Vol1. No. 10 – The
Journal of the Teaching of Bubba Free John, the Western
Spiritual Master
The
Creative Function of Life-Frustration in the Process of
Self-Sacrifice
In
relations with the world of mankind, “I” feels and observes
itself to be easily and profoundly disturbed and distracted
by mechanical, irresponsibly motivated, utterly
self-oriented, and disturbing people. Indeed, this
automaton, altogether subhuman, is identified by ”I” to be
generally present in the form of most people, or as the
principal and casual expression of most people. The moral
and intimate, sane and humorous, responsible, intelligent,
creative, and spiritual expressions that would constitute
real human companionship and society appear at the present
time to be almost totally absent from our ordinary worldly
possibilities. And they are only tentatively or partially
contained even in the sphere of our own creative and local
or private human relations.
As a consequence,
”I” is, in general, a disturbed individual. The
disturbances granted by ordinary life move us constantly to
realize levels of communication and effect that may
transform the theatre of our own experience and that of
others in general.
At times, however,
the frustration is so profound that ”I” feels nearly
immobilized, unable to see the possibility of significant,
immediate, or ultimate and permanent effect upon this
unconscious world, so stupid and arbitrary in all its ways.
There are times when true ecstasy seems impossible. There is
frustration. There is resort to the caves of inwardness,
abstract insight, consoling illusions, and mechanical states
of personal psycho-physical pleasure and certainty. But
delight, release, and sublime participation in the displayed
existence of the total World seem at times to be impossible.
Indeed, it is always a struggle, and never a permanent
realization.
Life is a creative
opportunity, motivated by frustration of the impulse of life
toward ecstasy. There is no factual end to the struggle.
There is at best a human maturity, in which frustration is
not permitted to become negatively dominant, permitting no
change or motion. Rather, frustration is maintained as a
positive or creative circumstance for motion, change, and,
ultimately, ecstatic participation in the Transcendental
Reality.
In any case, the Law
will be fulfilled. We are obliged from birth to be a
sacrifice. We are obliged to a participatory existence that
is most truly and freely realized when it is
ecstasy-self-release via love, or whole body
feeling-attention to the degree of Infinity. Nonetheless,
such a life of love, or creative participation in the
theatre of life-frustration, is a purifying fire that moves
toward release or sacrifice of self rather than fixed
survival.
Frustration must
begin to awaken us at the heart to a feeling sacrifice or
release of self and attention from the reactive contractions
experiences tend to generate in the body-mind. And that
heart-generative responsibility, rather than any functional
form of self-exploitation, subtle or gross, must become our
essential means of ecstasy. Only then is ”1” a human
being, real, moral, and true.
II
The childish
individual depends on the Spiritual Master as a parent,
seeking his living attention, expecting to be nurtured and
consoled and fascinated and saved from death by his Company.
He wants to be saved from that for which he must himself be
responsible-which is the demand to love and be a sacrifice,
even to the degree of death.
The adolescent
individual identifies with the Spiritual Master, thinking
himself to be identical and equal to the Realization of the
Spiritual Master, and thus requiring no Grace, no practice,
no transformation. Such an individual likes to engage in
casual association with the Teaching and Person of the
Spiritual Master, disguising a secret need and intention to
become truly the Master’s equal (at least in the eyes of
others) by mere association. Such a one also likes the
glamorized sense of himself he appears to acquire or about
which he boasts, because his casual friendship with the
Spiritual Master seems to indicate an acknowledgment of his
own superior qualities. He wants to be known for being what
he can only Realize in eternal sacrifice into what includes
him but which is not him in his exclusive independence.
The mature
individual or true devotee is free of childish and
adolescent approaches to the Spiritual Master. He is neither
childishly dependent, as upon a parent, nor adolescently
independent, as in revolt against a parent. Rather, he turns
to the Spiritual Master freely, in love and service, in
gestures of surrender to the Process and the Reality which
is always Present and Awakening in that Company. Such an
individual is not motivated by the neurotic dilemmas and the
self-protective searching for solutions that characterize
the usual man. He has been awakened to intuition of his own
Real Condition and to the native activity of love in
service. He has been awakened through “hearing” the argument
and “seeing” the Presence of the Spiritual Master. Thus, he
is not bound or afraid. He is free to surrender in love to
the Agent of his own Destiny, and in such surrender in love
he fulfills the Law of practice wherein Grace may be given
and transformation made.
III
The Divine Reality,
or God, is not ultimately the Savior of our lives. The
Divine is That to which our lives must be a sacrifice.
Indeed, it is the intuition of the Divine that permits us to
live as a sacrifice rather than a Narcissistic, reactive,
and self-possessed struggle for ultimate survival.
The Truth is not
that we survive forever as we now are or conceive ourselves
to be. Nor is God, or the Divine Reality, the Instrument of
such permanent survival, immortality, or salvation. We are
necessarily changing and mortal in our present structural
form. But we tend to react to this sense of our destiny by
seeking to protect, glorify, permanently fulfill, and
immortalize ourselves as we are. The discovery of the Divine
through true hearing, intuition, self-observation,
functionally appropriate discipline, and responsible higher
growth permits us to be at peace with the mortal or finite
destiny of our present independent form and circumstance. We
become capable of self-release or sacrifice in the case of
the Intuition of the Real.
Therefore, we must
awaken to the Reality that obliges us to be born and to
change and to pass out of sight-or else life is a tormented
absurdity and a mean unrescued center of illusions. Those
who awaken to the Divine Reality and become a continuous
sacrifice into It find each moment to be either a passing
lesson, or a test, or a temporary blessing in the Mystery of
Amazement in which we appear and to the State of which we
are always dissolving.
The arising of lives
and of all changes is inevitable. Our responsibility is to
be the fulfillment of the Law, which is sacrifice or love.
Thus, we will persist as selves and changes as long as these
persist, but we will in every moment be the release of these
into the Reality or Intensity that is their Source and
Bliss.
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