A Talk Given by Adi Da Samraj
On November 20, 1975
DEVOTEE: When you were at Aurobindo’s Ashram, did you sense the frustration in the people that were there? With all that they’re trying to keep together to aid evolution as it were?
BUBBA: Right, not only…worse than frustration – blindness. People still believing it but not representing a shred of evidence of that evolutionary development.
DEVOTEE: Do these kinds of examples of wrong dharma which are, you know, become really heavily institutionalized and everything… they really seem to hold back the ability of people to be available.
BUBBA: In a certain sense what these various organizations and institutions and teachings represent is just the same karma that’s produced the birth and the illusory lives that are already here. They’re just karmic, they’re just ordinary.
These paths that really are positive from a conventional point of view that bring people to discipline themselves more, they bring them to associate themselves with subtle things or Divine ideas. Well, that aspect of it is not entirely negative, it is just karmic. It’s a conventional aspect of these movements and so forth.
Those conventional aspects are to be criticized but not in the heavy sort of political, anathematizing way. The things that really must be dealt with are the extremely negative extensions of the karmic process whose function it is to prevent the higher process. Wherever such things appear they must be countered. That’s the purpose of debate and of discussion of these various enterprises.
The people who go to Sri Aurobindo’s Ashram in some basic way are doing a right thing, you know. And they do clean themselves up and so forth. People who go to any of these conventional ashrams tend to do that and that in itself is not negative,it’s just not true.
You approach something that’s not true in a different way than you approach something evil. You’ve got to help them to become more sensitive. But those things that are communicated to them that make them absolutely unavailable, that make them think the way of the Dharma is evil, well, those things must be dealt with. And they must be dealt with, with great intensity, but also not in especially in conventional ways. They require a great deal of intelligence and you have to know when arm-wrestling with these devils is not appropriate… and just undermine them but getting them to show where they’re at that’s all.
People are intelligent. They can recognize a bullshitter if he’s unable to bullshit. All he wants to do is save his face, you know, be the hero on his own. But if you get him to communicate about things that he doesn’t tend to communicate about, he’ll undermine himself.
Whenever the Dharma does appear, it is resisted. And Bubba Free John is not a well-loved figure, hmm? And this Teaching is not universally accepted, it’s universally misunderstood. (Laughter) Not even universally. (Laughter) It’s not even that well-known. (Laughter) And that’s alright, you know.
I sort of like being out here in the country. If we start inviting (everyone up here) then I’ve got to become more of a public person, as if I was really interested in saving the world. I couldn’t care less. I don’t want to save the world. The function of the Guru is not about saving the world, the function of the Guru is about making himself available to those who will do sadhana.
All the reactions, all the nonsense of this life is another matter altogether and requires intelligence, not a great program of world salvation. There is no such thing. That whole possibility is completely uninteresting to me, so absurd.
(I’m not completely out of the picture either). There are karmas even involved in the work of the Guru. It involves a further adaptation to all kinds of lives of karmic individuals in which his absolute responsibility not just telling him where it’s at and so forth.
Bubba Free John, Franklin Jones, you know, way back five-six years ago, you know, well, he enjoyed his liberation and so forth. It’s just a matter of telling everybody that. You know, he wasn’t ready for all of this, hmm? And it came on by degrees. And then dealing with individuals, well, it became obvious that a lot more had to be done, a lot more had to be done to get this devil in shape.
You just couldn’t tell him about the Heart and a little bit about Understanding and he did it. You know. It was all kinds of problems in people… all kinds of resistance. So he had to play with them and create conditions for them and teach them lessons and…. And it became obvious at some point that I couldn’t just be the sort of realized man that I had to get out there and do what everybody was doings!! You know???
There had to be a real integration with all of the nonsense of life and creating lessons from that point of view, not from some higher point of view, but making those lessons or that level of identification the instrument for this communication, hmm? And then all kinds of esoteric things, you know, really esoteric stuff about everything beyond the earth is so profound, you know. It’s mainly a matter of availability and then dealing with those who come.
I’ve had to adapt a little bit at a time, learn you, you know. And read a little bit about it and all that “Yes, I think I can say it then relative to this”… and I’ll say, and then tomorrow read another book it’s another something altogether diff… I was wrong yesterday!!! (Laughter)
DEVOTEE: I felt that about like you had to get more and more gross to get down to where we were at in a certain sense. Cause like you looked to have us take responsibility at levels in which we just didn’t have it together to be responsible for.
BUBBA: Right.
DEVOTEE: And so every time you saw us fail at what you’re were trying to communicate you had to get it down to student conditions, do this, do that.
BUBBA: Well, what’s happening these days is that it looks like, you know, the really grosser kinds of adaptation I had to get involved with have really served their purpose basically, you know. Not absolutely, I’ve still got to hang in there a little bit, you know, (Laughter). But all the stuff that’s gone on since almost two years ago, the really gross theatre that I had to get involved in and make lessons out of it all, not just do things but make lessons while doing it.
I want to done with that. Hopefully more and more people will really do it. Hopefully, more and more of the Community will be organized in the way I want.
The Teaching is established and literature and other kinds of ways that’ll make it work for people. This way I don’t have to get involved in that level of anymore. I can then withdraw from that sort of gross level of theatre, more and more as time goes on. Never absolutely, because it is still life, so there is no reason to abandon it absolutely until I’m ready to leave.
This is a process even for me. Because I’m not identified with it, it’s just like looking at the garbage all over again. It’s an expression of my responsibility to you all, not of where I’m at. So I’m looking always more and more to find a standard of language and of reference and of formulas or technical words and so forth, that I can be referring to and that you all know something about and so forth. So the expression of the Teaching in human terms and then esoteric terms and all of this can achieve a point of standardization that basically will hold.
You can see that my work with the Ashram is just as much a developing affair as my own sadhana, as Franklin Jones way back there, is. It’s the same kind of agonizing process in which there’s all kinds of transformations that must occur. It’s not a matter of coming down the mountain with five Commandments on each arm and that’s it forever. Fundamentally, it has been the same but the elaboration of it and how it is taught, how it is implemented, how it is described, how it relates to all kinds of existing language, how it relates to all of these planes and sheaths and up and down and gross and subtle and causal, all of it.
DEVOTEE: You had to learn it all.
BUBBA: Right! Now the experiences or the knowledge of these things in themselves and how they relate to that fundamental realization is clear from the beginning, but how it is all expressed? How to make sense out of it all is just as mysterious from the beginning to me as it is to anybody else. And it’s a matter of continually learning about this dimension, this life and all of its history and all the content of people that approach me. It’s a living process in other words. It’s not a standardized thing from the beginning, it’s alive.
Every moment of my involvement with individuals is a living moment is never false, it is never wrong, but there are all kinds of changes it involves. And from an external point of view, there’re all kinds of developments, even improvements, even the elimination of false statements – all of that is part of it. It’s part of the same absolute enlightened communication from the beginning.
You must understand that in terms of its appearances, it is that kind of a process. I don’t feel the obligation to sort of be laid back wearing a seamless robe with a standard chatter from the beginning. I throw that away every single day. I’m perfectly willing to have a completely different kind of communication, a completely different kind of language, deal with you individually in a completely different kind of way, every single day. It is always thrown away, always surrendered, always shattered.
I’m perfectly willing for everything that I’ve done and said before this moment to be completely misleading, completely false, hm? I know that it is not, hmm? But I’m every day making that judgement. And I’m completely willing for everything that I’ve done with you individually to have been completely false before this moment. I re-inspect it, I re-inspect you to realize it again in a living form, hmm?
That is because the core of it is absolute and all of its trappings, all of its theatre can be good, bad, indifferent, wrong, false, you know, elsewhere, conventional, not right, misleading. It can be whatever it is at any moment. So there is some limitation then to even like having a tape recorder here or you to remember what I did with you today. You must go beyond that, you must alive in it.
Your relationship to me must be alive in this moment and we must continually be undoing the level of realization that we established with one another yesterday. And so we’ve got to continually cleanse everything that existed before.
The Ashram in terms of its communication of the Dharma must understand that then, it must view all, everything that’s been taped recorded, everything that’s been remembered, everything that’s been formulized, must review that every single day. And what we communicate to the public must represent that analysis, that judgement, that responsibility.
We don’t just publish every talk, everything that happened. No, we review it and we make it as best as we can handle today a representation of the useable communication of this Way. Well, that’s a different kind of obligation then the conventional ashram.
The conventional ashram’s got to be right today, it’s got to be, whatever it says today has got to be maintained with every kind of ridiculous argument forever, never abandon anything, never learn anything new, or never establish the communication in a newer form. You’ve always got to save your face and anything that was not adequate in the past has got to maintained, justified in some ridiculous way or other. Otherwise, you’re enlightenment is in doubt.
Enlightenment is never in doubt. And it’s got nothing whatever to do with proof and disproof. And so it is free to be a fool. And the enlightened man is a fool, the enlightened man is foolish, the enlightened man does what he does and says what he says and doesn’t pre-judge it essentially… and abandons everything behind him and because it has that liveliness about it.
There are all kinds of inadequacies you may discover when you judge individual specimens of what the Guru did and said and thought. So there’s a difference between the living process of Satsang then than the kind of standardized, official, divine approach to everybody which is just the convention of which everyone is held in place, whereas this is not a standard group, hmm?, this birth, this world is not a fixed something. It has infinite variations, numberless sides to it. It is absurd in itself, it is a paradox. It is a process. It is never fixed. And enlightenment is not a fixation, a standardization at all. It is alive.
Everyone must be able to deal with the fact that the Guru is a wild and the Guru is always right. (Laughter) You know, the Guru doesn’t operate like the lecturer who prefigures everything from a lesser point of view and then says it or does it.
The Guru operates without thought, without pre-judgement, without strategy, spontaneously. It is always right then because it’s not dependent on lower determinations. But it’s not necessarily right tomorrow. It is alive. Tomorrow is the same instance, is an instance of the same process. All these memories recollections and standardizations must continually be reviewed. And I continually review it. Fundamentally, there is nothing… absolutely nothing!!! Since there is nothing what kind of force do all of these somethings that I have said have? (Laughter) Many of them are completely wrong probably. Not a high percentage of them!!! (Laughter) But I’m sure there’s a lot of it that in itself could be misleading if you didn’t stay with me tomorrow.
All of that possible wrongness or necessity for a re-inspection is also just another test for devotees. It’s a test of their ability to remain in service in this moment… rather than becoming fixed on memories, early experiences, earlier variations in the process and judge this moment from that point of view. Everything must be thrown away every single day, it’s a living reality, this Satsang.
That service must be done now… under the conditions of this moment. If that is done, that is all forgotten and we review everything again, every single moment, every single day. So the Teaching really doesn’t have to become standardized in that sense, but through this process the lower levels of it all, of all that communication, tend to become at least formal. Their outlines are essential, they don’t fundamentally change.
The basics of this Teaching have never changed. The teachings can become communicable in a predictable form. The way realizing it is still a living responsibility of those in the Ashram. To provide the conditions to make it possible for themselves and others to realize it, not just to hear it and repeat it, but to realize it.
This is a living process once it becomes static it dies.