---

GARBAGE AND THE GODDESS

---

6. SPIRITUAL THEATRE

Talks like "Garbage and the Goddess" moved members of the community to give up their hold on ecstatic experiences, to "throw away" the garbage of their lives. But they found it was no simple matter. It required more than momentary intelligence, and more than merely mental understanding. The "re-cognition" of which Bubba spoke in that talk requires absolute intelligence, great and reckless intelligence, which cares nothing for any experience whatsoever.

By tendency, however, people are not interested in such a sacrificial existence. They want fulfillment, not obliteration. They refuse the Guru and resort to the Goddess, to experience. The effect of the Guru's Presence on anyone who doesn't understand is the constant stimulation of his tendencies, until he undergoes the crisis in consciousness which makes understanding possible. Thus, Bubba teaches by "lessons." A lesson is an instance in which certain of a person's tendencies are stimulated until he sees himself creating his own suffering through them, and truly realizes that they are unnecessary. It is a moment, in other words, of seeing that what is presently in the paper bag of life is only garbage. Once that occurs, he naturally and easily throws it away.

What is learned doesn't have an exclusive relationship to the circumstances in which it is learned. A devotee who sees the larger pattern of his attachment to his wife hasn't simply learned a lesson in particular about his wife. He hasn't even learned a lesson about himself, because the lesson is itself the recognition of his own non-existence as an independent entity. But he sees the falseness of a particular pattern of action by which he was compulsively feeding the notion of his separate self.

Bubba has said that when one understands, the world takes on an illumined quality, and that which seemed solid and limiting is revealed as fluid and free. This is not an intellectual discovery. It liberates a person at every level of his being. But upon seeing this, he is usually only able to articulate what he saw in particular about his separative activity, how that isn't necessary, and how good he feels. He has thrown away some garbage.

Lessons are a natural by-product of Satsang, like kriyas and other life-force manifestations, but they are not its perfect fruition. Bubba uses the word "lesson" with humor, because, when applied to genuine sadhana, it has a much different meaning than in common usage. There is only God from the beginning, and that is what is revealed in Satsang, so neither the learner nor the lesson itself is valued at all. The continual process of learning lessons can be experienced only by the individual. As long as he feels he is learning something, he hasn't learned anything, and he hasn't understood. The gradual realization of the many ways in which he distracts himself with food may be quite fascinating, but when he finally understands, he couldn't care less. Who could care? Understanding is an event in consciousness in which the foundation and support of the individual himself is undone.

Because they constantly lead to that sacrifice of the fundamental activity that is the ego, lessons take place in every area of life. In April, Bubba continued to create theatre that stimulated powerful tendencies in nearly all the members of the community. He played with all the attachments to husbands and wives, the desires for enlightenment, desires for personal attention from the Guru, resistances to change in the external circumstances of life. Through their involvement with this dramatic theatre, devotees also began to see the necessity for understanding in ordinary, non-dramatic moments of life as well, when taking a shower, eating lunch, being bored or ecstatic while driving to work.

Bubba "packages the garbage" in every dimension of existence, and he expects his devotees to throw it away. Craving the personal attention of the Guru and craving sexual release are both ordinary and conventional activities founded in suffering and dilemma. When the individual sees what he is up to in either case, he falls back into Satsang, the unobstructed and happy enjoyment of the Guru in God. Until then, though he may feel beleaguered and set upon, he is in fact simply buying experience, a "bangle of the Goddess," and refusing the Guru and his love. He is avoiding relationship. So many devotees describe their lessons simply by talking about how their dilemmas disappeared and how they enjoyed Bubba's love.

Bubba does not miss a chance to play on this very enjoyment, to turn devotees more and more intensely to him as he really is, the Divine. At the end of April, he began talking about the benign strategy of his behavior toward devotees as a piece of "romantic theatre." He said simply that the Guru appears in the world as the Heart, and that his function in the world is to turn devotees to the Heart, to himself.

The symbol of Krishna and his gopis is a perfect description of the process involved in our Satsang. With women I may act like a lover, and with men like a close friend, but it is always the same thing. It is the creation of this conscious attachment. Everyone who attaches himself to the Guru immediately gets involved in the Divine, because the Guru is just a symbolic bit of theatre through which the Divine represents itself in the world. The Guru is only interested in attaching people to himself. Everything he sees: "Turn to me." So he seems to enjoy a luxury that nobody else is permitted. As soon as his devotees do anything but turn their attention to him absolutely, he gets angry with them, because he is the Divine in the world. And the Divine demands absolute attention.

In the next two weeks Bubba elaborated upon this theme, clarifying how he plays with the capacity in his devotee to believe that he is special, "the beloved," in order to involve him more and more with the Divine process. He talked about his Divine Romance in such a way that many devotees could see that perfect love and perfect death in God are not different. Some devotees had been involved in this romantic theatre with Bubba for years, thinking they were dealing with a special "other," but now they suddenly saw that whole affair as only another part of their absorption into the Divine. Bubba draws devotees to him and frustrates their demands on him so that they must turn to their prior relationship with him, rather than maintain a superficial attachment to his human form.

When Satsang becomes the condition of a person's life, everything that arises to him externally, as well as in his subtle and intuitive life, serves the spiritual process. As long as he lives as a separate and separative individual, the devotee is refusing the Guru, and when he understands, his non-separation from the Guru is known. Satsang intensifies both the pain of separation and the fullness of love, so that the life of understanding takes the form of an ever-intensifying romance with God.

The often dramatic interactions between Bubba and his intimates provided symbolic representations to everyone of their personal relationships with him. The "gopis" served that exemplary function. Bubba had begun using the word "gopi" back in Los Angeles around Christmas, but he had applied it affectionately to all the women in the Ashram. In the last week in March, Bubba began to ask certain women to move into his household. Eventually, all of them performed practical functions in the community, but their primary function was that of "gopi," or one who adores the Lord in human form, and this was something new to the Ashram.

These women were always present when Bubba invited others to his house for parties. They would sometimes help serve guests, clean Bubba's house, or do laundry, or they might administer some principal area of the Ashram's public work, but they were always absorbed in attention to Bubba. In the next months the community saw all of them become magnificent madwomen, obsessed with God, always near Bubba, unless, for some reason, he asked them to be elsewhere.

Because he is present as Love in the world, Bubba is truly free, free to play the games of this world and to use all its possibilities, including its pleasures. However it is played, life contains nothing but limited phenomena, and regardless of what he appears to be doing from a limited point of view, the Guru's activity in the world is never anything other than the complete, continuous sacrifice of himself to devotees. Therefore, his Company is the perfect form of discipline.

Bubba has talked about the paradox of his person and his behavior:

That is the drama, the excess permitted to the Guru, because the Guru is not a personality. The only reason he can perform the function of Guru is because he is dead. He is finished with all the cults and conventions of human life. He has already wrecked himself, so you don't have to worry about him. He is finished.