No Remedy – Bubba Free John – An Introduction to the life and practices of the spiritual community of Bubba Free John

NO REMEDY

Part Two: The Complications of Sadhana

THE WAY OF DIVINE COMMUNION

On Love-Desire

from a talk given on February 15, 1976

(1) There is a vast difference between eroticism, the conventional obsessiveness that some couples feel for one another, and the real process of love-desire which may serve a non-conventional understanding of sexuality. Love-desire is a play of every sexually-oriented couple, of every man-woman relationship, of every kind of sexual relationship. Love and desire are the implications of these unions

 

(2) Most conventional relationships are a play upon the failure of either love or desire. Many couples are very “horny” for one another, always wanting to make it with one another, basically because of the failure of love. The more love fails, the more erotic they become. They are really very cool toward one another, but also very horny at the same time. Then there are other couples in whom there is the failure of desire. In them there is a kind of conventional exploitation of the feeling of love. They are frigid, impotent, and sexless, but always holding hands and kissing and being very cozy with one another. Their obsession is the result of the failure of desire

 

(3) The true and useful form of mutual relationship that includes sexuality is one in which both love and desire are positively present. In that case there is not the usual erotic motivation to exploit sex with one another. It is undone through love. On the other hand, there is not the similarly conventional motivation to hold hands and be children with one another. That motivation is undone through the force of desire

 

(4) Where there is the full complement of love and desire in a relationship, there is not the seedy, erotic inclination to exploit one another all the time, nor is there the kind of distance where there is no love. Then, every occasion of intimacy that includes sexuality is creative, because there is no mind, no imagery. There isnt the sense that you can succeed at it. When you are horny, you know you can succeed in sexual relations, because you are basically obsessed by the exclusive principle of desire

 

(5) Where there is both fullness of love and fullness of desire, you do not have the feeling that you are going to succeed at it. You do not even have the feeling that you can necessarily have the orgasm on the occasion of lovemaking. Orgasm becomes a possibility as the intimacy is played out in every particular occasion. And such an occasion is very new, then, and something that human beings are generally not familiar with. Human beings are generally familiar with the exclusive forms of loving or the exclusive forms of desiring, in which the complement is suppressed. The exclusivity is what creates the energy around desiring or eroticism or loving or just tacky, airy-fairy emotionalism. Where there is the fullness of love-desire, there is no face. There is real attention, real energy, real emotion, real fullness, without the usual content

 

(6) Where both elements of the living process of love-desire are not completely present, you become involved in a conventional orientation to one another, one of these two kinds that I have just described. Where both elements are present, there is a natural commitment to one another that is not a matter of discipline and decision and “I wont make love with anyone else, just with you” and all that sort of stuff. None of those decisions come into play. There is a natural orientation to one another, and therefore, there are occasions of sexual intimacy which create their own immediate destiny through the play of sex but which have no guarantees beforehand

 

(7) Where there is so much love, desire does not become erotic. Where there is so much desire, love does not become twinkle. Where both are active, where there is love-desire in a relationship, there is the motive of real play, and in that case you may begin to grasp the esoteric aspects of the Dharma relative to sexuality. But as long as you have only an exclusive desire relationship with your partner, or an exclusive love relationship, you will never grasp the Teaching relative to sexuality. You will continue to be a random, mediocre person, compromisable by the influence of every other human being who represents sexuality and emotion in some form to you

 

(8) Where there is love-desire, there is natural commitment, natural attention, fullness of presence with one another, not the usual hominess and obsessiveness and twinkiness of a conventional relationship. On the other hand, most relationships are very conventional, a play upon the suppression of either love or desire. You must see, in the case of your marriages, how you are consistently, strategically involved in the suppression of one or another element of the life union. You must ultimately become responsible to the point where love-desire is the form of your connection with your lover. Then you may understand something about the higher, esoteric nature of the sexual process, which I have described to some recently and which most of you will have some contact with eventually

 

(9) There is nothing more disturbing than a continuous sexual contact in which there is no love, in which there is just the conventional and verbal acknowledgment of loving. But you know when you are loved by someone. When the force of love and desire is presented to you through someone, you are profoundly relieved of your conventional mind. And if you truly respond to it through both love and desire in yourself, that response is the grounds for a real marriage

 

(10) Most marriages, though, are just based on either eroticism or twinkle emotionalism. They are agreements, cults, that support the suppression of one or another of these two elements of love and desire. If your marriage is of that kind, and I am certain that all your marriages are of that kind to some degree, then you must understand that play and why you got married-in other words, what the cult is between you. And you must ultimately come to the point where the fullness of love-desire is the form of your play with one another. If it cannot be, then either you will naturally divorce one another eventually, or you will just submit to that limitation and not fully realize yourself in sexual terms

 

(11) DEVOTEE: Bubba, I have noticed that when there is real love-desire, that in itself is the fulfillment. There is no movement towards any satisfaction because love-desire is the total fulfillment at that moment

 

(12) BUBBA: The sexual play is not satisfying except to the erotic mind. Where there is love-desire, nothing changes through the vehicle of sexual play. Where there is love-desire between two people, the orgasm does not produce anything significant. The exercise with one another does not change anything. The condition of their relationship is their enjoyment, and it is constant. The ritual of sexuality does not change it at all. Therefore, only such people, who are free of the conventional ritual of sexuality that exhausts the life-force, may begin to understand higher responsibility relative to the sexual process

 

(13) So where there is genuine love-desire between two people, they are very full, very happy, not always agitated by one another, not always getting horny and exclusive. The conventional motive to sexuality is completely eliminated where there is love with desire. But you are all used to desire without love. You have all seen the magazines and the movies and been turned on. You know what desire is without love, and it is the principle of your sexuality. That is why you get turned on, that is why you respond to eroticisms. And that is why you require your marriages to be erotic, because you depend on that loveless connection through which you may have the orgasm and return to this sense of emptiness. But where you love one another as well as desire one another, the connection is constant. It is always a play

 

(14) Where there is the natural relationship of love-desire, there is also sex play, not only the actual, typical sexual play that you all know about. But the life drama between two people is all sexual play. It is all full of energy. It all brings energy into being. Where there is love-desire between two people, it continually awakens the life-force in them and makes them very full. And occasionally, at random, they engage in actual sexual relations, but not obsessively

 

(15) But you are all obsessed with sex. It is all pornographic. Pornography is desire without love. It is the specimen of movement without opening. And you are all involved in this eroticism. You are obsessed with no-love. The significance of it is not the obsession with desire and sexuality itself, but the obsession with no-love that promotes such an involvement. As long as love is not the principle of your presence in the world, you are completely limited to the force of desiring, not only of sexual desiring, but of all desiring. All your life is desiring, without love. It excludes love. It is based on no-love. It depends on no-love. And therefore everything you are doing reinforces no-love. But where there is love, then the pattern of desiring in the world becomes benign and intelligent, no longer a matter of suffering. Then at least there is the possibility of the conscious process, the sacrificial process, of Divine Realization

 

(16) As long as you are simply obsessed with desire and therefore with no-love, there is no realization, there is no sadhana. And there is great pain in a life obsessed with desire and its fulfillment without love. Where there is love there is no obsession. All obsessions fall where there is love. And there is no hominess in love. There is great fullness, and all sexual play is fulfilled in the moment without mind. If you are “making love” and also thinking or imagining at the same time, there is no love. Where there is felt love with your lover, there is no pornography. And this is the only form in which sexuality has any value. Sexuality without love is terrible. None of you should engage in sexual intimacy without love-desire. Do not respond to the exclusive motive in yourself that depends upon the suppression of one or the other of these two. Become sensitive to it and develop your intimate relationships to the point where they are realized in this way. And only then engage your intimacy with one another, not at any other time. Never! That is the discipline of marriage. Marriage is not the excuse to exploit your tendencies in a way that society forgives or accepts. The private ritual is not the thing served by marriage, certainly not in this Ashram!

(17) When people love and desire one another, they cease to be promiscuous. People are obsessively involved with trying to control their promiscuity. They get married, but still they want to make it with other people. They play around, and they do not actually do it a lot of the time, but they feel it, they want it, and they dramatize it just short of sex. There is no real way to control promiscuity. Promiscuity is naturally undermined where there is love and desire. And where two people truly love and desire one another, they do not have to make a cult with one another. They do not have to wonder obsessively if their partner wants other people and is fooling around. That concern has nothing whatever to do with their relationship. It is completely absent, and yet without willful discipline. The only discipline is that fullness. Satsang is the discipline, not all the things by which you are motivated to control yourself. In terms of spiritual life this is true

 

(18) Just so, in terms of your intimate life, it is the force of love-desire that economizes the life process and frees it from its conventional obsessions. If that force is not there, then your marriage is insane. It is just a porno movie or an intimate, little hand-holding quietude. Where there is love-desire, there is great energy between people, and such couples intensify one another constantly. They are moved always to love one another and to express their love for one another. They do not feel self-conscious about it!

(19) Such unions are very rare. Most people marry for erotic reasons. Some people, who are not particularly oriented to sex, marry for so-called love reasons, on the basis of the aesthetic emotion of loving, without force. But people who love and desire one another are involved in the most intimate and forceful kind of play. In such people the sexual process may be a matter of instruction at some point, so that it realizes its higher purpose and not the conventional one of release

 

(20) So you must transform your marriages. If you are not married, you must transform your sexual possibility and be free of eroticism, impotence, and frigidity. That is the way it seems to me!

(21) DEVOTEE: If the life force is present, then you can truly be a celibate in that sense. You do not have to be married, because you are available to all beings

 

(22) BUBBA: Yes, but there is no call to conventional celibacy. Theres no genuine motive for actually cutting off the sex process. That is bullshit. Nevertheless, all of those who are truly sexual in their orientation are celibates, because they are not involved in the conventional use of sexuality. Their sexuality does not serve their emptiness, their descended fixation in the body. They are always returning the force of life, sacrificing it to its Source. And their relationship to one another is self-intensifying, in other words, spontaneously intensifying. Their sexual relations are pure, not pure by being modest, but pure by being very forceful, very energetic, even very physical. They do not serve the ritual of limitation

 

(23) DEVOTEE: This whole culture, because of its orientation, tends to associate the words “celibate” and “ascetic” with being empty, but the two words truly mean full

 

(24) BUBBA: Right. Genuine celibacy is sexuality in Truth. It is the realization of your human functions in Truth. That realization does not involve separating yourself from others and becoming literally celibate, having no sex connection, but rather it involves fulfilling your sexual obligation. You are obliged, not by society, but by your body. Your body obliges you to be sexual and human. Therefore, you must realize your sexuality. You are involved in it in any case, whether or not you want to shut it off or exploit it. And so everyone is obliged to realize his functions in Truth

 

(25) Paradoxically, there is no realization without celibacy. However, celibacy must be understood in non-conventional terms. So the pure celibate is also the greatest dancer, the greatest lover, because he has realized the play of life in Truth, and it does not surrender him to bondage, to limitation. Only when you begin to love one another as well as desire one another in your intimacies do you begin to enjoy in human terms the kind of fullness that I am describing. All your other strategies are reactions to your obsessions. And obsessions in most cases are obsessions with desire to the exclusion of love

 

(26) Where there is desire there is not any real attention, there is obsession, scattering of the mind, no real concentration of force, no love, only all kinds of negative emotions. So people have sex for very negative reasons. They are beating one another with sex, killing one another with it. It is a kind of ritual murder in which the woman gets killed and the man kills her, or the man gets killed and she kills him, and they get eaten, and all of that. Most sexuality is very crude, very gross, very obsessive, and belongs to the whole realm of the orientation to the body idea

 

(27) DEVOTEE: What do you mean, though, when you say that the man should overwhelm the woman?

(28) BUBBA: Where there is love-desire, then each individual engages in the characteristic form that his or her birth implies. And so the woman is negative or passive in the body, and the male is positive and oriented toward the physical. So the male penetrates the woman. Women should not become men, aggressive in the way that men are, though they can be very active sexually. The male overwhelms the female, but in doing that he is overwhelmed by the female. The woman is Shakti to her husband. The more the male penetrates the female, the more overwhelmed he is with force, the more undone he is in the body. Not the other way around, which is the way it works out through the conventional exercise

 

(29) The usual sex act is not just the overwhelming of the woman by the male, but the degrading of the woman, her murder, her submission. And it is all very cool, as you must have observed. But the true play of sexuality is full of energy, full of force, full of movement, full of love. It overwhelms both individuals. It is the medium of the elimination of conflict in the life affair. Sexuality as it is played out conventionally is an exploitation of conflict. But the real sexual union undermines all conflict, overwhelms both individuals, restores them both to a contemplative state

 

(30) But you all use your intimacies in conventional ways, to exploit what you are obsessed with and to exclude what you cannot enjoy. So your sexuality is dead. It is self-meditation. It relieves nothing, except temporarily perhaps some relief in the lower body. You are left feeling empty when you exploit intimacy in this way. Where there is genuine intimacy, the real force of love and desire, then there is great energy even in sexual play. There is no sense at all of emptiness, separation, loss, even through the orgasm. None. You are left with the same sense that you enjoyed before you played with one another

 

(31) Well, if your intimacies, your marriages, are not of this kind, then keep it in your pants until you get it straight! Require this participation of one another, and when it is alive, then you can play with one another, but not otherwise. Real sexual intimacy between individuals in the Ashram is a play with me.