Childish Spirituality

adapted from Moving
Beyond Childish and Adolescent Approaches to Life and Truth,
Breath and Name, by Bubba Free John (Adi Da Samraj)

---

…..the child is always grasping
for permanent security in an undifferentiated, unborn
bliss…..Re-union through obedience is the way the child
learns….

 

“Experiences,” high and low are
required by those who are still lingering in the conditions
of their childhood and adolescence. Everything a child does
is a manifestation of one underlying assumption:
dependence.

When you are a child, the assumption
of dependence is eminently realistic and useful. But it
should be a temporary stage of psycho-physical life, in
which one’s functions are nurtured and developed in
conventional ways. However, there is commonly a lag in the
transition to manhood, because of the shocks experienced in
the immature attempts to function in the world. Thus, to
some degree, every man or woman lingers in the childhood
assumption of dependence. And insofar as men and women are
children, they seek to enlarge that personal assumption of
dependence into a universal conception in the form of the
God-Cosmos-Parent game, the game of dependence upon and
obedience to That upon which all depends. That childish
aspect in each of us seeks always to verify the condition of
dependence in forms of safety and relative unconsciousness.
The childish demand in every man and woman is the principal
of religion, which means “reunion”, or, literally, “to bind
again”. It is the search to be reunited, to experience the
vital and emotional re-establishment of some imagined or
felt Condition or State of life that is previous to
responsibility. It is the urge toward the parented, enclosed
condition. This urge always seeks experiences, beliefs, and
immunities as a consolation for the primitive cognition of
fear and vulnerability. And the “way” enacted by such a
motivation is principally a game of obedience to parent-like
enormities.

---

Full text of Part One –

Moving Beyond Childish and
Adolescent Approaches to Life and Truth

 

This first part of
Breath and Name is Bubba Free John’s own revision and
expansion of material from “The Way of Dissolution vs. the
Way of Experience,” the final chapter of Garbage and the
Goddess. Here Bubba has excerpted the central argument,’ the
major portion of which was originally written as an essay
before it was offered in discussion with devotees. This
presentation summarizes Bubba’s criticism of our commonplace
motivations, and the interpretations, worldly and
philosophical, which we mistakenly impose on the spiritual
Way of life. Taken by itself, this essay introduces the
unique nature and human implications of Bubba Free John’s
Teaching and his spiritual Presence.

There is a difference in my way of
working with devotees now. I have relaxed all strategic and
secondary involvement with both the yogic and the outer,
“theatrical” aspects of the Divine Siddhi or Power of
Transformation. I have no concern for such effects at all.
Previously, I maintained continuous attention on such
processes. I made use of such possibilities constantly,
because of the state of those who came to me. I could not
assume that the Teaching had been finally given in living
form. So I always made use of this capacity to draw a person
out of his or her habitual and lower functional states,
wherein the conventional model of cognition and perception
is lived, into uncommon or extraordinary ones, high or low,
where the conventional model has, usually, not yet been
learned and assumed. By these means, I worked to awaken the
crisis of true and radical Understanding, of Divine
Ignorance, by making use of the intelligence released in the
individual case in the midst of the contrast between his or
her ordinary and extraordinary states.

1. Garbage and the Goddess (Lower
Lake, California: The Dawn Horse Press, 1974), pp. 337-348.

---

Until now, the Radical Power of the
Heart could never have been considered sufficient, because
people insist on miracles, effects, and fascinations. It was
in fact necessary to operate in the way I have described
until the lessons of my argument had been made in some
living way. But now I can and do consider the Power of the
Heart, the “mere” Divine, to be sufficient. And by the
“Power of the Heart,” I mean the Power or Presence that is
the Divine, which does not lead toward any goal of exclusive
Self-realization, but which serves the awakening of the
non-exclusive, regenerated, eternal Nature and Condition of
all arising, free of the illusion of separate or defined
consciousness, and free of all dilemma or implication on the
basis of objects, high or low. Uncommon “internal”
phenomena, if they appear, are purely secondary, as with any
change of circumstance. They may follow spontaneously upon
the Power of the Heart, but they are to be understood.
Concerned and craving involvement with changes is itself a
way that never changes. There is no humor in it. It is not
given up to the Divine Reality. It is like spending all day
eating a salad, waiting for Wednesday again and
again.

In the current exchanges about the
true Way of life, people are alternately invited either to
submit themselves in childish, emotional, and cultic
fashion, usually by grace of “hype,” to one or another
glamorous tradition, personality, or possible effect, or
else to assert their adolescent independence from any Divine
Influence, Master, or Way by engaging in any one of the
seemingly numberless, cool, mental, and strategic methods of
self-indulgence, self-possession, self-help, deprogramming,
or certified sudden transcendentalism now available in these
media-motivated times.

In the midst of the pervasive
language of these offerings is all the implicit crawling
fear of children and adolescents, surrounded by Parent,
waiting for Wednesday, wasting weekends on authorities who
preach against authority, or who promote peculiar
enthusiasms for secret, unique, scriptural, and wholly
fulfilling techniques for bodily, emotional, and mental
absorption’s in the One True Reality, which everyone
advertises, but very few find sufficient. Religious,
spiritual, and philosophical revivals are so plastic and
popular, as mindless as soap, and yet they seem always to
distract the world. In spite of all this “revival,” I must
do my work, and those who respond to me must, in the face of
every kind of street-call, TV barb, and hype of Mom and Dad,
make their way to me and with me in a wholly authentic and
useful manner.

I am not the usual man. All that I
teach has been awakened and tested in my own case. There is
Grace. There is Truth. There is God, which is both Real and
Reality. There are true and false or fruitless ways to live.
There are partial revelations. What is only distraction and
foolishness has always been part of the theatre of mankind.
This need not concern us, if our need for true illumination
is strong enough. What we are obliged to do is realize, in
our own case, a heart that is the center of our life, that
is neither self-indulgent nor foolish, and that is
responsible only to Truth.

 

Therefore, the fundamental dimension
of this Power of the Divine Master is not Force, but mere
Presence. Every form of Force is secondary, and, ultimately,
a conditional expression. The Heart is perfect, direct, and
there is no Force that may be identified with it. In the
midst of the fundamentally silent and moveless communication
of the Heart, the Divine Power in Ignorance, this Intuition
or radical Understanding of our real Nature, Condition, and
Life-Process may be Realized. It may be perfectly Realized
by one who lives the whole discipline, the lifetime of
devotional sacrifice, who studies the Teaching and fulfills
the demands of the Spiritual Master, who makes right or
sacred use of the Company of the Spiritual Master, who
serves and lives in the midst of all kinds of conditions
that arise, within and without, and remains a devotee in the
midst of them. Such a one will ultimately and steadily
Realize that all things arising are merely the modification
of that very Consciousness or Radiant Reality that is his or
her always Present Nature and Condition.

More and more, the living
consciousness of the devotee will dwell in its own prior
Nature and Condition. And none of that is a matter of
manifest yogic or worldly attainment. It is not a matter of
any experience whatsoever. It is a matter of falling out of
the conditional and conventional representation of existence
as every world, body, mind, and ego-soul, into the prior,
absolute Enjoyment or Real Condition of all arising.

That radically intuitive Realization
has no qualities of which we can speak. There is nothing to
be recommended about it that would make sense to anybody who
is not already drawn to it. But from the position of
ego-dissolution, of Enjoyment, of the Nature and Condition
that is the non-exclusive Divine Reality, or Ignorance,
there is all Wisdom, even relative to birth, life, death,
waking, dreaming, and sleeping.

“Experiences,” high and low, are
required by those who are still lingering in the conditions
of their childhood and adolescence. Everything a child does
is a manifestation of one underlying assumption: dependence.
When you are a child, the assumption of dependence is
eminently realistic and useful. But it should be a temporary
stage of psycho-physical life, in which one’s functions are
nurtured and developed in conventional ways. However, there
is commonly a lag in the transition to manhood, because of
the shocks experienced in the immature attempts to function
in the world.

 

Thus, to some degree, every man or
woman lingers in the childhood assumption of dependence.
And, insofar as men and women are children, they seek to
enlarge that personal assumption of dependence into a
universal conception in the form of the God-Cosmos-Parent
game, the game of dependence upon and obedience to That upon
which all depends. That childish aspect in each of us seeks
always to verify the condition of dependence in forms of
safety and relative unconsciousness. That childish demand in
every man and woman is the principal origin of religion,
which means “reunion,” or, literally, “to bind again.” It is
the search to be reunited, to experience the vital and
emotional reestablishment of some imagined or felt Condition
or State of life that is previous to responsibility. It is
the urge toward the parented, enclosed condition.

 

This urge always seeks experiences,
beliefs, and immunities as a consolation for the primitive
cognition of fear and vulnerability. And the “way” enacted
by such a motivation is principally a game of obedience to
parent-like enormities.

It is in the childhood of man that
the idea of God-apart or Reality-beyond is conceived. The
sense of dependence initiates the growing sense of separate
and separated self through the experiential theatre of
growth. The intuition of the Whole, the One, is the ground
of birth, but “growing up” is a conventional pattern of
initiation in which the sense of difference is intensified.
At the conventional level of the life-functions themselves,
there needs to be such functional or practical
differentiation, but the implications in the plane of
Consciousness are the cause of an unnatural adventure of
suffering and seeking in dilemma.

The passage of childhood thus
becomes the ground for the eventual conception of the
mutually exclusive trinity of God-apart, separate self, and
world-in-itself (any world, high or low). The drama implied
in the added assumptions of independent self and objective
world is generated at a later phase of life than is realized
by the child. The child himself barely realizes the full
force of implication in the ego-concept or the world of
things. His principal concern is relative to the
God-Parent-Reality, That on which all depends, and his
growing but as yet not fully realized sense of separated
self-existence. Separate self and objective world are yet
hidden in unconsciousness for the child. They are themselves
a mysterious and later realization of that which is at first
only felt, not conceptualized, as fear and sorrow.
Therefore, the child is always grasping for permanent
security in an undifferentiated, unborn bliss, wherein the
threats implied in life are forgotten and unknown. Re-union
through obedience is the way the living child learns in
secret, while the life that grows the child through
experience continually demonstrates the failure of all
childish seeking.

There must be a transition from
childhood to manhood. That transition is also commonly
acknowledged as a stage in the psycho-physical development
of a human being. It is called adolescence. This stage also
tends to be prolonged indefinitely, and, indeed, perhaps the
majority of “civilized” men and women are occupied with the
concerns of this transition most of their lives. The
transitional stage of adolescence is marked by a sense of
dilemma, just as the primal stage of childhood is marked by
a sense of dependence. It is in this transitional stage that
the quality of living existence as a dilemma is conceived.
It is the dilemma imposed by the conventional assumption of
separate, egoic, independent consciousness, and thus
separative habits and action. That whole assumption is the
conventional inheritance from childhood, and its clear,
personal comprehension, felt over against the childish urge
to dependence, is what initiates the ambiguous conflicts of
the phase of adolescence.

The dilemma of adolescence is a
continual goad to dramatization. It is the drama of the
double-bind of dependence versus independence. Adolescence
is the origin of cleverness and, in general, of mind. What
we conventionally call the conscious mind is a strategic
version of consciousness that is always manufacturing
motivations. And, in the adolescent, these motivations or
desires are mutually exclusive or contradictory. This is
because he or she is always playing with impulsive
allegiance to two exclusive principles: dependence and
independence. The early or childhood condition yields the
tendency to assume dependence, but the conventional learning
of childhood, as well as the general growth of the
individual psycho-physical state, yields to the growing
person the equally powerful tendency to assume independence.
The result is conventional consciousness or conscious mind,
as opposed to the unconsciousness of childhood, but it is
strategic in nature, and its foundation is the actual
conception of dilemma. Therefore, adolescence is the origin
of the great search in all men and women. It is an eternally
failed condition, an irrevocable double-bind. It is the very
form of Narcissus,2 or eternal self-reflection (immunity)
achieved by impulsive, psycho-physical flight from the
impositions of relational conditions.

2. In The Knee of Listening (Los
Angeles: The Dawn Horse)

The solutions developed in the
adolescent theatre of mankind phase between the exotic and
exclusive extremes of either yielding to the status of egoic
dependence (thus tending to disintegrate character) or
asserting the status of egoic independence (thus tending to
rigidify character). Both extremes remain tenuous,
threatened by the possibility of the opposite destiny, and
involve an ongoing sense of dilemma. We make culture and
adventure out of such mid-learning. In the case of the
yielding toward the childish condition of dependence, we see
more of the mystical-invocatory-absorbed tendency. In the
case of the revolutionary assertion of independence, we see
more of the analytical-materialistic-discriminatory
tendency. In the adolescent range between these two extremes
are all of the traditional and usual solutions of man,
including the common understanding of religious and
spiritual life.

Traditional religious spirituality,
in the forms in which it is most commonly proposed or
presumed, is a characteristically adolescent creation that
represents a balance between the extremes. It is not a life
of mere absorption in the mysterious enclosure of existence.
It is strategic absorption. It raises the relatively
non-strategic and unconscious life of childhood dependence
to the level of a fully strategic, conscious life of
realized dependence or absorption. Its goal is not merely
psychological reunion, but total psychic liberation into
some imagined or felt previous Nature, Position, or State of
Being.

Press, 1973), page 26, Bubba
describes Narcissus as follows:

He is the ancient one
visible in the Greek “myth,” who was the universally adored
child of the gods, who rejected the loved-one and every form
of love and relationship, who was finally condemned to the
contemplation of his own image, until he suffered the fact
of eternal separation and died in infinite
solitude.

I began to see that
same logic operative in all men and every living thing, even
the very life of the cells and the energies that surround
every living entity or process. It was the logic or process
of separation itself, of enclosure and immunity. It
manifested as fear and identity, memory and experience. It
informed every function of being, every event. It created
every mystery. It was the structure of every imbecile link
in the history of our suffering.

When the child of man fully realizes
the way of obedience to That on which all depends, he has
also entered the phase of adolescence. At that point he also
has realized the assumptions of the ego-self and the world
as apparently independent or objective dimensions, exclusive
of or other than the Reality that is the goal of all
dependence. Therefore, the way of obedience, fully
developed, is already a way of dilemma, of conflict, of
struggle with self, as every religious person realizes by
experience. Truly, then, the experiential realization of the
way of childhood, or dependence, is fully demonstrated only
in the advent of human adolescence.

In every form of its adventure, the
way of experience and attainment conceived in the
adolescence of man is a struggle for solutions to a
principal dilemma. And that dilemma is itself the
characteristic demonstration of all such adventures, as well
as of the mere suffering of the usual man. In the
adolescence of man, the separate, separated, and separative
self is the motivating assumption in our common suffering
and our common heroism, both in life and in spirit. The
sense of permanently independent existence is the source of
that dilemma which undermines the undifferentiated
dependence of mere birth. In the adolescent man, there is
the unrelenting search for the success, salvation,
realization, transcendental security, survival, immunity, or
healing of the assumed ego. The ego, self, or soul as Self
is the primary assumption of the adolescent man, even as the
assumption of God, or That on which all depends, is the
primary assumption of the child of man. Therefore, in the
usual man, who is embedded in the adolescent conception, the
idea of God becomes in doubt, or is chronically resisted.
Thus, “sin” (“to miss the mark”) enters into the
consciousness of adolescence. And the world becomes merely a
scene of the adolescent drama wherein even the very “stuff”
of the world is viewed as a problem, a principal warfare of
opposites, in which manipulation of manifest things, rather
than radical intuition of the eternally Present Nature,
Condition, Form, and Process, becomes the hope of
peace.

There is a mature, real, and true
phase of man. Our manhood is radically free of all childish
things and all that is attained, acquired, and made in the
adolescent adventures of our conventional life. In that
mature phase, the principle of separation is undermined in
Real Consciousness, and exclusive God, self, and world are
returned to the Condition of Truth. In the maturity of man,
the world is not abandoned, nor is it lived as the scene of
adolescent theatre, the adventure in dilemma. Exclusive God
occupies the child, and exclusive self occupies the
adolescent, and both see the world only in terms of their
own limiting principle or suffering. But in the real or
mature man the world, or the totality of all arising
(subjective, objective, high and low), not in its exclusive
sense but in Truth, is primary. In the mature man, the world
is felt as World, as a single, absolute, non-separate
Reality, implying no separate “self” or outside “God,” but
including the Reality they each imply. For such a one, the
Absolute Reality and the world are the same. The World is
the inclusive Reality, the Divine Nature, Condition, Form,
and Process. It includes all that is manifest, and all that
is unmanifest, all universes, conditions, beings, states,
and things, all that is within, all that is without, all
that is visible, and all that is invisible, all that is
here, all that is there, all dimensions of space-time, and
all that precedes space-time.

Clearly, the search for realization
via experiences of all kinds is the principal characteristic
of both the childish and the adolescent or conventional and
traditional stages of human development. Those who come to
me, like all other men and women, are, temporarily, more or
less fixed in the demands of their childhood and
adolescence. They look for experiential reasons to resume
the sense of unconscious dependence, while at the same time
they struggle to realize some kind of conceived and
experientially founded independence. Therefore, they are
always rising and falling, coming and going.

The experiential or life-dimension
of the Divine Transforming Power contains every possibility
for the holy or unholy fascination of children and
adolescents. But I must always work to disentangle men from
their lingering and strategic life-motives, so they may
realize the Way of the final or mature phase of life. It is
only in that mature phase of functional human existence that
life in Truth may be realized and the experiential drama of
unconsciousness, egoity, conventional mind, and strategic
motivation be understood.

Thus, I have, in the theatre of my
work with individuals in the past, made temporary use of the
uncommon experiential possibilities that exist by the Power
of God. But it has only been an exercise to trick
individuals out of the usual and conventional forms of,
their attention. It has only been a bit of theatre whereby
what was awakened could also be confounded. Therefore, I
have continually pointed out the strategies that experience
itself awakens. I have always shown how the principle of
seeking underlies even the turning of devotees to me, and
how all of that is founded in the dilemma of separated
existence and the motivations toward every kind of
separative activity and knowledge. All of the theatre of
these last few years of my work has been an instrument for
weaning devotees from their commitments to childish and
adolescent ways, so they could be established in relation to
me as responsible and free men and women by the Power of
Communion with the Process, Form, and Nature that is the
Divine or Real Condition.

The mature phase of life is not
characterized by either unconscious dependence or the
strategically conscious dilemma of dependence-independence.
It is the phase of intuitive attention (rather than
dependence) and real responsibility (rather than exclusive
independence). As in childhood, there is no problematic
strategy at the root of the mature phase of life. But
childhood is a realm of unconsciousness, whereas the mature
man is freely conscious. All of this is because, unlike the
case of adolescence, there is no irreducible dilemma
conceived in life and consciousness.

This mature phase of life requires
conscious, intuitive, and radical Understanding, the Divine
disposition or presumption of Ignorance, for its ongoing
foundation. The separate and separative principle of
independent self, the strategies of mind and desires, the
usual self-possessed life of the avoidance of relationship,
the urges toward unconscious dependence and mechanical or
wild independence, and all the mediocre and mediumistic
solutions that balance or fulfill the extremes of
experience, all of these must be obviated in the radical
presumption that, no matter what arises as apparent
experience or knowledge, “I” do not know what a single thing
is. Therefore, understanding initiates the mature phase of
life. The mature or responsible and truly conscious phase of
life is thus the origin of the real practice of life, or
true action. And to this mature phase of life, perfectly
realized, belong not the usual religious and spiritual
solutions, but perfect or radical Ignorance as the Principle
of life. Such maturity or true humanity is characterized by
no-seeking, no-dilemma, no orientation toward the goal of
any conceived or remembered state or condition, but radical
Enjoyment, the perfectly prior, and thus always present,
Nature and Condition that is Reality. Only a man thus free
enjoys manifest existence in the very Nature and Condition
and Heart of the Divine, which is also the Process and Form
and Light and Fullness of the worlds.

When I say my work to reveal the
Teaching is complete, I mean that I will no longer serve the
child or the adolescent in those who come to me. Those who
would approach me must come to me on the basis of the
Teaching, the effective presumption of the lesson or
argument of all that I have done and said in the past. The
educational services of Vision Mound Ceremony will engage
and prepare all those who come to me. And when they come, I
will not commonly engage them in the experiential drama of
conventional and possible worldly, religious, or spiritual
phenomena. I am the Heart. I yield nothing, but I demand
everything. The Way awakened in my Company is not one of
accumulation and attainment. It is the way of dissolution,
in which the conventional realization of life is
undermined.

I expect those who come to me
through the instruments of the Teaching and Vision Mound
Ceremony to live the real practice of this mature and
intelligent realization of man. Now that all of this has
been demonstrated, now that the Teaching is full, those who
have been coming to me and living with me during this period
of instruction, and all those who come in the future, should
begin to enjoy Divine Communion in my Company in the spirit
of true manhood, or human maturity.