The
Enlightenment of the Whole Body
by Bubba Free John (Adi Da Samraj)
Chapters 1-3
pp. 71-114
Enlightenment
of the Whole Body Full Index of Articles
The
Way of the Translation of Man into God
Real God is not the God of abstract
or unchanging permanence and the survival of fixed selves.
Real God is the God of changes, the God of the moment to
moment transformation and dissolution of selves in the
Transcendental Condition of Reality.
It is not by righteous, aggressive,
or self-destructive conceptions of our personal condition
and the ultimate Condition of all beings and things that we
are liberated into Happiness and Truth. Rather, it is by
awakening to the freedom to release the whole body-mind of
person in the moral sacrifice of love and the transcendental
sacrifice of radical spiritual intuition that we Realize
Truth and Happiness and God.
True Prophecy Is the
Purification of Human Culture
I . Love-Communion with the Divine
Person is essentially a It is a matter of direct surrender
of the body-mind, via all kinds of right activity, into the
All-Pervading Life-Current and Transcendental Consciousness,
which we may intuit at the heart. It is a Process that
transcends body and mind in self-transcending Ecstasy, under
all conditions.
But that Process may also be
described and considered in terms of the various aspects of
specific psycho-physical change that necessarily occur over
time. And, even though it is a Process that goes on
continuously, in the form of every kind of activity, it must
be aided, quickened, and epitomized by certain kinds of
formal exercise, such as prayer and meditation.
Therefore, many religious and
spiritual cults have developed around this ancient Way. And
they have all achieved uniqueness through specialized
descriptions of the various aspects of the developmental
Process and its associated religious and spiritual
exercises. If we add to these differences the historical and
cultural setting of each tradition, and the association of
each with particularly exemplary human individuals, we can
see the essential sources of difference and ultimate
conflict between historical cults. And if we can thus
understand the limitations of even our own religious and
spiritual presumptions, we may become able to be restored to
the Essence of the Teaching and the Way of Truth.
II.
In the essays I have written for The
Enlightenment of the Whole Body, I have frequently
criticized popular and historical religious and spiritual
cultism. This is because such cults are taken day may come
when the common man is again submitted to the Living God,
rather than to his own desires and the hopeless powers of
this World.
The various essays in The
Enlightenment of the Whole Body were written spontaneously
and at random. Each represents a consideration of the total
matter of Truth and its Way, but each engages that
consideration via a critical examination of particular
aspects of traditional or conventional understanding or
practice. The intent of this collection of essays is to
serve the practical Realization of self-transcending
God-Communion. Therefore, what is written here is critical,
in the positive, creative, or Prophetic sense of the term,
but it is also and primarily Revelatory. Those who study
this Teaching must be purified of their own failures to meet
the Mark, but they are also offered the Enlightened
alternative, which is a fully considered and perfectly
conceived approach to the Living God and the Realization of
the Single and Absolute Divine Destiny.
Chapter 4
The Vision and the Way of
Eternal Life
The Essence of Transcendence – A
free rendering of the Bhagavata Purana, book eleven, chapter
14, verses twelve through fourteen, by Bubba Free
John
The pleasure of those who desire and
possess experiences of all kinds is not even remotely
comparable to the Bliss of one who surrenders to Me and
transcends all experience in Me, by Realizing Me as the true
Self, the Transcendental Condition of his own soul. Such a
one is always already Happy and Full of Pleasure. He no
longer depends on bodily satisfactions, nor is he disturbed
by the inevitable changes in his experience. He has
transcended the motion of attention in the body, the senses,
the mind, and all the subtle reaches of his higher being. He
no longer seeks for any state or place, but only Abides in
Me. He does not seek to become equal in Power with the
Creator. He does not desire paradisiacal glories in the
Heaven Worlds. He does not crave dominion or power on Earth,
or in the lower Worlds of Elemental Nature. He does not seek
or hold on to the psychic and astral powers of mysticism and
yoga. He does not even cling to the notion of bringing
experience to an end, and an end to the cycles of birth and
change and death. But one who Loves Me and always Communes
with Me quite naturally transcends all possible phenomena,
and he simply Abides in the Bliss of the Radiant Self,
whatever comes and goes.
We Are the Food of God
and is the highest structural expression of Life on
Earth.
There is no other creature or
process comparable to him on Earth. It is only through Man,
and not through lower-adapted creatures or the elemental
proceedings of the Realm of Nature, that the spiritual and
Transcendental qualities of Divine Life can become
manifest.
The human individual is not
generally born with a native capacity to exercise his
highest structural potential, but each individual is born
into a circumstance in which, through the play of
adaptation, he may eventually Realize and even Transcend the
highest structural destiny of Man. Man can learn only his
most rudimentary lessons from what is less than himself.
Therefore, the human individual cannot depend on the
workings of Nature or the testimony and demonstration of
other creatures for his Life-Lesson in Love, or
Transcendental God-Communion. Nor can any individual depend
on the mass of immature human beings if he is to gain the
Lesson of Love and fulfill Life as Man.
We are each inherently obliged to
fulfill the Law in human form-to be Love. Love, or the
spiritual and Transcendental Realization and Incarnation of
God, comes into expression on Earth only through Man, or
else it does not appear at all. It is through Man that the
higher potential of Earth can be Realized and Shown.
Therefore, do not aspire to what is merely active in the
Realm of Nature. Do not aspire to the level of creatures and
elemental processes. Do not aspire to the mediocrity and
subhumanity of the usual man. Rather, be Inspired and
Instructed by the Spiritual Master, the True Man. Be
Inspired to Incarnate Love, Ecstasy, Divine Communion,
Radiant Life, and all the Excellence of Man in God.
Transcend yourself in God-Love, and fulfill the Man by
Sacrifice, or constant Ecstasy.
In our subhuman childishness we look
to feed on God, the Real, and all that exists. We are
violently motivated toward food, pleasure, and survival. We
are summarized in the demand to be sustained and satisfied.
We seek the Edible Deity, in order to contain Him and
control His Powers of Life. But our bodies and minds are
obliged by the Law of Sacrifice. The inherent and Divine
demand that pervades the structures of Man is the demand
that we be a sacrifice to the Purpose and Person of God. We
must feed the Deity with all our feeling acts. We are the
necessary food of God. We must consent to be eaten, to be
ecstatic, to be the offering of the body-mind or self in
God-Communion.
Those who fulfill the Law in human
form do not feed on God, or contain Him within themselves.
Rather, they surrender themselves in God and are Translated
into God through their ecstasy. They do not contain Him.
They are Him, since they have ceased to be themselves
alone.
The most ancient human act or symbol
of God-Communion is the offering of food to the Living God
and to the Spiritual Master, the True Man. It is the sign of
primal human understanding-that we are to be a sacrifice to
the Radiant Reality that is the Transcendental Condition of
the World. Our own Force of Life must be granted to God and
to the True Man. We must feed the Truth with our own feeling
sacrifice, the offering of the bodymind. Then the True Man
and the very Divine may, in turn, function as a Process of
Conversion, Transformation, Transfiguration, and Translation
in our own case. In this manner the True Man and the Living
God Incarnate as those who participate in GodCommunion
through sacrifice.
If we do not consent to be Love-to
feed the Deity through all our acts-then we are surrendered
to ourselves. And those who are recoiled upon themselves are
wrung dry by all their years of satisfaction. The sated
heart yearns for relief from the Mystery of birth and death.
Therefore, become this Sacrifice, since the Radiant Power of
the Living God is always ready to Incarnate as your own Life
of Love.
Ecstatic. You have no clarity, no
understanding, no capacity to transcend your own reactivity
and isolation. Find yourself in that position, and then you
start wondering if God is Real or if God Exists. But God is
Reality. God is Existence. The mind may know doubt, but it
cannot know what God, or Reality, or Existence is. The
Divine is, therefore, beyond knowledge and doubt, which are
only ordinary conventions of mind and experience. The Divine
is Realized only through ecstasy, or self-transcendence,
beyond knowledge and doubt. The Living God may be neither
doubted nor known, but only Realized. God may only be
loved.
Therefore, you must become oriented
to this Way of Life, this Way of Divine Ignorance. Through
Awakening to the intuition of the Divine, the unprovable and
undoubtable Divine is simply, tacitly obvious. God is simply
Reality. God is the Process of Existence altogether, and God
ultimately Transcends the Process and the manifestations of
all manifest experience.
God and
Doubt
We today talk about God as if one
could thoroughly deny that God Exists. The puzzlement about
whether or not God Exists is not a true question at all.
There is no genuine doubt that God Exists. Obviously you did
not create yourself, nor can you sustain yourself
independently, nor can you spontaneously uncreate yourself.
You can only be confused by illusions of doubt, and these
illusions can create the sense of separation from the Living
Divine. Such doubts are only illusions whereby we become
self-possessed, self-destructive, loveless, and incapable of
Ecstasy.
We are lived. We are part of a Great
Process that is ultimately mysterious, a Process in which we
do not know. God, or the Inherent and Transcendental
Reality, clearly Exists. Each of us is inherently obliged to
relate to the Divine through love and to fulfill the Law of
sacrifice that is Revealed to us in every moment of
existence. The Divine Reveals Itself, in our sacrifice,
through intuitive illumination, and through a process of
psycho-physical transformation and ultimate Translation of
self into the Real. Only the Awakened devotee truly
understands or Realizes the Nature of God, the Reality of
God.
There is no justifiable reason to
doubt the Divine Reality. Doubt is simply a reflection of
ourselves, our reluctance to fulfill the Law of sacrifice
and to become Lawfully oriented to Infinity. Doubts about
whether or not God exists are descriptions of Man in his
recoil from Infinity. Impenetrable doubt cannot be logically
justified in the midst of things. Concepts or beliefs about
“God” may be doubted, but that which is Divine and Eternal
is always perfectly obvious-and, therefore, inherently
beyond the conventional disposition we feel as
doubt.
You are always “capable” of doubt,
because doubt is a condition of yourself. It is a form of
contraction. And when you involve yourself in contraction,
you become mad-neither relational nor Realized in Truth and
as the Very and Transcendental Radiant Reality of which all
worlds and things and beings are only an illusory,
temporary, and playful modification.
God is All-Pervading Radiance and
Transcendental Consciousness. God is what has traditionally
been called “Spirit,” or the Great, Perfect, and Most Holy
or Unqualified Power and Life. The Worship and Realization
of God is, therefore, imageless, prior to knowledge or
conception, prior to subject and object, prior to self and
body and relations and worlds. God is the Condition or Truth
of all conditions. God is Perfect Ignorance-that is, Perfect
Transcendental Consciousness, within which everything arises
and changes and disappears, spontaneously, without necessity
or ultimate knowability. God is Radiance, or Love, the Force
Field that Pervades and Supports and Moves and Receives and
Lives all conditions.
To Worship and Realize God is to be
a Sacrifice into Truth, Transcendental Consciousness, or
Divine Ignorance, prior to all knowledge, all thought, all
experience. To Worship and Realize God is to be a Sacrifice
into Radiance, All-Pervading Life, or the Divine Power,
prior to all forms, images, perceptions, consolations, and
beliefs. To Worship and Realize God is to be a Sacrifice
into the All-Pervading Transcendental Identity, and,
therefore, it is to be pervaded and oneself transcended by
Identification with the Divine.
NOTHING BUT DIVINE COMMUNION IS
FREEDOM
God Is the Identity and
Force That Lives Everyone and Receives Everyone
The God who is Truth is Worshipped
and Realized by devotees in the Way of Divine Ignorance.
Real God is not a God who is to be identified with visions
and the subtle subjective planes of an alternative Reality.
Nor is God necessarily associated with only benign or
desirable successes in our ordinary lives. All of that is
transcended in this Way. God is to be Worshipped and
Realized in Truth and
as the Very and Transcendental Radiant Reality of which all
worlds and things and beings are only an illusory,
temporary, and playful modification.
God is All-Pervading Radiance and
Transcendental Consciousness. God is what has traditionally
been called “Spirit,” or the Great, Perfect, and Most Holy
or Unqualified Power and Life. The Worship and Realization
of God is, therefore, imageless, prior to knowledge or
conception, prior to subject and object, prior to self and
body and relations and worlds. God is the Condition or Truth
of all conditions. God is Perfect Ignorance-that is, Perfect
Transcendental Consciousness, within which everything arises
and changes and disappears, spontaneously, without necessity
or ultimate knowability. God is Radiance, or Love, the Force
Field that Pervades and Supports and Moves and Receives and
Lives all conditions.
To Worship and Realize God is to be
a Sacrifice into Truth, Transcendental Consciousness, or
Divine Ignorance, prior to all knowledge, all thought, all
experience. To Worship and Realize God is to be a Sacrifice
into Radiance, All-Pervading Life, or the Divine Power,
prior to all forms, images, perceptions, consolations, and
beliefs. To Worship and Realize God is to be a Sacrifice
into the All-Pervading Transcendental Identity, and,
therefore, it is to be pervaded and oneself transcended by
Identification with the Divine.
The Vision of God Is in
the Transcendence of Experience
The Living God is All-Pervading and
Transcendental. The Divine Person is the Great Spirit or
Perfect Consciousness that Lives the World and is Present to
the intuitive or native feeling of all beings.
The Divine Person has no specific,
fixed, and independent Form. God is not truly object or
other to Man. The Divine Person may be experienced to
be any manifest form or all manifest forms, but that One has
no ultimate Form that does not otherwise appear as a
possibility within the total Realm of Nature, high or low,
subtle or gross, psychic or physical. And the total Realm of
Nature is itself Pervaded and Eternally Transcended by that
One. Therefore, in Truth, the Divine Person is simply the
prior and Eternal Condition of every condition, every
experience, and every being in the Realm of
Nature.
All the forms we might experience,
high or low, and which we might consider to be the Divine
Form, the Ultimate Vision, are simply moments of
experiential possibility. As such, any form that we might
consider to be God could just as well be considered to be
what it appears to be apart from any special or fixed
identification with God.
Even so, the Divine Person is
Real-even Reality Itself. And we may enter into direct
Love-Communion with that One in every moment. And we may
acknowledge the Glorious Presence of that One in the form of
any or all forms in our experience. But that One remains
All-Pervading, Transcendental, and utterly beyond the
knowledge we acquire or contact through experience. To
Realize God is to be Free of everything, since everything is
only a moment passing into God.
Therefore, only this Vision of God
is the Vision in Truth. It is the Vision Realized in Divine
Ignorance, or the radical understanding of experience. One
who is possessed by this Vision may experience many
wonderful and terrible things, but the Living God remains
the Eternal Refuge, the Blissful Paradox of Totality and
Truth.
Realize this Vision, this
Understanding, and so be free of all desires for the
experiential attainment of God-Vision. All experiences come
and go, while the deluded consciousness, the experiencer,
survives all changes and is not Free. Awaken from the
pattern of desire, high and low. Do not seek to attain the
Form of God via any experience. See through the illusion of
all such seeking and every such attainment. Stand
Free.
Your own body-mind defines you.
Therefore, you seek God as a similar but Great Form. But God
is not truly attained. God is not better shown in colors
than in stone. God is the Truth, the Condition, the
Consciousness, the Radiant Bliss, the Love in which this
moment is appearing.
Do not pursue God as a form of
experience. Rather, understand the motive and the limiting
power of all experience. Through this Understanding, you
will Awaken to the Divine Vision in Truth, the
Transcendental Intuition of God.
We may not finally Realize the
Divine Person in the forms of experiential possibility. God
is not the fulfillment of the bodymind, the independent
self. God is not truly shown to the mind that concentrates,
high or low. God is Realized only through our sacrifice, our
self-transcending Intuition and Love, our bodily surrender
of mind.
When we Awaken to this
Understanding, then we Realize that One under all
conditions, and that One Radiates as the Fullness wherein
every experience is superficial, unnecessary, and even
happy. Then every moment is the Vision in Truth. The Self of
God is not within us. Rather, we inhere in that Radiant Self
whenever we are surrendered and dissolved in Ecstasy, or
Love, Translated beyond all the limits of this
body-mind.
God Is the One in Whom We
Are Sacrificed
The Divine Reality, or God, is not
ultimately the Savior of our lives. The Divine is That to
which our lives must be a sacrifice. Indeed, it is the
intuition of the Divine that permits us to live as a
sacrifice rather than a Narcissistic, reactive, and
self-possessed struggle for ultimate survival.
The Truth is not that we survive
forever as we now are or conceive ourselves to be. Nor is
God, or the Divine Reality, the Instrument of such permanent
survival, immortality, or salvation. We are necessarily
changing and mortal in our present structural form. But we
tend to react to this sense of our destiny by seeking to
protect,
Teaching, the argument of Truth, and
“see” the Teacher, who awakens the whole bodily being to the
disposition of the heart. In that “hearing” and “seeing” of
Revealed Life, we must be moved to love and to faith in
relation to the Divine. We must suddenly become ecstatic and
relax the body-mind, wholly and in every part, into the
All-Pervading Current and Process and Wisdom and Destiny in
which we are appearing. Only from that moment can we live in
Happiness, Fullness, Humor, Blessedness, and Great Almighty
Wonder of Beauty and Grace.
God Is the Truth of Life,
Not the Parental Source of Future
Fulfillment
The Truth that is God and Life is
sufficient in and of Itself.
We are not truly separate from That.
We are happy only in ecstatic or self-released Communion
with That. To release the entire body-mind into Communion
with the Radiant and Unknowable Divine Reality is happiness.
It is not that the act of such release produces effects in
us that are happiness. Rather, the sacrifice, or Communion
itself, is happiness.
God is not, in Truth, That which
produces experiences that fulfill us and make us happy. God
is the Reality or Condition that is our freedom and
happiness. To Commune with the Divine is to be released from
the absurdity and torment of independent psycho-physical
existence. The Truth or Condition of the bodymind is the
prior, unqualified Reality.
Therefore, we must Worship the
Divine whole bodily, and so abide in our Condition or Truth
or God. We do not Worship God in Truth if we merely hope and
demand to be given immortality, bodily or psychic
fascination, or any other objective or subjective
fulfillment of our psycho-physical birth. We Worship God in
Truth only if we surrender to the Divine Condition Itself,
and abide in That, free of the body-mind, Awake to the Real
Condition of the stream of events. Just so, the Unqualified
Truth is not other than the Life or Radiance of which self
and experience and world are only temporary and unnecessary
modifications.
To Worship the Living God in Truth
is to Realize the Free Condition of “I,” the body-mind. It
is to be free, in the Present, of the dilemma of
independent, self-possessed existence. It is not to cling to
self, the body-mind, and to seek its fulfillment or
survival. It is to be free of the entire absurdity of
independent and limited existence, and all that it may seek
or acquire.
Therefore, to Worship or Commune or
be a Sacrifice in God is not a matter of self, or any hopes
and beliefs about the future, or any despair and knowledge
about the past. It is a matter of freedom and happiness
itself, or Realization of the Divine for Its own sake.
Nothing but Divine Communion is necessary for happiness.
Nothing but Divine Communion is freedom. Those who surrender
to Life beyond all knowledge may continue and enjoy or
suffer every kind of apparent experience as the Play in
which Life incarnates. But, in any moment, their happiness
is only in the Truth of that Life, and not in experiences
themselves.
The Radiant Life of
God
Life is God, and God is Life. The
Process of Life is our –A Situation. We may, in reactive
and mortal fear, contract from the All-Pervading Field and
Transcendental Radiance of Life, and so we may live a
loveless and self-possessed drama of doubt that reflects no
Wisdom, Freedom, or transcendence of Death. But whenever we
are most Awake, only Life Radiates as all
phenomena.
The radical intuition of the Radiant
Truth of Ignorance is the Awakening to the Living God, the
Eternally Present Divine. And those who so Awaken are moved
to a personal, moral, higher psycho-physical, and altogether
sacrificial or ecstatic Way of Eternal Life. Eternal Life is
Dissolution or Translation into the Divine Condition, even
while alive. It is not a matter of the survival of self, or
of the raising of the independent self to a realm of more
pleasurable circumstance. It is a matter of the ecstatic
sacrifice of the self, the body-mind, and all
psycho-physical limits of experience, into the Radiant Life
and Unqualified Consciousness that is the God, Mind,
Subject, Person, and Truth of the World.
Faith Is Bodily Surrender
to Life
The truly human individual is
expressed via the heart, or the feeling-intelligence. That
summation of Man transcends and masters the vital-physical,
emotional-sexual, and mentalintentional structures “below”
the heart. It provides a way for the psychic and supramental
structures “above” the heart to awaken, grow, and also be
transcended. The heart is the bodily epitome, and the
disposition of Communion with the Divine Life-Radiance and
unqualified Consciousness of the Real.
At some point in the cycle of our
living, we must awaken from our reactive sleep below the
heart and our romantic fascinations with what is above the
heart. We must suddenly “hear” the Teaching, the argument of Truth, and “see” the Teacher, who awakens the whole bodily being to the disposition of the heart. In that “hearing” and “seeing” of Revealed Life, we must be moved to love and to faith in relation to the Divine. We must suddenly become ecstatic and relax the body-mind, wholly and in every part, into the All-Prevading Current and Process and Wisdom and Destiny in which we are appearing. Only from that moment can we live in Happiness, Fullness, Humor, Blessedness, and Great Almight Wonder of Beauty and Grace.
The Vision and the Way of
Eternal Life
We do not live. Life lives as us. We
do not survive. Life survives us. The individual body and
mind are only temporary expressions and stepped-down
modifications or lesser intensities of Life, which is
Absolute Instensity, or Infinite Radiance. The individual is
not an inherently independent “entity,” radically “other”
than all other “entities.” The individual is only Life
alive, and all who are alive (or filled and lived by Life)
are identical to that same, All-Pervading and Absolute Life.
Each one is Life itself, in person, and yet not other than
Itself.
Life is Absolute Radiance, Absolute
Consciousness, Absolute Power, Absolute Intelligence. Life
is the Spirit, the Divine Reality, or God. Each one os us
must Realize his native identity with the Absolute Life,
through radical intuition of the Condition of every aspect
of his own existence and experience. In such intuition of
the Real, the “Vision” of Eternal Life, we are liberated
into the Bliss and Freedom of Eternal Life.
The Way of Eternal Life is in
intuitive understanding that “I” is not independently alive
nor even utlimately identical to itself. Not is any aspect
of body or mind the Reality itself. All identitification
with aspects or experiences of the personal body-mind is an
agony, a confrontation with absurdity, frustration,
emptiness, change, loss, and death.
We must each awaken to the Truth,
that “I” is Life, the Eternal Radiance and Consciousness.
Therefore, happiness is not in self-possession or even in
survival of self. The Way of Eternal Life is the sacrafice
of self into its own Condition or Life, the Readiance or
Glory that is God. In that case, “I,” or self, the
independent body-mind, does not survive as itself in any
form. It is yielded as all of its forms into the Life, and,
therefore, only survies as Life.
All conditions change and pass. They survive only as Life. And Life lives the Play of appearance, change, and disappearance.
Bliss, Ecstasy, or Happiness is not in the things that appear, and change, and pass. Happiness is only in the One that lives, the One that always already transcends all phenomena.
Only Life is free, and we are not free unless we identify with Life, in the intuition of Divine Ignorance, and sacrifice all contraction or self-possession to Life, in ecstatic love of the Divine Radiance. Such is the Way of Eternal Life, the Way of Divine Ignorance, whereby we are Translated into the
One who is alive as us. This is the bodily and irreducible Truth of Man.
From time to time, Life manages to Realize Itself perfectly while yet appearing in human and bodily form. Such an
Event is of unique value to all other men. It is the Event wherein Life achieves Agency and the capacity for direct Influence via all of the functions of a human body-mind, the likeness of all men and women.
The Spiritual Master is such an Event. He is the Agency of the Reality, the Influence, and the Process whereby mankind in general (in the form of every human being in particular) may Realize inherent Identity with Life and literal Translation of self into Life. Therefore, the Process of love, or devotional
self-sacrifice to the Reality or Life incarnate as the Spiritual Master, is the unique, transcendental, and practical means in Nature, or the Play of Life, whereby Truth is brought to Man. Through the Company of the Spiritual Master, Life instructs and transforms and Enlightens those whom
it lives, and so restores all that is alive to the Life, the One, the Person that lives all things.
Next: pages. 136-158 – The Way of the Translation of Man into God
The Enlightenment
of the Whole Body – Full Index of Articles
