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Bubba Free John THE WAY THAT I TEACH - Talks
on the Intuition of Eternal Life
Chapter 9 Love Is the Sacrifice of Man BUBBA: The import of the Spiritual Master is not that he comes into the world and is love, or that God independent of man is love. The import of the Spiritual Master and the Divine Communication is that you, and every being, must be love. Every being must fulfill the Law, regardless of his or her past. It does not make any difference how difficult it is for you. The Law remains the Law. The Law is unobstructed feeling-attention under all conditions and in all relations to Infinity. If you are obstructed in feeling and attention, you fail to fulfill the Law. That is why you suffer, and why you stop growing. Until now you have adapted in complicated ways to the three lowest stages of the development of the whole body - the physical, the emotional-sexual, and the mental. But the structural destiny of mankind is to move into the fourth stage of life, wherein the heart, the psychic core of the being, truly awakens. All religions are basically about the awakening of the heart, the function of love. This is the essential idealism of humanity in our time. Nevertheless, human beings now are developing casually, realizing only the subhuman stages of life. We become human only when we awaken at the heart. We are spiritual then, God-conscious only then. Thus, profound Divine Communion, the fully spiritual initiation of the Way of Divine Ignorance, begins in the fourth stage of life. Until you are living as the awakened heart, every last one of you feels that you have been separated from the Source, your link to life, your food line. It is not that when you were a dependent baby your parents stopped feeding you. You, for whatever reason, recoiled from the source of food. Though you may not now remember it, you consciously chose to cut yourself off from relations, to contract as unlove rather than to live openly in relationship under all conditions. Perhaps, in your childish need to survive, such an action was necessary. But you are not a child anymore. I am here to tell you that you are always connected to the true food Source through love, through unobstructed feeling-attention via the functions in which you are presently awake. That is the Law. We are fed through the spine from the heart, in all directions, when we are love. When we are not, then we are cut off from the food Source, and in our relations we cut everybody else off from it too. When you love, you are connected with the food Source on which the whole body-being depends. It radiates to you, in you, around you, and as you most especially. You must become love. And you must enjoy integrated responsibility for the whole of the lower life, if you are to continue to grow into the psychic dimensions and into the Light itself. Therefore, you must accept the discipline of the Law of love, or sacrifice, and bypass completely all of your old and loveless ways. To love is not a matter of self-denial, which is self-directed effort, concerned for the so- called sinfulness of your lower life. Love is the transformation of self through Divine Communion, through pleasure, the inherent Bliss of the body-being when it is feeling to Infinity. No matter how difficult it is - because you can still sympathize mightily with these old tendencies - you must enter into the heartfelt enjoyment of the Divine Reality, and be its agent. The Way is the way of the heart itself, which you realize not by constantly manipulating the lower life, but by submitting the lower life to Divine Communion in a natural, intimate, orderly, full, and human life. Releasing your concern for lower life to the power of the heart, you become aware, through a native process in the midst of this Divine Communion, of the higher life. You are being fed again. By reconnecting with the Light, with the heart, with the Divine, you grow again and begin to develop in your awareness, just as a child naturally grows from one stage to the next. The stages of growth through which your human functions may naturally develop are not available only to the most extraordinary beings who enter the earth plane. They are available to all human beings who will release themselves into the stream of the process. For you, now, existence is basically material, elemental, vital life, emotional-sexual awareness, and thinking. When you become steady as the heart, however, the psychic dimension of the being opens, and it becomes quite natural to you to be psychic - to intuit the Divine and to be blissful because of that intuition, to enjoy a psychic awareness of your environment and other beings. This function becomes quite natural to you, just as now it is natural to think or to have a physical sensation. Now your attention is focused, by tendency, below the psyche, below the heart. If you exercise the psychic function at all, it is through a vague, temporary, and only occasional stability in love and intuition. When you commit yourself to it, however, it becomes more and more natural to you. The aberrations of the lower life become less and less significant, less and less forceful, because now they are simply noticed, rather than identified with. They are taken into account through a profound responsibility. Thus, your humor toward the tendencies of the lower life begins to return, and you realize that you are not at all in Truth what you are by tendency. On the basis of this awakening of the heart, you begin to grow again and to move into the higher stages of development. It is in the maturity of the second stage of practice, the Way of Relational Enquiry, and in the third stage of practice, the Way of Re-cognition, that the esoteric aspect of this Way of Divine Ignorance begins. In these higher stages, dimensions of awareness become natural to the being that are not imagined to be true or even possible by the usual man, who is still struggling with the ideal of love, only occasionally coming close to it, and spending all of his time in the dilemma of sex and all the usual reactive emotions - anger, jealousy, guilt, fear, sorrow, doubt - that keep him in conflict with others. The individual who constantly dramatizes reactive emotions is a profoundly dependent and childish person. He, or she, is suffering uncertainty about whether he is loved - rather than presenting himself as love at all times. The dependent person, who is always watching to see if he is loved, is subject, for example, to jealousy. The secret to overcoming jealousy is not to try somehow to stop being jealous. The secret to being essentially free of jealousy is to stop being dependent on whether or not you are loved in this moment. As long as you are always sitting back and reading each situation for evidence that you are loved, you yourself are being loveless and contracted. Thus, you will always continue to find the evidence you seek. You will always find that you are already not being loved. The truth is, however, that in your watching for love, you are already not being love. The way to be free of jealousy, as of all reactive emotion, all contraction of the feeling being, is to be love, to be the radiant feeling-attention that is the truth of us in Divine Communion. When you are that, then you will respond in the appropriate way to the circumstances of life, no matter what they are. And perhaps on some occasions you may not be loved or properly acknowledged. But the effects of the circumstances of life will not be critical any longer. Not only will you be able to survive, but you will be able to transcend all the effects of your experience. Abiding in Divine Communion, you will be greater than experience. If you are love with your lover under all circumstances, jealousy is not primary any longer - it could fundamentally be abandoned. It does not have any significance, any real force, when you are love. It is only when you are always wondering whether or not you are loved that you become insanely jealous, debilitated by jealousy, always testing your lover. So there is never any real evidence of loving in you. There is always the wondering, always the testing, always the suspicion, always the relative certainty that you are not loved. But basically you are not loving in relationship. Eventually your attention becomes scattered, and you become promiscuous. You cannot concentrate in your relationship with your lover if you are not love. If love is in doubt, you are promiscuous Hence the religious dictum that you are an adulterer if you think casually about having relations with someone else. The reason that you think casually about sex is that you are not love. When your love is in doubt in your intimacy, then your attention becomes casual. It cannot be concentrated through loving, through commitment, through real feeling in the moment. Thus, you become very mental, full of imagination, tending to be promiscuous, tending to believe that something romantic is happening between you and every one, and approaching every person as if he or she were ready for romance. All of this instead of being strong and free. A relationship of true marriage is created and lived by choice, if you are free. Your sexual intimacy is chosen, a matter of commitment, concentration, real attention, real feeling. But to love all beings is not to be seductive with all beings. Nothing like that is at all associated with real love. The love of all beings, which is native to us, has nothing to do with sexual indulgence or any other curious and specific function. It is the whole life. It is Divine life. It is the natural fullness that we represent in the midst of Infinity. Therefore, in order for women, for instance, to be devotees and naturally to move through free feeling- attention in all of their relations, they need not be subject to the casual sexual advances of all men. The disposition of Truth has nothing especially to do with sex or the role that a woman plays intimately with a man. Truth has no such implication. It is a moral force, a spiritual force. It does not require any self-conscious attempt not to be sexual. It simply is not inherently sexual. But the woman who is not responsible, who is childish and dependent on sexual attention, is tending in one or another way to be sexually related to all men. She will always tend to be that way to one or another degree, at least in feeling, perhaps even in action, until she becomes responsible in the spiritual sense for love. Then the lower life, including sexuality, becomes her responsibility, something that she uses lawfully through real feeling, real commitment, real enjoyment. You will never realize truly human sexuality until you are responsible for love. There is more to sexual intimacy than not being promiscuous anymore, or having a husband or a wife. You must be able to live that polarized, intimate relationship lawfully and to transform it. Just as you became emotionally adapted to lovelessness and contraction, you have also become adapted, physically and sexually, to the discharge of life through orgasm and all the other emotions associated with sexual intimacy. You waste energy, you stimulate one another, you lead one another to orgasm together. Until you are free in the spiritual sense, responsible in your intimacy, you will not be able to realize the lawful sexual aspect of your intimate life. You will perhaps remain physically true to one person, but you will tend to live that relationship as a dramatization of orgasm, separation, self-indulgence, loss of life. You will degenerate through it, even though you are applied to it from the point of view of conventional morality. People may say of you, "A very good marriage. They are a very good couple. See how devoted they are to one another. Neither one of them has ever been with anybody else." Whereas you spend all your time exhausting one another's energies and separating together from the whole world. You must be instructed in and learn through practice the regenerative form of your sexual possibility. The regenerative form of sexuality is not like the generative one. It does not arbitrarily discharge the life- force through the terminal of the genitals. The life-force must not be thrown out through one of the body's organs by stimulation of that or another organ. To do so devitalizes the body, emptying it of energy and degenerating its functions. The life-force and all the essential chemistry of the body is not to be discharged in that frivolous fashion. It is to be conducted to the whole body and expressed by the whole body through love to Infinity. Not only is orgasm degenerative in this way, but also casual indulgence of sexual interest, sexual exploitation of the body, and the many ways of discharging vital a and emotional energy through the terminals of the body. Nor must sexual relations, actual genital play with your lover, be engaged casually, indulged when you merely feel stimulated externally or subjectively. Sexual desire alone is not the occasion for sexual intimacy between devotees. The quality between lovers must be mutually loving and full of desire. Their mutual feeling must be love-desire in its truest sense. Then the time they spend together in intimacy is not the brief moment that most people indulge for the sake of the orgasm. Sexual play must be engaged fully and as a regenerative process. If you will practice your sexual intimacy in the regenerative way that will be described to you at the appropriate stage of your practice, in a relatively short time you will find that you are beginning to enjoy sexual intimacy with one another less frequently, because you enjoy the same fullness in the incidents of ordinary intimacy. The regenerative practice of sexuality should not be merely repeated, nor does it require repeating. It is too strong, too profound, too full a matter for casual repetition. There is a time of learning, a time of adapting to this regenerative process, but when the individuals are mature in its practice, then the frequency of their sexual contact normalizes in an appropriate emotional and vital economy. They are liberated from their sexual obsession as the process of their spiritual growth develops. There may come a time when actual genital intimacy is very occasional, in some cases even very rare. But when it does occur, it will not be solid, stiff, or self-conscious, as if to keep from having sex in order not to lose the semen or the life- force. The true practice of sexuality is a natural extension of regenerative living, through right diet, energetic service to all beings, and conscious exercise of all your functions. And it becomes natural to you to choose not to indulge in sexuality casually. Thus, devotees who enjoy sexual intimacy in this regenerative form free one another of obsessive involvement with sex and become strong. They are no longer promiscuous in thought and feeling nor in action. They have become oriented toward spiritual delight in the midst of the conditions of ordinary life. The occasions of their sexual intimacy may become less frequent, but those occasions are also very true and profound when they do occur. Secondarily, the right practice of sexual intimacy is also regenerative in the literal sense, generally strengthening and improving the health of husband and wife (or of homosexual mates), stabilizing and harmonizing them. And their attention moves naturally into the plane of their relationship itself, the polarization, the spiritual awareness of one another, the spiritual regard for one another, the presentation of love to one another rather than childish dependence. You can see that this process is a profound leap into the human realization of sexuality. Truly human sexuality is all I am talking about, not any super- esoteric sexual magic. This regeneration is the human realization of sexuality. What we have been led to adapt to in our emotional and sexual experience is nothing like this at all. We have been bereft of culture, reared by people who did not turn us to the Divine life, but rather served and reinforced and in various ways created a degenerative and irresponsible life, a self-indulgent life, a curiously disturbed life that cannot be love. This discussion of love, which seems perfectly ordinary to me, is extraordinary to the view of people in general. Very few people would consider it, yet it is the absolute obligation of human beings. It is not our obligation in the sense that the world becomes utopia when we fulfill it. We are projected into this world until we realize the principle of existence, but the fact is that when we fulfill this obligation we go beyond the world. Thus, the world is populated by people who have not yet fulfilled it. That is why they are here. That is why this world is the way it is, not particularly hellish, but a school, a plane of experience that schools us for as long as we may be stupid enough to have to stay and insensitive enough or self-indulgent enough to be trapped here. The wise man or woman will go beyond his (or her) humanity, beyond his physical, sexual, emotional, mental adaptation, even beyond being a moral or worthy being in this world. He will move to adapt to functions higher than the human psyche, so that he may be projected into a dimension that corresponds to his adaptation. The truly wise individual will become an absolute sacrifice to the Divine. The more conventional aspirant looks to climb the ladder of the body toward cosmic knowledge and visions. But the true devotee transcends all knowledge and experience and passes into perfect God-Communion. He passes to and beyond the sahasrar. He does not linger in any of the levels of knowledge, but, on the basis of the realization of the heart, discards the whole body-being to Infinity. Therefore, I instruct you, as Krishna did Arjuna at the end of the Bhagavad Gita, to renounce all dharmas - gross, subtle, and causal - all supports, all principles, all levels of experience, and resort to Me, not to any dimension of experience, none. Throw yourself into Infinity. Climb the ladder of the body and throw it to Infinity, and then you will come to Me. God will be your Destiny. If you look only to ascend egoically to levels of knowledge represented by the esoteric centers of the body, you may go to more subtle worlds, more heavenlike places, but you will not be there eternally. You will have to be born in the human form again and continue climbing the ladder until you lose your taste for heaven. But if you acquire a taste for the Divine through sacrifice, there is no ultimate release until the whole body is sacrificed into God. That sacrifice is what this Teaching is about. And when we bypass the illusions of all phenomena, even the highest, and throw ourselves whole bodily, as the whole psycho-physical condition of our manifestation, into the unknown being of Ignorance- Radiance, that gesture transfigures us, transforms us into Radiance itself, the Light of God. If we persist long enough, it even begins to change the physical body into light, making it relatively immortal and regenerating it, so that ultimately, instead of dying and being left behind, the body may disappear in space. It is not necessary to persist to that point, but it is necessary to persist to the point of transfiguration and sacrifice in Bhava Samadhi, or the Bliss of Perfect Sacrifice, so that you remain in that Condition even bodily during the conventional states of waking, dreaming, and sleeping. You remain one with that Light which is not seen but which you are. It is complete madness and utter
devotion to make such a gesture. The lesser wise man settles
for seeing the planes, the heavens, the beings, while the
weak, foolish, ordinary man spends his life indulging
physical, sexual, and mental possibilities. Those who have
sinned are a little wiser, but those who throw themselves
into God are absolutely wise, absolutely foolish. True wise
men are like fools. And like a truly wise and foolish man,
the devotee realizes that experiences, high and low, are
nothing, that they are only modifications of the Absolute.
Thus, he is not fixed on them. He lets them dissolve into
the Absolute. This is the Way of faith, sacrifice, love, and
terrible obedience. It leads beyond all the worlds. It does
not lead to any conventional heaven or subtle dimension. Its
Destiny is the Divine itself.
The Way of Divine Ignorance is the Way through and beyond illusions, not the way of accumulating illusions through a subjective orientation to appearances. Love is disillusionment, or freedom from recoil and modification, subject and object, under all conditions. Hear this, and turn from inner, reactive concerns to Radiance in all relations. At last this Radiance, which is perfect Ignorance, overcomes or dissolves all reflexes of birth, inwardness, concern, and self. Even every loved one is consumed at last in that Radiance of our own loving and direct awareness of them, so that the immortal Beloved, the very Real, the undifferentiated and formless Current of Bliss, stands where only encounters were before. Bubba Free John The Paradox of Instruction
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