Selections from Talks and Essays by
Da Free John on the Nature and Function of the Enlightened
Teacher
The Adept
Selections from Talks and Essays by
Da Free John on the Nature and Function of the Enlightened
Teacher.
VI. The Divine Person:
The Adept Is the Unborn Reality.
“I Am You”.
The Accomplishing Power.
Da Free John – 1983
VI
The Divine Person
The passages in this section
bring into relief the “hidden” dimension of the God-Realized
Teacher – that aspect of his being where his real Work, of
spiritual Transmission, takes place. The Adept’s
Transmission is not a form of mere somatic or psychic
energy. It is not dependent on his physical body or
proximity. Rather, it is the dynamic pole of his essential
nature as the Transcendental Being-Consciousness. As Master
Da confesses in The Dreaded Gom-Boo, or the Imaginary
Disease That Religion Seeks to Cure (p. 311): “The Spiritual
Master is not an individuated personality. I am not a
separate character. I have been murdered, undone, sacrificed
by this Great One.”
As the devotee’s practice
matures, it begins to become obvious to him that the Adept
is not a limited body-mind or person, or even a particular
configuration of energy, but Reality Itself. And it is as
that Ultimate Being or Divine Person that the Adept must
become the intimate of the mature practitioner. For, in
their essential nature Adept and devotee coincide perfectly.
This is the only reason why spiritual Transmission can occur
and be an effective force of transformation.
The Adept Is the Unborn
Reality
I am not born. And I am not one who
has been born. I am not a reincarnated individual. I am not
even an incarnated individual. I am not one who has a
future. I am not one who is in the worlds. I am not one
whose consciousness is here or there. I have seen all things
and they all exist in Me, so I can describe them to you. But
I am not always meditating on them, so they are really
beside the point for Me. And I, fundamentally, know nothing
about them, except that I recognize them
perfectly.
I am simply a Voice that instigates
your own insight. Da Free John is not one who is like you,
who is related, who is knowledgeable, who is informed, who
is saved or relieved. Da Free John is not any such person.
Da Free John is no person. At some point you may begin to
realize this. Da Free John is like a movie on the screen.
You do not suggest to yourself when you see a movie on the
screen that there is consciousness in the screen. The play
itself is the argument. And Da Free John is not anything
other than the process of his appearance on every level of
being. There is no implication of an individual in him.
There is no individual in Da Free John – none! No person. No
one who has been, who is, or who will survive. This
appearance is only a relection of you.
Vision Mound, vol. 2, no. 5
(1978), p.8
I have no past lives and no future
lives in any dimension. This is my only birth, and it is
only apparent. This birth, this body, these conditions have
been assumed and undone in one lifetime, in order to
demonstrate the whole Way and to have a fit vehicle for its
present communication. The undoing is effective in every
plane, high, low, gross, subtle, causal, transcendental.
This body-mind, this vehicle or apparent, karmic being, has
extensions and destinies in many dimensions, high and low,
past, present, and future. But these are not mine, nor are
they effective in me. This vehicle or karmic being may
continue or be taken up by others after this apparent life
is terminated. But I am not expressed in that destiny. I am
before time and space, and no condition has me. I have not
appeared for reasons. It is only that this vehicle has
mysteriously, paradoxically coincided with me. Therefore, I
have conformed it to myself and come forth. I stand present
without qualification in this theatre of my apparent birth.
Through this Paradox, my mere Presence has become
Instructive. I am not a one, a being, nor a One, a Being. I
am not object or subject, Object or Subject, except I may
appear to be so to devotees, until they Realize me
Perfectly.
Breath and Name, pp.
158-59
I have already done everything that
you can do. In a very short span of time I have seen every
universe, every world, every vision, every part of the body.
I have loved everyone. I have done everything! And I am only
relieved that I have done it all. You could do it all too,
but it would take aeons of time, with many spaces in
between. It would be a torment for you to uncover all your
potential experiences. It is the Law of nature that from
time to time some apparent individual may appear in the
scheme of things who may, without effort, experience
everything and be without consolation, so that the Law may
be expressed through him or her. It is not a reflection on
that individual in any cultic or personal sense. It is about
God. And it serves you. It occurs so that you can be Happy.
I serve you as a witness, because I represent to you what it
is when one is free. You could not be free without such a
witness. I not only witness through verbal communication,
but also through the most absolute communication, which you
may realize only in the form of Divine Communion in my
Company.
Powers and visions may appear
through me in your experience, but they are not my position.
I see nothing, I hear nothing. Nothing. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!
Have I said it? Yes? There is nothing to be attained. You
pass through everything to nothing. For lovers, you see,
nothing is necessary. That is why to be a devotee is the
secret of life. Once you realize the disposition of the
Heart, nothing is necessary for you. No visions, no
contemplations, no powers, no miracles, no worldly
experiences or attainments, absolutely no great thing is
necessary. It is not that you become satisfied with the
ordinary contemplation of life. Even that is emptied. There
is nothing – except absolute joy, absolute bliss without the
slightest trace of anything. To swim in Infinity, free,
without objects, and without a center, is a bliss beyond
comprehension. And that is my position. That is why I can
speak. Yes, a remarkable occasion, and true enough. Not only
just true enough to be said it is absolutely true and
absurd, ridiculous and humorous. But it is Happiness. And. I
recommend it to you all.
The Way That I Teach, pp.
231-32.
I am God. Without a doubt. This is
my confession. Not “I am God exclusively,” although that may
seem to you to be so in the meantime. My confession to you
is the confession of your very existence. If you will
respond to my confession and become absorbed in me in love,
so that all the artifacts of your ordinary impulses, your
ordinary life, your conventional desiring, are superficial,
then your meditation on me, your Communion with me, will
become tantamount to my meditation.
My meditation is not a grinding
affair. My meditation is absolute. It is what is being
reflected to you in these ridiculous conversations. Through
that communication you become absurdly and madly sympathetic
so that the grinding force of your ordinary life and its
desires and its destiny become superficial. You become a
loving, serving devotee in your impulse, in your thinking,
in your feeling, completely beside all your tendencies, all
the subjective rumoring and wrangling, all the complication
by which you turn upon yourself and identify with this
frozen moment.
Communion is simply love,
attachment. It is founded on hearing of my Argument, and my
Argument takes place in time and space in every moment of
all the time I live with everyone. Whenever you hear me,
then you may begin this contemplation, this Communion. It is
simply loving attachment to me. If you will consider my
Argument, you may also become attached to me. When you
become attached to me, then all your conventional relations
will become ordinary, happy, human, superficial, nothing –
just a discipline of happiness and of pleasure. Your
attachment to me will become overwhelming, without any goal
whatsoever, but a motive of happiness, an indelible
simplicity. You will simply Commune with me. The energy of
your attention will rest with me day by day, hour by hour,
moment by moment. And without your doing anything about it,
I will meditate you. I will do everything.
The Way That I Teach, pp.
217-18
“I Am You”
For years, I would sit down in
meditation, and all my own forms would appear, my own mind,
my desires, my experience, my suffering, my feeling, my
shakti, my this and my that. But, at some point, it all came
to an end. There was no thing, nothing there anymore, none
of that distracted or interested me. Meditation was perfect,
continuous. Then I began to meet those friends who first
became involved in this work. And when I would sit down for
meditation, there would be more of these things again, all
of these thoughts, feelings, this suffering, this dis-ease,
disharmony, upsets, suffering, craziness, this pain, these
shaktis, all of this, again. But they were not mine. They
were the internal and life qualities of my friends. So I
would sit down to meditate, and do the meditation of my
friends. When I would feel it all release, their meditation
was done. And I began to test it, to see if this meditation
went on in some more or less apparent way for these people
who were not with me. And I found that this meditation went
on with people whom I had not even met. People I saw in
dreams and visions would show up at the Ashram1.
So the meditation went on. It was the same meditation I had
always done. The same problems were involved, the same
subtleties, but the content of the meditation was not
mine.
1. An Ashram is a place
where a Spiritual Master gathers the community of his
devotees in order to live with them, instruct them, and
communicate the Living Force of his Presence. Master Da Free
John sometimes uses the term to include the entire community
or fellowship of devotees, wherever they may be
located.
The Method of the Siddhas, pp.
269-70
When I look into the room, the
Condition of all this is perfectly obvious, all these
bodies, all these “me’s,” this whole room. Everything in the
room is just a pattern of energy. It has no ultimate
necessity. It can pass – in fact, it will pass! While it
continues, it is God. There is a beauty and a fullness to
it, in my right relationship to it. On the other hand, it is
exactly like a dream. This apparent concretion here has no
limiting force whatsoever from my point of view. If I close
my eyes and stop talking and remove myself from your
attention, I can see the space of the room with my eyes
closed. I can pass into subtle places. I can pass into these
bodies here. All of that is, happily, an ordinary experience
for me.
All I can say is, this is the way it
is for me. I am already all-pervading, without a form, and
therefore I enter into ordinary relations as an impulse. In
Truth I am manifesting as all bodies. I am absolutely
certain of it. And I am conversant with all bodies. By a
simple act of attention I can be you, be identical to you,
and have a perfect reading of your disposition so that I can
be of service to you, while at the same time also having the
sense of being this body. It is crazy. It is a paradox. It
is all silly, paradoxical, ultimately unexplainable. It is a
mysterious conjunction and it is contradiction.
In the early months after the
incident in the Vedanta Temple2, I realized in
meditation that I was no longer meditating this body. All
its limitations were already obvious, not binding any
longer. In meditation I experienced many, many, many people.
And I could meditate them. I could be completely identical
to them. I could meditate them if they were in Communion
with me. I could be their meditation. I could awaken the
God-Realizing process in them because I did not have to
presume the limited point of view that they were. They
simply had to be in direct Communion with me so that I could
be them, and then I could do the practice, and in that case
it could be brief. The trouble is that people do not enter
into that Communion. They are reluctant. They remain
self-possessed. Therefore, I cannot enter into that process
with them as directly as would be ultimately
useful.
2. The spiritual
transformation of Master Da Free John was spontaneously
perfected by Grace while he was sitting in meditation in a
small temple on the grounds of the Vedanta Society in
Hollywood, California, in September 1970. For a full
discussion of this event and its significance, see The Knee
of Listening and Part I of The Enlightenment of the Whole
Body, by Da Free John.
The Way That I Teach, pp.
212-14
Anyone who comes close to me in
space is my vision. People come and sit with me, and I dream
their dreams all night. They wake up in the morning and they
feel good, because I have lived their dreams. Every day I
live your dreams. If I give any one of you my attention in
mere thought, I absorb all of your psyche, all of your
suffering, all of your diseases. This is literally true.
People do not understand that such a process is possible in
human time. And yet this is my experience exactly. If anyone
comes near me in physical space, I totally absorb their
psyche, even their physical disease. This body absorbs their
disease, their emotion, their dilemma, their problems, their
unhappiness, their lack of vision.
You wonder why I allow myself to be
used by people. I am unable to do anything about it. As long
as people do not bring me an absolute desire for God, as
long as they bring me their absence of God-Communion, their
absence of vision, their absence of love, their absence of
sacrifice, I must simply absorb it. But if my devotees begin
to manifest the God-Realizing desire that comes from Divine
Vision, from intuition, whereby they become a sacrifice to
me, then even my own life, even my own physical state, will
be transformed. In the meantime, I am you, and whatever you
animate in my Company is the destiny of this
Church.
Vision Mound, vol. 2, no. 5
(1978), p. 10
The Accomplishing
Power
My life is a little bit like going
into the world of enemies and dragons to liberate somebody
who has been captured. You cannot just sit down and tell a
dragon the Truth. You must confront a dragon. You must
engage in heroic effort to release the captive from the
dragon. This is how I worked in the theatre of my way of
relating to people, particularly in the earlier years, and
in the unusual involvements of my life and Teaching. You
could characterize it as the heroic way of Teaching, the way
of identifying with devotees and entering into consideration
in that context and bringing them out of the enemy
territory, gradually waking them up.
The Dreaded Gom-Boo, or the
Imaginary Disease That Religion Seeks to Cure, pp.
16-17
The ultimate form of my Teaching
Work is Transmission – the awakening of devotees to the
Current of Love-Bliss or Happiness upon which the body-mind
is set (as a wheel is set upon its hub). Therefore, I Teach
understanding so that people will become serious about the
Lesson of life and renounce the search for Happiness. But
while they are becoming serious, I am merely Present among
them, and the Current of Divine Happiness is freely
Radiating to all, even through me. Thus, when such devotees
begin to understand, they also naturally begin to locate the
Current or prior Happiness of Radiant Transcendental Being.
And I continue to be merely Present among such devotees
while their practice matures, so that the Magnitude and
Power of this Current of Happiness becomes more and more
profoundly Realized by them.
The Bodily Location of Happiness,
p. 102
This is the Baptism that is always
being generated by my Presence here. When I call you to
consider the Teaching, I call you into my Spiritual Company,
even if you are simply sitting down to read my books.
Whenever you are in my Company, whenever you give me your
attention, then you are as good as sitting in the room with
me where this Baptism is being given. I do not stand in a
river to perform the water ritual. I stand in the fire to
perform the Spirit ritual, which purifies, enlivens, and
grants Enlightenment. It is the perfect Baptism.
Thus, those who give me their
attention, in whatever form it may take at any moment, align
themselves to my Baptizing Power, the profusion of Grace
that is manifested through the Adept, which is simply a
magnification of the Spiritual Divine to living
beings.
The Fire Gospel, pp.
76-77
The Force of God pours out of my
body all the time. It never stops, whether I am waking,
sleeping, dreaming, apparently feeling sympathetic or not.
It is always manifested through this body. The limit is not
in me. The limit is in you. You are devoted to this effort
of Narcissus, this reaction, this vital shock3
that shuts you down so that you cannot experience my
Transmission, cannot know It, cannot submit to It, cannot be
sublimed and carried off by It.
3. “Vital shock” is a
term used by Master Da to describe the contraction of the
vital-physicalemotional dimension of the being (the “navel,”
or the whole gross body-mind), which chronically obstructs
the flow of life and creates and reinforces the sense of
separate, egoic existence
Therefore, the first office of
spiritual life is to hear the Argument of the Adept. And to
hear it, you must observe yourself through the pictures of
your own activity, reflected to you by the Adept, to the
point of recognizing the contraction in life that shuts you
off from Bliss. With my criticism I paint pictures for you
of your own activity, so that you can feel and observe it.
You must know the self-contraction and you must see it. You
must observe it to the point of realizing that it is not
happening to you. You are doing it, just as you are moving
your mouth and blinking your eyeballs. Like the movements of
your intestines, it is a rhythm to which you have become
habituated. It is really very simple, but you must observe
it, and you must understand it. This is the first office of
spiritual life.
The second office, when you have
heard the Teaching and become responsible for the effort
that is your self and every aspect of your body-mind, is to
receive my Blessing, which is always given. Give me your
attention at any moment and you will receive this Grace. It
is always pouring through this body-mind, which is no longer
a person.
The Dreaded Gom-Boo, or the
Imaginary Disease That Religion Seeks to Cure, pp.
362-63
Selections from Talks and Essays by
Da Free John on the Nature and Function of the Enlightened
Teacher