THE DREADED GOM-BOO
Part III: Spiritual Transmission
CHAPTER 23
The Baptism of Immortal Happiness December 17, 1982
Because you have not used the Teaching. You must hear the Teaching and then receive my Spirit-Baptism. If you have not really heard the Teaching, you can taste the Baptism, but you will shut It down. Even in the very moment of Transmission, you will not truly experience my Blessing. You will not use It. You will not enter into It. You will not practice the yoga of Spirit-Communion.
Therefore, you must prepare yourself to use my Transmission by using my Argument-not just by listening to it, but by combining yourself with it-to understand the knot of self-contraction, how it works as a mechanism that shuts down the Beauty of Infinite Life. When you have understood me to that degree, then you can receive my Baptism truly and begin to practice.
To practice is to submit yourself to the Energy of the Spirit, to life in the Spirit, to my Baptism. When you have contacted the Spirit most profoundly, then you can live your whole life with the Spirit and give yourself up to It altogether. The Spirit sublimes the being. It makes a wonder out of existence. It lifts you out of the subhuman round of un-Happiness. It awakens your emotion. It awakens your faith. Therefore, until you have tasted my Baptism, you do not know what I am talking about, because I talk the Spirit only to prepare you to taste It. And when you have heard me, then you can suck It up, luxuriate in It, and fall into It.
Spiritual life is Intoxication. You must become Intoxicated in the Spirit. But if you are so committed to your self-contraction, then my Interference in your life is only a lesson, an edge of criticism. You will not experience my Interference as Grace, as Beauty, as Deliciousness, as Love, because you have not yet heard me. The first thing to do, therefore, is to hear me. When you have heard me, then you can practice. When you begin to practice, you can move through the stages of life and practice like a hot knife through butter. While you are in the listening stage, you have not yet understood yourself enough, and consequently you shut down my Life-Transmission and hardly experience anything.
The only thing that prevents the sublimity of Spirit-Communion in every moment of existence is the simple mechanism of self-contraction. You must hear me, therefore. You must observe the self-contraction and understand it so thoroughly that it is not happening to you anymore, so that you recognize it as your own action, so that you can enquire of it or meditate beyond it or feel into the Life-Current, the Divine that is beyond it, in your daily life. That is the capability you must regenerate in yourself. It does not exist in you now because you have habituated yourself to shutting out the Force of God.
Therefore, the first thing you must do is to hear me, combine yourself with the Argument relative to Narcissus to the point of relieving yourself of the arbitrary notion that things are just happening to you and that you are succumbing to limitation. You must realize that these limitations have no force at all. Rather than just respond or react to them, you must see the mechanism of contraction or reactivity and know it utterly. The sense of self-contraction is just like clenching your hand or getting a knot in your stomach or tightening your eyebrows. You must see it exactly as something that you do in reaction to conditions of existence.
When you can know the self-contraction as such, then you can be responsible for it in one or the other of the three Ways that I describe to you. Then you will not only experience this Baptism-all devotees who turn themselves to me at all experience my Baptism-but you will be able to use It, because you will be responsible for the activity that turns away from It. Then you will become a real devotee. You will become a practitioner. You will move through these slices of time, these technicalities of the various stages of practice, swiftly and directly. The essence of practice is this capability for self-understanding. Have I not told you this? You must become responsible for this mechanism of contraction. There is no other way to enter into the sublimity of God-Realization.
My Offering to you is given continuously, but you are shutting it down. You do not live an Intoxicated life. You are living an ordinary life, wondering what is going on with you, waiting to die. You do not feel the sublime Energy of God because you shut It down. The reason you shut It down is that you have not participated in my Argument to the point of understanding that the mechanism of self-contraction is your own activity. It is just like the tightening of the iris in the eye. It is just an ordinary mechanism of reactivity in the body-mind.
You must see it. You must understand it and be responsible for moving beyond it through submission to God, through Divine Communion or enquiry or the Perfect Practice. Through one or the other of these means you must be capable of surpassing the tendency to contraction. Then what I pass on to you will be something that you can Commune with, that you can love, submit to, and feel. But until you have understood yourself and become responsible for the automaticity of self-contraction, all that I give you will ride over your heads, pass beyond you, and be tasted only a little bit here and there. It will have no effect on you, and you will think that you have received nothing. Therefore, do not be a fool anymore.
Most people hardly even feel the great Force of Being that pervades this universe. If you could Locate It, you would Locate Absolute Bliss. It would make you into a mystic Siddha, just as It has made me. Since endless time, I have always been Blissful, I have always received the Divine Spirit, I have always loved It. I have no resistance to God. But you do. And I am trying to Teach you out of that resistance, the mechanism that shuts down the openness to the sublime Force of God. It is the only thing in you that is making you un-Happy. It is not the fact that you are born and living as a human being that makes you un-Happy, but just this simple activity of self-contraction that is reflected throughout your body-mind.
Therefore, you do not taste me in your life. You do not taste me when you meditate. Instead, you concentrate upon this mechanism of separation and you do not get Intoxicated in my sight. Until you become responsible for that contraction, it makes no difference how much I give you.
Thus, the first form of my manifestation to you is this understanding, this consideration, this Argument relative to the knot, the effort, the mechanism of withdrawal, the self-contraction. And you must become responsible for this self-contraction. Otherwise, it makes no difference how much I give you of the Intoxicating Force of God. It makes no difference how much of It I am. Until you are responsible for the mechanism of separation from the Spirit-Presence, you cannot taste It, you cannot love It, you cannot know It, you cannot be swooned by It. And we should exist in a swoon of Intoxication. To do that really is our nature.
All of us are potential saints and Siddhas, but very few are born like me. I am a very rare being. I am not an ego at all. I am a rare Intervention in the world. Hardly any people in the entire history of mankind have been manifested with my Siddhis, and I am sitting here in this living room with you people trying to convince you of the Divine Life! I am a unique Advantage to mankind. But how many people can suck me up and love me? How many will kiss my knees, pull my feet and massage my face, receive my Love, receive my Delight in them? How many people will do it? I am prepared to give everyone everything, but how many people will do it? You cannot receive me until you understand your resistance to me. Understanding is the first gesture of spiritual life.