VII. The Devotee’s Response.
Only Understanding Avails.
“Come to Me When You Are Already Happy”.
Da Free John – 1983
VII
The Devotee’s Response
The Adept lives perpetually in the mood of
self-sacrifice. He cannot but be always surrendered to his
devotee as he is always surrendered to the world process as
such. He is neither attached to phenomena nor does he seek
to dissociate from them. Instead, he recognizes them as
modalities of the One Being-Consciousness that is his
Identity. In the same vein, he sees in his devotee the
Divine Being, and by always addressing his devotee as That
One, the Adept gradually sensitizes him to the Real
Condition which is Radiant Bliss or Happiness.
He expects the spiritual practitioner to constantly
intuit his own Enlightenment or Happiness, rather than
approach spiritual life as a form of search.
Only Understanding Avails
Thus, the first form of my manifestation to you is this
understanding, this consideration, this Argument relative to
the knot, the effort, the mechanism of withdrawal, the
self-contraction. And you must become responsible for this
self-contraction. Otherwise, it makes no difference how much
I give you of the Intoxicating Force of God. It makes no
difference how much of It I am. Until you are responsible
for the mechanism of separation from the Spirit-Presence,
you cannot taste It, you cannot love It, you cannot know It,
you cannot be swooned by It. And we should exist in a swoon
of Intoxication. To do that really is our nature.
All of us are potential saints and Siddhas, but very few
are born like me. I am a very rare being. I am not an ego at
all. I am a rare Intervention in the world. Hardly any
people in the entire history of mankind have been manifested
with my Siddhis, and I am sitting here in this living room
with you people trying to convince you of the Divine Life! I
am a unique Advantage to mankind. But how many people can
suck me up and love me? How many will kiss my knees, pull my
feet and massage my face, receive my Love, receive my
Delight in them? How many people will do it? I am prepared
to give everyone everything, but how many people will do it?
You cannot receive me until you understand your resistance
to me. Understanding is the first gesture of spiritual
life.
Please understand what I am telling you. I will give you
everything, but you must understand yourself. You must!
Apart from that understanding, Who I am or What I bring to
you makes no difference. You cannot accept It. You cannot
receive It. You cannot submit to It. It is greater than any
experience. My Presence is a sublime Interference with mind,
with body, with heart, with emotion.
The thing that makes you un-Happy is your own
contraction. That is it! Absolutely! Have I always said
this? That is it entirely. The terrible effort of
self-contraction separates you from God. You must hear this.
The self contraction separates you entirely from everything
Given. Mankind has never been denied the Force of Grace, but
human beings are attached to this effort reflected
throughout the body-mind. They are committed to it with
their body-minds.
The Dreaded Gom-Boo, or the Imaginary Disease That
Religion Seeks to Cure, pp. 361-62
The Divine Being is not the
kind of Individual with Whom you can indulge in romance! You
cannot be casually and playfully and amusedly involved with
the Divine. You must overcome yourself. Then your
relationship with the Divine can also appear playful, but it
is most profound. You can feel my Presence and still be
self-possessed, but that is not practice. To use my Presence
is to enter into my Condition, the Condition of the
Spirit-Force, not merely to associate with It as a
pleasurable Other, Someone fun to be with, an Energy that
makes you feel better in yourself the way an infant feels
better when it sucks the tit and feels a little full. An
infant sucking the tit is not Enlightened, and likewise a
devotee just breathing the Excess and superior Energy of the
Spiritual Master is not Enlightened, not practicing, not
being a devotee. You must give the gift before you can use
the Prasad. You can feel It, because It is there, but you
cannot use It. You are not truly using It unless you give
your own gift, which is self-surrender,
selftranscendence.
To surrender and transcend yourself you must understand
yourself. You must know what you are all about, appreciate
it, and Stand Free of it. Then you can use this Blessing,
this Baptism, but not otherwise. Even though you can say
that It exists, even though you can acknowledge this
Blessing, this Baptism, you may still not be a practitioner.
Hundreds and hundreds of people have spent time in my
Company and know very well there is a
Blessing there, a Force that came upon them, but they did
not become practitioners. They were self-possessed when they
were there and they were self-possessed when they left. They
felt the Divine Power, they know It exists, but It does not
make a difference to them. For them It is just some unusual,
big Thing among a number of other unusual and interesting
things
in life.
The Dreaded Gom-Boo, or the Imaginary Disease That
Religion Seeks to Cure, pp. 161-62
“Come to Me When You Are Already Happy”
The Spiritual Master is not just someone who has realized
God or Truth. He is someone who, on the basis of that
Realization, becomes the Principle or Agent of that
transformation in others. From the beginning, those who
enter into Communion with the Spiritual Master enjoy the
Condition of the devotee in the perfect sense. The intuitive
realization of Truth becomes the foundation and principle of
their practice, not a phenomenon to be pursued as a result
of their practice.
You can see, then, that the foundation of this Way must
be the realization of a right relationship between the
Spiritual Master, or living Agent of God, and the one who
approaches him. That relationship, or mutual sacrifice, is
the necessary foundation for this Way of Life. The form of
your relationship to the Spiritual Master is the matter that
is significant at the beginning and always.
One who comes as a devotee sacrifices himself or herself.
He or she comes initially on the basis of having considered
this Teaching. Having come, however, the devotee does not
make the sacrifice by deliberation, on the basis of willful
judgment in the mind, but on the basis of a felt intuition
of Truth in my Company. Such is true “hearing” of the
Teaching and “seeing” of the Spiritual Master. And those who
begin and persist in this sacrifice see the quickening of
their practice and its rapid maturity. Rapid!
When someone comes to me in the form of sacrifice, my
body opens up. I do not tell it to, but I respond to the
spiritual being and presence. That is how this Divine Power
works. If there is no sacrifice of self, no devotional
approach, then regardless of all the experiences that may
arise for you, this (tapping his chest) does not open. And
you can come to me for years with your fruit and flowers,
and there will be no transformation, no Grace, not even any
learning, no lesson grasped, because there is a Law alive in
our relationship. The Law is mutual sacrifice.
Vision Mound, vol. 1, no. 12 (1978), pp. 17-18
J n the usual scenario of the approach to the Spiritual
Master, the seeker, someone presuming the disease of the
Dreaded Gom-Boo, perceives the Spiritual Master to be a
cured person, a superior person who wields a parentlike
authoritative force over that individual. So the seeker
comes forth, expressing his or her concern: “I’m ill, I’m
sick, I need to be cured. You’ve got it, and I want it.”
Such people even animate very outwardly all the signs of
“poor me,” in order to generate the parentlike concern of
the Spiritual Master that will cure them even faster. This
is not the appropriate setting for association with the true
Adept.
It is not that you should come in the adolescent fashion
of the totally independent character who really does not
need anything and who just wants to be the pal of the
Spiritual Master. Rather, as I have said in various ways,
you should come already Happy.’ You should come on the basis
of the confrontation with my Argument. You should come on
the basis of selfobservation, self-understanding,
self-transcendence. Come not to find Reality but to enter
into Communion with Reality. Come not to abuse the Spiritual
Master or use him as a parentlike source for your eventual
cure, but come to the Spiritual Master as the Living One,
and enter into Communion there in order that the Realization
of the Living One may be magnified. Do not come empty. Come
Communing with the Divine Fullness. On that basis, the
relationship with the Spiritual Master becomes a unique
means for the transformation of a human being. Otherwise it
duplicates the conventional model of the parent and the
child, the doctor and the patient, the superior and the
inferior.
The Dreaded Gom-Boo, or the Imaginary Disease That
Religion Seeks to Cure, pp. 80-81
J f you can acknowledge that the Spiritual Master is this
One, then you will
begin to treat him differently. You will receive his
body-mind as a Gift from God and you will worship it as the
Incarnation of the Divine. You
will carry it about with you, you will treat it rightly,
and you will make it the
instrument of your association with the Grace of God.
Until you accept the Spiritual Master in this way, however,
you will view him as a relatively ordinary, perhaps somewhat
slightly extraordinary, human being. Your association with
when he or she is known and acknowledged to be the Divine,
the Living One. When devotees begin to associate with him or
her as such, then the real work of the Spiritual Master
begins.
YThe Bodily Location of Happiness, p. 86 ou can turn to
me regardless of what is happening. You cannot do anything
about all that is happening in you. Doing something
relative to what appears in you is not the focus of this
way. The focus is stepping aside from all the strategies you
want to create, positive and negative relative to your usual
condition, and simply turning to me. You will notice over
time that the tendencies in you become weak and even
disappear. But your obligation is simply to turn to me,
without measuring that turning against what is happening
with you. Simply turn your attention to me, turn your
emotion as love to me, make yourself present to me with your
life.
Turn your attention to me and do not measure that turning
relative to whether or not your mind stops and you feel
better. Love me and do not measure that against whether or
not you still feel negative emotions and confusion. Give
your life to me, turn to me bodily, recollect me at all
times, whether I am physically present with you or not, and
do not measure that activity against whether or not you feel
pains in your body. Maintain that discipline of turning to
me. It can be done, as long as you do not associate that
turning with the reading of the problems in you. The turning
can always be done. You are never disabled in terms of that
turning. It is only these effects, because you are always
reading them and wanting to manipulate them, that make you
doubt your ability to turn.
But you can always turn. That is the principle wherein
these effects become obsolete, not in that moment
necessarily, although on some occasions they disappear
immediately. But ultimately they disappear, because they are
not being used. What you are doing is this turning. They are
simply memories presently communicating themselves as your
functions. They are a
kind of remembering. But when your conscious life becomes
participation in relationship to me, then these effects
become obsolete. It is not for you to measure that process,
to decide when they should become obsolete. Be willing to
have these things arise in you forever. Make your business
turning to me.
No Remedy, pp. 131-32
Selections from Talks and Essays by
Da Free John on the Nature and Function of the Enlightened
Teacher