Conscious exercise is a fundamental functional discipline in Adidam practice, it tends to be a discipline easy forgotten and given less attention than many others. The basic routines and philosophy written in the book, “Conscious Exercise and the Transcendental Sun” remain as written, however new forms of exercise and movement have been added as well as the discipline itself being seen as a devotional responsive practice. A new and updated version of this book, will be published in the near future- look forward to this.
“The principle of Love applied to exercise and the method of common physical action. A science of whole body wisdom, or true emotion, intended most especially for those engaged in religious or spiritual life.
Do not randomly think and daydream, but apply the mind as free attention to the whole process of the present activity.
Mind is not, in itself, thought. Thought is only one of many objects of attention. Mind is basically consciousness, conscious awareness, or free attention itself. Therefore, the basic condition of mind in any moment is thoughtless free attention, or awareness. If attention is not turned into the relations of the whole body, it will, because of our habitual adaptation to separative and self-possessed games of existence, tend to reflect or randomly turn upon subjective and self-meditative phenomena.
Thus, we always think, randomly and obsessively, and we always turn within and away, and we always daydream or meditate on our own sense of independent existence, unless we are already and presently turned into the functional pattern of present relations.
2. Do not merely “perform” actions, as if you were causing them to happen from some detached heaven within or above the body, but feel the entire process of action, with constant attention to every moment of the action.
Attention is free of thought and all other objects only when it is connected to present events through direct and fully permitted feeling. Attention has no more connection to bodily action or bodily states than it does to the shoes on the lawn, unless that connection is presumed in the present.
That presumption is feeling. We may be connected as free attention to whatever objects, functions, or states we may intend, but only if that connection is the one of feeling. Feeling is the medium of relationship. Feeling is the energy of attention. Feeling is the life-force. Feeling is our participation in the universal medium in which all objects, including the physical body, arise. Feeling is the whole body intuition of the universal Life and Radiance. Unobstructed feeling is Love.
3. Consciously, intentionally, as a matter of whole body feeling rather than thought, breathe the constant cycle of inhalation-exhalation as a process of reception and release, and allow it to be timed with the rhythm of all activity, including formal exercise.
4. Act, or else be in repose, but always intentionally.However
do not intend only or, in general, at all through thought, or the head alone, but through the spontaneous feeling-intention of the whole body. Such action or repose is always in love, pleasurable, intense, open, and true.
5. In summary, always remain active, or associated with the pattern of relations, and do this by presuming the discipline of abiding as constant free attention, through profound whole body feeling (rather than reactive or negative and partial-body emotions), in and through the living, breathing, rhythmic play of all functions.
If you will live and exercise in this manner, it will be natural for you to be aware and to feel in and as the universal theatre of life-force, or manifest light. The environment of the whole body is not solid, like a wall of concrete pressed against the psyche.
When attention is free as present and constant feeling in and through the functions of life, the psycho-physical nature, rather than the merely physical nature, of our total environment begins to become obvious. Then breath and body are realized to be a single process in a single environment, which is made not only of solid elements, but of subtle ranges, including all that may be felt, and thought, conceived, intuited, and realized in Truth.
The whole body is the body that includes not only the physical but the etheric, the emotional, the mental, the transcendental, and the conscious¬ness.
The environment of the whole body is like the whole body, since the whole body arises from and within it. The environment of the whole body is Light, or Radiance. The Condition of the whole body and its environment is Truth, or the Real. Those who live and exercise in the manner of consciousness, as described here, may also become sensitive and disposed to the whole way of life that characterizes devotees in Truth.
Excerpted from Conscious Exercise and the Transcendental Sun, by Bubba [Da] Free John, pp. 35-37.
© 2010 The Da Love-Ananda Samrajya Pty Ltd, as trustee for the Da Love-Ananda Samrajya. All rights reserved. Perpetual copyright claimed
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