NO REMEDY
Part Two: The Complications of Sadhana
THE WAY OF DIVINE COMMUNION
On Service
(1) Another dimension of what I require of people in the
Ashram is service. There is the study of the path, which is
a constant way of dealing with this understanding at the
level of the written Teaching. There is the fulfilling of
the life-conditions, managing sadhana in practical,
personally functional terms. And there is also service.
Service is a form of activity that is not self-referring by
nature. It leads you into a condition in which you do not
make the self-reference, in which you must be directed to
others, and in which you will observe in yourself the
tendency not to want to do that. You will observe the
strategic ways in which you are still withholding even while
you are turning towards others and serving them
(2) People often fail to grasp what I mean by service,
because they think they are supposed to be doing it for some
good reason or other. But it is just appropriate, it is
relational life, it is bringing the life-force into the
life-game. That is all that service is. It is to be
consciously uninvolved in the unconscious drama of
self-reference, self-meditation, contraction, avoidance. It
is a way of living life in appropriate terms, just as the
conditions relative to money, food, and sex provide a way of
living life in appropriate terms. If people will serve one
another, serve life, and serve the world, if they will bring
life into life, allowing life to flow in life, they will
make obsolete all the karmic games that are otherwise only
being dramatized through ordinary actions and forms of
concern
(3) We literally depend on other beings for our
continuing existence in this form, not our ultimate
existence, or even our mere vital existence (except that we
depend on the sex play of others for our birth), but our
human existence We cannot exist as human beings for one more
moment without participation in the communication of life
that other beings give to us, and which the whole grand
affair of the manifest world gives to us. If that
communication is withdrawn, we die to what is greater than
self and mere vitality, and we pass out of our humanity into
some state that is not realizable in the way that we may
truly experience this moment as human beings. When you
realize your dependence on the conscious communication of
life from others, then you see the reasonablenessor,
rather, the unreasonablenessof love. Then, in spite of
what the hell that guy seems to be, you bring your life to
him or her in the form of real energy, real intensity, real
attention. When you do that, then that person is enlivened
literally, he is fed, because the life-force, particularly
in the heightened form to which it is transformed in human
beings, is principal food. The dimension of life that we
communicate through attention to others, unobstructed, is
principal food. The food that we take through the mouth is
gross and secondary. The food that we take through the nose
is gross and secondary. These are also necessary, generally,
but they support a lower organic form of our existence. Many
people eat well enough and breathe well enough, but they are
depressed, insane, because they do not communicate through
the eyes and through the heart. They do not enjoy the
life-process in its subtle form
(4) It is merely intelligent, not moralistic, not a
matter of yoga, to be present with life to other beings, and
to expect their presence to us. We are present to one
another in the form of a demand for life, a righteous demand
for life. We should absolutely demand it. And we should
finally discover what it is we are demanding of one another,
which is life, intensity, love, conscious energy. We
absolutely need it to survive. And so we should cut through
all the crap that we give to one another and absolutely
demand that, settle for nothing less, and also settle for
nothing less in ourselves. We should submit to that
righteous demand in others
(5) That is the politics of life. That is what life is
all about, apart from all the economics, and food, and
bullshit. That is basically what we are here to do with one
another. We are here to communicate life itself through the
faculties of our humanity. And that is merely a natural and
righteous discipline. It is appropriate for you as a
discipline to bring your own presence as life to other
beings and to demand it from them. And that is simply
appropriate in the same way that it is appropriate to take a
meal several times a day
(6) DEVOTEE: It seems like were always demanding life
from another in a childish way
(7) BUBBA: We settle for less than life. A smile, a piece
of ass, a cigarette, that is sufficient. We dont really
require life of one another, and that is what we need. You
cannot survive in your truly human functions without it. If
you all were busy truly loving one another, truly being
present to one another without complication, without making
any assumptions about one another or yourselves, you could
live for a long time, and even if you lived for only 20
years, you would be happy, at least on those ordinary human
levels. You would be feeding one another, and you could die
happily if you happened to have to die some day. Because
everybody would be with you. They would be holding your hand
and shooting you full of conscious life. You would be loved,
free, not prevented from Truth, and who cares then?14
d* * *d
Note
14. Bubba Free John, “Early Morning 4:00 A.M.,” a talk to
the Ashram. December 22, 1974.
