Baker Street Blues – Vision Mound Magazine – Sadhana at the Point of Death





The Dawn Horse

Number 6 (Volume 2, Number
4) 1975



Sadhana at the
Point of Death

On
May 8 of this year, Bubba Free John and his
devotees were enjoying a celebration at a large
community house in San Francisco. Late in the
evening, Lynn Schmidlapp, an Ashram member, slipped
and fell off the edge of a third story sun porch.
Glancing against a second story ledge, he fell onto
the sidewalk, some forty feet below.

One of the first people to
reach Lynn after his fall was the Ashram doctor,
Bill Gray:

When I first saw him, he
was crumpled on the sidewalk on his left side, limp
like a rag doll. It only took a minute of
examination to determine how serious his condition
was. There was blood all over his head, he was
barely breathing, and there were gurgling sounds in
his throat. As ‘I felt his skull, it was rippled
and sunken in a couple of places. I turned him over
and cleared his throat, pulling his jaws forward to
keep it _clear for air.

Just a few moments after
I arrived, Bubba arrived. He asked if Lynn was
conscious and after trying to get him to respond to
pain, I said no. While I worked on him, Bubba
placed his left hand on Lynn’s neck and his right
hand on his chest. Others have said Bubba’s face
showed that he was having yogic manifestations.
Later I asked Bubba what he was doing when his
hands were on Lynn. He said he was giving him about
50,000 watts of energy. He said Lynn’s “apparent
entity” was temporarily disassociated from his
body. The physical shock caused an emotional shock
in him-emotional upset, hallucinations, temporary
insanity. Bubba was providing a calming influence.
He said the energy he provided would not
necessarily heal the physical body. A choice would
be made as to whether it was worthwhile to continue
in that body. He said he had to remind Lynn to do
sadhana even in that circumstance.

Lynn’s condition was very
serious. The neurosurgeon who was in charge of him
described his as one of the worst head injury cases
he had ever seen:

He was unconscious, but was
moving all four extremities. He had fractured both
arms and his right leg. In the operating room we
found that he had a very severe skull fracture
involving the entire forehead. Bone fragments had
been driven into the right side of the brain. He
could easily have died, but I felt there was an
outside chance.

After Lynn was taken to the
hospital. Bubba spoke to everyone present at the
Baker Street house. he didn’t say anything new or
different, but his teaching that night had a
special impact because of the immediate presence of
death. At the time Bubba gave the following talk,
no one knew whether or not Lynn would
survive.

 

Baker Street
Blues

BUBBA: Is this the first
time you were reminded of your mortality? Death is
not the great event you know. It’s a relatively
minor incident in the midst of things. If you throw
it on the street, you’ve got to be willing to pay
your dues.

DEVOTEE: What if you are
unconscious?

BUBBA: Nobody is
unconscious. (Pause.] What do these doctors do
when the skull is caved in?

DEVOTEE: The first thing
they do is wait for the vital signs to level
out,

BUBBA: They won’t touch
that kind of a fracture then?

DEVOTEE: No, they insert
pins into the skull bone and pull it off, after
there is some vital stability. There can’t be any
pressure put on the brain itself.

SECOND DEVOTEE: It all
depends on his power, his will to live.

THIRD DEVOTEE: Bubba, what
is that struggle, that desire to remain in the
body? What is that?

BUBBA: Nobody’s in a body.
There are just bodies. There’s no one in a body.
Consciousness is of a transcendent Nature and That
is aware of all these modifications, these
different levels of function. The conventional
assumption of the usual man is that he is in a
body. He makes a lot of assumptions, but none of
them are true.

DEVOTEE: Who’s making the
assumption?

BUBBA: No entity is doing
it. The assumption is being made.

DEVOTEE: It’s just an
activity.

BUBBA: Right. These
conventional assumptions are simply an apparent
implication of experience. Some people imagine that
they are a body and that they are mortal. Other
people imagine that they are a psyche and that they
are immortal. It is the same imagining. There is
that one Nature and all that arises is its
modification. That Nature is not inserted in
anything.

There is nothing happening,
you know. Somebody has impressed you with something
which, from a human point of view, is a very
serious incident. So all of a sudden you get very
serious. Why weren’t you serious two hours ago?
That was the time to be serious. The time to be
serious is when you’re walking down the street
eating your banana. That’s the time to look at it.
Karma is simply the machine of the universes. There
are tendencies, inclinations, and they set things
in motion. These things tend to keep moving unless
you divert them. So every appearance is tending to
produce a certain destiny. In the case of a human
being, destiny is very complicated. It is the
result of karmas moving on many different
functional levels. So every human being is tending
to realize a certain destiny, which may seem good
or bad, but it is just the universal machinery. The
matter of Truth is not a matter of escaping karmas
and manipulating your destiny. It is a matter of
realizing the Nature of this condition in which you
appear to suffer and enjoy, and in which you are
motivated and all the rest. Then you make this
whole affair obsolete, and that very Nature which
is your condition, reassumes its own position
without convention, without illusions. That Nature
is what a man truly is.

Every individual tends to
realize a certain fate apparently. A couple of
hours ago I looked at Lynn and noticed something
about him. But Truth is not a matter of saying,
“Lynn, you’re going to fall off the roof two hours
from now,” so that it won’t happen. As a matter of
fact, it is not even necessarily good for it not to
happen. What must be realized is the conscious
process. This event of life and death should make
you serious. It should make you sick of your
romantic bullshit life. Instead of trying to get it
together and become spiritual, really see what life
is. See this machinery of destiny that’s always
tending to work itself out and become moved to the
point of realization, Truth,
understanding.

DEVOTEE: In that sense,
then, is it important to become realized or is it
just fun?

BUBBA: It depends on your
point of view. I personally have no stomach for
birth and death and this mediocre enjoyment. But if
that’s your interest, then of course, it may seem
pleasurable to get enlightened. Maybe it doesn’t
mean anything to you. It depends entirely on your
point of view, your position relative to this realm
of changes.

DEVOTEE: What interests
you, Bubba?

BUBBA: Who cares what’s
interesting? What is true? What is the case? What
is this condition? What is our nature? Realize that
and you realize what is of a transcendent nature,
which has no qualification associated with it, no
destiny, no birth, no death, no function. And it
cannot be described from the human point of view.
It cannot be described from any point of view
within a universe. It is utterly free. In human
terms, Bubba Free John walks and talks and has
apparent human form like everybody else, so you can
ascribe interests to Bubba Free John. But Bubba
Free John is not here to represent some
personality. Bubba Free John is simply the agent of
this communication, this Satsang, which is beyond
complications. You, on the other hand, are
complicated. You will all die. You will all suffer.
You will all get old, if you live long enough. You
will all be confused, you will all live in mystery.
You are suffering at this moment. If the movement
of things means a great deal to you, then you will
identify with that process and realize its destiny.
But if it seems somehow absurd to you, insane,
fruitless, if it begins to wear itself out and no
longer grabs you, then you may become involved in
that conscious process in which the Condition of
all of this is realized perfectly. It is not a
matter of spiritual experiences, of adjustments in
your nervous system, of blissful bodily sensations,
or of visions. It is a matter of absolute
unqualified freedom from all possible destiny. If
you realize such freedom, then you can say what you
like about it, and you can engage in life itself in
whatever way you like.

DEVOTEE: Is it possible for
an individual who is not a Siddha to realize the
freedom of a Siddha?

BUBBA: The devotees of the
Siddhas realize the same freedom. Otherwise there
would be no purpose for Siddhas. They would never
be known. Siddhas are simply a function within the
manifest worlds for restoring other living beings
who do not come originally out of that dimension of
the perfect. The Siddhas do, and they serve those
who are karmically determined. Through various and
humorous methods they try to move individuals out
of the whole
affair of
karmic life into the conscious process of Truth.
Obviously, that is the effort this Ashram
represents. That is what you’re all supposed to be
engaged in.

Even so, you are all going
to die. Every last one of you is going to die. And
you will all have to fulfill your obligations in
life. Those obligations may be transformed,

not because you can do
something to them, but by virtue of your
participation in the Divine Reality. In that case,
the grosser dimension of karmas tends to be reduced
and become subtler. Rather than having to pass
through a very difficult destiny on a sheer
physical level, an individual’s dreams or his life
circumstances may represent the fulfillment of that
karmic movement within him. On the other hand,
nominal involvement with a Siddha, and mere
conventional fulfillment of spiritual programs does
nothing to one’s karmic life. To start talking
about karma involves talking in something like
fire-and-brimstone terms. “If you don’t get
straight, your karmas will kill you.” Certainly,
from the point of view of karma, it is true., In
fact, it is by visiting his own karmic life and
truly perceiving it, directly knowing it, reading
his own destiny in the midst of things, that an
individual becomes involved in spiritual life. Take
a look around you. Listen to the news and walk down
the street. This is not heaven.

No amount of running the
jazz up your spine is going to make it heaven. It
requires something entirely different from all that
nonsense, all that envisioning and so forth.
Something much more profound than that is required.
A little observation of life will demonstrate that
to you. It takes, more than a peaceful episode or a
distracting vision. All tat is childish nonsense.
What is required is absolute penetration of this
event. That is what sadhana is all about. Sadhana
is not giving you an alternative to the drug
culture, or to your childhood religion. It is a
profoundly intelligent life that requires your
whole being. No nonsense. You must feel as moved by
your daily moment-to-moment experience as you are
by this little tragedy tonight. When life itself
impresses you that way, then you will start to do
sadhana.

DEVOTEE: Is it appropriate
to deal with the emotions in order to take on that
seriousness?

BUBBA: It will happen in
any case.

DEVOTEE: I feel caught up
in my mind so that I make it all bland and it
doesn’t seem like there is any movement in me which
can generate sadhana.

BUBBA: The mind will not
generate sadhana under any conditions.

DEVOTEE: What about the
emotions?

BUBBA: None of them will.
You must generate your sadhana.

DEVOTEE: It is so
paradoxical! We can’t generate it out of
ourselves.

BUBBA: Well, sadhana is the
result of an intuitive movement that takes place in
your very Nature, not your mind.

DEVOTEE: Bill Gray just
called and asked me to tell you that Lynn has a
depressed skull fracture, definite broken arms,
definite broken hip and that he is in very bad
shape. From Bill’s superficial observation he said
that Lynn very well might die.

BUBBA: Did he say anything
more?

DEVOTEE: No. That was
all.

BUBBA: You do sadhana under
the conditions of your mind, the conditions of your
emotions, the conditions of your body. It is your
own Nature that does the sadhana. That responds
intuitively to the communication of the Siddhi, to
the force of Satsang. It is not by looking at your
mind and emotions and body and psyche and trying to
find some reason to do sadhana that you will ever
do sadhana. There are no reasons in the whole
universe to do sadhana. Sadhana is an unreasonable
activity that comes out of the very Nature of all
beings and works upon all of these functions. At
some point you stop consulting your mind and your
emotions and your body and your whatever-else for
reasons to do sadhana. And you put all those
functions to the task of sadhana. You stop
sympathizing with that

stuff and you bring it to
the discipline. Everybody’s mind is so god-damned
precious. It’s time to really get pissed off with
where you’re at. I don’t mean for you to lose your
humor. To really get pissed off at yourself is to
regain your humor. Every now and then somebody dies
and you realize that Bubba Free John did not ask
you to come and be immortal with him, but to get
straight. It is by realizing that you are mortal
that you will bring your life to the
task.

DEVOTEE: So I’m standing
here wondering just what I can do other than to
submit to the discipline of the Guru.

BUBBA: Submit to the
discipline and always consider the Guru’s argument.
When the argument causes a response in you, then
the discipline will become possible. The discipline
doesn’t come first, the Teaching comes first. Your
response to that makes the discipline possible.
Then, the discipline is amusing.

Truth is not the
fulfillment of life. Because life is what it is
Truth is significant. Truth is utterly beyond life.
It has nothing whatever to do with life. What men
usually call spirituality is the fulfillment of
life. It’s not Truth, It is simply part of the
strategy to be distracted, to realize some destiny
that is more than man’s usual mortality. Those who
realize Truth, secondarily, may appear to enjoy a
greater destiny, but it is not their
accomplishment. It is not their goal. The spiritual
seeker looks for changes themselves. He looks for
transformations to occur. He looks for distractions
and fulfillment’s of all kinds and he hopes somehow
at the end of that to realize the Truth. But Truth
was never his object. Truth is realized without
accumulating a single change. It is not a matter of
changes. It is a matter of penetrating the entire
affair of changes. In fact, it is only because you
are fitted to this mortality that you are in the
least moved toward anything like Truth. Mortality
serves. But not if you misinterpret your life and
think that you are immortal. You must know your
mortality very well, and then you will do sadhana.
Your very Nature is not mortal, but neither is it
immortal. It is not a “something” that goes on
forever. There are some things about this machine
with which you identify that go on from life to
life, but even that is mortal, changeable,
mutable.

Examine your spiritual
experiences. Of what value are Lynn Schmidlapp’s
spiritual experiences when he’s lying on the
sidewalk? The little blissfulness he could feel in
his body, the distracting visions and so forth? It
is all zero at that point.

It is good to be impressed
by another’s suffering. It can be a good lesson.
But it is just a moment in most people’s cases.
Tomorrow morning the day returns, and you forget
about it. Basically you are not sensitive to what’s
happening. You would be equally impressed by
everything that happens from moment to moment, if
you were really perceiving it. But you wouldn’t
become solemn. Only mediocre men are solemn. They
are stuck on some idea, some event. The really
intelligent man sees the entirety of life. He sees
the whole thing and his humor is restored. His
conscious life is initiated. The vision of
mortality and suffering is not grounds for becoming
a solemn asshole. It is grounds for celebration and
sadhana and a mutual life.

I think tonight’s
celebration is basically done.

DEVOTEE: And the solemnity
too.

BUBBA: Right. You all knew
Lynn Schmidlapp was mortal, didn’t you?

 

Some of Lynn’s close
friends were at the hospital when he regained
consciousness after major surgery the next day. He
was able to speak, and he said that he recognized
them, squeezing their hands. But it was evident
that he didn’t understand what had happened. Jane
Gerakin describes that first day:

It felt like he was
drunk. He would try to free himself and he’d make
noises of frustration when he couldn’t get out of
bed. Roger and I told him to lie down. (He was
pulling at his oxygen mask and thrashing at the
tubes.) We started getting film and he’d respond by
obeying. All of Lynn’s tendencies were coming out
very blunt and raw.

At one point Roger had
to leave and I was alone with Lynn. He began to
react again-he was totally resistive and negative.
I confronted his resistance and he stubbornly
reacted. He told me, “a lot of what you’re saying
is bullshit.” I told him that he was right then
face to face with what he really was and it was
time to see that, and deal with it. Sadhana was
being demanded in the most fundamental
way.

Jane’s husband, Roger,
returned while Jane and Lynn were
talking:

The entire situation
seemed to have intensified Lynn’s resistance to a
ridiculous degree. His usual vital compulsion and
stubbornness had become acute. Jane was uniquely
firm with Lynn, speaking to his indulgence of these
exaggerated tendencies, his truly incredible
resistance, with a kind of ruthlessness that would
have seemed strange to anyone listening,
considering the virtual deathbed circumstances. And
Lynn was hardly passive in this confrontation. But
finally he responded to this forceful communication
with a quieting of his resistance.

Lynn’s injury relaxed
his usual strategic control over himself. He would
have ordinarily concealed his compulsive tendencies
or have adapted them to socially acceptable forms.
Now he was simply displaying the unconscious
movements in himself. It gave others an opportunity
to confront Narcissus nakedly, something which Jane
found extremely disturbing:

It was the most intense
confrontation I’ve had since I’ve been in the
Ashram. I went home and was terrified. The
experience had put me face to face with my entire
existence, my separate self, my death. Fear just
took over my body. I trembled under my skin and had
a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. The
scene felt like it was straight out of The
Exorcist. The reality of the whole situation hit
me. It was the first time I had ever really dealt
with Lynn, straight, with any kind of intensity.
And with myself.

The next day, Lynn’s
recovery suffered a severe setback, a profound
complication and certainly a life threatening
problem,” according to the neurosurgeon. His right
lung had collapsed completely, threatening the
oxygen supply to his brain and other vital
centers.

Word of this reached Bubba
at Persimmon, where he very soon involved a group
of devotees in a high energy celebration. Far from
becoming concerned about Lynn’s condition, Bubba
mentioned him periodically with great humor, poking
fun at his “karmic realization” and promising to
“ruin his ass” when he got well. While the party
continued, Bubba got on the telephone with Rick
Pugh, who was waiting to see Lynn in the hospital
corridor in San Francisco. At first Bubba demanded
to talk to Lynn personally, “coma or no coma,” but
instead he gave Rick a message to be delivered in
person. Rick tells the story:

I walked toward the
Intensive Care Ward and met up with the
neurosurgeon who was in charge of Lynn’s case. He
was on his way to take a look at Lynn and I asked
if it would be possible to see Lynn for just a
second. He shrugged and said, “OK, as long as it’s
just for a minute.” That in itself, I thought, was
very unusual. But I had just talked with Bubba and
was very much affected by that, and I think I was
in a peculiar state. So I went in. He was already
in the Intensive Care Ward, and he was in an
extreme medical crisis. People were surrounding his
bed, and they were all making adjustments on the
machines and consulting each other. Lynn was lying
on his side and was obviously unconscious-not
present at all in his body. So I went up and said,
“Lynn, I don’t know if you can hear me. But I just
talked with Bubba on the phone. He said that you
should not drift at all and you should be present
and put your attention on him and he’ll take care
of everything.” There wasn’t any response like
moving his hands or nodding his head because he was
just totally out of it at the time. But I had a
feeling maybe it was just an emotion, I don’t know
– but there was a feeling that that contact had
been made. Fifteen or twenty minutes later his
state improved. He began to respond to their
working with him. It was a very dramatic point in
this whole event.

For Missy, Rick’s wife,
this incident represented a release of anxiety.
When she first heard about Lynn’s fall, Missy had
been very upset:

What I really noticed,
was the tendency to rush to the emotions and to pin
everything on the psychophysical entity, like it
was what really mattered. The night of the
accident, I reacted like somebody who had never
heard of the Teaching.

But Lynn’s apparent
response to Bubba’s message brought a turnabout in
her:

From then on I just let’
go of something. I wanted Lynn to survive, but
there was a relaxation of that desire. It was more
than, “Well, it’s in Bubba’s hands so everything
will be all right.” It had gotten to be less of a
crucial thing whether he did live or
die.

Missy, like most people,
had never felt death as a real element of life, and
Lynn’s accident forced her to feel that, to, see
her own mortality:

You really had to deal
with death at those crisis times at the hospital.
Not for Lynn, because he was totally unconscious,
but for me, death was a very real
threat.

What I saw is how
vulnerable we still are, in this lifetime, unless
we really take responsibility for it and turn to
the Teaching and live from the point of view of
understanding. Lynn’s accident was a demonstration
of what happens to someone who doesn’t take
responsibility in life. You just get murdered and
that’s it. He could have gone just like that, in
any instant.

After his recovery from the
collapsed lung, Lynn remained in the Intensive Care
Ward for about two weeks. People who visited him at
this time independently reported sensing the Guru’s
presence surrounding Lynn. Jane Gerakin reports one
incident:

He began to point his
index finger up and continued to try to get my
attention. Finally, I understood what he was doing.
The first night I had put up a picture of Bubba at
the end of the bed and he was pointing to it. I
pulled it down and brought it over in front of
Lynn’s face. I pulled back his eyelid (His eyes
were swollen shut.) so he could see the picture. I
asked him if he could see Bubba and he nodded his
head yes. As soon as he saw Bubba’s face all the
tension in his body relaxed, he stopped squeezing
my hand and he seemed to fall asleep peacefully. It
completely undid me. There was no doubt about
Bubba’s presence.

Some felt strong
spiritual force surrounding Lynn. According to
Missy Pugh, “When we were standing around the bed,
it was like sitting in the Satsang Hall, the energy
was so intense.” Rick, who is a “solid” person,
generally not very sensitive to spiritual energy,
said: “Whenever I was feeling drained, the thing
that would transform me would be to see Lynn for a
while, to just stand by his bed. There would be
regeneration of that intensity.”

Many people made the usual
assumptions about this incident: that Bubba had
intervened to save Lynn’s life, that his touching
Lynn’s body, the celebration and telephone message
when Lynn’s lung collapsed, and the force which
surrounded Lynn’s bed, were all significant
signals, evidence of the “really important”
activity which was taking place. Some believed
Bubba had worked a “miracle.” Bubba has spoken many
times about how all such experiential effects are
an entirely secondary affair, not really worthy of
special attention. But it is also important to note
that these activities are not extraordinary or
“miraculous” in some mysterious sense. The
manipulation of energies and the use of subtle
“spiritual” influence is a mechanical affair. Bubba
can operate in that dimension as can other persons,
and his response to Lynn’s situation was to exert a
life enhancing, “healing” influence.

This, like everything Bubba
does, was an expression of his presence as Guru,
but this kind of behavior doesn’t itself
‘characterize the Guru. It’s only one of many
possibilities. Because it takes place on a level at
which most of us are not conscious, such activity
seems awesome and God-like. So people look at Bubba
as if these mechanical capacities were the same as
his radical function as Siddha-Guru, But these
healings are, in fact, an entirely minor affair.
Lynn’s near death can serve as a spiritual lesson
for other people, but the message is not, “See
Bubba’s miraculous demonstration.” The real
Teaching is suggested in Bubba’s comment the night
of the accident: “You are going to die, and
considering where you’re coming from, that’s no
joke.”

We can also learn by
examining what happened with Lynn following the
accident and during his recuperation. Bubba had
told Dr. Bill Gray that Lynn was temporarily
disassociated from his body after the fall. When he
regained consciousness after his 12-hour operation,
Lynn’s unconscious, resistive behavior seemed to
indicate that he was only partially aware of the
people around him. Rick Pugh said that although
Lynn was responsive to people’s presence with him,
“I never thought during the first week that he was
particularly conscious of our being there as
personalities.”

After his lung collapse,
Lynn’s mouth was covered by a mask attached to a
respirator, so he was unable to speak for nearly a
week. When he began talking again his voice was
deep and raspy, low and “way down.” He would look
at people “as if he was seeing everything different
from all of us.” He would recite poetry, speak with
subtle sarcasms and have “solipsistic
conversations, all from the point of view of subtle
dreamlike perception.” Lynn gave his body very
little attention, not even bothering to try to
raise his head, so his visitors would feed and tend
to him, while he would talk with this subtle irony.
“He was like a mad king.” Most of his visitors have
said that they felt he was indulging his subtle
perceptions, but he was, nevertheless, responsive
to their demands to do sadhana:

There were many times
when he would start to ramble about something, and
you could interrupt him, and say something like,
“Hey, Lynn, don’t ramble and drift. Remember Bubba,
just keep your attention on Bubba.” And he would
stop talking and nod his head.

When he was quiet we
would often ask him, “Are you able to keep your
attention on Bubba?” and the answer would always be
affirmative. It was obvious that he could reconnect
with that Presence, at least on some
level.

At this time, the people
who were visiting Lynn were unable to engage in
their usual strategic approaches to him. Lynn was
needful of attention, of real service, but he
wasn’t playing the usual social games, and that
served to shake those who were visiting him out of
their accustomed social immunity. Roger Gerakin
recalls such as occasion:

A few of us had spent
several hours with Lynn one night, some being
entertained, some, I felt, being intimidated by
Lynn’s knowing sarcasm, his eerie poetry and
ghostlike voice, his meaningful looks and
aphoristic statements. Jane and I were about to
leave , and we bent over him to say good-bye. I
guess I expected simply to be dismissed in the
offhand fashion he , had lately adopted. Instead he
opened his good eye as wide as he could, paused a
moment to focus, and then, seeing our faces, his
face opened into a beautiful childlike smile. He
said, “You two are my angels.” He said it
twice.

Something collapsed
inside me in that moment. I saw Lynn, Jane and I,
and all who are Bubba’s as one body within His
consciousness. The sharing of life was going on as
surely as the organs of a body share the same
blood.

Lynn’s “mad king” behavior
gradually normalized over the next month or two. He
gained strength quickly, aided by friends from the
Community who brought him natural foods to
substitute for the hospital diet. Lynn was
interviewed about six weeks after his fall, and he
reported that his brush with death had not
transformed him at all, and that he could not even
remember most of what had happened:

Essentially it’s just
been an ordinary experience, like going down to the
grocery store. There’s been no dramatic change in
my life except a sobering influence. I just stayed
in bed for a few months. After the accident I don’t
really remember anybody. The only thing I remember
is waking up in the midst of some kind of
ward.

You would think that I
would be able to see the possibility of death more
clearly. But that’s not the case. So nothing’s
changed. I intend to be a substantial member of the
Community and to contribute whatever I can, but I
don’t have specific plans.

I do see my relationship
to Bubba as being more constant, steady and even.
And that’s the demand I feel – to remain present
with Bubba, in that simple relationship. There is
the obvious response of gratitude to Bubba and the
Community. I guess the only real response will be
received in God.

Obviously, the event of
Lynn’s near death provided more evident lessons for
the people surrounding him than it did for Lynn
himself. People saw the consequences of karmic
life, the real possibility of death, the fact that
death is not necessarily a problem.

Bill Gray describes what he
saw:

This whole incident was
a good lesson for me. From a professional and human
standpoint, working on Lynn was a most dramatic
life and death matter. But with the Guru right next
to me, I knew with certainty that there really was
no problem – a lesson which Bubba has been trying
to show me, and which undermines all the
assumptions of my professional
training.