Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!spool.mu.edu!agate!eos!data.nas.nasa.gov!news
From: cyee@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Chut Ngeow YEE)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Da Avabhasa on Sexuality (1)
Message-ID: <1991Jun28.233736.11300@nas.nasa.gov>
Date: 28 Jun 91 23:37:36 GMT
Sender: news@nas.nasa.gov
Organization: --
Lines: 146
Approved: prabhu@amelia.nas.nasa.gov

There have been a few angry outbursts over the postings that I made. I was
expecting that it will happen, but the subtle implications and open displays
of anger still am shocked me to the core. It doesn't feel good at all, but
My Guru has broke my heart and left me a big open wound, and took my
capacity to activate the immunity and counter attack mechanisms to protect
myself.  Well, since I have got it started I guess I have to carry it on
like a man now.

There is nothing cool about Da Avabhasa life and works. His life is a
profound ordeal of submission to his devotees. In the early years of his
teaching the people that came to him were amongst the worst of humanity; the
whores, pimps, criminals and neurotics, and he has to make devotees and
build community out of these most unrulely and incompatible people.
He accepted it, and see that his humble birth has equipped him well to serve
these people, and he did it with enormous love and compassion. He submitted
himself to the point of identification with his devotees, and wrestle with
them and lead them as a loving brother through the distractions of life,
at the same time shine lights on all aspects of life, paving the way for all
who were to come and making the Spiritual Process possible to the least
prepared of humanity.  It is a profound ordeal, and there are mountains of
heart-breaking stories to be told for a long time to come.

At present the community of practitioners that I am associated with is
engaged in considerations of our emotional-sexual adaptation. This is an
area that Da Avabhasa considered 'the pit of snakes' that humanity is
mightly stuck in. In the next two or three postings I will share with you
the reading materials that I come across in my considerations.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Da Avabhasa: "Sexual bondage is emotional bondage, suppression of life,
suppression of Spirit, suppression of Spirituality, suppression of Happiness,
of Truth, of Enlightenment. To be Sexually bound is to be emotionally bound
and Spiritually bound, and therefore it is a profound area of every
individual's life, requiring understanding and self-transcendence. You must
hear and see me, and take on all the other kinds of disciplines associated
with our Way, but perhaps nothing is as fundamental as the undoing of this
emotional-sexual complication"

"You are being asked to live a different way, not just to seem a different
way, not just to fulfill the exoteric or outer forms of practice, but to be
completely different, to live as a devotee, to appear to be essentially what
you are altogether. Therefore, your hidden, subjective life must be
liberated, and you must abandon your reactive, egoic self-image that is
identified with guilt and fears and a past. You must be present in this
moment through feeling-attention in order to live according to higher
instruction and understanding.

"Thus, in the initial consideration of emotion and sexuality you are asked
to communicate, confess, openly describe, and have acknowledged and seen by
others the incidents of your emotional-sexual adaptation. And you are asked
to take that adaptation into account by confessing, on the basis of
recovering your past, in what sense your present emotional and sexual life
is a ritual repetition. Then you do not have to live it as a dilemma any
longer, you see. There is nothing secret or hidden about it anymore.
Therefore you can choose to do something else.

"By tendency you are unlove, not unobstructed feeling-attention, but
obstructed, contracted feeling-attention, feeling-attention trapped bodily
in subjectivity and self-orientation, feeling-attention chronically involved
in certain episodes, certain emotional states, certain obsessive desires.
These tendencies are demanding fulfillment. What you must see is that the
tendencies that arise in you do not originate from some foreign, absolute,
hidden dimension of the universe. Essentially they are forms of psycho-
physical memory. The reason you feel and desire and think the way you do at
this moment is that you thought and felt and did certain things in the past.
You have actually lived certain kinds of incidents in the past that were the
moments of your adaptation. Now in this moment, you are tending to live in
the same way. You will see that memory is all there is to your emotional-
sexual life.

"There is nothing mysterious about desires and thoughts. They do not make
any difference whatsoever. They do not arise out of the deep, hidden you.
They are just the mechanical expression of adaptation, and fundamentally
they have no force except what you give them. You are the only force of your
memory and you are just as free to adapt in this moment as you were free to
adapt in the moments that you are now recollecting in the form of thoughts,
impulses, various kinds of negative emotion and desires. The incidents of
your present life can bring up these tendencies so that they seem to appear
randomly and arbitrarily, but they are always forms of memory.

"Memory is not just the thinking recollections of incidents. Memory is also
an emotion arising, or a desire or an impulse arising. In any moment you are
either memory or free feeling-attention. You are either protecting yourself
with the defenses you learned in the past, or you are available as love in
all relations under all conditions. You must be free feeling-attention more
and more so that you can live this process. All the rest is memory.
Everything that we call tendency is a species of memory. This truth must
simply become obvious to you, and the way whereby it will become obvious is
through the consideration of your own history of emotional-sexual adaptation.

"Just recount fully those things that you do not particularly want to talk
about because you will be found out. Find those moments in which you were
adapting, not random and casual moments, but moments in which emotion
conflicted with pleasure. Then discover how each of those incidents became a
kind of memory that enforced future incidents, emotional and sexual, in
which you acted in some way that duplicated what occurred on that previous
incident of adaptation. Also discover that although now it seems to you that
you are living an ordinary and intimate life with your spouse, in fact you
are living a ritual of emotional and sexual tendencies based on previous
adaptation. You must be free of those adaptations so that you can live as
free feeling-attention, moment to moment, in the present.

"Thus, the purpose of considering your emotional-sexual adaptation in the
past is to see that everything that you are by tendency in the present
moment is simply memory or mechanical tendency. It has no profundity, no
depth. It is not deeper than it seems. You need not consider it deeply, it
is not deep.  It is profoundly superficial. Nevertheless, you must simply
see that characteristic emotional states, characteristic desires,
characteristic patterns of obsessive thinking, characteristic ways of
behaving, that all of these are just reflection, memory, old forms of
adaptation, and therefore unnecessary and completely arbitrary. However
forceful such tendencies seem, they are only what they seem, and you can
just as well do something else.

"You must be fully aware of the mechanical nature of your subjectivity and
you must be free to be communicative about it. You must be seen, because
part of what keeps you trapped in those subjective impulses is their
hiddenness. You maintain in each moment a certain way of being known. You
are consistently hiding yourself. You dramatize what you are by tendency
only under certain kinds of secret circumstances, in the worst moments of
your life, the moments that you most regret, or at least do not want anyone
to know about, the moments when you actually feel free to dramatize your old
adaptation.

"If you had been brought up in a true culture all your life, there would be
no function for such a consideration at this point, because in every stage
of life you would have been brought into a condition of right adaptation.
The people you lived with would have fully understood what you represent and
also what your stage of life is intended to realize by adaptation. You would
not be fooled by aberrated tendencies at your present stage of life, because
you would not have adapted in an aberrated way. You would have adapted
lawfully, you would be a different kind of individual. However, you in fact
have not grown up in such a culture. You have indulged yourself physically,
emotionally and sexually, and thus you have not only adapted unlawfully but
constantly reinforced adaptations that are not lawful. Some people have a
very heavy subjective demand, very strong tendencies that are aberrated,
very strong conflicts, very strong suppressions of the natural
responsibility of emotion and sexuality. That is just the way it is for many
of us. But however strong your subjectivity is, you must see it as
mechanical memory that is making use of your feeling energy in the present
and you must be willing simply to do something different."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yee.