Thing
Bubba Free John (Adi Da Samraj)
December 23, 1973
edited and adapted
by Beezone
Bubba Free John (Adi Da
Samraj): The usual man or woman begins to include
spirituality as a possibility within his or her search
through the medium of his or her experience. They may start
to meditate or begin reading uplifting religious and
spiritual literature. This is fine, but this has nothing to
do with Spiritual life.
These methods just become part of
their search, their quest for change. The usual methods of
spirituality may provide temporary consolation, but in
themselves do not provide real consolation, but only a
preoccupation to be consoled, to be fascinated, to be
fulfilled. This satisfaction, fulfillment sought by these
means, is never forthcoming. The motivation for this search
remains at the deepest levels of the psyche, the fundamental
condition being lived from moment to moment. Such a life is
fundamentally disturbed.
Fundamentally, the seeker is
unconscious, he does not know the motivation of his search,
it’s principle. He is always in pursuit of it, and so it is
always at the deepest levels of the psyche fitted with this
sense of suffering, dis-ease, disharmony, separation, doubt,
conflict. Whenever the instruments that may distract or
fascinate the seeker are temporarily removed, whenever the
instruments that serve the capacity to be fascinated and
consoled are temporarily removed, he gets
uptight.
We have spiritual teachers and
psychiatrists and all the rest, who want to help you not
have these experiences so you can carry on the business of
being consoled and fascinated. You can go on being
unconscious, essentially not knowing what it is that is
truly motivating your search.. The usual approach of all
teaching, spiritual and social or whatever, is to prevent
your falling into that condition in which you already are
living, to prevent that sense of suffering that comes over
you whenever you are not distracted.
And so the search continues
motivated unconscious and consciously.
So people think the first thing they
are supposed to do is to become spiritual or psychologically
aware. This is absurd. People who are full of suffering and
fundamental ignorance about themselves one day are yogis and
psychologists the next. What is required of an individual is
not to become psychological or spiritual, but to become
human. The individual lives in a subhuman dimension limited
by his own subconscious and unconscious processes, which
have been locked in by the structure and psyche of society
and allowed to control his conscious life from hour to hour.
The combinations of what is locked away in his psyche,
subconscious, and unconscious, and their apparently random
external influences or effects produce the usual adventure.
The beginning of the life of understanding is not a matter
of starting to have grand psychic experiences and powers,
but of undoing that bondage to limitation, that subconscious
and unconscious trap.
Someone who has simply become
spiritual, psychic or who is able to have super conscious
visions because of an exploitation of the inner ascending
energy has not become a human being, nor has he become a
benign influence upon others. One can become a yogi and at
the human level be demonic.
You aren’t suffering from anyone
else’s failure to have a super conscious vision of the
Divine Light. What every individual is suffering in others
is the simple absence of consciousness and life. The
avoidance of relationship, the contraction, the crunch of
Narcissus, is what we are suffering in relation to one
another. Until the life of love, of real presence begins,
there is nothing but suffering at the human
level.
The true fruits of spiritual life
are human ones. Those are the real tests of our
spirituality, our humanity, our functional humanity, our
ability to love and live in relationship. This is simply a
process of unobstructed energy, fullness, happiness. Until
men become happy with one another, their spirituality is
bullshit. It serves no purpose whatsoever. It’s like moving
into another room where you don’t have to deal with any
human functions at all. But there are already billions upon
billions of beings in other rooms. They are having the same
difficulty in those other rooms, because even there they
aren’t present. They are only trying to get into still
another room. This conflict goes on in all dimensions! After
going through all the worlds and reaching the higher lokas,
yogi-siddhas still have to become enlightened there. Even
there, they’ve got to understand.
There are many kinds of influences
that men experience without consciousness, some of which are
the influence of entities who aren’t alive in any materially
apparent form. We are continually being used by these
influences as they seek through the human functions to have
the vicarious experience of vital enjoyment. Whenever we are
vitally weakened we tend to experience the limitations
created by these subtly incarnate influences. Possession is
an extreme form of such experience. Mediumship, when
legitimate, is also an example.
Normally, we are all media for the
use of subtler functional entities or influences. These,
like our social magic, tend to reinforce our bondage to
unconscious and subconscious limitations. It serves the
purpose of these entities or influences to keep us
unconscious, because whenever we are weakened, they are able
to make use of our life-force as an instrument for their own
sensation.
All life forms are essentially
systems of life-force, including those that are visible to
us on this earth plane, from human beings to plants and
animals, and also including those we cannot see. All systems
of life-force have the same source, the same foundation, and
are fundamentally of the same condition. They are part of
our process and can be consciously so. We are mutually
involved with all of them. We limit them, we suffer them,
and we seek to fulfill ourselves through them, even through
those we cannot see. Similarly, they seek to fulfill
themselves through us, through the communication of force,
the mutual sacrificial activity. This truly is
life.
The whole scheme of cosmic existence
is a vast sacrificial system of mutuality, mutual exchange,
transformation from one state to the next. While you are
alive in this apparent form you live as a continuous process
of transformation of state. Death is just another form of
that same sacrificial process. We are the meal of this
universe, and all beings are food. There is no living entity
that is not food, perhaps for some other living entity, but
ultimately for the vast cosmic process of energy
transformation. Everything terminates, everything is
transformed. This is the law of life, not of death. By
taking creatures or plants for food we are just involving
them in that sacrificial process. We are also being used,
devoured. We may be butchered if we aren’t conscious, and so
become domestic fodder for some invisible race or system of
energy, some life-system. Or we may become conscious and
live the sacrificial process that is our humanity with
absolute awareness of what it is.
In that sacrifice we are endlessly
renewed and enlivened, because that process is the
‘spiritual process. We aren’t properly the meal of some
invisible race of giants, but we are properly a sacrifice
into the Divine Light. Despite this, we are continually
being sacrificed to our own unconscious and subconscious
life and to subtle, invisible influences of various kinds.
The unconscious man, Narcissus, is like a sheep. The
conscious man lives the sacrificial process, lives the
universe itself as this great sacrificial process in every
moment proceeding from the Divine. Every moment. And in
every moment he makes the sacrificial return to the Divine.
You become consciously a participant in that endless cycle,
descending and ascending life, in which life is manifested
and returned again to its source.
That is not the law only of death.
You don’t only return to God when you die. In every moment
you are returning to God. This sacrificial process is going
on in every moment. Our human, physical death is simply an
incident of that sacrificial process. Those who live that
sacrificial process while alive lose the common fear of
death, which is maintained by our social magic, our
experience, our conscious, unconscious, and subconscious
life.
In one who is truly conscious, life
is no longer a mystery. He breathes the very Light of God.
He sees the aichemical transformation of the Divine into
life in every moment and sacrifices himself in return. He
only lives in God and everything is obvious to him. His life
is not the search for God. Life isn’t intended to be a
mystery that leads to the discovery of God at the
millennium, at enlightenment, or at any other point in the
future. Life is founded in God, and is meant to be lived in
God, happily and without mystery.
The evolution of man, if that is
something actual at all, isn’t going to be achieved
gradually from eon to eon. It will he produced by mankind’s
becoming conscious, living already in the Divine, so that
the Divine process can be fully realized in life. It isn’t
by going toward God that we evolve but by standing in the
Divine already, already happy. It is not yogic bliss that we
are seeking to attain, some psycho-physical manipulation of
the life-force. It is to be already and presently happy
regardless of the apparent condition. All the manipulation
of the life-force is God’s concern. Life in Truth is to be
already happy without any reasons whatsoever, not to be
hoping to be happy by moving into samadhi.
But the usual man can’t decide to be
thus happy, because he has nothing but reasons. He is a
completely reasonable person. Even his irrationality is
reasonable. His condition of fixation, experiences,
limitations, concepts is acceptable to him, reasonable to
him. The happiness men claim is always reasonable happiness.
Men are happy because they have their mantra, because they
believe in Jesus, because they have just smoked dope, or
because they finally made a million dollars.
When you have understood, when you
have uncovered the sham of your reasonableness, then you
stand already unreasonably happy. Only when you lose the
support of your reasonableness can you be really happy. You
can’t assume it as an effort of belief. You must understand.
You are obliged to understand. You are obliged to live
without any supports at all, unreasonably happy. You are
obliged to become intelligent.
Bubba delivered this talk to his
community on December 23, 1973.