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Bubba Free John THE WAY THAT I TEACH - Talks
on the Intuition of Eternal Life
Chapter 10 No One Is the Beloved of God DEVOTEE: Bubba, recently I made a decision to move out of the household where I have been living, because my relationship, or lack of it, with one of the people there wasn't tenable. BUBBA: Why wasn't it tenable? DEVOTEE: Because there was always so much conflict. BUBBA: Why is that not tenable? Why isn't that useful? Why isn't that a creative situation? DEVOTEE: For quite a while I felt that it was very useful because of the "heat" it created for both of us. BUBBA: It wasn't really "heat," or spiritual fire, because in this case both of you became less and less involved. To love when you are not loved, that is the heat of spiritual practice. The heat, when you are not loved, is not to love less and to feel unloved. That is not heat. That is lovelessness. I believe I have called it the avoidance of relationship! (Laughter) DEVOTEE: Several times she1 made it very clear that she couldn't live with me any longer, and that refusal justified my own departure from the household. BUBBA: That is probably the logic that had to appear eventually. The whole episode obviously was a dramatization, the rehearsal of a script. Everything became inevitable, and now you are living alone. You made the emotional choice, not necessarily the intellectual one, but you chose by habit to respond to being unloved by not loving. Therefore, the rest of it became inevitable. But if you had done the opposite, then that script could very well have been unnecessary. You might not have become one another's favorite human being, but you could certainly have realized a human relationship. This is what you do when you are not loved. You separate yourself. And when you get similar metaphysical feelings, so you are really not certain that you are loved from Infinity either, the script continues to be one of isolation. You go inside to the big Self, you take the inward path in isolation, indulging in meditation for fifteen hours a day and all the rest of it. You choose the loveless life. Do you think you are loved from Infinity? Do you believe that the universe is pervaded by all-sustaining, absolute, immortal Love? 1. The devotee
speaking to Bubba was living in a household with his wife
and a few other couples, as is commonly the case with
members of The Free Communion Church. The woman with whom he
came into emotional conflict is the wife of another male
member of the household.
DEVOTEE: Do you want me to answer you? (Laughter) I feel that in your company. BUBBA: Apart from what you may feel by association in Divine Communion, which of course is the cure recommended since ancient times, and apart from the love that you may feel comes from any individual specifically, when you are off naked in the universe, do you feel connected to Infinity through love? Or are you uncertain of it? DEVOTEE: I mainly feel in a state of shock. BUBBA: Right. In the metaphysics of your existence you are responding to a great woman or being or condition of existence by which you are not loved. DEVOTEE: It feels now like a great tension in the heart. BUBBA: Yes. That is the contraction of the ego, the avoidance of relationship, the collapse from Infinity. At birth, when we individuate bodily, we feel ourselves cut off from Infinity. We become dependent on the food source, on the sources of love, in our childhood, when we are vulnerable. But those agents are always doubtful. We always come to discover that the love and attention any being can give us is not steady, is not absolute. Yet we continue to depend on such gestures. This dependence, however, enforces a sense in us that we are fundamentally disconnected, vulnerable, mortal, unloved. That is the mood of the ego, contracted from Infinity and in fear of annihilation. Independence is the falser incident of birth. It is a disposition we inherit through psycho- physical individuation. And we must individuate because we are born. The third stage of life should be the time in which we are unparented at last, thrown from the nest, in which we are guided to the point of responsibility for that presumption of independent existence, that false incident, so that we can assume our full humanity and enter into spiritual life, which is not founded on the sense that we are individuated and moving toward annihilation, to be murdered by nature. In the third stage of life we are to become responsible for all the adaptation that we have inherited in our incarnation, and to be certain to Infinity with an open heart, connected to what sustains us in Truth. It is only on the basis of this responsibility that spiritual life begins, not on the basis of the agony of our egoic life, struggling to be consoled by some vision, some relationship, some functional pleasure. DEVOTEE: I never feel consoled by any kind of vision. BUBBA: You have been looking for visions, haven't you? Trying to realize some state that is completely pleasurable through meditation, perhaps! DEVOTEE: I have always felt that I would realize such a condition only in relationship to you, to your Presence. BUBBA: That is good. But in terms of your position in the midst of things, this reaction to being unloved is what you are all about. And of course the cure is to find the Spiritual Master and enter into Divine Communion. That is the cure, when, through incarnation, you abandon the incident of the ego and realize the incident of Divine Communion, or reconnection to the Food Source at Infinity. DEVOTEE: Over time I have felt that realization coming more and more into play. BUBBA: But you are still dramatizing this loveless life. You are still dependent on being loved. What we discover is not that love comes to us from Infinity, as from a super-cosmic Parent. We discover in our Communion with Infinity that we are love. That is the Divine Realization. God-Realization is not a relationship to some great something that loves you. No one is the beloved of God, absolutely no one. God is not the kind of Reality that makes beloveds out of creatures. Creatures owe their love to Infinity. You don't realize God by finding God at the end of a great chain to Infinity, but by being wholly one with Infinity, so that you yourself are love. If you come to me and keep getting loved, having the blossom projected at you, there will be no change, because you will remain loveless. Divine Communion begins when you love. Then not only are you connected to love but you are it. The only way by which we commune with God is by being love. Love has great strength. It is Siddhi, the Power of the Divine. It is the fundamental Power, the great Power, when we are it, but not when we worship it or depend on it in our egoic separation and weakness. What it comes down to in your case is that you are living the usual life of contraction, not just in a relationship here and there, but fundamentally. Your infantile reaction to being unloved is not just something that you bring into a certain few relationships. It is your philosophy. It is an interpretation of things as they are. It is an interpretation of the universe: to be loveless because you do not trust love. It is a way of existing in the midst of Infinity. You are not certain of being loved and, thus, you cannot love. But to love is the Law. You must love, regardless of the circumstance, you see. The essential principle of spiritual life is unobstructed feeling-attention via all functions, in all relations, under all conditions. That principle is to be realized in all the complicated mechanics of your relationships and in all the esoteric developments of the practice that may be given to you. Love is the principle, but love is not what you are living. You are weak in that force of feeling-attention because you are subject to the conditions outside you. You basically feel unloved, unable to depend on love. You are always reacting to the universe as a great something in which you are not loved, always protecting yourself from death. This reaction is the essential learning we must undo in order to become human beings. Spiritual life is not a matter of reading signs about ourselves and going within, through meditative techniques, trying to find the great absorption. That is Narcissus, whose solution is further isolation. God-Realization is in the moment, yet it has nothing to do with the conditions that are arising in this moment. They are not it. God-Realization is to awaken to your true Condition, which is love, Radiance to Infinity, and to live it, not just to believe it, not to depend on it from others, but to be that confidence, that overwhelming bliss, that energy, unthreatened - that is the business of devotees, not the mediocre drama you are telling us about here. Because of our emotional adaptation, which comes early in life, we feel greatly justified in our unlove, our weakness. We realize our true manhood, male or female, when we are able to confront that contraction, when we are able not to dramatize it any longer but to grow far beyond it. Everything follows that awakening. Then we no longer find the Divinity in the form of our lower functions or our higher functions. Those are simply conditions of experience. They are not themselves God or non-God. They are simply conditions of existence that are not other than God. They do not have the force, in other words, to separate us from the Absolute. But the ego finds all kinds of consolation in the lower life, and, if it can, it detaches itself from the lower life. The ego thinks that the visions within the body and above the brows are the Divinity that loves you. That is simply heresy! All this nonsense about spiritual life is my complaint. I have seen all those visions, and they are not God. You might as well call your wife God. Your wife is not God. She is not other than God, if you love her to Infinity, but she is not in herself God. She is not burdened to fulfill you absolutely, unless you make the egoic demand, which is what you tend to do. We make that demand of all our relations, high and low. "Fulfill m , love me, console me." We must awaken from that childishness, even in our so-called spirituality. We must be sacrificed at Infinity without the slightest trace of vision to console us. In this Way of Divine Ignorance we pass far beyond all of the psychic illusions, which, for the most part, are simply projections of our own nervous system. For instance, some people speak of the vision of the blue bindu2 as if it were God, whereas it is orally the light near the center of the spinal column. It is not even at the center of the spinal column. If you invert the physical vision, you may see physical energies discharging in the midbrain, and at one point a blue circle may appear. Sometimes it is completely circular and at other times it is slightly irregular, like the iris of your eye. It is a brilliant blue usually, but it can be other colors, ranging toward violet. It is surrounded by a gold aura, and at its center is a star, that, strangely enough, has five points. The star does not look like a machine-made, five-pointed military star, but it looks basically like a star. And all of that is the "blue pearl." It is nothing more than the visible energy of the spinal column and the midbrain. 2. Bindu is a
psycho-physical center or point that is the locus of
specific energies and transmutations of consciousness. In
this sense, all the chakras might be called bindus, as well
as the causal center on the right side of the chest.
Traditionally, the word refers to very subtle centers, or
the experience of knowing them, usually in visual or
super-visual terms. Thus, a vision of a single point or
several points of light, sometimes colored, is usually
refered to as bindu.
The golden light is the outer energy of the gross physical body; the blue light is closer to the center of the spinal column; and the white light is at the very center. The white light is the vision on which the mystic concentrates in order to awaken the energies of the brain, once the attention moves out of the physical dimension below the brows. Yogis who realize this vision speak about what they see there as if it were cosmology, as if they are seeing the universe, the cosmos. But they are seeing their own body, their own brain. That is essentially what they are looking at, and it structures the awareness of anything that may be perceived objectively. In this Way of Divine Ignorance, or Radical Understanding, there is a time for visions of this kind. I know all about the kundalini and shabds awakenings. I know exactly what they are as processes. I can hear the inner sound, or shabd3, right now. I can see the vision right now. They are my own body. Such an experience is nice. It reflects my general state of health and well-being, but it is not God. In the third stage of practice, the Way of Re-cognition, the devotee engages this subtlety. But then it is seen for what it is, not as God, but as a modification of the field of awareness. 3. The shabd is internal sound, the audible life-current or subtle vibration at the root of all appearances. Bubba Free John describes the path of "shabd yoga" and distinguishes it from kundalini yoga in the following passage, which is adapted from The Paradox of Instruction: The subtle path, exemplified by traditions such as shabd yoga, bypasses all involvement with gross or lower energy manipulation, including the kundalini, and begins with concentration on the life-current as internal sound and light at the door of the subtle dimension behind the brows, thus controlling and absorbing the mind. The special characteristic of the descriptions of the ascent in this path is the assignation of specific types of sound and vision to each step of the way. The subtle path travels on the life-current as audible light, whereas paths such as kundalini yoga travel on the life-current as the lower or grosser forms of life-energy or vibratory bliss itself. For a more expanded
consideration of the technical or esoteric principles of
this path, please see The Paradox of Instruction, chapters 3
and 4.
The yogi in his egoic illusion, on the other hand, is not moved by love but by his suffering, his contraction, his dilemma. Thus, such visions seem cosmic to him. But he is not truly looking into the cosmos. Subtle experiences have something to do with the makeup of the cosmos, but they are not in themselves cosmic. They are human. They are something to be understood, something for which we must be responsible, just as we must be responsible for the display of energy and awareness at the gross physical level. Neither dimension, gross or subtle, is more God than the other. Some people feel "close to God" when they go to the mountains on vacation. Some people have to look into their heads to see God, to feel that they are in touch with God. Some people must be having an orgasm to feel that they are with God. But none of that, in itself, is God. Those experiences are only the possibilities of our bodily existence altogether, of our adaptation in the most ordinary sense. They are essential to us perhaps, but deluding, unless we are free as the heart. Only thus can we see these experiences for what they are and become the sacrifice of them. If we are not free as love, free from the egoic contraction, then we interpret all experiences as sublimities and we become attached to them as yogis, or as lovers, as whatever form of attention we are animating at the moment. The key to our existence is at the heart - not in the planes of experience above or below the heart, but at the heart. The condition of the heart determines our disposition, our realization, our understanding of every experience, high and low. That is the essential Teaching. DEVOTEE: Yes. I have heard this argument many times, and yet there is just that contraction, that tension at the heart. BUBBA: Yes. But you are toying with all the possibilities of experience, high and low, mainly low, perhaps disposed at times to be meditative and to go up. You are dramatizing this contraction, this dilemma of independent consciousness, in the form of your experiences. People look to increase their experiences all the time without being responsible for the fundamental matter. The yogi in his "spiritual" strategy is also a loveless individual. DEVOTEE: I always feel that it does come back to that dramatizing, and yet it seems that what has to be cut through is this contraction at the heart. BUBBA: But in your case it is like using a hair to cut through a twenty-foot marble wall! You are not cutting through it. You are busy meditating on the problem, busy being the contraction. Thus, it seems to be immensely difficult. But you see that it wasn't "heat" at all in the conflict you talked to us about. It was a dramatization of being unloved and unloving. That is not transcending anything. There may be literal heat, but it is not the spiritual "heat" of devotional practice, not the heat of love, of sacrifice. That is what cuts right through it. Your activity must be the gesture of absolute certainty to Infinity, not a tentative feel, weakly asking, "Do you love me?" DEVOTEE: It isn't, even a question of that, because I knew she didn't! BUBBA: Nevertheless, you asked the question and the answer was no. And so you did what seemed necessary - you left. You withdrew. You went into your solitude. That is the very model of Narcissus! And that is the model of your life, you see. That is the way you have done it since childhood. That is the level of your emotional adaptation. The devotee represents a different kind of adaptation in the moment, based on inspection and responsibility for old adaptations. He or she lives in a new way in the moment. As he persists in living in that new way moment to moment, the old tendencies become obsolete. The discipline is not to dramatize them outwardly and not to be concerned for the subjective artifacts. Let them pass, and in the moment be positively oriented toward your responsibility as love, as feeling-attention to Infinity in all relations under all conditions. You have simply given yourself an excuse to fail at it. And you have continued to fail at it. You are failing at it in this moment. Love is the meditation, not all that inward stuff, nor the outward stuff. All of that is just an experiential occasion to be inspected, so that you can be responsible for the dimensions of your experience. But it is not God. God is the Realization from the beginning. God is the foundation of the practice, responsibility for the ego, separation, unlove, contraction. You must be responsible for contraction, mindful of it moment to moment, so that you always pass beyond it. The conscious process a t every stage is a way of passing beyond the contraction of the ego. Thus, the ultimate affair of this practice is not meditation upon some objective, psychic phenomenon. It is the sacrifice of the whole body-being, high and low, at Infinity. It is bliss, selflessness, dissolution at Infinity. It is the same thing that you realize in love. Since that is the case, we are under no obligation to go elsewhere to find it. Thus, this world is not a hell, you see. It is a dimension of experience that has its inherent limitations as a game. It is a school, ultimately to be transcended by living in God within it, not pursuing God elsewhere. This world is not a hell, because we may and must realize God in it, as it, as our own Condition. Then the world becomes obsolete, not through any strategy to exclude it, but simply through realizing it to be unnecessary, not other than the Divine Condition. It falls away on its own whenever its time comes, like the flesh body. For the usual man, death is annihilation. For the devotee, in some fundamental way it is not even noticed, because it is simply a condition of experience, whereas the Divine Condition is Truth, and no experience is a limitation of it. The devotee is free to die, because he already is the sacrifice. He already is love. DEVOTEE: I always feel that any experience is limitation. BUBBA: The ego is crushed by experience, surrounded, hedged in. The devotee passes beyond the force of limitation that surrounds him, the force of the contraction around his own heart, the whole body, and all the environments that are imploding upon the center. DEVOTEE: That is what always feels limiting. BUBBA: That is what you are meditating bn. You are not living in Divine Communion. You are living with yourself. You are meditating on yourself. You are keeping bad company! (Laughter) The traditional recommendation is that the primary form of practice, the one thing necessary, the essential of spiritual life, is to spend your time in the Company of a realized man or woman. But true practice is not just to be sitting there in the same room. You must enter into Communion, pass out of self-meditation, move to Infinity in that Communion. All other associations, you see, reinforce our self-meditation. People tend to move out of the Company of the Spiritual Master, if only subjectively. I Even if they spend all day in his physical company, they can be subjectively oriented to their own self-meditation. Likewise, those who do not commune all day with the Spiritual Master are wandering subjectively, meditating on themselves. If they leave the community of devotees, they immediately return to their destiny. They choose their own destiny, choose self-meditation, leave the Company of Infinity. Everyone does it in his or her subjectivity, or self-meditation. Some dramatize it in even very gross ways. The key to spiritual life is to be responsible for that inclination, that self-meditation, and remain in Divine Communion persistently, to value it above all things. Then all conditions appear to you, and you become responsible for your self-meditation in the midst of them. That is the simple matter of the stages of practice - to see the many forms of experience, to see the self-meditation, the unlove, that appears on the basis of experience, and to pass beyond it in consciousness, in feeling. DEVOTEE: There is always a tendency to separate consciousness and feeling. BUBBA: That tendency arises simply because of the way the nervous system in the body is structured. The body-being has a number of centers that should be integrated with one another. But if the very center of the being is contracted, then all of its parts become disintegrated, in conflict with one another. Thus, you have a thinking and attention part, and you have a feeling part, which is basically involved in reactions. And you have a sensuous part and an active part. They are all in different places; they are different persons, different selves, even described as such in some descriptions of the psychology of the human being - low self, middle self, high self, all these selves. They are just parts, not really selves. None of them is truly a self. DEVOTEE: The feeling self is the one I move toward when I see that I am becoming too much involved in the conscious self. BUBBA: The feeling self is the conscious self, the mental self, the thinking self. Our attention should be free through feeling. It should be simple attention. But our attention is wrapped up in thought, obsessive thinking. Our feeling is wrapped up in reactive feelings, mediocre and contracted emotional states. Our body is wrapped up in all kinds of kinks and knots, so that our actions are nonsense. They are limitations and dramatizations. If you are expressed as feeling without obstruction, mind becomes attention, but through feeling, not through obsessive thought. If you feel to Infinity, you do not think. The mind naturally comes to rest. But if you are obstructed in your feeling, and your try to stop thoughts like a yogi, it does not work very well. And if it did work, you would just become blank, dull, dead. The only reason for obsessive, continuous thinking is that the feeling core is collapsed, and thus all the parts race off in their functional independence. So we think and think and think and think and think and think. Our constant thinking never stops. Even if we lose consciousness for a while, as soon as we are conscious again we start thinking. We cannot stop it. After a while we become obsessed with stopping it. How do we stop it? The one who wants to stop it is the feelingless nature. If it understands its own dilemma and returns to feeling, then the thought forgotten, as in sleep, but the being is not unconscious, not dull. Through feeling, the being becomes sympathetic to the point of Radiance. It perceives the all-pervading Bliss as itself and gives itself up to Infinity. Even the body changes. All the functions are reintegrated, returned to one another, and the body, piece by piece, becomes light, literally. It becomes pure energy, even to the point of sudden disappearance. There have been a number of historical cases of individuals in a high state of emotional transcendence, who have suddenly disappeared on the spot, vanished, gone up in a flash of light. They are the evidence of our bodily Condition. But even before such an event as transfiguration, there are other sublime changes that occur in the body itself. It becomes radiant, blooming, pervaded by Bliss. It may appear to be surrounded by light. The, ego cannot effect such a transformation, because the ego is the collapse of feeling-attention, the collapse of Radiance, the contraction of energy. Only when we are yielded to Infinity does this transfiguration begin. And it begins in a relatively ordinary way. Our relations improve, our functional life improves in the loving sense, and psychic dimensions of the body-being begin to open. Visions and other phenomena may arise, but they all vanish in the face of the heart's comprehension, until there is nothing to hold onto. There is simply inclusion in Bliss. There is no archetype in the mind by which to know that Destiny. It is not a matter of knowledge. All knowledge is a figure, a contraction, a modification. We are moved to Infinity without benefit of knowledge. We must pass beyond the demand of knowledge, which is simply another way of getting loved, getting attention from without, surrounding ourselves with consolations. We must pass beyond knowledge by presuming Ignorance to be our Condition, which is the same as love, as Radiance. The seventh or ultimate stage of life is the bloom of that Reality, in which even the body is sacrificed to Infinity and transfigured through Bliss. The ultimate Realization is simply a maturing of love. The old saying "God is love" is absolute Truth. God is not the blue pearl nor your wife's body nor any other experience. Only the devotee realizes the secret. The devotee is sacrificed upon the secret. DEVOTEE: Well, as I said before, it is not so much feeling either up or down. It is simply a matter of feeling. BUBBA: Yes, that is what it is a matter of. DEVOTEE: I mean, I don't feel . . . BUBBA: It does not make any difference what you mean! It is a matter of that feeling, presently, right now. You can realize God in this moment. You must! You always know what it is to look, to feel, to be, and to act completely happy. In any moment you already are completely certain of it and could look and feel and be and act completely happy. But you dramatize the mood of the ego, contraction. That is your choice. Hopefully, you will become aware of the destiny of it and become willing to be foolish. When you are willing to become foolish in God, then these stupid problems you are rehearsing here will lose their significance, you see? Then all their logic becomes unnecessary. Your humor is restored, and you can deal with the conditions of life with a certain flair and enjoyment.
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