You must commit yourself bodily, beyond your fear and reluctance in dealing with your emotional life. This occurs at the base of the body, at the base chakra. Strong feelings are rooted there, feelings you are not in touch with, unconscious. When you get in touch with these base feelings, sorrow, fear and anger will arise. And when these feelings arise you will want to stop the process of getting in touch with them. 

The principle mood at the root of your emotional life is fear. Fear arises in and as separation or individuation. Separation from what? From the Source! In the infant the source is the mother, in the adult it's the Divine Reality. This Source is prior to mind and prior to thought. In the child the mind isn't fully developed yet. But in the adult, with your developed mind you must get in touch with this primary emotional matter and allow what was previously unconscious to become conscious. When consciousness is 'applied' to what was previously unobserved the possibility of growth in the emotional realm of your life can become observed and hopefully understood and transcended. If not, these unconscious feelings, down at the root, will control your life.

In this basic fear your manifest personality may develop as a very controlling person or one who needs to be controlled by others. Security may be a dominant and aggressive trait of your personality and therefore your psychology. You may need to dominate others, control others or be controlled by others to avoid feeling this underlining fear. You may develop as a very passive individual basically asleep needing always to consol yourself with food and experiences in the vital arena. You may develop as a couch potato or a bungie jumper all in reaction to your basic underlining fear. Becoming numb or an adrenaline junkie are two extremes in this type of personality development. Another unconscious strategy in dealing (or avoiding) this basic underlying emotion is more of a mental approach one that shows itself as a strong intellectual or mental type of person, book worm, a scientist a scholar. A type of person who basically cuts off this root feeling by existing only in the mind.

Below is a chart designed from the teachings of Adi Da. Adi Da observed and described three distinct character types, or ways in which individuals tend to dramatize egoity in the first three stages of life. He calls these three strategies "solid", "peculiar", and "vital".

The chart below outlines the attitudes of each of these three strategies.

	SOLID	PECULIAR	VITAL
PRINCIPLE MOTIVATING MOOD	Fear	Sorrow	Anger
STAGE OF LIFE	First Stage	Second Stage	Third Stage
ASSOCIATED WITH	Vital shock of birth	loss of self-security and loss of power over others on whom one depends	struggle with motives of independence and dependence and aggressive effort toward genital victory
CHARACTER	obsessively self-controlling and other-controlling	alternately idealistically (and thus mentally) self-controlled and chaotically self-indulgent	characteristically vitally (or physically) self-indulgent
FOUNDATION MOOD	fear of being controlled by others (or conditions outside the body-mind-self)	yearning to be effectively touched or loved and a call and hysterical need (or search) to be controlled, or restored to balance by a positive controlling influence	chronic effort to resist, refuse, or avoid the controlling influence of others (or even the mind) on the bodily existence of the conditional self
REACTION TO FEELING OR ACTUAL EXPERIENCE OF BEING	too much controlled by others, especially adults	neglected, denied love, and denied a positive controlling influence	too much controlled by others, especially adults
"STYLE" OF REACTION	passive and rather infantile	hysterical and rather childish	aggressive and rather adolescent
STRATEGY	mental (or mentally "solid", or strategically, and, principally, by means that exploit the conceptual mind, invulnerable)	emotional (or emotionally "peculiar", and, perhaps, or sometimes, even hysterical)	vital (or "vitally", and, perhaps, or sometimes, even "grossly", physical)
DOMINATE CHARACTERISTIC	hyperactivity of the conceptual mind	excessively "romantic" (or even sentimental) and idealistic (or unrealistic) expectations (that are inevitably frustrated) and the loss of balance	obsessive and compulsive vital-physical self-expression

see more on the three primary characteristics of the Solid, Vital and Peculiar personalities

Above these frontal-line emotions is the heart, or love. And there are greater energies beyond that, and of course there is a greater participation beyond the frontal line.

This sequence of dramatizations is a very natural, even ultimately mechanical, sequence that you can observe and point out in others. This does not mean, of course, that you just go on to love from anger. You could drop back into sorrow, and drop back into fear. However, when emotion becomes anger, you feel that everything has come to an end.

The root of this dramatization of reactive emotion is the feeling of love itself. All these' emotions are a play upon a basic feeling of affection, a love feeling. Having put love on the line, you are afraid, you get sorrowful, and then you are angry. You tend to drop down from anger into sorrow and wanting to hold on again.

If you are ever going to establish a firm intimacy with anyone, you must deal with all these emotions and become emotionally clarified. In your egoity, you rarely get in touch with the core of true feeling, or love. Your capability for detachment and lovelessness is exactly what you must deal with. The realization of actual love changes all these egoic complexes.

Further reading and study:

Vitals, Peculiars, and Solids and the Primal Qualities of Universal and Bodily Life

The Frontal Line - The descending current

Discriminative Intelligence and The Seven Stages of Life - Laughing Man Magazine

Observe Your Pattern - Adi Da Samraj, January 30, 1996

* What's interesting and useful about noticing a pattern early in your life is to see that the pattern is right now.

* It's not that you have to struggle with something that happened early in your life - if you see it there then you can see something about the pattern which you are enacting right now. And that's what you can change.

* The more fully you are aware of the pattern in which you are apparently in motion, certainly the more intelligent, perhaps the more effective your transcendence of it in every moment

* It's the being set straight that's the important part,

* Then functioning in that straightness, directly, moment to moment, rather than with a lot of verbal instructions which you have to organize and rehearse every other moment.

* The sadhana must become straightforward.

* It's not about building up a massive structure of mental calculations.

* It's a matter of freeing up the intelligence from confusion and bondage and uninspected entanglement.

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

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

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

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

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