The First
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.
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by Jerry Sheinfeld
The Dawn Horse Magazine, Vol 2, No.
2, Jubilee Issue August 1974
In true sadhana you are dealing
simply and directly with your state, your atmosphere, your
ordinariness. It is truly perceptive to see that in your
actual state, your very presence, is disturbance, completely
independent of qualities that condition you are obviously
disturbed. But your very presence is that disturbance. You
can see that there is no genuine rest in you, except a
mediocre experience of no disturbance which comes from
without or within. When those gross disturbances are
removed, you begin to see that your actual state, your very
presence, is disturbance, completely independent of
qualities that may appear to you. It is always this
contraction. You begin to see that. You see it in your
ordinary moments of relative ease and happiness, not just in
your neurotic highs and lows, but in this neutral state in
which there is no peculiar event. When you begin to see it
then, understanding has begun. But people buy out at that
point. Instead of truly becoming perceptive and carrying on
the real activity of consciousness, they just enjoy that
neutral time until the next disturbance arises or the next
high arises. The highs and the lows are too baroque, they
are not fundamental, they are extraordinary. This
ordinariness is an omnipresent quality against which all
other qualities play. The secret of understanding is in
recognizing that.
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