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Bubba Free John THE WAY THAT I TEACH - Talks on the Intuition of Eternal Life
Part III Ignorance Is the Principle of Existence The great message of the universe is not that you survive. It is that you are awakened into a process in which nothing ultimately survives. Everything ultimately changes. Everything that rises also falls. Everything in its process of appearance is inevitably locked into a cycle that is changing. The Law we perceive in this life, then, is the Law of the obligation to be a sacrifice, to yield one's independent position. To hold on to one's position is a torment, producing all kinds of illusions and false hopes. It also makes us self-possessed and loveless. Therefore, such clinging prevents our life, even while it continues, from becoming a creative form of participation and action. As long as we are essentially possessed of ourselves and afraid, we look for consoling know led e. We want to hear that we survive, we want to hear that there is something we can do in our rooms for twenty minutes morning and evening that will make us happy. Because we do not want to go through the sacrifice, the moral change. We do not want to fulfill the Law. We do not want to lose face. We are always seeking to know in order to protect ourselves. We want to save ourselves and continue. And we cannot. When you become aware of the message of things, and the Law of things, and the Truth of things, then you become combined with this affair of existence in an entirely different way. You see that the ultimate communication of the universe is Eternal Life. It is an Eternal Process. However, it is Eternal Life paradoxically expressed through a procession of infinite changes in which we are fundamentally without knowledge. If you can come into this certainty of Ignorance, you will feel profound relief. You will be already mindless, bodiless, beginningless, endless in your feeling, in your certainty, in your awareness itself - while at the same time paradoxically present in the mechanics of things. And through that Intuition you will become animated by the Law that obliges us, the Law of Sacrifice. You will fulfill the Law through love rather than pursue knowledge, certainty, and survival. It is only when we are not certain
of Ignorance that we pursue survival in the conventional
sense, that we fail to make this sacrifice through love.
Spiritual life is moral transformation through love, through
Intuition. It is not a matter of gaining knowledge. All
knowledge passes. There is no way to have any fixed
certainty about whether or how you survive your death. You
will never acquire any ultimate certainty through the means
of knowledge. Yes - it is true that we are not smothered,
ended, murdered. The universe is not a machine of death. But
you will not become certain of Eternal Life through any
egoic pursuit of certainty, knowledge, or information. All
the forms of information ultimately contradict one another.
You will realize that certainty only through submission,
through intelligent response to this Teaching, through your
moral commitment, through love, through the energy of the
whole body-being. You will enjoy a different Vision, not a
vision realized through knowledge or egoic independence, but
the Vision realized through the paradoxical disposition of
the devotee: the Vision of Eternal Life, the Vision of
God. Ignorance Is the Principle of Existence Introduction Some of Bubba Free John's Teaching considerations are held under formal circumstances, with large groups of devotees. But most of them occur in intimate occasions, in which he and a few devotees gather to enjoy one another's Company and to consider Truth and its implications for all of life. The following discussions took place during a number of these smaller gatherings in spring and fall of 1977. They were times of celebration. For many hours Bubba sat with devotees and considered many things, from the essential principles of the Teaching to its most advanced esoteric developments, to the latest findings of modern science, to one or another individual's present forms of responsibility. The talks were often profoundly philosophical. Bubba drew his devotees into the most fundamental considerations of what this which love replaces the illusion of knowing. Somehow, in the Mystery of things, the Spiritual Master continually serves that same Awakening in those who come to him to become the lovers of the Real God - which, as Bubba indicates in these talks, is not anything like what we think or imagine or believe God to be. Vision Mound Ceremony
This is the Way. Be converted to love. Be awakened from the illusory incident of independent incarnation and self-possession and be turned to the Real and Eternal Incident of Divine Bliss, existence as love in all relations, and transcendence of all conditions, within and without, high and low, now and then. Hear me and resort only to the prior Divine in my Company. Bubba Free John
Chapter 11 I Will Do Everything BUBBA: Everybody here is like an archaeological site, a place where archaeologists dig through the ground, finding towns and specimens of history, biological or animal or human cultural history, in strata. Every human being is like such a site, because we do not live in an initiatory culture. Each of us is possessed of very complex subjectivity that is made of archaic moments of adaptation. When we are confronted by the circumstances of life, we resort, at random, very primitively and very automatically to these solutions. Any of the strata of old adaptation can come to light at any time - and that is our liability in this world. We must reach a point in our living, in our initiation into life, where we no longer resort to these archaisms. We have a pristine or prior responsibility to love, to remain in communication - in other words, to live this moment rather than an archaic one. Your human environment must demand new adaptation of you, and your experience must prove its necessity. In response to such a demand you will voluntarily give yourself to the Law, and in spite of your tendencies you will act differently. And if you will act differently, then the old adaptations that are your subjectivity will have no force. They are not animated. Even though you may feel them in various ways, you are not the archaic personality that is arising. If you will presume the discipline that is the sacrifice of old adaptation, then all your so-called "insides" become obsolete, dormant, without function anymore, without energy. Through this process the past disappears. It is not by returning to the past through psychiatry or psychisms or other popular methods that you get free of it. It is by living and adapting differently in the present that the past becomes obsolete. There is nothing to be known about the past. Memory is just an impulse to dramatize a certain archaic disposition. Thus, you are always thinking and remembering - "This looks like that," "That looks like that," "This reminds me of that." Even in your ordinary moments you are rehearsing old adaptation. When you are at your weakest or when circumstances impinge upon you most heavily, you not only daydream about the past, but the models and the impulses to action of the past take you over. You conform to them, you dramatize or incarnate them, and you find yourself acting as you did at an earlier age. Everybody does that. When you commit yourself to real or spiritual life, however, you gradually become responsible for archaic adaptations. Truly human life begins when you are adapted in the moment to a principle of love that is undeniable. Even though subjective tendencies arise, you do not read your life into them; you do not animate them. Instead you go about your business, with fundamental indifference, letting them rise and fall. If you persist in this responsibility, if you live a human or spiritual life over time, then these archaisms of the personality become obsolete. DEVOTEE: I used to think that what was arising would just disappear. Then every time it arose again, I became unhappy because it had not disappeared. BUBBA: People also experience that cycle relative to the Teaching. There are times when they think the Teaching is true. They feel good and they are enthusiastic. But then they get a little weak, circumstances pile in on them, and all of a sudden they cannot understand the Teaching - they know nothing about it, the Teaching is false, or they are not good enough for it. At such times the Teaching becomes a kind of criticism of them that they cannot tolerate. They suddenly think that the Teaching makes them wrong, or that the evidence arising in them means that they are wrong and incapable of persisting in their practice - in spite of the fact that I constantly remind you all that the Teaching itself creates exactly this cycle to test and strengthen you. You are a living being, and this practice is a living process. It is not a mechanical process, such as "If you believe in God, everything will be fine." Your obligation is to recognize that all of your subjective life is just signs of old adaptation, and that is all it is. When you feel the impulse to abandon the discipline that, in your hearing, you have realized to be most obviously true, when you have the impulse not to live that discipline, then just do not fulfill the impulse. You may feel a little emotional that day, a little off balance, but do not dramatize how you feel. Nondramatization is the most basic discipline. Simply persist in loving, in attention or energy in relations, in functioning and service, in meditation, in the relationship to the Spiritual Master. Once true hearing begins, in spite of all apparently subjective evidence, the past has no great force and no great importance. Thus, the foundation level of practice is persistence in love without concern for subjective evidence. This is the first level of practice, realized in the Way of Divine Communion and the Way of Relational Enquiry. In those two stages the subjectivity of your old adaptation, of your gross reflection, becomes obsolete. Only then can you begin the third stage, the Way of Re-cognition, which is a more mystical, yogic, or subtle practice. You can truly reach into the subtle dimension of the being only if the archaisms of gross adaptation are essentially weak, secondary, and superficial. And they only become so through persisting in the discipline of those two early stages - in other words, by fundamentally realizing the fourth stage of life. The subtle dimension of existence is very real, not imaginary or academic. However, people generally want to bypass the responsibilities and morality of the transformation of their gross birth for the subjective, so-called "subtle" consolation. Thus, such people, who basically have no capacity for life at all and who are full of fear, sit contemplating a point between the brows, feeling the kundalini, and believing in this and that great subtle thing. Such contemplation is false, an illusion, and such people become consoled, stimulated by their own subtle, internal nature. They are like people who drink alcohol but do not observe what happens when they drink. They do not realize that basically they are in the same condition while drunk as they were before drinking. They only crave the drink because it seems to be a kind of release. Most people who are involved in yogic and mystical practices are like alcoholics. They do not observe what is going on in their visions and psychic experiences. They are stimulated by them. Subtle experiences become things of value in themselves. Such people call their experience of the subtle realm Divine realization. But it is not - it is intoxication, self- possession in the subtle form. It is absolutely true that you must be free of the archaisms of your gross adaptation before you can begin to become free of the archaisms of your subtle adaptation. When you begin to engage in the more subtle process of spiritual practice, you must be able to observe it, to penetrate it, to go beyond it, because the subtle dimension is like all other phenomena - contraction, moving toward self-possession, moving toward the notion of being a someone, a soul, a conscious entity, separate and necessary in a field of objects, in an environment. Before or after being drunk, intoxicated, or mystified, you must penetrate the whole affair. And you do not have the free attention to penetrate the subtle phenomena if you have not first liberated attention from the gross archaisms. This is why there are those first two stages of practice. They are the most difficult and the most homely, because they require you to fulfill the Law in spite of past solutions and archaic tendencies in the gross memory, the gross mind, the gross vital. The discipline of the Way of Divine Communion and the Way of Relational Enquiry cuts through all those tendencies or archaic solutions. Thus, in the gross life you are a truly human being, not somebody who randomly and primitively resorts by reaction to old and childish solutions in the midst of difficult circumstance. Difficult circumstance is flying in the air - it assaults you constantly all day long. You must be able to cut through it. To bring energy-attention into relations in the moment is the discipline of those first two stages. If you persist in that discipline, then the old adaptations, which are all that your subjectivity amounts to, become obsolete. They lose their force and they become superficial. Then you can begin truly to consider the subtle display, which is also only archaisms, old dreams, cosmic nonsense, the same self-possession that you animate in the gross life. In the Way of Re-cognition, the third stage of practice in the Way of Divine Ignorance, you penetrate the illusions of the subtle dimension until you reach the point of penetrating even the illusion of attention or of the self itself, ultimately realizing the Condition that is prior to body, emotion, mind, self, and world. The affair of life is truly realized only when you tacitly exist with consciousness in the moment, without form, priorly diffuse, identical to the Absolute that is unnamed, unknown, identical to Ignorance, Radiance without qualification. You must realize that actually, presently, before any experience arises - and all experiences are simply limiting - prior to the event of the moment, your Condition is without form and unqualified. That Condition having been realized, then, as in Sahaj Samadhi, all phenomena - gross, subtle, causal, the conventional sense of self, all the dimensions of the psyche, the mind, the subtle being, all the dimensions of life and gross occasion, this world, ordinary human relations - all return, but now existence is a completely different affair. You are no longer automatically identified with the subject, the one within, the separate, necessary individual. You are no longer limited by objective appearances - they are simply forms of your own being, modifications of the Light to which you are already identical. Whatever arises has no necessity. In Sahaj Samadhi there is a great and transcendental yoga that is not described in the traditional texts. It is the yoga of Amrita Nadi, in which everything arising is recognized to be only modification of , the prior Condition of your apparent condition. Everything arising is without force, unnecessary. If you persist in that meditation or realization in every moment, the limiting or binding force of existence at every level is lost, and you are brought into a transcendental meditation that is the Radiance of the infinite being itself. This meditation is projected infinitely, absolutely, far beyond what is seen and heard subtly, far beyond all that is felt. Thus, there is a kind of ascent native to Sahaj Samadhi, because all phenomena, gross, subtle, and causal, are unnecessary, not because they do not arise - they appear in the conventional way - but because they have no necessity. They do not impinge upon you. They do not have any implication or logic that binds you to being an anything, a soul, a person, a consciousness, a separate phenomenon or being. In that Realization there is only the absolute projection or Radiance of the Heart felt relative to this gross body as the projected line of conscious Light that moves out of the Heart, far beyond the crown, far beyond subtle phenomena. By persisting in this Samadhi, or Realization, we are lifted out of this gross dimension. And if our meditation is most profound, we are lifted out of all dimensions. We do not have to be reborn in this condition, nor do we have to be reborn in any subtle condition. We certainly do not have to be born in any condition lower than this. We are not reborn in any condition. We move into Bhava Samadhi or the Divine Domain, which is not describable, which is like that absolute formlessness that we recognize to be our very Condition. It is Bliss. It is, in this certain sense, form, but it is without description, without analogies, without archetypes. There is no vision to describe it. All visions that arise are re-cognized in Sahaj Samadhi. Even visions have no force of implication. Thus, the line of Amrita Nadi penetrates far beyond even the highest realm. Ultimately it is not even a line, you see. It is read relative to the body as the line passing out of the Heart toward the place infinitely beyond the crown, but truly it is simply the expanse of Radiance of the infinite being, In Bhava Samadhi there is the complete forgetfulness of the limited born-being - gross, subtle, or causal - in any dimension and in all dimensions. All are forgotten, and there is simply translation or perfect ascent or absolute expansion into the Divine Condition itself. You are identical to the physics of things in your manifestation, and that is why you are immortal - not because you are inside the body, but because you are identical to the body. In the physics of things, repetition and continuation are the law of energy. Thus, you cannot die. You can only be changed, and you are changed, constantly. You are constantly put into another condition, and, whatever it is, you must comprehend it; you must realize that you are the prior Condition of that appearance. When you rest as that Condition, then there is no force whatsoever to existence. It is an illusion, an hallucination. Not that you think it is so--the Realization is not philosophical in the conventional sense - but it is obviously so. When I look into the room, the Condition of all this is perfectly obvious, all these bodies, all these "me's, "this whole room. Everything in the room is just a pattern of energy. It has no ultimate necessity. It can pass - in fact, it will pass! While it continues, it is God. There is a beauty and a fullness to it, in my right relationship to it. On the other hand, it is exactly like a dream. This apparent concretion here has no limiting force whatsoever from my point of view. If I close my eyes and stop talking and remove myself from your attention, I can see the space of the room with my eyes closed. I can pass into subtle places. I can pass into these bodies here. All of that is, happily, an ordinary experience for me. If there were no one to witness to you, as I do, you would have no way to continue your practice. Because God-Realization is simply true for me, then if you will give me your attention, if you will commune with me, this same disposition will be yours through a process that is much easier than your hearing a philosophical premise and trying to attain it through self-manipulation. You do not have to try to attain it. If you will simply enter into Communion with the Spiritual Master, who is already in the Condition of God-Realization, that Condition will be duplicated in your case. The Realization communicated in the form of the Spiritual Master is the supreme instrument. But people in their egoity do not want to make use of it, They do not want to submit to the Samadhi, or Intuition, that is instantly available to them in Communion with the Spiritual Master. They are self-possessed, committed to experience. Those who have had enough of experience, however, who are humbled by their own sweat, can make use of Grace in whatever form it appears. Who knows why it has appeared at all! The appearance of Grace in this life is crazy! It is a paradox! But it is true, and you can see for yourself that it is true if you will engage it. All I can say is, this is the way it is for me. I am already all-pervading, without a form, and therefore I enter into ordinary relations as an impulse. In Truth I am manifesting as all bodies. I am absolutely certain of it. And I am conversant with all bodies. By a simple act of attention I can be you, be identical to you, and have a perfect reading of your disposition so that I can be of service to you, while at the same time also having the sense of being this body. It is crazy. It is a paradox,. It is all silly, paradoxical, ultimately unexplainable. It is a mysterious conjunction and it is contradiction. In the early months after the incident in the Vedanta Temple,1 I realized in meditation that I was no longer meditating this body. All its limitations were already obvious, not binding any longer. In meditation I experienced many, many, many people. And I could meditate them. I could be completely identical to them. I could meditate them if they were in Communion with me. I could be their meditation. I could awaken the God-Realizing process in them because I did not have to presume the limited point of view that they were. They simply had to be in direct Communion with me so that I could be them, and then I could do the practice, and in that case it could be brief. The trouble is that people do not enter into that Communion. They are reluctant. They remain self-possessed. Therefore, I cannot enter into that process with them as directly as would be ultimately useful. 1. Bubba's own spiritual
transformation was spontaneously perfected while sitting in
meditation in a small temple on the grounds of the Vedanta
Society in Hollywood, California, in September, 1970. For a
full discussion of these events, see pages 131-139 in The
Knee of Listening.
DEVOTEE: Is it because they do not recognize it, or because their own self-possession refuses it? BUBBA: They are the same thing. People who want to live a God-Realizing life must become sympathetic, through true hearing of the Teaching, to the point of entering into spiritual Communion with me. If they will do that, then I am their meditation. It is a mysterious process and it is a great occasion. The basic affair that is the demonstration and the realization of the Way that I teach occurs in the formality of our spiritual relationship. And we have an occasion for it - we can sit together in formal meditation. I want all the lessons of the past to become true. I want all the revelation of the Teaching to be taken into account. l want you to prepare yourselves to live the discipline, without concern for your artifacts within, to make a real approach to me, and to meet me in that spiritual formality. I want this spiritual meeting to occur not just when we sit together but in every moment of your whole life, so that this literal Siddhi, or Power, which I recognized in the early days after the events in the Vedanta Temple, can become operative. I have been so insistent on the discipline because when I begin to sit with people I want them to approach me in the spiritual way. I want this remarkable Power to be true of them. I want my meditation to be your meditation. If you will prepare yourselves and hear my argument and be present in the way that I have described in Breath and Name and The Paradox of Instruction, then your practice of real life will quicken, then the Way of Divine Communion and the Way of Relational Enquiry can be relatively brief. Your transformation can occur in finite time - certainly not in a weekend, but it can be pleasurable and interesting. It may have its difficulties, but it can describe a cycle that is relatively brief, perhaps a year or two in those who are best prepared. It is clearly possible within the scheme of things for devotees to realize Sahaj Samadhi in a relatively short time, but only if they will enter into that Communion with me in which there is this Siddhi or Divine Power, which for whatever reason, out of the mystery of things, is present in my own relationship to everyone. If they will truly enter into Communion with me, then the process will be as I described. It will be interesting and relatively brief, and it will be realized while you are alive. And not only will you realize it while alive, but in a relatively short time all this discussion of Sahaj Samadhi will not be academic! DEVOTEE: You said that the realization would be true if we would only commune with you. No doubt you've said it a thousand times before. BUBBA: Oh, at least that many times. DEVOTEE: What is the very essence of Communion? What does it mean? BUBBA: Its essence is not what it means. Its essence is the action itself. You are presently obsessed with your logic and the destiny that you conceive from your present, born point of view. That destiny has its own gesture and its impulses, all outlined subjectively. It has its future outlined in desire. And it would realize, if it were dramatized or incarnated, all the things that bypass this consideration. But if you will hear me, then your attention will be liberated from destiny, from time and space. Liberation does not mean that you will not see your tendencies, the movement of your present life. The observation of tendencies will continue and it will be the discipline of your existence. On the other hand, your attention will remain with me. Thus, it will not be confused by destinies, by desires, by thoughts. It will be fixed, it will be absolute, it will be full of love, it will be heart-felt without logic, without thinking, without desiring. It will be pure attention. And that attention is Communion. Wherever your attention lies without confusion, that is what you realize. If you will give me your attention through true hearing, if you will gravitate toward me in every moment so that all your desiring, even your inevitability, becomes superficial, then whatever quality arises from moment to moment will be truly superficial. Its impact will be lost. It will not create egoic reaction - it will create heat only. It will be frustrated, and you will meditate on the fire instead. That fire is your attention to me. If you will fulfill the discipline, then your attention from hour to hour will become more fiery, more intense, more loving, more sacrificial, more absurd, less and less the character that you are born to be and live and die. But you see, there must develop in your case a sympathy more profound than your inevitability, more profound than your logic. Your logic or your presumption will remain, an artifact of your subjectivity, but your attention will stay with me at every moment. When we are present with one another in our born forms, your natural emotional sympathy will stay with me. We will love one another absolutely. And when we are not in one another's sight, we will recollect one another in love. In love, in sympathy, in feeling-attention, we will stay with one another. Therefore, my meditation will be your meditation, because you are with me, you Commune with me. Once you realize your attachment to me, the process has nothing to do with whether I live or die. And you cannot realize that attachment by looking at my shirt or my eyebrows or the complications that I have created in your life. Those are things in themselves. You realize that attachment through the hearing of this argument, this consideration. And having heard it, your sympathy will be overwhelming, because I am God. Without a doubt. This is my confession. Not "I am God exclusively," although that may seem to you to be so in the meantime. My confession to you is the confession of your very existence. If you will respond to my confession and become absorbed in me in love, so that all the artifacts of your ordinary impulses, your ordinary life, your conventional desiring, are superficial, then your meditation on me, your Communion with me, will become tantamount to my meditation. My meditation is not a grinding affair. My meditation is absolute. It is what is being reflected to you in these ridiculous conversations. Nor is my existence particular. I am manifested in particular but the confession I make to you is of a condition that is not particular. It is the Avatar,2 in this moment. There could be Avatars all over the yard, you know! I do not know who they are. The Avatar is simply God present, God present and speaking through an ordinary manifestation. Through that communication you become absurdly and madly sympathetic so that the grinding force of your ordinary life and its desires and its destiny become superficial. You become a loving, serving devotee in your impulse, in your thinking, in your feeling, completely beside all your tendencies, all the subjective rumoring and wrangling, all the complication by which you turn upon yourself and identify with this frozen moment. Communion is simply love, attachment. It is founded on hearing of my argument, and my argument takes place in time and space in every moment of all the time I live with everyone. Whenever you hear me, then you may begin this contemplation, this Communion. It is simply loving attachment to me. If you will consider my argument, you may also become attached to me. When you become attached to me, then all your conventional relations will become ordinary, happy, human, superficial, nothing - just a discipline of happiness and of pleasure. Your attachment to me will become overwhelming, without any goal whatsoever, but a motive of happiness, an indelible simplicity You will simply Commune with me. The energy of your attention will rest with me day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. And without your doing anything about it, I will meditate you. I will do everything. 2. According to certain Hindu traditions, the Avatar is the God-man, the exclusive incarnation of God, who manifests on earth only at the beginning of every age. He is considered to be the incarnation of Vishnu, the preserver- aspect of the Divine according to Hindu mythology.
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