No Remedy Compiled & edited by Bonnie Beavan
and Nina Jones in collaboration with Bubba Free John. NO REMEDY Part Three: The Complications of Sadhana THE WAY OF UNDERSTANDING Only Then Does the Student Touch My Heart: The Conscious
Process as Prasadd [Students] also continue to approach me
through the formality of Prasad, and their lives continue to
develop as service to me. However, the formal process of
Prasad is not engaged during our times of sitting. It is
done by students before or after I appear in the Hall. The
time of sitting is an outwardly non-formal extension or
realization of the formal sacrament of Prasad. Therefore,
the student engages in an inwardly formal process that
essentially duplicates the outward formalities of the
sacrament of Prasad. This inwardly formal process is what is
implied by my invitation to students to simply sit with me
and be consciously involved, along with me, in the enjoyment
of our mutual company Satsang is the condition of life in which there is
constant and conscious involvement in a total, practical,
and mutually sacrificial relationship with the Guru, or the
living Divine Presence. This Satsang is the foundation
principle of the way of Understanding. It is realized in
action in more total, perfect, and spiritually profound ways
as the stages of sadhana develop. The new Communion devotee
realizes this Satsang in the form of the practical or
functional devotion of his or her life as service to me. The
student takes this a step further. When sitting with me in
the Satsang Hall, at Persimmon or at home, the student
constantly sacrifices himself to me and constantly receives
the Prasad of my spiritual influence. As long as he or she
can consciously maintain this activity while sitting with me
in the Satsang Hall, the student may remain until I get up
to leave. If distractions begin to hold his attention too
powerfully, then the student should leave the room and
continue his sadhana in the form of practical service to me.
(When sitting at home or under circumstances when I am not
physically present, the student may spend up to an hour each
time, twice a day, in this non-formal process of
Prasad.) Sitting with me is Satsang, it is always the great
occasion of Prasad, it is mutual sacrifice. The life of
Satsang is right fulfillment of the Law, which is Sacrifice.
Therefore, the student simply sits with me, just as all my
devotees simply live with me. But the living and the sitting
must be forms of the Law, forms of sacrifice in the manner
or after the model of the formal occasion of
Prasad.4 Since he is already involved in the second or spiritual
stage of the way of Divine Communion, the new student in the
way of Understanding will already have been sitting with
Bubba in formal Satsang. And the initiation of the
Guru-Siddhi will essentially already be active in him. And,
in the beginning of his work in the way of Understanding,
the form of his sadhana is not essentially different from
his practice as a Communion devotee. He continues to witness
the stirring up of his whole subjective life in the intense
Presence and Power of the Guru. If he maintains the form of
his sadhana, he will neither indulge nor suppress all this.
He will simply observe it as it arises while continuing in
the momentum of his ordinary, functional life. We all tend
to get distractedif not horrifiedat some of the
content that is revealed to us. Thus, we temporarily lose
(actually abandon) the thread of sadhana. But when the
student sees something about himself, he should, like the
Communion devotee, simply take it into account and continue
to sacrifice himself to Bubba through the practical
conditions of life. In the midst of formal sitting, if some
sort of content arises, he should simply turn his attention
again to Bubba. It is not that your subjective “stuff” may arise in
Bubbas Presence. It is supposed to, so that the conscious
process may begin in you. But if you get involved in that
content and distracted to the point of being unable to
return attention to the Guru, then it is time to get up from
meditation and go out and perform that same sacrifice in
more tangible ways. Many students find that when they
actually do leave the Satsang Hall and go serve in some
practical fashion, they feel the Gurus Presence in their
lives more powerfully than when they were sitting distracted
in his Presence in the Hall. Bubba recently wrote, The true sacrificial approach to me, the true turning
of self to the practice of devotion, which is the whole life
made to serve me under all conditions, ensures that our
spiritual connection is alive and my quickening and
awakening Siddhi will be effective.6 What Bubba means by devotion is not emotional enthusiasm,
but living commitment. If you are committed to the Guru
rather than to your own transformation, you will always do
what is appropriate The core of the students life, then, is the continued
self-sacrifice that began in the second stage of the way of
Divine Communion. As a student, however, you are beginning
to receive the Gurus Prasad in forms that you perhaps could
not fully appreciate as a Communion devotee. Unless you are
constantly reestablishing yourself in the principle of
sacrifice to the Guru, you may not be able to appreciate
these forms of Prasad even now. It sometimes seems
impossible, when starkly witnessing your withdrawal from
others, to recognize and use that observation as Prasad. You
have to be sensitive to the intuitively happy, free quality
of all real observation as a spontaneous event of Grace. And
you have to live your sadhana of surrendering your life,
negativity included, to the Guru. As Bubba says, happiness,
freedom from concern, is itself the discipline. Again, it
sometimes seems unnecessarily austere to really surrender
the delicious energies and blisses that may awaken in you as
a result of the Gurus Presence. In that case you have to
resort again to service and sacrifice to Bubba. Those
effects of the Gurus Prasad also must be observed; as a
student you have no right to them. Your business as a
student is the comprehension of your entire life game. In
the Community, the way of action that serves such
intelligence will always be demanded of you, again and
again, every day and every hour. And so, in time, as you
yield without dramatization all your preferences,
inclinations, and patterns of avoidance, the conscious
process will intensify as real self-observation, insight,
and enquiry When Bubba speaks of non-dramatization, by the way, he
does not mean that the student must become a perfect human
being! To try to do that would miss the point. The student
has to see the failure of his life, the impossibility of
“succeeding” at sadhana. His vital stance and motion as a
separate human being in the world must be undermined in
student sadhana. So the actual play of it does not read like
a story of perfect will, intensity, commitment, and
faultless action. The student is continually seeing his
faults, continually being confronted with his inclinations
to dramatize his emotions, his laziness, his boredom, his
cravingsyou name it, it all comes up. And every now
and again, he blows it. But the secret to sadhana, even if
youve blown it temporarily, is to pick up again the thread
of your submission to the Guru and become responsible for
what you have seen. As Bubba says, “just dont do that any
more.” It is not a matter of correcting your failings or
suppressing your tendencies, but of allowing yourself to see
immediately what all that amounts tothe avoidance of
relationship. If your observation is true, you may then
become responsible in those areas, instead of remaining
automatically subject to your unconscious and subconscious
whims. The students service to me, under and as all
conditions, is his only meditation, until enquiry. My
service is in the forms of Teaching, Community, and Siddhi
(as Prasad and Grace in every phase of sadhana) I look for this service, this loving sacrifice. Only
then does the student touch my heart. Such a one is given
everything freely, happily, and in the proper
time.7 As this process of Satsang or Prasad continues over
time under all the conditions of sadhana, the student will
see the development of true hearing, random
self-observation, and insight. When these have matured, then
he may also adapt to the responsibility of enquiry. Enquiry,
then, becomes the form of his meditation in Satsang, under
all conditions, the responsible means whereby he abides
always, consciously, and intuitively in my
Presence.8 SELF-OBSERVATION IS ABSOLUTELY ECSTATIC From all this, we can see that the whole development of
the conscious process at the core of the way of
Understanding is a manifestation of the Gurus Prasad. It is
all Grace and all dependent upon your surrender of your life
to the Guru in practical terms. Moreover, once we do become
sensitive to its truly Divine qualities, even the early
stages of this conscious process become very happy events
for us. Self-observation, for instance, which sounds a
little dry and often reveals our subjective life in its most
grotesque and nasty forms, is in fact a perfectly joyous
occasion of Grace Now that members of the Community only begin to deal with
the conscious process if they are obviously inclined to it,
and only when their sadhana as devotees of the Guru is
mature, it is easier to appreciate that real conscious joy
more quickly and truly than in the early days of the Ashram.
Bubba spent several years laying the groundwork of the way
of Understanding. Because he took such pains to describe and
demonstrate in detail the nature of the activity of
Narcissus and the various qualities of action that we would
see in the course of understanding that activity, and
because we tend, due to our own karmic inclination, to focus
upon the content of our lives rather than to enjoy his
Presence with us, most devotees involved in the early stages
of the Community became obsessed with trying to achieve
self-observation, insight, etc. We treated these activities
in Consciousness as if they were activities of mind. We
became very concerned to have it all occur in us, very
absorbed in seeing all kinds of negative things about our
own lives and those of our friends. All of that, of course, had nothing to do with the
true dynamics of the way of Understanding. In this radical
way of inspection, you certainly do see all kinds of
unpleasant things about yourselfthere are nothing but
unpleasant things about yourself, from the point of view of
real Consciousness! But that witnessing in Truth is an
absolutely ecstatic event Why? Because self-observation in the way of
Understanding, in the midst of the life of Divine Communion,
is simple, immediate, and instantaneous restoration to
perfect God-consciousness. It doesnt carry with it all the
celestial trumpets and miraculous feelings of expansion that
we ignorantly associate with God-consciousness in our
thoughts and imagery. But it is very God-consciousness,
nonetheless. Self-observation is spontaneous, present,
uncaused, perfect absorption in the Guru, who is
Consciousness itself The process of discriminative, intuitive insight is a
good indicator of the simultaneous sublimity and simplicity
of life with the Siddha-Guru. There is nothing extraordinary
about it. As an illumination, it is so quiet and free of
dramatic effects that we quite often miss its appearance or
fail to enjoy its true quality. Self-observation is entirely
a Graceit involves no effort whatsoever. And it occurs
in the midst of any and all of the ordinary moments of our
lives, when we are already founded securely in the
devotional life of sacrifice to the Guru through the
practical conditions relative to money, food, sex, study,
and service. It is completely different from any form of
deliberately watching, observing, or analyzing
yourself Self-watching is a kind of solution: you analyze your
behavior, your experiences, your circumstances, your
thoughts, feelings, and all the rest. You assume a kind of
abstracted “witness” point of view, stand back, see it all,
and then you get disgusted with yourself or decide to do
something about it, etc. You will notice that whenever this
occurs, you become dull, self-concerned, very conscious of
dilemma, of problem Self-observation is that insight in which what you
might otherwise watch, or notice in yourself, is undone. It
cannot occur as a method, as a kind of practice. True
self-observation is not a matter of putting yourself forward
in some kind of witnessing point of view to see the things
that are occurring. Self-observation occurs when you are not
present as a self, watching. Self-observation occurs in
natural, functional moments of self-forgetting in which you
are simply doing things. In other words, basically when you
are fulfilling the conditions for sadhana that the Guru has
given you, when you are living them in the spirit of
Satsang, in the spirit of the Teaching, simply doing it in
ordinary terms, at random within such a process you suddenly
see or comprehend something. . . . When we are seated in the
dimension of consciousness itself, not in the seat of the
brain as a strategic position, we suddenly grasp the entire
play that is our humanity. When you are free of all
manipulative exercise, you are like a mirror to your own
event and the process of your life shows itself to you in
instant comprehension.9 BUBBA: The difference becomes clear if you do sadhana.
Self-watching, or conventional self-observation, is itself a
technique, a method. It is not necessarily one that you
adopt, that you devote time to, like reciting a mantra. It
is something that some people do as that kind of technique,
but it is more commonly the kind of method that is a natural
strategy, a common strategy, a part of the accepted notion
of sanity. Everybody is engaged in this practice of
self-watching to one or another degree. Thus, you find
yourself at random moments all day long looking at yourself,
thinking about it all. But self-observation, real
self-observation, is not something done methodically as a
technique DEVOTEE: It just happens? BUBBA: In a sense you could say it just happens. It is
not an activity of the ego, of your deciding to analyze
yourself. This sadhana is not generated by my prescribing
self-observation to you. Rather, it is generated on the
basis of a consideration of the Teaching, a natural turning
to the Guru, accepting his conditions with understanding,
and fulfilling these conditions from hour to hour, always
turning into the form of these conditions, making them the
form of ones relationship to the Guru. This is sacrifice in
its natural form. In the midst of that life there are real
moments of insight from time to time. And when such insight
appears, it is not in the form, “Oh, shucks! Will you look
at that!” That kind of information comes from self-watching.
When you find yourself out, that is self-watching. That is
data. That is images that you capture about yourself. All
that analysis is a natural product of self-watching But the natural product or expression of real
self-observation is radical insight. Where there is such
insight, all the things that you feel bad about on the basis
of your self-analysis or self-watching are undone. In
a moment of real insight, there is no obstruction, there is
no bad guy. The principle of the ego is not present in the
moment of real self-observation, but it is always there in
the moment of self-watching Understand that everyone engages in self-watching. You
are not prohibited from self-watching. However, you are not
asked to self-watch. You will simply and randomly notice
yourself self-watching, and you will begin to understand
this strategy in yourself. You will see what it represents,
why it is there. You will see what it really is. What is
self-watching? It is self-meditation. What is that? It is
contraction. You will really see it. You will know it to be
that. And in those moments, that is insight. That is
self-observation, that is understanding.10 Essentially, the conditions are preventions of
dramatization. They are simple, appropriate, natural,
life-supporting, and all of that, and from a certain point
of view they are good, harmonious, sattwic things to do. But
that is not their essential function. They are not true in
themselves. Their essential function in the way of
Understanding is to prevent the dramatization that you are
always enacting via your functions. When, in some functional
area, you are prevented from dramatization, you
automatically observe yourself. Dramatization prevents
self-observation because it gives you self-enactment through
energies of various kinds and provides you with the
consolation of unconsciousness. The conditions are all ways
of frustrating the intention to dramatize and be
unconscious. Therefore, self-observation arises. It appears
as cognition at the plane of the mind, and thats how you
know youve observed yourself. But actually the root of
self-observation is the Heart of Consciousness itself. That
is why this self-observation is tantamount to
Self-knowledge, knowledge of Brahman, knowledge of the Heart
or Real-God ultimately.11 Thus, it should be clear that self-observation is
essentially an ecstatic instant of absorption in our
natural, Divine Condition, which is Satsang or Divine
Communion. This is not anything like our usual notion of
what ecstasy is. Commonly, ecstasy is thought of as a great
rush of energy, or even absorption in energy or visionary
light to the point of loss of body-consciousness. Real
ecstasy, however, is this very understanding. It involves no
loss of consciousness, but, on the contrary, restoration to
the true position of Consciousness, which is always already
ecstatic relative to the plane of life events. And that is
the kind of free, spacious, clear enjoyment that occurs in a
moment of real self-observation. Notes 4. Bubbas written instructions, November 28, 1975 5. Ibid 6. Bubbas written instructions, November 20, 1975 7. Bubbas written instructions, November 14, 1975 8. Bubbas written instructions, November 28, 1975 9. Bubba Free John, “Hidden Plumbing,” a talk to the
Ashram, April 14, 1975 10. Bubba Free John, “My Company,” a talk to the Ashram,
June 28, 1975 11. Bubba Free John, “Hidden Plumbing.”
An Introduction to the Life and Practices
of the Spiritual Community of Bubba Free John.
First edition: 6/75
Therefore, the student should sit in my Company, but he
should constantly and consciously sacrifice or surrender
himself to me all the while. This is not to be a
self-conscious effort. It is not a kind of “working on
yourself.” It is simply a matter of the constant return of
attention, with love, to my Presence. In the process the
individual will observe the modifications of his attention.
He will observe distractions and subjective involvements of
all kinds. When these arise, he should simply return and
yield his attention to me. This is his gift of self, his
real sacrifice. When this is done, I return to him my own
Gift, my own Presence, my Prasad, my spiritual
influence.5
DEVOTEE: Im not sure what the difference is between
self-observation and self-watching
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“The perfect
among the sages is identical with Me. There is absolutely no
difference between us”
Tripura
Rahasya,
Chap XX,
128-133
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