The Paradox of Instruction – Da Free John

Chapter 1

Awakening From the Dream of Subjectivity

There is no inner self independent of “the body.” Subjectivity, the reflexive orientation toward the self inside the body, is founded on a lie. It is a way of living in illusions. It is the way of Narcissus. It is an argument, a method, an experiment in destiny. It is meditation on death, future, dilemma, fear, and sorrow. It is the way each of us appears to choose. But no choice was ever truly made. The “choice” is not a subjective matter. Awakening to the born condition, the apparently independent body-being, is itself the logic of this habit to death. The body itself names this self. The self is not independent of the body. The self is the body. The self is only independent as the body. Prior to the whole body, or birth in any realm, there is no separate self or consciousness or mind. The whole) body, or the self, is simply the sense of separation or independent existence.

The whole body is a psycho-physical event. The lie is that its psychic aspect represents an independent being-that is, an elusive, subtle person or specific soul that is separable from the complex whole body or born body-being, just as the elemental body, or physical aspect, appears separable from all other bodies and things. Traditional religion and spirituality generally argue for the seniority and separability of within, and modern “materialistic” science seems to argue for the irreducibility of the flesh, and thus the mortality of the psycho-physical “soul.” In truth, both arguments are false, since neither is founded in realization of the Truth or Condition of the whole body. But the so-called “materialistic” view is at least more correct in its analysis of the singleness of the whole body-being.

The inner, emotional, mental, psychic, mystical, egoic process is not radically reducible to itself and separable from the elemental body, its relations, and its destiny. “I” is the body. “Within” is the body talking. The whole body arises spontaneously, each of its aspects simultaneously, and prior to our knowledge. All that we know or seek to know is acquired after the fact of the complex body-being itself.

The whole body, or the body-being, the apparent psycho-physical entity, is itself the “soul.” The soul is not within. The being, the sense of separability and independence itself (not only subjective but even physical), is the dilemma. The apparent independence of existence in the case of the individual in the born condition is suffering.

The inherent suffering that is ours by birth is ours by birth. It is not simply acquired over time in the form of sophisticated inwardness or subjectivity. We are not born innocent and then come to “sin” only through an inner error. Subjectivity, or the exclusive orientation to inwardness or psycho-physical self-possession, is itself the dramatization of our suffering. It is reactive dramatization of the limitation or incident that is birth itself. It is the proof and fact of suffering, not the instrument of release. The awakening of the Way of Truth is not itself an awakening to inwardness,but an awakening from inwardness, from recoil, contraction, and all hiding behind the flesh. Awakening into Truth is a process of incarnation, or release of the reflex of inwardness, or selfness, under all conditions (physical, emotional, mental, psychic, mystical, intuitional, and egoic).

Birth is shock. It is the primal incident. As an incident, it is usually interpreted psychologically -in terms of its emotional-mental or subjective impact. But its significance is in the event itself, the sudden event of existence as the whole body. Birth is itself shock-vital shock, a recoil at Infinity. Our life is a drama of subjective struggling against an unbearable demand: relationship, incarnation, or love. We are in the mood of recoil, contraction, and self-possession -not by virtue of some inward and soulish preexistence, but by virtue of birth itself, the apparent independence of self all relationships imply. All that is other implies the separate me. Even infants, growing adepts in the shock of living based on birth, demonstrate this reflex, the self-sympathy that dramatizes our suffering. There is no innocence, for all have been born. The feeling of independence is the burden of living beings.

Truth is not in inwardness or the experiential elaboration of a born self. The Realization of Truth is not a matter of experience arising within or without the born-being. Truth is Revealed in re-cognition, or knowing again, of the shock or recoil represented simultaneously in every dimension of the born-being. Truth is Realized in radical intuition of the prior and present Condition not only of self and thought but of the whole body, even the worlds in time and space.

We suddenly are born, independent, related, dependent but separate. There is no inherently separate inwardness over against this. That is a gradual invention, but only an extension of the sense of bodily separateness. The whole elaborate manufacture of complex emotions, thoughts, and expanded psychic and subtle appearances is only an extension of the born-condition, the inherent shock of separateness and separability. It is all madness, a lie, a torment, an unrelieved wilderness of nonsense, high and low. The complex inner being is a drama made over time. Most men and women are ordinary, even mediocre, examples of the breed. A few are geniuses of the various parts within and beyond. It makes no difference. The whirl of incident, of birth and death, accounts for all equally. The inner and the outer heroes are visible vectors of the same visible stream, and each falls up from the same born shock, and back to invisibility through the same execution by “Nature.”

The matter of Truth is there for all, whatever their degree of inner glamour or outer opportunity. The sense of separate existence is the motivating lie of each and all, within and without. The human is only that. All the rest of any life is the reaction, played out among probabilities.

Knowledge has nothing whatever to do with Truth. All knowledge is subsequent experience of the born being. Truth is the prior Condition in which the born-being itself, and all its subsequent knowledge, arises, in which it all proceeds, and in which it is again resolved, either in death or in Wisdom while alive. We are born in Ignorance-absolute, unqualified, and eternal Ignorance. “I” do not know what a single thing is. And that Ignorance remains native to our case as long as we live, whatever we do, or attain, or realize, within or without. Ignorance is our only link with the Divine. It is the root of Divine Communion. Ignorance is the Truth of our birth and our knowledge and our worlds, high or low, as long as we live or persist, in this or any number of lives.

Those who are subjectivists, whether religious or scientific, view our native Ignorance as a fault, a temporary condition, which is constantly to be invaded by the growth of various kinds of knowledge. They are only temporarily agnostic, even relative to the highest matters. But our Ignorance is not a lesser principle than knowledge. It is not the absence of knowledge. It is senior to all knowledge, as death is to all those already born. Death and birth are equally confounding to the idealism of knowledge and the illusory victory of inwardness, or any of the destinies of the separable man, whereas Ignorance is untouched by the transactions of birth and knowledge and death.