If You Can Come to this Realization, Then We Can Make Our Agreements.

Originally published in

THE WISDOM-TEACHING OF THE SPIRITUAL MASTER

The Domain of Love


a talk by Da Free John on June 29, 1983

 

The following is the middle portion of the talk.  To see the full talk scroll down the page.

We live together in this Domain of Love, which is the incarnate form of the Spiritual Principle. I live that Principle to you, and you should likewise live It to me and to one another. If you can come to this understanding, which is a very practical understanding and not a matter of think, think, think, think, think about your tendencies, then you will suddenly find that you do not have any damned problems and you do not have any damned tendencies. In that event your word means something. You can make agreements. You can live.

 

If you can come to this Realization of Spirit as Love, then we can make our agreements.”

 

Spiritual life is real in that case. But it is not real if you merely accept the Spiritual Principle, or accept me as an abstracted Spiritual Principle, and enter into yogic association with It or with me and fail to incarnate It specifically as love, humanly, emotionally, directly, through community, friendships, sexual intimacy, every feature of your human existence. If you can come to this Realization of Spirit as Love, then we can make our agreements.

 

This Realization is the basis of our community”

 

This Realization is the basis of our community, the basis of our friendships and our sexual commitments. If we incarnate this Spiritual Principle, then our discussion can come to an end. We know what to do to organize our lives together and we know how to live in our intimacies. The formalities that we introduce in that case relative to how we live and communicate should be very easy to implement every day. They are expressions of our freedom in this

Spiritual Principle and our incarnation of love. They simply express It.

 

Freedom is love founded in Spiritual Awakening. No other kind of freedom exists”

 

Such cultural formalities are simply the natural order of the Free disposition. To live in that natural order is freedom, you see. Freedom is not the license to do anything you want without impediment. Freedom is love founded in Spiritual Awakening. No other kind of freedom exists, because there is no such thing as individual motion without limit. That idea is merely a notion that exists in the world of egos trying to accomplish all kinds of political, social, cultural, and personal ends that are consonant with this false view of freedom as personal license.

True freedom is a Spiritual matter and is literally the incarnation of love, the communication of it, and the acceptance of it. It is the capacity to live in the Domain of Love, in a world that is about love, in relationships that are about love. If you are about spirituality and are not about love, then you have your head up your ass. To live without love has nothing whatever to do with spiritual life.

 

I have known many people involved in spiritual life who could not grasp this principle of love. They could not incarnate it…but they could be very spiritual.”

 

I have known many people who were very spiritual, so-called, and who did not know a damn thing about love, had no interest in it, had no capacity for it. They could shine out a little love selectively here and there, but anyone is able to do that. Any libertine does that. I have known many people involved in spiritual life who could not grasp this principle of love. They could not incarnate it, could not live with it, could not make humanity out of it, could not make human life out of it—but they could be very spiritual. Some of these people want to be celibates or to wear all the trappings of being spiritual or religious, but they cannot love. There they stand in their ridiculous costumes, their eyes rolling up in their heads, swooning in the yogic perfume, and they are nothing but self-possessed egos. They cannot love. They cannot submit to love. They cannot accept being loved, and they cannot love others consistently. They cannot bring spirituality into life, into relationship. Therefore, they are dramatizing the same problems that all egos suffer and at the same time they are calling themselves spiritual.

 

There is no spirituality without incarnate love worked out in very practical terms”

 

I have considered this with you on many, many occasions. There is no spirituality without incarnate love worked out in very practical terms. It is a creative, lifelong process, then, to allow the implications of the Force of Existence to develop altogether and to change human life. That is what I am trying to do here, you see, not merely to be some abstract spiritual machine. I will not submit to this model of the yogi who is outside the Domain of Love, who is merely interested in his own mystical state and his power over other people.

 

I oblige you all to demonstrate your hearing and seeing through love”

 

Therefore, I oblige you all to demonstrate your hearing and seeing through love, through relations. The test of spiritual life is in relationship because the failure of spiritual life is in relationship. The ego arises only in relationship, and the ego is the betrayal of relationship. As long as you cannot incarnate love, you are endlessly a betrayer of relations and relationship itself. You cannot incarnate love until you embrace the Spiritual Reality.

To be Enlightened does not necessarily mean that you have dealt with the betrayal of love completely. You certainly must have examined it and become responsible for it sufficient to release energy and attention for Awakening. Once you have Awakened, the whole process of the seventh stage of life lies before you, and it is fundamentally the Transformation of existence through the incarnation of the Spiritual Force, or Love, allowing It to Transfigure and Transform existence to the point of Outshining it. There is nothing cool about this process. It is love to Infinity, in which everything is Transfigured and Transformed by love.

That process is my whole life. When this free Force of Being, which is Love, is magnified perfectly, then everything is Outshined. Until then, you have a lot of work to do. That work does not come to an end until everything dissolves in Love, in the Force of Being. There is no end to it.


 

The Full Talk

 

THE WISDOM-TEACHING OF THE SPIRITUAL MASTER

The Domain of Love
a talk by Da Free John June 29, 1983

 

It is the feeling of The Free Renunciate Order that the following talk, given on Nukambati Island, Fiji, best summarizes our life and consideration with Master Da in Hermitage. Our intention in publishing it is to honor the Feast of the Master’s Name and to remind devotees around the world of the Supremacy, Wisdom, and Love expressed in the miraculous Appearance of the Divine Reality in human form.

MASTER DA: The essence of amorality is the systematic elimination of the dimension of love, the systematic elimination of its acceptance and its communication, the elimination of your own love in relationship, and the refusal to accept the love of another. Because of their self-doubt, people do not believe they are loved. They are possessed by fear, and therefore they will not love. Out of this failure to love comes the usual life. Egos have trouble with love. If I were to summarize the problem of egoity altogether, I would say that it is the betrayal of love. The betrayal of love is egoity.

As you well know, I do not speak of the ego as an entity. It is an action or contraction that is universally effective in every dimension of life, but it is most directly, most fundamentally effective at the level of feeling, or emotion, or love. The ego is a problem about love. The ego cannot love. It cannot accept love and it cannot “do” love, cannot confess love, cannot be known to be in the world of love or allow itself to be known to exist in the world of sensation, action, desire, and pleasure.

The ego-transcending point of view actively acknowledges the principle of love. The individual who is either Enlightened or is functioning in an egotranscending fashion presumes himself or herself to live in a world of love. In the world of relations, that one is alive in the Domain of Love. Love is the principle of functioning. It is the principle of relationship. Love is what is to be realized and expressed. You must overcome all limits upon it. Spiritual life is many things, but at the level of human relations, its essence is love.

Recently I pointed out that devotees tend to make me into a nonentity. You dehumanize me for various reasons, one of which is that you have rather abstract notions about the state of the Spiritual Master. You tend to think that the Spiritual Master is somehow exclusively a transcendental state and that this human machine sits out here and helps people out and deals with their tendencies. But that is not the way it is. I personally, and anyone who functions as Spiritual Master, am not someone who does not love. How could it be imagined that that is so! Yet devotees act as if that were so. You talk as if the Spiritual Master were all love, but you make the Spiritual Master into a nonentity. You all treat me in a way that makes me nonexistent. You conceive of me in merely abstract terms rather than in the fullest possible terms. It is egos that have trouble with love and cannot love, while Spiritual Masters have no defenses against unlove and are completely involved in loving.

When you have no problem with loving and accepting love, when you are no longer suppressing your love, when you are no longer believing that you are not loved, when you are free to love and to be loved, then you do what I Demonstrate to you. You live the principle of love I communicate to you. In that case you do not casually abandon relationships. I enter fiercely into relationship with devotees, you see, on every level, to transform everything. My Work is always an expression of this love, this commitment. I live with it.

If devotees are to live with me, they must know that I love them. They must be absolutely certain of it. If I am to be effective as a Teacher, devotees must know that I love them. They must know it is true of me humanly. Spiritual Realization, Spiritual Adeptship, is a human demonstration. There is nothing about being a Spiritual Master that is not human. To be a Spiritual Master is profoundly human, the fullest Realization of being human. Spiritual Masters or Awakened beings, truly Free, exhibit the most human signs of love.

Why, therefore, should people think of me as someone who is not loving in the most human terms? Because I am Awake or Realized? To think of me as not human is an utterly false point of view that makes me into a nonentity and makes our relationship abstract.

You who are face-to-face with me here in Hermitage every day and devotees who live in our institutional community are engaged in practices that involve you in a daily life of Communion with the Spiritual Reality. Nevertheless, you still suffer from the egoic or neurotic failures of love. Even though you acknowledge the Spiritual Principle and indulge in spiritual exercises whereby you enjoy personal Communion with It, you have a problem with the incarnation of that Principle. And as long as you have a problem with the incarnation of It, you will have problems with sexual intimacy, problems with friendships, problems with community, and problems with living sanely and happily every day.

You have these problems primarily because you do not acknowledge the Spiritual Reality and submit yourself to It, and secondly because you do not incarnate It humanly, do not allow It to humanize you through love. But as soon as you Realize this Principle and are submitted to It, allow yourself to incarnate It and allow It to humanize you, your life gets straight. We must confess this Principle in order to bring this seemingly endless consideration of emotional conversion to an end. You must confess the Spiritual Truth you Realize in my Company and bring the incarnation of It to one another, as I also bring it to you.

Therefore, I am party to this human loving. You must not abstract me from that reality. You should rather observe that I fully incarnate love and that it is a major aspect of my Work with you. I am not some Divine Robot, merely here to suffer, endure, and talk about your tendencies, and manipulate you on the basis of decisions I may make about your demonstration of those tendencies. That is not at all the primary aspect of my work with you.

We live together in this Domain of Love, which is the incarnate form of the Spiritual Principle. I live that Principle to you, and you should likewise live It to me and to one another. If you can come to this understanding, which is a very practical understanding and not a matter of think, think, think, think, think about your tendencies, then you will suddenly find that you do not have any damned problems and you do not have any damned tendencies. In that event your word means something. You can make agreements. You can live.

Spiritual life is real in that case. But it is not real if you merely accept the Spiritual Principle, or accept me as an abstracted Spiritual Principle, and enter into yogic association with It or with me and fail to incarnate It specifically as love, humanly, emotionally, directly, through community, friendships, sexual intimacy, every feature of your human existence. If you can come to this Realization of Spirit as Love, then we can make our agreements.

This Realization is the basis of our community, the basis of our friendships and our sexual commitments. If we incarnate this Spiritual Principle, then our discussion can come to an end. We know what to do to organize our lives together and we know how to live in our intimacies. The formalities that we introduce in that case relative to how we live and communicate should be very easy to implement every day. They are expressions of our freedom in this

Spiritual Principle and our incarnation of love. They simply express It.

Such cultural formalities are simply the natural order of the Free disposition. To live in that natural order is freedom, you see. Freedom is not the license to do anything you want without impediment. Freedom is love founded in Spiritual Awakening. No other kind of freedom exists, because there is no such thing as individual motion without limit. That idea is merely a notion that exists in the world of egos trying to accomplish all kinds of political, social, cultural, and personal ends that are consonant with this false view of freedom as personal license.

True freedom is a Spiritual matter and is literally the incarnation of love, the communication of it and the acceptance of it. It is the capacity to live in the Domain of Love, in a world that is about love, in relationships that are about love. If you are about spirituality and are not about love, then you have your head up your ass. To live without love has nothing whatever to do with spiritual life.

I have known many people who were very spiritual, so-called, and who did not know a damn thing about love, had no interest in it, had no capacity for it. They could shine out a little love selectively here and there, but anyone is able to do that. Any libertine does that. I have known many people involved in spiritual life who could not grasp this principle of love. They could not incarnate it, could not live with it, could not make humanity out of it, could not make human life out of it—but they could be very spiritual. Some of these people want to be celibates or to wear all the trappings of being spiritual or religious, but they cannot love. There they stand in their ridiculous costumes, their eyes rolling up in their heads, swooning in the yogic perfume, and they are nothing but self-possessed egos. They cannot love. They cannot submit to love. They cannot accept being loved, and they cannot love others consistently. They cannot bring spirituality into life, into relationship. Therefore, they are dramatizing the same problems that all egos suffer and at the same time they are calling themselves spiritual.

I have considered this with you on many, many occasions. There is no spirituality without incarnate love worked out in very practical terms. It is a creative, lifelong process, then, to allow the implications of the Force of Existence to develop altogether and to change human life. That is what I am trying to do here, you see, not merely to be some abstract spiritual machine. I will not submit to this model of the yogi who is outside the Domain of Love, who is merely interested in his own mystical state and his power over other people.

Therefore, I oblige you all to demonstrate your hearing and seeing through love, through relations. The test of spiritual life is in relationship because the failure of spiritual life is in relationship. The ego arises only in relationship, and the ego is the betrayal of relationship. As long as you cannot incarnate love, you are endlessly a betrayer of relations and relationship itself. You cannot incarnate love until you embrace the Spiritual Reality.
To be Enlightened does not necessarily mean that you have dealt with the betrayal of love completely. You certainly must have examined it and become responsible for it sufficient to release energy and attention for Awakening. Once you have Awakened, the whole process of the seventh stage of life lies before you, and it is fundamentally the Transformation of existence through the incarnation of the Spiritual Force, or Love, allowing It to Transfigure and Transform existence to the point of Outshining it. There is nothing cool about this process. It is love to Infinity, in which everything is Transfigured and Transformed by love.

That process is my whole life. When this free Force of Being, which is Love, is magnified perfectly, then everything is Outshined. Until then, you have a lot of work to do. That work does not come to an end until everything dissolves in Love, in the Force of Being. There is no end to it.