process of Spiritual development, human beings are like
Arjuna at the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita -egoically
“self-possessed”, collapsed on themselves, in trouble,
suffering, bewildered, functioning merely egoically,
seeking, experiencing the results of functioning egoically,
unable to act truly, seeming to be incapable of true
intelligence. When the human being comes into contact with
the true Realizer-when My devotee comes to Me-when that
meeting occurs and the individual being responds and accepts
the Instruction, examines it thoroughly and applies it, then
the life changes. It begins to be transformed by
Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga, or the submission of all conditions
in Divine Communion. It becomes purified, balanced,
enlivened, clarified, and the human individual moves through
and beyond the various developmental stages of
life.”
Submission
to the Source –
Adi Da Samraj 1993
REVULSION TOWARD ALL
POSSIBILITY
IS THE BEGINNING OF SPIRITUAL LIFE
A TALK GIVEN BY BUBBA FREE
JOHN
TO A PRIVATE GATHERING IN SAN
FRANCISCO, ON THE EVE OF THE NEW YEAR, DECEMBER
31,1976
There is no end to the possible
suffering in this dimension and there is absolutely no end
to the delusions of human beings. So spiritual life is not a
way of fulfilling this life in any conventional sense. It
rests upon the most absolute revulsion to the consequences
of every moment, of every breath. This
earth is one of the hells,
and you, like all human beings, are possessed by
worldliness, by the point of view of your birth, your
experiencing, the illusion of your separate power and
pleasure. My wrestling with people has come to an end, but I
want it to be very clear between you and me what I have
represented to you in my play with you over the last five or
more years. Because some of you, I think, believe somehow or
other that in your self-possession you represent spiritual
life or this Teaching, whereas in fact you represent a
degradation of it and an illusion.
I was not born into a traditional
religious culture. I have no conventional society to which I
belong, of which I am a monk or a representative. I have
appeared in a society in which there is no spiritual
tradition, no way of dealing with an individual like me, no
way of dealing with a process of this kind, no way of
recognizing it and truly making use of it.
When I began to take up my teaching
work, I clearly understood that I was going to have to bury
myself in the world in order to awaken devotees. If there
were to be devotees ultimately, I would have to pass through
the lower, ordinary life with them, and make lessons in that
play with them, make lessons out of all the possibilities of
conventional fulfillment. That conventional fulfillment
includes everything from typical life pleasures to
conventional, so-called spiritual and psychic enjoyment. So
all of my work has been a process of engaging in play with
people on the basis of conventional possibility, living it,
exploiting it, allowing it to show itself altogether as
experience, as consequence, in order ultimately that you
might enjoy that revulsion to the destiny of this birth that
would enable you to take up the spiritual process
truly.
There is no spiritual culture here,
practically no culture whatsoever. Look at the street you
came up out of tonight. That is where you all come from, and
that is where I teach. Not in order to recommend all of that
bullshit, all of that terror and disease and delusion and
stupidity and obsession and craving and torment, but to live
with people in such a way that they might enjoy a revulsion
to all possibility in itself, all fulfillment, high or low,
that is latent in the tendencies of this birth. And so, at
various stages in my play with individuals, you have seen me
live and work in every possible way. At one or another time,
everything from the most exotic psychic and conventional
experience to the most ordinary fulfillment of social life
was, in one or another way, represented, communicated, lived
among you, and never at all for the sake of those things in
themselves.
You have not understood me if that
is what you thought I was up to. These experiences are not
the point, they are not Truth. Every way of life that you
pursue on the basis of experience, high or low, making
experience the principle of your future, is ordinary
destiny, the usual life leading to death. It is not
spiritual in any sense whatsoever, whether its content is
psychic and more subtle or very gross. The lessons of your
life with me should be very clear to you in your own
body-mind. And yet I do not think they are very clear to all
of you, because I see so many of you intending to persist,
righteously persisting, in a way of life that has nothing
whatever to do with spirituality.
Everything is passing, all this
flesh, all this mind. There is no freedom from rebirth and
illusion unless while alive you are literally existing in
another dimension. Literally! Such an existence is not a
matter of philosophy, of feeling good, of all the
conventional horseshit that people put together. You may
return to this human kind of birth after your next death, if
you are lucky, but you will return to it without any
recollection, without any more capacity than you now enjoy,
driven as you are now, confused, obsessed, without the least
distance in you from this arising here, bound to it, craving
on the basis of it, having no capacity whatsoever to be
distinguished from this body-mind. This will be true of you
unless while alive you literally begin to exist in another
condition, in another “place.” Then, at death, and also
while alive, you may go there and not come back
here.
But, you see, in Truth it is not a
matter of just being able to go to some dimension or other.
There are countless dimensions above and below this! The
Truth of the matter is to come to rest in God, not in this
ego-soul, the separate one that is your destiny until the
heart is broken. Other worlds have no significance
whatsoever. They are equally tormenting after you have been
there a few moments! There is a great struggle in every
being that comes into contact with the Divine demand,
because the Divine does not fulfill this life. The Divine
Power draws you out of this life, draws attention out of it,
reduces the mind to nothing, frees you of the illusion of
being identical to this body, not just philosophically, but
literally. The Law is sacrifice. If you do not fulfill it,
you will become a sacrifice in any case, grudgingly,
unconsciously. You will be eaten.
Until the Divine Power, Grace, and
Demand is accepted, you will not fulfill the Law. You will
not become a sacrifice of the whole body mind. Until this
heart comes to rest, there is only contraction, this
separate and separative consciousness, whose mind is
separative, obsessive, bewildered, pursuing fulfillment on
the basis of what is apparently possible in the midst of
this puny limitation we wake up to each day. To take up a
Divine life, a spiritual life, you must yield that principle
of separation, but not just philosophically and not through
conventional willfulness. Your yielding must be a real
process, and it must represent real adaptation in
you.
We spent a good deal of time over
the last months in the midst of the consideration of Divine
Ignorance. And some imagine that a little ordinary
consideration and thinking – psychology means that they get
the right to call themselves enlightened and to think of
themselves in all kinds of glamorous ways. But this
consideration must become commitment in you. The spiritual
or sacrificial process of devotion is what follows on the
basis of it, not endless claims on the part of deluded
people that they are full of spirituality. A God-life, the
fulfillment of the Law or sacrifice, is what properly
proceeds from this Ignorance, not a stupid, obsessed life,
not a life completely given over to all the conventional
illusions of gross and subtle desiring! Who could imagine
the usual life to be Spiritual or Divine? A human being
could! Only a human being-no dog would do it. It is true! As
a human being, in your divisions, you can have the sense of
identification with the vital, but you cannot be the vital
simply. You are more than that. So if you go about trying to
be the animal, even the animal erect, you will live a life
of conflict, of illusion and mystery. The clarity in your
eyes will disappear. Whereas a dog is simply the vital. He
doesn’t go through any mental process of identifying with
the vital. He is simply that, and by fulfilling his destiny,
the motion in which he is born, his eyes may remain clear.
If the principle of desiring, of vitality, of the navel,
overwhelms you, though, you see what happens. You become
subhuman, and sub-humans do not know what it is either, you
know! But they have not become fitted to Divine Ignorance.
If they had, they would begin to become human, and then,
having become human, they would begin to become spiritual,
and, having become spiritual, they would begin to become
Divine, not by becoming glorified themselves, but by having
become absorbed in that Divinity-which, if you could only
glimpse it, would put fear into you!
There is no God responsible for your
bondage. You are entangled because of your own inclination,
and, having appeared here mysteriously, you become more and
more inclined, by reaction, toward what is simply possible
here. Everything here passes. And when your appearance here
is finally done, after you have gone through a wretched end
of life, when it is finally all gone, then what is gained?
Only the right to another mysterious repetition, as this
life is! None of you can account for your presence
here.
You cannot realize Real God. You can
only be led into that Realization. And if you resist it,
then of course it does not take place. And such Realization
is difficult, I grant you that. It is immensely difficult,
It requires tremendous intelligence, tremendous discipline,
tremendous feeling, to pass out of this limitation, this
philosophy, this birth. But there is help for it-there is
Grace. And you must give up your whole life for it! Whatever
you do not give up, keeps you here, and until you have given
up everything, here is what you see.
You should also understand that I am
not here to fight with you for any cause whatsoever.
Whatever you choose, you are completely free to choose, and
that is all there is to that. All I represent here is an
offering. I know how difficult it is to accept it and to
live it. And I know exactly what I am doing and what I have
to do in the case of every person. I have known exactly what
to do with people who come in the condition that you all do,
without the purification or clarity that a mature individual
would represent in a spiritual culture. The karmas that must
be relieved in the case of individuals who come in this
condition are of the grossest and most resistive kind. So
they are not just plucked off like a pimple on your cheek.
It is difficult for you and for me, and it has always been
difficult.
My relationship to individuals is of
a spiritual kind. It works on the level of the super-physics
of things. It is not a worldly matter. It is not founded in
this or any other world. It is not conventional, it is not
something within your experience altogether. On the other
hand, a true relationship with me is not arbitrarily
realized by everyone who happens to come in the door, or who
makes some ordinary gesture toward the idea of taking up
this Way of life. I can serve you with the Teaching through
literature and by providing instructive educational
occasions for you somehow, if you will support that
possibility, but you must fulfill the Teaching, you must
live it. You must take on that discipline, you must live it
altogether, this meditation must become true, this
adaptation, this transformation of the body-being, this
repolarization of it altogether, must be literally true of
you. The true spiritual process is not just mental stuff. It
is cellular, molecular, and requires great human character
to perform. And if you will live it, then a spiritual
relationship with me, personally, directly, in the
transcendental form in which it exists, becomes possible.
Until then, you should just consider the Teaching if you are
interested in it.
A spiritual relationship with me is
not of a conventional or nominal kind. It depends on
sacrifice, the fulfillment of the Law. The sacrifice must be
true of you and it must be true of me. And. no one, just
because he likes something about me, somehow or other, on
that account has a relationship with me, has any spiritual
connection with me whatsoever. I am not a whore. I know my
spiritual relations. They are entirely my responsibility.
And if they are violated, if they do not fulfill the Law,
then that is the end of the matter. A true relationship to
me does not just float around in the imaginations of people.
It depends on a real human process, mutually acknowledged,
mutually experienced, expressed at the level of life. If the
spiritual and devotional practice is not true of you, then
the sacrifice is not true, and my response is not
forthcoming,
This possibility for spiritual life
is available to you all. It is available to all beings who
will consider it. Apart from such a process, what this life
can amount to is a torment, it seems to me. But until it is
clear to you that only the Divine process avails, spiritual
life cannot be true of you, it cannot begin. We are not
possessed of spirituality in our giddy feelings.
Spirituality is sacrifice. It is not our content that is
spiritual, whatever the experience.
It is said in some of the Scriptures
that the greatest of all sins is to imagine your Spiritual
Master is a mere human being, just as he or she appears to
be while sitting in front of you. You know what you know and
experience about yourself when you begin to think the
Spiritual Master is of the same kind, altogether the same.
You begin to become contemptuous and claim equality. Whereas
there is no thing and no one to be equal to. The spiritual
process working through such an individual is without the
separate one, and only when approached properly, when
prepared for truly, is the Divine function of the Spiritual
Master brought into your life. The Spiritual Master in human
form :is not engaged in a conventional human game, and he
cannot be imitated. What must occur in the case of an
individual who functions in that way for others is an
abomination to anyone else. It is terrifying from the ego’s
point of view. And for this reason such an individual is
usually only rejected for the most part, made to suffer at
the hands of devotees themselves, even if unwittingly. He is
in general found unacceptable. He is always wrestled with
because of what he implies for your own life. What such an
individual represents as a demand of you is difficult for
you to fulfill, and what such an individual represents as
Realization requires an undoing in you that is immense, not
a thing you can do willfully, not a thing you can
fulfill
as you would some ordinary
occupation in life. For this reason such individuals often
avoid as much as possible becoming part of the worldly
appearance of things. They avoid becoming too visible and
too well surrounded with ordinary kinds of attention. In
this way, the process that is possible through their
appearance may actually be lived with the relative few who
are seriously inclined toward it.
The human birth, on the basis of its
native desiring, does not fulfill itself. It becomes
confused and begins to create a destiny which at some point
becomes terrifying and unacceptable. But here and there some
individual appears who has broken through all that ancient
adaptation. Whenever such a one appears, others merely born
have great advantage. But they only have great advantage if
they make right use of such a one, by fulfilling the Law in
his company.
There are all kinds of ways of using
such a person, or the communications around such a person.
Most of the ways of using such a person are simply ways of
exploiting the birth potential itself. There is only one way
that is true use of such an individual, and that is to
fulfill the Law, which is sacrifice, in relationship to him
specifically,and to have it fulfilled, in turn, relative to
you. Then such a relationship represents a literal
advantage, because it brings the engine of super-physics, in
the Divine rather than the cosmic sense, into the play of
your ordinary life.
The human individual who serves
others in that way is simply open, broken hearted. Your
relationship with him is your relationship with Real God.
And it is not a matter of constant human face to face
contact with such a one. In general, the more there is of
that, then the more contemptuous people tend to become and
the more they tend to crave face to face contact in itself,
whereas it is a spiritual relationship that must be
established. The relationship must also be real at the human
level, through occasional contact and through right
approach, but it is essentially fulfilled in your practice,
in your living, in your meditation. So somehow in the
process you must gain the heart of the Spiritual Master. If
you do not, if you are busy struggling, rejecting,
resisting, offending, then the spiritual process cannot take
place-that is the Law.
Read
the whole book – Paradox
of Instruction