The Paradox of Instruction – Da Free John – Chapter 5

IDENTIFICATION OF THE BELOVED IS THE PRINCIPLE OF SPIRITUAL LIFE

THE PRIMAL INCIDENT – THE HEART BEAT 

A TALK GIVEN BY BUBBA FREE JOHN TO A GATHERING OF DEVOTEES AT VISION MOUND SANCTUARY, APRIL 18, 1977

What is the root of our existence? What is the single incident that we must comprehend? There is one incident in which you are all completely involved at this moment. You are completely aware of it. You recoil from it and thereby create your whole life, your whole adventure, all of your subjectivity and the mood of your person. If you penetrated it, you would be free. What is it?

It is a present incident. It is happening at this moment and you are reacting to it. It is your reaction to it that binds you. What is the fundamental incident that binds all of us – not in the past, but at this very moment? What is happening that we are all believing? It is more primitive even than sensation. What is the last thing you would give up? Before there is a thought, what do you hold on to most dearly? Before you hear the inner sound, before you see a single vision, before you breathe the next breath, before you are born into this conception, what are you tuned to? When the mind is rested from action, when there is no thinking, when even the breathing is still, what is going on? If you stop thinking and acting and breathing, what is still going on? What is the last thing to go?

It is the beat of the heart. When the mind stops and action stops and breath comes to rest, the thing that defines you is the heartbeat. When you are at rest, still you feel the thundering in the chest. The primal incident is not any thought nor the sense of “me,” but it is the heartbeat. The heartbeat in the center of the body-being is the ultimate meditation. It is the single motivator of life. It is the principal illusion of all beings. All beings have in common this beat, or the feeling-intensity at the core of the being, which particularizes or gives “birth” to consciousness. Everything that lives, that is self-conscious, is meditating on the beat or intensity that is the heart. The heartbeat alone is responsible for the whole adventure and complication of existence.

Before there is a single action or a single desire, there is the beating of the heart. It is not conceptual – all concepts proceed from it. Nor do you create it. You do not beat the heart. Yet the heartbeat alone is responsible for your belief in your own existence. If it ceases, you have no such belief. It interrupts the unqualified force of prior consciousness. When you are moving into infinity, it presses on your consciousness, defining you. Everything is created in rhythm with that stroke, everything. Until you are no longer bound by the beating of the heart, you are structured in the egoic dream. You are interrupted in infinity by the beating of the heart, by birth itself.

The heartbeat is not conceptual, it is not subjective, it is not within. It is the armature of the body-being. You are willing to relax the anxiety of breathing, but you are not willing to be vacant of the heart. Everything, except the heartbeat, can come to rest and you still survive. The heartbeat is at the core of the breath. The breathing surrounds it. Thinking surrounds it, though the event itself is not thinkable. It is at the core of everything above and below. Everything above the heart, every thought or vision or contemplated wonder, is an expression of that foundation liveliness, that beating. Everything below it, every feeling and sensation, is an expression of it. The heartbeat is “me” and “that,” left and right, up and down, in and out. It is the whole conception of existence. Everything is implied by it.

Like the clock that creates time, the heartbeat creates the self. The heartbeat is the most primitive incident, the center of fear. It is a metronome in an empty room. All hearing and all perception are guided toward it. All your inwardness, all your thinking, and all your activity are simply a rhythmic expression of the beat of the heart, perhaps timed in different ways but always consonant with it. You are breathing in rhythm with it and then thinking. and acting, sexing and moving, energizing and feeling all in time with it. Your great fear is that it will cease, because when it ceases you are no longer different from anything. As long as you believe you are independent, a differentiated being, you are timed with the rhythm of the heart.

That rhythm is pronounced on the left, but is surges between the right and left. There is no actual rhythm on the right, but only a constant feeling-intensity, the root stroke of the beating heart, a constant sense of self-definition and self-absorbtion, contracted from infinity – but it is at last not different from the beat itself, the sounding of the birth moment. On the left there is pounding, interrupting. It surges from right to left and from left to right – from sleep to dreams to waking, and from waking to dreams and then to sleep.

In the moment when you feel the heartbeat, you do not think, you do not act, you do not breathe. You are -now and separately, vulnerably. It is the principal incident to which we are all attuned. We are all suffering it, we are all subject to it, and we are all waiting for it to cease. It arises prior to knowledge. Our very existence pulses in Mystery, subject to a prior design of which we are Ignorant and to which the will at last must bow with all the mind, emotion, and whole flesh.

The heartbeat is completely untrue. Our condition in Truth is previous to this stroke, previous to all the inwardness, all the activity that is built upon this rhythm, this interruption, this stimulation, this distraction. When the heartbeat ceases, we are returned to our prior disposition, but mere death is not sufficient for liberation into the Divine. Mere death just arrests the current of the ego, which is the beating of the heart. Liberation is freedom from that rhythm while alive, to be no longer interrupted, no longer identified with left and right, up and down, in and out, here and there, now and then. When consciousness ceases to be defined by the rhythms of the heart, it is immortal. Therefore, what makes the heart beat? Why do we fear its ending? Why do we promote the adventure of individual existence? Why do we doubt the Reality of the Divine, the unchanging, the Absolute?

We presume that if the heart ceases to beat, we cease to exist. The heartbeat is the ego. That is the illusion, not the thought “I am me,” not the thought “I am the body,” not any thought, but the heartbeat itself is the illusion. We witness it, we are confined to it, we are subject to it, we are disposed to a whole life until it ceases. Of all things, it is completely beyond control. Even the yogi’s mastery of heartbeat and body-sense remains bound to the very condition in feeling-conception that the heartbeat signals – the sense of independent consciousness and its experiential destiny. The heartbeat is the ego, the soul, the body, the mind. It is the most involuntary of all appearances. It is the recoil that thunders back from all appearance. There is no devotee who has not suffered this incident. It is the same as his or her own birth or life or death. Everything is the response to this rhythmic contraction or root feeling-intensity. Thus, everything is betrayal, a witness for the lie.

The heartbeat continues, prior to thinking and acting, feeling and living, vision and illumination, immortality and mortality. Whatever occurs in your comprehension, the beating of the heart is the single thing that defines you in that enjoyment. Liberation is the transcendence of that incident; thus, it is the same as death. In conventional, bodily death, however, we pass into unconsciousness, of self. The only recourse while alive is the most absolute, the most perfect, sacrifice, passing beyond thought in mood, in action, in feeling, in desire, into perfect surrender or Radiance. Nothing else characterizes the devotee.

You have responded to this drama, this rhythm, this sound, this signal. And so you feel yourself to be opposite, other, individuated, single, separate, trapped, in dilemma, obliged to make your way strategically, to define yourself, to assume your immunity, your salvation, your continuation, your survival. Your whole effort is regulated by this beat, which is beyond your comprehension. The great fear is that if it stops, you disappear. It defines you in otherness, in separation. When the mind comes to rest and actions come to rest and the breath becomes still, the heart shocks us with its rhythm, with its striking, its pulsation, defining the consciousness. The principal meditation is to be free of action, of liveliness, of intention, of thought, of vision, of comprehension, of knowledge, of reaction, of recoil, of separation, of incident, until you penetrate this motion that shocks us. The only salvation is in the penetration of that signal. Until then there is betrayal, separation, ego, mind, person, separate destiny, action, illusion, dreams, knowledge, fascinated meditation, sublimity, absorption, discrimination, consolation, good feeling, profundity, eagerness, fear, sorrow, anger, hatefulness, me, I, within.

In the Way I have described, there is, naturally, penetration of the subjective root. The illusion of a subject or ego somewhere “within” is something that must be re-cognized, known again. Now we identify with this illusion of an interior “I.” It must be penetrated, through insight. In the process there is an event even more direct, one that does not involve contemplation of subjective content, but that occurs after the subjective content is essentially quieted. In the final events of the Way of Re-cognition, there is this passage out of contemplation in the brain, the subtle contemplation above. The thread of active attention is followed back from the crown to the heart. That is the passage to Jnana Samadhi.

The samadhis associated with the crown of the being are subtle and depend on the ego-illusion. In such samadhis the independent self-illusion remains, the contemplator remains, not penetrated. All subtle realizations are soul-realizations, having to do with the survival of the subjective being independent of the gross form. But the ultimate realization goes beyond the subtle illusion to penetrate the self-root, the fundamental illusion itself. Although the illusion of “I” passes in this process, its passing is not the final moment. After all, the “I”-thought arises in the brain. It is part of the subtle mechanism. It is a thought, a literal thought, “I,” part of the lower mind.

But the contraction that is responsible for the “I”-thought and all other thoughts and feelings of independence is at the heart itself. It is not subjective or anything like an idea interior to the body. It is the body condition itself in its most fundamental form – it is the heartbeat. Thus, in the final stages of the Way of Re-cognition, after the passage beyond contemplation of subtle objects, the mind essentially comes to rest. There is essentially no thinking. The breath is very restful. Then only the heartbeat stands out. The final re-cognition occurs in contemplation of the heartbeat, not. of any subjective interior.

You must give up your life, the identification with this rhythm, this contraction, this recoil that defines you. And how do you give it up? It is impossible. It cannot be done by the one who would do it. No one can transcend the rhythmic contraction of the heart, which defines our consciousness, except by the most perfect and absolute sacrifice. The way to this perfect sacrifice is the practice I have described in this Teaching, by which, as a discipline, you move beyond the contracted disposition. You must move beyond fear and sorrow and anger into the disposition of love, of radiance, previous to any form of contraction or separation. You must presume the radiance of happiness as a discipline in spite of all subjective signs to, the contrary.

All the disciplines of this Way of Divine Ignorance are forms of radiance, of non-contraction and non separation, of love, of bringing un-contracted energy, rather than knowledge, desire, and self-possession, into the realms of experience. This is the principal discipline. It is service founded on true hearing of the Teaching, free of all concern for the continuation of inward inspection. In this liberation you pass beyond the great fear, beyond the beating of the heart which defines you, in which you are born in every moment. That passage is madness, healed and cooled only by motiveless or loving Communion with the Spiritual Master, which now in your knowledge you deny. Be wary of your own knowledge, your own good feeling, of all the things that make you feel better, or worse. They console you behind the pulsation of birth. The heartbeat is the ultimate vulnerability, the great fear. It defines all things apart from you. It defines you as nothing, apart from everything, the everything with which you struggle, mentally and emotionally and physically, in every moment, to find union.

The practice is exactly as it is described. Hear this communication, the fundamental argument, and live the disciplines in relations. Do not be separative, egoic, emotional, contractive, negative, angry, fearful, sorrowful, but be full of energy and enthusiasm in relations. This is the demand which always obliges the devotee and with which he is always at odds by tendency. You should look and feel and be and act completely happy under all conditions. Change your way of action and the subjective dimension itself will change naturally. The born condition precedes all subjectivity. You want to manipulate your subjectivity first – your feelings, your thinking, your conceptions, and your feeling-conceptions. You want to change them before you will change your way of life. You want to be free inside before you will love, before you act differently. You must act differently first, and not be concerned that the feeling and thinking aspect of the being remains full of tendencies. You must not be concerned about them. They are just the signs of the old way of living. You must act in love, in radiance, with energy, with life, in all your relations, in your disposition moment to moment, under all conditions. You will observe in the midst of such action that the subjective dimension is also gradually penetrated and transformed. Its negativity, its reactivity, becomes unnecessary and ultimately obsolete by virtue of your different action.

You either change your action or you do not. You must begin to do it. There is nothing more that can be said, nothing more convincing than that. You simply must begin to do it. As you begin to do it, the vulgar disposition of your internal life and your subjective tendencies will continue. You must not be concerned about it. Tendencies are only the signs of your old way of living. Let them pass. Live differently now. Love, serve with feeling. Put your attention on this argument, be transformed by the hearing, and act differently. The new subjectivity will follow. Subjective, internal changes, emotional and mental, will follow. Start to act differently. Stop presuming the separative position. Stop being angry and sorrowful and fearful in your relations and bring energy into them. Be happy in them. Be enthusiastic in them. Bring life to all beings. Bring life to the tree. Bring life to the doorknob and to me! And you will see your subjective life changing, over time. It may remain completely wretched for 25,000 births. Do not be concerned about it. Act differently on the basis of what you have heard. Then you will be communicative as a devotee.

Now you are waiting for your insides to change first. They are the last to change! Your action must change first. Then the inner being will reflect the new rather than the old adaptation. Having seen what you have seen and heard what you have heard, act differently. Kick everything else aside. Hear, love, serve, bring life – that is the discipline. The emotions and the mind will persist in their aggravation, their negativity, their self-possession, their sulking stupidity. Be indifferent to them on the basis of this hearing, and you will see the mind and the emotions change.

Subjectivity follows action. Your subjectivity having changed on the basis of action, you will begin to be attuned to the subtler dimension of the being. And you will hear and see, perhaps, all kinds of incredible things. I have seen all of it, every kind of vision and transport. It is all a hallucination, it is all ridiculous, it is nonsense, it is stupid and false. There is no vision that is true. It is all bondage. It is all something to console the separate one. Press through all of that in the Way of Re-cognition and you will become coincident with the whole body-being, no longer turning into your subjectivity. You will stand as the whole body, and suddenly the prior Condition of the body will become obvious. There is no independent consciousness. There is no separate being. There is no “me” within. There is no one to survive. There is the most absolute, unqualified, and unspeakable Reality, which is Bliss, Fullness, without description, without form, without argument, without a single symbol to win its victory over living beings. Only the devotee is sensitive to God. That is the whole communication that has been served in this Company.

You must begin to do something different. Now you are doing the same old thing in your rhythm, being an other within. You must do something different without, not concerned for what happens within, for desiring and thinking. Let it pass. Be different as the whole body. You are always certain, in this instant, what it is to be completely happy, to look and feel and be and act completely happy. It is always true of you natively. You can always return to this native sense. You could be and look and feel completely happy in this moment. But you do not. Why? Because of your sympathy with this born condition that is rhythmed to you moment to moment, this pulsation or feeling-conception in the chest. Pass beyond it through this whole practice and you will realize the Divine Condition. But not before.

The heartbeat draws you back into the round of birth and death. It is recoil. It does not permit you to be released to infinity. It draws you back. It defines you in time and space. It defines your existence. If it ceases, you cease to exist. All philosophy is founded on the beating of the heart; all mysticism, all life, all desire, and every single experiential presumption are founded on it. The penetration of the beating of the heart is the difference between “I,” which is the body as a whole, and the realization of the Condition of the body. When the heartbeat ceases to define consciousness, then there is the natural intuition of the Condition that precedes birth. The usual man is relieved of this constriction only at the point of death, and so he is released from the superficial organism. But that release is not sufficient for illumination. It is only sufficient for another birth. You must penetrate this rhythm while alive, while conscious, while in the ordinary disposition. You must penetrate the illusion of separation, and the heartbeat is the primal incident. The grosser incident of birth may have occurred so many years ago, but the incident that promotes the present illusion that is birth as the whole body is the heartbeat. Prior to it there is no definition of consciousness. There is no definition of bodily existence, of egoic existence, as a separate individual, independent of this beating, this rhythm, this shock. You exist in your consciousness only because of this sympathy, this rhythm that you perceive. All of your thinking and desiring extends from that.

How do you realize liberation from the born condition? Not by philosophy. You realize it through the instrumentality of a born being who nonetheless has penetrated the whole cycle. The Spiritual Master is the instrument of the liberation of living beings, not philosophy nor conception nor your own contemplation of the heartbeat. You become disposed to that contemplation in sympathy with the Spiritual Master, but only because the Spiritual Master exists prior to that contraction, that rhythm. Through hearing this argument you are disposed to act, not to internalize, but to act, without concern for your subjectivity. Subjectivity is only the sign of your old adaptation, whereas you have become disposed on the basis of this hearing to act differently, to love, to be radiant in relations rather than contracting in the forms of anger and sorrow and fear and thinking and all of the illusions of your own subjectivity. You must submit absolutely to the Spiritual Master. This principle is the core of all Teaching. Once you have heard the argument of the Spiritual Master, then you must enter into devotional and spiritual relations or Communion with the Spiritual Master. The primary function of the Spiritual Master is the spiritual service of devotees, those who have “heard” and changed their way of action. Such service is Divine. By that service, the Way is quickened and fulfilled by Grace of the Beloved, the Real beyond all birth of selves and knowledge of souls.

A SACRED RELATIONSHIP

A TALK GIVEN BY BUBBA FREE JOHN TO A GATHERING OF DEVOTEES IN HONOLULU, DECEMBER 8, 1976

There is virtually no limit to the delusions that human beings can presume on the basis of their tendencies, their desiring, their motivation, their reactions to experience. Because this is so, individuals eventually step out of the stream of conventional relations. In other words, they at some point cease to act or live on the basis of the ego-soul, the experiential self, and they establish instead a sacred relationship by which they are relieved of the implications of this birth. Our meeting with one another – each of you individually with me – is of this kind. It is not a conventional relationship which we are here merely to dramatize with one another, you with me or you with one another. We are here to be lifted out of that destiny. Therefore, your relationship with me must be of a sacred nature. It must involve an entirely different kind of discipline than the usual life presumes. Your relationship to me in itself implies a commitment to the essential Teaching or consideration which is part of my communication with you. Apart from this sacred process that our relationship implies, the only thing we can possibly realize in one another’s company is suffering and delusion, which as you see is what the usual man realizes.

In all my years of teaching work it has been a constant struggle to maintain this quality in our relationship. It is constantly my obligation to eliminate what stands in the way, what makes your approach to me a conventional one, what makes your response to me conventional, egoic, ordinary. And this is a great and very difficult task. It requires all of our lives entirely.

Part of the apparently conventional nature of our connection is the threat of separation and death. This body dies. That body dies. We can rejuvenate, feel better, live longer, but, even so, in this world everybody dies. That is why we do spiritual practice, because we are conscious of the destiny of separation. We are willing to fulfill the law of love, but on the other hand what we love dies. That is the paradox of this place, and that is what makes it a hell. That is why this is one of the realms of suffering. This world is not a heaven. This is not a place of fulfillment. Thus, we must yield to the true Condition. We must not become dependent upon the conventional aspect of our relations. We must recognize our relations. We must identify the Condition of the loved one. You must recognize or identify me in Truth. Our relationship must be a spiritual one. That does not mean that we will not see one another, or that we cannot have occasion to carry on human relations face to face. But the vital dependency and demand that is based on the fear of separation is something that must be undone through this matter of spiritual practice, through this intuitive recognition.

You must become established in the real Condition, or you will never be satisfied. You will be driven to all kinds of preoccupation’s and great schemes, trying to become victorious or immortal, for immortality’s own sake, simply because you cannot deal with the fact of death. But death is an absolute message in this realm. It obliges us to recognize or identify one another in Truth, and we are not relieved of that obligation in this place.

It is not a matter of seeing me face to face twenty-four hours a day. Nobody does that. You must truly live the spiritual Condition of our relationship. You must lead a spiritual life in the world. You must fall into this Condition that precedes all conditions. You must enjoy your relationship to me in the form of meditation, the form of that sacrifice, because no form of our conventional and ordinary relations, our ordinary contact, ultimately satisfies in itself. And if your approach to me is a conventional one, you will be making use only of the ordinary forms of our possible relationship, and all those forms pass. All those forms make you anxious. You must realize a form of relationship to me in Ignorance, in which you recognize or identify me in the form of the very Condition of this world, your own Condition, so that when we are face to face it is that intuitive identification that you are involved with, not all the kinds of worldly anxiety such as lovers might feel for one another in the face of death. They love one another and yet they are going to be separated. That is the conventional nature of relationship. The kinds of lovers that can be separated are just the image of suffering, the pair. Lovers must become a paradox, a single Condition, not a cult of two. Our relationship must become a paradox, a spiritual matter, in which we are all given up to the Condition that precedes all this madness.

This world literally is being dreamed at this moment. It has no force except insofar as we live by reaction, merely by experience, on the basis of what appears or comes across to us in the dream. We tend to make our philosophy, our way of living, out of the dream, out of the limitation that arises here, which we cannot account for. Our life must cease to take that form. You cannot make philosophy out of this world and succeed. You would just be crazy all your life, and you would die anyway. You cannot make your way of life out of this experience here as it appears, this dream. No, you must recognize it, truly identify it. You must be awake relative to this experience. You must enjoy the release that a person enjoys upon waking in the morning from his or her dreams the night before. You must identify the Truth of the dream, which is to re-cognize, to know again, intuitively to penetrate all the conventional forms of the dream, which in themselves are illusory, passing. That is what spiritual practice is all about. That is what the spiritual process is all about: being relieved, ultimately, of the force of this experience, this condition, this limitation, this dream here.

You are liberated from that in the process of our relationship, but only if you are related to me truly, sacredly, spiritually, only if your relationship to me is simply one of sacrifice, of natural orientation, not all the reactive things you get into on the basis of it in the conventional way. Then the play between us serves this intuitive recognition, this identification of the Condition of all conditions. But you must yield constantly, because as soon as you become involved in your ordinary life by reaction, you separate yourself and become involved again in the illusion of experience arising here.

It is a maddening experience, this place. It is attractive in all kinds of ways. Equal to the force of all its attractiveness is the force of all of the destruction of the Beloved. All the forms of the Beloved rot in this place. They come to an end, they are taken away. That is the truth about it, and there is no way around it. You must confront that. That is the way it is here. This is not heaven. This is not the world of the Beloved, of the loved one in any form you may recognize as the Loved One. This is a dream play on the Beloved, in which the Beloved appears in shapes and forms that are fleeting, that are binding in themselves. They attract you, and then they are withdrawn and leave you with only the craving. Left with the craving only, you are cycled back again and again into the same dimension as that experiencing reaction.

So you must recognize, truly identify, the Beloved appearing here in all this attraction, which means you must enter into a spiritual process in your living rather than the conventional attempts to survive, to win, to live forever. If you become truly committed to the spiritual process, in a relatively short time you literally pass out of the limitation in which you now conceive of this world. But you must utterly surrender. You must give up everything for that, for what you recognize, for that Truth, that Condition, the Condition of the very current of your own being. Give yourself up to it entirely. Allow it to create the event of the dream. The dream is its business. You will notice it stops playing the dream the way it seems to be playing it now. Now you are turned on to the Beloved as if to a whore, a fancy dancer. She has a little bit of extra seductiveness now. I was out here in the yard with some of you a few minutes ago, and we played this game of looking up in the night sky for something extraordinary. Some weird unidentified thing has got to be flying around in order to make us feel a little light, a little wonder. And yet you cannot account for any of it. The mere existence of any of it at all is sufficient mystery. All the rest of it is fancy dancing, a little twirler put on the end of her pasties. The woman herself, the universe itself, is sufficient mystery. We do not need all the extra attractions, and yet the woman herself, the lover himself, the universe itself as it appears here, is fancy dancing. It is unnecessary. It bewitches you, it beguiles you, it attracts you into a whole way of life, and yet it is fleeting, temporary, just a costume, a bit of business. It is not the Beloved herself, himself, itself. You must identify the Truth of what is attractive.

Thus, in your relationship to me, the matter of intuitive recognition must become the principle of our play. You must recognize me in the form of your Condition, the Condition of all this arising, the real Condition of it, the Condition of conditions, the Condition of the body, the mind, the self-sense, the very current of the being, and be rested in It constantly. When you do that, the Beloved takes off her garment. Her true Form, his true Form, the Beloved’s true Form begins to appear. That true Form is not transitory. But you must be adapted to the loving of the Beloved in eternal Form, because you do not have desires fitted to that Form at the present time. The desires you have are all products of adaptation to this limiting illusion of attractions. You are turned on by bangles and flesh. All this appearance is how you are attracted to the Beloved in this form here. Having recognized it, though, giving yourself up to the true Condition of this, your very Nature, then your desiring or the movement of the being itself becomes capable of enjoying the Beloved in eternal Form. Only in that case are you satisfied.

All else is suffering. There is no doubt about it. There is absolutely no ultimate relief in the dream. So our play with one another cannot be based simply on this conventional attraction. It cannot be limited, in other words, to the natural, human dimension of our intimacy with one another. It must be sacred. It must be a spiritual relationship. It must be founded in this Ignorance. You must recognize me in Truth. You must do this practice. You must enter into this real meditation and give up everything for the Beloved. In that case our ordinary human relations become pleasurable, because they are not necessary. We are not bound by them. We are constantly reached into the Condition of these conditions and so can love one another, play with one another in this dream circumstance without becoming bound, because we constantly recognize one another in Truth in this play. If we will intuitively recognize one another, we can be free of the conventional striving which is a reaction to the awful sense acquired while alive that separation or dissolution of our relationships is inevitable.

Our immortality is not conventional, earthly, elemental. It is a Divine matter, founded in this recognition. It is founded in sacrifice, not in any effort simply and exclusively to make this elemental body live forever. No such motivation would work. If we are fitted to this sacrifice absolutely, maybe the body’s life gets prolonged. All kinds of things may occur, but they are not our point of view. They are secondary to the essential fulfillment of the Law of Sacrifice.

So we do not only need to see one another, you and I. You also need to live your life on the basis of this relationship in which the true Condition is identified, in which you recognize these conditions and therefore rest in the true Condition. So you need to live an ordinary life. You need peace and quiet, a natural, human-size environment, with ordinary intimacies, a few people to see regularly. You need a place, an occasion, in which to meditate in private. All these things are your obligations if you are to fulfill the true Condition of our meeting. Since all of these things are required, we will certainly see one another, but we will also all live our privacy as well, because if we are not given up in private, our meeting has no opportunity to grow, to represent a new adaptation. You will simply be struggling and striving here anxiously, never really being released from the implications of this world.

Our destiny is not something that we can prefigure. Our obligation, though, is clear. The law in this moment is clear, the true form of our living is clear, and so we must fulfill it. Having fulfilled it perfectly, you will then see transformations of this ordinary living here that are more and more positive, but you will also see the real spiritual transformation, which fundamentally has no drama whatsoever connected with it. It is simply absolute release from the necessity of this appearance here and all the craving that we develop on the basis of it. In this release, the being rests in its true Condition, in which all kinds of other conditions appear, such as this world here. The gross form continues to appear. Subtle forms may appear.

And then perhaps such changes may cease to appear, and you rest in the Condition itself, the God-World, the Realm that is itself the Beloved. There is no speech to describe it. There is no vision of it. You must fulfill the Law, and that is all. Whatever the perfect Destiny is beyond the cessation of changes in these unnecessary realms, it is nothing of which any born being has knowledge. Such is not permitted. There is no vision, no doctrine, apart from the Law itself. You make this sacrifice, and then only the Truth or the Divine is your Destiny, whatever that altogether is. So all the anxiety built up on the basis of experience here must come to an end, and in our relations we must become natural, ordinarily loving. You cannot oblige any creature you love to live forever, because he or she simply cannot do it, and neither can you, as an act of will. Whenever we come together and say we love one another, we cannot promise to stay with one another. We can promise our life to one another and in that sense stay with one another, but we do not have in our will the capacity to stay with one another forever, because the body dies. This condition disappears. So you must die while living. You must be able to let go of this unnecessary realm and dwell in the God-Condition while alive. In that case you will be free of anxiety, you will have humor in relation to things here. You will be capable of loving in the natural fashion because you are not obliging it all to stay here forever. You are recognizing it intuitively, and therefore the Condition of all these conditions is the Beloved you find in every lover, in every arising phenomenon, in every moment, and in the Spiritual Master most directly.

Truth is not some hopeful word such as “You will be immortal on this earth, and all things will cease to die and we will live forever.” There is no such message. That is not the Truth. Even if that were factually true, it is not the Truth. The Truth is in this recognition, this identification of the Beloved, this sacrifice. Secondarily, our lives may be prolonged, but we are still obliged to the same sacrifice and the same humor. Only on that basis are we to realize all the secondary effects of the fulfillment of the Law, which may or may not be prolonged living.

So it is true that this anxiety about your relations is something you discover in yourself. It is not healed by any ordinary arrangement. It is itself that condition in our awareness by which we are moved to fulfill the Law, to make this sacrifice. It is not otherwise removed, we are not otherwise relieved of it. In your right response to me, in this actual practice, it passes. Anything, anyone, that you love and enjoy in this realm is only, if you will recognize it, the Beloved, the very Real itself. This is what you discover in all your loving, all your enjoyments, if you are a true man, a true woman. If you do not live by such sacrificial recognition, all your experiencing and enjoyments lead to attachment only. They reinforce ritual behavior, craving for contact, craving for experience, craving for repetitions in which we are constantly anxious, ill at ease, suffering reactive emotions, endlessly thinking, mulling things over mentally as if we were trying to solve some hidden problem, knotted up in the body, always active to find some pleasurable condition that will last, that will fulfill us. If you intuitively recognize this matter arising here, you are not bound up by reaction to that whole automatic ceremony. You are relieved of it. And that recognition is the only release.

Paradoxically, even though there is all of this delight and suffering, there is not one single thing, there is not a single event, not a single change, not a single modification, no birth, no death. Nothing has happened. Nothing has ever happened. Nothing will ever happen. There is only a single and absolute Condition, unspeakable in its Nature, which we may not see, hear, experience over against ourselves, but which is our very Condition prior to all changes, high or low. Having fallen into That, then we have a disposition in us from which properly to view all the changes, high or low, should they arise. And, as it happens, this one you seem to be when active in the waking world continues to arise for the time being-paradoxically, because it does not amount to anything. Nothing is gained by a moment’s living, absolutely nothing. Nothing changes on the basis of it. Nothing is gained by a single meeting, by a single moment’s satisfaction, by a single contact. This living isn’t anything. It is only an illusion, a modification of the essential Condition. If you come to rest in that Condition, then in every moment you recognize this and are happy, already happy. You can play in the ordinary ways, but you never become wretched. You are not degraded through your own craving, because you recognize what you love, and therefore your relations with loved ones, with this whole world, are natural, happy.

Otherwise, your craving for the immortality of the loved one will become so profound that you will be forced to kill her or him. You will murder the loved one in your craving for the loved one’s immortality. Your anxiety over the loss, the separation, will become so great that you will eventually begin to degrade the relationship itself, to separate yourself automatically. Then everything you do begins to separate you from the loved one, even though you are here to be loving, because you are so anxious, so terrified, so upset. But if you will recognize one another in Truth, if you will recognize this world in Truth, if you will recognize me in Truth, then you are engaged in that process that relieves you of this illusion, and you can come to rest. You can be happy. It is not necessary to go on with great plans to conquer this world in one fashion or another. Nothing is gained by it. You never conquer the loved one. You are enamored. You are in love. No conquering goes on at all. You only start conquering when you become afraid, when you fear this separation. Then you get anxious and start craving all kinds of satisfaction.

So I recommend that you meditate. However, you cannot meditate. You cannot willfully go about some program of meditation and have it be true, because that is a way of conquering rather than of being in love. You must realize this real meditation through the consideration we enjoy face to face. And if you will begin to rest in the current of the being in my Company, then you will begin to feel my influence. I will be of use to you in that case, but not until then. If your approach to me remains conventional, you are not at ease, you are not rested in this current, and you cannot feel it. Then there is no initiatory force in our meeting. You will really only discover the force of my influence when you begin to come to rest, in meditation, in our meetings, and in life. When you are rested in this current of your own being, through true intuitive identification of me and of the Condition of the current itself, then you can feel my work.

Because I am simply present in this Condition, I do not have any plans. I have nothing to do with all of this arising. I am simply standing here, and if you recognize me truly, then this current of the being is intensified, its revelation begins, and you will fall out of the point of view of this dream, even though you continue in your ordinary relations within it. You may also, in the course of this meditation, this living, have the opportunity to be involved in all kinds of other dreams, to live and perceive in other forms, other dimensions entirely. It is not that you must strive for that. That is another kind of craving, another kind of effort toward victory based on a failure of recognition, a failure to presume this Ignorance which is native to our birth. All the conventional yogic efforts are kinds of craving. People will sit for hours a day manipulating themselves with various techniques, hoping to have this and that kind of remarkable experience as a result. It is just an extension of worldliness, of the same thing that is your suffering in this gross appearance. You must simply be relieved of all of that through the presumption of Ignorance and the intuition of the Condition of these conditions arising.

That intuitive recognition or identification is simply rest of the current of the being in its prior Condition. It is felt in the grosser body sense at first, and as we come to rest in it, it is enjoyed in all kinds of ways, none of which is in itself fulfilling as mere experience. These enjoyments are simply the secondary reflections of our fulfillment of the Law, our present resting in that Condition which does not have any content, which is unspeakable. Call it God, Brahman, the Self. It is the only Happiness, and it is the foundation of all happiness in the midst of conditions here or anywhere else.

So it is not that we must sit down and struggle to hear the inner sounds and see the inner lights and go somewhere with them. It is quite natural that at some point you become absorbed in such sounds and lights and other phenomena in the extensions of this current, but it is rest in the prior Condition of the current itself that is fulfillment of the Law, that is Happiness. It relieves you of the point of view of this world.

It is not simply experiences of other worlds that relieve you of the point of view of this world, though they may arise and bring ordinary release. It is rest in the Condition of the very current of this arising, the Condition of these conditions, which is Happiness. It is perfect Sacrifice, and, paradoxically, is perfect fullness. It is a way of being mad without being crazy.

Nothing could be more mad than to be happy in this place, because there is really no justification for it. It is not reasonable to be happy. If you thoroughly examine this world, there is reason to feel very unhappy. Even with a little pleasurableness thrown in, it is not enough to overcome that conviction of darkness that you get when you really see what is happening here. So it is not any philosophy we can base on our experience here that makes us happy. It is complete release from implications, the force of this dreaming, this appearance for which we cannot account. And you see, it is already miraculous. Nothing fantastic has to happen. We already cannot account for a single thing in this room here. The mere existence of anything is beyond comprehension. It is sufficient to boggle us. You do not know what a single thing is. You cannot build any great programs for victory on the basis of such Ignorance. On the basis of that Ignorance, we are naturally disposed to all of this arising and may be led into the intuitive identification of the Nature and Condition of all this arising. And that is my occupation, to bring you to that recognition through Ignorance, in which you may come to rest in the current of the being and more and more profoundly fulfill the Law through radical intuition of the Condition of existence. But you see that this requires a new orientation, a turnabout from the conventional strife in which you pursue fulfillment here by reaction. The more you do that, the more confounded you become.

In the old cultures, they frowned upon anyone who knew too much or owned too much, because these were the signs of somebody who was really struggling and was therefore very worldly and dangerous. Of course they made this a blanket, black-and-white world-view, but there is some wisdom in the feeling. We must be relieved of the burden of knowing and owning, of all our craving. We must become perfectly Ignorant. We must become a Sacrifice, not an Owner, not a knower. The usual knowing and owning is ordinary enough, and we can take pleasure in ordinary things in one another’s company, but only if we are free, only if we all make this sacrifice constantly and are clarified in the being. So you must have the leisure, the ordinariness, in which to consider in this moment of arising that you do not know what a single thing is, that you do not know what the thing is itself, that you do not know what any of it is. If you will enter into your relations with me on that basis, this Ignorance, this falling into the current of the being through identification of its Condition, will become natural to you by Grace-freely, because it is not a conventional gift. It is the Gift of the being itself. It is prior to all strife, all circumstance. It is simply that you must be disposed to enjoy it. Become so disposed in my Company, and it absolutely will be given to you. That is also the Law. It is not a matter of striving and acquiring it, but of giving up that whole effort as you naturally do in Ignorance, in which you simply rest in this moment and recognize it in the form of your own Condition, the Condition of the current of the body-being itself. It is felt more and more profoundly as a current. It goes through changes. And it obliges you to go through changes outwardly in your relations and also bodily, because the body is transformed in its adaptation. Then the current is felt passing from toe to crown rather than crown to toe. It is not that it goes from the toe and leaves the body toward the crown. It is just felt as if there were a wire from toe to crown in which the current or the flow is moving in that direction rather than the opposite. Then the current between the crown and the Heart may at last be Realized also.

We still stand in the world even as we rest in this current. But then you may notice in your private meditation that you also are released even of this experience here from time to time. As the currents of the gross being begin to harmonize, become naturally reoriented, the body comes to rest, the breathing becomes slow, simple, the heart rate goes down. We hear the breathing and feel it, but then we become aware in such a way that we do not hear it any longer, we do not feel it any longer. The current itself becomes visible and audible to us, and we may simply forget the gross body and pass into the subtler dreams, all the while being in the disposition of this Ignorance, in which we truly identify what arises rather than automatically becoming attached to it, rather than getting into patterns of craving on the basis of gross or subtle experience.

Therefore, all of that also passes. We come to the point where we are more and more profoundly identified with that Condition itself, which precedes all arising, high or low, and which does not have any reference really, which cannot be accounted for in conditions. It is prior to them. It is the Condition of conditions. It is a paradox, because it is true of you even while alive, while in the gross plane, in the subtle planes, in any and all of these unnecessary realms. This Condition, which is unspeakable, remains true, it remains your very Condition. Therefore, unnecessary worlds constantly fall away.

We must fulfill the Law, this Sacrifice, this Truth. The Condition of conditions is Truth in this realm or any realm, and it is that to which we must be committed while alive. Any glorious eternity that appears on the basis of it is a Gift, which we may not seek, and find, and know, and still fulfill the Law. But just as all of this now present has suddenly appeared, as unnecessary and terrifying as it is, the Perfect Domain is always presently existing, and it is the same as no thing, no disturbance, no craving, no separation, no birth, no event, no moment, no future, no time, no place, no suffering. It is also exactly the same as love, as fullness, as delight, as very Light, as Happiness.

THE DREAM OF APPEARANCE

A TALK GIVEN BY BUBBA FREE JOHN TO A GATHERING OF DEVOTEES AT VISION MOUND SANCTUARY, MAY 11, 1977

In fact and in Truth this manifest appearance in which we are animated to one another in the waking state is a hallucination that occurs in consciousness. All these trees, buildings, bodies, hairs, thoughts arise as modification of a single and absolute field that is Perfect Radiance. The world is a conception, as completely unnecessary as a thought or a dream. And it is just as silly, just as humorous, just as arbitrary and unserious, as any dream.

The truth of this moment is that everything arising is literally a hallucination. The entire arising incident of the present moment is completely unnecessary. The pattern we identify as our lives is a complex logic of repetitions. Repetition is self, and mind, and body, including all relations and environments. Repetition is consolation, or distraction from fear. The pattern we know as life persists by reinforcement, by desire for repetitions, by being used. The incident of any experience appears, and you presume it to be both independent and necessary, and thus you enforce its repetition. If the presumption of necessity and independence ceases, then what reinforces the appearance and makes its repetition necessary is absent. Then the present configuration, the appearance of the so called world, which is totally arbitrary and unnecessary in the midst of infinity, is weakened. The present configuration becomes obsolete, it rises and falls, and something else replaces it.

There is no need for this present configuration to appear. There is no reason for it to persist. There is no need to overcome it or to enjoy a victory as it. It is completely arbitrary, just as arbitrary as any dream you might have had recently. The dream came to an end -it became obsolete because you realized it was not necessary. You woke up.

You must be awake. Your awakening is what the communication of this Teaching is all about. The Teaching is a penetrating criticism, a goad to awakening to the non-necessity of things. The communication of Truth, the Argument and Influence of the Spiritual Master, works to undermine the droning trance in which you exist in the waking state and in all other states of experience.

You ordinarily maintain the presumption of being this fleshy entity without the slightest ambiguity. That presumption just seems necessary. You do not feel that there is any way around it. You do not even regard the body to be something arising in consciousness. You consider consciousness to be somehow inside the body, in the brain, or in some condition less than the flesh itself, somehow created by senior unconscious atoms, its destiny determined by the fleshy thing that you know well. Thus, you presume that when you are dead, you are dead. But the necessity of the body is not true. This body is, presently, a hallucination in the field of brightness. When you can “see” that the body and the mind and the sense of separate identity itself all arise in the field of brightness as a mere modification, then you will have a great deal of humor relative to this affair of waking life. Then the great adventure of trying to attain a victory or to find the great goal for which all beings are born will come to an end. You will be free, but not until then. Until then, you are bound to discover, through all the means of release, some sort of extraordinary occasion that will console you as an entity.

The conventional spiritual teachings serve your search for consolation and reinforce the dilemma of existence. “Oh, Master, I’m suffering. What do I have to do to be saved? How do I get to heaven? How do I see God? How do I get to feel better?” And the master says, “Do this, do that, it is up here, it is in here, it is over there, it is to come, it is never realized.” And so, on the basis of your trouble, you are further motivated to feel good. Whereas the entire search, the entire drama of getting to Truth, is a lie. It is not true in this very moment that you are an entity. Your Condition is not that of an entity. The entity is only a convention of appearance. It is not Truth. That configuration is what is appearing, it is what is arising, but it is not the Truth in the moment.

In the present, and always in the past, and always in the future, the Condition of existence that is true and Truth is not defined and separate, but diffuse, without center or bounds. That is the Condition in this very moment. In that Condition, paradoxically, there arise all the conventions of limitation, out of which, in your ordinary impulse, you try to make your philosophy. You presume, on the basis of the conventions of experiencing, what the universe must be like, what you are like, what your true Condition must be. But your Condition precedes all of experience. Your Condition is Wisdom, the force of Existence, which eternally precedes all this arising, and within which or as a modification of which this arising occurs. Only by realizing that Condition are you properly related to all these limitations that rise and fall, waking, dreaming, and sleeping, gross or subtle, in this world or any other world.

True awakening is penetration, in the present moment, of the presumption of the necessity and independence of your apparent or experienced condition. This penetration is not the same as the glamorous path of going within, of achieving a victorious subjectivity. That is the solution founded in the presumption of independence, of necessarily separate existence. Such a solution is a serious matter then. If you are separate, you must find some way to feel better while separate – to feel holy, to see lights, to feel blissful in some part – because life appears to be necessary and humorless, a dilemma to be undone. The whole universe, then, becomes a problem and an always contradicted adventure, a game that you can win or lose, a very treacherous and fundamentally unhappy affair.

If you will observe all the human beings you casually meet, you will see that basically they are tormented by their existence. They are presuming their independence presently, and, therefore, they suffer all the effects of the drama, the play, the conjunction of apparent entities and processes. This life is treacherous, humorless, bearing down on them, drawing them into a destiny upon which they can have no ultimate effect. They can perhaps produce modest little effects, but they cannot ultimately be relieved of the dilemma that impinges on them.

This dilemma, however, is only their presumption, and it is false. The force of their birth implies their independence, and they meditate on that separation constantly. Thus, they look for their release in the context of presumed separation. Instead of being released, however, they are burdened, impinged upon by endless effects. Furthermore, the thing they most identify with, that born, vital body-being, is disintegrating over time, getting worse and worse, and eventually dying. No wonder people get more and more solemn as the years go on! Yet the life you take so seriously is just a dream, a hallucination that persists without freedom because you do not enjoy the presumption that makes it unnecessary.

What you know of dreams should illumine your position in the waking state. You are in exactly the same position in the waking state as in the dream state. You know very well, from the point of view of the waking state, that in dreaming you create the environment as well as the sense of being an independent entity. Clearly the dream is your own consciousness. It is your dream. Who else made the dream but you? It arises in your own consciousness. If, in the dream, you are running to leap into the water and suddenly it turns into a pit of fire, you created it. Your own psychic nature made the fire, so that you fell into fire instead of swimming over the lake. This is clear when you wake up, though it is not clear in the dream itself, because in the dream you identify exclusively with the knowing entity, the ego presumption, the separate one in the adventure. When you wake, you realize that you created all of it, that it was your own consciousness, and that now, in the waking state, it has no necessity. Now it is completely arbitrary, a hallucination.

Consider how serious you are in the waking state. You are trying to make philosophy here, but you are doing exactly what people do in dreams. You are assuming that you are the “knower-I,” the separate entity caught. in this adventure here, in which things are constantly happening to you and taking you by surprise. Sometimes good things are happening, sometimes bad things. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. You have assumed this hallucination as your Condition. You are trying to make philosophy. You listen to spiritual teachings, you take up practices, you believe this and that. You may feel that you have grasped it now. Now you may feel consoled. But you must wake up! You must stop continuing in the mere presumption or tacit belief in this hallucination. You must enjoy the same release into the Truth of your present condition that you enjoy when you wake up from a dream. Nothing else is happiness. Nothing less or other than that is liberation. Not a single thought, conception, or experience, high or low, is anything but a permutation of the dream. Only the awakening itself, in which there is nothing happening, is liberation from the motivated distress of all things happening.

In that awakening, no matter what arises, in any moment, you do not suffer the apparent logic or implications of appearances, but remain established in your real Condition, which is the unqualified field of Radiant Consciousness, without center and without bounds. From the Radiance of that Consciousness all things arise as vibratory modifications, including the most solid things that you consider to be objective to you as the knower-I. If you realize the true Condition of the knower-I, you also realize the true Condition of all manifestation. It is hallucination, the conjunction of wave patterns, appearing very elusive to vision at times, and then at another moment defining their lines into rigid objects.

Yet there are no independent objects. There are no truly solid things. This world is a phenomenon of light. If you have studied contemporary physics, you have at least heard and thought this, but you have not yet realized its full implications. This world, and every sense of subjective or objective independence, is a phenomenon of light, a hallucination. It is always an event in the very Condition that is consciousness, the unqualified field of which everything that arises is the present modification. If you presume the condition or effect of any modification, rather than That in which the modification arises, then that effect becomes necessary, and the presumption that it is your Condition reinforces a complex adventure in which you are this implied knower-I, separate from events. But if you break through that presumption and if you are presently existing as the prior, diffuse, or absolute Condition, then the arising phenomena have a paradoxical significance. They are unnecessary, they are humorous, they are fluid, they are not binding. The whole adventure they imply, negative or positive, is unnecessary, untrue. Everything that arises, subjective or objective, is a portion of the dream. It has nothing in itself to do with God or Truth. Truth is realized only in the right presumption in the present, regardless of what arises. It is the tacit certainty that this is a completely unnecessary hallucination, a modification of light.

You must begin to stand in your real position, the true Condition in this moment, before all the belief systems, all the implications of the solid, present dream, enforce themselves as your presumption. You do not know what a single thing is. Not a single thing! Not even the subjective part that is saying to itself, “I do not know what the wall is, I do not know what a single thing is.” You do not know what the thoughts are, you do not know what the feelings are, you do not know what this “I” is! There is not any such “I” that you conceive of and know and present and see. You are busy all the time pointing to it, presuming it, but if you actually look at what you are pointing to, you will see that you do not know what it as. “I” is the whole body in fact, but there is no knowledge of what the body is entirely and independently and absolutely. You do not know what anything is. Therefore, you do not know what all things are. The whole of manifestation altogether is not a something of which you are a knower. You are Ignorance. You are a most undefined or diffuse Condition, unable to radically differentiate yourself from a single thing, because as long as any single thing arises, you exist in the vulnerable position of having no knowledge of what it is.

As it happens, there is a whole complex of things arising-all these environments and all the subjective effects are arising in this moment – yet you are not any self-contained entity, not a specific or defined knower in the midst of them. You are that Condition in which it is not known what anything is. You are already without form, without a foundation, without anything solid to rest on. You do not rest up against anything. You are not deeply behind or within anything. You are completely vulnerable and an absolute Mystery. You live in Mystery. When you have considered that fact to the point of hearing, to the point that this Mystery becomes tolerable and you are not grasping so mightily onto egoic consolations, but are able to move into relations with some ease-having heard me to that degree, then you can meet me in the spiritual sense. Then you begin to become sensitive to my Company, and then meeting me becomes a spiritual occasion that draws you more and more profoundly into this Realization of the present Condition.

That is what there is to realize in my Company. It is this profound initiation into our Condition in this moment. Until in your sympathy with me you begin to realize it most directly, all I can do is witness to you that I (and, therefore, you and all beings) am not identical to the condition of being a separate entity. I am not an entity; I am not inside a body. To call myself this body is just as arbitrary as to say I am the morning star or the vision within or a light you may see by turning upward. These are all arbitrary identifications, completely unnecessary, completely humorous, completely without the slightest bit of seriousness from my point of view.

Ultimately, it becomes clear that the tree in the yard is a hallucination, that it is a matter of mind, just as any thought that you project inwardly. It is exactly the same. You will not at last have to go through a mental process to believe this. It will just appear to be obviously that way. And when it is obvious, it is not disorienting. That is Sahaj Samadhi. People who act crazy, trapped in the sphere of their separate self and energy, and who say they are in Sahaj Samadhi or God-Consciousness are not liberated in Truth. They are in the terrified ego position, trying to feel better through glamorization’s of philosophy. If some have turned themselves up from the grosser conditions, then they may represent degrees of mystical holiness, but they yet persist in the same illusion that heats the flesh of others in the dream. The presumption of our real Condition is neither a thought nor an act. It is not itself a state of experience, gross or subtle. It is a kind of transparency. The present appearance is simply a process arising in a Condition that is without center, form, relations, or bounds. That Condition is transparent, obvious, and the only presumption that is Truth or Happiness. Until it is obvious, you must listen, you must hear, you must engage the argument, you must presume the disciplines. The practice of the Way of Divine Ignorance is leading toward this Realization absolutely.

Consider the argument and live the discipline. There will be a fire in that discipline equal to the degree of frustration of your habitual presumptions and distractions. Allow that fire to enter into this consideration, and it will be the undoing of this ordinary presumption of independence and necessity that seems so perfectly natural and logical to you in this hallucination, this dream, this birth. You will begin to penetrate that presumption. Its undoing, rather than “me” apart, will become your position. You will penetrate it, and its logic will no longer bind you.

You must take up this Way as a whole life. Just sitting here with whatever attention you have freely available at the moment is not sufficient to change your presumption in the future. It will simply establish you in the moment, more or less, in this consideration of Ignorance. But the discipline is obliged upon you in every moment. You must take it up as a way of life. You must be constantly available to the Spiritual Master, constantly available to his instruction, his argument, his disciplines, his Company. The life awakened in his Company serves the penetration of the dream. When that Realization becomes summary, most radical, in your case, then you are simply happy. Until then, you enjoy it more or less profoundly in some moments, and at other moments the usual life grinds in on you. But then you have the discipline to occupy you rather than the right you ordinarily assume to dramatize your self-possessed tendencies and illusions. The whole affair of this practice ultimately serves perfect transformation in Truth.

Difficulties persist because the ordinary life or dream persists. Things continue to arise. So there is heat in the process. But the heat is your advantage. The heat is not some negative side effect. The heat is free attention, available for this profundity. Secondarily, it is painful in a sense, but it is free. It is available force, attention. Free attention is not otherwise so available, because it is usually sunk into dramatizations and distractions. Now it is without an object. It cannot find a way to be relieved. It is hot. And so it can consider itself, the occasion itself.

If, through true hearing, you will be committed to such present consideration, and if you will persist in it and not restrain yourself from the whole discipline of my Company, that same enlightenment that is now argued to your face will also be true of you.