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from:
Choose What You Will Do - pp. 94-100
The Spirit DA FREE JOHN: There is a body and there is a mind. There are physical sensations and there are thinking, visions, and dreams. Whatever complex of bodily and mental conditions is arising at this moment, do you not also feel the Spirit? Do you not also feel the Life-Priniciple that pervades all mental and physical states? Do you not also intuit the Presence of a Matrix within which everything is arising, the unobstructed, Infinite Form that is Absolute Radiance? You are aware of the Spirit in this moment, are you not? You know the physical, you know the mental, and you know what is felt and intuited to be pervading the body and mind. The Way that I Teach, the Way of real life or true religion and spirituality, is to breathe the Spirit, feel the Spirit, be surrendered into the Spirit-Force, and therefore always be in a disposition of equanimity, fullness, balance and intensity, rather than your usual state of negativity, bewilderment, dryness, and mediocrity. When will you be Spirit-baptized? When will you become submitted to the Spirit? Presently, you are fans of the spirit! You want to consider it, but you will not submit to it. Yet you know the difference between your present condition and the condition that you would enjoy if you would look, feel, act, and be completely happy. The Spirit is not to be found in visions or in forms. The Spirit is not knowable or capable of being mentalized , grasped, or objectified. It is pervasive, flowing in everything, supporting everything. The Spirit is the Presence in all, the Being of all, to which you must surrender with great emotion, with all emotion, with the entire being. The Spirit is the Vision of God, That in which all imagery, sensations, feeling, and forms are arising. The Spirit is omnipresent, presently Present. It infills everything; it saturates, supports, and moves everything. And we do not know anything about it! We are just watching everything arise. Everything is mysterious, moved by the omnipresent Spirit. This is the Spirit's moment. You are not controlling this moment and you are afraid. Forget about that fear. Simply observe: Everything is being controlled! Everything is simply arising in the Spirit of God. You are not creating anything. Relax into the Spirit in this moment. Attain the equanimity of relaxing into the Life-Principle that moves all that is arising, and your life's adventure will change. Your life will be purified, and it will also be intensified. You will become Spirit- possessed, and true Spirit-possession manifests as equanimity, as resting in the Vision of God, which may be revealed in any number of ways. DEVOTEE: It is obvious that I am not in control, that I have no idea of the overall pattern of arising. And yet, in a certain sense I do feel that I am in control when I suppress that recognition of the randomness of everything. DA FREE JOHN: Everything is happening, so let it happen. Rest in the happening. Rest in the Law of the Spirit, the Force-Intention that is manifesting as you in this moment. You are trying to figure yourself out by becoming less than what you are. Just relax into the inevitableness of yourself, and you will see the Spirit working, rather than a separate you that is somehow independent from God. Although you seem to be in control, your body is simply arising. The breathing and the living of your body and all of its movements are just happening. The mind that is going on and on and on is just happening. Every process you can observe is occurring spontaneously in this moment. No one is creating anything and no one, no individual we can call by his name, is in charge of what we observe. Well! Who is doing it? Who or what is in charge in this moment? "The Spirit" is a name for it, you see. To call it the Spirit is appropriate because this name designates the breath and emotion through which we recognize the Spirit. Intuitively feel and breathe whatever it is that we recognize to be generating this moment. Something is making it happen. Somebody is breathing these bodies, thinking these thoughts, moving this whole world. All of this is somehow coordinated and interrelated as well. You are always trying independently to know about the state of everything, but you must recognize all forms of body and mind as pervaded and resting within the Spirit or Radiant Being. When you see this moment from the point of view of the Spirit, then you will also enjoy the wisdom of this Vision. You will see the body and mind, all the lower and higher states of experience, from the point of view of the Spirit. You will see the pattern of all phenomena rising in the Spirit. And in your surrender into the Spirit you will transcend all phenomena. To surrender into the Spirit in every moment is to Commune with the Transcendental Being. Thus, to "see" God is to enter into the disposition of surrender into the Living Being, the Infinite Radiance, wherein all events are always floating. First, find God. Recognize the moment. You may observe a range of physical conditions and a range of mental or psychic conditions, but whatever form your attention may take, there is always the sense that everything is simply arising, supported by what is Transcendental and All-Pervading. To "see" the Spirit is to see the Vision of God. It is a whole bodily realization, like the realization that the body has at the level of touch. It is profound, psychic, prior to bodily and mental configurations. The total being of the body-mind touches the Infinite Being of the Spirit, surrenders into the Spirit with every breath, whole bodily, on the basis of true emotion, love- surrender. That surrender is the epitome and the practice of the Way of Truth. The esoteric dimension of the Way of Divine Communion1 is simply to breathe, surrendering with every breath into the Life-Principle with unobstructed, radiant feeling, rather than contracted feeling. You may surrender even to the point of suspension of the breath, thus enjoying simple establishment in the direct, intuitive realization of the Transcendental Being, which is the Matrix, Self, and Truth of every moment, felt as the Spirit pervading all psycho-physical events. In every moment, then, we notice the whole range of psycho-physical phenomena or experience, and at the same time we feel the Spirit-Presence that is making everything happen, that is responsible for what is arising. 1. The Way of Divine Communion is the first stage of religious and spiritual practice in the whole Way of Divine Ignorance, or Radical Understanding. It marks the transition from commitment to the life of Narcissus, or self-possession, to commitment to the Way of Divine Ignorance, or radical surrender to Grace. The Way of Divine Communion is followed by three higher stages of practice: the Way of Relational Enquiry, the Way of Re-cognition, and the final, ultimate, God-Realizing stage, the Way of Radical Intuition. That feeling-intuition of the Divine Presence is the aspect of this moment that is the Realization of God. What is trying to become God, however, trying to know about things, and trying to be happy, is the "you" aspect, the ego-aspect of this moment. If you can transcend the benighted exploitation of the "you" aspect of this moment and enter into sympathy with the Spirit, the disposition in which all psycho-physical phenomena are floating and arising, then you become coincident with That in which the world inheres, and you become Spirit-possessed rather than self-possessed. Then all psycho-physical phenomena are re-cognized by you in every moment, so that they become transparent to the Great Principle of the Spirit. Everything is seen as a modification of the primal Radiance that is Infinite. The more profoundly you surrender wholly, emotionally, bodily into the Life-Principle, the more you feel the depth of what exists as Nature and the material universe and all the forms of experience, high and low. Such wisdom relative to things hidden and unknown arises when the Life-fullness, the Being, the Divine Power, is permitted to show itself, to make revelations, to infill the world and your body-mind so that you recognize the body-mind in the Spirit. The body-mind is not only what it seems to be in itself, associated with a pattern of experience. In every moment, the body- mind in its configuration of experience must be recognized in the Spirit, or Infinite Radiance of the Being. Emotional conversion is whole bodily surrender into the Holy Spirit, the Transcendental Life-Principle that pervades all phenomena. Therefore, surrender to the Spirit. Become part of the breathing, rhythmic manifestation prior to mind, the Radiant Ignorance that is fulfilling itself in this moment as our own body-minds. Something is appearing as us right now. Someone is being us right now, and yet that One is not us. Do you know what I mean? That Someone is being us right now, that we are being dreamed by that One, and yet that that one is not any of us, is a Realization that you may imagine someone might have in the dream state. We are all identities within the dream, and I am the persona in the dream who tells you that we are being dreamed, who tells you to notice that we are all simply happening and not creating ourselves. We can manipulate our future within that happening, but the happening itself is a mystery. We do not know what it is. We are not in the position of control. At the level of the mere existence of everything, we are utterly dependent upon the Spirit. We arise within the Spirit Being, Who is entirely Awake as this moment, Who is the consciousness and energy in which we are arising. That One is being all of us right now. Everything we seem to be is an expression of the qualities of that One. The more aligned we become to this understanding, the more spiritual we become, and the more wisdom we represent. This is the fundamental discovery, you see. No experience is senior to this realization. It is the Truth of experience. Look. Something is going on here. Something is appearing as all of us. Something is being us right now. We - referring to ourselves in conventional fashion - are not in charge of it. We are just looking at it. Who is being all of us? The Spirit Personality is being this moment, is being these people, is being you. The same One is being you and all the people around you. The same Dreamer, the same Being, the same fundamental Identity, is looking at all others here. Behind the persona in this moment is the Dreamer, communicating the factuality of Himself and teaching the Way in which we recognize the Truth and become transfigured. The One of which I speak, the One to which I refer, the One with which I am identified, is All- Pervading, Transcendental. It is the Spirit Being in which we all inhere, presently. We all equally are identical to that One, and all of us represent, in some particular fashion, the direct agency of the one who is dreaming. Consider the Spirit. Consider That in which the body-mind inheres, in which it is arising. Enter into such sympathy with the Spirit that any inspection from the point of view of the ego-contraction is transcended. Let it dissolve in the Spirit-position. You are all aware of the Spirit-Power-Being in the moment, are you not? That Being is God. You can create physical and mental reflections of That, but they never become more than that Infinite Substance and Mystery. |
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