Consent To Feel As You Are
Consent To Feel As You Are
by His Divine Presence, Avatar Adi Da Samraj
In this essay (excerpts of which have been presented earlier in this chapter), Avatar Adi Da summarizes “conductivity” as responsi- bility for the cycle of reception-release.
Life-Force Integrates Body and Mind
The living human body is a system (or structure) for conducting life. The physical body is contacted by (or integrated with) mind (or attention) via the pervading medium of life-force. The present-time capability of the complex of attention, feeling, and bodily form to conduct the life-power is its general state of responsibility, or “conductivity”.
The same life-force pervades both the physical body and its environment. The physical body does not “contain”, or grasp and hold, the life-force, but simply communes or communicates with the all-pervading life-force, or conditionally manifested light, and intensifies the sense and effect of the life-force through feeling, or psycho-physical emotion. Attention (including intention and con- trolled thought) and the control of posture and activity are the outer limbs (or extremities), the opposite poles of the process of living. The center, “root”, and living core of the process is the life-force, or universal energy, apparently cycled through the phases of the breath, but constantly and priorly communicated in, as, and through the human structure via the process of feeling.
The Feeling-Cycle of The Breath
Feeling is either obstructed and reactive or unobstructed and non-reactive. Reactive emotions—such as fear, sorrow, and anger— are forms of recoil. They contract the mechanisms of the whole body, and obstruct or attenuate the “conductivity”, and (thus) the responsibility, of the whole being. When there is simple, direct, and native participation in the state of life, there is no reactivity, but a pleasurable, relational force and radiance. This is love, or unobstructed “conductivity”. In that case, the responsibility of the whole body-being is optimum, and Communion with the Real Condition (or Truth) of all conditions is possible, and even inherent in that instant.
The cycle of breathing is a reflection of the present state of “conductivity”, and (thus) responsibility, of the individual. Indeed, the cycle of breathing, or “conductivity” of life-energy, is senior to all “subjectivity”, all reactivity. Breath and emotion are identical. You feel and breathe simultaneously, as a single event. Unobstructed feeling, or love, is senior to the physiological action of the breath, but simultaneous with it. Love is “creative”, or “causative”, relative to breath and life.
Reactive feeling, or negative and “caused” emotions, are secondary to the physiological action of the breath. Shocks of life modify the breath-life pattern directly, and create contracted emotional patterns, as well as the sense that love and good feelings depend on reasons or circumstantial stimulation. Thus, by “experience” and reaction, your native responsibility for love in every moment is weakened. Shocks of life and breath are “creative”, or “causative”, relative to reactive (or obstructed) emotions.
The artful task of the living being is to remain responsible for its inherent disposition and “conductivity”, even through and in the midst of the shocks and impositions of “experience”. It is the Law of “self”-sacrifice, or love, that is hidden in every breath. If you abide as love, with free attention in all action, then you remain in the responsible position relative to life, breath, action, and the process of Realization. But if you abide in your “subjectivity”, ego-possessed,
distracted (by the obsessive “sound” of thinking) from feeling in the infinite pattern of relations, then you are irresponsible, subject to random “experience”, unable to conduct life, or to breathe openly, or to act sanely and humanly, or to Realize Truth.
The feeling cycle of the breath is (thus) the center of life and all relations. The conscious feeling of the bodily and relational cycle of breath and life, under conditions of action and repose, is fundamental to well-being, good relations, and to the entire affair of “conscious exercise”. Therefore, it is essential to account for the critical factors and events in the feeling-cycle of breathing.
Feel Without Obstruction
The physical body is always already fully permeated by all-pervading energy, or life-force. It never becomes empty or filled, but it is only either more or less directly and presently in a condition of communication, or communion, with the universal life-force. You fluctuate or “phase” in your state of feeling, moment to moment. You also chronically feel reactive or contracted and negative emotional conditions—from fear and sorrow and anger, to relatively modest anxiety and sadness and despair, to depression and dullness and boredom. Therefore, you are also chronically tending toward a condition of non-communication of life (or energy), on the basis of the effects of “experience” or (otherwise) reactions to “experience”, in every moment.
The only way to realize a present degree of maximum intensity, communicated in, as, and through the whole body-being, is to feel without obstruction, or contraction. Then you abide in the inherent intensity of the universally present energy, life, or light. That feeling is named “love” and “sacrifice” (or “surrender”). It is the unlimited feeling and the inherent intensity of the whole body-being that characterizes you when you simply look and feel and are and act completely happy. In your chronic condition, you tend to manifest such happiness, or love—in other words, you tend to communicate (or commune) with the inherent force of existence—only when events “cause” you to react with complete, unobstructed feeling.
Thus, only in the rare moments of good fortune or fulfillment, the moments equivalent to suddenly getting a gift of a million dollars, do you consent to feel and to exist as that inherent force.
This is the chronic “problem” of humankind—that human beings do not consent to feel as they are, but only as they are “caused” to feel. You feel according to your present circumstances rather than your inherent force of existence. The Spiritual obligation of every human being is to realize the inherent intensity of life in every moment. And this is possible only if there is true, present, and “radical” understanding of the evidence of Truth and of life itself. Only then will you consent—or even be able—to look and feel and be and act completely happy, under all conditions.
The discipline of “conscious exercise” is a part of the total right-life discipline that obliges My devotees in the Reality-Way of Adidam. All others may also apply at least this part of the wisdom of the whole body, and so benefit all of human society by becoming more stable, healthy, and responsible for life and feeling. And feeling, as you see, is the key to the functional wisdom of the whole body. Feeling unlocks the contractions of the reactive body-life, and permits a free communication between attention and action. . . .