The Adept

Part One. The Nature and Work of the
Adept:

I. Guru Is a Function:
The Urgency of the Adept’s Work.
The Adept Is the Source of Religious Life.
The Superphysics of Spiritual Evolution.
The Guru Is a Sacrifice.
The Paradox of the Divine Person.

 

Da Free John – 1983

---

 

PART ONE

 

The Nature and Work of
the Adept

Guru Is a Function

Ordinary human life unfolds as a
result of the presumed separation from Reality,
Being-Consciousness, or God. Yet, even while countless
beings live out this illusion of independent existence, the
One Being remains perfectly unaffected by the ego’s bid for
self-rule. More than that, there is a principle active in
the manifest realm which works against the egoic illusion of
separateness. That principle is the Transforming Power of
the Enlightened Adept, who, motivated by a Love-Compassion
that is neither egocentric nor altruistic but
transcendental, is wholly surrendered to the process of
Enlightening others.

Such a being is not a mere
mentor, guide, or promulgator of wisdom. Rather, the Adept
is literally a Divine Intervention, a mechanism that
temporarily interrupts the meandering of conventional life.
In Hinduism, beings of this order are known as Avatars. The
word stems from the Sanskrit language (“avatara”) and means
literally “descent.” It refers to the unique spiritual
process of Divine Incarnation: Having no personal destiny to
fulfill, the sole purpose of the embodiment of the Avatar is
to confront mankind with the Truth of existence. He
demonstrates to humanity the possibility of its own
perfection.

The Urgency of the Adept’s
Work

Mankind needs regular reminders
of the fact that it is not fulfilling its highest potential,
which is God-Realization. The aspirations and lives of most
people fall far short of this supreme ideal and ultimate
necessity. Particularly today, in a time of crisis where the
traditions have been eroded by scientism and where the moral
fiber of the globe’s nations has been undermined
materialistic values reign supreme. In traditional Hindu
terms, our period can be characterized as a Dark Age (Kali
Yuga) that is en urgent need of the Light and Wisdom of the
God-Realizers.

If you want to learn about Truth
when Truth has become corrupted, then go to an Adept. Go to
one who has Realized the Truth. Go to one who has already
fulfilled the process completely. If you live in a moment in
time when there is no Enlightened Tradition, when all the
cults are corrupt, you can be certain that somewhere on
Earth an Adept is alive. Such a person appears under exactly
those conditions, when Truth is no longer visible in the
cults, and when religions have become so corrupted by
history and fetishism that they are about to become
extinct.

The religious traditions in our time
are about to be smothered by a mechanistic, political, and
scientific world view, only because the cults are in doubt.
They have held on to their fetishes so tenaciously that they
have lost their association with the Living God. They do not
even know the Living God anymore. People who belong to
churches, religions, and spiritual societies have no
unqualified connection with the Living Reality. There is no
true devotion in them, and, therefore, no Realization. Their
association with God is only words and hopefulness.
Therefore, they do not represent a living force in the
world. They have nothing to offer that is Alive. Only the
Adepts,’ who are God-Realized, through whom the Living Power
of God manifests, can make a difference in human time. Such
individuals are the instruments for the acculturation of
humanity. Periodically, such individuals must appear, and
they must be influential. There is a notion that Adepts
should be hiding in caves in the wilderness. This is not
true. If the Adepts do not speak, the only voice that will
be heard is that of ordinary people who are not
God-Realized. The Adepts are the Sources of spiritual life.
Such individuals must therefore enter into the stream of
society, to purify the culture and reestablish’ the process
of God-Realization. If they do not speak and become
influential, there is no hope at all for
humanity.

The Enlightenment of the Whole
Body, pp. 155-56

 

The Bhagavad Gita says that
“whenever the paths of life are corrupt, and whenever the
Law of Association with God has been forgotten, I come.” The
Divine Consciousness appears in the form of the Spiritual
Master who accomplishes the righteous realignment of the
Earth and all humanity with God.

The Divine is always doing this kind
of work in all the moments of history. The Revelation of God
to Man is a process that goes on and on and on. Ultimately,
you see, its function is to realign the entire world of Man
to God, but the process will not come to an end just because
some sort of sacred order has been established on Earth.
Everything that exists in all the universes is being brought
into alignment with God. The transforming process is a
struggle, and until it is ultimately accomplished, the
experience of beings is chaotic. Men and women may come to
the point of yearning for the Divine Principle, but until
the Divine Principle is fully established everywhere, we
will not see an order of life based on the salvation of all
beings.

The Bodily Location of Happiness,
pp. 82-83

 

The daily world, when viewed from a
free position, looks like a great wilderness of tiny acres,
each the camp of a single person, who surrounds his small
pond with a hedge of immunities, and remains bent upon the
water, observing all things reflected there, but seeing
nothing directly. The unliberated human world is the
wilderness of Narcissus,¹ where he is multiplied
as many times as there are human individuals, just as
Krishna was multiplied to provide a separate lover for each
of his many wives.

1. Narcissus, the
self-lover of Greek mythology, is a key symbol in Master Da
Free John’s description of Man as a self-possessed seeker,
one who suffers in dilemma, contracted upon himself at every
level of the being from all relations and from the condition
of relationship itself.

The Spiritual Master is indeed a
voice that rises in this wilderness, to Awaken every
neighbor from the illusion of his acre of land, his ordinary
pond, his body-mind. It is a necessary voice, the voice that
sounds whenever the Truth of human experience is Revealed to
one who is Awake. Therefore, such a one speaks, even with
urgency and anger. It is the prophetic voice, the awful
shout, expressed with all the gestures of frustrated
Divinity.

The Enlightenment of the Whole
Body, p. 152

 

The Adept Is the Source of Religious
Life

Religion is founded on the
recognition that human life is not limited to the
experiential possibilities in the material realm. It is
concerned with Man’s relationship to the spiritual
dimension, however that dimension may be conceived. To the
extent that religion preserves this basic orientation, it is
authentic and radical. And to the degree that it endeavors
to organize Man’s social relations in light of a higher
moral understanding, it is conventional.

At the center of authentic
religion is always the Creative Impulse of a God-Realized
being. Since there is only One Being-Consciousness, the
great Adepts are, in their essential Nature, fully
identical. However, their Teachings are diverse, and at
times even in seeming contrast, because they address
themselves to a particular culture and period. But there is
no disagreement about the ultimate purpose of their
Work-which is to draw others into the same Enlightened
Condition-and the nature of their spiritual
Transmission.

The primary force and root of all
the religious traditions are the Adepts, those who actually
Realize the Transcendental Divine Reality. Adepts arise in
all times and places and become associated with the
movements and complex structures existing in the immediate
environment. Throughout their lifetime, both before and
after their Realization, they move into the existing culture
and associate with its influences. Thus, while their
Teaching is an expression of actual Realization, their words
reflect and comment upon all kinds of cultural complexities
and ideals. Where Adepts or the Realizers of Truth arise,
they transform the existing culture, eliminating some
aspects of traditional religious and spiritual life and
emphasizing others. They are a motion in the midst of the
stream of conventions.

The tradition of Truth, of
Transcendental Realization, is the tradition of the Adepts.
Apart from the Adepts, there is no tradition of
Truth.

Don’t You Think If You Were
Really Being Religious You Would Be Seeing Things by Now?
vol. 2, no. 2 (1981), p. 3.

 

In all traditions, a great deal is
always made of some key individual. There is no great
spiritual tradition that is without a person at the center
of the process. How that person is interpreted through the
intellectual lore of each tradition varies, but such a
person always exists. In other words, the Truth is not
separable from a human function, a special human function
that is perceived in the form of the Guru. And the Guru is
not separable from God. He is not separate from your very
Self. The process of spiritual life, then, includes these
three principles: the very Self or Real Condition, the Guru,
and the Divine. All three are the fruits of spiritual life.
All three are its fullness, its enjoyments. The guru seen
apart from one’s Self, apart from understanding, is not the
true Guru. The guru seen apart from God is not the true
Guru. God seen apart from the very Self is not the true God.
The self, inner knowledge, understanding seen apart from the
Guru and God is not true Self-Knowledge. The Guru is the
function that arises in the world and serves the
illumination of men wherein they know their own Nature
perfectly. The Guru is the center of spiritual practice, the
center of spiritual life. The relationship to the Guru,
Satsang, is the condition of spiritual life, the true
principle.

The Dawn Horse, vol. 2, no. 3
(1975), p. 8

 

 

The Siddhas² who live in
the Form of Truth, are all the same. There isno difference
between them. If you place two sticks into one flame,when
you draw them out you will have two flames. But they are
thesame light. Just so, the Siddhas are fundamentally one.
But they arefunctionally unique, just as all manifest
entities are fundamentally thegenerations of one Nature, one
Reality, but they are functionally unique.

The Method of the Siddhas, p.
324

2. A Siddha is literally a
“Fulfilled” or “Perfect One.” A Siddha (also Maha-Siddha,
“Maha” meaning great) is one who has Realized God
permanently and beyond doubt. Master Da Free John uses the
term to refer to the Free Adepts who have appeared in many
cultures and who, because of their own Awakening, are
naturally moved to Awaken others through the spontaneously
transmitted Consciousness, Presence, Power, and Intelligence
of the Divine Being.

 

The mystical and evolutionary
processes of human development have been practiced and
transmitted by various kinds or degrees of Adepts throughout
human history. Certain founders of religion (such as Jesus
and Gautama) were practicing Adepts of this kind. Other
religious founders or leaders, such as Mohammed and Martin
Luther, were not practicing Adepts, but they were inspired
men of insight or prophetic urgency, whose personal activity
was entirely within the domain of exoteric religion. But
most practitioners or Adepts of the mystical and
evolutionary science were active outside the realm of
“Everyman,” and they were known only within the esoteric
“inner circles” of the religious and spiritual
traditions.

Lesser Adepts are individuals who
have enjoyed remarkable mystical experiences and attained a
degree of Wisdom that is helpful or useful to individuals
who are less developed than themselves. These lesser Adepts
serve the awakening of idealism and functional discipline in
ordinary people,, and the level of experience to which they
lead their followers is generally limited to mystical
developments of the Life-Current in the autonomic nervous
system and the central nervous system.

However, the highest Adepts serve
the awakening of radical insight and responsibility in
others, and they guide others through and beyond personal
and subjective mysticism, into the domain of the
evolutionary transformation and ultimate self-transcendence
of Man. Therefore, the Work of the highest Adepts is
fundamental to human culture as a whole.

Scientific Proof of the
Existence of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House!
pp. 355-56

 

The Superphysics of Spiritual
Evolution

From the vantage point of the
Enlightened being, life is a school in which the lesson of
conscious cooperation with the spiritual Law of
ego­transcendence must be learned. The sheer reactivity
that marks ordinary human life does not represent mankind’s
highest evolutionary potential. Rather, humanity’s true
potential and destiny is realized in the Adept, whose
perfect God-Consciousness is the ever-present possibility of
Man.

 

The higher evolutionary process has
traditionally been served by individual understanding of the
instructions of an Adept, and by individual acceptance of
the guidance of an Adept during every stage of practice. And
the Adept himself, by higher psycho-physical means,
stimulates the central nervous system of others (both in
itself and as a means of changing the mental and bodily
being via the autonomic nervous system). This process is
known in the traditions of religion as spiritual
transmission. For these reasons, spiritual Adepts tended and
still tend to accept disciples or devotees, and also to
create a community or culture of such
individuals.

Scientific Proof of the Existence
of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House!, p.
353

 

The Spiritual Master, because of his
Transformed psycho-physical Condition, is Radiant and
Conscious in the Perfect Identity of Self in God. Therefore,
he Functions as an Agent of Transformation in the case of
devotees who submit to him in love, in the spiritual
manner.

The Spiritual Master is one who has
fulfilled the Law in his own Transformation, and who has
been Served by the Presence, the Attention, the Glance, the
Instruction, and the Touch of others, who were Agents of
God. Likewise, he also serves devotees by his Presence,
Attention, Glance, Instruction, and Touch.

By such means, the Spiritual Master
Awakens and Enlivens devotees with the Radiance of the
Divine Person. It is a literal and necessary Process. It is
not symbolic, appearing only as ritual. By his Contact with
devotees,’ who make themselves available through devotional
Communion with him, the Spiritual Master Serves the Perfect
Purpose of God. His Regard Awakens the soul in the heart,
repolarizing the subtler mechanisms, consisting of the
cerebro-spinal fluid, the nervous system, the brain, the
endocrine glands, and so forth. In this manner, the Power of
the heart matures the devotee. The soul is established in
Communion with the Divine Radiance by the Touch of the
Master-Presence, which purifies and transforms the
body-mind, and leads the soul into its Perfect Awakening as
the Self at Infinity.

The Enlightenment of the Whole
Body, p. 255

 

The human Spiritual Master is an
agent to the advantage of those in like form. When one
enters into right relationship with the Spiritual Master,
changes happen in the literal physics of one’s existence. It
is not just a matter of ideas. I am talking about
transformations at the level of energy, at the level of the
higher light of physics, at the level of mind beyond the
physical limitations that people now presume, at the level
of the absolute Speed of ultimate Light. The transforming
process is enacted in devotees, duplicated in them in and
through that Living Company. It is not a matter of
conceptual symbolisms or emotional attachment to some
extraordinary person. It is real physics. And it is to the
advantage of people when someone among them has gone through
the whole cycle of Transformation, because they can then
make use of the Offering of that Process, that
Company.

Most people are willing to sacrifice
things, but not themselves. They are willing to pay cash, in
other words, for a quick salvation. This is an ancient
ritual of worship, but it is false and futile. True worship
is the sacrifice of your own bodily being in Truth, in the
living and Transforming Company of the Spiritual Master.
People absolutely resist that sacrifice. The reason they
resist it is that they know nothing about it. They are
subhuman in their present level of adaptation. Sacrifice
represents another stage of evolution for them. They are
incapable of it in their actual, literal, psycho-physical
condition. They must be drawn out of that condition, led out
into another state of existence. And it is as far to go from
where they are now to the ultimate Divine Realization as it
is for the amoeba in the primal mud of the Earth to become a
human being. Everything about them, even the body, must
change radically.

But the changes that must occur are
literal, psycho-physical changes, just as literal as if you
were to acquire more legs and arms, except that the most
dramatic changes occur in dimensions different from the
outward shape of the body. Certainly changes occur in the
flesh and the elemental structures of the body, but the
changes do not really alter its outward shape. The change is
as literal as evolving from a dinosaur to a human being, and
it is as dramatic as that, but it principally occurs at more
subtle levels of the physics of the bodily being. There are
literal changes in the nervous system, literal changes in
the chemistry of the body, literal changes in the structural
functioning of the brain.

You cannot realize such a change in
a weekend. Such a change is a living process, a matter of
growth. But it can be quickened and intensified through
right practice, through real moral or sacrificial
discipline, through the Company of the Spiritual Master. In
that Company, the Condition of the higher physics is
Communicated to the individual, in such a way that it brings
about a radical Transformation in the disposition of the
body-mind, and then magnifies the effectiveness of that
disposition many times, so that the whole process can take
place even in a single lifetime. That process can at least
be dramatically advanced in one lifetime, if not completely
fulfilled.

If you move into such a
relationship, the Process begins to duplicate itself in your
case. It is not as if you are a robot that is being
transformed through the effect of some computer-no, it is a
living and human relationship. But it is not like the
conventional doctor-patient or mommy­daddy-baby games.
Irresponsible people cannot enter into it. You must be
responsible for yourself at the human level, and in a
profoundly uncommon way. You must live the ordinary
discipline yourself. You yourself must be love under all
ordinary, daily conditions. You must make a moral change in
your life. There is no way whereby you can be relieved of
this necessity, and nobody can do it for you. But all of
that ordinary personal and moral responsibility simply
prepares you for the right relationship to the Spiritual
Agency made available by the Divine through the Spiritual
Master. Such a one is your unique advantage, because he is
present in the same bodily form as you-manifest in this same
physical condition, with the same nervous system, the same
kind of brain. But in him all of these things are raised, to
an absolute level of functioning, so that entering into
contact or Communion with that individual brings changes
even at the level of the psycho-physical body which you
bring into relationship with him.

The abstract Deity cannot serve you
in that way, you see, because the physics of this Process
must be directly present, and the human Demonstration of the
Process must be present, in a form that can do its Work in
your case. That Work is the purpose of the Spiritual Master,
because he represents a state of the ultimate physics of
things that is your potential but not your actuality at the
present time. The abstract Divine and the potential powers
of the universe are just as true as the Spiritual Master,
but they are not organized (except in the case of the
Spiritual Master) for the sake of the immediate
transformation of human beings.

Scientific Proof of the Existence
of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House! pp.
364-68

 

The Spiritual Master appears, to
communicate the Way of the transcendence of self and the
transcendence of the present stage of Man-so that mankind
may more generally fulfill the higher trend of evolution,
rather than fall back upon itself in regressive
self-possession and exploitation of the elemental Man.
However, the Spiritual Master is also full of Transcendental
urgency. He also communicates to Man. He reminds Man that
even Man is a moment, a process, grotesque when seen in
himself. He reminds Man that his beauty and happiness are in
his Ecstasy, his sacrifice toward what is yet to come and
what is Perfect. He reminds Man that his true Destiny is not
in his own evolutionary fulfillment, but in the fulfillment
of the sacrifice of the whole World, which includes
everything before and after Man, as well as Man
himself.

Scientific Proof of the Existence
of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House! p.
351

 

The Guru Is a
Sacrifice

“Guru” is a Sanskrit term meaning
“he who is heavy, weighty.” According to esoteric
explanation, the two syllables of the word denote “dispeller
of darkness.” Commonly applied to any spiritual teacher, who
may or may not be Enlightened, the word “guru” refers here
specifically to the “sad-guru” or True Teacher, whose whole
being is “heavy” or pregnant with Truth. He is homogeneous
with Reality or Being-Consciousness, and as such he lives as
a perfect demonstration of the Law of constant
self-transcending sacrifice or surrender.

 

Guru is not a kind of status. It is
a specific function. There are some who awaken, but who
simply live, without becoming active as the function of
Guru. There are others who awaken and do in fact perform
that function. Truth, not the “role” of Guru, is the
enjoyment of all who are awake.

The Method of the Siddhas, pp.
36-37

 

The ordinary devotee does not Awaken
at birth with Divine Consciousness. Only God, the Divine
Conscious Being, Awakens with that Consciousness in the
plane of human beings. The devotee Awakens to the Divine at
last through surrender, yes-this is the Great Secret of the
Way of Truth, the Way that I Teach. But the Divine
Consciousness or Spiritual Master is a specific function
among human beings. A handful of people in all the aeons of
human time have been the Purusha,³ the
Consciousness “I am God.” Only a fraction of the billions
and billions of births of beings that have occurred on the
Earth alone have been the birth of the Divine Consciousness.
Only the Spiritual Master is that birth.

3. “Purusha” is a
classical Hindu term for the Divine Being or the Divine
Person, the Conscious Identity of all selves, the “primal
Person” or original Self.

 

It is the unique function of the
Purusha to save the souls, the “jivas,” the un-Enlightened
beings. Yet, through ecstasy, through mindless surrender to
God, un-Enlightened beings may also Realize God, even as the
Spiritual Master has done. The Divine Consciousness is
Realizable ultimately by all beings. In the play of
existence, however, the Spiritual Master is a different kind
of being, a fact that the Spiritual Master must eventually
realize!

You must understand that the unique
status of the Spiritual Master is not given for his own
sake. The Spiritual Master is not a human being with a
superior egoic consciousness that he or she is God. The ego
of such a one is destroyed, transcended in the process of
his or her lifetime. The situation of the Spiritual Master
is not as you might imagine. You may be thinking: “We all
know you are not suffering like us! We poor bastards are the
ones who are suffering-you’ve got it made!” Well, such
thinking is not true at all. The lifetime of the Spiritual
Master is only sacrifice, and therefore more a torment than
the lifetime of the ordinary soul. Read the biographies of
the great Spiritual Masters. They all tell the same story of
a life that is terrible in some ways, a life in which
frequently they are exploited and rejected, and in which
they are under the constant threat of domination by worldly
and negative forces. Such individuals are always dealing
with great forces, not just mastering their rejection by
human beings, but tussling with demonic energy. Such is also
the case in my lifetime! What you see in my lifetime is the
biography of the Divine Being. This is how the Divine Being
must live among human beings.

People who are not truly devotees
often feel that they must become like the Spiritual Master,
that they must have the status of the Spiritual Master. Such
people envy the Spiritual Master, and they will not
surrender to him. They only want from him a token, a bit of
magic, that will somehow make them like he is. But
understand this: No un-Enlightened soul wants to be in the
position of the Spiritual Master! If you understood my
constant experience, you would not envy it-nor could you
endure it! One must be Helped by great Divine Power in order
to endure the events associated with such a unique life, in
order to pass through such events with a clear understanding
of what they are as a Divine Process. Only the Divine has
the power to endure the complete revolution of
consciousness. Only the Divine has the power to confront the
entire play of manifest existence and master all the forces
to which beings are subject. The Spiritual Master engages
those forces in actual warfare, whereas devotees in general
perceive the same forces to be the play of their natural
experience. The devotee does not struggle with the power
that produces weather or with the physics of light
personified as self-conscious beings, although the devotee
is also somehow involved in the same play. The Purusha, the
Divine, is the victorious Warrior, the Master of all
life.

The Bodily Location of Happiness,
pp. 84-85

 

The Spiritual Master has many
functions, to exemplify the Way, to Argue the Way, to Bless
devotees, to Interfere with them, to Transmit the Spiritual
Influence tangibly to them so that they will then, having
understood themselves, be capable of spiritual growth. The
function of the Adept does not come to an end. The Adept is
the continuous resource and resort of devotees.

The Adept is simply the Agency of
That which is to be Realized. He is a useful and remarkable
Agency, a unique mechanism in nature, a hole in the universe
through which the Transcendental Influence moves to the
world. Therefore, this remarkable Agency, when it occurs,
should be used. It should be acknowledged and understood as
it is. People should know how to relate to it, how to use it
as a unique instrument of the Divine. Adepts appear to serve
your Realization. Otherwise, as soon as someone entered into
the sphere of Perfect Realization, he or she would be
Translated, and that would be the end of it. Even if some
Great Teaching appeared, there would never be the unique
instrument of the Adept.

The Fire Gospel, p.
165

 

The living Spiritual Master is the
ultimate Healer, and the mere Presence of such a one is the
most benign healing Influence. Without obstruction or
limitation of any kind, the Spiritual Master incarnates the
All-Pervading Radiance and Transcendental Consciousness of
God. Those who enter his Company enter the very Presence of
God. He does not have to perform any special intentional
action to heal-though he may in fact exercise specific
healing capacities of both ordinary and extraordinary kinds.
But his Radiant Presence itself spontaneously purifies,
harmonizes, and rejuvenates his devotees whole bodily. It
restores them to the Ecstasy of Love­Communion with God
and, ultimately, to perfect Realization of God. The Agency
and occasion apart from the physical Company of the
Spiritual Master or through occasional access to his
physical Company. They should not disturb him in that
setting or make secondary demands upon him, but should
simply live in that Presence.

Such is the most direct opportunity
for Transmission. It is really usable only by people who are
prepared, people who can make use of the Siddhi of mere
Presence, who are not confined to Agencies. Agencies are of
course a major source of this alignment to the Source, but
for some people nothing but Agencies, and particularly the
most outer forms of Agency, serve. In other words, they
could not make any use of sitting in silence in the physical
Company of the Spiritual Master, whereas they can make use
of studying the Teaching, hearing various kinds of
instruction, and making use of other services that help
establish the rudimentary discipline in life. They might be
able to use the Spiritual Master to give them personal
advice or to compensate in many ways for their own
limitations or irresponsibility, but such are inappropriate
uses of the Spiritual Master. Unless the Spiritual Master at
some time in his spontaneous activity is moved so to serve,
it is not appropriate to make such demands. Rather, devotees
should make it possible for the Spiritual Master to serve
simply the ultimate form of Agency.

The Bodily Sacrifice of
Attention, pp. 82-83

 

One who functions as Guru, or
Spiritual Master, for his devotees may operate for the sake
of those who are not his devotees, but his function in that
case is not that of Spiritual Master. In the world,
generally, he must serve the crisis of understanding, which
confounds the search, all need for consolation, fascination,
all need for cultural and cultic games. In the world he may
function, if he appears at all, in the role of the prophet,
which is essentially an aggravation, a criticism, an
undermining of the usual life.

The Guru function is not a public
function. It does not appear in public, and it does not
invite the public as if the spiritual process were simply
something you could decide to do, buy, or believe, and then
go ahead and perform. The man of understanding appears in
public only in the role of prophet and critic. He does not
exploit that search. He turns the questioner back on that
quality of suffering, dilemma, and dis-ease that motivates
him to take on spiritual practices and other kinds of
disciplines or to exploit his life possibilities. The Guru
function is essentially hidden until the prior condition of
real intelligence, understanding, has been fulfilled. Then
the Guru may take the role of Spiritual Master for his
devotee.

The Dawn Horse, vol. 2, no. 2
(1975), pp. 34-35

 

The Paradox of the Divine
Person

The idea of the God-Man is alien
to materialistic thinking. And in the case of the Adept
Jesus, it has provoked a great deal of controversy in
conventional theology. How can any being be coessential with
the Divine and yet appear to be human? How can it be
suprapersonal and personal at the same time? Difficulties in
answering these questions only arise when the Divine Reality
is presumed to be an Other that exists above or beyond the
finite realm of body, mind, self, and world.

However, from the viewpoint of
Radical Transcendentalism, as Taught by Master Da Free John
and other great Adepts, this problem is merely a
pseudoproblem of theology or philosophy. In Truth, there is
only the One Being-Consciousness in which body, mind, and
world arise as self­modifications. The real “problem”
is not the nature of the Adept or Divine Incarnation but the
ego that arbitrarily fragments the Whole and presumes
discontinuities in the One Reality.

The ego is the process of
identifying with a particular modification-the body-mind-of
the One Being-Consciousness. In the Adept’s case, this
limited identification is surrendered in favor of the
All-Identity of Being­Consciousness. Thus, the Adept is
no longer fooled by the belief in a separate body-mind. Even
though “his” body-mind, together with its particular
personality, continues to arise within the overall
world-process, it has ceased to be his reference point. Or
rather, the Adept knows his body-mind to be the total Field
of Existence.

This is a great Paradox and a
great Truth, which is demonstrated again and again to those
who come into the spiritual Company of the Adept and catch a
glimpse of his spontaneous Work.

 

The Appearance of the Spiritual
Master in this world is the sacrificial embodiment of the
Divine Consciousness, or the “Purusha,” as it is named in
the Hindu tradition. Such a life is Divine, but it is also
paradoxically associated with all the limitations of human
existence.

This is how the Purusha breaks
through space-time and into human time, by taking up
precisely the limitations, even the unconsciousness and the
un-Enlightenment, of the human individual. Yet the force of
the Realization of the Divine is so profound that the
ordinary destiny of the human individual or incarnation is
constantly undermined and his or her limitations transcended
to the point that suddenly the same human being, with full
consciousness, Realizes that he is the Purusha. Such a
Realization is given occasionally in human time.

The Divine Being in the form of the
Spiritual Master is Transfigured during this lifetime and
Awakens to his or her Divine function. Likewise, every
individual, every devotee, Awakens, through right
relationship to that One, to the ultimate destiny and to the
God-Realizing process of existence. God does the work of the
Spiritual Master, God creates the lifetime of the Spiritual
Master, and God is Awakening as the Spiritual Master. The
birth of the Spiritual Master is extraordinary! The Divine
Conscious Being appears in the world with the same
limitations with which all other beings are born, yet such
an individual is more and more profoundly Awakened with full
consciousness of the Divine Truth that “I am that
One.”

The Bodily Location of Happiness,
pp! 83-84

 

The Spiritual Master literally does
not exist in the state of the natural human being. The
Spiritual Master has Gracefully Realized God, and this
Realization is not the same as having one’s attention on the
Play of God and feeling associated with Divine Influence.
God-Realization is literal transcendence of the human
condition. The Spiritual Master consciously abides in the
Infinite Condition of Consciousness and Energy. Thus, the
body of the Spiritual Master is literally, directly, felt by
him to be Infinite Energy and Infinite Consciousness. No
effort is required in order to feel this Radiant
Consciousness. The Energy, the Consciousness of God simply
has no obstruction in this body-mind. Attention is not in
exile, unillumined, elsewhere. He seems to engage all the
ordinary play of attention, but there is no limitation in
the heart. There is continuous immersion in the Infinite
Force of the Heart⁶, and that Force is Radiant as
the body-mind of the Spiritual Master. It also outshines
this body-mind, since it is not limited by what the
Spiritual Master appears to be.

6. The “Heart” is another
name for the Divine Self, the intuition or Realization of
the Radiant Transcendental Being or God.

Vision Mound, vol. 2, no. 10
(1979), p. 15

 

The longer you live with the Guru,
the more your relationship to the Guru becomes itself an
intuitive realization of the Divine, because the Guru is not
simply a human individual, a cultic figure. The Guru is a
specific function in God. The Guru is not exclusively that
human person who manifests and demonstrates that function.
The Guru’s command to meditate on him is not the command to
meditate on the human figure, the cultic Guru. It is the
command to meditate upon the Divine Person. In fact the form
of the Guru is the Divine Form. It is upon the Divine Form,
the form of the Divine Person, that the Guru invites you to
meditate, through the agency of the human relationship
between the Guru and the devotee.

Garbage and the Goddess, p.
175

 

To meditate on the Spiritual Master
is to surrender, to participate in Divine Life from the
heart. It is to Commune with the Spiritual Master so that,
through love, one enters into sympathy with what the
Spiritual Master is altogether, not merely that person
sitting there with the characteristics you can discover by
observation through the senses. The Energy, the Radiant
Force of the Master, must be encountered in its Truth as the
Heart, as that very Consciousness, prior to all the effects
that it may create in the body-mind of the one who
encounters it.

Vision Mound, vol. 2, no. 10
(1979), pp. 15-16

 

You become what you meditate on.
Thus, if your feeling-attention is made a sacrifice, so that
it becomes absolute feeling-attention, love, or sacrifice to
the Spiritual Master, then there is a perfect link between
you and the Absolute or Divine Condition. By this means you
are lifted out of all the conditional states of life and
birth in any form. Therefore, spiritual allegiance to the
Spiritual Master is the highest function of existence. It is
the single advantage not only of human beings but of all
beings. It is a unique function in nature.

If we are mediocre in our attention
to the Spiritual Master, if our relationship to him, or her,
is conventional or casually indulged while we continue to be
driven by tendency, then the function of the Spiritual
Master is forgotten. It is denied. It is not effective as
described. Only the ego will deny the Spiritual Master or
the Divine. The ego wants to do it himself. Do what himself?
Be himself. Be untouched. Since you become what you meditate
on, you should meditate on, or give feeling-attention to,
the Absolute, which, in the form that it is given to you,
the Form of the Spiritual Master, is your highest
advantage.

The Way That I Teach, pp.
251-52