Enlightenment of the Whole Body – Adi Da Samraj (Bubba Free John)

The Song of the Heart of God

An epitome of the Bhagavad Gita and the Way of Divine Ignorance, freely rendered by Bubba Free John

Listen to Me and hear Me. This is My Secret, the Supreme Word. I will tell you what will benefit you the most, because I love you. (18:64)

2. If you will surrender to Me, if you will become a sacrifice to Me, if you will constantly yield your attention to Me through love and service, then you will attain Me and come to Me. I promise you this, because I love you. (18:65)

3. Abandon the principle in all your concerns and all your strategies. Abandon every experience that may be attained as a result of desire and effort. Abandon your search for what may be gotten as a result of the various kinds of strategic action. Engage every action that is appropriate for one who loves Me, but simply perform every kind of action as a form of direct and present Communion with Me. Relax all of your anxiety. Be free of sorrow and fear. When you abide in Love-Communion with Me, the natural results of your various activities no longer have power to separate or distract you from Me. (18:66)

4. The soul that is born into the Realm of Nature, or the worlds of action and experience, advances from childhood to manhood, old age, and death, while identified with the same body-mind. Then the same soul attains another body-mind as a result. One who is truly intelligent is not troubled by all of that. (2:13)

5. All of that is simply the natural Play of Life, in which the two sides of every possibility come and go in cycles. Winter’s cold alternates with summer’s heat. Pain likewise follows every pleasure, since every appearance is followed by a disappearance. There is no permanent experience in the Realm of Nature. One who is truly perceptive simply allows all of this to be so, and he does not add his own distress to this inevitable round. (2:14)

6. Realization of the Eternal Destiny is only possible when a man has ceased to defeat himself by reacting to the Play of Nature. Such a one is steadied by his own understanding, seeing that the cycle of changes, both positive and negative, is inevitable in the world of experience. (2:15)

7. Those who see the Truth of things acknowledge that what Exists Eternally never changes. And whatever does not Exist Eternally only changes. (2:16)

8. Such seers of Truth also Realize that the entire Realm of Change, even the body-mind, and even the soul itself, is Pervaded, each and all, by That which Exists Eternally. (2:17)

9. I am the Eternally Existing, All-Pervading, Transcendental Divine Person, the true Self of all. And My Power of Creation, whereby individual beings are made to live and change, is Eternally Active as the Universal, All-Pervading Life-Energy of Nature. (8:3)

10. I am the Divine Person, Who Pervades even the Realm of Nature, and within Whom every individual being is arising. I am Realized by self-transcending love, wherein every action is engaged as a form of direct and present Communion with Me. (8:22)

11. Men and women who are without faith in this Way of Communion with Me do not Realize Me. Therefore, they remain associated with the Changing Realm of Nature, the round of psycho-physical experience, and the repetitive cycles of birth and change and death. (9:3)

12. Such fools already have Me in every human form, but they do not notice Me. They do not Realize Me in My Transcendental Nature, the Master of everything and the true Self of all manifest beings. (9:11)

13. But if anyone will live in Communion with Me, surrendering himself to Me in love, then even if his love is shown with nothing more than a leaf, or a flower, or a fruit, or water, I will always accept the gift, and Offer Myself in return. (9:26)

14. I am situated in the heart of all beings. (15:15)

15. The Divine Master of all beings is literally to be found at the heart, wherein the soul observes the changes of experience. Every experience rises and falls at the heart, spontaneously generated by Eternal Activity, the Universal Life-Energy, as if the soul were fastened helplessly to a perpetual motion machine. (18:61)

16. Therefore, do not surrender the heart to experience, as if you were in love with your own body-mind. Surrender the heart to Me, and to no other. I am the Divine Person, the Eternal Master, the Radiant One, Who Pervades the Machine of Nature as the Blissful Current of Life-Energy, and Who Transcends all experience as Infinite Consciousness, the true Self. If you will surrender your self-consciousness into My Transcendental Consciousness, and if you will yield your experience into My All-Pervading Current of Life, then I will also become an Offering to you. You will be Given the Gift of Perfect Peace, and an Eternal Domain for your heart. (18:62)

17. Now I have Revealed My Mystery to you. Consider it fully, and then choose what you will do. (18:63)

---

The Soul Transcends the Body-Mind

A talk given by Bubba Free John to his devotees.

 

BUBBA: The “I” that says “I do this” and ‘I want that” is the body-mind. What we read about religion and spirituality give us the notion that “I” is the spiritual entity, the soul, the conscious entity that exists independent of the body. But “I” is the whole and entire body-mind. And it can, at death, continue, as such. The bodily aspect becomes, temporarily, more subtle than this gross physical body, but the body-mind, the ordinary psychophysical entity, continues.

The body-mind, the “I,” the individual that appears in the Realm of Nature, is a changing phenomenon. Change is what this Realm is all about. Thus, the born condition is a bewildered condition, a condition without understanding of the Real Condition of existence.

The soul is not like the body-mind that continues from life to life. What continues from life to life is the born entity, the psychophysical being that is without the Intuition of its real Condition and has not been Transformed into the very Existence of that Condition. The soul, the Radiant Conscious Being, precedes the psyche, precedes the mind, precedes the body, precedes all phenomena, precedes all experience.

In our time there is, in general, universal denial of the Existence of the Divine, and there is universal acceptance, even from a sophisticated, scientific point of view, of a material existence in which we are identical to this psycho-physical form and to no other Condition. And alongside this common acceptance of the body mind as our ultimate Condition there exists a tradition of religion and spirituality that is equally possessed by illusions.

The traditional view is that the soul is the psychic part of the born being. Truly, the soul is not at all the psychic part of the born being. To realize the soul is not to have moved one’s attention into the brain centers in order to generate subtle phenomena. The soul is prior to the body-mind, prior to what is above and what is below, prior to Heaven and Earth, prior to the psyche, prior to the body, prior to all the “sheaths” or “coverings” of the soul-the physical, the etheric, the “astral” (which includes the lower mental and the higher or super mental) and the egoic (which is the very knot of self, the original recoil, or the sense of separate consciousness).’ The soul is prior to all of that.

Thus, there is no ultimate Truth in the resort to inwardness, to the interior, subjective part of “l,” independent of the physical. Spiritual life is not about seeking the soul by going within. Spiritual life is the process of transcending the inwardness of the body mind, just as well as the outwardness of the body-mind. Going within does focus the attention of the born being on subtler aspects of its experience, but it does not Realize Truth. Truth is the Realization of the Condition of “I,” the Condition of the body-mind, and not the experience of any part of the body-mind itself.

The soul is not the “I. ” The soul is the Reality behind the “I,” behind the psycho-physical personality, behind the being that migrates from life to life. It is the Condition of “I.” It is Radiant Consciousness. And, relative to bodily existence, it is associated with the heart region of the body.

The soul awakens through right understanding, founded on “hearing” and “seeing” the Spiritual Master. I use these terms “hearing” and “seeing” in a special sense. True “hearing” is not the same as simply listening to some spoken words and registering the sounds and meanings. True “hearing” occurs when the soul flashes forward, when it is Awakened. Likewise, true “seeing” is not the same as simply observing something and registering it in the mechanisms associated with sight. To “see” the Spiritual Master is to Awaken as the soul. It is to feel, intuit, and directly Realize, or be Awakened to, the Perfect Condition of the Spiritual Master. Thus, in the process of our spiritual Awakening we begin to intuit the soul that is behind the “I,” behind the body-mind.

1. From ancient times, the Wisdom Teachings of esoteric spirituality have described our living being in terms of a series of progressively more subtle bodies or ”sheaths”: the physical body; the “etheric” or vital energy body; the lower “astral” or lower mental body of gross-level reflection, thinking, memory, and attention; the higher astral, higher mental, or “light” body of subtle knowledge, wisdom, and illumination; and the causal body of primal differentiation, wherein illusory ego or independent self is defined. For further discussion, see especially “The Esoteric Process of the Last Two Stages of the Way of Divine Ignorance,” pages 352 ff., and the section in chapter 7 titled ”The Free Soul Transcends All Phenomena

In the Way of Divine Ignorance there are three early stages of practice: the Way of Divine Communion, the Way of Relational Enquiry, and the Way of Re-cognition.² Each of these is a stage of maturity in the intuition of the soul and its ultimate Condition. It is a process in which we inspect the various aspects of the body mind, not just the outward, physical life and its relations, but also the inward or psychic aspects. We also observe the phenomena that are considered to be extraordinary, from the traditional point of view, and that are in fact considered to be the qualities of the soul. The phenomena that are generally associated with the soul are actually aspects of the psyche. What are commonly called soul phenomena are brain phenomena and higher mental phenomena, or psychic aspects of the body-mind. While we are alive, while the body-mind is alive in gross physical terms, it is the brain that is the source or medium of these phenomena. When the physical body dies, and while we still retain an “energy body” of one or another kind, there is a mechanism similar to the physical brain that is the source and medium of such psychic phenomena.

The Realization of the soul is not the experience of subtle or psychic phenomena. It has absolutely nothing to do with observing subtle phenomena, such as sounds and lights and visions. These phenomena are not Truth, nor are they the soul. All of them must be inspected and transcended, so that we may penetrate the illusion of attention in this body-mind.

Once we have passed through this process of inspecting the experiential or psycho-physical being, we penetrate the core of consciousness, which is neither in the brain nor in the lower body, but at the heart. This Realization of the heart as the root of attention is the beginning of the full Awakening of the soul. At this stage, when we have become aware of the soul in the heart, we move back and forth between two kinds of conscious awareness: One is complete absorption in the Condition of the soul, or Unqualified Consciousness, which is traditionally called Self-Knowledge, or Self-Realization. And the other is the awareness of all ordinary psycho-physical states. When this process matures, this alternating enjoyment of two states, the soul state and the ordinary “I” state of the body-mind, suddenly it is as if the eyes of the heart itself open, and there is no longer any passing back and forth between absorption in the Self, or the Free soul, and involvement in ordinary psycho-physical states. Then the soul itself is Awake, even while ordinary psycho-physical phenomena continue. It does not exclude those phenomena, nor does it hold on to them. They are permitted to arise, but there is absolutely no illusion created by the arising of phenomena. The soul remains Awake. It is open-eyed. Everything that arises is obvious as only a modification of the Radiant Consciousness of the soul. Thus, the soul Realizes its Divine Condition, which is the true Self. In such Transcendental Realization, the soul is one with the Radiant Person, the Divine Self.

There are two ultimate dimensions to the Divine Reality. The one is that Power by which all appearances are created, which is the Radiant, All-Pervading Life Energy, or Current, the original Light or Radiance or Vibration of which everything is a modification, a temporary, changing, passing illusion. The other aspect of the Divine Reality is Absolute Consciousness. The path of God Realization is the path of Communion with and Surrender into the Divine Condition in both of its aspects. That path is submission into the Divine as the Absolute, All-Pervading, Eternal Radiance or Current of Life and, simultaneously, the surrender into the Divine as the True Self, the Absolute Transcendental Consciousness.

The Current or Life of the Divine Person pervades the body mind. Therefore, we may, by turning attention into the Current of the living body, concentrate the force of the Current of Life in various aspects of this body-mind. By moving the attention in a certain way, we can even have the sense of moving into the psyche independent of the physical body. But we do not Realize the Current itself by moving attention through the body-mind. We do not thus surrender into the Current itself. Rather, we move attention about within that Current, within the confines of the body-mind. Generally, our effort moves us toward the brain core, or the higher end of the spectrum of experience.

Nevertheless, the brain is not the center in which we may Realize, or be submitted into, this All-Pervading Current. The brain is only a part of ourselves, just as the sense of smell, the sense of sight, the sense of hearing, the capacity to think and to speak, the sex organs, and all other functions or parts. The brain is a part of the body-mind. The mechanism of surrender into the All-Pervading Radiance is not in any part; the mechanism of surrender is the native Disposition of the total body-mind. Therefore, it is not merely through turning attention upward, to the brain, or the brain-mind, that we are able to submit to the Divine Current of Life.

The only mechanism of the body-mind that represents the body-mind as a whole is the mechanism of feeling, which is expressed as emotion and the sense of touch. Through feeling, guided by the Intuition of the Absolute Consciousness, the total body-mind submits into the Current that pervades and ultimately transcends the body and the mind and the world of experience. Through the direct Intuition of that Conscious Radiance of which everything is only a modification, our submission into the All-Pervading Current becomes more and more perfect.

This is the process in the Way of Radical Intuition, the ultimate and God-Realizing stage of the Way of Divine Ignorance. It is submission, through Feeling-Intuition, into the All-Pervading Current and Absolute Consciousness of the Divine Person. It is the Realization of a Condition as concrete and actual as any experiential condition of the body-mind. But it is a Condition that absolutely transcends the body-mind and all phenomena. Temporarily, while it continues in its conventional form, this body-mind appears as before. But now the soul is Awake to its true Condition, which is the Life and Consciousness of the Divine, and it exists literally in that Condition. That Realization is not a matter of philosophy or of ideas, but of existing in a Condition in which the experiential body-mind is perfectly transcended in God.

There is no thought, no experience, no vision, nothing that you can describe or name that is associated with this Realization. Through feeling we are submitted into the All-Pervading Current; therefore, none of the independent faculties of the body-mind is an instrument for Realizing It. Since everything is submitted to this Current, all the faculties are transcended. There is only the Realization of Bliss, the Current itself, in which there is no sense of the body, no sense of the mind, and no sense of identity with body or mind. As long as the body-mind continues in its conventional appearance, there remains a sense that the body-mind is there, but that sense is not really describable. The body-mind is perceived in some ordinary and superficial way, as if it were at an infinite distance, yet it is also right here. It has no significance. There is no holding on to it, and there is no attempt to exclude it. There is simply the natural submission into the Radiant Current that is Eternal and All-Pervading. In every moment, there is the re-cognition, or knowing again, of all phenomena and all experiences as only modifications of the Consciousness and Radiance that are one’s own Condition. Thus, everything becomes superficial. Phenomena and experiences become less and less intense, less and less significant. It is not a matter of excluding what is arising. Everything is permitted to fulfill its ordinary cycle in quite a natural way, but there is no sense of being identified with any of it.

This Realization can be described in some sense. There are the words for saying something about it, as I have been doing. It is a literal Condition of existence, as literal as all the time-space phenomena that you now experience. But it has nothing whatever to do with any phenomenon. It is an absolutely and perfectly conscious Condition, perfectly Blissful, absolutely Radiant, fully and consciously Aware. It is the Self of all beings and of all conditions of existence, of which all conditions of existence, or all experiences, are simply modifications.

Because the body-mind has its own clock, it will terminate at some point quite naturally. In the meantime, the Awakened individual simply fulfills the Law. He or she lives the life of service, of love, of natural relations, from the point of view of the Realization of God. Everything that the usual man does to be happy is every kind of stimulation of the body-mind, every kind of engagement of attention in the Current of the body-mind, either low in the body or high in the body. All of that becomes superficial, no longer the motive of the soul.

The soul is not the “I,” the body-mind. The soul transcends the body-mind. And while the point of view of the body-mind still persists to some degree, the soul is felt to be atomic, smaller than smallness, infinitely small, and to be radiating from the position of the heart in the body. But when the soul fully Awakens in the Way of Radical Intuition, and it is no longer seeking experience outside itself, nor excluding phenomena and hiding in the heart, the soul is Free in its Divine Condition, the true Self, which is not within the body-mind. The body-mind does not enclose the Awakened or Free soul. Rather, the body-mind arises within the Free soul, which is without qualification. The soul is not even infinitely large. It is simply without qualification. It has nothing to do with time and space.

There is an All-Pervading, Blissful, Radiant Energy, of which everything is a modification. This Energy pervades all of existence, all manifestation. Senior to that Energy is the very Self, the very Consciousness, which is even the Self of that Energy. The Divine Person is this Consciousness, this true Self, and this Absolute Radiant Energy. We must realize our unity with That if we are to be free and happy and not bewildered, deluded, and suffering. By association with phenomena, however, we become identified with the sense of independent consciousness, and we attach ourselves to the temporary phenomena that are produced automatically by the radiant Energy of the Divine. We forget this Self, we forget this Current of Radiance, and we become attached to our independent consciousness and the phenomena that are only the modifications of It.

The Way of salvation, liberation, and God-Realization is to submit the independent consciousness into the Absolute Consciousness, or true Self, and to submit the independent body mind, and all experience, into the All-Pervading Current. That is the essence of the spiritual process. There is a practical and Perfect Way by which to realize submission to the Absolute Radiant Self, the Divine Person. It is the Way of Divine Ignorance-the four stage Way that I have described to you. To “hear” this Teaching and to “see” me in the midst of this instruction is to be moved to surrender into Divine Consciousness and Radiant Energy. Whereas, not to “hear” or “see” me is to be an ordinary person, self-possessed, attached to phenomena and the capacity for experience, not aware of the Radiant Self that Pervades and Transcends all things.

The devotee is attentive to this Teaching, attentive to the Spiritual Master. He is involved in the activities of sacrifice, or Love-Communion with the Divine Reality, the Divine Person, Who must be realized moment to moment. The life of the devotee is not founded on strategic or self-conscious asceticism, wherein he prevents himself from having experiences and enjoying himself. The life of the devotee is simply founded in prior Awakening, through “hearing,” to the Realization that experience, when viewed as a whole, is not pleasurable. It is not “fun” to be alive. It is, ultimately, a dreadful circumstance, a completely bewildered circumstance, in which some things make you feel good temporarily, but, essentially, apart from temporary pleasures, you do not feel good. You are in trouble, and you are mortal.

Therefore, life is not “fun.” There are pleasures, but even to the extent that there are pleasures a great dimension of suffering also pervades one’s entire life. Everything that might grant pleasure ultimately disappears. Every relationship that one might enjoy ultimately comes to an end, if not through immaturity and lovelessness then through death. There is no fundamental happiness or satisfaction in this life. Awakening to revulsion toward our ordinary possibility is the beginning of true “hearing” and “seeing,” or radical intuition and true feeling, in which we may realize a Condition that is absolutely Blissful and absolutely Conscious.

That Condition may be Realized even while we continue to be alive in the ordinary way, but the body-mind is superficial to the Self, superficial to the Free soul. When the soul truly Awakens, it breaks out of its atomic state in the heart and Radiates through and beyond the body-mind. Then the separate personality, the brain oriented individual, relaxes and becomes diffused in the Radiance of Consciousness, so that even while we appear to move around and act and think and do things in the ordinary way, there is no sense of being identical to the active body-mind. It is superficial and passing. It has its moments of pleasure and its moments of pain and it eventually dies. But in the meantime, and also when it dies, there is no sense any longer of identity with it. Rather, one is submitted into the Current in which the body-mind is just an appearance. One is submitted into the Consciousness in which the independent consciousness is just a recoil, a reflex, a knot, a contraction. When one is Awakened to what is prior to this contraction, then one Exists as that Radiant Consciousness that transcends this psycho-physical entity.

One may realize this Transcendental Condition while alive and enjoy its Destiny beyond this lifetime. This is my Communication and my Invitation to you.