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The Following is from
The
Enlightenment of the Whole Body
by Bubba Free John (Adi Da Samraj) pp. 189-203
The Vision and The Way of Eternal Life
Enlightenment
of the Whole Body Full Index of Articles
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The
Seven Stages of Eternal Life In the traditions of spiritual
culture, the development of a human being has commonly been
described in terms of seven stages, each spanning a period
of seven years. There is a rational basis in Awakened Wisdom
for this scheme. That basis is the very structure of the
total bodily being (or body-mind) of every human individual.
We are a composite made of elements and of functional
relations, a coherent life-form expressed via the nervous
system and brain, and levels of mind that may consciously
reflect not only the gross or “material” realm but the
realms of Life-Energy and all the cosmic realms or media of
light. At the root of this system is the heart, the primal
organ not only of life but of consciousness in man. It is
here that the presumption and conception of egoic
independence, or the separate “I,” arises in every moment.
It is on the basis of this presumption that the human
individual is predetermined to a reactive life of fear,
vulnerability, flight from mortality, and a universal
constitutional state of contraction. That contraction
encloses consciousness in the limits of skin and thought,
and it separates the whole bodily being of Man from the
Divine Radiance and Perfect Consciousness that is otherwise
native to it and eternally available to it in every
part. The Way of Divine Ignorance, which I
Teach, is a complete Way of Life. It is not merely a system
of self-applied methods of inwardness or of exclusively
external and worldly functional improvement. It is a whole
culture, lived principally among others who do likewise, and
in complete touch with every level of our structural
humanity, from the gross physical to the subtle and
Transcendental ranges of Light: The presumption of
independent conscious existence, rooted in the heart prior
to mind, and expressed as forms of contraction or
self-definition at every functional level of the bodily
being, as well as in all relations, is the present
foundation of the conventional and chaotic “culture” or
habit of adaptation of most human beings. Therefore, if we
are to be adapted (or readapted) to another Principle than
the ego, or the independent and separative self, we must
likewise become involved in a total culture of that
alternative. The culture of the Way of Divine
Ignorance may also be related to the traditional scheme of
seven stages of growth. But it is founded on the Awakening
of the heart, from self-possession to free
feeling-attention, via all functions, in all relations,
under all conditions. Indeed, the whole Way is the Way of
the heart. The first three stages purify and readapt the
whole bodily being via the lowest dimension of the heart,
the gross physical epitome. Thus, they involve the
foundation growth of the vital-physical, the
emotional-sexual, and the lower mental dimensions including
the will, or integrated responsibility for the whole of the
common human foundation. The fourth and fifth stages purify
and readapt the whole bodily being via the middle heart, the
subtle epitome. Thus, they involve the higher growth of the
conceptual mind, the psyche, the subtle intuitive gnosis of
the elemental world, and the higher or cosmic gnosis of the
planes and “heavens” of the Great Process of manifest
experience. The sixth stage purifies and readapts the whole
bodily being via the upper or right heart, the epitome of
the independent conscious entity and the Place of
self-transcendence. Thus, it is in this stage that the
presumption of independent, separate, and separative
conscious existence is dissolved in the true Heart, the
“Ignorance” or Unqualified Consciousness that is our
Condition in Truth. The individual bodily being is not
“snuffed out” at this stage. It simply persists free of the
irreducible illusion of separate existence, and exists in
utter Identity, or radical Love-Communion, with the
Condition of all beings and conditions. Thus, in the seventh
stage, the whole bodily being exists in a fully responsible
alignment with its Source, “Food,” and Condition, and
continues to grow at Infinity. This leads into more and more
perfect identification, even bodily, with the Light, Love,
and Consciousness that is the Absolute God and Self of Man.
Thus, this final stage, which goes on into Eternity, shows
the Divine Signs of Transfiguration and Regeneration while
alive, and ultimate Ascension or Translation of the
individual into the Divine Plane, the Heaven above all
heavens, which is God and Truth. The general culture of the first
three stages naturally belongs to the first twenty-one years
of life, but men and women in general fail to complete these
stages to maturity because of reactive adaptation to the
false principle, the experiential ego, untouched by
transcendental insight. Thus, most “adults” are only
bordering on the awakening of a life committed to love, the
life of the heart and of psychic awakening. They phase back
and forth from actual commitment to love and spiritual
ascent, but they spend most of their time in various forms
of problematic concentration in vital-physical,
emotional-sexual, and lower mental dilemmas of will,
morality, belief, and conventional knowledge. The reason for
this is that the first three stages of their adaptation are
immature, so they are still foundering in childish and
adolescent motivations of character, the theatre of the
struggle between dependence and independence. And this
chaotic subhuman struggle will continue to bind the
individual and also human societies as a whole until there
is release from the ego-principle, the chronic contraction
of the heart and the whole bodily being, the commitment to
separation, avoidance of relationship, loveless
self-possession, obsessive self-indulgence, doubt, and
unconsciousness of the Source, Light, Love, Living Food, and
Eternal Life by which all things are sustained
forever. Because of the ego-“I,” the
presumption of separation and independence, we are
constitutionally divorced from the Infinite Condition
wherein we have appeared. We are separated from our primal
Food-Source. Mankind is not merely hungry. We are starving.
We cannot even hope to be satisfied, and, therefore, our
hunger has become doubt, unlove, fear, self-possession,
self-indulgence, violence, disease, and a death that is not
merely a change of state but a suppression of existence to
the point of the illusion of annihilation. However, there is Wisdom to the
point of freedom, and not merely or only immortality but
eternal Bliss in God. There is Truth, Sustenance, Light, and
Life. There is Awakening, even bodily, to the utter
Consciousness and Radiance or Love that is God and Truth.
The Way of that Awakening is expressed through a culture or
Way of Life that evolves through seven stages. The first
three may generally be associated with the first twenty-one
years of life (three periods of seven years), but the last
four (which grow beyond the limits of the grosser elements
and functions) may not truly be considered in terms of
limits of time, whether brief or long. Each stage develops
as a process of adaptation (or readaptation) to a specific,
functional point of view relative to the totality of
experience. That specific point of view in each case depends
on the organization of life and consciousness relative to
any one of seven primal centers of the functional being of
man. Those centers are expressed at the physical level, but
they also reach deep into the subtlest and most
transcendental planes of light. The seven primary centers of the
human body-mind relate to the seven primary levels of
adaptation, integration, and Realization in the case of Man.
Adaptation to the whole of existence via each of these
centers in succession is the native Process of growth for
which we are fitted by virtue of our inherent structure. And
growth, at every stage, is a matter of “food,” or the
success of the functional pattern of reception, ingestion,
elimination, and adaptation not only at the physical level,
but also at the vital level, the mental level, the psychic
and supermental level, the Foundation level of
Consciousness, and the Transcendental level of Radiance,
Light, Vibratory Power, Love, and Mysterious
Creation. There are as many kinds of food as
there are levels of adaptation. Elemental food is the common
food of the lowest dimension of our appearance. But we
require other kinds of food to sustain us in our parts above
or subtler than the elemental physical. All manifest things
and beings appear within a universal cosmic theatre of the
physics of light. Even the most solid configuration is an
illusion, or a mysterious objectification that is not other
than light. The essence of things is light, or
Life-Radiance, and the right functioning of every individual
life depends on right communion with light, or the Light
above all lights, and above all the levels of energy or
vibration that lie between the subtlest light, or mind, and
solidity. Therefore, there are many kinds of
food on which we depend and which we must learn to eat,
humbly and in peace. There is the elemental food of the
physical aspect of the whole bodily being. There is, at the
next level, the etheric food, the Life-Force or pranic’
“substance” that is received and ingested via the processes
of breathing and feeling. And beyond this are all the
ascending and subtle degrees of chemistry and energy
associated with each of the primary physical, glandular, and
nervous centers of the gross bodily being, and their subtle
extensions to Infinity. The primary centers of the whole
bodily being are seven. And we are obliged to adapt our
whole bodily being to the view established at each center in
succession. Thus, there are seven primary stages of growth
or adaptation native to Man. But since we are generally born
into conditions where human development is minimal or
rudimentary, and where the culture of Wisdom is unknown, in
doubt, or denied altogether, we tend to adapt, through
random influences, to arbitrary, reactive, ego-based, and
even subhuman levels of awareness, ability, experience, and
responsibility. We tend to develop in patterns that
disintegrate rather than integrate the bodily being, and
human societies tend, 1. In the physics of
the worlds, ether or functional energy is the senior and
most subtle of the gross elements, which also include solid,
liquid, fiery, and gaseous substances (the ancient esoteric
elements of earth, water, fire, and air). Ether, the most
subtle state of gross or material appearance, is the
all-pervading element of the physical universe, analogous to
space itself. The etheric dimension of force or manifest
light pervades and surrounds our universe and every physical
body. It is the field of energy, magnetism, and space in
which the lower or grosser elements function. Thus, your
“etheric body” is the specific concentration of force
associated with and surrounding-permeating your physical
body. It serves as a conduit for the forces of universal
light and energy to the physical body. In practical terms of
daily experience, the etheric aspect of the being is our
emotional-sexual, feeling nature. The etheric body functions
through and corresponds to the nervous system. Functioning
as a medium between the conscious mind and the physical
being, it controls the distribution and use of energy and
emotion. It is the dimension of vitality or Life-Force. We
feel the etheric dimension of life not only as vital energy
and power and magnetic-gravitational forces, but also as the
endless play of emotional polarization, positive and
negative, to others, objects, the world itself, everything
that arises. “Prana” is a Sanskrit
term meaning “life-energy” or life-force. In yogic esoteric
teachings, “prana” is also a specific technical name for one
of a number of forms of etheric energy in the bodily being.
Bubba uses the term here more generally, in reference to the
whole dimension of living energy that pervades and sustains
the physical and vital processes of Man. Thus, “prana” is
the manifest life-energy. It is an aspect of the
Transcendental Current of Life, which is All-Pervading, but
also Eternal-but manifest or “pranic” energies are only
temporary phenomena of the Realm of Nature. therefore, to function as “schools”
of disintegration, reactivity, and mediocrity, rather than
as cultures of adaptation to Wisdom in Truth. Truly, most
human beings are human only in the sense that they are
specimens of an inherent structure that can realize a human
level of expression. If we consider the level of actual
adaptation and responsibility of the usual man or woman, he
or she is certainly subhuman, either in the sense of being
little more than a talking beast without instincts or in the
sense of being merely adapted to the physical,
emotional-sexual, and mental levels of experience, but
severely compromised or unstable in the demonstration of the
integrity and natural superiority even such adaptation
should represent in action. It is necessary, first of all, for
each individual to return to all previous levels of
functional adaptation that have been developed as reactive
and egoic mechanisms. Every functional level must be
re-awakened and readapted to the Divine Principle beyond and
yet pervading all contractions, all parts of the whole, all
defining limits of light and consciousness. Even the cells
of the body are obliged by this Principle. Therefore, the
Way or Culture of this Process is a Way of total
readaptation or rebirth. It is the Culture of Resurrection,
or the Enlightenment of the whole bodily being of Man.2 The
seven centers of progressive readaptation are (1) the body
base (at the perineum), (2) the root of sex, (3) the region
of the navel and solar plexus, (4) the heart, (5) the region
between the lower throat and the lower rear of the brain,
(6) the brain core, and (7) the crown, or the Light-Terminal
of the whole bodily being. But the Principle of human
adaptation (or readaptation) is not found in either the
lower or the higher dimensions of the bodily 2. The written Teaching
of Bubba Free John contains all necessary instructions for
practical and spiritual life in the Culture of Resurrection,
or Enlightenment. The Eating Gorilla Comes In Peace is a
book of instruction relative to right adaptation or Lawful
practice of diet and health. Love of the Two-Armed Form
considers the same responsibility relative to the sexual
process. Conscious Exercise and the Transcendental Sun is a
manual not only of exercise but of the psycho-physics of
feeling-attention, or love. The devotional and higher
esoteric or meditative considerations of this culture are
discussed in The Paradox of Instruction, Breath and Name,
the present book, and others, and are otherwise directly
communicated in the private instructional and educational
occasions enjoyed by devotees in The Free Communion
Church. being. It is at the center, between
the lower and the upper divisions or coils, each represented
by three centers. The center wherein the human being becomes
Awakened to the Principle on which it always already depends
is the heart. The heart is the key to human consciousness,
human Awakening, and truly human adaptation. Therefore, the
culture of human readaptation depends, from the beginning,
on the intuitive Awakening of the heart to its Condition in
Truth. That Awakening is Realized through true “hearing” of
the argument of the Spiritual Master, and it is
progressively intensified through spiritual Revelation in a
whole life of “hearing,” “seeing,” and “feeling” in
Communion with the Divine Company of the Spiritual Master,
wherein devotees are restored to God, even
bodily. Since the Awakened heart is the
Principle of the culture of true human adaptation, that
Awakening must come at the beginning of the Way and
progressively intensify or mature through its stages.
Therefore, the Awakening of the heart does not only come, as
one might expect, in the fourth stage of life. It is
continuous, from the beginning. In the fourth stage, the
intelligent psychic dimension of the heart must flower, but
the heart must be already Awake. And in the sixth stage of
life the Awakening of the heart becomes perfect, so that the
presumption of independent or separate consciousness is
forever dissolved in radical intuition of the Divine
Condition of all beings and things. Therefore, in the
seventh stage, the apparent individual (no longer suffering
the illusion of separateness, but, paradoxically, still
persisting as an integral structure in the conditional
realms) is able to be yielded perfectly into Light, Love,
the Radiant Bliss that is communicated via the crown of the
whole bodily being. In the seventh stage of our Divine
readaptation, we are perfectly restored to the primal Food
that the ego contraction and all the bodily and psychic
locks of our reactive adaptation have denied us. All the
centers of the whole bodily being have then become open
doors to the stream of Vibratory Bliss, and we are
Transfigured, Regenerated, and Translated into Light, in
both the spiritual and the literal bodily sense. The stages of readaptation in this
Culture of Resurrection are (1) the physical-vital, (2) the
emotional-sexual, (3) the higher vital (will) and lower
mental, (4) the truly moral, higher mental, and the lower
psychic, (5) the higher psychic, the cosmic “gnosis,” (6)
the Realization of the unqualified Condition of
Consciousness, or the prior Freedom of the soul, and (7) the
Sacrifice of the body-mind through the Sacrifice of the
Awakened Self into the Infinite Radiance of God, or the
Translation of the soul of Man into the Divine
Domain. In the higher stages of
readaptation, esoteric spiritual responsibilities in life
and meditation become natural, creative extensions of the
life of the human being. In the fourth stage of life, the
Way of Divine Ignorance, which I Teach, truly begins. Prior
to that time, the individual must pass through functional
disciplines in the common dimensions of life-physical,
emotional, and mental. And it is only when that rudimentary
human foundation is established that the esoteric or higher
development of Man may begin.
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First
Become Human The third stage of life is mature
when the individual enjoys integrated responsibility for the
whole of the living being (physical, emotional-sexual, and
mental). Thus, he is in that case able to be present as a
clear will and as love under all the otherwise frustrating
or pleasurable conditions of lower experience. Those who
seek to begin spiritual life must be mature in this sense in
order to move on to higher maturity. Otherwise they will
have no stability of will and love to keep them in the
practice. Those who are constantly complaining and
regressing in the practice of the Way are simply not yet
mature in the ordinary human sense. They are weak of will
(thus of mind) and of love (thus of life and body and
feeling). Prepare yourself first. Approach me when you are
strong in the human way. And waste no time in that
preparation. Otherwise you will only suffer a life and a
future that are mediocre, foolish, frustrated, obsessed, and
unawakened to Truth and Happiness.
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The
True Man The childish individual wants
someone to save him. The adolescent individual wants to
fulfill himself, absolutely and independently. The true man simply serves Good
Company and surrenders to Truth, the Living God. The Mature Individual Is Not Bound
or Afraid The childish individual depends on
the Spiritual Master as a parent, seeking his loving
attention, expecting to be nurtured and consoled and
fascinated and saved from death by his Company. He wants to
be saved from that for which he must himself be
responsible-which is the demand to love and be a sacrifice,
even to the degree of death. The adolescent individual identifies
with the Spiritual Master, thinking himself to be identical
and equal to the Realization of the Spiritual Master, and
thus requiring no Grace, no practice, no transformation.
Such an individual likes to engage in casual association
with the Teaching and Person of the Spiritual Master,
disguising a secret need and intention to become truly the
Master’s equal (at least in the eyes of others) by mere
association. Such a one also likes the glamorized sense of
himself that he appears to acquire or about which he boasts,
because his casual friendship with the Spiritual Master
seems to indicate an acknowledgment of his own superior
qualities. He wants to be known for being what he can only
Realize in eternal sacrifice into that which includes him
but which is not him in his exclusive
independence. The mature individual or true
devotee is free of childish and adolescent approaches to the
Spiritual Master. He is neither childishly dependent, as
upon a parent, nor adolescently independent, as in revolt
against a parent. Rather, he turns to the Spiritual Master
freely, in love and service, in gestures of surrender to the
Process and the Reality that are always Present and
Awakening in that Company. Such an individual is not
motivated by the neurotic dilemmas and the self-protective
searching for solutions that characterize the usual man. He
has been awakened to intuition of his own Real Condition and
to the native activity of love in service. He has been
awakened through “hearing” the argument and “seeing” the
Presence of the Spiritual Master. Thus, he is not bound or
afraid. He is free to surrender in love to the Agent of his
own Destiny, and in such surrender in love he fulfills the
Law of practice wherein Grace may be given and
transformation made.
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Love
Is Freedom from Fear, Doubt, and Despair Men and women are commonly childish
and self-possessed. They fear relational commitment and
marriage primarily because they fear the loss of the right
of promiscuity, they fear the promiscuity of any other to
whom they might become attached, and they fear that the
sexual attractiveness of any individual, including
themselves, is short-lived. Doubt of self and other, and
despair of life itself, are the critically disabling factors
that disturb and prevent lasting sexual relationships, as
well as friendships, and the stability of life-circumstances
in general. However, all doubt, despair, and
fear become insignificant once the intention of life becomes
love, rather than the childish dependency on love. Childish
dependency on the love and attention given to us by others
is disabling because it cannot love or grant attention until
it has already been granted a high degree of love and
attention. The childish individual is always on the verge of
feeling rejected and unloved, and he is bright and lively
only when he is the primary object of love, attention, and
good fortune from without. But the mature individual is
active as love, under all conditions. Such a one always
primarily grants love and attention, rather than seeking or
watching for whether or not he is being given love and
attention. It is not that the mature individual
does not enjoy or need the love of others and the Blessings
of God, but the mature individual enjoys such love and
Blessings as a happiness that arises in the midst of a life
in which he is himself perpetually responsible to love and
to be a personally, morally, and spiritually responsible
sacrifice in God. Thus, those who have been initiated
into the human principle of responsible love are already
free of the burdensome fears, doubts, and reasons for
despair that plague the childish and subhuman world.
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We
Must Consent to Become Agents of Life We cannot ultimately depend on any
of our objective relations (high or low in the scale of
manifestation) for love, attention, support, sustenance, or
their unchanging continuation through time and space. First
of all, we discover that our relations are themselves
generally dependent and undependable, changing or mortal,
coming and going, and always changing the objects and the
quality of their feeling and attention. Thus, if we depend
on them, we will surely feel betrayed, and anxious about the
line of love or Life that feeds us through our relations.
Then we become possessed in our relations with the testing
mood of “You don’t love me.” But, more than this, if we
depend on love or Life to come to us through our relations,
then we ourselves tend to remain irresponsible as love or
attention and Life. Always watching to see if we are loved,
fed, and our pleasure and existence protected, we never
abide as love simply. Such is the error in our childish and
adolescent adaptation to born existence. We enter our maturity and our true
humanity when we come to terms not only with the variability
in the energy that comes through our relations, but with our
own reaction to that observation. The child adapts to the
energy that comes through relations and becomes dependent.
Then, as experience becomes more objective and complex, the
sense of betrayal (as possibility or actuality) begins to
intensify. The mortal news is heard in the very time of
children. Consequently, children develop strategies of
survival in the midst of their vulnerable dependence. They
look for more dependable relations. They sulk. They despair
and complain. They break out. They learn to compensate for
the variability and ultimate betrayal (by death) of all
relations by discovery of private and inward
consolations. Thus, adolescence follows childhood.
It is a time of critical awareness that all relations are
changing and mortal, and that dependency is futile but yet a
profound motivation (because of childhood adaptation). Thus,
it is a time spent in testing the worlds of relations and
the degrees of consolation or pleasure offered by both
inward and objective sources. It is a time of struggle
between the motives of absolute dependence and absolute
independence, between commitment to self and commitment to
the play of relations. Human beings tend to waste their
whole life in that struggle or early awareness of the
conditions of manifest existence. The spell is broken only
when there is awakening from both the burden of dependence
(wherein mortality is still the last word) and of separative
independence (which is limited to rituals of
self-consolation and of exploitation of relations in a
self-possessed mood). Our human freedom and maturity comes
only with the abandonment of the whole disposition of
dependence-independence, or the ritual of “You don’t love
me” and “I don’t love you.” It comes when we are
reestablished in and readapted to the prior Condition of our
existence, which precedes all relations (even if the great
pattern of human and cosmic relations is the agent of that
Condition in the framework of conventional experience). Our
parents never were our Food or Life. They were only agents,
more or less capable. They were a connection to Life. They
were not Life Itself. But in our childish fear, founded in
our own bodily and psychic individuation, we began to depend
on the agents themselves, to the point that they no longer
functioned as a connection to Life, but were objects to
which we turned in despair, seeking the Absolute in them,
but not yielding enough to find It in them or through
them. Thus, we grow beyond the
experiential limits of the parent domain, but we cling to
all other relations, conditions, experiences, and objects,
high or low, in the same ritual manner. And that pattern
does not pass until a new and mature level of understanding,
response, and adaptation appears in our case. Otherwise we
live until death crying for love and safety, absolute
pleasure and help, immortality and an unchanging world of
glorious fulfillments of our ordinary functional needs. Such
is the root of conventional religion, in which dependence on
the parent agency is projected on all relations to Infinity,
where we install the cultic Deity of our childhood, the
archetypal and immortal Parent, and spend our days
alternately pleading for the fulfillment of our needs and
turning away, in adolescent fashion, to doubts and the
consolations of functional fulfillments
themselves. We must awaken from the spell of our
childish presumptions and become human. We must neither
depend on (in the absolute sense) nor recoil from any
relations. We must discover Life Itself, prior to all
agents, mediators, or means. We must become established as
love rather than the search for love via agents outside us.
We must enter into most direct Communion with the Life and
Truth that literally sustains us, and with which we are
ultimately identical, in consciousness and even bodily. We
must be free of the illusion that the ordinary agents of
Life are necessary in themselves. We must come into the
responsible disposition of stable love (unobstructed
feeling-attention) toward all the numberless and ordinary
agents of Life that appear in the universal pattern of our
relations, but we must be free of all illusions that bind us
to others apart from the Radiant Life Itself. We must
ourselves consent to be agents of Life through love, and,
through Communion with the All-Pervading Life, we must
become less and less obstructed in that function. The Teaching of Truth, the Way of
Divine Ignorance, is an argument or consideration and a path
of new adaptation whereby and wherein the childish and
adolescent man or woman, of any chronological age, may be
awakened to mature responsibility in Communion with the
prior Divine Reality. That Reality is not objective, within
or without, but the prior, absolute, and most radical
Condition of all conditions. It is not our Parent but our
Condition, Truth, and Happiness. The Spiritual Master
communicates the Teaching and Reveals the Way at every stage
of our new adaptation. As such he is an ordinary agent of
Life, to which we should turn with love, and not dependence,
but responsible surrender. He is not a Parent, but the
awakened Agent who abides as love to Infinity in all
relations, and in relation to whom we discover the prior
Reality as Grace, quickening our new adaptation and
liberating sacrifice. He does not ultimately draw us to
himself, as an objective and independent entity, but he
serves our Awakening, through spiritual relationship to him
(wherein we Realize Communion with the Real), to the very
Condition that is his own Realization. He is the direct
Agent of the Real Condition. He is not other than that
Condition, because he is surrendered, beyond all agents or
relations, to that Condition. Therefore, the Spiritual
Master is the Advantage of all true men and
women. Childish and adolescent individuals
also approach the Spiritual Master. Those who are still
critically burdened by their childish dependency look to the
Spiritual Master, and to the Divine, as an objective,
independent “other” or Parent, a Source that is also a
perfect Agent. Such individuals must be awakened to the
egoic illusion in their own approach, since it will prevent
their Realization of the Truth served by the Spiritual
Master and his Divine Revelation. Adolescent individuals
tend to be interested in and even fascinated by the
potential in the Spiritual Master and the Divine, but they
remain self-protective and, therefore, possessed by doubt
and even critical denials of both the Spiritual Master and
the Divine. Just so, they remain self-possessed in all their
relations, since doubt and fear of dependency are at their
hearts. Love, in its true form (which depends on direct
Communion with the Condition prior to all conditions) is not
in their capacity, but only seeking, temporary satisfaction,
self-protective fantasies of independence, and a constant
doubt of love and Bliss. Therefore, such individuals must be
tested until they are awakened to love in Divine Communion,
or else they will live until death in doubt of love, certain
only of their mortal independence, and without connection to
the prior Life. This is the Way. Be converted to
love. Be awakened from the illusory incident of independent
incarnation and self-possession and be turned to the Real
and Eternal Incident of Divine Bliss, existence as love in
all relations, and transcendence of all conditions, within
and without, high and low, now and then. Hear me and resort
only to the prior Divine in my Company.
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The
Work of Bubba Free John in Relation to the Stages of Life
and Practice of Devotees The fourth stage of spiritual
practice in the Way of Divine Ignorance is also the seventh
or perfect stage of human life. It is that stage of life and
practice wherein the individual body-mind is Translated into
Transcendental Life, or the Divine Ignorance-Radiance. This
ultimate stage is named the Way of Radical
Intuition. The first three stages of life
precede actual spiritual practice. They are the stages of
(1) bodily adaptation, primarily to the cycle of
assimilation-elimination, and to the processes of eating,
excreting, touching, and moving; (2) vital adaptation,
primarily to the cycle of reception-release, and to the
processes of breath, emotion, and sexual awareness; and (3)
mental adaptation, primarily to the cycle of
acceptance-rejection, and to the processes of speech,
thought, and intention. The levels of adaptation that
correspond to these first three stages of life develop more
or less in coincidence with one another after the initial
period of infancy. However, relative maturity in each of the
three areas develops or may be expected to develop at a
different rate. Thus, the first stage is considered to be
relatively mature after seven years. The second stage is
considered to be relatively mature at puberty, or at twelve
to fourteen years of age. And the third stage is considered
to be relatively mature at eighteen to twenty-one years of
age. However, many factors enter into
this process of adaptation in the first three stages of
life. Each individual, by tendency or capacity at birth,
represents a different complex of adaptability. And the
circumstances in which each individual learns to adapt are
also unique. Also, the higher wisdom that should be brought
to the whole affair of human adaptation is almost
universally deficient. Therefore, unless the individual is
born and raised in a cultural setting of the highest human
and spiritual kind, his adaptation in the first three stages
of life will necessarily be deficient and more or less
subhuman. And such is the situation for most human beings
now alive. The Free Communion Church is the
institutional setting for a culture of truly human and
spiritual adaptation. It is itself only beginning to develop
its potential characteristics and services. Relatively few
people are born into this Church. Most come to it after a
childhood, adolescence, and even many adult years of
struggling at a subhuman level in this subhuman world.
Therefore, the Church has had to develop various cultural
means to enable people to reexamine and complete the first
three stages of their adaptation, so they can be responsibly
prepared for a devotional approach to the Spiritual Master
and the continuation of their growth and sacrifice in the
fourth stage of life and beyond. Much of the activity of Bubba Free
John has had to be devoted to this reeducation of those who
came to him.
to be
continued..in progress
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