Identification of the Beloved

A TALK GIVEN BY BUBBA FREE JOHN TO A
GATHERING OF DEVOTEES IN HONOLULU, DECEMBER
8,1976

There
is virtually no limit to the delusions that human beings can
presume on the basis of their tendencies, their desiring,
their motivation, their reactions to experience. Because
this is so, individuals eventually step out of the stream of
conventional relations. In other words, they at some point
cease to act or live on the basis of the ego-soul, the
experiential self, and they establish instead a sacred
relationship by which they are relieved of the implications
of this birth. Our meeting with one another each of you
individually with me is of this kind. It is not a
conventional relationship which we are here merely to
dramatize with one another, you with me or you with one
another. We are here to be lifted out of that destiny.
Therefore, your relationship with me must be of a sacred
nature. It must involve an entirely different kind of
discipline than the usual life presumes. Your relationship
to me in itself implies a comment to the essential Teaching
or consideration which is part of my communication with you.
Apart from this sacred process that our relationship
implies, the only thing we can possibly realize in one
another’s company is suffering and delusion, which as you
see is what the usual man realizes.

In all my years of teaching work it
has been a constant struggle to maintain this quality in our
relationship. It is constantly my obligation to eliminate
what stands in the way, what makes your approach to me a
conventional one, what makes your response to me
conventional, egoic, ordinary. And this is a great and very
difficult task. It requires your whole life.

Your obligation personally is this
matter of practice, enjoying the sacred occasion of our
relationship. I must find a way to make that workable in
this world, to maintain a communication to you, to keep
myself available to you, to be able myself to stay out of
the usual games of life so that I am available under
circumstances that are free of conventional associations. I
myself and Vision Mound Ceremony should survive by the gifts
and general support of those who respond to this Teaching,
those who enjoy this relationship with me. Gifts and other
support that people give on the basis of this meeting should
serve the specific purposes of Vision Mound Ceremony. There
are essentially two purposes: One is to maintain the
communication that comes out of my Company, and the other is
to provide household and other circumstances in which I can
be kept available to people. And that is basically it.
Vision Mound Ceremony performs these two functions through
the gifts and general support of those who respond. It
shouldn’t be obliged to organize those who respond into some
other or independent worldly gathering, such as community
businesses, that will then enable it to survive. There is no
such obligation implied in our meeting.

Part of the apparently conventional
nature of our connection is the threat of separation and
death. This body dies. That body dies. We can rejuvenate,
feel better, live longer, but, even so, in this world
everybody dies. That is why we do spiritual practice,
because we are conscious of the destiny of separation. We
are willing to fulfill the law of love, but on the other
hand what we love dies. That is the paradox of this place,
and that is what makes it a hell. That is why this is one of
the realms of suffering. This world is not a heaven. This is
not a place of fulfillment. Thus, we must yield to the true
Condition. We must not become dependent upon the
conventional aspect of our relations. We must recognize our
relations. We must identify the Condition of the loved one.
You must recognize or identify me in Truth. Our relationship
must be a spiritual one. That does not mean that we will not
see one another, or that we cannot have occasion to carry on
human relations face to face. But the vital dependency and
demand that is based on the fear of separation is something
that must be undone through this matter of spiritual
practice, through this intuitive recognition.

You must become established in the
real Condition, or you will never be satisfied. You will be
driven to all kinds of preoccupation’s and great schemes,
trying to become victorious or immortal, for immortality’s
own sake, simply because you cannot deal with the fact of
death. But death is an absolute message in this realm. It
obliges us to recognize or identify one another in Truth,
and we are not relieved of that obligation in this
place.

It is not a matter of seeing me face
to face twenty-four hours a day. Nobody does that. You must
truly live the spiritual Condition of our relationship. You
must lead a spiritual life in the world. You must fall into
this Condition that precedes all conditions. You must enjoy
your relationship to me in the form of meditation, the form
of that sacrifice, because no form of our conventional and
ordinary relations, our ordinary contact, ultimately
satisfies in itself. And if your approach to me is a
conventional one, you will be making use only of the
ordinary forms of our possible relationship, and all those
forms pass. All those forms make you anxious. You must
realize a form of relationship to me in Ignorance, in which
you recognize or identify me in the form of the very
Condition of this world, your own Condition, so that when we
are face to face it is that intuitive identification that
you are involved with, not all the kinds of worldly anxiety
such as lovers might feel for one another in the face of
death. They love one another and yet they are going to be
separated. That is the conventional nature of relationship.
The kinds of lovers that can be separated are just the image
of suffering, the pair. Lovers must become a paradox, a
single Condition, not a cult of two. Our relationship must
become a paradox, a spiritual matter, in which we are all
given up to the Condition that precedes all this
madness.

This world literally is being
dreamed at this moment. It has no force except insofar as we
live by reaction, merely by experience, on the basis of what
appears or comes across to us in the dream. We tend to make
our philosophy, our way of living, out of the dream, out of
the limitation that arises here, which we cannot account
for. Our life must cease to take that form. You cannot make
philosophy out of this world and succeed. You would just be
crazy all your life, and you would die anyway. You cannot
make your way of life out of this experience here as it
appears, this dream. No, you must recognize it, truly
identify it. You must be awake relative to this experience.
You must enjoy the release that a person enjoys upon waking
in the morning from his or her dreams the night before. You
must identify the Truth of the dream, which is to recognize,
to know again, intuitively to penetrate all the conventional
forms of the dream, which in themselves are illusory,
passing. That is what spiritual practice is all about. That
is what the spiritual process is all about: being relieved,
ultimately, of the force of this experience, this condition,
this limitation, this dream here.

You are liberated from that in the
process of our relationship, but only if you are related to
me truly, sacredly, spiritually, only if your relationship
to me is simply one of sacrifice, of natural orientation,
not all the reactive things you get into on the basis of it
in the conventional way. Then the play between us serves
this intuitive recognition, this identification of the
Condition of all conditions. But you must yield constantly,
because as soon as you become involved in your ordinary life
by reaction, you separate yourself and become involved again
in the illusion of experience arising here.

It is a maddening experience, this
place. It is attractive in all kinds of ways. Equal to the
force of all of its attractiveness is the force of all of
the destruction of the Beloved. All the forms of the Beloved
rot in this place. They come to an end, they are taken away.
That is the truth about it, and there is no way around it.
You must confront that. That is the way it is here. This is
not heaven. This is not the world of the Beloved, of the
loved one in any form you may recognize as the Loved One.
This is a dream play on the Beloved, in which the Beloved
appears in shapes and forms that are fleeting, that are
binding in themselves. They attract you, and then they are
withdrawn and leave you with only the craving. Left with the
craving only, you are cycled back again and again into the
same dimension as that experiencing reaction.

So you must recognize, truly
identify, the Beloved appearing here in all this attraction,
which means you must enter into a spiritual process in your
living rather than the conventional attempts to survive, to
win, to live forever. If you become truly committed to the
spiritual process, in a relatively short time you literally
pass out of the limitation in which you now conceive of this
world. But you must utterly surrender. You must give up
everything for that, for what you recognize, for that Truth,
that Condition, the Condition of the very current of your
own being. Give yourself up to it entirely. Allow it to
create the event of the dream. The dream is its business.
You will notice it stops playing the dream the way it seems
to be playing it now. Now you are turned on to the Beloved
as if to a whore, a fancy dancer. She has a little bit of
extra seductiveness now. I was out here in the yard with
some of you a few minutes ago, and we played this game of
looking up in the night sky for something extraordinary.
Some weird unidentified thing has got to be flying around in
order to make us feel a little light, a little wonder. And
yet you cannot account for any of it. The mere existence of
any of it at all is sufficient mystery. All the rest of it
is fancy dancing, a little twirler put on the end of her
pasties. The woman herself, the universe itself, is
sufficient mystery. We do not need all the extra
attractions, and yet the woman herself, the lover himself,
the universe itself as it appears here, is itself fancy
dancing. It is unnecessary. It bewitches you, it beguiles
you, it attracts you into a whole way of life, and yet it is
fleeting, temporary, just a costume, a bit of business. It
is not the Beloved herself, himself, itself. You must
identify the Truth of what is attractive.

Thus, in your relationship to me,
the matter of intuitive recognition must become the
principle of our play. You must recognize me in the form of
your Condition, the Condition of all this arising, the real
Condition of it, the Condition of conditions, the Condition
of the body, the mind, the self sense, the very current of
the being, and be rested in It constantly. When you do that,
the Beloved takes off her garment. Her true Form, his true
Form, the Beloved’s true Form begins to appear. That true
Form is not transitory. But you must be adapted to the
loving of the Beloved in eternal Form, because you do not
have desires fitted to that Form at the present time. The
desires you have are all products of adaptation to this
limiting illusion of attractions. You are turned on by
bangles and flesh. All this appearance is how you are
attracted to the Beloved in this form here. Having
recognized it, though, giving yourself up to the true
Condition of this, your very Nature, then your desiring or
the movement of the being itself becomes capable of enjoying
the Beloved in eternal Form. Only in that case are you
satisfied.

All else is suffering. There is no
doubt about it. There is absolutely no ultimate relief in
the dream. So our play with one another cannot be based
simply on this conventional attraction. It cannot be
limited, in other words, to the natural, human dimension of
our intimacy with one another. It must be sacred. It must be
a spiritual relationship. It must be founded in this
Ignorance. You must recognize me in Truth. You must do this
practice. You must enter into this real meditation and give
up everything for the Beloved. In that case our ordinary
human relations become pleasurable, because they are not
necessary. We are not bound by them. We are constantly
reached into the Condition of these conditions and so can
love one another, play with one another in this dream
circumstance without becoming bound, because we constantly
recognize one another in Truth in this play. If we will
intuitively recognize one another, we can be free of the
conventional striving which is a reaction to the awful sense
acquired while alive that separation or dissolution of our
relationships is inevitable.

Our immortality is not conventional,
earthly, elemental. It is a Divine matter, founded in this
recognition. It is founded in sacrifice, not in any effort
simply and exclusively to make this elemental body live
forever. No such motivation would work. If we are fitted to
this sacrifice absolutely, maybe the body’s life gets
prolonged. All kinds of things may occur, but they are not
our point of view. They are secondary to the essential
fulfillment of the Law of Sacrifice.

So we do not only need to see one
another, you and I. You also need to live your life on the
basis of this relationship in which the true Condition is
identified, in which you recognize these conditions and
therefore rest in the true Condition. So you need to live an
ordinary life. You need peace and quiet, a natural, human
size environment, with ordinary intimacies, a few people to
see regularly. You need a place, an occasion, in which to
meditate in private. All these things are your obligations
if you are to fulfill the true Condition of our meeting.
Since all of those things are required, we will certainly
see one another, but we will also all live our privacy as
well, because if we are not given up in private, our meeting
has no opportunity to grow, to represent a new adaptation.
You will simply be struggling and striving here anxiously,
never really being released from the implications of this
world.

Our destiny is not something that we
can prefigure. Our obligation, though, is clear. The law in
this moment is clear, the true form of our living is clear,
and so we must fulfill it. Having fulfilled it perfectly,
you will then see transformations of this ordinary living
here that are more and more positive, but you will also see
the real spiritual transformation, which fundamentally has
no drama whatsoever connected with it. It is simply absolute
release from the necessity of this appearance here and all
the craving that we develop on the basis of it. In this
release, the being rests in its true Condition, in which all
kinds of other conditions appear, such as this world here.
The gross form continues to appear. Subtle forms may
appear.

And then perhaps such changes may
cease to appear, and you rest in the Condition itself, the
God-World, the Realm that is itself the Beloved. There is no
speech to describe it. There is no vision of it. You must
fulfill the Law, and that is all. Whatever the perfect
Destiny is beyond the cessation of changes in these
unnecessary realms, it is nothing of which any born being
has knowledge. Such is not permitted. There is no vision, no
doctrine, apart from the Law itself. You make this
sacrifice, and then only the Truth or the Divine is your
Destiny, whatever that altogether is. So all the anxiety
built up on the basis of experience here must come to an
end, and in our relations we must become natural, ordinarily
loving. You cannot oblige any creature you love to live
forever, because he or she simply cannot do it, and neither
can you, as an act of will. Whenever we come together and
say we love one another, we cannot promise to stay with one
another. We can promise our life to one another and in that
sense stay with one another, but we do not have in our will
the capacity to stay with one another forever, because the
body dies. This condition disappears. So you must die while
living. You must be able to let go of this unnecessary realm
and dwell in the God Condition while alive. In that case you
will be free of anxiety, you will have humor in relation to
things here. You will be capable of loving in the natural
fashion because you are not obliging it all to stay here
forever. You are recognizing it intuitively, and therefore
the Condition of all these conditions is the Beloved you
find in every lover, in every arising phenomenon, in every
moment, and in. the Spiritual Master most
directly.

Truth is not some hopeful word such
as “You will be immortal on this earth, and all things will
cease to die and we will live forever.” There is no such
message. That is not the Truth. Even if that were factually
true, it is not t,he Truth. The Truth is in this
recognition, this identification of the Beloved, this
sacrifice. Secondarily, our lives may be prolonged, but we
are still obliged to the same sacrifice and the same humor.
Only on that basis are we to realize all the secondary
effects of the fulfillment of the Law, which may or may not
be prolonged living.

So it is true that this anxiety
about your relations is something you discover in yourself.
It is not healed by any ordinary arrangement. It is itself
that condition in our awareness by which we are moved to
fulfill the Law, to make this sacrifice. It is not otherwise
removed, we are not otherwise relieved of it. In your right
response to me, in this actual practice, it passes.
Anything, anyone, that you love and enjoy in this realm is
only, if you will recognize it, the Beloved, the very Real
itself. This is what you discover in all your loving, all
your enjoyments, if you are a true man, a true woman. If you
do not live by such sacrificial recognition, all your
experiencing and enjoyments lead to attachment only. They
reinforce ritual behavior, craving for contact, craving for
experience, craving for repetitions in which we are
constantly anxious, ill-at-ease, suffering reactive
emotions, endlessly thinking, mulling things over mentally
as if we were trying to solve some hidden problem, knotted
up in the body, always active to find some pleasurable
condition that will last, that will fulfill us. If you
intuitively recognize this matter arising here, you are not
bound up by reaction to that whole automatic ceremony. You
are relieved of it. And that recognition is the only
release.

Paradoxically, even though there is
all of this delight and suffering, there is not one single
thing, there is not a single event, not a single change, not
a single modification, no birth, no death. Nothing has
happened. Nothing has ever happened. Nothing ever will
happen. There is only a single and absolute Condition,
unspeakable in its Nature, which we may not see, hear,
experience over against ourselves, but which is our very
Condition prior to all changes, high or low. Having fallen
into That, then all the changes, high or low, have a
disposition in us from which to be properly viewed, should
they arise. And, as it happens, this one you seem to be when
active in the waking world continues to arise for the time
being paradoxically, because it does not amount to anything.
Nothing is gained by a moment’s living, absolutely nothing.
Nothing changes on the basis of it. Nothing is gained by a
single meeting, by a single moment’s satisfaction, by a
single contact. This living isn’t anything. It is only an
illusion, a modification of the essential Condition. If you
come to rest in that Condition, then in every moment you
recognize this and are happy, already happy. You can play in
the ordinary ways, but you never become wretched. You are
not degraded through your own craving, because you recognize
what you love, and therefore your relations with loved ones,
with this whole world, are natural, happy.

Otherwise, your craving for the
immortality of the loved one will become so profound that
you will be forced to kill her or him. You will murder the
loved one in your craving for the loved one’s immortality.
Your anxiety over the loss, the separation, will become so
great that you will eventually begin to degrade the
relationship itself, to separate yourself automatically.
Then everything you do begins to separate you from the loved
one, even though you are here to be loving, because you are
so anxious, so terrified, so upset. But if you will
recognize one another in Truth, if you will recognize this
world in Truth, if you will recognize me in Truth, then you
are engaged in that process that relieves you of this
illusion, and you can come to rest. You can be happy. It is
not necessary to go on with great plans to conquer this
world in one fashion or another. Nothing is gained by it.
You never conquer the loved one. You are enamored. You are
in love. No conquering goes on at all. You only start
conquering when you become afraid, when you fear this
separation. Then you get anxious and start craving all kinds
of satisfaction.

So I recommend that you meditate.
However, you cannot meditate. You cannot willfully go about
some program of meditation and have it be true, because that
is a way of conquering rather than of being in love. You
must realize this real meditation through the consideration
we enjoy face to face. And if you will begin to rest in the
current of the being in my Company, then you will begin to
feel my influence. I will be of use to you in that case, but
not until then. If your approach to me remains conventional,
you are not at ease, you are not rested in this current, and
you cannot feel it. Then there is no initiatory force in our
meeting. You will really only discover the force of my
influence when you begin to come to rest, in meditation, in
our meetings, and in life. When you are rested in this
current, through true intuitive identification of me, of the
Condition of the current of your own being, then you can
feel my work.

Because I am simply present in this
Condition, I do not have any plans. I have nothing to do
with all of this arising. I am simply standing here, and if
you recognize me truly, then this current of the being is
intensified, its revelation begins, and you will fall out of
the point of view of this dream, even though you continue in
your ordinary relations within it. You may also, in the
course of this meditation, this living, have the opportunity
to be involved in all kinds of other dreams, to live and
perceive in other forms, other dimensions entirely. It is
not that you must strive for that. That is another kind of
craving, another kind of effort toward victory based on a
failure of recognition, a failure to presume this Ignorance
which is native to our birth. All the conventional yogic
efforts are kinds of craving. People will sit for hours a
day manipulating themselves with various techniques, hoping
to have this and that kind of remarkable experience as a
result. It is just an extension of worldliness, of the same
thing that is your suffering in this gross appearance. You
must simply be relieved of all of that through the
presumption of Ignorance and the intuition of the Condition
of these conditions arising.

That intuitive recognition or
identification is simply rest in the current of the being.
It is felt in this body sense at first, and as we come to
rest in it, it is enjoyed in all kinds of ways, none of
which is in itself fulfilling as mere experience. These
enjoyments are simply the secondary reflections of our
fulfillment of the Law, our present resting in that
Condition which does not have any content, which is
unspeakable. Call it God, Brahman, the Self. It is the only
Happiness, and it is the foundation of all happiness in the
midst of conditions here or anywhere else.

So it is not that we must sit down
and struggle to hear the inner sounds and go somewhere with
them. It is quite natural that at some point you become
absorbed in such sounds and other phenomena as an extension
of this current, but it is rest in the prior Condition
itself that is fulfillment of the Law, that is Happiness. It
relieves you of the point of view of this world. It is not
simply experiences of other worlds that relieve you of the
point of view of this world, though they may arise and bring
ordinary release. It is rest in the Condition of the very
current of this arising, the Condition of these conditions,
which is Happiness. It is perfect Sacrifice, and,
paradoxically, is perfect fullness. It is a way of being mad
without being crazy.

Nothing could be more mad than to be
happy in this place, because there is really no
justification for it. It is not reasonable to be happy. If
you thoroughly examine this world, there is reason to feel
very unhappy. Even with a little pleasurableness thrown in,
it is not enough to overcome that conviction of darkness
that you get when you really see what is happening here. So
it is not any philosophy we can base on our experience here
that makes us happy. It is complete release from the
implications, the force, of this dreaming, this appearance
for which we cannot account. And you see, it is already
miraculous. Nothing fantastic has to happen. We already
cannot account for a single thing in this room here. The
mere existence of anything is beyond comprehension. It is
sufficient to boggle us. You do not know what a single thing
is. You cannot build any great programs for victory on the
basis of such Ignorance. On the basis of that Ignorance, we
are naturally disposed to all of this arising and may be led
into the intuitive identification of the Nature and
Condition of all this arising. And that is my occupation, to
bring you to that recognition through Ignorance, in which
you may come to rest in the current of the being and more
and more profoundly fulfill the Law. But you see that this
requires a new orientation, a turnabout from the
conventional strife in which you pursue fulfillment here by
reaction. The more you do that, the more confounded you
become.

In the old cultures, they frowned
upon anyone who knew too much or owned too much, because
these were the signs of somebody who was really struggling
and was therefore very worldly and dangerous. Of course they
made this a blanket, black and white world view, but there
is some wisdom in the feeling. We must be relieved of
knowing and owning, of all our craving. We must become
perfectly Ignorant. We must become a Sacrifice, not an
Owner, not a Knower. The usual knowing and owning is
ordinary enough, and we can take pleasure in ordinary things
in one another’s company, but only if we are free, only if
we all make this sacrifice constantly and are clarified in
the being. So you must have the leisure, the ordinariness,
in which to consider in this moment of arising that you do
not know what a single thing is, that you do not know what
the thing is itself, that you do not know what any of it is.
If you will enter into your relations with me on that basis,
this Ignorance, this falling into the current of the being
through identification of its Condition, will become natural
to you by Grace, freely, because it is not a conventional
gift. It is the Gift of the being itself. It is prior to all
strife, all circumstance. It is simply that you must be
disposed to enjoy it. Become so disposed in my Company, and
it absolutely will be given to you. That is also the Law. It
is not a matter of striving and acquiring it, but of giving
up that whole effort as you naturally do in Ignorance, in
which you simply rest in this moment and recognize it in the
form of your own Condition, the Condition of the current of
the body-being itself. It is felt more and more profoundly
as a current. It goes through changes. And it obliges you to
go through changes outwardly in your relations and also
bodily, because the body is transformed in its adaptation.
The. current is felt passing from toe to crown rather than
crown to toe. It is not that it goes from the toe and leaves
the body toward the crown. It is just felt as if there were
a wire from toe to crown in which the current or the flow is
moving in that direction rather than the opposite. Then the
current between the crown and the Heart may at last be
Realized also.

We still stand in the world even as
we rest in this current. But then you may notice in your
private meditation that you also are released even of this
experience here from time to time. As the currents of the
gross being begin to harmonize, become naturally reoriented,
the body comes to rest, the breathing becomes slow, simple,
the heart rate goes down. We hear the breathing and feel it,
but then we become aware that we cannot hear it any longer,
cannot feel it any longer. The current itself becomes
audible to us, and we may simply forget the gross body and
pass into the subtler dreams, all the while being in the
disposition of this Ignorance, in which we truly identify
what arises rather than automatically becoming attached to
it, rather than getting into patterns of craving on the
basis of gross or subtle experience.

So all of that also passes. We come
to the point where we are more and more profoundly
identified with that Condition itself, which precedes all
arising, high or low, and which does not have any reference
really, which cannot be accounted for in conditions. It is
prior to them. It is the Condition of conditions. It is a
paradox, because it is true of you even while alive, while
in the gross plane, in the subtle planes, in any and all of
these unnecessary realms. This Condition, which is
unspeakable, remains true, it remains your very Condition.
Therefore, unnecessary worlds fall away, and perhaps then
there is a Realm corresponding to that Condition in which
you come to rest, to which you become fitted in your
Enjoyment or Sacrifice, in which all relations are eternal
and absolutely pleasurable, unobstructed, unthreatened.
Maybe. But first we must be free of all this. Wherever you
ultimately wake up, where all dreams are being dreamed, you
will discover in that moment that you have been lying there
asleep all this time. It will be as ordinary as waking up in
the morning and going about a day’s business.

But that is not a Realm to be
craved, because it is not of a conventional and unnecessary
nature. We must fulfill the Law, this Sacrifice, this Truth.
The Condition of conditions is true in this realm or any
realm, and it is that to which we must be committed while
alive. Any glorious eternity that appears on the basis of it
is a gift. But it is clear to me that if all of this now
present can appear, as unnecessary and terrifying as it is,
then the Perfect Domain is also existing, and it is somehow
the same as no thing, no disturbance, no craving, no
separation, no birth, no event, no moment, no future, no
time, no place, no suffering. It is also exactly the same as
love, as fullness, as delight, as very Light, as Happiness
disposition of this Ignorance, in which we truly identify
what arises rather than automatically becoming attached to
it, rather than getting into patterns of craving on the
basis of gross or subtle experience.