“The liability in the first stage of life is attachment to an experiential state of undifferentiated physical unity with the elemental dimension of the world. It is the tendency toward dependence on what is finite. It is the tendency toward unconsciousness, or a dependent, vague, and sleeplike awareness of experience.”
The Way of Translation of Man into God – CHAPTER 7: The Enlightenment of the Whole Body
The first stage of life concerns the origination and earliest development of the human being as a psychosomatic entity. In this talk, given on March 1, 1980, to a group of some fifty students, Master Da Free John takes In original and humorous look at the spiritual implications of conception. The question he addresses, and which any thoughtful person will have asked himself, is, “How does a collocation of molecules composing the reproductive cells amount to a living being?”
Master Da talks about the “holocaust” of ejaculation which destroys millions of living beings-the semen. He draws our attention to the fact that even reproduction involves death. Only a single sperm will survive by fertilizing the ovum, thereby giving birth to a human organism. The sperm has thus a tremendous potential. Shifting to another level of consideration, Master Da points out that we all have a comparable spiritual potential. Yet, how few “survive” to attain the seventh stage of life! This talk gives one a sense of the tragicomic dimension of existence with its infinite cycles of self-replication. But it also conveys a feeling about the inherent Mystery of it all.
In our research we have found that all the genuine Adepts have been remarkably humorous. Late in Ramana Maharshi’s life, doctors recommended that he should have his legs massaged daily. This turned into a competition between devotees who were clamoring for spiritual merit in this way. Ramana Maharshi would occasionally volunteer to massage his own legs so that the merit would accrue to himself! Sai Baba of Shirdi loved to play practical jokes on his disciples. He would surreptitiously put certain herbs into their- tea’, which would stimulate their digestion to the point of diarrhea. Narayan Maharaj, a great twentiethcentury saint of Western India, was known by his devotees to be the funniest man alive, and when he told a joke, his laughter would drown everyone else’s.
Similarly, people have always been struck by the imaginative and persistent humor of Master Da Free John. This kind of humor is ‘noted in the recognition that life, with all its cyclic repetitiveness, is really non-binding Play. But the unenlightened mind fails to see the humor in it. The humor of the “usual man” is merely irony; the humor of the God-Realizer is a blissful expression of his freedom from all arising conditions. Occasionally when a devotee comes to Master Da with a problem, he has been known to respond with a laughter so infectious that the troubled individual would soon be laughing along with Master Da and everyone else. He would find that the laughter undermined his self-dramatizing concern, giving him the strength to creatively face his difficulty.
The following talk on the “spermatic being” illustrates such free and humorous spiritual consideration. Master Da offends all of our preconceived notions, at times poking fun at what we know of the mechanics of reproduction. And in doing so, he not so much provides us with a new dogma about how it really works but rather leaves us with a sense of regenerated freedom from all the seriousness of the reproductive business.
The Seven Stages of Eternal Life – Laughing Man Magazine
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