My Divine Avataric Ashvamedha will not “End” with the ending of the physical Lifetime of My Divine Avataric Incarnation-Body. The all-and-All-Translating Process of My Divine Avataric Ashvamedha will forever Continue, generation after generation— not only here, but every “where” in the cosmic domain.
My Work in This, My here Speaking bodily (human) Divine Avataric Incarnation-Form, is only the Initiation (and the Initial Demonstration) of My Divine Avataric Ashvamedha. However, now that My Divine Avataric Ashvamedha has been Avatarically Self-Initiated by Me, My Divine Avataric Ashvamedha Is (now, and forever hereafter) the Perpetual Love-Bliss-Event of the “Brightening” of all-and-All in Me. – The Dawn Horse Testament
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ancient times a king or crown prince would send a royally bedecked horse throughout the empire, in the company of guards and courtiers, to be viewed by all the citizens.
The horse would be displayed in virtually every town and village of the kingdom and acknowledged by all as a sign of the king’s or prince’s dominion. Then, after a year of such touring, the horse would be brought back to the capital and slain in a royal ceremony. This sacrifice reaffirmed the king’s sovereignty or proclaimed the prince’s rightful ascension to the throne.
Shortly before the culminating events of his own spiritual transformation in 1970, Bubba Free John had a vision in which he witnessed the miraculous appearance of a small horse. It first appeared as a cloud or whirling mist of energies and then coalesced as a living, breathing being.
Adi Da Samraj devoted the first five years of his Teaching work (1972-1976) to a living revelation of his Teaching, the Way of Divine Ignorance, or Radical Understanding. Long before he took up this formal work, he knew that it would take more than philosophical argument to communicate his radical spiritual message in the present world-culture. What was necessary, and what he was uniquely fitted for, was a demonstration of his critical and liberating argument in the actual experience of ordinary individuals. In early 1977, Adi Da spoke of this stage of his work:
I was not born into a traditional religious culture. I have no conventional society to which I belong, of which I am a monk or a representative. I have appeared in a society in which there is no spiritual tradition, no way of dealing with an individual like me, no way of dealing with a process of this kind, no way of recognizing it and truly making use of it.
When I began to take up my teaching work, I clearly understood that I was going to have to bury myself in the world in order to awaken devotees. If there were to be devotees ultimately, I would have to pass through the lower, ordinary life with them, and make lessons in that play with them, make lessons out of all the possibilities of conventional fulfillment. That conventional fulfillment includes everything from typical life pleasures to conventional , socalled spiritual and psychic enjoyment. So all of my work has been a process of engaging in play with people on the basis of conventional possibility, living it, exploiting it, allowing it to show itself altogether as experience, as consequence, in order ultimately that they might enjoy that revulsion to the destiny of this birth that would enable them to take up the spiritual process truly.
Truly, I began That Great Work (and even all My Avataric Divine Work) – Which is My Ashvamedha (or Divine Horse-Sacrifice) – even billions of years (and even a countless Vastness of time) ago, before the “Big Bang” of this conditional Cosmic domain.
Birth & Mastering Goddess
(What I consider as the) second stage of My Unique Ordeal As the Divine Avataric Master was the Process of Fullest Realization, Acceptance, and Embrace of My Divine Avataric Status and Work. Part of the Process of My Divine Re-Awakening was the Revelation of My Own Form As the Divine Horse—Embodying the cosmic domain itself, and Including all beings and things. In the months before the Great Event of My Divine Re-Awakening, I spontaneously “Experienced” a Dream-Vision of a Horse, in Which I Became the Horse, and (thereby) Realized My Own Divine Avataric Nature, Status, and Work. This DreamVision marked My Transition into the last phase of My Avataric Ordeal of Incarnate Divine Re-Awakening, and into My Incarnation of Avataric Conformity to My Own Divine Pattern of Self-Manifestation (As the Divine Avataric Master)—Entirely Submitting to the Sacrificial Gesture of Divine Avataric Descent, Submitting to Be human, and Submitting to Be the “world”. This Divine Avataric Self-Submission of Mine is intuitively foreshadowed in the traditional Description of the Ashvamedha as the Event Wherein the Divine Person Takes the form of the Horse and Becomes all “worlds”.
Avataric Nature and Submission
All the traditional Descriptions of the Ashvamedha and the Divine Horse can be said to be prophecies of My Divine Avataric Appearance here. These prophecies (or metaphors, or liturgies) were not fulfilled in their time, but they are part of the awakening sense in humankind of a Great Event that must occur without fail—because humankind does not “Know”, but Only the Horse (or the Divine Person) “Knows”. In the True (or Divine) Ashvamedha, the Divine Person Is the Means, and the Divine Person must Perform the Sacrifice. That is to say, the Divine Person must Appear As all (and All), Submitting (Thereby) to Be all (and All). The Divine Person must Accept a conditionally manifested Form, Endure the Avataric Ordeal of Divine Self-Forgetting and subsequent Divine Re-Awakening, Realize the Fullest Awakening and the Fullest Acknowledgement of the Divine Avataric Nature, Status, and Work, and then Do the Divine Avataric Work. This Is the Great “Ritual Performance” (or Universally Effective Sacrifice) That humankind cannot do, but Which Only the Divine Person can Do.
Must Appear, Accept and Endure – Nature, Status and Work
The third (and final) stage of My Unique Ordeal As the Divine Avataric Master began with the Initiation (or Yogic Establishment) of My Divine Avataric Self- “Emergence”, on January 11, 1986. My Fullest (now, and forever hereafter) Avataric Performance of the Divine Ashvamedha began with That Great Event.
A little history
The following was on the inside cover of the first Dawn Horse Magazine, Vol. 1, Number 1, May 1974.
THE DAWN HORSE
The name of this magazine, like The Dawn Horse Communion itself, refers to a visionary symbol which appeared to Bubba as he wandered consciously during sleep in the spring of 1970, not long before the events in the Vedanta Temple.
He appeared in the Ashram of a Siddha who was proficient in the siddhi, or yogic power, of spontaneously manifesting objects. Only men were present; they were the disciples of this Siddha, learning to develop this same power themselves. The Siddha was seated in a large throne-like chair, and his disciples were standing before him in rows, in two large groups so that there was a pathway leading out in front of his chair. Bubba was standing among these men.
The Siddha began to initiate the process of manifestation. Everyone sat quietly for a time, and then the disciples started to get up and leave the room. They were all satisfied; it had been done. But nothing had appeared. They wandered away and the Siddha remained sitting quietly in his chair. Bubba stayed where he was, and suddenly a horse began to appear. At first it was vaporous and indistinct, but gradually it solidified and became crisply defined. The horse was perfectly formed, much like a thoroughbred, but very small, perhaps three feet high. It was alive, but it stood without moving.
Bubba remembers bringing this “dream” into his conscious mind as he woke up.
There was something about it that was hidden, so it remained with him as a symbol. After his realization in the Vedanta Temple and the development of his function as Guru over the next few months, it became clear to him exactly what had occurred. He was no longer there to recall it from the mind’s point of view; he could reconnect directly with the situation itself. He could see that this wasn’t just a siddha practicing the yogic siddhi of manifesting something from nothing. This was the Very Divine, the Maha-Siddha, shown in a visionary form revealing the nature of the creation of the manifest world, the nature of His relationship to it, and the nature of the world itself. This world appears to be very solid, like the horse, but it’s a spontaneous creation, subject to the conscious process. At every moment, the visible worlds are utterly dependent upon the Divine, who is the present and continuing creator, not the one who made everything long ago in some unique and magnificent power.
As an archetype of the relationship between this world and the Divine, this dream implies something about the way life should be lived once this relationship is known or can be intuited. In Satsang the Guru demonstrates this to the intuition, and restores the awareness of devotees to clear understanding of their present dependence upon God. The disciples in Bubba’s dream were intuiting this Real Process rather than involving themselves with the evidence of it. They knew that the manifestation had been accomplished without having to wait and see the horse itself appear.
The creation of the horse is also a symbol for Bubba’s creative work in the world. The Divine is spontaneously manifesting this community and its development over time like anything else that can be seen. Soon after Bubba opened the Ashram he named it “Shree Hridayam” which refers to the Sanskrit name for the Heart, “that into which all things return in the end.” Bubba encountered (watching a science-fiction movie) the scientific name for the first known ancestor of today’s horse, “Iohippus,” Greek for “dawn horse,” and he liked that as a name for the horse he had seen. Thus, when he decided not to associate his work with Indian or other traditions, he changed its name to “The Dawn Horse Communion.”
As it appears on the cover of this magazine, the logo of The Dawn Horse Communion is a symbol for the nature of life and consciousness and their immediate dependence upon the Divine, the Heart. At the bottom of the logo is a small circle crossed by two lines. This is a sign for the earth, the solid element, and the horse’s feet are there. Above that, wavy lines symbolize water and the watery levels of being; the lower body of the horse passes through this. At the center of the large outer circle is a smaller one representing the sun. The heart of the horse, if shown, would be at the center of this circle. The sun represents the fiery element. The horse’s heart symbolizes the Very Heart, God. The horse’s upper body passes through the air, which also symbolizes its element. In the logo, the rays of the sun are represented here. The horse’s head rests in another small circle, the moon. The moon represents the mind, including the high or illumined states of consciousness. All of these are a reflection of the Heart, just as the moon only reflects the light of the sun. The curve of the horse’s neck represents the S-curve of the Amrita Nadi, the open channel of light between the Heart and the point at the top of the head at which the Divine Light is intuited.
1975
American-Born Guru, Bubba Free John, Retires
by Jack Garvy
Part 1
Three days after the full moon in May, while I was visiting his ashram, then called “Persimmon,” Bubba Free John returned unexpectedly from an extended trip to Hawaii. Word of this event had spread through the ashram in midafternoon, but his plane wasn’t due in San Francisco till 9:10, and the ashram was a three-hour drive north from there, so I had gone to bed.
It was a little after midnight when shouts, laughter, and the Persimmon bell awakened me. I hurried into clothes and across the grounds to where a crowd of about two hundred devotees was gathered at the entranceway to Bubba’s private residence on the land. He was due any moment.
Suddenly lights turned in at the main gate. In that moment, no matter how preposterous my mind might consider this phenomenon, I was swept away in the excitement. Although paradoxical and implausible, it was nevertheless a certainty that eveyone around me believed that a perfect incarnation of God, the Very Divine, was traversing these last few hundred feet, to pass within our reach.
The crowd broke and formed two lines through which Bubba’s white Mercedes slowly rolled. However, I didn’t peek inside for my first glimpse of the guru. Instead, my eyes were fixed on the face of a student opposite me, Peter Roberts, known in the ashram as “Godfree.” A handsome, sophisticated, and articulate Australi an, he had been quite close to Bubba for years, having served as his cook and driver. As the car’s headlights passed him by, Peter’s face was radiant with unself-consciousness.
No matter how preposterous my mind might consider this phenomenon, I was swept away in the excitement. Although paradoxical and implausible, it was nevertheless a certainty that everyone around me believed that a perfect incarnation of God, the Very Divine, was traversing these last few hundred feet, to pass within our reach.
The Dawn Horse Testament of the Ruchira
Avatar
(2004)
The final edition of this “Root-Text” of Avatar Adi Da is still forthcoming.
Four volumes of recitation-length extracts from the final edition, titled
“Listen to My Testament of Divine Secrets”, are available for sale at
the Dawn Horse Press website: