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Adi Da (Bubba Free John) – 1977
“Because of today’s fast communication, because there are
more and more books about spirituality and more and more
people traveling and talking about spiritual matters, it is
easy to imagine that some great spiritual event is
occurring. But people are just considering spiritual ideas.
Most people who are involved with so-called spirituality are
involved in superficial ways, as they would be with
conventional church beliefs.
What people describe as the great spiritual age today is
just a turning toward subjective matters and subjective
illusions. Such a view was fostered in this country by the
drug culture of the 60’s, which turned people into the
subjective order. But that way is just as filled with
illusions as any conventional life. It is the dimension of
mind just as outward obsessions are also mind. Mind is the
thing that we suffer, including the ego, which is a part of
mind. Therefore, turning to the subjective order is not
spiritual.
Certainly the so-called spiritual cultures arising in
this country have some feeling for a fuller life. They
represent a sympathy with an aspect of the body-being that
Western life has tended to exclude. The subjective or
emotional aspect of the being is being emphasized again, and
so for that reason spiritual movements in this country look
toward the East. But the subjective being is not the Truth
any more than the active or objective being. Thus most
people are just arbitrarily and superficially taking on
Eastern religious customs in the name of spirituality.
True spirituality is a moral and spiritual
transformation. And the practice of real or spiritual life
begins to make a difference when people who are living
conventional lives are no longer addicted to the worldly
game. Not that they become otherworldly and separate from
the world entirely, but they no longer live as a
manifestation of conventional consciousness and
interests.”
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