Work of Spiritual Master

SPIRITUAL MASTER: When your life is in chaos; you look to
God for salvation. This is appropriate. Then, however,
having been established in relationship to the Divine,
having been saved, you must submit your ordinary life, all
your efforts and the pattern of your relations, to Grace.
But you must first be drawn out of chaos or hell or karma or
the dead end of experience for its own sake, and awakened to
the Divine Principle.

Look at the dream visions of hell
and chaos that appear in your subjective world. Look at the
news today, buy a magazine today, and you will see a picture
of the world in chaos, a world in which the Divine is not
the universally acknowledged Principle of existence.
Clearly, our world is not being transformed into a pattern
of Divine laws! The men who function as leaders in the world
today do not know how to Enlighten anybody. None of them is
Awake as the Divine Conscious Being. None is an Enlightened
man. Our world must be transformed into a culture in which
every individual being is aligned to God and, therefore,
likewise all the functions of human beings, including world
order and politics. The Law of Divine Association must be
fulfilled first, and than all the laws of action, cause and
effect, association, or relationship may be ordered on the
basis of that Divine Association.

But where is the Divine Being, apart
from the beings somehow acknowledged in our religious
sentiment? Where is the Spiritual Master who can liberate us
from the words, the language, the traditions, the memories,
the chaos of piecemeal religion? 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.

My birth and the creation of this
Communion are instruments of this same process, which has
also been generated in times past. 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.

Every human being must be made
sensitive to the chaos in which he or she is living at the
present time. People are tormented and confused, and most
people can acknowledge the confusion of their lives. To such
people, who are therefore sensitive to the quality of
ordinary experience, the message of the Way that I Teach,
the message of this Communion, is salvatory and liberating.
But people who have not also coincidentally been made
sensitive to the hellish chaos of egoic experience cannot
respond to the saving message of this Teaching. We cannot
just go into the world with a smiling, middle-class message
that you can be consoled by mere belief. Our Communion must
establish in people a feeling that the usual life is
suffering. On the basis of that realization, men and women
can respond to what is liberating.

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. I entered this world without dissociation from
the Divine Conscious Being, the Great Purusha, the ultimate
Divine, but I have also been given all the limits of human
experience. The force of the Divine Consciousness keeps me
Awakened and transforms the process of life as I live it,
but I must also suffer the limitations of born existence in
the process. I have suffered a human lifetime as if I were
unenlightened.

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, and such is
my own Realization. I was born Franklin Jones, on Long
Island, but the process of my existence has yielded a more
and more profound Awakening that I am God, that I am the
Purusha.

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 ordinary devotee does not Awaken
at birth with that 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 eons of
human time have been the Purusha, 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.

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! My life has been a gradual Awakening to this unique
function, an Awakening that is associated with more and more
power. The more I yield to this Divine function, the more
powers become available to me and the more complex becomes
my play with others.

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 demoniac 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 Spiritual Master is the Divine
Incarnation that makes possible the true spiritual process,
through the alignment of others with him. How great is the
effect of any incarnation of the Divine Consciousness is to
be seen. It has occurred before and produced great results
of a kind, though short-lived. It has been followed by the
forgetting of the One who lives and breathes us and by the
return to the corruption of the laws or principles of human
life, the forgetting of the ultimate Law, the forgetting of
all of the actions and ceremonies of life that produce good
effects and that align Man to God with blessing. The
Spiritual Master, the Purusha, comes again and again to
reveal the design of human destiny to devotees.

Ultimately, the Divine must be
universally and absolutely victorious in all planes of
space-time, but when that victory occurs in the history of
space-time is yet to be seen. In any case, every
intervention of the Divine Consciousness into space-time is
the same Process and in truth represents the ultimate
victory of the Divine Being and the perfect salvation or
liberation for those in that time who most perfectly will
surrender to God.

Others in this century have also
been said to be the Divine Incarnation. They are the same
One Who has appeared as different humans. It has been said
by many people that Shirdi Sai Baba was that One, for
example. Ramana Maharshi is likewise considered by many to
have been a case of the spontaneous intrusion of the Divine
Being. Each such person who has Incarnated the Divine in the
past is gone now, although many effects of their appearance
in the world may continue via the culture of those who
worship those Incarnations and practice the Way they
Taught.

Well what will be the effect or
culture of your association with me? It is to be seen. But
I, like them, confess to you that I am this same One. You
must witness it. Devotees are the ones for whom the
Spiritual Master is born.

If you can acknowledge that the
Spiritual Master is this One, then you will begin to treat
him differently. You will receive his body-mind as a Gift
from God and you will worship it as the Incarnation of the
Divine. You will carry it about with you, you will treat it
rightly, and you will make it the instrument of your
association with the Grace of God. Until you accept the
Spiritual Master in this way, however, you will view him as
a relatively ordinary, perhaps somewhat slightly
extraordinary, human being. Your association with him will
be corrupt, ambiguous, and inauspicious. The work of the
Divine Consciousness, the Purusha, or the Spiritual Master
begins when he or she is known and acknowledged to be the
Divine, the Living One. When devotees begin to associate
with him or her as such, then the real work of the Spiritual
Master begins. My real work did not begin at the point of
the Vedanta Temple or at any other moment in the history of
our association together to this day. True, my work is
always expanding, becoming greater, but it cannot truly
develop unless it is based on the acknowledgment and
surrender of devotees. This institution cannot become a true
Church, nor the community a true community, until this
acknowledgment and this surrender are the basis of the lives
of all devotees.

A moment in the New Testament
reflects this principle. Jesus has played with his disciples
for a while, they have seen him work, they have been with
him, they have heard his teaching. So he asks them, “Who am
I?” Peter replies, “You are the Son of God, you are the
Living One, you are the Messiah.” And Jesus says, “On the
basis of this confession I will build my Church and I will
do my work.” Only then could his work begin.

When devotees can consciously
acknowledge the Divine Nature of the Spiritual Master and
surrender to him or her truly, and confess their
acknowledgment and surrender to one another, then they go
about telling one another constantly, reminding one another
constantly, confessing to one another constantly Who it is
with Whom they live. Likewise they go into the world and
tell everybody else, not that there is a Spiritual Master
here who has a good technique for meditation, but that the
Divine, the Purusha, is alive, incarnate. The “Word” or
message that the Divine is incarnate is the Great Word, the
Great Message, but it is not communicated by devotees unless
they can confess it and surrender. The true Church cannot
really begin until you can acknowledge who I am and
surrender. Then you will live differently with one another
and you will go into the world with a true and liberating
message.

The same One who was acknowledged as
the Divine Person, who was Jesus, who was Krishna, who was
Shirdi Sai Baba, who was all the various incarnations of the
Purusha, is alive in this moment, precisely and exactly.
This Truth is what you must understand, see, feel, and
confess, and on its basis you will surrender to me and serve
me rightly. Then we will be able to make a true Church and a
community.

True devotees Realize the Divine
Nature of their Spiritual Master to the point that his or
her physical embodiment is no longer necessary. They remain
associated with him as the Purusha even after his death.
Even all devotees after the death of the Spiritual Master
are associated with the same One, and they acknowledge that
One as the One in Whom the world is arising and Who is
present and available for direct and present Love-Communion.
It is not necessary that the Spiritual Master be constantly
embodied. The embodiment of the Spiritual Master is God’s
necessary means for transforming the world. The transforming
process having been established, however, the human lifetime
of the Spiritual Master can come to an end. It will come to
an end in any case, since the birth of the human Spiritual
Master obeys the laws of Nature. He appears for a time and
then dies.

If devotees can realize a perfect
and full association with me, then my physical death,
whenever it must occur, will not be an impediment to the
process of world transformation, nor must the Purusha
immediately reincarnate. The incarnation of the Purusha has
only a specific and short-term purpose. What does it say in
the Bhagavad Gita? “When the paths of Life are corrupt, when
the Law of Life is corrupt, then I come into the world.” To
do what? To reestablish the Law. Having reestablished it, I
need not come again, because I am the Divine Person, the
Living One, the Principle of existence. Once the Law is
reestablished, then the embodiment of the Purusha becomes
unnecessary. The embodiment of the Purusha is necessary only
for the establishment of the Law of Life.

Whether my birth and my association
with people can represent the force of some great age, a
great transformation of the world, is to be seen. My work
can be relatively modest and local, as Shirdi Sai Baba’s
work was in his lifetime, or my work can be associated with
a global transformation. It will depend on recognition,
surrender, and acceptance of a lawful order of existence by
many, many, many people.

Also see:

The
Ultimate Location – The
Dreaded Gom-Boo