Beezone Articles

Adi Da Articles

Vol1. No. 10 - The Journal of the Teaching of Bubba Free John, the Western Spiritual Master

The Creative Function of Life-Frustration in the Process of Self-Sacrifice

In relations with the world of mankind, "I" feels and observes itself to be easily and profoundly disturbed and distracted by mechanical, irresponsibly motivated, utterly self-oriented, and disturbing people. Indeed, this automaton, altogether subhuman, is identified by ''1'' to be generally present in the form of most people, or as the principal and casual expression of most people. The moral and intimate, sane and humorous, responsible, intelligent, creative, and spiritual expressions that would constitute real human companionship and society appear at the present time to be almost totally absent from our ordinary worldly possibilities. And they are only tentatively or partially contained even in the sphere of our own creative and local or private human relations.

As a consequence, ''I'' is, in general, a disturbed individual. The disturbances granted by ordinary life move us constantly to realize levels of communication and effect that may transform the theatre of our own experience and that of others in general.

At times, however, the frustration is so profound that ''I'' feels nearly immobilized, unable to see the possibility of significant, immediate, or ultimate and permanent effect upon this unconscious world, so stupid and arbitrary in all its ways. There are times when true ecstasy seems impossible. There is frustration. There is resort to the caves of inwardness, abstract insight, consoling illusions, and mechanical states of personal psycho-physical pleasure and certainty. But delight, release, and sublime participation in the displayed existence of the total World seem at times to be impossible. Indeed, it is always a struggle, and never a permanent realization.

Life is a creative opportunity, motivated by frustration of the impulse of life toward ecstasy. There is no factual end to the struggle. There is at best a human maturity, in which frustration is not permitted to become negatively dominant, permitting no change or motion. Rather, frustration is maintained as a positive or creative circumstance for motion, change, and, ultimately, ecstatic participation in the Transcendental Reality.

In any case, the Law will be fulfilled. We are obliged from birth to be a sacrifice. We are obliged to a participatory existence that is most truly and freely realized when it is ecstasy-self-release via love, or whole body feeling-attention to the degree of Infinity. Nonetheless, such a life of love, or creative participation in the theatre of life-frustration, is a purifying fire that moves toward release or sacrifice of self rather than fixed survival.

Frustration must begin to awaken us at the heart to a feeling sacrifice or release of self and attention from the reactive contractions experiences tend to generate in the body-mind. And that heart-generative responsibility, rather than any functional form of self-exploitation, subtle or gross, must become our essential means of ecstasy. Only then is ''1'' a human being, real, moral, and true.

The childish individual depends on the Spiritual Master as a parent, seeking his living 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 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 what 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 which is 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.

III

The Divine Reality, or God, is not ultimately the Savior of our lives. The Divine is That to which our lives must be a sacrifice. Indeed, it is the intuition of the Divine that permits us to live as a sacrifice rather than a Narcissistic, reactive, and self-possessed struggle for ultimate survival.

The Truth is not that we survive forever as we now are or conceive ourselves to be. Nor is God, or the Divine Reality, the Instrument of such permanent survival, immortality, or salvation. We are necessarily changing and mortal in our present structural form. But we tend to react to this sense of our destiny by seeking to protect, glorify, permanently fulfill, and immortalize ourselves as we are. The discovery of the Divine through true hearing, intuition, self-observation, functionally appropriate discipline, and responsible higher growth permits us to be at peace with the mortal or finite destiny of our present independent form and circumstance. We become capable of self-release or sacrifice in the case of the Intuition of the Real.

Therefore, we must awaken to the Reality that obliges us to be born and to change and to pass out of sight-or else life is a tormented absurdity and a mean unrescued center of illusions. Those who awaken to the Divine Reality and become a continuous sacrifice into It find each moment to be either a passing lesson, or a test, or a temporary blessing in the Mystery of Amazement in which we appear and to the State of which we are always dissolving.

The arising of lives and of all changes is inevitable. Our responsibility is to be the fulfillment of the Law, which is sacrifice or love. Thus, we will persist as selves and changes as long as these persist, but we will in every moment be the release of these into the Reality or Intensity that is their Source and Bliss.