Prologue: This Book Is My Confession of Sexual Wisdom
The matter of sexuality is so profoundly structured into our infantile and adolescent adaptations that it persists not only as our most obsessive interest as individuals but also as our most significant and consistent social or interpersonal problem. When I began to enter into relationships with devotees for the sake of their spiritual Awakening, it became more and more clear that no one who came to me was yet prepared for the true spiritual process, which is total bodily responsibility for Truth or Life itself. Rather, all were essentially trapped in obsessions and problematic orientations to the vital and, particularly, the sexual dimensions of experience. I knew it would be necessary for all first to come to a level of interpersonal and cultural maturity relative to the vital play of life before the spiritual process could be fully introduced into the adaptive play of their lives.
The method of my Teaching Work with devotees is not common, although there are many traditional or ancient precedents for it. It is not merely a subjective, internal, or even verbal activity, but a matter of intense, full, and total consideration of any specific area of experience, in living confrontation with others, until the obvious and Lawful or Divine form and practice of it becomes both clear and necessary.
I have compared this method to the higher yogic technique of “samyama,” described by Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras. In brief, that yogic technique of “samyama” is a process of one-pointed but ultimately thoughtless concentration and exhaustive contemplation of a particular object, function, person, process, or condition, until the essence or ultimate obviousness of that subject is clear. Only in that case does the yogi enjoy native intimacy and understanding, or power, relative to that subject.
I have called my own Teaching method “consideration. ” Whenever a particular area of life, or experience, or spiritual and bodily Enlightenment has been given to me as a clearly necessary matter or subject of instruction for the sake of devotees, I have entered into “consideration” with them. Such “considerations” were never only or merely a matter of thinking and talking. They always involved a period in which individuals were permitted to live through the whole matter and to be tested to the point of change. Those who entered into any “consideration” with me were obliged to commit themselves to their own elaborate and concentrated play of life in those particular terms, until the whole matter was clarified and the Truth became clear in terms of the subject.
Such “considerations” required a willingness on the part of each individual to engage and explore many very ordinary areas of human experience, and also to understand and adapt to each new level of revealed responsibility as it was clarified, so that the “consideration” would develop as concrete change and growth (rather than as a mere “change of mind”). Only a “consideration” entered as such a concrete discipline can proceed all the way to its true end, which is right adaptation and freedom, or natural transcendence, relative to its functional subject.
All of the spiritual and practical Teaching of Bubba Free John is the product of such “considerations,” done in the processes of his own body-mind and in communicative and instructive play with devotees. And these “considerations” have been “samyama” in the highest sense, involving every aspect of body and mind, high and low, and resulting in both the highest intuition and the most practical grasp of the Lawful and Divine necessities of human existence.
This book is one of the products of the more than six initial years of trial and mutual society between myself and hundreds of aspirants to the radical spiritual Way that I Teach. During that period, we engaged in “considerations” relative to every area of our human possibility, from diet and sex to esoteric meditation and bodily Transfiguration by the Radiance of God. In the case of sex, we gave ourselves up to “consideration” of this whole matter, this whole immensity, in such a way that every aspect of the matter would be made clear, and every participant would be obliged to change his “act,” and to mature and grow beyond the subhuman tendencies of conventionally learned desire.
Promiscuity and random desire in general are typical of our contemporary and subhuman interest in sex. And such interest at first typified the common “wisdom” of those who came to me. As time went on, however, their “consideration” became more and more mature, responsibility increased, emotional insight became more typical, and sexual intimacy became a matter of loving commitment and choice, in relationship to the Radiant Divine Life within which all our functions appear and operate. Thus, our “consideration” became a meditation on the truly human, religious, higher psycho-physical, and regenerative dimensions of this most basic, fascinating, and agonizing motive of mankind.
This book attempts to make a full communication of the mature results of this whole experiment and “consideration.” It establishes responsible personal, moral or interpersonal, social, and higher cultural principles that do not represent arbitrary or negative views toward the subject itself. Sex is not itself in doubt in this Teaching. It is not presumed to be “sin,” or an experience that necessarily draws us away from God or Enlightenment. On the contrary, it is or must be realized to be a part of the self-sacrifice or ecstasy of Enlightened or Divine Life. No self-conscious and self-serving asceticism is communicated in this Teaching. Nor is there the embrace of any equally self-conscious and self-serving program of functional, social, or yogic exploitation of sex for some purpose that is itself an illusion. Rather, there is the assertion of right and Lawful or mutually sacrificial participation in full and human emotional-sexual adaptation, and the obligation to yield to the ultimately regenerative structural purpose of the sexual function in both men and women.
It is my intention that the material presented here represent a unique, complete, and exhaustive “consideration” and manual of instruction relative to the single subject of human sexuality. There is no way to go beyond the low level of adaptation we represent in our mere thinking, reacting, sexing, and eating without coming to the point of responsibility in action described here. The spiritual practice of life is not possible without prior and real maturity in emotional-sexual life. Therefore, this book is offered as a gift to all who suffer from the usual problems of sexuality and who also would realize both higher structural growth and spiritual transformation of their living.
Man is the “Two-Armed Form” of God. And regenerative, self-released practice of the sexual embrace is a process in which Man, in the form of individuals who are responsible in love, is sacrificed into Communion with the All-Pervading, Transcendental, Formless, and Infinite Divine Reality. The true and higher human function of sexual embrace is a form of Worship, or whole bodily surrender to the Divine. And such practice represents a positive adjunct to the total Way of Life that is religion and spirituality in the highest sense.
The sexual process described in this book is not even remotely like the self-indulgent infantile eroticism that provides the basic “problem” of most men and women. It is, rather, a form of higher human adaptation that functions as a means of psycho-physical regeneration and spiritual pleasure in the fullest bodily sense.
The truly human sexual process is itself a form of “consideration,” or “samyama” on the All-Pervading Divine Life. And it is that form of participation in the sexual function that permits us to transcend sex itself, and all forms of emotional and bodily reactivity, including conventional orgasm. Sexual communion with the Radiant Divine, via the love relationship with a human partner, is, when joined to a total life practice of personal, moral, higher psycho-physical, and radically intuitive disciplines, an expression of true religion, or sacrifice of self in God. True religion is total psycho-physical Communion and even bodily Sacrifice of self in the Radiant Divine Reality that Pervades and Transcends the World. Only when such Communion and Sacrifice typifies our emotional and sexual functions as well as our thinking, our moral disposition, and our personal habits in general, have we begun to Worship God, who is the Radiant Power and Transcendental Truth of all beings, things, and worlds of experience.
Note to the Reader
Sexual communion is the technical term used by Bubba Free John to describe the process whereby the emotional-sexual functions of the psycho-physical being are first yielded into Communion with the Current of All-Pervading Life and then sacrificed or transcended in perfect God-Commnion.
As a technical term, “sexual communion” would normally be italicized, according to literary convention. However, because Bubba uses it frequently throughout the book, often many times on a single page, such use of italic type would be a distraction rather than an aid to understanding. Therefore, we address the term here, in order to call your attention to its special, technical use, so that you may understand it within the context of Bubba Free John’s essays on the subject.
We wish to stress that sexual communion is not to be interpreted from any conventional point of view. Sexual communion is not merely a traditional yogic method for seeking one’s own higher psycho-physical awakening through exploitation of the sex fuction, nor is it a conventional means for seeking pleasurable release of genital tension. It is a natural practice, founded in positive adaptation to human emotional and sexual intimacy, and it is a sacrificial or devotional discipline, in which body, mind, self-sense, the loved one, and the sexual experience itself are surrendered in direct, present Communion with the All-Pervading Life that is God.
The process of sexual commnion is both self-transcending and sex-transcending. It develops in three stages. The first stage is the period of transitional struggle to move beyond conventional eroticism and degenerative orgasm and to become established in constant, regenerative Life-Communion during sexal play, without need of chronic orgasmic release. The second stage involves the relaxation of the strggle to avoid genital orgasm and the spontaneous “inversion” or conversion and transcendence of orgasm in the whole bodily thrill of Communion with the All-Pervading Current of Life. When this “inversion” of the orgasm stabilizes, the truly regenerative or Life-enhancing function of sexual communion begins.
The third stage of sexual communion involves the transcendence of the sex function as a necessary means for whole bodily Communion with Life. In this phase, sexual activity is spontaneonsly economized in the midst of a profound and constant enjoyment of spiritual Love-Communion with the Living God. As the devotee continues to mature spiritually, he passes through periods of motiveless celibacy, or unsought transcendence of the sex function. In some cases Love-Communion with God becomes so Full and constant that motiveless celibacy becomes permanent, and specific exercise of the sex function is no longer necessary or useful, except perhaps for the occasional purpose of producing a child. In other cases, sexual activity continues, but it is naturally economized by the devotee’s spontaneous, blissful bodily Communion with the Divine.