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Bubba Free John THE WAY THAT I TEACH
- Talks on the Intuition of Eternal
Life
Chapter 3 Come to Me When You Are Already Happy BUBBA: Finding ourselves alive in an independent form, vulnerable and subject to death, we become frightened, afraid of extinction. This fearful mood motivates us in all that we hope, believe, and do. We seek the consolation that we will continue in the face of the threat of death. This urge for consolation enters into all of our considerations. Any belief in our own continuation after death is created in our need to be consoled. Thus, if we are to discover the destiny beyond physical death, we must first of all become free of the demand for consolation that causes us merely to believe rather than to inspect, to understand and be free. Otherwise, we could never be certain that we are not just believing because we are afraid. We cannot be certain of our own spiritual or religious hopes and beliefs unless we are completely free of the need to be consoled. We might observe something about life that implies continuation after death, but we cannot be certain so long as we feel compelled to believe it as a consolation for our fear. Until you yourself become free of fear altogether, free of the need to be consoled, you have no way of knowing with any certainty whether or not you will survive death. If you consider the possible future, you notice that, to a large degree, fear determines what you choose to believe or observe about survival after death. In other words, you cannot feel certain about surviva lor anything-until you are free of this fear. DEVOTEE: That's probably true. BUBBA: Until there is freedom from fear there is no knowledge whatsoever. There are just ideas, hopes, and beliefs, all of which are very superficial, because fear is stronger. We are not really consoled even then. DEVOTEE: We are always seeking consolations. BUBBA: But even when consolations occur, we are not satisfied, because in our fear we doubt even our own experience when it arises. Thus, no one is satisfied by the ordinary consolations in life that we are always seeking in order to feel better, to be relieved of the pain or sorrow or fear of existence. All the experiences that we repeat and try to acquire do not satisfy us at any time while we are alive until we are completely free of fear, completely free of the need to be consoled by these experiences. Otherwise, our relationship to consolations is one of doubt and fear itself. How do we become completely free of fear, then? DEVOTEE: It's funny you should ask. I was just going to ask you the very same question! (Laughter) But I'd say you have to penetrate fear in Communion with the Spiritual Master. BUBBA: But how does that practice become freedom from fear? The experience of the Company of the Spiritual Master similarly fails to console you or relieve you of fear and doubt until you are already free of fear and doubt and can approach him truly. So on what basis will you become free of fear? Nothing with which you can be brought into contact will liberate you from it or console you to the point of being free of it. As we have concluded, fear is stronger. You are afraid, aren't you? DEVOTEE: Absolutely. As we're talking. Not quaking with terror, but definitely afraid in some fundamental way. BUBBA: You are existing in a state of fear at the present time, at this very moment. And all the characteristics of your own life are an expression of this condition. Everything you do, everything you seek to experience, everything you find to make yourself feel good, rests on fear. But you never really touch that fear. You distract your attention from it to a degree, but your life still remains an expression of it. Your whole life is a search for relief from it. But nothing will relieve you. If there is to be relief from fear, it must occur prior to the pursuit of experience and possibility. So what is this fear? SECOND DEVOTEE: It seems that fear is directly related to trying to know, to the action of ego that is knowing, and to finding that you are always failing. BUBBA: Okay, but what is it essentially? We do not just fear in the face of something particular. We are already afraid. So what is fear? FIRST DEVOTEE: It is just a gnawing feeling that something terrible is true, that separation from happiness is somehow inescapable. BUBBA: This is how we make sense of it, but what is it, most directly? THIRD DEVOTEE: It is in the body, in a bodily and mental reaction to everything. BUBBA: Just as it appears as a reaction to or in relation to every kind of external object, fear also appears reflected in all our mechanisms, physical, emotional, mental. It pervades all these things. It is expressed in everything. This is true. But it is prior to them. It is not caused by any of them. It is just reflected there. That being the case, what is fear? Is it a quality of feeling altogether, expressed as physical feeling, emotional feeling, mental feeling? What is it a response to? What does it exist in relationship to, fundamentally? It is reflected relative to everything, but what is it fundamentally? SECOND DEVOTEE: Well, then, it seems that fear is just the force of everything that arises. BUBBA: Fear is projected on all our experience, but it is not itself inherent in all things. It is a characteristic of our usual condition that we project on all our experience and circumstance. Examine it as your experience itself and see if fear is inherent in all things or if it is a characteristic of your own consciousness that is unnecessary. There is no information that can liberate you from it, because our whole involvement with information and knowledge is secondary to fear itself. Thus, freedom from fear is based on a fundamental liberation that occurs prior to all external causes. You cannot even talk about the Divine in any sense that is fully satisfying, happy, and free until you are already free of fear. Belief in God is not the way to become free of fear. It is merely consolation. If we are to enjoy Communion with God, we must be free of fear already. FOURTH DEVOTEE: I have been sitting here feeling and observing fear, and something about it seems to be just the opposite of your admonition to radiate. Fear is just the opposite, the collapse of that forceful presence. It seems to be simply a contraction of it. BUBBA: Can you radiate fear? If you bring the quality of radiance to the position of fear, can you continue to fear? FOURTH DEVOTEE: It doesn't seem like you can. BUBBA: You are in touch with this fear. It is not even that you are afraid, because being afraid implies that you are responding to something objective. You are fear itself. If you were aware of fear (and you have no choice, no option, because you are fear), and if you were to radiate in that position of fear, what would happen to fear? THIRD DEVOTEE: Well, you would think it would be obviated, but.... BUBBA: Don't think about it, do it! Radiate from this position of fear. Completely experience it. Feel as fear-which is quite natural. You do not have to get hysterical to do it. It is already there, you see. Well, radiate from this position. (Pause) Okay, what happens to fear, what is it when you radiate? FOURTH DEVOTEE: It doesn't seem to have any negative force. BUBBA: When you radiate from the position of fear, and fear is transformed, how would you describe yourself then? What is the quality of the feeling? If you radiated from your ordinary position of fear without ceasing, what would it be? Do it. (Pause) Is it still fear? THIRD DEVOTEE: No, it's not. BUBBA: What is it? THIRD DEVOTEE: It is love. BUBBA: Does it have an object? FOURTH DEVOTEE: No, it doesn't necessarily have a particular object. BUBBA: Love can be projected onto objects, just as fear may, but it has no object. It is itself a fundamental condition, the fundamental Condition of existence, just as fear in the other case is the fundamental condition of your existence. FIRST DEVOTEE: That principle does not become operative when love is operative. So love obviates fear in that moment. BUBBA: Which is most fundamental, love or fear? THIRD DEVOTEE: Well, Bubba, it seems that fear is not exactly a superimposition on love, but a disturbance of love. And it seems that love is first and fundamental. BUBBA: Yes, fear is secondary to love. Fear is a kind of distortion of the original Form, the original Condition. It is unnecessary. So we become free of fear by abiding in our native or prior Condition, not imploded, not engaged in the reaction that is fear. Thus, rather than projecting that contraction on all our experience, we exist as love, effortless, unobstructed feeling. Usually all our effort is a response to the sense of fear and the aggravation of experience. But from the point of view of love, which is not fear, we are no longer in need of consolation. We may simply be satisfied in our ordinary relations then. And we may be free to observe the conditions of existence, of experience, of knowledge. Now this is a different matter altogether from assuming that you can become free of fear merely by thinking about it, by analyzing it. People like to think that, in a moment of reflection, they can become completely free of fear. One well-known spiritual philosopher continually tells his casual audiences that they can become "completely free of fear!" in the course of an evening's consideration. You are simply to sit there and think about it, and then when you leave the auditorium you will be "completely free of fear!" You all like this idea of going inside, working on yourselves, being philosophical, or thinking things through, and believing that such activity is supposed to be or lead to salvation and happiness and freedom. But the spiritual demand is a moral demand. There is no freedom from fear until you live a life of love. There is no freedom until subjectivity or mere consideration becomes incident, new adaptation, a new practice of life. Literal love, which feels beyond all the limiting forces of experience, is the highest and most necessary philosophical activity or process. In that case you observe that you are already completely free of fear, whereas mere thought is self-meditation and a strategy in dilemma, fear, and lovelessness. You cannot become free of fear through mere philosophical or subjective reflection. That is total nonsense. Fear arises in our contraction, our withdrawal from the pattern of our relations, our separation from Infinity. The spiritual demand is not, "Think about all of that and then it will not be true, and you will not have to be afraid anymore." The spiritual communication is a demand for a moral transformation of your whole existence, your whole life. You cannot be free of fear j ust by sitting here thinking about it or reading a book. You must consider the mechanism of fear, yes, but then you must go and serve and work and love and be transformed, newly adapted. You must live a life in which fear, the mood of contraction, is made obsolete by love, which is feeling-attention to Infinity. No discussion in a hall or from an armchair completely relieves you of fear or of any problems you might have in life, including your compulsive thinking mind. All of these things that you are suffering are expressions of one affair, this contraction of the whole body-being, the contraction of feeling-attention, the collapse on oneself. That is the whole matter. And to be free of it we must begin to live differently. Simply to think about and consider freedom may make it sound good here and now, but that subjective activity does not change anything fundamentally. Even in that case, you are still everything that your past adaptation makes you. So you must go and live differently and it is very difficult to live differently) Only our insight, our responsiveness to the Spiritual Master, our enjoyment of the Grace of the Divine, makes living differently tolerable. Only Divine Communion makes us able to pass through the moments when we are tending to return to our previous state, to the consolations of our childishness. So whatever is wrong with anybody, whatever is troubling you, it is a matter of whether you love or not. The things that are wrong with you are expressions of your contraction of feeling-attention. When you are feeling good, it is because you are not exercising this recoil so profoundly as when you are feeling bad. But to get rid of the recoil a little bit is not sufficient. That is not spiritual life. That might be sufficient to improve your ordinary middle-class life, but it is not sufficient for true spiritual Realization, Happiness altogether, which is a profoundly creative process. The fundamental Principle of our existence is to persist as love, as Radiance prior to fear. Love is the fundamental Condition. Everything else is secondary to it, mere experience to be met either by fear or love, by contracting upon ourselves or radiating in all relations to Infinity. As long as we are not love, then every moment is a problem, a dilemma, in which we try to manipulate the circumstances of experience in order to console ourselves. But all our experience is distorted, all our relations are corrupted, everything fails to satisfy. Thus, we look for beliefs of all kinds, because we are afraid, unsatisfied, and unconsoled. You cannot truly enter into spiritual life in order to be consoled, to be relieved of fear. But that is exactly why the usual man engages spiritual practice, in order to attain the goal of bliss, or release from fear, or immortality. The search for happiness is not the position from which to enter truly into spiritual life. You must approach God as a devotee, already blissful, already free of fear, already alive as love. Therefore, come to me when you are already happy. This is the secret of spiritual life: Love is God Communion, or freedom from fear. The inherent disposition of Radiance is God-Communion, presently God-Communion, in this moment. No objective experience, no vision, no esoteric structure or condition of any kind is God-Realization, nor does any experience or condition add to this Communion. The path itself is to be love, to be unobstructed feeling attention, to persist in love under all conditions, and thereby to transform the conditions of existence from that point of view. If we abide in that Communion, then all the conditions and possibilities of existence are a great display of God that will always be benign. We need not be concerned, we need not acquire knowledge in order to be free of it all. In fact, we are not in a position to know what anything is. Our position is Ignorance, or God-Communion, love itself, to exist without obstruction in the continuous instant of Infinity that is in every moment. In our life with one another over the years, we have considered every kind of experience, every functional dimension in which your attention and feeling appear, all the esoteric matters, all the structures of the bodybeing, stages of adaptation, growth, visionary phenomena, energies, the matter of subjectivity, "I" as the body. The demonstration of the Teaching has had so many moments, there has been so much to consider, that it is impossible for you to contain it all in the mind in this moment and be happy. The path is so complex that it cannot be contained in the mind in a single moment nor grasped in such a way that you could live it totally, fully, unless you were to understand or realize the essential Principle of which all the rest of the Way is just an emanation encountered in its own moment. All the details need not be remembered in order for you to live the path. Only the essential Principle, or Divine Communion, must be remembered. I have communicated this essential Principle all along. No matter what the complexity of the development of this spiritual life that I have been considering with you at any moment, I have always summarized it and returned you to the essential Principle. That Principle is the summary of Bubba Free John's entire life, which he has described in The Knee of Listening. He passed through all of these complexities-just as you may also encounter complex experience. But regardless of the experience, high or low, there was one single, dominant Principle, one great and fundamental Significance. It is the same Principle that you must continuously realize as your responsibility apart from all else. Everything else is merely an emanation of it, an elaboration that does not in any sense qualify this fundamental responsibility. In The Knee of Listening I described it as "understanding." It is the same as Love, unobstructed feeling attention, God-Communion. If you will adhere to it, you need not be concerned for any complexity of experience. Experience is altogether without significance. Not a single vision or experience adds to God Communion. All experience only realizes a lesser destiny than the Destiny of God-Communion, which moves not to heavens but directly to God in every moment. Therefore, in every moment we must be responsible for God-Communion, for moving beyond the contraction of feeling-attention, the avoidance of relationship, the contraction that is the ego, the falling into the principal mood of fear and thereby experiencing existence as a dilemma, as a search for consolation that never ends and that is never satisfied. It cannot even be said that there is growth in God Communion. It does not change. You do not begin with feeling-attention and then gradually add to it visions of blue deities and subtle realms, which also, along with this love, become God-Communion. No, God-Communion is always the same. It is never any different from your realization of it in this very instant. Nor must you fulfill psycho-physical processes of transformation in order to realize God. Rather, on the basis of God-Realization already, you quite naturally participate in the psycho-physical transformation of ordinary experience. Thus, the principle of God Realization is inherent in this Way. It is not the goal. Nor is anything ever added to God-God-Realization, to the realization of Ignorance Radiance, or Love. Nothing is ever added to it, and none of your experiences is more than that Realization. The spiritual traditions are filled with doctrines of practice and esoteric knowledge, which are assumed to be necessary and leading to God. Thus, people think that their spiritual life is the practice of methodical and strategic approaches that lead through this life, through many lives perhaps, to the ultimate moment, the ultimate hope. But all such practice is fruitless. No knowledge is God. Even the traditional path of devotion, wherein you work yourself into a fierce state of emotional ecstasy for God, does not realize God. You do not have to bother with any of the esoteric practices. Even if you were to engage them, you would only have to be liberated from them eventually. That liberation from all experience is precisely the Teaching of the Way of Divine Ignorance. No practice realizes Truth. Truth is realized through the inspection of experience to the point of realizing that experience has no obligatory force and that none of it is the point of spiritual life. The point is this single responsibility, this single principle, this single inspection of your state in this moment, of your Narcissistic self-concern, of the contraction toward fear. Be responsible for that contraction so that you exist instead as Love, or God-Communion. That is everything. That is the whole Teaching. There is nothing to be attained. There is a single principle for which we must be responsible, and that is God-Realization. It is not the way to God-Realization. It is God-Realization itself. It is the disposition in Truth. It is the Way of life. Once it is Realized, nothing else obliges us. In itself it is not a matter of any vision, any esoteric or worldly experience. All conditions, if they do arise, are undermined by the force of God Communion and are no longer obligatory, no longer your destiny. You pass right through them. There is only one discipline: to become responsible for the contraction of feeling-attention by moving beyond fear in every moment into the disposition of love. It is the only discipline. If you will hear this, you do not have to do anything else. Live this process with me and it is always the same. It does not itself grow or change. It is simple, direct, absolute. I will always bring the argument to you in the form of your practice, until you actually come to the point of hearing me and transforming your life. This, then, is the ultimate consideration of spiritual life. It always has been. In Krishna's argument to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna reveals all the esoteric matters to his devotee, and then he tells him that they are not truth. He brings Arjuna to the point of understanding the fruitlessness of the whole affair of ordinary life and spiritual seeking. And then he communicates to him the essential Process, which is not strategically to turn the ego, or the contraction that is fear, toward various kinds of subjective and objective conditions and methods. On the contrary, Krishna tells Arjuna to "abandon all dharmas" -not only all duties, but all teachings, all philosophies, all supports, all methods, all approaches, all meditation and contemplation, all esotericism, all consolations in the world, all ways of trying to be fulfilled in the world, all ways of trying to examine the conditions of life in order to feel that they are all right-and he tells him, "Turn to Me. Abandon all supports and turn to Me. Remember Me. Meditate on Me. Remember Me and fight." Go back, change everything, change yourself entirely, change everything entirely on the basis of this Remembrance, this Communion with Me. Not "Me" in terms of the independent man Krishna, or even his subtle form as it might appear in visions or dreams, but the "Me" that is God, the Spiritual Master in Truth, alive as Love itself. Love is God-Communion, and that is the whole path. Live it under all conditions. If you live by that principle, you change everything. Fear is a way of creating and solidifying everything. Fear is the ego. From the point of view of the ego we create all of our experience. The ego is projected on all of our experience, all of our human relations, all of our esoteric relations. Everything we do is an expression of that egoic dilemma. Therefore, the way to change everything is not to take up the position of fear or the egoic dilemma any longer, but to be love, to live in God-Communion. Then you will also continue your experience. Whatever arises and involves you in the ordinary way, you will live from the point of view of this principle, and on its basis transform the conditions of existence. Your life will be a manifestation of God-Communion then. That is the simple affair. That is all there is to it. Jesus said the same thing very plainly. When people asked him casually, he would tell them the whole way right there in a moment-love God and be love in all your relations. That is it. There is nothing else to do. There is nothing else to realize. There is not a single experience that will add to it. That is the whole Realization. It is the whole Way. God is not at the end of it, but "the Father and I are one." This is not just true of Jesus, it is true of everyone. It is the Truth of everything. You must live from the point of
view of that Truth. Such a life is Divine. The Divine life
is not an effort toward the realization of Truth. It is to
live already in Truth. It is the Principle of life. I do not
know how to make it any more plain!
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