“Celebration Is the Meeting Between Heaven and Earth”
From The Eating Gorilla Comes in Peace – 1987
THE EATING GORILLA COMES IN PEACE (1987)
Part II: The Wholly Regenerative Vegetarian Diet
CHAPTER 8: Every Meal Is a Sacrament
Celebration Is the Meeting Between Heaven and Earth
A talk by Bubba Free John
(1) BUBBA: True celebration is not a way of abandoning
the principle of Truth, but of expressing it. The dietary
accessories can be used in two ways: They can be used as a
way of indulging the vital desires, or they can be used as
an expression of the Radiant Nature of the whole body, in
which case they are not used habitually, but sacramentally
and occasionally, as a ritual enactment of the discipline of
love. The essential discipline is the movement out of the
contracted, self-possessed, self-referring, recoiling,
reactive disposition into the native position of Radiance,
no contraction, relationship, or love. The use of all of
these accessories is simply a ritual play of the fundamental
discipline of sacred Communion.
(2) Thus, occasional celebrations of a sacred kind are
not necessarily inappropriate if people truly prepare
themselves, if they truly celebrate, and if their
celebration is a loving and energetic occasion.
(3) If you do not bring energy to one another in the
occasion of celebration, you are just feeding the vital fuel
and turning inward, exercising your subjectivity. And you
wind up with habitual cravings and self-oriented effects
only. You must break the pattern of the conventional and
merely intoxicating use of these accessories and engage them
sacredly, as an expression of the Divine Life, and as a
ritual instrument for bringing energy into the play of your
human relations.
(4) As soon as you recoil, as soon as you become
self-possessed in the sacrament, you degrade the play, you
enervate yourself, you throw Life away. You become sorrowful
ultimately, and fearful or angry, aggravated, motivated to
other acts of self-possession. You must engage the ritual of
the sacred occasion without fear, without withholding. You
must step beyond social conventions, which are simply ways
of communicating forms of limitation. You must be willing to
become ecstatic, to become foolish, loving, radiant, to
bypass all of the negative, ordinary, low-keyed, mediocre
presumptions of everyday life. True celebration is not an
invitation to anything that might take place under ordinary
circumstances through the use of killed food and wine and
sex. True celebration is a way of representing, in a
concrete circumstance of human relations, the mood of
loving, the mood of Radiance, without mind, without
separation, without self-indulgence.
(5) We should celebrate to renew our relations, to purify
them, not to become vulgar, not to bypass our daily
commitment to one another, but to purify or intensify our
mutual commitment and our essential discipline. And the
intoxication that comes to life in the ritual should not
move us to vulgar self-indulgence but to compassion, to
forgiveness, to humor and freedom. The psychic intimacy that
we all enjoy with one another should be affirmed by our
celebration. It is a sacrament. When we enter into the
celebration and use these elements, we acknowledge the
Divine Food as the essential content of our
relationships.
(6) The problem with the communication of the Teaching of
Truth is that it is not delivered to beings in whom
“hearing” and perfect Enlightenment coincide. It is
delivered to beings who are completely in need of it-who may
“hear,” but who must persist in the discipline implicit in
the communication of the argument itself. Heaven is Full.
Truth is Absolute. But to bridge the gap between the Perfect
and the dimensions of the dream in which living beings arise
and fall is a great task. Thus, Heaven and Earth cannot
simply meet . They are in conflict. Earth cannot rise to
Heaven first. It has no motive, no capacity for that. Heaven
must become Earthborn. The Teaching must be enlivened
ritually, with the elemental conditions and in their midst.
The work of the Awakened Teacher is a sacrifice, and
likewise the work of the devotee is a sacrifice. But the
sacrifice of Heaven is first. If Heaven descends and becomes
a sacrifice, and Earth ascends and becomes a sacrifice, they
are both transformed. They both cease to be what they have
appeared to be, and they become the Heart, the Truth.
(7) We must have celebrations in which Heaven and Earth
meet. not vulgar gatherings in which Earthborn beings are
degraded. Earthborn beings are degraded in the three
functional centers below the heart through vital indulgence,
through food and drink and sex and wrong association with
others. If they will make right sacramental and sacred use
of these same elements, then the Heaven-nature in them is
joined with the Earth-nature and comes to rest in the medium
of the heart. If you celebrate truly, then you will not be
degraded. Your fear and sorrow and anger and separation will
not be reinforced. The use of accessories will lift you out
of the vital region so that your elemental life becomes
expansive. That life must become a sacrifice; therefore, it
cannot turn in on itself. If you make improper use of these
accessories, then you will be less capable of love than you
were before.
(8) Love is the pleasurable dimension of this discipline.
People concentrate on personal disciplines, on controlling
the diet, working every day, maintaining their sexual
commitment intelligently, and so forth. All of that is
inherently difficult; it is a means of frustrating your old
ways. The fullness of the Teaching is realized via “hearing”
and “seeing” the Truth and via service, or the commitment of
Energy and Radiance in your relations. Only if you are
adapted to the Fullness of this communication are the
personal disciplines then pleasurable. Without true
celebration discipline is obnoxious.
(9) The ritual of celebration through the use of these
accessories must be occasional, but the true or Divine
Celebration is constant. Religious and spiritual life is an
ecstatic or Divinely intoxicated life-not a life of
self-possessed intoxication, but a life of Radiance, and
freedom from self-possession, from contraction, from
inwardness. True spiritual life is about how to be happy
without drink, how to be Full without stimulants, how to be
airy without nicotine and smoke, how to dance without an
excuse, how to sing without self-consciousness. Celebration
is simply a way of communicating to one another the
essential Divine Nature of daily life.
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