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Seventeen Companions
Esoteric Principles and Practices:
Tantra of Money, Food, and Sex
Book Nine:
Ruchira Tantra Yoga
The Physical-Spiritual (and Truly Religious) Method Of Mental, Emotional, Sexual, and Whole Bodily Health and Enlightenment In The Divine Way Of Adidam
Having Revealed Himself as the "Bright" and the "Thumbs", Avatar Adi Da now goes on, in Ruchira Tantra Yoga, to describe exactly how the human individual must discipline his or her bodily, emotional, sexual, and mental life, in order to become capable of receiving His Divine Gifts. This discipline ("Yoga") is the "Tantra" (or the Spiritual practice that deals with all aspects of life, without merely cutting any of them off) Given by Avatar Adi Da Samraj.
Avatar Adi Da presents an extraordinarily wide-ranging "consideration" that includes: understanding "victim-consciousness", the ego as addict, the secret of how to change, right relationship to money, right diet, going beyond the "Oedipal" sufferings of childhood, "true renunciate intimacy", Spiritually auspicious sexual practice, and so on. Not a "self-help" manual, Ruchira Tantra Yoga is Avatar Adi Da's Instruction in transcending all forms of bondage to gross existence. And, because sexuality is characteristically the most powerful form of gross bondage, there is a wealth of His Instruction on this topic.
In these writings of Adi Da, the esotericism of Tantra takes on a new poetic language, a new western incarnation, a new history. That Adi Da engages western critical and analytic scholarship so intelligently and understands the dialectic of the mystical and the erotic so deeply only makes his corpus that much more remarkable, for the historian of mysticism no less than for the devotee.
Jeffrey Kripal, Ph.D.
Vira I. Heinz Associate Professor of Religion,
Westminster College; author, Kali's Child: The Mystical and
the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna
Adi Da Samraj and his unique body of teaching work offer a rare and extraordinary opportunity for those courageous students who are ready to move beyond ego and take the plunge into deepest communion with the Absolute. Importantly, the teaching is grounded in explicit discussion of necessary psychospiritual development and guides the student to self-responsibility and self-awareness.
Elisabeth Targ, M.D.
University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine;
director, Complementary Medicine Research Institute,
California Pacific Medical Center
Read Excerpts:
The Secret of How to Change
Sex Is Not the "Great Evil"
En-Light-ened Participation in Money, Food, and Sex
The Secret of How to Change
True change and advanced human adaptation are not made on the basis of any self-conscious resistance to old, degenerative, and sub-human 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, you must enjoy the freedom to feel and participate in ways of functioning that are right and new.
The tendencies and patterns of your 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 ego-possession.
What is not used becomes obsolete—whereas what is opposed is kept before you. Therefore, the creative principle of change is the relaxed inspection and awareness of existing tendencies, and persistent, full feeling-orientation to right, new, regenerative functional patterns. If this principle is practiced consistently and in ecstatic resort to Me, the Divine Heart-Master, free growth is assured.
Have no regrets. Resort to Me in Truth and in the present. All that has been done by anyone had its logic in its time. Only I avail. 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 My Wisdom-Teaching of Truth, and understand what is the right, ultimate, and regenerative pattern of each function of the human body-mind. Feel free of all negative judgements about what you have done and what you tend to do. Turn with full feeling-attention to the happy ordeal of new adaptation in most positive Communion with Me, the Divine Heart-Master—for I Am The Unbroken (Indivisible and Indestructible) Light That "Lives" you, and I Am The Only One Who Is (Surrounding, Pervading, and Being you, and all, and All).
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Sex Is Not the "Great Evil"
From "An Open Letter
To All Who Would Find Heart-Breaking Freedom"
Sex—or, more accurately, emotional-sexual life—is the primary obsession of human beings, especially in the earlier stages of life and in the beginnings of sadhana. . . .
This emotional-sexual business is a nest of odd creatures—nasty little things, biting and screeching everywhere.
This was obvious to Freud—but (notwithstanding the accuracy and usefulness of many of his observations) he did not want to really deal with it.
He wanted to keep things safe on the psychoanalyst's couch, to eliminate emotional-sexual problems with talk in an office.
That is how he wanted to cure his patients—because he felt threatened by his own emotional-sexual tendencies, and he wanted to bring sex under the control of the social ego.
Thus, Freud suppressed himself—because he saw that the unmastered emotional-sexual ego is wild and powerful.
That suppressive disposition (or point of view) is not a workable basis for true religious and Spiritual life.
Nevertheless, the Great Tradition of mankind has characteristically operated in a manner similar to Freud—by suppressing emotional-sexual life in one manner or another.
Thus, religious and secular thinkers typically think alike relative to this matter.
The Great Tradition of mankind is, as a whole, unresolved and ambivalent relative to the entire matter of sexuality, and is even generally sex-negative in its orientation.
All such puritanical righteousness must be gone beyond—otherwise, one's emotional-sexual egoity is never truly inspected and dealt with.
In that case, attention remains fundamentally (even if unconsciously) bound in emotional-sexual dilemmas of all kinds, thereby limiting the degree of real Spiritual growth that is possible.
Sex is not the "great evil".
Sex is not evil at all.
Egoity is the root and source of all evil and all problems.
Sex is transformed and made right only through the process of transcending egoity.
Therefore, sex itself need not—and should not—be treated like an enemy.
It is emotional-sexual egoity that must be gone beyond.
I Say to you, and to all: True religion is ego-transcendence.
Thus, the Great Purpose of My years of Teaching-Work and Revelation-Work was to Reveal the Complete Way of ego-transcendence.
That Complete Way of ego-transcendence is (necessarily) the Complete Way of devotional Communion (and, ultimately, Most Perfect Identification) with Real God, or Truth Itself, or Reality Itself.
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En-Light-ened Participation in Money, Food, and Sex
From "The Non-Dual Healing and En-Light-enment
of Money, Food, Sex, and the Whole Body"
Mankind is, by reactive tendency, patterned ego-centrically. Therefore, even when people become involved in religious or Spiritual activity, there are certain uninspected notions that automatically tend to be brought into play. One of the principal such notions is that Spiritual life requires separation from vital and physical life. Indeed, in many religious and Spiritual traditions, that is exactly what Spiritual life is regarded as being—a strategically exclusive effort, an "inward"-turning search, getting away from all of life (away from the life-force, the life-form, the life-mind, the life-appearance, the life-sensation), and (by means of that strategic inversion) getting into some "inward", subtle, non-life perception, or vision, or heaven, or whatever. Because this traditional association of ideas tends to be blanketed over everything that has to do with religion, Spirituality, Yoga, and the like—every demand, every quality suggested within religious and Spiritual life that involves the physical and vital being, tends to meet immediate resistance.
Money, food, and sex are the essential activities of life. Those are the vital processes, the forms of vital appearance and function. And money, food, and sex are the first things that people begin to resist or manipulate when they become involved in anything that even remotely resembles religion or Spirituality. So-called "religious" people, for the most part, are extremely confused and guilty about money, food, and sex. People involved in conventional Yoga and religion are endlessly preoccupied in experimenting with money, food, and sex. What are such people always doing? "Should I or shouldn't I?" "What is the right diet?" "Fasting? Macrobiotics? No food?" "Renunciation? Poverty?" They are on and off food all the time, on and off sex. They may be celibate for years in order to get "enlightened", but then, just as dramatically, they are seeking the "tantric bliss" or the restoration of "mental health" in a perpetual orgasmic exercise. Then there are all of the other games of self-denial, no work, no income. Such are the notions that tend to arise whenever anything like religion or Spirituality comes into a person's life. . . .
If you become My true devotee (egoless in Me), your one and whole and entire body-mind (or total psycho-physical body) becomes (by Means of My Avatarically Self-Transmitted Divine Spiritual Grace) progressively Filled with My Divine Light, My "Bright" Transmission of Divine Love-Bliss. Thus, as My true devotee, your participation in money, food, and sex becomes (Really, and, at last, Most Perfectly) En-Light-ened, along with all the rest of indivisible you (non-separate in Me)!
The cosmic domain is entirely psycho-physical—not merely (or exclusively) psychic (or interior, or egoically subjective), and not merely (or exclusively) physical (or exterior, or apparently objective). If you conform yourself responsively to Me, I "Brighten" all of that. |
