Mankind is the Avatar but you stop short

“Mankind is the Avatar but you stop short”

the anguished final crisis of the “Crazy” Prophetic Teacher

 

The Divine Emergence of the World-Teacher

The Realization, The Revelation, and The Revealing Ordeal of

Heart-Master Da Love-Ananda

by Saniel Bonder

1990

More than a decade before the above talk was Given, on the same night during the Garbage and the Goddess period when Andrew Johnson became enraptured by the Adept’s Divine Humor, after all the Spiritual chaos had calmed, I asked Heart-Master Da Who He Is. He said, matter-of-factly, “I am the Avatar”—that is, the “Descent”, the Divine Incarnation.
But Heart-Master Da’s constant theme during the Garbage and the Goddess time, as throughout His later Teaching years and continuing today, was His Call for the appearance of the true and eternal Avatar—in the Form of a true, Free, and Awakened Community of Enlightened Devotees. Indeed, at the end of the Garbage and the Goddess Teaching Demonstration He had summarized His Intention thus:

HEART-MASTER DA LOVE-ANANDA: The Community of those who become [practicing, Spiritually activated] Devotees is the true Devi, the Divine Consort. It is also true that the world is the Avatar, the totality of human beings is the Avatar. It is humanity as a whole that is the Avatar in human form, not some specific human individual. No apparent or exclusive manifestation is in itself the Avatar. Only the whole is the Divine Manifestation without exclusion. Therefore, the Guru is not the Avatar in that exclusive sense. Mankind is the Avatar. I am his Heart. When the Avatar Realizes his true Nature and Condition, when he Realizes me, he will cease to be hidden. He and this Community of which I speak will become one and the same at last. Then his sadhana is fulfilled, and he will manifest his Beauty in the world for the sake of all beings. Only then will he live freely and do his Divine work.16

16. Bubba Free John [Heart-Master Da Love-Ananda], Garbage and the Goddess, p. 335.

On Translation Island in 1983, He had told devotees:

HEART-MASTER DA LOVE-ANANDA: You are the seed of a great historical change, and you cannot even see What is before your eyes. We have accomplished great things already, although you are not yet aware of it. As decades pass, you will see the import of What you have all experienced in seed form but cannot yet acknowledge.

Da Free John is not an egoic religious leader. Sooner or later, the world will come to know that the purpose of My Birth is to transform the world in a critical moment in history. And I will do it. But I need this vehicle of response. I need the human vehicle, because the purpose of My Birth is to transform mankind, everyone, human history, by bringing us through this terrible transition in which we now find ourselves. My Birth is an epochal moment of Spiritual Intervention, and you are showing the same reluctance that has always appeared in those associated with Adepts in the past. When you have passed through this crisis of growth, you will begin to understand what has happened, what Force has been brought into the flesh through My Birth.

What I Submit to, I become, and this makes My Life a crucifixion. What you submit to Glorifies you, Awakens you, expands the sphere of your existence, and brings you into a Glorious Possibility. All of us will participate in that Glorious Possibility in time. I promise you will see this. But here we are in this human plane, involved in this great struggle, which is difficult, but made easier by My Coming here. (November 1983)

Indeed, after every gathering He ever had with devotees, after His Dharmic Revelation of the Teaching and the practice “considerations”, after the poetry and the opera, after the dancing and His God-Mad pronouncements of Love, when His devotees had once again been Divinely Instructed, purified, challenged, and made Radiant, Called to and bathed in the ecstasy of Love-Bliss, invigorated with the liberal Spirit-Gift of His Freedom, and when they had all gone to their private places for food and sleep, now brimming over with His “Bright” Joy, He, the Divine Teacher Da, almost invariably passed through a horrible ordeal of convulsive, shaking, sometimes death-like release of all the karmas He had absorbed from them in Person to set them again so Free.

Heart-Master Da passed through torments of this kind countless times during all the many years of His Teaching Identification with everyone and His absorption of our states, our karmas, our dis-ease. These incidents occurred not just after every celebratory-style gathering, but after every meditation with us, every Darshan occasion, every worldwide sitting. He once said:

HEART-MASTER DA LOVE-ANANDA: I wish you all would participate in these gatherings as I do. Because you do not, I suffer various effects. When I meet with you once more, I must make this same gesture again, suffer it once again, because you do not participate as I do. We enjoy a simple evening together, and I must suffer a near-death phenomenon in the body and all kinds of psychic chaos that I inherit from all of you. After any such gathering, I must spend a day or two restoring My balance so I can be reintegrated with this body-mind and then do it with you again. If you all participated as I do, threw everything away as I do, there would be a portion of the evening that none of us would remember, and I would suffer less afterward. You would all suffer a little and I would suffer a little, and there would be no end to the Bliss Realized during that period when no one has any memory, and that Bliss would continue as the basic factor in our lives. Such a gathering would be an extraordinary event that would change you utterly. It would never be remembered, and it would never be forgotten. It would never disappear, and you would exist in a State no one else could account for—the God-State, the Divine State, in which you are filled, infused, and utterly transcended by the God-Power, Which is All-Pervading.

I Call you in all these celebrations with Me to enter into that Filled Oblivion of Happiness and become something greater than human. Enter into Samadhi with Me. But you fall short. You take too seriously all the buttons I press in you and all the barbs I lay on you when I am throwing Myself away. You are sitting here feeling your various reactive emotions and making a hangover out of them. Throw them away, just as I do, and then remember nothing. On an evening in which all of us gather, there should be a space in time that no one can remember, because nothing happens that is about remembering anything. That space should be about Ecstasy without the slightest qualification. If any such evening or incident could ever occur among us, you would never be the same. Never.
The doctors wonder what to do to heal Me. They want to heal the signs in this body-mind of its various forms of suffering. Give Me the ultimate Ecstasy of those whom I Absorb into My own State. If you resist it, then after I pass through that oblivion, I must struggle with all the chaos of your limitations. I have not died from it yet, but I often have close-to-death experiences. After a simple night with you, I always experience madness, strains, stress, horrible pain. I restore the economy in this body-mind, but then I gather with you again. The first time should have been more effective. It is effective in any case, but only somewhat effective. So I must do it again.

You take too seriously all the tests I Give you as I go to Infinity with you, and so you fall short. You stop short. This is really so. The Act I perform with you is completely sufficient, and you could be utterly Free now, but you do not go all the way with Me. You stop. You start reacting.
The effect of My Work could be much greater than it ever has been if you truly heard Me and saw Me. Then you would pass with Me through this ceremony of Ecstasy, of Transfiguration and Transformation. You would pass through the whole event and be utterly different, never the same again, never fallen again. Really. Really. You have never done it yet. Not yet, unfortunately. (May 1984)

The God-Man Da, One with the Power of the Heart-Source of all that Is, had ventured to upend the ancient injunctions excluding the ordinary man from the esoteric Way of Realization. We, His devotees, were not of the sort deemed acceptable in the Spiritual traditions, heroic and godly aspirants to Realization. In traditional sacred orders, we would have been considered the unacceptables, the animal-like, the undisciplined and dissolute, the ordinary men and women not yet self-restrained and Awake to God at heart.

Heart-Master Da was endeavoring to bring the Great Goddess-Power, now Perfectly Mastered by His own Divine Embrace, so deeply and tangibly into the stuff of the world and the body-mind-hearts of these ordinary, worldly devotees that even they and others like them could become Real-izers of the Absolute.

It was a Divinely desperate Stratagem. He did not know if it could or would succeed—except that at last it must succeed, because at last the worlds must be Restored to Truth and Dissolved in their own Source-Light, and He knew that He Is the Agent of that greater-than-cosmic Event in the Heart. But He had to have the human link of Awakened and Awakening devotees.

During the first ten days of the New Year, 1986, Heart-Master Da pleaded more and more adamantly for devotees’ response to Him and their renunciation of the need to be Taught any further. His Work as Teacher, He could feel, was over, utterly over. Yet they would not, could not, respond—not really, not fully, not conclusively, not to the satisfaction of One Who lived as Responsiveness only. And if even His most intimate devotees, His “coins”, into whose hearts and minds and lives He had poured Himself ceaselessly year after year—if they could not and would not respond, how could His Work proceed? What was He to do?

He had Given these and so many others everything possible for their Awakening, with an appetite for extremes of Giving that had many times nearly destroyed Him.

How many hours in the 1970s had He spent around His great oval table in His Residence at The Mountain Of Attention, “considering” the Truth, and Its Way, and their obstructions and resistance to It, with these and some few others? Or, in the early 1980s, in the Chung Room, the tiny gathering-room crucible for His Fire of Spirit-Baptism and renunciation at Tumomama Sanctuary? Or, on several Fijian islands, and more recently at The Matrix and in these very rooms, with these very people, trying to evoke their own Ecstatic, God-Filled Dance to the Divine Drumbeat of His “reality considerations”?

How many times had He Blessed them each, them and so many others, with His Glance, His Touch, His Embrace, His world-shaking Laugh infectious with Freedom, His barely uttered “Tcha” that says “Yes!” to devotion and anoints it with Love that melts the heart? How many times had He sung to them the delight of Perfect Understanding of all self-limitation and all seeking, and His “Crazy” Ecstatic Praise of “the Great One”?

How many times had they sat with Him in Darshan and received His Vision of the Great Bliss that countless seekers have prayed to feel even once in all their lives? How many times had He “happened” to walk past groups of them and their friends at one or another of His Ashrams, leaving a Blaze of God-Feeling in their hearts as they gazed upon Him?

How many times had He healed their bodies and calmed their hearts by Touch or Word or Glance or Thought? How many times had He addressed, and painstakingly, their “cases”—the byzantine intricacies of their infantile, childish, adolescent, emotional-sexual oedipal Narcissism? How many kisses had He Granted? How many startling Zen-like slaps in the face? How many Samadhis had He Given them? How many Liberating criticisms? Why did they not respond, when even His most ego-puncturing Words were “only modulations of My Blessing-Current”?

How many parties had He consented to engage with them—liberal feasts to toast and taste the Spirit-Substance of Life and to coax them out of guilty body-denial, created by pleasureless lifetimes and religions of so-called “fear of God”?

How many Satsang-meditations had He consented to attend with them, ancient moveless rites of silent God-Transmission, Awakening the Heart-Intelligence that transcends all things, even life itself, and releases all feeling into unknowable Love?

In the morning hours of deepest darkness on January 11, 1986, the futility and apparent uselessness of all that He had Done bore in upon the God-Born Man, Heart-Master Da. He and a small group of His “coins” had been persisting in another of their “considerations” for nearly thirty-six hours without ceasing. This occasion was only an extension of the sixteen previous years of Teaching, done with utter abandon for nearly twenty-four hours a day in the company of one or some or many devotees.

None of it had made the Difference. He was their prisoner, like the doctor in Africa in the allegory He had often told them: A physician comes to heal the people, only to be detained because he is so effective, and then worked to near death, and eventually killed by them in their resentment of their own dependency upon him. Heart-Master Da longed to be done with this world—like His Spirit-Friend Rang Avadhoot, who had given Him more Life in that one Glance in Swami Muktananda’s Ashram garden in 1968 than He had ever gotten from His own devotees, and who had ended his own long life in Yogic death, rapping his knuckles three times on the crown of his head and then ascending out of human embodiment.

Now, in the pre-dawn gloom that January 11, the Supremely Enlightened Master-Teacher and Divine Incarnation, Da, gave up trying to evoke His devotees’ response. For hours He had been at His Residence in the Hermitage Village, and the group of His “coins” had been gathered in a nearby building, No Doubt Of God, to discuss His comments and Calls to them. He spoke to them by telephone, giving broken, faltering voice to His heart’s despair. His Work was over. There had been no response. He was ready to die—willing for it, even.

And as He spoke, it began to happen. He said He could feel the numbness coming up His arm, His back. He could see the visions . . .

At that moment the Divine Master Da dropped the phone and collapsed. Devotees rushed over from the other house to find Him slumped on the floor by His bed, unconscious. After a final spasm of convulsions, He was still. All life had apparently passed from His body.

It was yet sometime before dawn on January 11, 1986.