The Obligation of Eternal
Existence
The Law of Evolution
February 12, 1978
Bubba Free John (Adi Da Samraj)
(see full talk)
Bubba Free John (Adi Da Samraj): Human beings suffer this life of changes which is obviously mortal. Everything changes, everything disappears. So everyone acquires a desire to find something that doesn’t change, and that does not disappear. Everyone wants some state of other that will relieve them of the burden of all of this change and disappearance, this mortality and all the troubles in the meantime. But as I said paradoxically, they are moved to find changeless happiness.
On the other hand, they also like all of these things that exist at this moment and that ultimately change and disappear. So they have to great desires. One is to find an absolute, changeless permanent happiness. And the other is to find pleasure, happiness in all the things that change. And as a result, a curious technique has arisen which combines both of these desires. It’s the technique of trying to find what is absolute, changeless, perfect happiness through and in the form of all the things that change and disappear (laughter).
This is exactly what you do, you see. You’re all probably able to identify with this technique in terms of your ordinary daily life and the gross human affair. And mainly because you don’t have much experience in the subtle mystical, magical realm of things you imagine, based on hearing rumors, reports of others that even though it seems pretty certain that you can’t find ultimate absolute changeless happiness in the world, but maybe. It’s not absolutely certain that this isn’t possible.
Even though that might be so you’re certainly going to be able to find it if you turn within and go up and become involved in spiritual reality, spiritual phenomena, subtle, psychic things that are not bodily, not gross not subject to mortality. This is also a presumption that you must be familiar with. It’s at least one of the principal motivations in your case, most likely, to take up a spiritual way of life. And without clearly understanding perhaps this Teaching, my communication you may think that you will satisfy this strategy in my Company, that that’s what this Way of life is about. But it is not.
What we may find within by inverting attention is not more absolute, changeless and immortal than anything we may find without by extroverting our attention. It is all changing, not only is it all changing, what we find by turning within is not something without, something in the infinity of the universes. It’s our brain. The ancient technique of inverting attention to get away from the gross phenomena is imagined to be a way of association with something supercosmic beyond one’s body. But in fact, it is a way of associating with one’s own mind, principally one’s own brain, one’s own nervous system. Automaticities that are in other parts of the brain than the parts we’re usually familiar with the language part of the brain, sensory part of the brain and so forth. So in our religious persuasion, our spiritual persuasion, when we’re yogic and mystics, we put our attention in one or another function of the familiar body-mind. It might be the breath, the life current, certain kinds of thoughts, speech itself, visions perhaps, hearing, tasting, smelling, archetypes, cultic objects, mystical words, whatever. We put our attention on one or another of these things which lead us to concentrate on one functional part of the body. And by concentrating on that functional process of the body-being to the point of absorption, we follow the lines of the nervous system back to the brain. We start having relatively involuntary experiences arise, shakings of the body, dreamlike phenomena, involuntary emissions of the brain, you see, flashes of light, sounds, you see a whole bunch of that stuff for a while and when all that goes away and we become stupefied. For instance, if you focus on the process of sight, you will be lead through the structures of the brain to the terminal of the upper rear of the head of the brain terminal from which sight originates, and at that point, you’ll stop seeing anything. You basically will have also withdrawn attention from the currents of the body, and you will be basically aware of nothing whatsoever and yet somehow conscious because you’re still embodied, still alive and without objects. You will feel all the great unity “This is God.” And people for thousands of years have been doing just this. This is what the yogis do. When you finally are successful at doing this spiritual thing what you are motivated to do, this is what happens. It is called Nirvakalpa Samadhi.
On the way, when you have sort of trance absorptions and spurious emissions of the brain; flashes, images and so forth, this is called Savakalpa Samadhi. Samadhi with form. Nirvakalpa samadhi is without form. So, you see what it turns out to be the case is that you can’t escape this body-mind by inverting attention. It’s the ancient dogma though that you can, and it’s fitted to the naive presumption that’s stated in the ancient formula: “as above, so below; as below so above.” So, it’s presumed that if you can enter into subtle awareness, subtler awareness of your own of your own body, that these correspond to the subtle dimensions of the cosmos. It’s a purely naive presumption.
It’s magical presumption. It’s not true in experience.
Fundamentally, what we experience by inverting ourselves upon
the nervous system are all the potentials of our own
body-mind that belongs to the nervous system and the brain.
Yes, we do see something about the subtler physics of
things but we don’t see anything other than ourselves
fundamentally. There is no escape there. It is just as
fruitless a technique for finding what is absolute,
unqualified, perfect, and unchanging as the extroverted
tendencies, interests, and desiring and so forth of daily
life that ordinary people are involved in.
There is an ultimately nihilistic tendency or result in
this process of inversion. In the process of
extroversion there’s a kind of ultimately eternalistic
search. The extroverted being exploits all of the patterns
of the gross realm and wants the things that are desirable
to be attained and wants them to stay forever, wants to be
fulfilled on the basis of functions themselves, wants
functional fulfillment to be absolute fulfillment’s, wants
to create utopia, immortality, unchanging relationships.
But you see the world never does come to an end it never
does stop changing. Never. So the urge to find what is
changeless in the form of this endless changing pattern that
is arising within and without is frustrated, and this is the
spiritual discovery. This is the moment of awakening, this
discovery. This is the way into Sahaj Samadhi and the Way of
Truth. Until there is the realization that happiness, Truth,
God, Reality, eternal blissfulness cannot be found on the
basis of the exploitation of any kind of experience,
internal and inverted, external and extroverted. When there
is that discovery then we are in the true double-bind of
existence. Neither within nor without is hopeful, promising,
ultimately liberating. All of our problems come to an end.
It’s not life within is toward God and without toward the
Devil. It is all the same. It’s all ultimately frustration
of the will and need to exist fully and blissfully as
happiness.
So, paradoxically in the moment of perfect frustration of
the search for happiness, perfect frustration that there is
awakening to the principle that is happiness. It
corresponds to understanding that neither the inversion
nor extroversion of attention, neither internal nor external
experience, ever realized what is transcendental, happiness,
perfect, enjoyment. They are only temporary modifications,
permutations of one’s own mortal psycho-physical condition.
So, the Way becomes not the satisfaction of internal or
external desires, not the fulfillment of this structure,
high and low, but the sacrifice of all of it. The Way of
Truth is not the exploitation of the internal life nor the
exploitation of the external life but the sacrifice or
surrender, perfect sacrifice or surrender of one’s
independent body-mind.
The internal exploitation of life is a gesture toward
everything that we consider to be mind leading toward the
annihilation of ordinary awareness. And the external
exploitation, the extroverted exploitation of experience is
in the direction of everything we call the ‘body’ and its
pattern of relations. It’s a gesture toward eternal changes,
existence as something changing, perfect eternal body,
eternal world, eternal relationships, and of course it is
frustrated.
The Way of Truth is the sacrifice of body-mind, the
sacrifice of this entire independent illusion that we’re
struggling to glamorize and make survive. But is is a unique
process, not like the strategic inversion or the strategic
extroversion. It’s not self-manipulative. it is in fact the
sacrifice of self, the whole body-mind.
There are two stages in this affair. These two stages
essentially describe the whole process of this radical Way
of Ignorance. The first stage which comes through the
process of the disciplines and so forth, through practice,
is the simple direct realization that “I” is not within. “I”
is not some subtler or eternal soul-like part. “I” is not
mind over against body. “I” is simply the body-mind as a
whole. The whole thing, a single presentation of
existence.
The second is stage is yielding, the sacrifice of that
whole body-mind or “I” into its Condition. The Radiance, the
unqualified Ignorance that is intuited to be the Condition
of one’s self, of one’s entire body-mind, and all
conditions. This second aspect of the process is developed
in more and more profound ways through the stages of
practice and through the stages of ultimate human structural
development which appear in these stages of practice. In its
origin it’s through the hearing of this argument one engages
in the process of sacrifice through love in one’s ordinary
relationships. It’s not a matter of meditation esoteric
inwardness and so forth, but of a moral transformation of
life and a presumption of responsibility for one’s ordinary
functional life. That is not the end of it, of course, nor is it the beginnings of the practice; nor could we describe the
practice to be an eternal social work, eternal
household politics. It’s the ordinary level of its origins
that’s all. Ultimately this sacrifice is made in the form of
perfect Radical Intuition of the condition of everything in
every moment.
So, there is a progress, functional progress in this
sacrifice of the whole body “I”, the body-mind through the
stages which is more and more esoteric which includes more
and more of the subtler aspects of the body-mind over time.
This sacrifice is not a kind of suicide you see. Suicide is
a gesture made at one’s self. There is no self-destructive
motive in this sacrifice. It is the yielding of the self
through love, through functional participation, relaxation of the knot, the contraction of consciousness.
In the Way of
Radical Intuition in the seventh stage of life in Sahaj
Samadhi, this radical perfect intuition is a process in
which even the cells are liberated into their Condition,
their prior Condition, even the cells of the brain, even
this nervous system, even this flesh body, even the whole
world all its relations, even this fleshy body, even the
whole world, all its relations. It is all relieved of its
solidity. It has become transparent and ultimately
dissolves. This occurs not by the internal or external exploitation
of this body-mind but by the sacrifice of the whole affair
of this body-mind through perfect intuition, communion,
sacrifice in the truest and ultimately most perfectly
esoteric sense. We are literally translated into the bliss
or radiance which is Eternal and which pervades all
existence.
That Reality is not at the root of the nervous
system nor at the end of the world in time. It is Present.
When we realize it we vanish. We are dissolved in it. You
become what you meditate on. As long as you persist in the
meditation of your parts, you continue to appear in that
form. When the gesture of existence becomes this sacrifice,
the intuitive sacrifice or yielding of all of these
conditions and you are glorified, transformed. In this Way or Process all of the functions of the
body-mind become ordinary. They no longer have the burden of
infinity placed on them. One can live an ordinary life
without inherent frustration, recoil. One can engage with
humor in the play of human relationships.
You can continue to live an
ordinary life but one must transform it, make it an
expression of this sacrifice, an expression of the Law
rather than an expression of the need to be fulfilled in the
perfect Presence by something that is limited, changing,
ultimately frustrating. We then enter as sacrifice into our ordinary human
relations and this is the higher form of asceticism, the
true form of it.
This process of the Way of Divine Ignorance
depends on real understanding, literal adaptation in the
case of each of you. So, you must enter into the structural
development of your entire human capacity. So, there are
moments in the process in which you are turned upon the
traditional objects, yogic objects, the internal, the
subtler objects and so forth in order to learn the sacrifice
there. These things are not made an end in themselves. They
are a moment in the lesson whereby we come to make this
sacrifice perfectly.
The only trouble with all of this is that I really do not
think you’re interested in it. I don’t think you’re
interested in it, but the kind of interest I’m talking about
is the kind of interest that makes you do it. This is my
frustration. Because I am prepared to enter into
relationship with you exactly as I have described it to you.
And the process is exactly as I’ve described it to you. And
there is spiritual power in this Company, this relationship
that can quicken it, make it realizable in this
lifetime.
But you bring so many liabilities, so much disinclination
toward it, so much to go within and so forth, which you’re
not even willing fully to perform. So much of it also, so
much of the reason for people being here is based on a
temporary frustration, a temporary disinclination toward the
things of their ordinary, life. But as the discipline goes
on and they realize that it’s still the same demand they all
of a sudden say, “oh it wasn’t so bad, you know.” And they
find some way within this discipline here, within this
community to devotees to live the usual life, or they leave
it and go live the usual life.
Day after day it’s like arguing with people who do not
have any interest in doing this, even though people are here
ostensibly to do it. Then the way it turns out is that
fundamentally I don’t have anybody to live the process with.
I have people willing to have me discuss it with them, and
there are people who are willing to entertain certain
common, garden variety aspects of this Way of Life, at least
for periods of time, but this great affair that I’m
describing, you see, is absolutely uncommon, just hardly
happened to anyone. Happened in the case of anyone. Hardly
ever in the whole history of the world.
What I’m describing to you all is a process that belongs
to the further evolution of humanity. At best it belongs to
thousands, millions, billions of years in the future for the
race. This is why is is frustrating. I’ve realized why it is
frustrating to me because I’m talking to people who are in a
moment in the evolution of existence that has nothing
whatever to do with the ultimate Truth of existence, that’s
only in the, infancy, still in the slime, still dependent,
still wanting consolations in the realm of changes, still
violent, still self-possessed. So, don’t imagine for a moment
that it is an easy matter, that you can just listen to this
and you’re in Sahaj Samadhi. It is the work of evolution
itself, the work of the universe itself, it’s the
obligation, the law of eternal existence that we are
considering and that our relationship generates and
regenerates. You cannot do it casually. You can’t respond
casually. You can’t be committed casually to your ordinary
destiny. You must become changed.
Part II
Your growth toward even ordinary preparation to begin
this path is very slow, and it seems like some are getting
closer to it, because according to the progression of
courses, some people are, taking the sexuality course, you
see. But the sexuality course is …like how many strokes
can you put on a ruler between one inch and two inches?
Infinity! The course, or any progression, can take
you from here to there to the end of time. It’s not really
like you’re getting closer it just seems that way. In the
real dimension in which I am testing you and preparing you
is not about all of this glory. It’s about money, food and
sex. It’s about a flesh body, and it’s eating, and it’s
sulk, and it’s sexual need to enjoy the nervous system spasm
regularly and all of that, in which you are not even full of
will and intelligence.
You are not able to see what’s
happening, make a judgment and change. You’re just entering
into that possibility, the third stage of life. My task is
to stay here with you and persist in making the absolute
demand, while at the same time serving you at this level of your response, which is subhuman and only
approaching the ordinary human level. You must be able to
observe and inspect your practice, and transform it, or the
actual spiritual process that I’m describing will never be
something that you truly begin.
I feel sometimes like a man who’s come here in a
spaceship through time, from the end of the universe, to
people who are near the beginning of it. It’s frustrating
adventure, kind of amusing to. And it’s difficult to survive
the frustration. My inclination very often is to get back in
my ship and get the hell out of here. And there are times
when I do this to some relative degree by becoming secluded
for a time.
There have been individuals who have served the spiritual
way in some form or other in human time in the past, who
have become to frustrated they quit. In other words they
stopped struggling to regenerate or quicken the evolutionary
impulse in people. They stopped working for people and went
into seclusion or disappeared.
The last bit of karma
is to teach. It’s the last bit of hopefulness before
dissolution. The realization that inversion and extroversion
are equally fruitless attempts at happiness, because in both
cases there is simply the exploitation of what changes and
what disappears. But all of it amounts only to
contraction, avoidance, separation, and self-possession.
It’s only the realization of that frustration that
will awaken you. It is not awakening to some permanent end
phenomenon of the psyche, its awakening to the process of
sacrifice.
The relationship between you and I you see
is a kind of warfare, between our independent frustrations.
If you will not awaken through this insight, then I am
prevented from engaging the process in you. If you will
awaken through this insight, then the process is alive in
our relationship, and there is a connection that can come to
life that is the medium of your transformation in this
company. This is an absolutely extraordinary and profound and
uncommon matter, this whole affair, and you’re not
inherently interested in it. You can’t be casual or naive in
your involvement with it.
You’ll be associated with this way
only through this insight, this frustration that awakens the
body mind through its singleness, its incarnation, in which
it may sacrifice itself through love, and through
transcendental insight into infinity, the condition intuited
to be one’s condition altogether, which is Ignorance, which
is Radiance, which is Unqualified, which is not nameable,
and which is not existing as some independent reality that
we may contemplate within or without. It is Realizable only
in the Paradox of our Existence.
We don’t meet it at last, we are dissolved in it, as
it. That is Bhava Samadhi, and it is a different kind of
destiny altogether than we can consider in our present form.
Does anybody have, any questions about this?
Part III
Because of your
social, cultural stage of adaptation, you tend to be fixed
in the verbal part of the brain. You don’t just have to be a
solid type to have this be true of you. The locus of
intelligence, not just what you do altogether, but your
intelligence is essential a verbal intelligence. It’s about
concepts we are all sharing in this
moment. Because of this, you tend to relate to the teaching
in verbal form, and you consider it to the point of getting
a verbal insight, and then that’s it. Then you go around the
rest of the day, having this verbal insight.
It’s kind of
s nice thing to have, and it makes you feel little better
and so forth. And you act basically like you’ve always
tended to act. It doesn’t become an instrument for the
communication to the whole body through all the other parts
of the brain and the nervous system, to all the other
functions of the body of a new kind of orientation.
You see, this must become the structure of practice. Yes,
there is a kind of listening, kind of verbal attention, kind
of understanding that must arise but it’s not an end in
itself. It will only tend to become that because of your
social habit. The intelligence, the insight that awakens
through listening to the teaching, through reading it,
through engaging in study groups and so forth must be
immediately brought to functions, to all the functions of
this body mind.
You must change your act in every moment of
hearing. This is the most difficult thing. This is the next
moment of your evolution. You’re not comfortable with it
altogether you see. It require’s certain discipline to take
verbal understanding and make moral physical changes in your
way of relating to others, your disposition in the world
altogether, your energization of human possibility. So, it’s
in this cross over that the fundamental difficulty of this
discipline arises. Bringing it from verbal understanding to
action, from inwardness to incarnation, to incident.
Understand this and don’t forget it. Beause whenever you consider the teaching your
obligation is to change your act. Never forget that’s what you’re supposed to do, never forget to do
it. Otherwise you will not make this understanding a principle for adaptation, for change, for transformation,
and for continued growth.
Now your growth is arrested at the level of the lower
functions of life. You tend to meditate on them,
falling back on them, constantly be in trouble with them. You find them
sufficient. There are all kinds of other
structures in this body mind that you’re not awakened to
yet, you haven’t grown into yet. You frustrate that growth
through certain kind of fixed ritualistic behaviors, and
states of mind.
You will only continue to grow if
you change your act on the basis of this understanding.
And if you will change your act in the very basic ways, at
the level of the lower life, then you will begin to awaken
to the dimension of the whole body being itself, which is
not localized in some brain center, It’s the
heart, not simply some organ or place in the body. The heart
is simply a symbol for the whole body, the quality, the
intelligence of the whole body.
If you will listen with the verbal mind, and change your
act on the basis of insight, you will go through these
original preparations, after which you’ll come to me for
this spiritual process. When you come to sit
with me, to live this way of life, this mutual commitment,
you won’t be localized in the verbal mind anymore. Yes, you
will think, you see. The verbal mind will still be there to
be addressed. It will have its function. But fundamentally
you present yourself whole bodily, with feeling, as a
sacrifice, as love; prior to thinking and activities of all
kinds. You see, it’s in that whole body mood, or gesture
that you are a sacrifice, then and only then.
It’s only when
you are a sacrifice then I can meet you and be of use to you
in the Spiritual sense. Then our relationship becomes
Spiritual,. Until then, my service to you is
basically at the level of the verbal mind, and the functions
below the heart, the vital life, endless discussions of
sexuality, emotion, diet, work, and ordinary daily
activities, and household politics; in addition to verbal
argumentation. You must make use of the considerations at
this stage and change your act literally, and move into this
whole body disposition, this. free loving, sacrificial
disposition. The spiritual process must begin, which
is a matter of Communion between us, whole bodily, at a
level that transcends specific functions, orientations. That is the principle of sacrifice, the principle of
Communion.
That is the instrument of your transformation in my
company. Everything else that may we consider, or become
associated with, or acquire in my company belongs to the
lower ordinary level of thing,, not to spiritual life. It’s
at best an instrument to move you in your feeling and your
understanding towards spiritual life.
My
involvement with people for years is has not been
spiritual in the truest sense you see. It’s simply a goad to
the spiritual. It’s all been a play between us to move you
toward this relationship in its true form. But your learning
belongs to the lower evolutionary stages, and not to the
spiritual principle, not stately, not simply and not truly. Basically my work now is to bring
people through the first three stages of life, when they can
be responsible, intelligently responsible for the lower
functions of life, and be moved beyond the verbal mind and
ordinary subjectivism to the psychic or whole body position.
When we meet in the Communion Hall, that’s when our
spiritual relationship begins. Once that begins, then there
is a whole other dimension of growth that appears,
structural responsibilities and so forth. And it leads us to
certain yogic experience and so forth, passing along the
lines of the nervous system as always, you see, to the brain
centers, all that stuff, you see. Then after all of that is
done, which will also take a long period of time, just like
everything we’ve already done and you are free of
all of that internal and psychic and higher spiritual
so-called stuff, as well as all of the dilemma of your
ordinary obsessiveness, outwardly, and you Rest in the
disposition of the Heart in the truest sense, then Real
Spiritual Life begins.
The way of Radical Intuition, the fourth stage of practice, the
seventh stage of life? I don’t know if I will have the
company of such devotees in this life time. I don’t know for
certain if there will be any sitting with me in the
Communion Hall truly. I hope there will be, and I hope there
will be some living with me in the ultimate or True Stage of
Spiritual life, who are conscious in this process wherein we
are translated, dissolved, which body and mind, the whole
affair is thrown to infinity and all ordinary destinies are
dissolved.