Selections from Talks and Essays by
The AdeptSelections from Talks and Essays by
IV. Crazy Wisdom.
 Da Free John – 1983
IV Crazy
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The Adept cannot help but
constantly and continuously Communicate the Divine Condition
to his environment. Whereas the walls or nearby plants and
animals pose no voluntary barrier to his Influence, people
characteristically react to his Work by intensifying their
egoic contraction. The ego is a formidable opponent of the
spiritual process. Surrender is not part of its vocabulary,
and it will do everything to preserve itself and its whole
universe of presumed associations with other beings and
objects.
Human culture, notably today’s
technological world of surfeit and easily gotten pleasures,
is heaven for the ego. Modern Man has access to innumerable
diversions that produce the illusion of Happiness and
Fulfillment and that make the spiritual process seem an
unreal, nonsensical, and wholly undesirable alternative. The
Wisdom of the Adept is scarcely heard in this world of
selfsatisfied, congealed egos. Even those whose destiny
brings them into the proximity of a living Adept are mostly
quite unprepared to receive the gift of his spiritual
Transmission: One can only fill an empty
vessel.
But since the Adept’s birth was
occasioned by his spontaneous Impulse to Enlighten others,
he cannot be discouraged by the spiritual gloom of his
environment. In fact, he will do anything to penetrate the
egoic armor of those who have found their way to him. Surely
guided by the Wisdom of his Realization, he may at times be
moved to leave the realm of common propriety and assume the
role of Crazy Adept: He becomes a wild, unpredictable
character whose behavior reflects the nonlinear and chaotic
nature of the World-Process itself. There is nothing mild,
calm, or passive about him. He certainly does not match the
conventional image of a saint. He is not a consolation to
his devotees, but a raging fire that consumes all egoic
obstacles in its way. But he himself is not motivated by an
ego but by pure spontaneity, the Impulse of transcendental
Compassion. His sole Purpose is the dissolution of the
illusion of the ego-bound devotee, whereupon the latter
Awakens as the Universal Being-Consciousness.
DEVOTEE: The possibility of saving
the world is a goad to your Teaching Work?
DA FREE JOHN: Yes, and the
impossibility of saving the world creates laughter. There is
the urge to Enlighten every being, and then there comes the
realization that it is impossible to do. That is the joke.
The impossibility makes a joke of spiritual Teaching.
Spiritual Teaching is a primal urge, like sex, you see, but
it is bound to be laughed at. It must become a laughing
matter so that the Teacher can go on to something
else.
This Teaching is also a kind of
joke, an expression of my sense of humor. I am a clown,
don’t you see? I do everything for the sake of good humor.
You are able to see the Brightness of God only through
responding properly to his fool – in other words, by getting
the “jokes” of the Teaching of the Adept, by transcending
the world in his Company. If you do not laugh at God’s fool,
then you do not see God. The way to God is through God’s
fool, God’s clown, one who has already transcended the
world.
Thus, I am here to make a mockery of
the universe, to demonstrate that the universe is a laughing
matter, so that you will transcend it. I am here to tell the
ultimate jokes – all seven of them. There are seven eternal
jokes, which are not revealed in words – they are not quips
or one-liners, but whole pieces of existence, or stages of
life. The seven stages of life are the seven original jokes.
They too are the fool of God. When you transcend them by
fulfilling them, then you are able to see the wonderment of
God. When you have fulfilled the Teaching of Truth, then you
get the joke of human existence.
Living the stages of life, though a
profound and necessary gesture, is ultimately foolishness.
The seven stages are stages of laughter, each of which must,
in its turn, become a great laugh to you. You must be able
to feel total pleasure in the face of each stage of
experience before you can go on to complete the next stage.
In your present level of realization, however, you have not
yet laughed at any of the stages of life. You are still
burdened by them, still carrying them around, still being
tested by them. You are not yet laughing at God’s fool. You
yourself will become God’s fool as you incarnate and laugh
at each of the stages of life. Even the seventh stage of
life, you will see, is a colossal lot of foolishness. The
only way to move through the seventh stage is to laugh your
head off. The seventh stage of life must become a laughing
matter, along with all the rest of your body and all its
stages of growth. You must get the seventh joke, which is
the body itself, the last laugh. That joke is eternal and
its Humor is infinite Bliss.
Scientific Proof of the Existence
of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House! pp. 377-78
In the seventh stage of life certain
higher karmas may be animated, particularly in the case of
the Adept, who does spontaneous “Crazy” Work sometimes, to
Teach. He is moved spontaneously to Teach. Such Teaching is
a “Siddhi,” a Divine Power, not merely a process of
conventional intellectual activity. Such an individual life
may continue to be quite active for some time in the seventh
stage of life. In some ways he may become simplified, but in
other ways he may continue to be active. The higher karmas –
if one could call them karmas at all -the higher expressions
of action, which are basically devoted toward the Awakening
of others and the Demonstration of the Way, may remain
intact. Therefore, the individual may not develop a stark
simplicity of renunciation until very late in life, or close
to death. Perhaps only in death will such simplicity
appear.
There is no way of judging the state
of the Adept, in other words, on the basis of behavior
alone. Behavior is not really a means whereby to measure
whether anyone is Enlightened, if we judge behavior
according to conventional standards, at any rate. The
Enlightenment of some individuals may be made evident by
virtue of Crazy behavior. In other words, you have to
understand the activity of an individual. You cannot merely
presume that a certain kind of activity characterizes
Enlightenment, or that if you do not see that activity then
you are not looking at an Enlightened being.
The Bodily Sacrifice of
Attention, p. 82
When you realize existence,
existence is not you independent of anything. All of this
exists. All of this is characterized by the One Being. How,
in the case of Enlightenment, therefore, can you settle into
a medium calm in your cave of meditative pleasures? It is
not necessary. You need not be isolated anymore. Because of
this expansive quality of compassion, a unity with all
Being, the Adepts take on the “Crazy” form. Such compassion
is the origin of the Adept’s willingness to do anything, not
speaking now in terms of the potential to do something
terrible and negative, but the willingness to do anything
outrageous yet benign for the sake of liberating
beings.
The compassionate Maha-Siddha does
not do for others everything he can do within the bounds of
propriety. The compassion of the Maha-Siddha is such that he
will do everything, whether in the realm of propriety or
not, for the sake of Awakening others. Therefore, the Crazy
Adept looks crazy. He or she does what is not within the
realm of conventional religious propriety. The Crazy Adept
is not bound by propriety or any dualistic
conceptions.
The Fire Gospel, p.
109-11
There is nothing gentlemanly about
the true yogi. There is nothing gentlemanly about the Lord.
As long as you want to be a gentleman, or a gentlewoman, you
can carry on your endless karmic destiny in limitation, but
you will never live the life truly. You will piddle around
in dimensions like this one, which are nothing but excrement
compared to the Divine Light, They amount to nothing, all
complications and struggles. There is very little pleasure
in it. If this world became a world of devotees, it would
become a different place, and in the community of devotees
it will be a different story. But the Lord is wild, the Lord
is a vast fire, not a gentleman. As soon as the Lord makes
His contact with you, He works for your
dissolution.
You must yield the body. Your cells
must yield. Only then are you fit for the Divine Yoga. When
you have no other commitments, when you have nothing to
withhold, then I enter your life. And because there is such
a wildness to the Divine Yogis, they hide themselves, either
behind the conventional spiritual game, or a conventional
social life, or behind some little hidden association with
other such Yogis. Now the time has come when it can be
stated more plainly.
The Bodily Location of Happiness,
p. 48
Selections from Talks and Essays by
Da Free John on the Nature and Function of the Enlightened
Teacher