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GARBAGE AND THE GODDESS

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2. NULL AND VOID: The First Miracle

When Monday's first gray light fell on Persimmon, along with waves of fine rain, the men and women who had disappeared into Bubba's house were still missing, and missed. The weekend was over now, and most of these people were expected at their jobs this morning, but they had waited with Bubba through the night, as had their husbands and wives, who were now having an opportunity to taste the "other side" of freedom in their relationships.

That morning people all over Persimmon were laughing, discussing the importance of living as devotees during dramatic times such as this, and exclaiming to each other at Bubba's outrageous conduct. They drank beer as they worked and listened to tape recordings of Bubba's talks about understanding and Satsang. It was a cold, windless day, with an inconsistent mist and drizzle. But "drizzle" hardly describes the lightness of this rain. Wes Vaught ran outside just to stand there, smiling, feeling it fall on him, then, laughing, he ran back inside the hotel and told those who were working there to come outside with him: "This isn't rain, man, it's Grace!"

Wes had been planning to drive to San Francisco that afternoon, but just before he was to leave, he brought an offering to Bubba.

I picked a half-dozen daffodils and brought them to the kitchen door of Bubba's house. One of the girls took them from me, and I began to leave. She called after me and said that I should come back, and that I could go into the front room and see Bubba. There was a circle of devotees around Him, I went in and bowed. Then He offered me a beer and invited me to the baths. We left the house arm-in-arm. I said, "Bubba, I feel lost in the Lord," and He said, "Sure. Best place to be." He was beautiful, but I knew He was reminding me that God isn't a place or a feeling. Everything is Divine. Anyway, I forgot about going to San Francisco.

It was about three o'clock, and on his way to the bathhouse, Bubba declared the day "null and void." The big bell in front of the lounge was rung for the workers to quit early and join him in the pool.

They brought down beer and cigarettes, and somebody phoned the Ashram members who were working at the community's businesses in town to come back for the party. People played in the water, talked, drank, kissed, and laughed, enjoying the energy of an unexpected break from the usual routine of life. At one point everybody gathered around Bubba. He was telling stories about his previous incarnations on this planet. He told Sal and Neil they were amazingly slow learners, that he had been working with them for thousands and thousands of years, and they still hadn't caught on.

This had a dramatic effect. Bubba rarely if ever mentioned his "own" past lives, and his devotees had a difficult time dealing with that notion. Some of them assumed that Bubba meant the past lives of "Franklin Jones," the persona through which Bubba had shown the lessons of the life of understanding. But everyone knew that the limited individual no longer existed, and that Bubba's spoken "I" in fact refers to the Divine. And so, hearing him speak about his past incarnations thoroughly confused many of his devotees. Bubba does this sort of thing often. He tests as well as teaches with his words. In fact, there is no distinction between these two activities. Bubba's very presence in human form is at once a test for his devotees, who always tend to see him as "another guy," and a lesson to them in relational, functional, humorous life.

While he was speaking about his past lives, Bubba was sitting on the edge of the pool with one hand on Sal's leg. Suddenly, he made a few cryptic comments to Sal. A devotee sitting nearby overheard Bubba ask Sal, "Are you ready?" Sal replied that he was. Then Bubba said, pointing to Sal, "You see this body? You see this self-sense?" Bubba's eyes rolled up, and his lips pulled into a sneer. His hands formed mudras as he slumped against Sal, who also fell back against other devotees sitting behind him. Almost immediately, many of those present began to feel the effects of intensified Shakti, through the spontaneous internal movement of the life-force. Their bodies jerked or shook, their faces contorted, some began to cry, scream, and moan. The whole bathhouse seemed to have slipped into another world.

While Sal and Bubba were lying there, apparently unconscious, the intensity of the room swelled almost unbearably. Seeing Bubba's body so vacant, many people began to feel bewildering emotions, fantasizing his death or even fearing that he had actually died. Greg Purnell had seen what was happening more clearly. At a group discussion the following Wednesday he described what he had seen.

On Monday in the pools I happened to be sitting right behind Bubba and Sal, and I immediately saw, when Sal started to fall back, that Bubba just suddenly came out of his own body. I didn't see it, but I absolutely knew it was happening. I saw Bubba just enter into Sal, just go right into Sal. From there he went out over everybody else, and then everybody else started going crazy. Sal fell onto me, into my lap, and then everybody else started howling and so forth, and I realized from that moment on that this is it. This is the beginning of the end, there's no turning back now.

Sal first described his experience to the community the next Friday evening at a study group. Later, he explained it in more detail to the editors of this book. His first words here refer to the decision he had made on Sunday night at Bubba's party, to go anywhere with Bubba":

The basic severing of the contract happened at the moment when I made that decision. It hadn't yet occurred at the level of life, but it had internally. I think that made the occurrence on the following night possible, the entrance of the Guru.

So that next night in the pool he said, "Come, sit by my body." I knew when he said it that something was about to occur, because that was the first time he'd ever spoken like that. I sat down next to him, and he put his arm on my leg. My leg began to get all tingly where his hand was. It was the penetration of the very cells by the Divine. My whole right leg became numb. At the time I thought it was just from sitting so long on the concrete.

Then he turned to me, looked at me, and said, "You remember the agreement we made?" I said, "Yeah." So then he said, "Are you ready?" and I told him yes, I was. At that point he entered the body completely, down to the cells. I could feel the entry taking place. It is a form of possession, only not by anything daemonic, but by the Guru. It is almost like anaesthesia, or like a form of radiation. After the entry was complete, he put his head against mine, and I couldn't feel my head any more. Then the body went into a yogic process, and we drifted out of the body together. Passing out of the body was a kind of "drifting." Again, it reminded me of anaesthesia, but I was fully conscious. In the internal world he appeared the way he looks in pictures where he is lying on his side, but he was moving through empty space. In this vision he said to me, "See, Sal, what does it all amount to?"

At that point we passed into what Bubba calls smithereens." There is no experience in "smithereens." There is nothing. So there was no form of experience in that state, and yet consciousness survived in infinite formlessness. Afterwards, we just came out of it, and we had passed through all the worlds, and I had seen the great paradox: there is no one, and the body is being maintained by a Divine yogic process, entirely independent of my" effort. The senses were alive. There was hearing, sound, there would have been sight if my eyes had been open. But there was literally no one "in" that body, no sensation of self.

Bubba has often said there are two aspects of his work with us. He lives as the prior and moveless Heart, prior Consciousness, the Self, and the Siddhi or Power of his formless, all-pervading Presence awakens the conscious life of understanding in those who come to him. At the same time he also lives as the God-Light, the perfectly and eternally reflected and creative Power of the Divine, and he intensifies that Light above the heads of his devotees. This intensification stimulates the free movement of the life-force, which is the Life or Fullness of the Divine Light transmuted into the grosser form of life-energy in the centers of psycho-physical functioning. The stimulated movement of life-force manifests as kriyas, shouts, screams, visions, etc. Bubba's entry into Sal was an instance of his activity as the Divine Light and Power, and it was felt by almost everyone present. Although it is as ever-present and perfect as the very Heart itself, the Light or Force can be said to "move." Thus, Bubba can speak of the Guru "entering" the devotee, even though in Truth the Guru always already is the devotee and all things. The entry is the devotee's awakening to the Guru's Presence in him as the absolute and blissful Power and Consciousness of God.

When Sal passed into "smithereens" and experienced no thing and no one, but only persisted as consciousness in "infinite formlessness," he awoke in and as the very Heart. That consciousness lived perfectly is the prior Self, the eternal intuition of Real-God. Sal's non-experience was a case of the awakening of Self-realization or God-realization as it is described, for instance, in the Vedantic literature and the teachings of Ramana Maharshi. The passage into infinite formlessness is the samadhi or trance of the Heart. It is the realization of perfect selflessness, of consciousness unqualified by any identification or other activity with respect to mind, body, and world. Thus, Sal was able to see the great paradox of absolute selflessness even in the midst of sensation and bodily existence. When he said the body was being maintained by a yogic process he meant that it is continuously manifested and lived in every way, independent of the apparent self, by the true Self, which is Real-God, the unlimited.

In fact, Sal realized, the apparent self has no existence whatsoever. In that light, his description of the Guru's entry as a form of "possession" is also paradoxical. The Guru apparently performs this concrete act of possessing, but in fact it is only that the apparent self is overwhelmed by the Force of the Divine and disintegrates until only the very Heart is lived. In fact, then, the life of the apparent one, the ego, is the real form of possession. Bubba has said this on a number of occasions. The seeming existence of Narcissus is a life of possession, and every human being is thus possessed by the most insidious daemonic force in the universe. In the midst of his spurious Narcissistic existence, Sal had suddenly awakened to the life of God.

Stephen Blas and Nick Elias were sitting in another of the small baths, in a completely different area of the building, when the scene with Bubba took place in the Roman Bath. Stephen later wrote that "all of a sudden the Presence took over and filled the whole bathhouse, we were screaming with ecstasy for what seemed like hours." Nick provides more detail:

What happened is difficult to describe, but I had an absolute sense of God, of Bubba. God filled the place. There seemed to be a vast internal space, an expanse. There was no difference between me and Stephen. We both were transported, ecstatic. It was one event. We screamed, called Bubba's name, laughed. There was no difference anywhere. It was absolutely one event. When Stephen cried out, it was the same as if I had done it. I felt as if I were dying, but it wasn't like death. It was as if nothing was happening. But it all seemed to have to do with dying. I was suffering, but there was no suffering. It was immensely humorous. I knew God absolutely. He was undeniable. I knew he was here absolutely and that Bubba was that same One.

Devotees express the same paradox in almost every description of their experiences of Bubba's intensity. They are terrified and delighted: "It was agony, but it was ecstasy too." Bubba has explained that his Siddhi intensifies and accelerates the "phases," or cycles of ups and downs, in the lives of his devotees. This is the mental and emotional counterpart to the energy movements that bring both the bliss of release and the pain of different obstructions, almost simultaneously. Over time, as the emotions and moods intensify, their duration decreases, joy is at first undercut by misery, then fear is dissolved by sheer happiness. The wild extremes of moods and feelings do not resolve themselves one way or another, but rather, they are dissolved in awareness of and as the one continuous Conscious Presence in which all things arise and fade.

Joan Kelley makes clear in the account which follows that Bubba's manifestation that evening wasn't restricted to the time he lay slouched against Sal, and she expresses well the dramatic quality of the whole event and the loving feeling many shared. She describes an experience with Bubba that took place after he had left Sal and turned to others in the pool.

When I got to the large pool Monday, I made my way to a place near Bubba. He sat on the edge of the pool with a crowd gathered around him. Soon I was reaching out with one finger, not even daring to hold His hand. He gripped my finger between His fingers. He was laughing and joking with everyone. Then He said, "I'm really not here, you know. Watch me and I'll disappear."

As I watched His face, His eyes became large and the sneer on His face became so crazy I could hardly concentrate on Him or myself or anything connected to the moment. He was holding my hand as I began to lapse into a trance. All I could imagine was dying, and I felt the hard vibrating force of Bubba's strength going through me like an electric shock. I have had powerful Shakti experiences in Bubba's Presence before. Some have even been painful, paralyzing ones, located in specific centers and moving in certain patterns. But this was different. It was everywhere at once and utterly consuming. I wondered if I had enough wits about me to hold my mouth out of the water to breathe. My body was totally limp.

All the while I mentally pleaded with Bubba to kill me, anything except not to let me consume Him with my unwillingness to die. Later that evening, as I was preparing to leave the baths, I spoke to Bubba and said, "I didn't die, did I? But I want to. What can you do if I don't give up? I don't want to drain you or kill you with my fear of dying. I love you so." He just smiled a sweet, knowing, loving smile, gave me a quieting shush, and said, "I'm all right. In time you will be ready."

Joan talks about how the Force she felt that evening was different from anything she had experienced up until that time. It was "everywhere at once and utterly consuming." It was in fact that same Force of Bubba, but more powerful, instantaneous, direct in its felt movement through the devotee. In the days that followed, devotees called it the "Divine" in an attempt to express the difference between this Force and the grosser, less disintegrating Shakti or yogic manifestations they had often experienced before.

It is also interesting how Bubba treated Joan when she asked him about dying. He might have said to her, "What does it amount to?" as he said to Sal in the midst of his dissolution. Or he might have asked her, "Joan, what are you always doing?" with reference to her self-concern. His devotees come to observe and understand that the Guru's behavior is always perfectly appropriate. Joan wasn't yet able to perform that complete sacrifice, but her devotion was growing, and she was beginning to become responsible for her relationship to him. And so he responded lovingly and gently.

After they left the baths that night, Bubba and his devotees returned to the lounge and two hundred seventy dollars worth of cheese-egg-bacon burgers, french fries and milkshakes! Bubba played. the guitar. He was just learning how. Nick Elias, who'd felt such a powerful recognition of God in the baths, approached Bubba in the lounge just before driving back to San Francisco:

I went to Him without hesitation and gave myself to Him. There was no doubt. I recognized Him as God, His Real Nature, absolutely. My wife earlier had asked Bubba if be would kill her. As I was leaving, I asked Him, "Will you kill me, too?" and He said, "Why not?"

After remaining awhile longer, Bubba remarked that he was "personally ruined," and left with those who had been with him at dinner. Most of the others went to bed soon afterward.