living God

Sexual communion is not about "cultic" attachment and obsessive fascination relative to one's lover. It is about ecstatic or self-releasing Communion with the All-Pervading Force of Life, via every function of the body-mind, and via one's lover. Neither one's own body-mind nor one's lover is the goal or ultimate object of sexual communion, but the Divine Life is itself the constant meditation of every part and moment. Therefore, self and lover are both sacrificed in the Divine Life in the process of sexual communion.

Just so, regenerative diet, health practice, and other personal and moral disciplines of the Way of Divine Communion are not merely about "health food," the ideal of nonkilling, or any conventional economic, social, or political intention. All practices in this Way are about whole bodily ecstatic Communion with the All Pervading Divine Life. And through each particular discipline a different aspect or function of the body-mind is literally adapted to the All-Pervading Life. Ultimately, by all these means and more, the whole and entire body-mind is Translated or Dissolved into that Life and Divine Destiny.

Top of Page

Bodily Transcendence and Sexual Communion

As the devotee matures in the stages of practice in the Way of Divine Ignorance, his practice of sexual communion also matures. Thus, at first he transcends reactive and self-possessed emotional and erotic motivations.

Then he realizes regenerative control over the orgasm, so that the energy awakened in the bodily thrill of sexual intercourse is directed toward the nourishment and enlivenment of the higher and the whole bodily functions. Gradually, a natural economy develops in his practice, so that its frequency coincides perfectly with the regenerative needs or patterns of the bodily being.

It can be said that motiveless celibacy is inevitable in the seventh stage of life-or the maturity of the Way of Radical Intuition. But permanent celibacy is only necessary and inevitable in the extremes of bodily transcendence, as in the approach to bodily Translation or bodily release at death. In practice, therefore, regenerative sexual communion may remain as part of the ordinary and humorous play of the individual in the seventh stage of life until the approach of death. (During the lifetime, periods of profound bodily transcendence are inevitable, and motiveless celibacy would, pertain during such periods-but sexual communion might be resumed at other, more ordinary phases of the bodily play of Life.)

Truly, to transcend the body is not to be bodily inactive. Rather, it is to be in a Disposition in which all bodily activity, including sexual activity, is engaged entirely as a form of Divine Communion, or Transcendental Sacrifice.

Top of Page

The Way of Renunciation and the Way of Ecstasy

If anyone renounces sexual activity, he discovers the mind in its place. The mind is all desires. Even if all desires are renounced, the mind remains. The mind is attention itself. But even if attention is renounced, the mind is victorious. The mind is the root of attention. It is the ego, Narcissus, the self-enjoyer, who renounces every one and every thing, for the sake of his own immunity from the threat in all relationships.

But if anyone truly transcends sexual activity, then he also transcends the mind. He transcends all desires, every gesture of attention, and the recoil of self from Infinity. Such a one transcends the person and the motive of Narcissus. Such a one has chosen the Way of Ecstasy rather than the Way of Renunciation. Such a one is Awakened to the true Self, through Eternal Communion with the Master of Love.

Therefore, renounce no thing and no one, but transcend every thing and every one. Do not struggle with the Force of desire and self-definition. Rather, be Awakened. Be turned about in your attention, your feeling, and your action. Let every moment of attention, feeling, and action be a moment of Ecstatic LoveCommunion with the All-Pervading Radiance and Eternal Consciousness of the Living God, the true Self of all.

Top of Page

Love Is the Method of Sacrifice

The true man or woman yields to the process of experience as to a lover. Such a one does not enter into the realms of experience in a defensive manner-cranky, rigid, full of self and knowledge. Rather, such a one enters into the present moment of experience as an act of love.

Experience, whether positive or negative, coincides with ecstasy in the case of devotees of the Real. They are sacrificed in any case, spoiled with wounds, and ultimately eaten by a mysterious lover.

Lovers do not fear dissolution. Therefore, they are active as submission, feeling, and ecstatic awe. Unlike the knower, who does not make love but at best presumes to love, the devotee of the Real is engaged in the process of ecstasy. The devotee exceeds all knowledge through love and ecstatic self-surrender. For such a one, knowledge is only a convention of ordinary order and thinking, whereas love is the method whereby the secret purposes of the universe are fulfilled.

Top of Page

The Ascetic Problem and the Freedom of True Devotees

The world-renouncing ascetic considers his born existence to be a problem. He feels himself always confronted by two great alternatives: Sex and God. He feels obliged to choose one or the other. He struggles to choose God. But the God he chooses is only an aspect of his own experience, a modification of his own body-mind. It is the God who is the opposite of sex, the alternative to sex, at the opposite terminal of the body.

The ascetic suffers himself as a problem. He considers his own body to be structured like a problem. There is sex, or the experience of the world, at one end. And there is God, the inner and higher mind, or the brain in itself, at the other end. He chooses what is within and above, and he abandons what is below and without. He is at war with himself, and even what he chooses as God is only a part of himself.

But the self-transcending devotee of the Living God is Awake to the Truth that precedes all problems, all solutions, and all experiential choices. He enjoys insight into his own dilemma, his own motivations, his own strategic efforts. He is free of the alternatives that troubled ascetics see mapped in the body-mind. He has realized that the truly Great Alternatives are not two forms of experience or two aspects of the body-mind. The Great Alternatives that truly confront him are not Sex and God, but self and God. And the consideration of these Alternatives does not produce a dilemma or division in him. The two Alternatives are not within himself. Rather, they are the two possible orientations of himself. He may turn upon himself by exploiting his relations, for the sake of the pleasures of such experience. (Such is the choice of the libertine.) Or he may turn upon himself by strategically renouncing his relations, for the sake of the pleasures of inwardness. (Such is the choice of the ascetic.) But the ultimate Alternative to both of these choices is self-transcending Love Communion with the All-Pervading and Transcendental Divine. And such is the free choice of the true devotee.

The true devotee is free of the double-bind of problematic choices. He is not obliged to renounce the world, nor is he bound to exploit the world. Rather, he may surrender himself into God Communion via all of his true relations. Thus, the true devotee need not choose between Sex and God. Sex is ordinary to those who love God. The true devotee lives his sexual possibility as a form of Spiritual Worship, or self-transcending Love-Communion with the Living God. Likewise, all of his functional possibilities, high or low in the structure of the body-mind, are engaged or lived as forms of that same Love-Communion. The true devotee does not choose among his own parts. He does not suffer doubt of the world, or the body-mind, or experience. Rather, he is liberated by insight into his participation in the world, or the body-mind, or experience. Therefore, he neither chooses nor abandons the world, or the body-mind, or experience. He simply surrenders as the body-mind in the world, and via every kind of fundamental and right experience, to the Living God. He surrenders as himself. He does not renounce himself or any part of himself. He transcends himself through surrender, or Love-Communion with the Living God, via every function, through all his relations, under all conditions. Therefore, he is always already free-neither bound by the choices of the libertine nor deluded by the choices of the ascetic.

This Way of the true devotee is the Way of Divine Ignorance. And when that Love is Perfect in the seventh stage of life, then where is God and where am "I"? Where is a place? Where does experience happen? When all arising is Realized to be only an unnecessary and temporary modification of Radiant Consciousness, then even the motive is understood as That. Such is the Free Disposition in which even the body Shines with a mindless Shout and Dissolves in Happiness.

Top of Page

The Fullness of Life Dissolves Body and Mind

All attachment to degenerative sex must ultimately pass, or else the body-mind remains addicted to its own tensionrelease mechanism of self-consciousness. Just -so, all chronic stimulation of the independent and separate parts of the bodymind must pass, releasing the body-mind itself into the All-Pervading Current of Life. The "Sacrifice of Man," or Divine Translation, occurs only when the body-mind is stabilized in both wholeness and fullness.

Thus, all reactivity, self-division, self-possession, tension, thought, and chronic obstruction or emptiness of Life must be dissolved. The Way of such dissolution is in regenerative practice (in which Life is constantly permitted to pervade the whole body rather than stimulate each part to a different degree), founded in awakened intuition (in which transcendental Ignorance constantly undermines the self-binding force of experience and knowledge).

The Way in which the awesome binding power of sex is dissolved is not through strategic detachment, suppression of sexdesire, or manipulation of thought. Just so, the chronically exclusive stimulation of any part of the bodily being cannot dissolve through self-manipulative strategies. Rather, the dissolution of the tendencies and the effects of partial bodily or psycho-physical stimulation of every kind occurs as a natural event, when the Fullness of Life is permitted to be continuous in the whole and entire body. When the Fullness of the Current of Life pervades the entire bodily being, without obstruction, contraction, or reaction of a mental, emotional, or physical kind, then every form of the partial stimulation of the body-mind relaxes and becomes gradually obsolete. The imbalanced or partial and chaotic stimulation of the bodily being gradually ceases as chronic fixation of Life, and attention in separate organs, parts, or functions relaxes. Ultimately, the conductivity⁶ of the bodily being becomes total, continuous, and profound, permitting radical sacrifice of self, or whole bodily Communion with the Radiant Reality that pervades the world. It is not a matter of inward concentration, strategic exclusion of bodily awareness, mental manipulation, suppression of sexual feeling (which is only Life felt more or less exclusively in the genitals), or suppression of feeling in any sense. It is a matter of total feeling into the Current of Life, and intuitive abandonment of attachment to every form of experience that arises as modification of that Current.

When the bodily being is whole, the Current of Life is equalized throughout the body, dissolving chronic thought, reactive emotion, and bodily tension. And the consciousness, in Ignorance, intuits the Current not to be within but to pervade in all directions to Infinity. Therefore, the self, or body-mind, yields to Life and becomes ecstatic as Fullness of Feeling to the degree of Infinity. In that case, the whole body-mind is Transfigured in the Radiance of Divine Ignorance, and thereafter there is only Transformation and Translation in God.

6. Conductivity is the specifically yogic or technical form of responsibility in each stage of the Way of Divine Ignorance. (Its counterparts, upon which it depends in every stage, are the various forms of the conscious process of unobstructed, transcendental intuition, or Divine Ignorance.)

In general, conductivity is the capacity of the body-mind to conduct, or be surrendered into, the All-Pervading Life-Current. Such conductivity or surrender is realized through love, or radiant whole body feeling to Infinity, and such love involves coordinated engagement of body, breath, and attention in alignment with the Universal Current of Life-Energy.

Top of Page

Renunciation and Transcendence

Renunciation is a strategic act, motivated by the problems of self, or the independent body-mind in its constant alternations between temporal frustration and fulfillment. But transcendence is a natural process, realized through right application or adaptation of our various functions. Such right application or adaptation is a matter of intuitive sacrifice, or submission to the All-Pervading and Transcendental Divine, via all ordinary activities. Such is the Law of God. Therefore, transcendence of our functions is a natural, necessary, and inevitable process or event, if we are Awakened to the Way of Sacrifice, which is the Way of Love and Eternal Life.

For this reason, it should be clear that the ultimate result or import of all functional practices of a personal, moral, or esoteric mystical kind that are engaged in the Way of Divine Ignorance is transcendence of all psycho-physical functions, practices, and results of practice.

This Way does not involve strategic renunciation, but it most certainly involves natural and progressive transcendence. This Way is the Way of transcendence and Translation of the separated self, or the disposition of the body-mind, into the Absolute and Eternal Divine, Who is the Transcendental Self and Radiant Person that Pervades and yet Transcends all manifest phenomena and all persons or beings in all worlds.

Thus, as devotees grow and mature in the stages of practice in this Way, they naturally demonstrate more and more of the signs of the transcendence of the separated or conditional self and its functions. This is made clear in my descriptions of dietary and sexual practice, as well as esoteric or meditational practice, relative to the four stages of the Way.

Thus, as devotees mature, their dietary practice first moves away from all gross forms of dietary indulgence-away from such food elements as animal flesh, alcohol, and tobacco. Then, as devotees enter into the later stages of practice, even the "earthier" food elements, such as milk, milk products, most cooked grains, cooked beans, nuts, salt, spices, and concentrated sweets (such as honey), are used either in moderation or only occasionally (and, in some cases, they are entirely avoided). Devotees thus enter into more and more direct association with the Primary Food Source, which is the All-Pervading Life of God. Eventually, in the Way of Re-cognition and the Way of Radical Intuition, the diet is naturally limited to those substances that serve as a most direct medium of connection or Communion with the All-Pervading Life, and that create the least tendency toward toxemia, psycho-physical imbalance, and enervation. Such is the most perfectly conservative and regenerative dietary practice.

Likewise, as devotees mature in their general practice, including adaptation to the self-sacrificial process of sexual communion, they naturally demonstrate the inevitable signs of the transcendence of eroticism (in thought, desire, and action), including gradual transcendence of the degenerative orgasm. In the Way of Re-cognition, the third stage of practice in the total Way, such signs provide a firm basis for steadiness of attention, breath, feeling, bodily disposition, and the bodily Current of Life-Force.

Thus, natural transcendence of the egoic sexual motive gradually produces a native economy in sexual activity, whereby its frequency is moderated and its effects are conserved. And that sexual economy continues in the Way of Radical Intuition.

Just so, the esoteric practices of a meditative kind, which appear in various and progressive forms from stage to stage in this Way, are themselves a form of self-transcending psycho-physical adaptation and sacrifice. Therefore, although various mystical and yogic phenomena are experienced by these means, they are instantly transcended via the conscious process (as remembrance of God, enquiry, re-cognition, and radical intuition). In this manner, the stages of esoteric practice are, like those of dietary and sexual practice, self-transcending. And, in the Way of Radical Intuition, all phenomenal exercises of the body-mind are radically transcended in Perfect Absorption in the Absolute Personality that is the Divine Master and Real Self of every individual.

MORAL DISCIPLINE: ALWAYS MEET THE MARK

Top of Page

Wisdom and Morality

This is Wisdom: Always relax into the pains and circumstances of experience, and so remain in Communion with Life, rather than in confrontation with the modifications of Life. Relax into Life rather than react to experience. Do this consistently, under all circumstances, and thus remain always free, happy, Full of Life, and disposed toward loving self-release in all relationships. This is the Human Foundation of Morality.

Top of Page

Truth or God May Be Sought inside or outside the Body, but Only Radiant Sacrifice or Love As the Whole Body Is the Way of Truth and God

The Way of Divine Ignorance as a whole, as well as each of its specific stages or degrees of responsibility, represents a single, present, intuitive, and ultimate Act. The entire affair is the awakening of the necessary potential and obligation of our birth-the fulfillment of the Law, which, is sacrifice. That fulfillment is love, the sacrifice of and as the whole and entire bodymind, through feeling, into Infinity, both prior to and via all relations, under all conditions.

There is no right or ultimate subjective, interior Goal, and no absolute satisfaction of independent consciousness in any realm, high or low. The true Way is simply the sacrifice of and as the whole, simultaneous being, through unobstructed feeling, or Radiant sympathy with what is always already the case. And what is always already the case is intuited in the confession of Ignorance, or the Love of God which precedes thought. Therefore, it is this primal Act, this sacrifice or love, that is constantly obliging us at every stage of the Way. We are not merely to turn or recoil within, but we are to be free as attention in and via all relations, under all present conditions. We are not to react and to prefer, but we are to be perpetually responsive as unobstructed feeling in the midst of all relations, under all conditions. We are not to indulge inner motivations or desires for satisfactions within and without, but we are to serve. We are actively, intuitively, and radiantly to bring effective life, energy, or love into the plane of all presently arising relations and conditions.

To be a sacrifice in this Way is not to intentionally bring an end to oneself or any one or thing. It is to participate responsibly, freely, intensely, and unqualifiedly in the unqualified, prior, and always present Condition of Ignorance-Radiance. It is to feel without obstruction, to feel as the whole body to Infinity, via all relations, under all conditions. It is to sacrifice the whole body into its prior Condition in Truth.

The life in Truth is the life of love, of service. The Way of Divine Ignorance is the Way of love, or service-the Way of the fulfillment of the Law by Grace of the Revelation in Truth of the Condition of all conditions. Practice of the Way does not Realize any ultimate Object as a result of love or service. Love itself, service, whole body sacrifice through feeling in action, the Law itself, is the fulfillment and Truth of the Way.

At last we become perfectly responsible for perfect Sacrifice. The enlightened devotee lives the life of service without obstruction, recoil, or holding on to self and body. Such a one is neither a conventionally inward nor a conventionally outward personality. He or she is not any longer compulsively active toward some inner Object, nor among outer objects, seeking some other Object. There is simply love, the Radiance of Ignorance, the radical Sacrifice of and as the whole and entire bodily being, or "I," into Infinity, without withholding. When that Sacrifice of entire love, or total freedom from recoil, inwardness, and both bodily and psychic independence and dependence is simply the case-on the basis of radical intuition of the Condition of all present arising, including the primal act of self-differentiation at the heart-there is conversion or translation of the conditional bodily being or "I" into the unqualified prior or Divine Condition of all manifestation. That is Divine Translation, or Dissolution into the Infinity of Radiance, and resumption of the Condition and Responsibility of Absolute Divinity or Truth. Therefore, devotees in the Way of Divine Communion, or devotees in any stage of the whole Way of Divine Ignorance, should hear this argument.

The inner, subjective life is not the proper field of attention. It is not glamorized in this Way, but only inspected and understood. It is undermined through radical insight. That insight is constantly served or given a living form by functional disciplines that intentionally frustrate and require the inspection of old adaptations or accumulated tendencies. All of these disciplines may be summarized under the principal discipline of service which frustrates the subjective or learned demands of our past experience and adaptation. Through study, or listening to the argument of the Teaching to the point of present "hearing," we enjoy the capacity for these functional disciplines, or the life of service, the life of love, or free feeling-attention. And the "heat" generated via these disciplines must be consciously directed, by the attention freed through "hearing," so that it functions actively as love, unobstructed feeling, or service, via all relations, under all conditions. That love, which is Radiance founded in Ignorance, is constantly to be brought to the Spiritual Master, in whose Company it is drawn into Divine Communion and Transcendental Absorption. And, through all the stages of practice, that love or service in Communion, via all relations, under all conditions, becomes a more and more perfect sacrifice of the whole body. Therefore, at last there is no turning within, and no strategy without, but dissolution in Ignorance-Radiance itself.

All devotees should consider this. Service is the Way, the whole life. It is the feeling sacrifice of (and as)the whole body. Therefore, do not neglect this obligation for the sake of mere thinking, sensation, inner illusion, or personal self-indulgence. Do not give yourself up to dramatization of reactive emotions, preferences, and childish demands. Accept the discipline through "hearing." Become active as feeling-service. The meditations that develop over time are only forms of further responsibility for this very act or disposition.

Everything accumulated is ultimately thrown to Infinity in this Way. But that dissolution depends on radically intuitive insight, not effort. And all the apparent efforts or acts of devotees are, when true, simply forms of feeling into Infinity, founded on insight. Service or love is to throw the whole and entire bodily being into Infinity. It is not an act performed on oneself or one's body. It is simply to feel into Infinity via all relations, under all conditions. It is to look, and feel, and be, and act happy. It is the Infinite Pleasure of love. It is not humorless self-mortification, but humorous relaxation into the Infinite, beyond all recoil. The whole Way of Divine Ignorance is training for the ultimate priesthood of this Sacrifice. And every devotee must perform this Sacrifice alone in the Presence or Company of the Spiritual Master, who is the present and eternal Divine, the Condition of every body-"I."

Top of Page

Reactivity and the Passion of Life

When the individual is frustrated, it is the Life in him that is suppressed. The Force of Life is naturally expansive, moving, blissful, and undefined. But frustration or suppression of the feeling being, the whole body-mind, tends to create an equal and opposite reaction, in the form of reactive contractions of attention (into forms of thought) and emotion (into reactive forms, such as fear, sorrow, guilt, anger, and self-doubt) and body (into genital tension and organ and muscle tensions or dis-eases all over the body). The reaction to experience defines life and limits it to the individual body-mind, or born self, preventing ecstatic Identification or Communion with the Divine Reality.

Therefore, self-defining reactivity, or contraction of body, feeling, and attention, must be radically transcended and made a matter of moment to moment responsibility. Otherwise, Life is reduced to self-meditative psycho-physical releases of functional tensions. When self-transcending responsibility characterizes the individual, the self-defining, contracting, tensing effects of experience will become less and less profound. And, in that case, daily existence will cease to be a constant effort to overcome obstacles and purify or save the self, but will instead become ecstatic self-sacrifice through relational love and selfless Communion with the Real.

Such a Way of Life is natively free of the conventional selfmeditative solutions to the "dilemma of life." Such an individual is not obliged to exploit the internal experiential capacity of the independent body-mind or the consoling benefits of the exploitation of relational contact for the sake of releasing his own tensions. Instead, ecstasy is realized in Divine Communion moment to moment, and the reactivity of the body-min is thereby undermined and made penetrable by the Force of Life. Thus, the devotee is not obliged to solve the problems created by chronic reactivity, but he penetrates reactivity with living force, and he lives a happy life of love and service and constant Fullness in God.

Such freedom from the reactive tendencies of the mental, emotional, and physical dimensions of the bodily being is not a matter of living as a strategically unresponsive and passive character. It is a matter of always abiding in intuitive Communion with the Divine, and creatively dealing with the self-defining power of every experience. Such an individual is profoundly responsive and alive. And he transcends the frustrating and reaction-forming power of experience by intensity of participation rather than unresponsive coolness.

Such a character is profoundly emotional, intelligent, and full of Life. He works creatively within the mechanisms of his present adaptation, as one who is lived and pervaded by Life. Thus, he is a creative force or, ecstatic agency of Life, rather than a self-possessed, abstracted, chronically reactive or strategically nonreactive opponent of his own mortality. He grows, adapts, and cuts through. He is not weak, but strong. His freedom is shown in his aggressive, self-yielding resort to the Divine under all circumstances. He is not passionless. Rather, his passion is pressed to God.

Top of Page

The Creative Function of Life-Frustration in the Process of Self-Sacrifice

In relations with the world of mankind, "I" feels and observes itself to be easily and profoundly disturbed and distracted by mechanical, irresponsibly motivated, utterly self-oriented, and disturbing people. Indeed, this automaton, altogether subhuman, is identified by "I" to be generally present in the form of most people, or as the principal and casual expression of most people. The moral and intimate, sane and humorous, responsible, intelligent, creative, and spiritual expressions that would constitute real human companionship and society appear at the present time to be almost totally absent from our ordinary worldly possibilities. And they are only tentatively or partially contained even in the sphere of our own creative and local or private human relations.

As a consequence, "I" is, in general, a disturbed individual. But the disturbances granted by ordinary life move us constantly to realize levels of communication and effect that may transform the theatre of our own experience and that of others in general.

At times, however, the frustration is so profound that "I" feels nearly immobilized, unable to see the possibility of significant, immediate, or ultimate and permanent effect upon this unconscious world, so stupid and arbitrary in all its ways. There are times when true ecstasy seems impossible. There is frustration. There is resort to the caves of inwardness, abstract insight, consoling illusions, and mechanical states of personal psycho-physical pleasure and certainty. But delight, release, and sublime participation in the displayed existence of the total World seem at times to be impossible. Indeed, it is always a struggle, and never a permanent realization.

Life is a creative opportunity, motivated by frustration of the impulse of the living individual toward ecstasy, or self-transcendence. There is no factual end to the struggle. There is at best a human maturity, in which frustration is not permitted to become negatively dominant, permitting no change or motion. Rather, frustration is maintained as a positive or creative circumstance for motion, change, and, ultimately, ecstatic participation in the Transcendental Reality.

In any case, the Law will be fulfilled. We are obliged from birth to be a sacrifice. We are obliged to a participatory existence that is most truly and freely realized when it is ecstasy-self-release via love, or whole body feeling-attention to the degree of Infinity. Nonetheless, such a life of love, or creative participation in the theatre of lifefrustration, is a purifying fire that moves toward release or sacrifice of self rather than fixed survival.

Frustration must begin to awaken us at the heart to a feeling sacrifice or release of self and attention from the reactive contractions experiences tend to generate in the body-mind. And that heart-generated responsibility, rather than any functional form of self-exploitation, subtle or gross, must become our essential means of ecstasy. Only then is "I" a human being, real, moral, and true.

Top of Page

Self-Sacrifice and Self-Denial

The process of self-sacrifice is not to be casually equated with the activity of self-denial. Self-denial tends to reinforce the contraction, isolation, and emptiness of the body-mind. But self sacrifice is always a matter of ecstasy, or release of the contraction and isolation and emptiness of the body-mind into the prior Fullness of Radiant Existence. Self-denial is at best an occasional purifying technique or, at times, a moral necessity for love's sake.

But whenever it is applied it must itself be transformed through the disposition of love, of self-release, of ecstatic sacrifice of the independent self or body-mind in the Living Reality that pervades all beings and things.

Top of Page

Life Is the Urge to Ecstasy

The constant purpose of manifest existence is ecstasy. But there is nothing within us that can produce ecstasy. To be "ecstatic" literally means to stand outside oneself or to be released of oneself-to transcend oneself. Therefore, ecstasy is not produced by experience, or by any kind of higher or lower knowledge, or even by self-knowledge. Ecstasy is realized only through sacrifice of self-which is fulfillment of the universal Law. Ecstasy is realizable only in relationship, not in inwardness. It is realized through moral and esoteric spiritual or transcendental sacrifice of self, or the whole body-mind, via all the kinds of relations, into the Transcendental Condition and Life-Intensity that is Absolute. Ecstasy is realized through love, which is surrender of self-attention and reactivity via unobstructed feeling-attention in all relations and to the degree of Infinity.

Top of Page

Ecstasy Is the Means of Self-Realization

The essential function of ecstasy is the entire release of feeling and attention from meditation on the psycho-physical limits and reactive contents of the person, the soul in manifestation. When ecstasy becomes the case, the soul is Realized as the Self, transcending manifestation, or all possible experience. Then we are released into all our possible relations and into the absolute Intensity or Reality that is the always present Source of everything.

Top of Page

The Transition from Pleasure to Ecstasy

Things done to seek release from the bodily, emotional, and mental tensions or reactive contractions of life tend to be repeated for the sake of the pleasure they produce. Thus, whereas frustration is at first necessary to motivate action that seeks release of reactive tension, the repetition of such action requires nothing more than the desire for the pleasure attainable by that action.

This is how degenerative patterns of sexual behavior, as well as antisocial behaviors of all kinds, are created and maintained. And analysis of the rituals of such behaviors, including recollection of the frustrating circumstances of their origin, cannot fully account for the patterns themselves, or make them unnecessary. Frustrating circumstances duplicate themselves from time to time, and so we occasionally approximate the reactive motivations that may have originally created a degenerative pattern. But the primary motivation for the repetition of any chronic pattern-however bizarre the pattern appears is the pleasurable release of ordinary tension, rather than any attempt to continue to solve an original problem or circumstance. There is, of course, a likely degree of problemsolving relative to original circumstances, but the reactions themselves last long beyond the circumstances they reflect. And the pleasure attainable by ritualistic tension-release is more fundamental than the tensions themselves, which are purely mechanical and barely inspected.

Reactivity creates a machine in the form of a pattern of tension-release that is done for the sake of present pleasure. Therefore, the search for pleasurable release is the motive behind all patterns, whether the patterns appear "bizarre" and clearly "antisocial" or "normal" and "social."

This is why it is so difficult to bring an individual, even oneself, to the point of responsibility for breaking apparently negative behavior patterns. To the individual, all patterns are nothing more than structures for attaining pleasurable release of tension. Many such behavior structures clearly involve the individual in cycles of disturbed, secretive, negative, self-destructive, and other-destructive activity. But the individual holds on to all of that with a sense of its inevitability and necessity. And the pleasure moments of tension-release are the centers of his concentration, so that he does not see the relative force of a brief moment of release over against a lifetime of ritual obsessiveness. Perhaps this can be brought to his attention by others, or he may awaken to it himself. But the ultimate key to the abandonment of fixed patterns of tension-release is not the observation of any pattern or its causes in the past. Rather, it is a matter of full awakening to the sense and valuation of ecstatic pleasure, or happiness in the highest sense.

Truly, everyone is involved in rituals of activity and persuasions of mind that were created in reactive situations in the past, and usually at an age of relative immaturity. These patterns may even be acceptable as "normal" behavior and thinking. But they function in precisely the same way and serve the same ultimate purposes as fixed patterns of "abnormal" behavior and thinking. That is, repetitive patterns of action and thought reflect adaptations that originally appeared in circumstances in which we reacted, protected ourselves, and sought release from the reactive tension. Those patterns continued even after the original circumstances passed, and even though few if any circumstances up to the present have tended to bear any force or likeness to the original. This is because reaction is more or less permanent, whereas circumstances pass.

This is all a matter of the physics of motion: Circumstances, or active forces confronting us as experience, tend to be reflected in the form of reactions, equal and opposite-unless we are stronger than the circumstance is effective. But the child, or the relatively childish individual, fixed in childhood rituals, is not so strong. Therefore, reactions are typical of those who are relatively weakand this includes most people. And reactions remain in place due to another law of the physics of motion (or the effects of one force on another): What is already set in motion-such as a reaction tends to remain in motion, or effect, until it is redirected, usually byanother force or influence.

The "normal" patterns in our lives are mostly frozen reactions. We do not hope to simply drop the patterns themselves. They seem necessary and inevitable to us-because no other influence is present to change the reactive or contracting motion of the bodymind. Therefore, we accept chronically reactive or contracted physical, emotional, and mental patterns in our lives as simply the given structures wherein we must move to find our pleasurable satisfactions. We do not often reflect on the patterns themselves or the circumstances of their origin. Nor do we fully consider the significance of the pleasure we attain through release of chronic tension of body, emotion, and mind.

The "normal" patterns in our lives are, therefore, as "abnormal" as any reactive fixation and solution. All of our patterns of personally pleasurable tension-release are of the same ultimate kind. They are self-possessed, degenerative, and effectively separative, even antisocial, but always relatively loveless. Such patterns are not patterns of ecstasy-or surrender of the entire self into the prior Reality-but they are only patterns that pursue an internal or personal sense of self that is at least temporarily pleasurable and that is derived from acts that discharge personal functional tension.

Our lives are filled with rituals of this kind. Indeed, such a way of life is considered "normal" and "human," as long as the rituals are not too bizarre or unpredictable. But, truly, the way of life that essentially seeks pleasurable tension-release is not human in the fullest or ecstatic sense of Divine Realization.

Thus, the consideration of Truth or God through the Teaching Argument and the Transcendental Demonstration or Influence of the Spiritual Master are the primary means of truly human change. And such change is not only from relatively "bizarre" patterns to relatively "normal" patterns. It is a change from repetitive subhuman patterns of reactivity and degenerative tension-release to truly human or superhuman responsibilities of ecstatic and regenerative or entirely self-released Communion with the Divine Condition of our existence.

The Way of Divine Ignorance is founded on a call to selfobservation and conversion of the entire direction or reactive tendency of our lives. It requires the consideration of the past circumstantial origins, reactive contents, and tension-release goals of our characteristic patterns of activity. And it generates the awakening of primary pleasure, ecstasy, and love as a force that transcends and transforms the reactive motions, past, present, and future, of the body-mind. Thus, devotees in this Way do not merely "normalize" their patterns of living (although this may be true in some ordinary sense), but they are moved in an entirely new direction. They move on from self-meditative patterns of contraction, and they move into the self-released ecstasy of Divine Communion.

This transformation of the motion and pleasure of the bodymind is effective in many areas of our living that we would never have otherwise considered changing. Thus, the "normal" patterns of self-indulgence in gross and degenerative diet and drink, or in casual social amusements that only reflect the reactive vulgarity of childish people, or in sexual addiction to orgasm-even all of these patterns are interrupted and transcended in ecstasy. And the maturing of the life of ecstatic love and transcendental intuition of the Divine, via all functions and relations, demonstrates both human and superhuman growth through adaptation beyond the vital and lower mental functions exploited in the childhood of Man.

Top of Page

The Supreme Science

The "feeling" or "love" I have recommended to devotees is not an egoic or conventional act. It is realized by Grace and spontaneously generated (re-awakened or re-permitted) in the case of one who hears the Teaching to the point of Ignorance. Therefore, in the Way of Divine Ignorance, negative emotions, obsessive desires, and chronic thinking, as well as fixed or inappropriate forms of outward activity, are not to be suppressed. Such is a conventional egoic strategy, founded in the absence of hearing and Revelation. In that case, the trapped impulses will only disturb and obstruct the whole body. Rather, accumulated conditions of existence are to be released. They are to be made a specific sacrifice, whenever they are indicated by any tendency. In that moment, feel through the tendency. Release it, through the breath cycle, into the All-Pervading Reality and Presence. Feel into the Presence absolutely and constantly. In other words, all tendencies are simply fixed reflections of old activities or adaptations. And all tendencies are, therefore, dissolved or made obsolete by present sacrificial devotion, or unobstructed feeling, as the whole body, into the Infinite Reality and Presence. Such unobstructed feeling into Infinity is love, or Radiance. If it is lived in the moment of any tendency, the tendency itself is dissolved or made unnecessary and ineffective in that moment. If the devotee consistently lives in the form of sacrificial devotion or love, active as remembrance and service, felt via the breath, then the whole body is lived as Radiance, and all its parts and artifacts dissolve into a present harmony in that Radiance. Thus, action becomes true or appropriate, thoughts rest, reactive emotions dissolve in unobstructed feeling, and a natural or native economy brings order to the whole body and its destiny. All accumulated tendencies become obsolete in this Way, and the life of tendency is replaced by the presently intuitive, free, creative, and inspired life.

Whoever loves in the present is not bound. This is the Law. Where there is love there is release of karma,⁷ or the effect of the past. To love is to be "forgiven," or released from past unlove and the destiny past unlove creates through accumulated reactions and the tendencies established . by past experience. To love is to be happy or Radiant as the whole body to Infinity. In this manner, the past, in the form of mental, emotional, and physical tendencies, will not be dramatized. The past becomes unnecessary through love. Love is primal freedom.

Love is the supreme science of life. It is Communion with the Real, the very Divine. It is the principle of transformation, of moral and spiritual healing and growth, of meditation, of Realization. Love is the evidence and proof of our freedom. Whoever is not active in this principle has not yet heard the Teaching of Truth, regardless of how much extraordinary worldly or psychic power and experience he or she has known.

There is no religious or spiritual "salvation'' or "forgiveness" independent of this principle, wherein all righteous attitudes and all destructive compulsions are shown to be the absence of love and God. All accumulations or tendencies are disproved and dissolved in present love, which releases self, and thought, and all knowledge, high or low, and reactive emotions, and all repetitive and reactive patterns of action into the Infinite and to Infinity. Such love is not merely felt within but whole bodily, through all actions, and in all relations, under all conditions. Such is the spiritual discipline of devotees in the Way of Divine Communion. And it is made possible by the Revelation of the Presence of Real God in Communion with the Spiritual Master, who is a spiritual sacrifice to and for all devotees.

7. Action that entails consequences or re-actions. Thus, karma is destiny, tendency, the quality of existence and experience that is determined by prior actions or conditions. By extension, karma also signifies the latent tendencies, or patterns of action and reaction, condition and experience that originate prior to and apart from the conscious mind.

Top of Page

Always Meet the Mark

In the instant in which reactive states of mind, emotion, and body arise, then desires, motivations, and obsessive fascinations also arise, high and low, as methods of relief from the problems and tensions of the bodily being. Such is the origin of self-possession, temptation, and "sin," which means "to miss the mark. " The reactive and independent body-mind is turned upon itself, and so it avoids or "misses the mark" of all relationshuman, natural, and Divine.

The mature and truly human individual is able to inspect and understand this cycle of reaction, self-possession, and tension-release, in his own case as well as in the case of others. Therefore, he does not indulge the self-possessed sense of dilemma, nor does he indulge the tendencies that automatically arise to relieve him of his self-contraction. He only observes the whole pattern in every moment, and so resorts to none of it. He yields himself instead to ecstasy, or Communion with the Divine, in every instant of selfcontraction or dilemma. He always bypasses the ordinary destiny of problems and solutions. He abandons the problems and solutions of the reactive and independent body-mind in moment to moment feeling-sacrifice into the Living Divine Reality. This is his Way always to meet the Mark. Therefore, he remains creatively effective, whole, essentially simple, and utterly free of the illusion of separation from what is Real, Divine, Blissful, and Great.

Top of Page

The Secret of How to Change

True change and higher human adaptation are not made on the basis of any self-conscious resistance to old, degenerative, and subhuman habits. Change is not a matter of not doing something. It is a matter of doing something else-something that is inherently right, free, and pleasurable. Therefore, the key is insight and the freedom to feel and participate in ways of functioning that are right and new.

The tendencies and patterns of our earlier adaptations are not wrong. They were appropriate enough in their own moment of creation, and there is no need to feel guilt or despair about them. Likewise, efforts to oppose and change them are basically fruitless. Such efforts are forms of conflict, and they only reinforce the modes of self-possession.

What is not used becomes obsolete, whereas what is opposed is kept before us. Therefore, the creative principle of change is the one of relaxed inspection and awareness of existing tendencies and persistent, full feeling 'orientation to right, new, regenerative functional patterns. If this is done consistently and in ecstatic resort to the Living Divine, free growth is assured.

Have no regrets. Resort to the Divine in Truth and in the present. All that has been done by anyone had its logic in its time. Only God avails. Whatever is your habit in this moment is not wrong. It is simply a beginning. No habit is necessary, but it is only tending to persist, because it has not yet been replaced by further growth. Hear the Teaching of Truth, and understand what is the right, ultimate, and regenerative pattern of each function of Man. Feel free of all negative judgments about what you have done and what you tend to do. Turn with full feeling-attention to the creative affair of new adaptation in most positive Communion with the God who is Life, and who is Alive as all beings.

Top of Page

Love Is the Bodily Intuition of God

The desire connection to the world is self-motivated and self possessed, possessed, and it leads only to experience, which is self. Experience itself is the ego, the separate one, Narcissus, the mechanical illusion.

The love connection to the world is motivated by God and toward God. The love connection is God-Possessed, and it always already transcends self, or all experience, in God. Love is transcendence of all experience, through prior God-Communion. Therefore, love, serve, be free, master all desire, and transcend all experience, through God-Communion. Simply love, serve, abide in God-Communion, and do no more than what is necessary for ordinary, simple, and free bodily existence in Communion with the Radiant Transcendental Reality.

Establish no relationships or habits that are founded upon or dependent upon mere desire, or satisfaction of the self-generated needs of yourself or of others. Live to God in all relationships, surrendering all consolations, all self-indulgence, all exploitation. Live in the prior or inherent pleasure of Existence, ecstatic in GodCommunion, or love, rather than live in bondage to the acquired pleasures and limits of psycho-physical experience, high or low.

If you choose this, you are free in God. Make this Way in the free community of devotees, those who value and understand and mutually serve the attributes of manifest existence thus moved in God. The Spiritual Master of such devotees wanders freely at Infinity and never looks back.

Top of Page

The Straight Place

As the devotee matures toward the fourth and perfect stage of practice, or the Way of Radical Intuition, all casual indulgence of the phenomena of the body-mind should gradually cease. Diet should be reduced to what is necessary for health, and sexual contact should be realized as a fully regenerative occasion. Speech should be responsible to Life, rather than betray Life in the service of childish reactivity and degenerative society. Reading and writing should be reduced to what is strictly necessary to one's practice and one's daily obligation to serve others. Activity should be creatively directed toward service, necessary work, and the enjoyment of intimate loving and devotional company. Worldly entertainments, created without spiritual or higher human intelligence, should be avoided. And disturbing or fruitless contacts with worldly people, who are self-possessed rather than God-Possessed, should be minimized or even altogether abandoned. Considerable daily time should be spent in solitary Communion and Fullness, and the general ease and happiness of one's life should permit each moment to be essentially a matter of such undisturbed Communion and Fullness. Therefore, devotees at every stage should constantly work to create households and Church sanctuaries that permit each and all to find such a private, happy, and relatively undisturbed circumstance of daily life as practice matures. The conditions and persuasions of the world itself are not likely to provide or even permit such a happy circumstance. Those who value it must create and maintain it themselves. Only the voluntary and cooperative community of devotees can provide the necessary circumstances and occasions of life for the learning and practice of the Way of God.

Top of Page

The Community of Devotees

The unique and ultimate Advantage of devotees is the Revelation of the Spiritual Master. Just so, the unique and mutual advantage of the devotees of the Spiritual Master is their ability to cooperate, or to create an alternative and truly human cultural environment, essentially and in principle free of the subhuman limitations of the common social order of mankind.

My devotees should create self-sustaining communities of cooperative households, and Sanctuaries in which all may practice the Way and resort to Me. They should build on what they have already been given in this Way, using the Teaching and the Institution and the Environments that I have prepared for their use. They should continually turn themselves over to the Transcendental Personality Who is the Life and Mind and Consciousness in which all things arise and change and pass. Only in the literal practice of the Way do my devotees love Me.

The Enlightenment of the Whole Body