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.