The Ashvamedha (Sanskrit: asvamedhá) is a horse sacrifice ritual followed by the Srauta tradition of Vedic religion. It was used by ancient Indian kings to prove their imperial sovereignty: a horse accompanied by the king’s warriors would be released to wander for a period of one year. In the territory traversed by the horse, any rival could dispute the king’s authority by challenging the warriors accompanying it. After one year, if no enemy had managed to kill or capture the horse, the animal would be guided back to the king’s capital. It would be then sacrificed, and the king would be declared as an undisputed sovereign.
***
The Miraculous Revelations and Life Lessons of the Early Teaching Work of Bubba Free John, 1972-1976
(Book proposal from The Dawn Horse Press, 1977)
***
In ancient times a king or crown prince would send a royally bedecked horse throughout the empire, in the company of guards and courtiers, to be viewed by all the citizens.
The horse would be displayed in virtually every town and village of the kingdom and acknowledged by all as a sign of the king’s or prince’s dominion. Then, after a year of such touring, the horse would be brought back to the capital and slain in a royal ceremony. This sacrifice reaffirmed the king’s sovereignty or proclaimed the prince’s rightful ascension to the throne.
Shortly before the culminating events of his own spiritual transformation in 1970, Bubba Free John had a vision in which he witnessed the miraculous appearance of a small horse. It first appeared as a cloud or whirling mist of energies and then coalesced as a living, breathing being. This was but one of innumerable visions that Bubba has witnessed during his life, and indeed, such phenomena in themselves have little value in the spiritual Way that he teaches. But this particular demonstration signified to him the imminent perfection of his own Realization of Truth and the future manifestation of his Teaching work in the world. (On this basis, he decided to name the original gathering of his devotees “The Dawn Horse Communion” and our publishing company “The Dawn Horse Press.”)
Bubba devoted the first five years of his Teaching work (1972-1976) to a living revelation of his Teaching, the Way of Divine Ignorance, or Radical Understanding. Long before he took up this formal work, he knew that it would take more than philosophical argument to communicate his radical spiritual message in the present world-culture. What was necessary, and what he was uniquely fitted for, was a demonstration of his critical and liberating argument in the actual experience of ordinary individuals. In early 1977, Bubba spoke of this stage of his work:
I was not born into a traditional religious culture. I have no conventional society to which I belong, of which I am a monk or a representative. I have appeared in a society in which there is no spiritual tradition, no way of dealing with an individual like me, no way of dealing with a process of this kind, no way of recognizing it and truly making use of it.
When I began to take up my teaching work, I clearly understood that I was going to have to bury myself in the world in order to awaken devotees. If there were to be devotees ultimately, I would have to pass through the lower, ordinary life with them, and make lessons in that play with them, make lessons out of all the possibilities of conventional fulfillment. That conventional fulfillment includes everything from typical life pleasures to conventional , socalled spiritual and psychic enjoyment. So all of my work has been a process of engaging in play with people on the basis of conventional possibility, living it, exploiting it, allowing it to show itself altogether as experience, as consequence, in order ultimately that they might enjoy that revulsion to the destiny of this birth that would enable them to take up the spiritual process truly.
This demonstrative revelation was like the journey of the king’s horse throughout the empire, and its subsequent sacrifice. Bubba led his early devotees in a living exploration of almost every kind of human possibility. His purpose was not to bind them to the accumulation of experience, but to create conditions in which the argument and the Teaching of Truth might be viewed or considered “in every village of the empire”–that is, in relation to every aspect and capacity of human existence, worldly and spiritual, within and without, physical,,emotional, mental, psychic, intuitive, and egoic.
When he had presented his critical communication in the midst of every kind of knowledge and experience, both earthly and transcendent, Bubba brought an end to the horse’s journey, and sacrificed it. In other words, he retired from the “theatre” or drama he had been living with his devotees for several years and began to reserve himself for more directly spiritual contact with us, in formal meditation. His dramatic journey with us through all the experiences we usually crave and seek is now no longer necessary. The lessons of Bubba’s criticism of the usual life have been amply demonstrated in the experience of a large group of people. His initial years of Teaching thus represent a communication and a sacrifice, not for the sake of some cultic exaltation of himself, but for the sake of the “dominion” of Truth, and the graceful revelation of the living argument and Way of Truth to all who will listen.
The Horse Sacrifice documents all the major incidents and lessons of these years of miracles and revelations. It is therefore a most necessary volume among the source books of Bubba’s Teaching. It is the essential companion text to The Paradox of Instruction, because it illustrates in dramatic, living terms the more philosophical statement of the Teaching that is offered in that book. This book will communicate the whole experience of Bubba’s early Teaching work in such a way that all readers will naturally identify with the ordinary individuals who were approaching Bubba as devotees. This sympathy will yield an undeniable feeling for the lessons those devotees learned from Bubba in life and in spirit.
This text, by the way, will cover all the material we originally planned to treat in two separate volumes, Indoor Summer and the revision of Garbage and the Goddess.
‘At this stage, we cannot offer more than a most tentative outline of The Horse Sacrifice. We are just now formally beginning the research and preparation for the book, which involves three basic projects:
(1) Reviewing thousands of pages of transcripts from Bubba’s recorded talks over the years to find useful dialogues, discourses, and conversations.
(2) Collecting diaries, journals, “life and meditation summaries,” other reports, and fresh interviews from many of the devotees who were involved with Bubba during this time and whose experiences, insights, understanding, and transformations will form as important a part of the book as Bubba’s own criticism, instruction, and actions.
(3) Fully documenting the objective history of Bubba’s work with people during this period by gathering and editing the “news” sections of our in-house magazines and bulletins, transcribing tapes of our weekly presentations to gatherings of devotees, and recording further personal interviews.
We expect the research alone to occupy our staff during the summer. Once we review the material that is developed, we will be able to flesh out a fuller working outline. We expect to begin writing the book in August or September, to finish the manuscript late this year, and to publish a Dawn Horse Press edition in the early spring of 1978.
The basic intention and purpose of the book
In Bubba’s early work with devotees, a “lesson” was a living event in which an individual was allowed to live out some self-possessed inclination to the point that he realized undeniably, with his whole being, the negative implications and. consequences of his actions and the necessity for a total transformation, not only of his activity but of his very presumptions about life. Bubba’s creation of “theatre,” or circumstances for such lessons, and his choreography of all the incidents, criticism, and instruction, were utterly masterful. And readers will no doubt get a feeling for that mastery, and for Bubba’s unique and unconventional way of working with people during these years.
But what we are principally concerned to communciate in this book is the lessons themselves. We want to present what happened in the lives of the relative few with whom Bubba lived and worked in such a way that all who read the book can begin to feel the suffering and delusion of their own everyday self-possession, and to consider the possibility and necessity for a radically new way of life, one that is founded in Truth. The excitement and sometimes outrageous events of Bubba’s living “theatre” will absorb the reader’s attention and interest from beginning to end. But the drama in not the point. Bubba himself stressed this again and again in the midst of the events we will chronicle here. The theatre only served the communication of Bubba’s liberating criticism and the Way-he teaches in terms that people could not help but deal with directly. Just so, the presentation of the theatrical events and experiences in The Horse Sacrifice will serve the same critical and instructive purpose for readers.
The time frame and sequence of the book
In spring 1976, Bubba Free John and a few of his intimate devotees vacationed for several weeks in Hawaii. The narrative of The Horse Sacrifice will begin around the time of his return to California and will proceed more or less sequentially through the events of that summer and fall. It will probably close around the time of Bubba’s return to Hawaii in November or the formal end of the initiatory, preparatory, and theatrical period of his Teaching work in December (at which point we began to prepare the original manuscript of The Paradox of Instruction). The book’s Introduction will probably present a useful incident, and Bubba’s accompanying instruction, from that November-December period. In this way we will be able to open the text with a statement that reflects the Teaching in its fullness, as it presently stands. Then we will return again to the beginning of the summer of 1976 to unfold the theatre of Bubba Free John’s Teaching work.
The summer and fall of 1976 provide a good dramatic context and undoubtedly the best Teaching context for the whole book. During this time Bubba rarely left his house at Vision Mound Sanctuary, our retreat in northern California. Instead, he spent many, many hours inside each day and night with a small group of devotees–20-30 during the week, perhaps 50 on some weekends when people visited from San Francisco. Throughout this “indoor summer” he was engaging them in the consideration of Enlightenment, or Divine Ignorance, and, on its basis, all sorts of secondary matters concerning how human beings should conduct their affairs from the point of view of Truth. It was a most suspenseful time-we literally did not know from day to day, what consideration Bubba would come up with next, or what change in the circumstances or structures of our lives he would recommend on its basis. Not that these talks were one-sided occasions, mere lectures by Bubba Free John–they were living dialogues and mutual considerations. It is just that Bubba, having lived this Ignorance or Enlightenment for many years, always moved to initiate us into dimensions of the consideration that we could not have taken into account.
Using this several month period as the basic framework of the book, we will freely move backward in time to describe other periods of Bubba’s work with us. For instance, the discussion of both sexuality and sexual relationships and spiritual or “higher” experiences will include detailed accounts of spring and summer 1974, the period originally chronicled in Garbage and the Goddess. Most of the flashbacks will serve to amplify the revelation of an entire, extended, and living examination of a specific area of human experience and possibility. Thus, the book will not present a strictly chronological report of the five years of Bubba’s preparatory Teaching work, or even of the “indoor summer” itself. Rather, it will use that latter period as the framework for the presentation of–all his spiritual theatre and lessons. Bubba has suggested that we also tell the story of his own earlier life, not sequentially but randomly, whenever one of the lessons inherent in his own spiritual adventure becomes useful for the book as a whole. And we will also move into more recent times, to indicate the nature of our present lives and spiritual practice and the form of Bubba’s spiritual availability, now that the period of dramatic lesson-making is over.
Form and use of materials
The book will take the form, for the most part, of an interpretive narrative. We found with Garbage and the Goddess that it does not work to mix third-person narrative with whole transcripts of edited talks by Bubba and edited statements by devotees. The text of that book was disjointed and thus failed to convey a single informative and critical perspective. A book of talks should be a book of talks-period. And a book of quoted accounts from devotees is not likely to be useful without considerable commentary. So our plan for The Horse Sacrifice is to use descriptive narrative to place Bubba’s Teaching discussions in their original context, the actual scenes of his encounters and play with people. We will tell most of the devotee’s stories in third person, quoting their actual statements only at dramatic or summary, interpretive moments.
The writer of the book is Saniel Bonder, working in close collaboration with Bubba Free John himself and with the help of the other editors on the staff of Vision Mound Ceremony.
An initial working outline
(The headings below are only indications of subject matter, although some may perhaps survive as chapter titles.)
Introduction.
We will begin the text with a brief, dramatic incident and Teaching conversation from late 1976 or very early 1977, something that absorbs the reader’s interest immediately and prepares him for the content of the rest of the book. This will be followed by a few general statements on the purpose and nature of the book, and on Bubba Free John himself.
1. Prelude–The Creation of The Free Communion Church
During the early years of his work, Bubba Free John occasionally absented himself from the daily affairs of his devotees to test their capacity to continue in a spiritual way of life without his physical presence and personal guidance. One such occasion was in the spring of 1976, when he spent several weeks in Hawaii. This chapter will begin with Bubba’s return, the reasons for it, and the creation of The Free Communion Church. It will describe that spring and early summer as a typical cycle of our lives with Bubba during these early years: the way he taught by moving his devotees through cycles of experience and discipline relative to work, diet, sexuality, and other matters. That spring, we were all absorbed in a basically humorless and concerned attempt to live strict disciplines. As always, Bubba required the discipline but criticized how “boring and dry” we became in the midst of it. Finally, that June, as he had so often in the past, Bubba required us to abandon all that ascetic seriousness by joining him in an extended series of celebrations. These may have seemed outwardly to be conventional parties, but in fact they were the occasion for intense Teaching and lesson-making.
This chapter will be relatively brief, setting up some necessary background for the reader’s understanding of the rest of the book. Where useful, it will recount aspects of the history of Bubba’s Teaching work previous to this time, but only in summary terms.
2. The Universal Pre-Cosmic Snake Oil Teaching
Here we begin the story of the “indoor summer.” That July, Bubba began to teach in a radically new way, engaging his devotees in the enlightening consideration of Divine Ignorance: “No matter what arises, you do not know what it is.” These were lively, humorous dialogues and challenging encounters, and they_ will be presented. in full color. They were also profound and intense occasions of spiritual initiation–Bubba was not only arguing for the point of view of Truth, he was directly awakening us into that Enlightened Condition. This event in itself is unparalleled in the recorded history of human spirituality.
The chapter will include a brief discussion of the radical or fundamental nature of this communication-initiation, in comparison with past teachings and even with Bubba’s own previous communications. And it will indicate the liabilities of thinking you’re perfectly and permanently enlightened when in fact you have only begun to feel a little of the Truth-liabilities which would show themselves unmistakeably in later months. Enlightenment, as Bubba would go on to indicate, is instant, immediate, and absolute–but it takes time and profound discipline to mature as perfect God-Realization.
3. The Theatre of Spiritual Experience–“Garbage and the Goddess”
The considerations of Ignorance as literal and present Enlightenment, or immediate intuition of our Divine Nature and Condition, could not have been effective or useful if Bubba had not already shown us the futility and illusion of conventional spiritual experience.. Here the narrative will digress to the period of spring and summer 1974, which was originally chronicled in Garbage and the Goddess. At this time Bubba intentionally created a continual display of psychic, miraculous, mystical, and magical “higher” phenomena, both in the environment (in the form of weather changes, coronas around the sun and moon, etc.) and in the lives of several hundred people (blisses of energy, spontaneous movements called “kriyas” and “mudras” in the yogic literature, kundalini awakenings, visions, hearing of heavenly sounds, spontaneous healings, experiences of ego dissolution, etc. ) – It was a magical, intense time–so full of spiritual force that the very environment seemed transformed, permeated with radiant presence.
This chapter will recount that period and some of the other occasions when Bubba generated secondary or yogic spiritual force for the sake of teaching people lessons about such experiences. His point was not to bind people to these phenomena, but to demonstrate the suffering and delusion of our fascination, search, and even attainment of them. Bubba’s power to initiate transcendental phenomena, rather than merely talk about them, is testimony to the all-inclusive nature of his spiritual Realization–but here, as throughout the book, you will find him criticizing mere experience and subjective knowledge of any kind, earthly or sublime, and pointing always to the understanding and radical freedom from self and all its motivations that is inherent in Divine Ignorance.
4. How Shall We Live by Our Desiring?
At this point the narrative returns to the “indoor summer” and the considerations that follow upon the matter of Ignorance. Bubba argues that we are not within the body, as a separate ego or inner self or soul, but in Truth we are the body — and that the appropriate discipline is to be present always as love and radiant happiness, to become truly incarnate, and to live by our enlightened desiring. This led to some serious discussions about. sexuality, marriage, love relationships, and the social structure of our group. And then, quite naturally, we became involved in a bit of theatre with him that was profoundly interesting to all of us–whether to make new arrangements in our social and marital structures to accommodate our desiring in enlightenment, how to use men’s and women’s separate “tents,” or councils of consideration, and how to educate the young properly and fully in their native sexual character.
Leaving this consideration unfinished–and the group’s social structure for sexual and love relationships still uncertain–the narrative will recount the theatre of earlier times elative to this matter. Bubba had always known that mere moralism and conformance to conventional norms would never illumine the usual man’s or woman’s complicated relationship to sexuality. His earlier considerations with devotees had required them to confront their sexual complications directly. It had led them to understand their random desiring and chronic difficulties in relationship as a refusal of commitment and true intimacy. This part of the text will recount a number of the principal incidents of the Teaching relative to sexuality from the beginning of Bubba’s work with devotees, including, again, the period chronicled in Garbage and the Goddess.
Then the narrative will return to the “indoor summer” and describe the progress of our considerations at that time. Essentially, we agreed to maintain our natural intimacies and the present social structure of our relationships, and to confine all sexual activity to those circumstances. The theatre of the past finally became effective in our living understanding, so that it became possible for us to conduct our sexual relations as a true, voluntary, and enjoyable discipline of love and marital intimacy.
5. “The Tribe” and the Political Organization of Human Beings
In the next stage of the summer’s discussions and experiments, we abandoned the “church” concept of organization and began to define our group as a “tribe.” This chapter will present a lively account of our whole adventure in political and religious organization: first, the years of The Dawn Horse Communion, a centralized, largely localized spiritual community, then the era of The Free Communion Church, a broader way of organizing our work which we had incorporated only that spring (1976), and for which we were establishing “seed” communities in cities all over the United States and in several foreign countries when we decided, in these summer considerations, to abandon the “church” altogether. Here we will focus on the lessons of these organizational structures, both for ourselves and, by implication, for all others–how centralized political-economic organizations, whether religious or secular, tend to become parents to the governed individuals, who respond in either childish (dependent, passive) or adolescent (independent, assertive, rebellious) fashion. (This part of the book will present the basic outlines of Bubba Free John’s political philosophy, which we expect to present in a full volume within the next few years.)
6. The Chocolate-Vanilla Wars
The discussion of politics and the internal wranglings of Bubba’s gathering of devotees over the years (and during the indoor summer) leads naturally into the chronicle of the “Chocolate-Vanilla Wars,” which took place in the spring of 1975. Bubba noticed, as that April drew near, that we were beginning to get a little feisty–having water balloon fights and the like–and, as usual, he seized the opportunity to create some useful theatre. He divided most of the group who lived with him at our retreat in northern California-about 50-75 people at that time–into opposing forces, the Chocolates and the Vanillas. The Chocolates represented the forces of evil, darkness, degradation, and stupidity, while the Vanillas, led by Bubba himself, represented the forces of light, goodness, Divine and benign presence, etc. There were Ministers of Propaganda, Quartermasters, Spies, Generals, Wartime Consolieris–a whole range of titles and functions assigned, or, as in the case of the Chocolates, “detected and exposed” by Bubba. And we had literal wars: preliminary councils that degenerated into rumbles, food wars, sneak attacks, kidnapings, wrestling matches, and so on. All of this may sound innocuous, but by the time readers reach this section of the book they will have a feeling for Bubba’s awesome presence as Spiritual Master above all else. To be required by your Spiritual Master to trade the grossest insults with him, to wrestle with him and really give it all your effort, while at the same time maintaining a fundamental mood of devotion and respect and love, is at least a disorienting experience. For some it was extremely disturbing. But Bubba wanted us to confront totally the life of conflict that we dramatize in all our relations and circumstances. Every human being’s constant un-love and strategic combat with life and living beings is a direct rejection of the present Divine Reality, which is the Spiritual Master’s very Nature, and that of all beings. In the midst of these apparently light-hearted and humorous wars, we were forced to recognize the malevolence that we chronically generate in life.
In the aftermath of the Great Wars, Bubba also criticized the principles of Light and Darkness that he had played upon. One of the most pervasive illusions in all religious culture is the notion of life as, struggle between forces of light-good and darkness-evil. In the dialogues that end this chapter, Bubba argues that Truth and its Way effectively transcend all such dualities and all necessary conflict and opposition, both behavioral and philosophical. And he directly criticizes the history of human religions to this time as, in part, a deluded adventure in plunder and political aggression. Presuming that they alone represent God and Light and Truth, and that those of other faiths are demonic and evil, men have been murdering, routing, and subjugating one another for millenia.
7. “I Am John” and the Consideration of Past Incarnations
The discussion of world religions in chapter 6 provides a good background for the events recounted in this chapter. The narrative returns once more to the indoor summer and the next stage of the considerations: Bubba Free John’s investigations of his–and his friends’–possible past incarnations on earth. Two of the principal characters with whom Bubba identifies here are John the Baptist and Shah Jahan, the 16th century Mogul Emperor of India who built the famous Taj Mahal. Other possibilities Bubba considered with us included Kamehameha the Great of 18th and 19th century Hawaii, the prophet Mohammed, and a Tibetan “Rinpoche” or spiritual teacher and initiate. This was not mere armchair fantasizing. Devotees had numerous visions and psychic revelations about their involvements with Bubba in these past times and places. Bubba himself relived some of these scenes with dramatically convincing effect: the night he “recalled” being John the Baptist, he literally passed through the beheading, and, as often happens around him, the very atmosphere responded. We had a tremendous electrical storm that lasted almost all night–one of the first ever to be recorded during the summer season in this area of northern California.
In recounting this consideration of past lives, we will be presenting some intriguing, unorthodox, and controversial perspectives on the relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus, and the function of Mohammed’s birth and work in relation to Christianity. But all belief in past or future lives as such will be undermined in the end by Bubba’s summary discussions on the matters of incarnation and reincarnation. From the point of view of Divine Ignorance, our birth, life, death, and continuation are much more mysterious and paradoxical than our solemn psychisms would lead us to believe.
8. The Kingdom in the Garden–The Search for Wealth, Rejuvenation, and Immortality
Bubba’s “recollection” of a life as Shah Jahan created the background for his presentation of himself as a “Kingdom-maker,” and the resulting consideration of the “tribe” of his devotees as the seed of a new “kingdom.” On this basis, he began to urge upon his devotees the search for the ultimate realization of earthly life–for profound, even radical rejuvenation of the physical body, to the point of effectively immortalizing it, and for enormous wealth and the political security to carry on our lives indefinitely and exactly as we pleased in this world.
At the time, this whole prospect seemed completely realistic to us. We even made contact with a man in India who administers an herbal treatment that, Look magazine reported in 1938, enabled one yogi to live to the age of 185: And Bubba revealed to us a whole range of yogic, tantric, and esoteric processes that seemed to promise the literal immortalization and glorification of the physical body. Again, however, all this seeking and fascination had nothing to do with Bubba Free John’s real work and ultimate intention with devotees. It was only his way of showing us our own conventional urges. By playing this drama out with us for awhile, he enabled us to feel unmistakeably the “dead end” of this self-possessed and deluded approach to life. But the lessons of this act in the theatre were not to be made clear for a few months to come.
9. The Round Dance and the Circles of Spiritual Transformation
Having established his following as a “kingdom” of sorts, Bubba then took the game a bit further. From his most apparently intimate devotees, he chose seven couples who would be the centers of circles of spiritual intimates. These couples would directly serve him and his household, and would in turn be served by a circle of couples and individuals around them–for whom they, like Bubba for them, would be responsible for spiritual education, etc. Bubba used the esoteric circles of John the Baptist’s and Jesus’s time as a precedent and model in his discussions with us. It was a wonderful stroke of theatrical play, which we took completely seriously, as we were meant to. Bubba aligned each of the couples and their circles with colors in the spectrum and specific qualities of action and potential–and we ourselves became fascinated by the entire event, creating our own cults of enthusiasm, interest, and personality. One circle was primarily involved in business concerns, another in general spiritual education, a third in magic, healing, and rejuvenation research, etc.
It seemed to most of us that this would be the way we would organize our lives and livelihood from that time forward.
It is impossible to relate here all the kinds of lessons that derived from this “circle game”–personal, political, spiritual, etc. One had to do with spiritual status, which Bubba had dealt with from the beginning of his Teaching work. This chapter may recount some of the earlier occasions on which he had played with status directly (by announcing, for instance, that certain individuals were responsible enough spiritually to be “disciples” while the rest must remain “students”). But we did not receive Bubba’s full criticism of this dimension of our involvement with him, and so did not perceive all these lessons, until some time later–the events and considerations covered in chapter 10.
10. Conclusion–The End of the Initial and Theatrical Period of Bubba Free John’s Teaching Work, November-December, 1976
Shortly after celebrating his 37th birthday that November, Bubba moved to Hawaii with a substantial group of his close devotees. His intention was to sell our property in northern California and to establish a new center for our work in the islands. As it turned out, we returned to our property on the mainland in March, 1977. But the move served to bring to an end Bubba’s theatrical involvement with his early devotees and allowed him to begin a new era altogether of his Teaching and initiatory work.
This chapter will cover Bubba’s move to Hawaii and the events of the following two months. At that time he began to communicate comprehensive criticism of all his devotees’ past involvement with him, including the drama of the indoor summer and all the previous years. He demanded that they begin to establish themselves once and for all in a true, direct, responsible, and formal spiritual relationship to him. And he began to produce the summary statements of his Teaching–initially, The Paradox of Instruction and Breath and Name, more recently Conscious Exercise and the Transcendental Sun and The Eating Gorilla Comes in Peace, and now The Horse Sacrifice–that would enable them to do so.
Epilogue: The Present Work and Availability of Bubba Free John
This brief postscript will present some recent incidents of Bubba’s life with devotees to illustrate the new form of spiritual life that he offers to all men and women, now that the preparatory Teaching demonstration is completed. Our recent life with Bubba has felt vastly different from the lesson-making events of the past. It has been the beginning of true, conscious, and happy celebration in the midst of ordinary practical disciplines. And, after almost a year and a half, Bubba has resumed the fundamental occasion of his spiritual work with us: sitting in formal meditation. Now, however, the circumstances are different. Those who are sitting with Bubba today are genuinely prepared for this purifying, initiatory, and absolutely transforming occasion. They have become established in a real life of loving service and intelligent study and “hearing” of Bubba’s critical Teaching, and are thus able to make responsible use of his transcendental Company or Presence.
This chapter will indicate just how preparatory-and necessary–the “horse sacrifice” was. It will also show that the real opportunity and spiritual process of Bubba Free John’s work with devotees is only now beginning in a truly spiritual way. Now the Teaching itself, in the form of the literature and the educational services of Vision Mound Ceremony, provides all necessary criticism and instructions. On this basis any ordinary person may take up the Way of Truth that Bubba teaches. Those who do so with intensity and intelligence may witness in this very lifetime the transition from common human suffering and delusion to the very existence that is God or Absolute Reality.
The Epilogue of The Horse Sacrifice, then, will stand as an open invitation to the Divine opportunity that is available at this time in the Company of Bubba Free John.
This rough outline does not begin to indicate the full scope of Bubba’s work during the years of his Teaching revelation. Nor does it show his humor and compassion, and his uncompromising integrity in relationship to the spiritual process that he offers to the world. The book, of course, will make all these matters very clear to the reader. Bubba no longer engages most people in the seemingly casual forms of contact with him that were necessary during the early years of his Teaching work. He offers only the direct, formal, spiritual relationship itself. Those who prepare themselves for such a Divine relationship find it completely sufficient, the radically happy foundation of their entire lives.
The Horse Sacrifice will contain the living core of all the lessons about life and spirit that the ordinary man or woman must learn and presume before moving into such a spiritual connection to a Divine teacher. So the book will function as an announcement, as an engaging drama, as a highly literate account of an unprecedented, extended event in the spiritual history of man. It will serve all these functions, and many more. But its principal purpose will be to document the critical lessons necessary for all who are or will be inclined to undertake the way of Divine Ignorance, or Radical Understanding, that Bubba offers. It is more than anything else a Teaching book.
We hope you will be interested in publishing this book, and we look forward to talking it over with you. Please call us if you have any questions.
Saniel Bonder
Steve Frappier
THE DAWN HORSE PRESS