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VISION MOUND
Volume 1 , Number 12
JUNE 1978
Part I: The Transfiguration of the Whole Body-Mind
The Crucifixion of Change
A talk given by Bubba Free John to his devotees on March
,
The truly spiritual Realization is not what people have
traditionally imagined it to be-essentially subjective, a
matter of realizing that one is not the body and of
identifying with some inward, mental, psychic, or higher
mental state (which is really nothing more than the nervous
system and the brain, felt, through the inversion of
attention, to be independent of the physical body and its
energies). People imagine that spirituality is essentially a
subjective, inverted orientation, leading toward complete
identification with some subjective, non-bodily state. But
subjective states are simply other versions of bodily
attention, or self-possession.
In fact, the spiritual process is a transformation of the
whole body-mind, the whole psycho-physical entity, through
Sacrifice to Infinity, or into the Absolute Intensity of
which all manifestations are stepped-down intensities or
modifications. Thus, spiritual Realization occurs through
the process of sacrificial release into the Absolute
Intensity. That Realization is the Enlightenment of the
whole body. It is not exclusively subjective or internal. It
is, rather, the process by which the whole body-mind is
transformed, sacrificed. And in the ultimate event of this
process, the body-mind is Transfigured.
The process that involves me now is the passage through
the dissolution of certain factors of the body-mind. This
process has already occurred fundamentally in my case, but
there is a certain ordinary dimension of the body-mind that
has remained intact during these years so that I could have
a medium through which to work. But during the last year and
a half a kind of bodily and mental crucifixion has been
occurring, a transformation of the body, in which I have
less and less capacity to enter into casual relations with
people. Very dramatic physical changes have occurred many
times, not so much in outward physical appearance as in the
glandular system, the functioning of the gross organs,
including digestion and the heart, changes in the brain,
changes in the nervous system. These changes are an
extension of the process that has been active in my case for
years; but they are an intensification of that event, in
order to provide a vehicle for the demonstration of this
Teaching in its highest form.
This crucifixion of change is not just part of my life.
It is also part of the life of devotees. It is part of the
process that everyone must go through in this Way of life,
but it need not be so dramatic for devotees as it might have
to be for the Spiritual Master, who is the agent that helps
their transition. Because the devotee has a great deal to
gain through the agency of the Spiritual Master, he owes the
Spiritual Master a great deal-simply serving the Spiritual
Master, permitting him to go through these changes
comfortably, relieving him of ordinary demands, letting him
live comfortably in seclusion without expecting him to act
normal. He may essentially look normal, but do not demand
that he be ordinary, or extraordinary either, for that
matter.
The way Ramakrishnas devotees served him during a similar
period in his life is a good example. When Ramakrishna had
to endure aspects of this process, he was put in a position
where he did not have any worldly responsibilities. His
devotees were puzzled by his bizarre behavior-he spent his
days screaming and weeping and falling on the floor and
passing out and displaying weird physical signs-but they
would simply serve him and keep him comfortable. He did not
have to tell them what to do. He did not associate with
people who would react to him. He was not associated with
people who made ordinary, worldly demands, so he was free to
go through these changes.
The influence of worldliness, the contact with
worldliness and worldly demands, is a torment to a person
going through this cycle. All that people live casually from
day to day is intensely disturbing. The usual man, however,
is accustomed to it, and therefore he is a disturbing
personality. He is satisfied by disturbance in one way or
another. Even his pleasures are a disturbance, so he does
not recognize them as such. But in this process of Bodily
Transfiguration, the individual becomes profoundly sensitive
to the things that people ordinarily tend to do. To live in
the ordinary way seems an unbearable agony. Thus, a person
going through this process looks a little odd to people, and
perhaps some get a little afraid or reactive, whereas they
should simply serve him, allow the process to occur, and
create for him the best physical and emotional and mental
environment possible.
Either you want this process to occur and be available to
you, or you do not. If you do value it, then you must allow
it to happen, you must serve It, and you must relate to me
differently. Up until now, people have expected me to
maintain a thread of conventional attention and
self-awareness in this body-mind so that I could carry on
with ordinary human relations and make lessons out of it
all. That thread of attention has been maintained in this
body, but for the last year and a half or so the ability to
be associated with this body-mind through that thread of
ordinary ego has been dissolving. This does not mean that I
will not continue to be able to act in a relatively ordinary
sense-walking around and talking and so forth. But the
thread of conventional self-presentation will dissolve.
All my life I have had to deal with this phenomenon. Ever
since birth, ever since my childhood, this process has been
going on in me. Even in my childhood there were signs of
this change, which made me appear a little bizarre to
others, so I just kept it to myself as well as possible. I
have always tried to find ways to bypass the ultimate
expressions of this change, because I recognized that others
were not even close to this process and knew nothing about
it. They did not know how to live with me while I was going
through it, and so I have tried to maintain the worldly
personality as much as possible. I have thrown myself into
the game of life all my life in order to keep in touch with
people, and I have even tried to forestall certain of the
phenomena of this ultimate change because I sense what
happens when it finally fulfills itself. I just have not
felt free to be able to do it. I have not felt that I had
the human environment in which to do it or that I had
fulfilled my obligation to provide a Teaching influence for
others so that they could make use of me when I allowed the
process fully. Thus, through adaptation, through my own
activity, I have maintained this ordinary character as a way
of helping people to prepare to live a truly spiritual way
of life with me and to make use of me when all these changes
shall become most profound.
Nevertheless, it cannot be prevented. At some point it
becomes impossible to hold on to the body-mind. The urge to
dissolution has been there all my life, not the usual motive
to self-destruction, but release into perfect energy. It
requires such a change of personality and body and emotion
that people cannot deal with it. What would people have done
if I had simply allowed it to happen fully, with full
evidence, in Franklin Square, New York! But now I have come
to the point where I cannot forestall it any longer, and
coincidentally I have also come to the point where basically
I have done enough to prepare an environment where I can
pass through the final stages of this process and where I
can be available to people who will know how to make use of
me, who will value a relationship with somebody who is no
longer psycho-physically constricted but who represents a
pure Agency of Absolute Intensity.
VISION MOUND
Volume 1, Number 12
JUNE 1978
Part I
The Transfiguration of the Whole Body-Mind
In the following talk and essays, Bubba Free John
describes the literal psycho-physical Transformation of the
whole body-mind into Absolute Intensity as it is occurring
in his own case. Bubba reveals the details of this bodily
Transfiguration to His devotees so that they may recognize
the profundity of His Sacrifice on their behalf and respond
appropriately. The True response to the Spiritual Master is
heartfelt service, study of His Teaching, and bodily
surrender to the Living Divine through the devotional and
practical disciplines of this Way of life. Through such
religious practice the devotee prepares himself or herself
in body and mind to make use of the Agency of Divine Grace
in the form of the Spiritual Master.
VISION MOUND
Volume 1 , Number 8
FEBRUARY 1978
Every Realm Must Be Transcended
The seven stages of life are not stages beginning with
birth and simply ending at death. Death is a process
relative to the gross physical body, which is ours at birth
and in the first stage of life. Thus, death may occur at any
time after birth, even long before the seven stages of life
are matured. If death occurs before the responsibility of
Sacrifice in the seventh stage, there is a temporary
interval of experience in subtler dimensions than the gross
physical, but then it is necessary for a new physical birth
to occur, and the continuation of the cycle of seven stages.
If the individual matures to the point of stable capacity
for ascent beyond the gross physical (in the fifth stage of
life), then it may not be necessary to be reborn into the
gross physical realm, but the body-being is awakened to born
experience in subtler realms. Even so, such realms must
themselves eventually be transcended, yielding the subtle
body-being to the prior Infinite in Sahaj Samadhi and Bhava
Samadhi. The human being enjoys the structural capacity to
Realize all seven stages in a single brief incarnation,
whereas birth into subtler realms implies levels of
consolation that require great periods of time or experience
in order to be transcended. Just so, the failure to become
fully responsible while alive implies countless future
lifetimes in the gross world struggling toward
happiness.
Written by Bubba Free John
VISION MOUND
Volume1 , Number 8
FEBRUARY 1978
The Seven Stages of Eternal Life
by Bubba Free John
In the traditions of spiritual culture, the development
of a human being has commonly been described in terms of
seven stages, each spanning a period of seven years. There
is a rational basis in Awakened Wisdom for this scheme. That
basis is the very structure of the body-being of every human
individual. We are a composite made of elements and of
functional relations, a coherent life-form expressed via the
nervous system and brain, and levels of mind that may
consciously reflect not only the gross or “material” realm
but the realms of life-energy and all the cosmic realms or
media of light. At the root of this system is the heart, the
primal organ not only of life but of consciousness in man.
It is here that the presumption and conception of egoic
independence, or the separate “I,” arises in every moment.
It is on the basis of this presumption that the human
individual is predetermined to a reactive life of fear,
vulnerability, flight from mortality, and a universal
constitutional state of contraction. That contraction
encloses consciousness in the limits of skin and thought,
and it separates the whole body-being of man from the Divine
Radiance and Perfect Consciousness that is otherwise native
to it and eternally available to it in every part.
The Way of Divine Ignorance, which I teach, is a complete
Way of life. It is not merely a system of self-applied
methods of inwardness or of exclusively external and worldly
functional improvement. It is a whole culture, lived
principally among others who do likewise, and in complete
touch with every level of our structural humanity, from the
gross physical to the subtle and Transcendental ranges of
Light. The presumption of independent conscious existence,
rooted in the heart prior to mind, and expressed as forms of
contraction or self-definition at every functional level of
the body-being, as well as in all relations, is the present
foundation of the conventional and chaotic “culture” or
habit of adaptation of most human beings. Therefore, if we
are to be adapted (or readaptedto another Principle than the
ego, or independent and separative self, we must likewise
become involved in a total culture of that alternative.
The culture of the Way of Divine Ignorance may also be
related to the traditional scheme of seven stages of growth.
But it is founded on the Awakening of the heart, from
self-possession to free feeling-attention, via all
functions, in all relations, under all conditions. Indeed,
the whole Way is the Way of the heart. The first three
stages purify and readapt the whole body being via the life
heart, the gross physical epitome. Thus, they involve the
foundation growth of the vital-physical, the
emotional-sexual, and the lower mental, including the will,
or integrated responsibility for the whole of the common
human foundation. The fourth and fifth stages purify and
readapt the whole body-being via the middle heart, the
subtle epitome. Thus, they involve the higher growth of the
conceptual mind, the psyche, the subtle intuitive gnosis of
the elemental world and the higher or cosmic gnosis of the
planes and “heavens” of the Great Process of manifest
experience. The sixth stage purifies and readapts the whole
body-being via the right heart, the epitome of the
independent conscious entity. Thus, it is in this stage that
the presumption of independent, separate, and separative
conscious existence is dissolved in the true Heart, the
“Ignorance” or Unqualified Consciousness that is our
Condition in Truth. The individual body-being is not
“snuffed out” at this stage. It simply persists free of the
illusion of separate existence in consciousness, and exists
in utter Identity, or radical Communion with the Condition
of all beings and conditions. Thus, in the seventh stage,
the whole body-being exists in a fully responsible alignment
with its Source, “Food,” and Condition, and continues to
grow at Infinity. This leads into more and more perfect
identification, even bodily, with the Light, Love, and
Consciousness that is the Absolute God and Self of Man.
Thus, this final stage, which goes on into eternity, shows
the Divine Signs of Transfiguration and Regeneration while
alive, and ultimate Ascension or Translation of the
individual into the Divine Plane, the Heaven above all
heavens, which is God and Truth. The general culture of the
first three stages naturally belongs to the first twenty-one
years of life, but men and women in general fail to complete
these stages to maturity because of reactive adaptation to
the false, or ego, principle. Thus, most “adults” are only
bordering on the awakening of a life committed to love, the
life of the heart and of psychic awakening. They phase back
and forth from actual commitment to love and spiritual
ascent, but spend most of their time in various forms of
problematic concentration in vital-physical,
emotional-sexual, and lower mental dilemmas of will,
morality, belief, and conventional knowledge. The reason for
this is that the first three stages of their adaptation are
immature, so they are still foundering in childish and
adolescent motivations of character, the theatre of the
struggle between dependence and independence. And this
chaotic sub-human struggle will continue to bind the
individual and human societies as a whole until there is
release from the ego, the contraction of the heart and the
whole body-being, the commitment to separation, avoidance of
relationship, loveless self-possession, obsessive
self-indulgence, doubt, and unconsciousness of the Source,
Light, Love, Living Food, and Eternal Life by which all
things are sustained forever.
Because of the ego-I, the presumption of separation and
independence, we are constitutionally divorced from the
Infinite Condition wherein we have appeared. We are
separated from our primal Food-Source. Mankind is not merely
hungry. We are starving. We cannot even hope to be
satisfied, and, therefore, our hunger has become doubt,
un-love, fear, self-possession, self-indulgence, violence,
dis-ease, and a death that is not merely a change of state
but a suppression of existence to the point of
annihilation.
However, there is Wisdom to the point of freedom, and not
merely or only immortality but eternal Bliss in God. There
is Truth, Sustenance, Light, and Life. There is Awakening,
even bodily, to the utter Consciousness and Radiance or Love
that is God and Truth. The Way of that Awakening is
expressed through a culture or Way of life that evolves
through seven stages. The first three may generally be
associated with the first twenty-one years of life (three
periods of seven years), but the last four (which grow
beyond the limits of the grosser elementsmay not truly be
considered in terms of limits of time, whether brief or
long. Each stage develops as a process of adaptation (or
readaptationto a specific, functional point of view relative
to the totality of experience. That specific point of view
in each case depends on the organization of life and
consciousness relative to any one of seven primal centers of
the functional being of man. Those centers are expressed at
the physical level, but they also reach deep into the
subtlest and most transcendental planes of light.
The seven centers relate to seven levels of adaptation,
integration, and Realization in the case of man. Adaptation
to the whole of existence via each of these centers in
succession is the native Process of growth for which we are
fitted by virtue of our inherent structure. And growth, at
every stage, is a matter of “food,” or the success of the
functional pattern of reception, ingestion, elimination, and
adaptation-not only at the physical level, but also at the
vital level, the mental level, the psychic and supermental
level, the foundation level of consciousness, and the
Transcendental level of Radiance, Light, Vibratory Power,
Love, and Creation.
There are as many kinds of food as there are levels of
adaptation. Elemental food is the common food of the lowest
dimension of our appearance. But we require other kinds of
food to sustain us in our parts above or subtler than
elemental physical. All manifest things and beings appear
within a universal cosmic theatre of the physics of light.
Even the most solid configuration is an illusion, or a
mysterious objectification that is not other than light. The
essence of things is light, and the right functioning of
life depends on right communion with light, or the Light
above all lights, and all the levels of energy or vibration
between the subtlest light, or mind, and solidity.
Therefore, there are many kinds of food on which we
depend and which we must learn to eat, humbly and in peace.
There is the elemental food of the physical aspect of the
whole body-being. There is, at the next level, the etheric
food, the life-force or pranic “substance” that is received
and ingested via the processes of breathing and feeling. And
beyond this are all the ascending and subtle degrees of
chemistry and energy associated with each of the primary
physical, glandular, and nervous centers of the gross
body-being and their subtle extensions to Infinity.
The primary centers of the whole body-being are seven.
And we are obliged to adapt our whole body-being to the view
established at each center in succession. Thus, there are
seven primary stages of growth or adaptation native to man.
But since we are generally born into conditions where human
development is minimal or rudimentary, and where the culture
of Wisdom is unknown, in doubt, or denied altogether, we
tend to adapt, through random influences, to arbitrary,
reactive, ego-based, and even subhuman levels of awareness,
ability, experience, and responsibility. We tend to develop
in patterns that disintegrate rather than integrate the
body-being, and human societies tend, therefore, to function
as “schools” of disintegration, reactivity, and mediocrity,
rather than as cultures of adaptation to Wisdom in Truth.
Truly, most human beings are human only in the sense that
they are specimens of an inherent structure that can realize
a human level of expression. If we consider the level of
actual adaptation and responsibility of the usual man or
woman, he or she is certainly subhuman, either in the sense
of being little more than a talking beast without instincts
or in the sense of being merely adapted to the physical,
emotional-sexual, and mental levels of experience, but
severely compromised or unstable in the demonstration of the
integrity and natural superiority even such adaptation
should represent in action.
It is necessary for each individual to return to all
previous levels of functional adaptation that have been
developed as reactive and egoic mechanisms. Every functional
level must be re-awakened and re-adapted to the Divine
Principle beyond and yet pervading all contractions, all
parts of the whole, all defining limits of light and
consciousness. Even the cells of the body are obliged by
this Principle. Therefore, the Way or Culture of this
Process is a Way of total re-adaptation or re-birth. It is
the Culture of Resurrection, or the Enlightenment of the
whole body-being of man.
The seven centers of progressive readaptation are the
body base (at the perineum), the root of sex, the region of
the navel and solar plexus, the heart, the region between
the lower throat and the lower rear of the brain, the
midbrain, and the crown or Light-Terminal of the whole
body-being.
But the Principle of human adaptation (or readaptationis
not found in either the lower or the higher dimensions of
the body-being. It is at the center, between the lower and
the upper divisions or coils, each represented by three
centers. The center wherein the human being becomes Awakened
to the Principle on which it always already depends is the
heart. The heart is the key to human consciousness, human
Awakening, and truly human adaptation. Therefore, the
culture of human readaptation depends, from the beginning,
on the intuitive Awakening of the heart to its Condition in
Truth. That Awakening is Realized through true “hearing” of
the argument of the Spiritual Master, and it is
progressively intensified through spiritual Revelation in a
whole life of “hearing,” “seeing,” and “feeling” in
Communion with the Divine Company of the Spiritual Master,
wherein devotees are restored to God, even bodily.
Since the Awakened heart is the Principle of the culture
of true human adaptation, that Awakening must come at the
beginning of the Way and progressively intensify or mature
through its stages. Therefore, the Awakening of the heart
does not only come, as one might expect, in the fourth stage
of life. It is continuous, from the beginning. In the fourth
stage, the intelligent psychic dimension of the heart must
flower, but the heart must be already Awake. And in the
sixth stage of life the Awakening of the heart becomes
perfect, so that the presumption of independent or separate
consciousness is forever dissolved in radical intuition of
the Divine Condition of all beings and things. Therefore, in
the seventh stage, the apparent individual (no longer
suffering the illusion of separateness, but, paradoxically,
still persisting as an integral structure in the conditional
realmsis able to be yielded perfectly into Light, Love, the
Radiant Bliss that is communicated via the crown of the
whole body-being. In the seventh stage of our Divine
re-adaptation we are perfectly restored to the primal Food
that the ego contraction and all the bodily and psychic
locks of our reactive adaptation have denied us. All the
centers of the whole body-being have then become open doors
to the stream of Vibratory Bliss, and we are Transfigured,
Regenerated, and Translated into Light, in both the
spiritual and the literal bodily sense.
The stages of readaptation in this Culture of
Resurrection are the physical-vital, the emotional-sexual,
the higher vital (the will), lower mental, and moral, the
higher mental and the lower psychic, the higher psychic, the
cosmic “gnosis,” the atmic, or the Realization of the
unqualified Condition of consciousness, and the mutual
Sacrifice of the individual and the Divine, or the
Translation of Man into the Divine Domain.
In the higher stages of readaptation, esoteric spiritual
responsibilities in life and meditation become natural,
creative extensions of the life of the human being. In the
fourth stage of life, the Way of Divine Ignorance, which I
teach, truly begins. Prior to that time, the individual must
pass through functional disciplines in the common dimensions
of life-physical, emotional, and mental. And it is only when
that rudimentary human foundation is established that the
esoteric or higher development of man may begin.
VISION MOUND
Volume 1, Number 9
MARCH 1978
The Condition of Being Is Not Within
by Bubba Free John
There is no such thing as a being. We are patterns of
functions. “I” is not a being but a pattern of functions
within an extended and ultimately indefinite pattern of
functions. If “I,” the whole body-being, is considered
totally, it may not be absolutely differentiated from the
larger pattern within which it appears, since It cannot
create or sustain itself by any process independent of that
total and ultimately undefined pattern within which it
appears. “I” is a dependent pattern of functions within a
larger, ultimately undefined (in terms of the knowledge
possessed by “I”pattern of functions. “I” is not a being,
but a dependent pattern of functions that may not be
radically differentiated from the greater, ultimately
undefined pattern of functions. Therefore, that dimension of
the whole body-being which we intuit as “being,” or
conscious existence, is not within, behind, or defined by
the dependent functional pattern that is the whole
body-being, or “I.” Being is not function or pattern. It is
not defined or differentiated. It is the prior Condition of
“I,” of all functions, all patterns. It is the Condition of
the ultimately undefined pattern of totality. “Being” is
intuition of the Condition of “I” and of all patterns,
functions, or differentiated and conditional events.
But “being,” which is beyond all differentiation, is not
the condition of the differentiated “I.” “I” is only a
pattern within and continuous with a greater, undefined
pattern. It is not a being. However, that presumption may
arise as a false conclusion on the basis of witnessing
events against the intuition of being and assuming “I” to be
independent of the pattern of totality. In that case, being
is presumed to be the condition of “I” independently. And
the same judgment tends to be made about all other witnessed
(and equally dependentpatterns and events, particularly
those that imply conscious intuition of being and the
capacity to witness patterns as experience. Thus, other “Is”
imply numbers of beings-differentiation of beings. But
differentiation is among patterns of functions, not at the
level or in the dimension of being.
Therefore, our right disposition is not toward the
presumption of the independence of “I” as a being but toward
responsible or cooperative continuity of “I” with the
pattern of totality, so that the Condition of “I” and of the
total pattern may be continuously Realized. That continuity
is established through Communion, or unobstructed
feeling-attention (via all functions, in all relations or
patterns, under all conditionsto Infinity. Such is the true
Way of love, whereas the false Way is that of independent
being, self-possession, acquisition of personal attributes
and extensions (experience, knowledge, various goods, other
beings, etc.).
The Condition of being is not within. It is not me. “I”
is the pattern of functions that is the dependent body-being
in the pattern of totality. The Condition of being is the
Condition of the totality of patterns. It is the Divine
Reality. It is the Self of all. That Self is not within, as
a being, nor without. It is not identical to any pattern in
itself, not even the pattern of totality. It is the intuited
Condition of the totality. It is Infinity. Therefore, to
Commune with Infinity, or being (which is inherently
unqualified), is to submit or sacrifice all patterns,
including the whole body-being (or “I”and all other
patterns, even the pattern of totality, into the unqualified
Condition of Being. Such is Ignorance-Radiance. And the Way
is love, which is intuition of unqualified being
(Ignorance-Radianceand, on that basis, release of all
illusions of independent being presumed on the basis of any
witnessed pattern of functions (including “I,” all others,
all worlds, etc.). That release is submission of attention
to Infinity through unqualified feeling. It is the Way of
Divine Ignorance. It is the Way that passes from the
self-possessed illusion of “I” as a being into the Bliss of
unqualified being, prior to all patterns of functions-prior
to all differentiation.
Such Realization is Divine Happiness. It does not, in
principle, exclude any condition, but all conditions are
ultimately, perfectly, and (paradoxicallyalways already
dissolved or assumed in that undifferentiated Bliss beyond
self, mind, body, and every kind of pattern or world.
The illusory defined “I” (as a beingproceeds by
experience and in accordance with the functional laws
pertaining to every discrete dimension of the pattern of
totality to enlarge itself toward Infinity through
evolutionary accumulations. Once the spell of
self-definition, other-definition, and separation or unlove
is broken, there may be direct release of feeling-attention
from the contractions of independent being into the radical
intuition of unqualified being. Such is the direct Way into
prior being. It is the Way of Divine Ignorance, since it
does not proceed by knowledge of the independent being but
by radical intuition of unqualified prior being. When that
intuitive sacrifice of feeling-attention to Infinity is true
in any moment, there is only Bliss or Radiance, prior to all
differentiation (subjective or objective). Persistence in
this sacrifice Realizes literal Translation of the whole
body-being (“I”into Ignorance-Radiance, or Bliss.
VISION MOUND
Volume 1, Number 7
JANUARY 1978
The Essential Teaching of the New Testament
an essay by Bubba Free John
The New Testament is not, in its meaning, the
representation of a drama outside man. It is an archetypal
drama, an esoteric play about man rather than merely a
concept or incident directed to mankind. The life of Jesus
is itself a Teaching or “Word” about man, and it obliges
those who “hear” and understand to live a new and true
pattern of presumption and action-whole bodily, rather than
exclusively in inner belief or in superficial outward
appearance. That pattern is sacrifice to the Divine Truth
and Condition rather than mere yielding to experience and
the circumstances of gross life.
The New Testament represents the ancient archetypal and
esoteric understanding of man. It is also a story and a
commentary about the communication of esoteric and
transcendental Truth in the common world of ordinary
fascination and exoteric beliefs, behaviors, and
rituals.
The key to the right understanding of the New Testament
is this: The “Kingdom of God” is not outside man. It is man.
The “Kingdom of God” is the whole body of every man and
woman. The “Kingdom of God” is the whole body-being and
Destiny that is every man and woman.
The drama of Jesus birth, life, death, resurrection,
“ascension to the Father,” and communication of the “Holy
Spirit” is not, in Truth, a drama outside and merely
observed, believed, or rejected by mankind. It is the
necessary drama of transformation and Realization in the
case of every human individual. “Jesus” is the “Word” or
Truth about every man and woman, and every man and woman is
obliged to “hear” this Truth and duplicate this Life, or
else continue to be deluded by experience and egoic
knowledge. The story of Jesus is an archetypal story and an
esoteric Revelation of the whole bodily or spiritual process
of the human being in Truth.
The “world” of the New Testament is the total human
world, including “Heaven,” “Earth,” and “Hell.” Its meaning
is not external to man but native to him. That is, the
“world” of the New Testament is the whole body-being of man
(male or female), and It, therefore, includes the apparent
universe, but interpreted as a Process like that of man-that
is, a psycho-physical rather than a merely physical realm.
The whole body is the epitome or meaning of the world. And
the whole body includes not only the elemental physical, but
the etheric or life-force dimension, as well as the mental,
the higher psychic or subtle super-mental, and the egoic
ground or witness. Human beings discover or assign meaning
to the world of their experience. Their whole bodily form
and nature and Condition is the archetypal structure wherein
the Truth and the Way and the Life of this world is shown
and obliged upon them. The New Testament “Word” or meaning
is the sacrificial Way of the human body-being as a whole.
And the message is that man, in the form of every man and
woman, priorly (or always alreadyexists in a transcendental
Condition that is eternally free and not ultimately or truly
limited by the cycle of birth, life, and death. Each of us,
therefore, is destined, in Truth, to eternal Existence,
Happiness, Delight, and Freedom, since we are presently,
totally, and always established in the same. However, until
we respond to the communication of Truth and accept, whole
bodily, responsibility for the play of our manifest
existence in this human world, we are distracted by our
mortality, divided in our body-being, and tending by
association to be constantly limited by and to the
conditions of the lower body consciousness. Therefore, we
are striving to survive as that portion of our Condition we
notice as our conventional human birth, and we are bound to
a self-possessed struggle, divided in ourselves, chronically
turned away from others, and knowing only what we observe or
acquire in our apparent and presently extended form rather
than our prior whole body-being.
The archetype of Truth communicated in the New Testament
is the whole body “Gospel,” or the message about our
Happiness and Lawful Destiny. If we change in response to
the understanding of this archetypal message, then we
participate, presently and consciously, in the Destiny of
Happiness, Fullness, and Responsibility in Truth. If we do
not respond whole bodily, from the heart, then we remain
turned in on ourselves, divided and self-possessed, and
confined to the knowledge and presumed destiny of
mortality-until we Awaken to Truth.
The drama of Jesus is the drama of human Destiny when
lived in Truth. It is the story of the whole body-being of
archetypal man. “God the Father,” “Jesus the Christ” (the
“Son,” “Messiah,” or Messenger of “God the Father”), and the
“Holy Spirit” (eternally sent from the “Heaven” of “God the
Father” and also sent via the sacrificial and radiant action
of the “Son” of “God the Father”are all archetypes of
aspects of the whole body-being of every man or woman.
“God the Father” is the crown, the head, the brain, and
the prior Source Light of the whole body-being of man.
“Jesus the Christ” is the heart, the true Self (or Condition
of the ego), and the sacrifice or Lawful Way of the whole
body-being of man. And the “Holy Spirit” is the nervous
system and the all-pervading, eternal Life of the whole
body-being of man.
The heart, or “the Christ,” is the Way. It is the Way of
sacrifice, through unobstructed feeling-attention, love, or
whole body radiance to Infinity. It is the sacrifice of the
ego-or the reactive contraction and functional
disintegration of the whole body-being-into perfect
Feeling-Intuition. The true heart is prior to the egoic
subconsciousness and unconsciousness of the lower body as
well as the egoic consciousness and superconsciousness of
the upper body. The Truth or God of the whole body-being is
not itself any part of the whole, nor is it the whole
body-being itself. The Truth is at the heart of the whole
body-being. The Truth is the sacrifice of the whole
body-being into its eternally prior Condition. Therefore,
the heart of man is one with Truth, the Condition of all
conditions.
The crown of the body is one with the subtle Light of the
whole body. It is the Revelation of the Light, Radiance, or
Brightness communicated by the heart (which is the Truth of
the whole body-being). It is “above,” in the direction of
the creative Source, the manifesting Source or Light of all
states of human experience, just as the heart itself, in the
midst of the whole body-being, is the prior Truth of that
Light and the whole body-being. The Light that is seen when
the brain rests from perceptual reactivity and
conceptualization is revealed by that rest itself. That is,
the heart (or “Christ”is the Truth of the whole body-being,
and when the heart sacrifices the contracted or egoic
position, the Light is revealed, not merely or only to the
gross or subtle eyes, but in Truth, prior to perception or
differentiated knowledge.
When the heart becomes a sacrifice-when the whole
body-being is love rather than contraction and reactivity of
body, emotion, and mind-then it abides in its Condition in
Truth and is one with its eternal Radiance or Light, which
is then expressed infinitely above and all around, prior to
all thinking and knowing.
Therefore, “Jesus the Christ,” the heart-which is the Way
of the Law of sacrifice or love-reveals the “Father,” who is
otherwise unseen or falsely envisioned. Light itself is not
Truth, unless the Truth itself is Realized. “Jesus” is the
Way of that Realization. The heart is the Truth of the head
and the rest of the whole body-being. “Jesus” is the Truth
of the Creator God. The heart, the seat of egoic
consciousness, is awakened to the Real Condition in the
instant of intuitive awakening and the fulfillment of the
Law of Sacrifice. Then the heart says: “I and the Father are
one.” That is, the Truth of the Light is sacrifice of all
conditions. The “Father,” in Truth, is not any manifest or
created condition, above or below, nor is He even the
intention, process, or act of creation in itself. The
“Father” in Truth is realized only in sacrifice of the heart
(the whole body-being, including the knowledge presumed by
experience at the head or via the nervous system). The
“Father” is not the physical world or like it. He is the
“Spirit” of the world. The “Father” is not the Light in
itself, but the Source of the Light. The “Father” is
revealed by the sacrifice of the “Son.” The “Father,” God,
the Truth of the whole body, is one with the “Son.” The Real
or God is Love-or unqualified Radiance beyond all knowledge,
all forms, and prior to all that can survive.
The “Son” (the heart, and every “Son of God,” every true
man or womanis not only one with the “Father,” and thus able
to reveal the “Father” through sacrifice. The “Son” is also
the only perfect “Messiah” or Messenger of the “Father.” The
“Father” is prior to the appearance of the world (the whole
body-being). The “Father” is also the ultimate Source of the
world, and all things are manifest modifications of Him.
Therefore, the “Father” is not only the Truth of the world,
but the Love and Light of the world. The “Son” reveals the
Truth, the Love, and the Light. He is not only one with the
Light, but the Messenger (“Messiah”of the Light. He reveals
the eternal activity of the Light in the world. That
activity is the “Holy Spirit,” the Life or Breath of God.
Only those who become “Sons of God” through transformative
“hearing” may enter Into conscious Communion with the
“Spirit” of God.
Thus, the heart becomes one with Truth through right
understanding, and, in that event, fulfills the Law, which
is sacrifice, release of egoic contraction, or love. Love is
itself the intuition of the Truth or Condition of the whole
body-being. Therefore, “Jesus” reveals the Truth of the
“Father” to be the sacrifice of the whole body-being from
the heart, which is love. Then the Light is realized in
Truth to be beyond conditions. It is the forgiveness or
non-assumption of the necessity or the effects of
experience, past, present, or future. The head, the brain,
is purified by the sacrifice of the heart, so that the brain
and the whole body stand at rest in the all-pervading
Vibratory Light rather than in the obstructed stream of
reactive and presumptive thinking, feeling, and moving. When
the brain is so released by the whole body sacrifice
initiated by the intuition of the Condition of the heart, it
sends or reveals its “Comforter” or “Spirit” to the whole
body. The “Son” comes into the world to reveal the Truth, to
reestablish the intuition of oneness with the Light, and
then to leave, or return to the simple and prior position of
the heart in Truth, and allow the “Holy Spirit,” now
revealed to be pervading the whole body-being and the world
eternally, to awaken, or enter, pervade, and transform, the
whole body-being and its activities.
When the heart (or Truthand the crown (or Lightare
acknowledged to be one through the sacrifice of the whole
body-being as love (the intuition of Radiance), then “Jesus”
has died, come to life again, and ascended to the Light.
When this has become true in the case of any man, male or
female, then “the Holy Spirit descends upon him.” That is,
the Radiance of the Truth of the whole body-being pervades
the whole body-being. The nervous system becomes the
conductor of unqualified Light, or Fullness of Life. Such an
individual is free while alive, conscious in and as eternal
Life, Light, and Truth, and functioning in intuitive unity
with his or her prior or Divine Condition, while alive, in
death, and beyond death, into the eternity of
transformations of the possibilities or “worlds” of the
whole body-being, from the human to the Divine.
The universe in which such a regenerated (“reborn”man or
woman appears is like himself-a whole body-being, or
psycho-physical Process. And the experiential destinies he
may suffer or enjoy depend on the forms his attention takes.
If he responds to the Teaching of Truth, then he will tend
to be associated with more subtle or “Heaven-ward” futures.
If he only fulfills the responsibilities of the true man to
a modest degree, oriented toward fulfillment in the apparent
world, then he will tend to be associated with human
futures-in the present life, in etheric or purgatorial
realms after death, and through future human rebirths. If he
does not respond at all to the Teaching of Truth-or the
right fulfillment of the Law of the whole body-being-then he
will tend to be associated with human futures that are
profoundly difficult to bear, or else with daemonic futures,
sub-human and elemental. Such futures are the destiny toward
“Hell,” or the apparent and lower or gross, semi-conscious,
unconscious, and elemental dimension of the whole
body-being.
If any man or woman not only responds to the Teaching of
Truth to the degree of sympathetic absorption in Radiance or
Light and the subtle destinies above the awareness of Earth
and the gross body, but if he or she becomes an absolute
Sacrifice in Truth, so that all attention, all conditions,
high and low, are yielded in the radical intuition of
Happiness, then he or she will ultimately be translated out
of the play of extended and unnecessary phenomena into the
very Divine, the Domain of Eternity, that is neither
unnecessary nor extended.
Thus, it should be seen that the Way communicated by and
in association with the Messenger Jesus is the Way of every
man. It is the Way in which all men, male or female, are
“Sons (and “Daughters”of God.” That is, all who are devoted
to Truth in this Way are alive as the whole body-being in
Truth. The dimension of the whole body-being above the heart
and the dimension of the whole body-being below the heart
are lived as a unity, a heart-felt sacrifice, rather than a
theatre of conflict and separativeness. Thus, such devotees
are both “God” and “man” in their singleness. They are holy,
set apart from the vulgar destiny created by reactive and
mortal knowledge, understanding, and experience.
The Law of such devotees is Sacrifice, or love, which is
unobstructed feeling-attention, as and via all functions, in
all relations, and through all relations to Infinity, and
under all conditions. Therefore, Jesus description of the
practice of “Sons of God” may be summarized quite simply:
Love God, or be a living and total sacrifice to God, which
is Reality and Truth, or Love itself. And love or be a
living sacrifice to all others, as if each other were
yourself-which is, in Truth, the case.
Such devotees or “Sons of God” value above all relations
the relationship with the Spiritual Master, who is the
Source Messenger and direct Revealer of the Way and the Life
of Truth. And they also value above all forms of ordinary
human relationship the relationship of devotee to devotee,
and the life they enjoy in the devotional Community of those
who practice the Way. Such was or became the case with the
principal devotees of Jesus, and it must also be or become
the case with those to whom the Truth is revealed in every
age. Therefore, abandon the narrowness of the cults of
vicarious salvation and consoling beliefs. Become the whole
body through hearing and awakening to Love. Become a living
sacrifice, through the intelligence of unconstricted Love,
to the eternal Divine, that transcends and pervades the
mind, the body, and the world. Become a living sacrifice to
others through Love, or unobstructed feeling-attention, and
so be free of the inwardness of fear, self-possession,
knowledge, experience, and belief. Be deeply rested in brain
and body, regenerated in your feeling and transformed in
your action. Then you will become lighter than angels and
dissolve in the Bliss of God, which is neither above nor
below, nor within, nor without, but all-pervading, prior to
time and space.
VISION MOUND
Volume 1, Number 7
JANUARY 1978
Beyond the Heartbeat and the Mind
an essay by Bubba Free John
There is a current of vibratory force pervading the whole
body. It is the bodys life and the light of its mind. It may
be felt to be identified with either the whole body itself
or with the prior Condition of the whole body. It is
perfectly identical to the whole body itself, but it is
ultimately not qualified by the finite body or any of its
conditions. It appears to be structured and limited via the
mechanisms of the gross body, and its principal functional
locus is thus identified with the spinal line, running from
toe to crown and vice versa. The elemental and outer aspect
of the whole body is controlled by the pervading current, as
etheric and magnetic energy. Thus, the illusions of
conventional subjectivity and inwardness involve a turning
of attention, the egoic expression of the current of the
manifest body-being, from the lower body and its outward
functions toward the upper body and the brain, the
controlling core of the outer functions. But the Truth of
the whole body is at the heart, where the Condition of the
current of the body is intuited, prior to all
differentiation of form and thought and self.
The brain controls all the psycho-physiology of the gross
being. That is, the current of the whole body controls the
gross processes via the brain and the descending structures
of the nervous system. Thus, the heartbeat is also
controlled via the brain and nervous system. However, the
region of the heart is the central and senior dimension of
the whole body. Indeed, the heart, the dimension of
feeling-intuition, is the epitome of the whole body, whereas
the brain is only a part of the whole body. The heart is the
dimension of the manifest being wherein the current that is
pervading the structures and controls of the whole body is
contacted directly, intuitively, rather than via perception
or conception. It is “located” prior to all limitation-even
prior to the heartbeat.
The heartbeat is a manifestation of the extended and
defined being. It is, like thought, an expression of the ego
and the brain, wherein and whereby the all-pervading and
prior Condition of the current of the whole body is
interpreted and defined in limitation. The Truth of the
whole body is at the heart. That is, the Condition of the
whole body is intuited, through penetration of the limiting
reactivity of the whole body, to be prior to the heartbeat,
and thus prior to self, mind, body, and all relations.
Therefore, the Way in Truth is not toward or within the
bodily structures themselves, nor even toward any perception
or conception, gross or subtle, impressed upon the
all-pervading current via the nervous system and the brain.
The Way of Truth is at the heart, prior to recoil and
structure, prior to every extension and action of manifest
existence and experience. It is the Sacrifice of the whole
body at Infinity. It is Love rather than Yoga. In the
Process of this Way, the psycho-physiology of body, life,
and mind, even of the higher mind and the inner self, is
transcended. The tyranny of the heartbeat and the bodily
structures wherein consciousness is defined and the Infinite
is differentiated are all obviated-released of the power of
implication and limitation. Then the very Divine stands
forth, in radical intuition, as the Truth of the
all-pervading current of which all differentiated conditions
are the present modification.
When the heartbeat, the structures of the body, the
brain, and the mind cease to define the consciousness,
consciousness is Realized as the Heart, the Condition in
Reality, the Radiance of God prior to all knowledge. Such is
Sahaj Samadhi. Sahaj Samadhi is Sacrifice of the whole body
at Infinity rather than the attainment of consoling
structural and subjective states of the differentiated
being, high or low. When that Sacrifice, Love, or Radiance
is perfect in Ignorance, it is Bhava Samadhi, or translation
of Consciousness from the planes of unnecessary modification
to the Perfect Domain of Bliss, wherein there is Perfect
Responsibility for all Experience. That translation is the
necessary Destiny of devotees in Sahaj Samadhi. It is the
Gift of God. Until it is given, the arising of manifest
conditions continues, during the present life and in
conditions after the present life is past. Until then, all
conditions are tacitly re-cognized in Sahaj Samadhi, on the
basis of radical intuition of the Real Condition of all
present arising, and no condition has power to suppress the
essential Bliss or Radiance of Divine Ignorance. At last the
unqualified intuition of the Real Condition is transformed
into unspeakable Glory beyond the worlds of mysterious
problematic embodiment.
VISION MOUND
Volume 1, Number 4
OCTOBER 1977
The Supreme Science
by Bubba Free John
“The Supreme Science” is an ecstatic communication of the
principle, process, practice and source of this
Teaching-Love. Here Bubba distinguishes the practice of love
from all forms of motivated action. Love, he says, releases
all negative or limited patterns and destinies to the Divine
rather than suppressing or manipulating them. Love is the
ultimate science because it is aligned not only to the
actual functional laws of psycho-physical life, but to the
very Law of existence, which is Sacrifice.
The “feeling” or “love” Bubba has recommended to devotees
is not an egoic or conventional act. It is realized by Grace
and spontaneously generated (reawakened or re-permittedin
the case of one who hears the Teaching to the point of
Ignorance. Therefore, in the Way of Divine Ignorance,
negative emotions, obsessive desires, and chronic thinking,
as well as fixed or inappropriate forms of outward activity
are not to be suppressed . Such is a conventional egoic
strategy, founded in the absence of hearing and Revelation.
In that case, the trapped impulses will only disturb and
obstruct the whole body. Rather, accumulated conditions of
existence are to be released . They are to be made a
specific sacrifice, whenever they are indicated by any
tendency. In that moment, feel through the tendency. Release
it, through the breath cycle, into the all-pervading Reality
and Presence. Feel into the Presence absolutely and
constantly. In other words, all tendencies are simply fixed
reflections of old activities or adaptations. And all
tendencies are, therefore, dissolved or made obsolete by
present sacrificial devotion, or unobstructed feeling, as
the whole body, into the Infinite Reality and Presence. Such
unobstructed feeling into Infinity is love, or Radiance. If
it is lived in the moment of any tendency, the tendency
itself is dissolved or made unnecessary and ineffective in
that moment. If the devotee consistently lives in the form
of sacrificial devotion or love, active as remembrance and
service, felt via the breath, then the whole body is lived
as Radiance, and all its parts and artifacts dissolve into a
present harmony in that Radiance. Thus, action becomes true
or appropriate, thoughts rest, reactive emotions dissolve in
unobstructed feeling, and a natural or native economy brings
order to the whole body and its destiny. All accumulated
tendencies become obsolete in this Way, and the life of
tendency is replaced by the presently intuitive, free,
creative, and inspired life.
Whoever loves in the present is not bound. This is the
Law. Where there is love there is release of karma, or the
effect of the past. To love is to be “forgiven,” or released
from past unlove and the destiny past unlove creates through
accumulated reactions and the tendencies established by past
experience. To love is to be happy or Radiant as the whole
body to Infinity. In this manner, the past, in the form of
mental, emotional, and physical tendencies, will not be
dramatized. The past becomes unnecessary through love. Love
is primal freedom.
Love is the supreme science of life. It is Communion with
the Real, the very Divine. It is the principle of
transformation, of moral and spiritual healing and growth,
of meditation, of Realization.
Love is the evidence and proof of our freedom. Whoever is
not active in this principle has not yet heard the Teaching
of Truth, regardless of how much extraordinary worldly or
psychic power and experience he or she has known.
There is no religious or spiritual “salvation” or
“forgiveness” independent of this principle, wherein all
righteous attitudes and all destructive compulsions are
shown to be the absence of love and God. All accumulations
or tendencies are disproved and dissolved in present love,
which releases self, and thought, and all knowledge, high or
low, and reactive emotions, and all repetitive and reactive
patterns of action into the Infinite and to Infinity. Such
love is not merely felt within but whole bodily, through all
actions, and in all relations, under all conditions. Such is
the spiritual discipline of devotees in the Way of Divine
Communion. And it is made possible by the Revelation of the
Presence of Real God in Communion with the Spiritual Master,
who is a spiritual sacrifice to and for all devotees.
VISION MOUND
Volume 1, Number 3
SEPTEMBER 1977
The True Teaching Is a Renewal of Culture
By Bubba Free John
When people think of spiritual matters they tend to think
of the influence of the Orient. But because in the last
hundred years the world has become more and more
intercommunicative, we are witnessing a synthesis of world
cultures in which the great divisions of East and West are
breaking down. And, coincident with this development, new
awakenings to spiritual influence are appearing in both East
and West. My work here represents both of these cultural
events. The Teaching I am here to demonstrate is not an
Eastern philosophy, nor is it a Westerners recounting of his
experience in the East. It is a reunion of the great
divisions of culture.
In the past, to be acceptable to Western people a
teaching had to be based in the one-sided experience of the
West. Today, however, to be truly acceptable a communication
must represent a unity of experience. Individuals in the
world today, because of the modern experience of
communication, will not accept nor rest in a practice that
is not unifying and full.
Even so, people generally identify genuine spirituality
with Eastern cultures. And there are aspects of this
Teaching that relate to Eastern culture, but there are also
aspects that relate to Western culture. These relationships,
however, are secondary and superficial. This Teaching
represents a synthesis of cultural and spiritual tension of
the being. Thus, while it is not Eastern, it is not
particularly Western either.
Nonetheless, while this Teaching does not represent
simply the objective, Western approach or the subjective,
Eastern approach, it is also not just a mechanical or
intellectual synthesis. It is itself a unity created out of
spiritual realization. As a matter of fact, if realization
were not its source, then it would be simply intellectual
stuff. Thus the whole matter of Divine life cannot be
summarized. It is not something that can be presented in a
weekend to an interested group. It emanates from an impulse
that is the renewal of culture and the transformation of
life.
People have many cultural suppositions about spiritual
life and spiritual teachers, based on what they have read
and heard. The teacher is supposed to look and act a certain
way because what is spiritual is generally associated with
what is ascetic. The Way of Divine Ignorance does not
represent an exclusively ascetic point of view. But clearly
it is a discipline, ascetic in the highest spiritual sense.
Nothing in itself is presumed to be the Real. No experience
in itself is the Truth, no inner experience or outer
experience, no object, no state in itself exclusively is the
Truth. Thus all experience and all movements of attention in
the being are transcended in intuition of the Real
Condition. In that sense all the disciplines in this Way are
ascetic. They are a kind of heat. They transform, they
transcend. Yet the world of arising manifestation is not
avoided. Therefore when you become involved in this work you
live an ordinary life. You work in the world and are
creatively active in the world, if that is your interest.
Ordinary worldly activity is not prohibited in
principle.
Because of todays fast communication, because there are
more and more books about spirituality and more and more
people traveling and talking about spiritual matters, it is
easy to imagine that some great spiritual event is
occurring. But people are just considering spiritual ideas.
Most people who are involved with so-called spirituality are
involved in superficial ways, as they would be with
conventional church beliefs.
What people describe as the great spiritual age today is
just a turning toward subjective matters and subjective
illusions. Such a view was fostered in this country by the
drug culture of the s, which turned people into the
subjective order. But that way is just as filled with
illusions as any conventional life. It is the dimension of
mind just as outward obsessions are also mind. Mind is the
thing that we suffer, including the ego, which is a part of
mind. Therefore, turning to the subjective order is not
spiritual.
Certainly the so-called spiritual cultures arising in
this country have some feeling for a fuller life. They
represent a sympathy with an aspect of the body-being that
Western life has tended to exclude. The subjective or
emotional aspect of the being is being emphasized again, and
so for that reason spiritual movements in this country look
toward the East. But the subjective being is not the Truth
any more than the active or objective being. Thus most
people are just arbitrarily and superficially taking on
Eastern religious customs in the name of spirituality.
True spirituality is a moral and spiritual
transformation. And the practice of real or spiritual life
begins to make a difference when people who are living
conventional lives are no longer addicted to the worldly
game. Not that they become other-worldly and separate from
the world entirely, but they no longer live as a
manifestation of conventional consciousness and
interests.
It is important to recognize that conventional
consciousness and interests also include all the baggage of
conventional spirituality, all the outer forms of
priestliness, all the Pharisaic nonsense-your robes, your
philosophers, your sitting at the head of the table, your “I
belong to this and you are crazy,” and all the beads and
trappings and concepts and symbols and cultishness. These
are not the sign of spiritual awakening. They are part of
the ordinary consciousness, just as ordinary as gray flannel
suits and Madison Avenue.
Nevertheless, all states of consciousness, whether
ordinary or extraordinary, are to be overcome. They are just
mentality. People in this country in particular are not too
much aware of the dual criticism that is contained in the
ultimate spiritual message. They are attuned to the message
that serves when you are outwardly obsessed, full of
desires, living by the flesh. Then the common message is
that you must turn to the spirit, change your mind, get
involved in internal, spiritual things. But spiritual is not
internal. Spiritual is absolute vacuum. Thus the true
spiritual message is a criticism of inwardness and the
subjective order just as it is a criticism of ordinary
outward, compulsive, obsessive desiring.
An aspect of spiritual growth is the passage through the
revelation of so-called internal content. But the individual
overcomes the content in the process. He stands over against
it, in relationship to it, consciously, just as he must also
stand in relationship to the so-called outer world. But
people tend to become involved in subjectivity rather than
transcending it. They get turned off to the “outside” world
and turned on to the “inside,” and then they become obsessed
with all kinds of symbols of the mind that they identify
with Truth, everything from artificial designs of God, like
the paintings of Krishna, to subtler aspects of the
subjective order, such as internal lights and spontaneous
visions. Thus, every tradition in religious history has been
subject to the illusion of the internal. This Teaching,
however, is the expression of the radical Way of Truth. It
criticizes the order of the mind, the subtle dimension, just
as it criticizes the gross or objective dimension.
Traditionally there has been a division between the great
tendencies in consciousness of West and East, the one toward
manifestation and the other toward the source of
manifestation. When the Western man gets religious, he turns
toward the source, but without leaving the born condition.
He believes in Creator-God, the God-apart who has plans for
the world. Basically his belief in God is an orientation
toward his life, his future. The Eastern man is turned
toward the source, giving up his born position, merging back
into the origin. These approaches are like two different
relationships to the sun-in the one, the individual stands
in the sunlight and depends on it for his destiny; in the
other he tries to merge himself in the sun. These are the
two classic, cultural religious positions represented by
East and West.
The Eastern and Western paths developed independently for
a time, and eventually they began to come into contact with
one another, in opposition to one another but also combining
and sharing qualities. Today communication is so fast, and
time and space on earth are so single, that a synthesis is
emerging, a whole body culture, and the seat of it is here
in this country.
As this new culture emerges, the criticism it implies of
old adaptations must be absorbed. Separate tendencies
represented by past cultural habits can no longer be
accepted. We no longer are disposed to indulge a one-sided
culture. This is the time of synthesis, not the superficial
synthesis of mere communication, but the real synthesis of
the reawakening of the whole body point of view. That point
of view is the essence of this Teaching. It is a reawakening
without the cultural limitations of any time and place in
the past. And it carries with it, then, a criticism of the
presumption that any object or experience, whether
subjective or objective, is Truth in itself. Therefore,
neither of the great orientations is, in itself, the way of
Truth.
In the fullness of our practice the whole body is brought
into consciousness, all of its orientations and all of its
experiences are inspected and become a matter of
responsibility. All the superficial patterns that we
represent individually, psychologically, culturally, and
socially all are inspected and all are made a matter of
responsibility. We are turned to lawful practice rather than
reactive patterns by tendency. Thus this is a different
practice altogether from what is traditionally represented
in East or West.
DEVOTEE: You have said before that the spiritual
influences of Buddha and Christ initiated a completely
different form of culture.
BUBBA: They represented a synthesis in their time also,
not so much of East and West, because rapid global
communication did not exist in those times, but between the
movements of the being. Jesus emphasized the inner man and
mans higher sympathies as opposed to outer observances and
beliefs. Gautama also was a critic of the great
sacrificially ritualistic culture of the time. He saw that
real life required the individuals full commitment, full
realization, full conscious participation, and a revolution
of consideration. Both Jesus and Gautama taught that the
individual himself must become responsible for a union
between outer and inner considerations.
Krishna likewise, in the recorded teaching associated
with him at any rate, did not teach simply the inner path.
He taught that spiritual practice is not a matter of
avoiding action but of assuming a different relationship to
it, one that enables you to be turned toward the Divine
while active. Thus Krishna also represents a movement toward
the synthesis of “within” and “without.”
Whenever a spiritual awakening appears, unique in time
and space, and begins to become communicative in the world
to others, it synthesizes oppositions, differences, the
qualities that are creating disharmony in individual lives
and separating people from one another. Its origin is a
realization of real or Divine life in that time and place,
realized and communicated through an individual in the
company of others and for their sake. It has cultural
significance and thus cultural synthesis also occurs. But
such a Communication is fundamentally a radical approach to
all things harmonious or in-harmonious. It is prior even to
any synthesis. It is a real process. It is a serious and
profound matter in the highest sense. It always has
been.
VISION MOUND
Volume 1, Number 2
AUGUST 1977
You Must Become Responsible as Feeling-Attention in Every
Moment
By Bubba Free John
From a Talk to His Devotees June ,
The discipline of this practice begins with the exercise
of feeling, with the presumption of responsibility for
withholding, withdrawing, and reactive manipulation of the
feeling dimension of the being. This discipline is what
service is all about, what recollection of the Presence of
God is all about, what the Breath of God is all about. It is
the awakening of the heart, and the various stages of
practice are the stages of the maturing of the realization
of the heart as the feeling core of the being. The ego is
simply recoil of feeling, the collapse of intuition that
occurs when we move out of Communion with our true Condition
and identify with the born reaction. When feeling becomes
free and unobstructed, when it becomes perfect love, that
Intuition is God-Realization or Sahaj Samadhi.
When you recoil from feeling-intuition, you collapse into
identification with the body, and thus you suffer the
illusion that you are inside it. At birth you were simply
the body, and the body enjoyed the condition of perfect
communion, feeling, or intuition of its true Condition. But
the shock of birth caused a reaction or recoil. That shock,
or recoil, affects all of your behavior, all of your
development in the future, until you penetrate it. It is the
sense that you are inward to the body, that you are
subjective, that you are a point, an independent awareness,
not a feeling, diffused condition, but a specific
feelingless particle of awareness located somehow inside the
body or subjective relative to it. Thus, you suffer all the
usual emotional, mental, and psychic disabilities as you
develop. As the various functions of the body-being grow and
mature, you adapt through this recoiled position, the
original reaction of birth. And all of the shocks that you
accumulate from the unenlightened, unloving, and unfeeling
actions of others, from the apparent feelingless activity of
the environment, and from the horrors of the world-all of
these reinforce the recoil from feeling.
Therefore, you must become rooted in your natural
disposition and presume again the position of the heart or
the feeling being. Now you feel yourself to be isolated as a
separate awareness, surrounded by flesh and thinking. But
that perception will begin to break down once you have
adapted to this Way by presuming the feeling position again,
by pervading the mental and the physical dimensions with
feeling, by becoming responsible for feeling-attention in
every moment. Then the whole affair of spiritual practice
becomes simply the maturing of that response.
Likewise, you must prepare yourself for this meeting with
me. You must be unobstructed in your feeling. You must
approach without obstruction, without recoil, without
self-reference. Simply be present in my Company, and the
Presence of the Divine will establish itself. You must be
able to feel in spite of the effects of reactions,
self-possession, inwardness, thinking, and all the rest that
you tend to become involved with, and you must abide as
feeling-attention completely, not only on the formal
occasions of our being together, but characteristically,
constantly, ultimately.
It may very well be in your contact with me that effects
are generated in the energies of the body and their
movements; these will attract your attention. Just so, you
may experience the awakening of mental and emotional
reactions. All the adaptations you represent may be
awakened, moved around, or set aside, and some other
relatively private sensation, emotion, or thought may take
its place, such as kriyas and visions and that sort of
thing. The matter of spiritual practice in Truth, though, is
to feel through all these effects, to pass beyond them, to
let them be whatever they are and to let them rise and fall
without any concern. When you abide as feeling-intuition, in
that natural relationship, the Presence of God is shown as
it truly is. And it will draw you into Communion. It will
not leave you in self-possession, surrounded by the
artifacts of your own living. These are not God; therefore,
they pass. Everything native to you, or established as you
through adaptation, dies!
The usual man needs exaggerated conditions in order just
to feel, to have a sense that he is experiencing pleasure.
Thus he becomes addicted to excesses because he does not
already live in the condition of pleasure, happiness, or
fullness. Such people cannot feel, in other words. If you
cannot feel emotionally, then you cannot live a life of
love, you cannot be intimate. If you cannot feel with the
head, you cannot enjoy clarity of mind, and you cannot
consider things as they truly are. If you cannot feel, if
the core of the being, the heart, is not operative, not
active, then at the physical level you must be
self-indulgent.
Thus, feeling must be awakened from head to toe and from
toe to crown. It must become natural to you. It must become
your discipline. You do not by tendency live by feeling from
the heart, so you have adapted to the obstruction of
feeling, to the recoil of the ego. You do not by tendency
have the ability to live a feeling life or a life of love.
Your tendencies are of another kind-they are obstructed and
separative. Through true hearing of the Teaching of the
Spiritual Master you realize commitment to the discipline
and the obligation of love.
Part of the discipline of the Way of Divine Communion is
not to be concerned about the continuation of your old
adaptation, the physical, emotional, and mental signs of
your old way of living. Allow them to come and go, rise and
fall, without concern, without dramatization. Live the
discipline of love, physically, vitally, emotionally,
mentally, and spiritually. By living that commitment as a
discipline, you will see the old adaptations fall away and
become unnecessary and obsolete. New adaptations of
existence naturally come into being when you change your
act. It is as simple as that. But you must persist in this
discipline. You cannot indulge in playing with yourself and
falling back constantly. You must become stronger in your
hearing of the Teaching so that you do not fall and then
collapse under concerns and low-grade dramatization. You
must be stronger than that to bring feeling-attention into
the present. Do not be concerned when subjective stuff
arises. It eventually disappears, if you only persist in
feeling-intuition.
VISION MOUND
Volume 1, Number 11
MAY 1978
God Is The Truth of Life, Not the Parental Source of
Future Fulfillment
by Bubba Free John
The Truth that is God and Life is sufficient in and of
Itself. We are not truly separate from That. We are happy
only in ecstatic or self-released Communion with That. To
release the entire body-mind into Communion with the Radiant
and Unknowable Divine Reality is happiness. It is not that
the act of such release produces effects in us that are
happiness. Rather, the sacrifice, or Communion self, is
happiness.
God is not, in Truth, That which produces experiences
that fulfill us and make us happy. God is the Reality or
Condition that is our freedom and happiness. To Commune with
the Divine is to be released from the absurdity and torment
of independent psycho-physical existence. The Truth or
Condition of the body-mind is the prior, unqualified
Reality.
Therefore, we must Worship the Divine whole bodily, and
so abide in our condition or Truth or God. We do not worship
God in Truth if we merely hope and demand to be given
mortality, bodily or psychic fascination or any other
objective or subjective fulfillment of our psycho-physical
birth. We Worship God in Truth only if we surrender to the
Divine Condition Itself, and abide in That, free of the
body-mind, Awake to the Real Condition of the stream of
events. Just so, the Unqualified Truth is not other than the
Life or Radiance of which self and experience and world are
only temporary and unnecessary modifications.
To Worship the Living God in Truth is to Realize the Free
Condition of “I,” the body-mind. It is to be free, in the
Present, of the dilemma of independent, self-possessed
existence. It is not to cling to self, the body-mind, and to
seek its fulfillment or survival. It is to be free of the
entire absurdity of independent and limited existence, and
all that it may seek or acquire.
Therefore, to Worship or Commune or be a Sacrifice in God
is not a matter of self, or any hopes and beliefs about the
future, or any despair and knowledge about the past. It is a
matter of freedom and happiness itself, or Realization of
the Divine for Its own sake. Nothing but Divine Communion is
necessary for happiness. Nothing but Divine Communion is
freedom. Those who surrender to Life beyond all knowledge
may continue and enjoy or suffer every kind of apparent
experience as the Play in which Life incarnates. But, in any
moment, their happiness is only in the Truth of that Life,
and not in experiences themselves.
CRAZY WISDOM
Volume 5, Number 2
MARCH/APRIL 1987
The Survival of the Community of Devotees
a conversation with Heart-Master Da Love-Ananda
May 19, 1980
HEART-MASTER DA: The members of this Communion must
function in the realities of this world and also engage in
Spiritual practice. Yet they are acting as if they live
forever and as if the world will continue to be a TV-land
forever. Practitioners must understand the circumstances in
which we live and they must understand what the Communion
must do. There should be no “ifs”, no conditions on the
survival of this Wisdom-Teaching in the world. This
institution is not like a business that may or may not
survive. It therefore requires a profound commitment of
energy and intelligence to insure.
Many long-standing prophecies from many sources foresee
that the entire population of the world will be reduced to a
fraction of its size through a combination of wars, natural
disasters, and plagues. This dimension of the karma of
humans may affect the experience of the world profoundly,
and it must be taken into account. If the Communion is to
survive, even though many may be lost, there must be
locations in many areas of the world where a certain number
of members of the Community exist. Then the Wisdom-Teaching
in the world can survive, and centers of practice can be
part of a regeneration of the Communion in the future-if
such profound negative effects will actually be suffered.
Therefore, it is in the interest of the Communion, as a
cultural entity, to create renunciate hermitages in isolated
areas and to support them for the survival of the
Wisdom-Teaching and for the practical survival of
devotees.
The Sanctuaries and the Spiritual Masters residences will
always be the principal form of a renunciate hermitage. But
a number of places could be established in other locales so
that the Spiritual Master could reside in any one of them.
Such hermitages should be in places that are so isolated
that they would not likely be affected by war and political
influence. Each could be inhabited by a small group of
people. Each should be a repository of the Wisdom-Teaching.
Each hermitage should also contain a good library, and
people should live there who are practicing in the advanced
stages of the Way. The hermitages should be self-sustaining
environments for educational and priestly activity to
preserve and communicate the Wisdom-Teaching and to maintain
the Sacred Influence within the Community of devotees.
Even if there is no holocaust, it is still reasonable to
do all this, because we live in a world that is distracted
by itself, corrupted, and turned in on itself, a place where
human beings are easily deluded. This is the reason for the
evolution of the Spiritual Community, which must pursue its
cultural integrity through the creation of its own centers
of activity. The principle of these centers is Satsang, an
essential Spiritual life, and “Good Company”, including the
Company of God, the Company of the Spiritual Master, and the
company of devotees.
It is reasonable to do all of this if there should be a
holocaust. The Communion might well have to deal with many
eventual negative effects. The first would be a full
holocaust, such as a war or other such disaster. The second
would be dramatic political and economic changes, and the
third would be the inevitable influence of deluded humans,
which always exists.
We must therefore create cultural environments where
Spiritual life can be practiced. We must do all this while
remembering that as long as it takes and to whatever degree
possible we must function for the sake of others. The
Communion must always be the vehicle for the education of
the world and for the intelligent consideration of the
Wisdom-Teaching in the world. We must be outer-directed
while at the same time not undermining ourselves.
CRAZY WISDOM
Volume 3, Number 4
APRIL 1984
What I Look For
a talk by Da Free John
March 5, 1984
MASTER DA: The core of the process whereby you make a
transition to the mature stages of practice is the
transcendence of the emotional problem of which your whole
life is the dramatization. So individuals listen to me, and
they enter into spiritual Communion with me, even though I
am not very often physically present among them. And from
time to time I come into physical proximity to them, and
everything that is developing in them through hearing and
seeing is suddenly magnified, and free Grace
appears-although it is always present in my spiritual
relationship with them. There is a special potency in my
physical Company, and in it we suddenly see large numbers of
people seemingly without an emotional problem, being
religious ecstatics, spiritual ecstatics, loving people,
tears coming from the eyes, Happy, their bodies freely
moving, their communications all feeling and true and open,
not merely conventionally or cultically friendly.
But next week, after I leave, these same people will
discover that they are once again suffering from emotional
and functional and social problems. They may feel as though
something has been lost, but that is not so. Nothing has
been lost. Something was gained during this week, you see.
Something was realized. What this will mean, as you will
inevitably discover shortly after I have returned to
Hermitage, is that you must practice. What comes upon you
suddenly, freely, in my physical Company will require more
of you when I leave. It will require you to really practice
the sadhana or spiritual discipline that I have given you.
That practice, of course, includes functional and social
disciplines, but those things could be performed without
awakened spiritual consciousness by someone who has the will
for it. Many people in the world are trying to be spiritual
by doing just that-being vegetarians, meditating, being
friendly and harmless, disciplining themselves functionally
and socially, and so forth. Such is the substance of their
religion or their spiritual practice. But I Teach you
otherwise.
Social and functional disciplines are naturally a part of
the spiritual Way of life, but they are not the essence of
it, and without that essence they are simply conventional
forms of behavior. The essence of spiritual life is
heart-submission, Ecstasy, self-transcendence, and the
Intoxication of intimacy with the All-Pervading Divine.
Realizing That in every moment through real, feeling
submission, you will also conform the body-mind in its upper
and lower coils to that disposition. Thus, in addition to
this heart matter you also practice dietary disciplines,
exercise, service, and so on. But all of that is simply a
natural extension of this heart-Realization, this
heart-practice. This spiritual consciousness, this spiritual
conversion, this emotional conversion, is what I have been
trying to develop in individuals all these years. It is a
very difficult matter to draw people into such a
discipline.
My physical Company can awaken them to this Ecstasy and
this Intoxication very dramatically and instantly, but then
I call people who have had such a taste to practice this
submission in every moment. When I call them to do that,
however, they contract again. And there they are, contracted
even siting before me, understanding very well that
spiritual life can involve functional disciplines and
service, but not seeming to understand this heart matter. Or
even if they understand something about it, it seems so
profoundly difficult to them that they do not know how to do
it. They would know what to do instantly about being a
vegetarian-just go upstairs and eat a handful of sprouts.
But it is not such an instant matter for them to practice
heart-submission, whole-bodily heartfelt submission to the
Divine in every moment. That seems to them to be a capacity
that is not theirs, not their own. In that case, they start
talking about needing insight into themselves, or needing
some help, and so on. They look at their lives and see that
their lives are not about such love. They look at themselves
moment to moment and see that they are living in doubt of
the Divine much of the time, automatically submitted to a
contraction at the heart and therefore whole-bodily. They
are very goodheartedly willing to take up all kinds of
functional and social disciplines but are apparently not
capable of practicing the fundamental heart-submission that
is the root of all disciplines.
Individuals have struggled with me relative to this
matter for at least twelve years. As a result, instead of a
community of people who have advanced into mature stages of
practice, we see a growing gathering of people locked into
the FCC- stage, having moved through the original LMI
period. And why do they stop at that stage ? Why does that
seem to be the maximum level of maturity generally in
evidence in our community? Because of this emotional matter
that we see dramatized in the emotional-sexual game of daily
life. I have been addressing this for years, and I am still
addressing it. I am still observing people who want to
practice this Way in my Company, who are practicing some
rudimentary form of it and doing that better as time goes
on, but who are still struggling with this fundamental
demand for Ecstasy, love, self-submission. Instead of this
self-submission, they are dramatizing patterns built upon a
spiritual or emotional limitation that has been present
since their childhood. People want to do all kinds of things
because they are suffering this limitation. They want to
develop themselves outwardly somehow, do something in the
world, be successful at something or other in the world, or
be successful at some inverted act, some kind of meditation,
yoga, kundalini and so on.
The kundalini energy goes up if it moves at all. The
God-Force comes down. And the Adept brings the God-Force
into the company of people. The kundalini if it can be
developed, leads through a series of self-based experiences
to a state of obliviousness relative to phenomena. If you
can become oblivious to all phenomena, then in some tacit
sense you are left with whatever is left over, and that is
God. But the Way is not about going through a long course
and winding up with God. The Way is about the process that
develops once you find God, once you Realize God. Thus, the
Adept has a special function. That function is not to call
people to Realize God after submitting themselves to a long
process, including perhaps the kundalini process of ascent
and dissociation from phenomena. The Adept brings God into
the company of people directly. The Adept descends. The
Adept brings the force of Realization into the body-mind,
into the vehicle of his own body-mind, which he must first
prepare through an arduous life-trial. Having done that, the
God-Force is stabilized in that apparent personality, is
Radiant in the form of that personality.
Anyone who comes into contact with the Adept will in one
way or another or to one degree or another experience an
awakening. Of course, they may defend themselves against it.
They may have it momentarily and then contract from it, but
that awakening is the significance of the true Adept. The
function of the Adept is not to call people back to Realize
God but to grant people the Realization of God instantly.
Having established you in such Realization, the Adept calls
you to practice the Way of that Realization, the Way of
constantly abiding in that Realization. Such abiding
requires the discipline of self-transcending submission to
Divine Communion.
Therefore, I am not calling people to look for God, nor
am I arguing them into believing in God. I have simply come
among you all. And when I come into contact with people,
suddenly God is obvious. But that is not the end of it. That
is the beginning of it. From the conventional point of view
God-Realization is the end of everything. But it can only be
the end of everything once you have gotten rid of
everything. In our Way God-Realization is the beginning of
everything. Therefore, people who come into my Company must
be instructed about what they must do now. They must not
merely luxuriate in the free gift of Divine Intoxication.
They should luxuriate in it, certainly, but not only
luxuriate in it. They should enjoy it, they should become
completely immersed in the miracle of God-Realization in my
Company, but they must be instructed about what their
obligation, their practice, must be.
After I return to Hermitage you will inevitably
experience the apparent loss of God-Realization. This does
not mean that God is lost. What is being shown in you is the
mechanism, the contraction that comes into play that makes
it seem that God is absent, that there is no love, that
there is no inherent Force of Being, that Being is
threatened, you see. You must know that mechanism, and you
must see me, you must enjoy God-Realization by seeing me.
You must observe the mechanism in yourselves that withdraws
from God-Realization and be responsible for a practice that
relinquishes that mechanism, that contraction. Fundamentally
that is our practice. Functional and social disciplines are
secondary and natural parts of this practice, but the
practice is fundamentally this heartfelt submission.
That heartfelt submission is practiced in the Way of
Faith or the Way of Divine Communion in one fashion, and it
is practiced in the Way of Insight in another fashion. In
both cases, however, precisely the same process is involved:
relinquishment of the self-contraction, immersion in the
inherent Reality, which is the Spiritual Divine, which is
Self-Radiant Love-Bliss. Therefore, That Which is Realized
through this discipline is always Love, Bliss, inherent
Radiance of Being, inherent Unity, Communion with and
ultimate Identity with the Living God. This is a profound
practice. It is not just some smiling, conventional
religious affair in which you try to keep yourself together
morally and functionally. It is a matter of Ecstasy and the
accompanying Intoxication. You must practice this. You must
submit yourself in my Company every moment, and that is a
discipline.
There are some moments in my Company in which it just
happens. You do not know how it happens. You did not do
anything. You did not especially make a gesture of
submission-at least it was no greater than on any other day.
It was given to you for free, you see. That is good, because
that is the Blessing, the instant granting of
God-Realization. But with that Gift comes the demand of the
Law. You must practice self-submission to stay one with that
Realization. Grace will always be available. That Blessing
will be given to you again and again, but you must fulfill
the Law. You cannot by-pass that obligation, and that
obligation is the sadhana.
You must hear and see me and develop that specifically
spiritual process. If you will do that, you will also do all
the other social and intimate disciplines. You will practice
an intelligent, functional habit of life. You will serve and
make this Way available through the communications of the
institution and the community, and you will have productive
work and so on. Spiritual consciousness does not in any way
prohibit those things. In fact spiritual consciousness is
the creative principle that makes such things grow and
advance beyond conventional limits. But in addition you will
live the Ecstatic and Intoxicated life of a true devotee who
is constantly distracted by the Living One, Intoxicated by
that Presence, Intoxicated by immersion in the All-Pervading
Power of Love-Bliss, which does not appear to have a point
of origin within or without or anywhere in the universe, at
its periphery or its center. It is a Radiance without
center, without bounds. It is a Mystery. We are one with It
in our Ignorance, in our transcendence of the
self-contraction and the forms of knowledge and experience
associated with our individuated body-minds.
This Blessed Realization is given to you for free, and
you are in a state of total Ignorance, immersed in Mystery,
and at the same time absolute certainty. Wisdom without
limits can grow in you if you remain established in the
Living Divine. You will tend not to do that. Everyone who
has gathered for this celebration will tend not to do this
next week. It is not that they will not do it at all but
that they will be tending not to do it. They may become
depressed or despair or think that they must go on and look
for something else now, whereas what they must do is simply
practice. They must know what that practice is, however, and
they must become sensitive to the symptoms of egoity and how
it turns them from Ecstasy and Intoxication to
self-contraction, self-bondage, and all the complications of
ordinary life.
Ours is not a utopian community or self-help organization
or other-help organization in which we are simply trying to
make human beings calm, more balanced, and more socially
functional. Such equanimity is part of our culture of life,
but it is not the principle. The principle of our Way of
life is God-Communion, God-Realization, given for free by
Grace. But it is a Way of practice, a Way of submission to
That Which is Realized by Grace. If you do not make that
submission, then you will always tend to feel that you have
lost it or that it is not true anymore, that it does not
even exist. No matter how profound your experience may be
this week or one day, in another moment you can wonder if
that ever even happened, or you will try to account for it
psychologically or circumstantially or whatever, and you
will read little bits in magazines and books and newspapers
that will confirm your doubts. But the next time you are in
touch with that Blessing you will realize that it has
nothing to do with such limitations. It cannot be accounted
for by worldly philosophy. It is simply Divine
Realization.
Well, you must come to the point at which it is no longer
acceptable to you to fall from such Grace, at which you are
no longer interested in merely surviving and functioning,
however cleanly. You must come to the point of commitment to
the Ecstasy and Intoxication of Divine Life, the Way of life
in which you are no longer separated from the Divine, but
are constantly one with the Divine, in constant Communion.
Only that must be acceptable to you. That is the capacity
for real practice. That is the impulse to Realization. That
is the core of every mature practitioners life.
Therefore, if there are going to be people moving out of
these beginning stages into mature stages of practice, then
this event, this transformation, this commitment must occur.
It must become profoundly important to you to remain in a
state of God-Realization and not to fall from it by becoming
preoccupied with ordinary life, which is really a
dramatization of Godlessness, a dramatization of an
emotional problem, shown through sexual signs, intimate
signs, social signs, in the form of all your preoccupations,
physical, mental, emotional, social. People in general are
dramatizing this Godless life or this emotionally contracted
life, separated from the Divine by virtue of that
contraction. I am calling you to live free of that and to
develop a different kind of life altogether, not based on
idealism but based on actual God-Realization from the
beginning.
I must struggle with people constantly. Why am I
struggling with them? If I were simply proposing a belief in
God and an idealistic program of practice, I would not have
to struggle at all. I would just give calm little lectures,
and everybody would practice rote disciplines. It is being
done all over the world by religious people. I am struggling
with people because what I am calling them to and what they
are experiencing in my Company, at least from time to time,
is a great matter that cannot be practiced on the basis of
belief and idealism. It involves this heart-submission,
whole-bodily. It must be Ecstasy. It must show the signs of
Intoxication or Love-Bliss. These signs must be in clear
evidence, in every aspect of functional life, in every
aspect of social life. This force of inherent Happiness, or
Love-Bliss under all circumstances, must be evident. If it
is not evident then you are not realizing it, you are not
practicing it. Thus, if your life is full of complications,
problems, and complaints, you are not enjoying the
God-Intoxicated state and you are not practicing the
discipline to which I have called you.
If you truly see me and truly practice, then everything
becomes clarified. Your relationship with me is the key.
Because I am here you no longer have to seek God. Therefore,
you can practice the unique Way that is founded on
God-Realization. You need not seek, or be a sinner. You can
be inherently sinless, which does not mean merely to live in
conventional moral purity and so forth, but to live in a
state of non-separation from the Spiritual Divine such that
that Reality transforms your life and makes the event of
life the practice of life. Thus, the unique advantage given
to human beings is the relationship to the Adept, and this
is so not merely because the Adept is someone who has
Realized the Truth and can tell you how to do it. It is a
unique advantage because the Adept Is what he has Realized
and Awakens that Realization in you instantly, merely by
entering into relationship with you. This is the root of the
Great Way. There is no practice, discipline, or wisdom that
we might call religious or spiritual that is as great as
that. It is the one Great Principle. Everything that we can
call religious or spiritual develops from that Principle,
that relationship. It is greater than anything we might call
our philosophy or our practice or our community.
This consideration must be developed with everyone. For
the first several days of my visit, what was emphasized was
the fact of my availability, the fact of people coming into
my Company and the experience they were having as a result.
That is good, and that should continue to be emphasized or
made the core of this celebration, because that is the Great
Principle to which I have been pointing. On the other hand,
people must be instructed about the practice that is their
obligation when they have been Blessed with seeing, Blessed
with God-Realization, Blessed with heart-release. The
experience will tend to fade, and then they will be stuck
with the egoic game of Narcissus. By tendency that is
inevitable. Thus, they must recognize this Blessing,
acknowledge it, be able to observe the signs of withdrawal
from it, and know what their discipline is and that it is a
hard school. They must be committed to it because they value
a state of God-Realization above all and are not inclined to
make any ordinary experience the focus of their
existence.
Thus, everyone should emerge from this celebration
committed to that practice, not just temporarily intoxicated
by my Company. In other words, they must realize what a
Great Principle this Ecstasy and Intoxication is, value It,
and know Its supreme nature. They must make this Principle a
future practice and not be naive, not be winging it for a
few days in my physical Company and ready for a crash next
week, you see. In years past people would exhaust me by
requiring my Company for this Ecstasy and then not
practicing, so that I was being wrung dry like a goose
laying golden eggs or a cow full of elixir. That is an
abuse. Everyone should definitely use my Company for the
sake of this Realization, this Ecstasy and Intoxication, but
they must accept the obligation that comes with it, and be
prepared to endure the necessary discipline of this daily
life-practice when I return to the Hermitage. I am not going
to be absent from them. I will simply not be in their
physical company for the time being.
In most cases devotees will have only very rare
experiences of being in my physical Company, and that is
fine. It should be sufficient to come into my Company a few
times and be awakened to God-Realization-even once will be
enough if you are willing to endure the practice of
spiritual discipline. I do not mean “enough” in the sense
that you have experienced my physical Company today and so
do not care if you ever see me again. Rather, my physical
Company should be used effectively, and then you must know
how to locate my Transcendental Company thereafter.
When I return to Hermitage all devotees should still
Commune with me. I should still have their attention. Their
relationship to me should be the core of their daily
practice. Devotees should develop a culture with one another
that is about such practice, and they should accept the
charge I have given them relative to their own practice and
the offering of this Way to others. All of that is the
business of devotees. It is none of my business at all.
Therefore, I will look for those signs as the evidence of
devotees response to me. There are certain signs I look for
during this celebration, the tangible signs that are
immediate to our meeting-all the Ecstatic signs in people in
my Company. Those signs are good, and this is especially a
time for all that to be let loose. When I return to
Hermitage I will be looking for other signs as well. I will
be looking for the effective performance of this practice,
in its essential discipline as well as its secondary ones,
and for the fulfillment of the charge I have given to this
institution and to the community. All that is a very serious
matter. It is a great discipline. It is a very creative
obligation and a very Happy Way of life. If you will do it
and attract others who will do it, there really will be no
limit on the importance of my birth. This birth can, in
other words, be the incident that changes the course of this
human dilemma. That is the intention of this birth, but its
fulfillment requires the response of devotees and their
fulfillment of the Law of their own obligation.
What it comes down to is that this matter must become
important to you. You would say, I presume, that it is
important to you, but obviously it has to become a lot more
important to you than it is. Ask any devotee who has come
here for this celebration whether God-Realization, this Way
of life, is important, and he or she would say yes. But it
is not important enough yet. Otherwise we would see a
profound transformation in the quality of everyones living
from day to day. The Way of God-Realization is a great
struggle. You have to struggle with yourself and I must
struggle with everybody. There is no luxury in it for me,
you see. Struggle is inherent in this outpost. When
everything vibrates down to this vulgar level, it takes a
lot of work to stay Happy.
Most people are just struggling to survive. You all are
struggling to stay Happy. It is another matter altogether.
If you have enjoyed even a moment of Divine Intoxication in
my Company you can see how trivial all the preoccupations of
mankind are and how they are all based on the absence of
such Happiness. Some of those un-Happy people even claim
that they are looking for it or that what they are doing is
a means for realizing that Happiness, but it is not really
true. All those preoccupations are not leading toward
Happiness, they are what people are doing because they have
despaired of Happiness already and have settled for
something less. Most of them would settle for a good word, a
little bit of hope, a little miracle, a promise of survival
after death. A little consolation is all they would like to
have added to this difficult and un-Happy struggle. Because
of that many people only want or only accept that much from
me. But I am showing them something more and calling them to
something more, calling them to a Great Life and not merely
to the continuation of their mediocrity or a little bit of
consolation based on the fact that I exist.
Thus, it is not sufficient, from my point of view, for
everybody to feel good this week only to crash next week. I
will consider this visit to be auspicious only if people
continue to practice next week and all the weeks following
and will show me the evidence of spiritual practice and its
signs in all of the practical affairs of the institution and
the community. In the past the report I received from
devotees was typically that of the failed case, the failure
of practice, the “oh, shucks, I did it again” stuff, the
“please examine me and give me insight into my problem”
stuff. I have given people everything to free them of their
problems. They are inherently free of such problems in my
Company. Therefore, instead of begging for insight into all
of that, or begging for me to analyze their case or give
them one more taste, they should be bringing me their gifts,
the gift of submission, of entering into this Communion and
developing the signs of spiritual life. If they will do that
then not only will the institution and the community develop
and grow, but people will move readily into advanced stages
of practice and the profundity of the central culture of our
institution will be magnified. That is what I am looking for
as a follow-up to this occasion. Make sure everybody knows
that.
CRAZY WISDOM
Volume7 , Number 2
MARCH/APRIL 1988
“Im Talking to Everybody”
from a conversation with Tom Closser
In recent weeks I have clearly noticed the “M-field”
effect in our Communion. Ive always felt it to be true, but
I experience it most directly when I have a conversation
with somebody about our relationship with Love-Ananda. When
I relate experiences from my own life that occurred in
Love-Anandas physical Company, I often discover there were
similar incidents in the other persons life from which they
were able to derive the same understanding that occurred for
me. In moments like this it becomes obvious why telling the
leelas of Da Avadhootas Teaching Work is so important. They
give people a reference, a confirmation, and a fuller
understanding of what they have experienced outside His
physical company.
On many occasions Love-Ananda has taken us to task for
casually using language that suggests we are ever “outside”
His Company. To say something like, “I wasnt in Your Company
when it happened”, goes over like a lead balloon. He asks,
“What do you mean you werent in my Company?” So you get down
to the details and say, “Well, I wasnt in Your physical
Company.” He says, “Well, thats different.” From His point
of view, He has a relationship with many, many people, and
He performs the same Spiritual Function for them that He
does for people who are sitting physically in front of
Him.
When He talks in gatherings, there are periods of time
when Hell look up over everybodys head, so that Hes not even
looking at us, and Hell say, “Im not just talking to you
people here. Do you understand?” Hes shouting it. And
sometimes He looks right at the tape recorder and says
passionately: “I’m talking to everybody!”
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