Guru as Prophet – Bubba Free John – Adi Da Samraj – 1973


Guru as Prophet

Bubba delivered this talk to his community on December 23, 1973.


DEVOTEE: Bubba, could you talk a little more about your role as a prophet in the world?

BUBBA: The intelligence of real understanding must precede involvement with the true spiritual process, so the function of Guru or Spiritual Master isn’t a public function. It’s not a matter of walking down the street and zapping people, telling them that life is a fountain and pretending that everything is already all right, or showering blessings, or giving mantras, or consoling people, fascinating them. None of these things serves the crisis which must precede the real spiritual process.

One who functions as Guru, or Spiritual Master, for his devotees may operate for the sake of those who aren’t his devotees, but his function in that case isn’t that of Spiritual Master. In the world, generally, he must serve the crisis of understanding, which confounds the search, all need for consolation, fascination, all need for cultural and cultic games. In the world he may function, if he appears at all, in the role of the prophet, which is essentially an aggravation, a criticism, an undermining of the usual life.

The usual guru, who communicates the search, will appear in a theatre, greet people, and they’ll say, “We aren’t happy, we haven’t found God.” He says, “Oh, that’s the beginning. That dissatisfaction is the beginning. Just look, see, use this method, apply yourself to these practices, and you’ll ultimately realize God.” All that is a sham. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the Truth. It’s simply a way of exploiting people for the sake of the personal or cultural cultic games that they’re playing.

The Guru function is not a public function. It doesn’t appear in public, and it doesn’t invite the public as if the spiritual process were simply something you could decide to do, buy or believe, and then go ahead and perform. The man of understanding appears in public only in the role of prophet and critic. He doesn’t exploit that search. He turns the questioner back on that quality of suffering, dilemma and dis-ease that motivates him to take on spiritual practices and other kinds of disciplines or to exploit his life possibilities. The Guru function is essentially hidden until the prior condition of real intelligence, understanding, has been fulfilled. Then the Guru may take the role of Spiritual Master for his devotee.

To the extent that he appears in public at all, by seeing people, writing books, or simply having an Ashram that exists in this world, the Guru’s role can only be that of prophet. Even in the Ashram of his nominal devotees, those who are turning to the life of understanding with various degrees of intensity, he must serve the crisis which makes the life of understanding possible. He won’t serve the random needs of individuals to be fulfilled, consoled, fascinated, to have a cult in which they can live. The Guru must always work to offend, criticize and undermine the usual process of every individual.

He must be paradoxical, free, in order to serve those who come to him. The qualities of his action can’t be predetermined. He won’t consistently assume the qualities of an archetype, the holy man, the yogi, the philosopher. He must be free to appear in any form. He must be free to behave in all common ways, as well as all uncommon ways, at any moment, in order to undo the expectations of those whom he meets. Even in his Ashram the Guru is always acting to undo the cultic tendency, to dissolve the Ashram itself, to undermine it as a cult, to bring to an end the cultic life of individuals in his Ashram.

He does this so that spiritual life will not become identified with qualities, tendencies, preferences, all the cultic armor that people take on when they think they are turning from the world of suffering towards Truth. Spirituality is not the way to Truth. The cultic path is not the way to God. No spiritual process makes you realize God. There is no such process. The Divine already enjoyed is the foundation of any genuine spiritual process. All these ways of realizing God are false. They are the communications of men of experience, cultic gurus, who don’t serve the crisis of understanding. So the responsibility of the True Guru in his Ashram is not only to purify those who come to him from their ordinary self-indulgent and irresponsible habits, but to purify them equally of their spirituality, in order that the foundation for their spiritual life may become the very Divine. God isn’t supported by experiences, by the fulfillment of prescriptions, moralities, assumptions about the way it is, was or will be. The man of understanding in his prophetic function is always managing to produce a condition in which those who come to him may be undone.

He always works to create a condition in which this crisis may take place on an entirely new level in each individual for whom he is responsible. There is truly no condition that he may not at one moment or another create for the sake of those who come to him. Life in such an Ashram cannot be predetermined in the way life in a cultic Ashram is predetermined. It cannot be fixed or ritualized. It is a living condition in which the man of understanding in his prophetic role creates true devotees so that the spiritual process may also come alive through the instrumentality of his Siddhi. Life in God precedes all righteousness. It precedes the fulfillment of any kind of prescription for life or spirituality. The radical intelligence that is understanding is that intelligence in which the Divine life in its prior sense is enjoyed.

The spiritual process proceeds from the unqualified God-Light, which we intuit above the head but cannot see through any of the various psycho-physical instruments. There is a process begun in Satsang with the man of understanding as Spiritual Master in which the life-force is stimulated by an intensification of the God-Light and the descending and ascending circle of life in every individual is purified, loosened, moved and intensified. All the various obstructions or forms of contraction are undone, one by one, until there is this perfect circle of conductivity lived and enjoyed.

But that process is entirely secondary to the knowledge of God, to understanding or life in Truth. As soon as the psycho-physical mechanism of your experience of life is removed, you have passed into an entirely new condition in which transforming work has to go on through the medium of other instruments under completely new conditions. The mere manipulation of the life-force in itself is a temporary and limited activity that comes to an end or at least is remarkably transformed at death, just as the taking of food during your lifetime becomes obsolete at death. It is only by living in God already, priorly, that we are secure. That is the foundation wherein the spiritual process may be engaged under whatever conditions arise for us during life or beyond this world. The point of view of Truth is not the spiritual process, but the life of understanding, wherein we live that radical enjoyment of the very Divine, the form of God.

The spiritual process is utterly dependent upon the Divine, as is all of life. No exploitation of life or spirituality itself realizes the Divine. In fact, it is motivated by a prior sense of separation, dilemma, absence of Divinity. Only the crisis which undermines that whole possibility of seeking and being fulfilled and ultimately finding God truly serves even the spiritual process. The cultic guru, the man of experience, is always exploiting the search in those who come to him, giving them methods and beliefs, appearing in public and allowing the so-called guru function to appear as if it were available without conditions, without God. As if you could take on the spiritual process without prior enjoyment of absolute, perfect freedom.

This is why the man of understanding doesn’t appear as Guru in the world. He appears as prophet, critic. In those who come to him he works to produce the radical condition of true Devotees in order that the spiritual process may then become their responsibility. Until the life of understanding has matured even in those in the Ashram, he continues to function in his prophetic role, constantly serving the crisis of understanding. He doesn’t call people’s attention to the spiritual process as something in which they might engage methodically. He allows the spiritual process to be initiated as a grace in Satsang, utterly apart from the concern of those in the Ashram. When the life of understanding has matured in the Devotee, when there is a genuine, direct perception of the nature of this internal circle of the life-force, then the man of understanding, functioning as Spiritual Master, may invite the attention of his Devotee toward that spiritual process so that he may engage it responsibly, consciously, deliberately, directly.

DEVOTEE: When you use the word prophet you are describing a different function than Guru, but I don’t think you are using it in the traditional sense of a person who foretells something.

BUBBA: That is not the traditional sense. That is the Reader’s Digest sense. The prophets in Israel were not prophets in this sense. They were not soothsayers. In fact, they criticized that whole resort to elemental powers and spirits. They did not foretell the future in that sense of looking on your forehead and telling you that you are going to go on a world trip next year. When they told the future, they said, “Unless you birds get straight, you are going to go through the fire next year.” That was the form of the prophecy they gave. When I speak of the function of the man of understanding as prophet, it is in that sense, as critic, not as someone who exercises secondary psychic powers to foretell the future.

That kind of prophet has always existed and always fulfilled very much the same kind of role that it fulfills today. All that the psychic can tell you by looking at the various phenomena he might perceive is what might occur if you continue to be disposed as you presently are. It’s a tacky parlor game of reading your tendencies. The individual does not need to look for the fulfillment of his tendencies. His tendencies have nowhere to take him but to zero, regardless of whatever world trip they happen to bring to him on his way there. Such a “prophet” doesn’t fulfill a critical function in the life of the person he is fascinating. He doesn’t draw that individual into a new intelligence or self-perception in which he might transcend the karmic tendencies that may produce certain future phenomena.

The true prophetic function is that critical function in which there is no fundamental concern for what is likely to occur if tendencies continue as they are. The fundamental concern is to undo the whole force of tendencies or karmic destiny, and to plant the individual at this moment in the Divine principle, and then again in this moment, and then at this moment. Then the whole ream of karmas has fundamentally no qualifying force whatsoever, regardless of how your life continues to unfold itself in the form of the usual destiny. The true prophet doesn’t lead a person to align himself with karmic destiny. He leads him always toward a radical new position relative to the whole force of his ordinary life.

The prophets of Israel are representatives of that kind of prophecy. They were all aggravated, annoyed, humorous, paradoxical people who sought to draw people into the Divine condition, not to occupy them with psychism. The man of understanding in his prophetic role must take the same position relative to all of the yogic and psychic honkytonk that permeates our society. Time has not fundamentally changed anything. People are still turned from the Divine condition and want to find their way back through the exercise of their capacity for experience. They want to read the stars and have visions, they want to read tarot decks and see ghosts. They do not want the prophet.

They don’t want that criticism of the usual stream of life. They don’t want that force to enter into the cult and culture of Narcissus. The cult of Narcissus permeates every instrument of our ordinary experience, whether it is the common social pleasures and activities or the so-called spiritual ones. The world is corrupted by its commitment to the path of Narcissus. So the only form of activity the man of understanding takes to the world at large is his prophetic role, in which he invites people to understanding and criticizes the entire attempt to be fascinated and consoled. He is an offense to society at large. It wants to remain irresponsible and self-indulgent and make experiences the principle of life. He is also an offense to all spiritual cultism with its phony righteousness.

In one in whom the life of understanding is full, those “spiritual” processes do continue. Lunch continues, kriyas continue, inner purification’s continue, natural psycho-physical blisses intensify. All that occurs as a fulfillment of the functional life already founded in God, not as an exploitation of one or another functional capacity to find God. The man of understanding takes advantage of every opportunity to demonstrate to his disciples that they are committed to the path of Narcissus, committed to the creation of a cult, committed to the elimination of the possibility of the life of understanding in their own case, that they are fundamentally committed to their own illusions even while engaging what they think is the life of understanding, that they are fundamentally riddled with preferences and preconditions, which they find consoling, relaxing and anxiety-reducing. These preferences reach deep into the psyche and the social conditioning of every individual, so the man of understanding must take advantage of every possibility to remain unfixed in the quality of his communication. He must suddenly make the critical communication of understanding known to his disciple at a place where he would never have examined it before.

DEVOTEE: Could you describe what you mean by the crisis of understanding?

BUBBA: The usual man is a seeker. The manner in which he manages his life of seeking is by exploiting his capacity for experience. The usual man simply exploits his capacity to experience money, food and sex, the range of functional life in its usual sense. He tempers his exploitation of it based on the degree of social magic he is involved with, social influences, and other personal experiential limitations.

In the midst of that exploitation of the capacity to experience he may uncover certain subtler functions of life either in himself or in books or in conversations. So he begins to include spirituality as a possibility within his search for experience. When considering the possibility of spiritual life, going to an Ashram, studying this work, coming here, even when he is doing all that, he is still fundamentally committed to the same order of life, the same motivation, the same ritual of existence.

The search in itself does not provide consolation, but its moment to moment preoccupation is to be consoled, to be fascinated, to be fulfilled. But this satisfaction, fulfillment sought by these means, is never forthcoming. The only thing that does arise is moments of fascination, moments of distraction, preoccupation, experience. The motivation for all that remains at the deepest levels of the psyche, the fundamental condition being lived from moment to moment. Such a life is fundamentally disturbed and in mystery. In spite of his spiritual experiences or his life experiences, the usual man stands as a human being in the world without the slightest idea what that is.

Who knows what it is? The most obvious thing that is happening is that we are all sitting here in this room. And who knows what that is? When you come into one room you know that you have just come from that room into this room. You have walked bodily, that is obvious. But in terms of that condition itself, that being human in a world, you have no certainty. You don’t know where it began, you don’t know fundamentally what it is, you don’t know where it goes. So we all live this sort of blase’ or fitful round of experiencing and mutual exploitation, having a society, having T.V. and all the rest, listening to lectures, and nobody knows what it is.

Fundamentally, the seeker is in mystery. He is unconscious. His conscious life is unconscious because it does not know its own principle. It does not live from the point of view of its own foundation. It is always in pursuit of it, and so it is always at the deepest levels of the psyche fitted with this sense of suffering, dis-ease, disharmony, separation, doubt, conflict. Whenever the instruments that may distract or fascinate the seeker are temporarily removed, as with the alcoholic who can’t get a drink, whenever the instruments that serve the capacity to be fascinated and consoled are temporarily removed, he gets uptight.

But we have spiritual teachers and psychiatrists and all the rest, who want to help you not have that experience any more so you can carry on the business of being consoled and fascinated and can seek without having to have these periodic anxiety attacks. You can go on being unconscious, essentially not knowing what it is, but not really being bothered by that. You just recite your mantra. The usual approach of all teaching, spiritual and social or whatever, is to prevent your falling into that condition in which you already are living, to prevent that sense of suffering that comes over you whenever you are not distracted.

That sense of suffering doesn’t necessarily take the form of a profound anxiety attack. It can take the form of boredom, mediocrity, stupidity, self-indulgence and righteousness. It takes all of the forms that we commonly call human life. It also takes all those obvious social forms, all the political difficulties, wars and psychosis. It takes all kinds of forms. Because ultimately the search is failing. The principle of the search is suffering.

The man of understanding enters into the human picture without mystery, fully conscious, even as the usual man knows what has happened when he has walked from one room to the next. The man of understanding does not live in mystery. He’s not unconscious, he’s not a man of experience who has managed to remove some of the sense of anxiety and put in its place some sort of continuous distraction. So he doesn’t teach people the way of experience. He doesn’t continue the lie that experience leads to fulfillment now or in the future or after the world is gone at the millennium. He already lives from the point of view of Truth and knows it to be the foundation and absolute process and substance of this world. He doesn’t have to console anyone or fulfill the obligations that this whole cult and culture of seeking, which is mankind, has produced for the sake of its own unconsciousness. He does not suffer anxiety when he sees an individual begin to fall back into the sense of his own suffering, so he is not busy trying to prevent individuals from knowing the source of their usual life. Indeed he serves that possibility. He serves it in such a way that it isn’t a terminal or negative influence but so that it turns about fundamentally and begins an entirely new process.

You can see that the effect of his influence is to draw a person into that quality of dilemma that motivates the life of seeking. Thus, the person will know it and know it to be his condition, that to which he is always reacting, always trying to escape, always trying not to notice. He serves individuals by simply drawing them into the sensation of that difficulty.

Simply to go through neurotic episodes and heavy difficulties and all the rest is not the crisis of understanding. That is simply meditation on your own suffering. The Guru serves the individual’s capacity for critical self-attention, the possibility to really observe, to have insight into the quality of his ordinary condition and activity. He serves individuals by bringing them into that awareness in a form that is itself transformation, Not dwelling on difficulty, not being anxious, not being simply upset, they pass through that underlying condition in such a way that it is illumined or undermined.

The crisis he serves in individuals does not negate. It illuminates, perfects. In order for that living intelligence to manifest in individuals, there must be passage through that ordinary condition which motivates the whole pattern and ritual of life, the path of Narcissus. That must be known. That intelligence must be the foundation of life, and it requires a purifying confrontation with the life of tendencies. The intelligence for bearing it, for allowing it to become a truly transforming event, is what the man of understanding communicates. All the instruments of his Ashram serve that crisis of understanding-not the mere drifting into your difficulties in the form of neurotic episodes, but the transforming event of real intelligence, real self-observation, real insight that becomes enquiry, re-cognition, radical intuition. Any other questions?

DEVOTEE: Could you explain what you mean when you talk about our responsibility for other people’s conduct?

BUBBA: We are always communicating our limitations to one another. In fact, that is our communication. You can’t communicate to anyone anything other than your present condition. That is your fundamental communication to all other beings. You may also communicate, “How do you do?” or something else, but the fundamental communication received regardless of the rituals of your involvement is always that of your fundamental condition at that moment. Apart from the life of understanding, the condition that people communicate to each other is that of limitation, the quality of Narcissus.

The collection of human beings is itself a great cult whose content is a vast complex,system of social magic, of thoughts, influences, psychic phenomena, psyche itself, limitations, karmas. As one begins the life of understanding and lives it in Satsang, he begins to become aware of this in himself. He begins to enjoy insight into his own activity, his own separativeness. The more he understands in a practical way, a functional way, the more responsible he must become for his relationships to others, because he knows full well the effect of communicating the quality of Narcissus, the limitation of existence. The more he understands in himself, the more responsible he becomes for his communication, his presence in the world. The more levels in which he becomes self aware, the more responsibilities he has, and every moment in Satsang stimulates this self-awareness.

I have often used this image of the sunlight at noon over the well. When the sun shines directly into the well all of the creeps that hang around deep under the water start coming up the sides. Then a few minutes after noon they quiet down again. As soon as they can find a little shade they quiet down again. The time you spend in Satsang is like time spent with the sun directly over the well. The more time you live in Satsang, the more these slithering things arise, the more you see of yourself, the more you must pass through the crisis of personal understanding.

Your karmic limitations, your ritual life of Narcissus, the whole avoidance of relationship is revealed. So Satsang requires more responsibility, not less. As your awareness of your own life quality, games and karmas intensifies, your negative way of life is exposed. It can no longer be unconsciously indulged. The intense inner revelation that occurs in Satsang could produce all kinds of episodes in an individual’s life if he wanted to indulge the sensations. He must make this inner revelation grounds for the life of understanding, not something to which he can react by exploiting himself or getting upset.

The man of understanding sees that life is a great process in which there is no isolation or fundamental individuality. There is just a vast process of relationships or mutualities, all of which in the world of usual men tends to communicate limitation and suffering. One who understands sees that this is not the necessary order of life, and that life can be the communication of the Divine. I don’t mean life evolving toward the Divine, but life presently founded in the Divine. The presence of such a one in the world begins to become more and more of a discipline to others. Not that he becomes a disciplinarian, but he makes it unnecessary for others to manifest the drama of Narcissus in the grosser ways.

One who understands and becomes free of the necessity of his own life of Narcissus begins to live among men in an entirely new way. What he requires is the communication of love, of presence, because he knows that we are the food source, the life source, for one another. The force of his presence begins to become a demand for that life, that love, that Truth, the lightness, that happiness. This alone is the proper condition of a human society. The more that responsibility begins to extend to the activities of others, – his intimates, his household, devotees in the Ashram, and in varying degrees all those whom he contacts.

One who functions as Spiritual Master or Guru must function with perfect consciousness of what this affair of human existence is, what its effects are, what is going on in relationship. He is aware on all possible levels of what he must absorb from another. The usual man is not aware either what he absorbs from others or what he forces others to absorb from himself. One who is functioning as Guru has full consciousness of himself and of all others.

The Guru has the freedom to accept responsibility for making an absolute demand on others. He requires the life of understanding in others, by teaching it and entering into relationship with them in Satsang, in which this spiritual process of transformation is consciously lived. He must absorb the karmic conditions of devotees, not in the sense that he, this poor little person, has to absorb all this karma and grind it up at night, but because he is alive in the Divine process, and the Divine process is functioning through him.

People think the first thing they are supposed to do when they enter into the life of understanding is to become spiritual. This is absurd. People who are full of suffering and fundamental ignorance about themselves one day are yogis the next. What is required of an individual is not to become spiritual and manifest spiritual phenomena, but to become human. The individual lives in a subhuman dimension limited by his own subconscious and unconscious processes, which have been locked in by the structure and psyche of society and allowed to control his conscious life from hour to hour. The combinations of what is locked away in his psyche, subconscious, and unconscious, and their apparently random external influences or effects produce the usual adventure. The beginning of the life of understanding is not a matter of starting to have grand psychic experiences and powers, but of undoing that bondage to limitation, that subconscious and unconscious trap.

The cycle of purification, moving down from the super conscious to the conscious and through the subconscious and unconscious in the life of understanding, is moving in a full circle. All these processes occur simultaneously. As the descending purification awakens genuine humanity in a person and draws him into consciousness, the natural spiritualizing process draws him into a super conscious life. As the super conscious manifests, he becomes consciously responsible for it. Someone who has simply become psychic or who is able to have super conscious visions because of an exploitation of the inner ascending energy has not become a human being, nor has he become a benign influence upon others. One can become a yogi and at the human level be demonic.

You aren’t suffering from anyone else’s failure to have a super conscious vision of the Divine Light. What every individual is suffering in others is the simple absence of consciousness and life. The avoidance of relationship, the contraction, the crunch of Narcissus, is what we are suffering in relation to one another. Until the life of love, of real presence begins, there is nothing but suffering at the human level.

The true fruits of the life of understanding and spiritual life are human ones. Those are the real tests of our spirituality, our humanity, our functional humanity, our ability to love and live in relationship. This is simply a process of unobstructed energy, fullness, happiness. Until men become happy with one another, their spirituality is bullshit. It serves no purpose whatsoever. It’s like moving into another room where you don’t have to deal with any human functions at all. But there are already billions upon billions of beings in other rooms. They are having the same difficulty in those other rooms, because even there they aren’t present. They are only trying to get into still another room. This conflict goes on in all dimensions! After going through all the worlds and reaching the higher lokas, yogi-siddhas still have to become enlightened there. Even there, they’ve got to understand.

Spirituality is consequential for humanity. It’s not a way for individuals to involve themselves in an experiential trip that tunes them in on phenomena that transcend humanity. When this quality of unreasonable happiness, prior fullness, genuine life and love is present in an individual, we are certain of him. We are healed by his presence. The yogi is always emptying his navel and fattening his sahasrar, just as the glutton is always filling his navel and emptying his head. But the man of understanding is full. The full circle is alive in him. He doesn’t become empty, and life never becomes a dilemma. He always sees it as the Divine process. Has anybody got a question that I haven’t answered?

DEVOTEE: Can any of those other beings in other rooms try to get in here?

BUBBA: Sure. There are many kinds of influences that men experience without consciousness, some of which are the influence of entities who aren’t alive in any materially apparent form. We are continually being used by these influences as they seek through the human functions to have the vicarious experience of vital enjoyment. Whenever we are vitally weakened we tend to experience the limitations created by these subtly incarnate influences. Possession is an extreme form of such experience. Mediumship, when legitimate, is also an example.

Normally, we are all media for the use of subtler functional entities or influences. These, like our social magic, tend to reinforce our bondage to unconscious and subconscious limitations. It serves the purpose of these entities or influences to keep us unconscious, because whenever we are weakened, they are able to make use of our life-force as an instrument for their own sensation.

All life forms are essentially systems of life-force, including those that are visible to us on this earth plane, from human beings to plants and animals, and also including those we cannot see. All systems of life-force have the same source, the same foundation, and are fundamentally of the same condition. They are part of our process and can be consciously so. We are mutually involved with all of them. We limit them, we suffer them, and we seek to fulfill ourselves through them, even through those we cannot see. Similarly, they seek to fulfill themselves through us, through the communication of force, the mutual sacrificial activity. This truly is life.

The whole scheme of cosmic existence is a vast sacrificial system of mutuality, mutual exchange, transformation from one state to the next. While you are alive in this apparent form you live as a continuous process of transformation of state. Death is just another form of that same sacrificial process. We are the meal of this universe, and all beings are food. There is no living entity that is not food, perhaps for some other living entity, but ultimately for the vast cosmic process of energy transformation. Everything terminates, everything is transformed. This is the law of life, not of death. By taking creatures or plants for food we are just involving them in that sacrificial process. We are also being used, devoured. We may be butchered if we aren’t conscious, and so become domestic fodder for some invisible race or system of energy, some life-system. Or we may become conscious and live the sacrificial process that is our humanity with absolute awareness of what it is.

In that sacrifice we are endlessly renewed and enlivened, because that process is the ‘spiritual process. We aren’t properly the meal of some invisible race of giants, but we are properly a sacrifice into the Divine Light. Despite this, we are continually being sacrificed to our own unconscious and subconscious life and to subtle, invisible influences of various kinds. The unconscious man, Narcissus, is like a sheep. The conscious man lives the sacrificial process, lives the universe itself as this great sacrificial process in every moment proceeding from the Divine. Every moment. And in every moment he makes the sacrificial return to the Divine. You become consciously a participant in that endless cycle, descending and ascending life, in which life is manifested and returned again to its source.

That is not the law only of death. You don’t only return to God when you die. In every moment you are returning to God. This sacrificial process is going on in every moment. Our human, physical death is simply an incident of that sacrificial process. Those who live that sacrificial process while alive lose the common fear of death, which is maintained by our social magic, our experience, our conscious, unconscious, and subconscious life.

In one who is truly conscious, life is no longer a mystery. He breathes the very Light of God. He sees the aichemical transformation of the Divine into life in every moment and sacrifices himself in return. He only lives in God and everything is obvious to him. His life is not the search for God. Life isn’t intended to be a mystery that leads to the discovery of God at the millennium, at enlightenment, or at any other point in the future. Life is founded in God, and is meant to be lived in God, happily and without mystery.

The evolution of man, if that is something actual at all, isn’t going to be achieved gradually from eon to eon. It will he produced by mankind’s becoming conscious, living already in the Divine, so that the Divine process can be fully realized in life. It isn’t by going toward God that we evolve but by standing in the Divine already, already happy. It is not yogic bliss that we are seeking to attain, some psycho-physical manipulation of the life-force. It is to be already and presently happy regardless of the apparent condition. All the manipulation of the life-force is God’s concern. Life in Truth is to be already happy without any reasons whatsoever, not to be hoping to be happy by moving into samadhi.

But the usual man can’t decide to be thus happy, because he has nothing but reasons. He is a completely reasonable person. Even his irrationality is reasonable. His condition of fixation, experiences, limitations, concepts is acceptable to him, reasonable to him. The happiness men claim is always reasonable happiness. Men are happy because they have their mantra, because they believe in Jesus, because they have just smoked dope, or because they finally made a million dollars.

When you have understood, when you have uncovered the sham of your reasonableness, then you stand already unreasonably -happy. Only when you lose the support of your reasonableness can you be really happy. You can’t assume it as an effort of belief. You must understand. You are obliged to understand. You are obliged to live without any supports at all, unreasonably happy. You are obliged to become intelligent.