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Bubba Free John THE WAY THAT I TEACH
- Talks on the Intuition of Eternal
Life
Chapter 1 The Other Side of the Body In September, 1977, Bubba Free John
made a brief journey to India, accompanied by two of his
devotees. Bubba had made pilgrimages to ashrams1
and holy sites on a number of previous occasions, both
during and after the period of his own spiritual testing and
transformation. But one of the principal purposes of this
recent trip was to create a dramatic lesson, for both his
present devotees and all who would consider his Teaching,
about the illusions of conventional spirituality and the
archetype of India in the religious and spiritual
consciousness of the world. The following discussion is
taken from talks Bubba gave to his devotees both in India
and, upon his return, at Vision Mound Sanctuary in northern
California, the principal educational and spiritual center
of The Free Communion Church.
BUBBA: The ultimate Truth is not Divine Ignorance alone or Consciousness without qualification. It is Ignorance-Radiance. One day, in India, we laughingly considered asking an old monk at one of the holy sites we visited if he was happy. Of course we did not ask him-we didn't have to. The man was not happy. It was perfectly obvious that he was not happy. The people in India are fundamentally not happy. Why not? Because the dimension of Radiance is absent in their character, because their cultural psychology is a turning away from relationship, or energy. Energy is absent in their human practice, in their traditional realization of spiritual and ordinary life. You can see it in all the old men, who are near the end of their lives and who have been turning in on themselves for decades. To a degree, at least, they have gotten in touch with the principle of their own consciousness but not in Truth. They are not happy. They are not blissful, because consciousness by itself, strategically turned away from phenomena, is not yet blissful in the truest or fullest sense. In perfect God-Realization, the
Radiance of our Condition is restored. Consciousness is
Radiant. It is blissful. It is love. It is forceful. It is
creative. That which is realized to be the Truth of man is
also the Truth of the world. Forceless consciousness cannot
create worlds. It is dead. It is a corpse. Siva2
without his consort is just a corpse. Siva without his
consort is not the Truth. Truth, in the imagery of India, is
SivaShakti.3 It is Ignorance-Radiance. These are
just names, archetypes, symbols for the single, absolute,
ultimate Reality, the very Nature and Condition of our
existence. There is no Realization without Radiance, without
love. And one who is truly involved in spiritual life is
happy. If you are not happy, you are not anywhere near it!
3. Shakti is the Divine Creative
Energy, or Spiritual Force, the "female" aspect of the One
Reality and the complement of Siva. The perfect union of
Siva-Shakti is fundamental and unqualified Intensity, the
very Self and Energy. All relationships, all forms of
exchange, are ritual enactments of the One Intensity that is
Siva-Shakti.
Throughout India, particularly in the ashrams, where the Oriental point of view is enforced, you can see the suppression of the Radiance of the being, the movement to withdraw toward a formless or at least subtle condition that is not this body, this living being. The living being is in doubt in the Oriental psychology. In the Western psychology, the living being is not in doubt in principle, but it is in trouble, yes, and sick. When the whole body is a matter of responsibility, however, when both sides, right and left, top and bottom, outside and inside, when all aspects of the body are fully conscious and fully adapted to one another, then a different way of life altogether is implied. Such a way is not a Western point of view, nor an Eastern point of view, but one that is communicative relative to East and West, that is in touch with East and West. The whole body or the intercommunicative world is what this Teaching represents. The Way of Divine Ignorance is a new Teaching, based on a world culture, that is, the world that is completely intercommunicative. Therefore, this Teaching also communicates a new psychology, in which all sides and aspects of the body are equally enforced, equally accounted for in the demonstration of existence and in the consideration of Truth. Thus, the principle of this Way is not inwardness at all, nor is it objective experience in itself, or the world as an independent and mortal reality. Neither of those points of view is the point of view of this Teaching. This Teaching is founded in the principle of love, or unobstructed feeling-attention. Where there is love or unobstructed feeling-attention to Infinity, in this moment, the body and its relationship with mind or psyche are no longer binding. The body is Radiant. Arising phenomena, sensations, perceptions, bodily sense, sense of the life-energy, concepts, thinking, psychic appearances above the mind, the ego-sense - all of these conditions are, in themselves, forms of contraction, forms of the avoidance of relationship. Where there is love to Infinity, no avoidance of relationship, no contraction, the forms of contraction naturally come to rest. No strategy is directed toward them in themselves, as is characteristic of the Oriental approach. They naturally come to rest in love, in Radiance to Infinity. The ethic of love is known in the West, through the Middle Eastern religions, but it is complicated by all kinds of misunderstandings and vulgar thinking. It has basically become a superficial gesture of social morality, whereas, when viewed in its proper light, it is a spiritual principle. Love is the process in which all the functions of the being are turned through free feeling-attention to Infinity, in all relations, under all conditions. In other words, contraction or self definition in any form is not permitted to become the point of view. The sacrifice that is love or feeling attention is moving to Infinity in every moment. The forces of contraction are not reinforced. They are constantly falling away under the force of love. The conditions of existence then become acceptable as spiritual from this point of view. Life is not in doubt. It is passing, but the phenomenon of life is to be comprehended from the point of view of the blissfulness of God-Realization. In principle, there must be no turning away from the conditions of existence. Therefore, the inherent pleasurableness of existence, even of the manifest form, is to be acknowledged. Doubt, or fear of existence as the body, or the meditation on mortality that arises by reaction to this birth, is undone through real hearing of the Teaching, or awakening to the response of love. Doubt falls away. Thus, men become free to engage in relational enjoyment, feeling to one another, through one another, to Infinity. Sexual relationships, then, are likewise not in doubt. You are not somehow sinful because you are involved in sex. Right sexual relationship is a love relationship. Rightly realized, fully enjoyed, it achieves its own economy. But there is no obligation, in principle, to abandon it at some point. It is perfectly compatible with God-Realization, just as bodily existence, as long as it lasts, is itself also compatible with it. In perfect Realization, bodily existence is realized to be only modification of one's real Condition. It is not in doubt. It is passing, yes, but it is not in doubt. It is unnecessary, yes, but it is not in doubt. It need not be prevented or resisted. The body is not seen as something independent and mortal, something to be sought and held onto and kept from passing. Life in Truth is a Radiant existence, a practice based on hearing in the life of Truth, a Radiant process, not inward turned or recoiling in any sense whatsoever. The fundamental discipline or awakened responsibility of this Way is the ability to inspect the tendency to turn away in ordinary activity, to turn out of the process of relationship, out of the condition of relationship. Westerners adopt all kinds of Oriental attitudes, practices, and habits out of fear, because Truth is associated with inwardness even in the West. But Western people are not inherently oriented to Truth. They are oriented toward the fulfillment of their birth. When they begin to think of spirituality and religion, they think that Truth is within. That is the popular notion. If they take it up seriously, they must go to the Orient. There is certainly a dimension of the East to be comprehended and made useful. It is part of the discipline of spiritual life, but it is not necessary or even desirable to abandon the West and go to the East, which is what people do psychologically, some even culturally and literally, when they become involved in spiritual life. They hang out in India, in some Indian or Oriental cult. In fact, they are from the West, though they might appear to be Orientals. They are more fans than players in that game. There is a dimension of the left side and of the Orient to which we must adapt and which we must accommodate in our whole body realization of life. Spiritual practice, however, is not to go to the left side, or to the East, and to abandon the right side, or the West. Spiritual practice is to become aware of and as both sides of the body. The whole body, in other words, must become the sacrifice. The principal lesson of our trip to India is that the subjectivity conventionally associated with spirituality-mind, inwardness, passivity, the "left side" is an illusion. When you get into that mood, you drop out of the sphere of relations. Wherever there is identification with subjectivity, there is the absence or the failure of love. What appears in India, in ashrams and on the streets, is exactly that-the failure of love, the failure of relationship. It is the inward turning, subjectively oriented tendency in which life is considered to be nothing, people are considered to be nothing, and relations are to be struggled with and avoided. The tendency is just the opposite in the Western world, which is violent, but it is also outwardly oriented, relationally oriented, oriented toward the experiences of the gross life rather than the subtle life. India is the epitome of left-sided glamor and the absence of energy. One thing that is impressive about being in India, that feels good about being in India, is the absence of violence. There is, in general, no violent quality in the people. They do not, in their daily ordinariness, feel dangerous, as people generally feel in the West. People in the West are aggravated, and you feel the tendency toward violence and its possibility immediately. It is right there all the time. But the quality of superficial violence is naturally absent in traditional Indians, because the dimension of relationship, intentional life-force, love, sexuality the whole force of relations-is suppressed. So, naturally, violence and the outward expressions of energy in general are suppressed, not expressed, in the conventions of Indian culture. The tendency that is "India" is a psychological and cultural drive. The culture of India is part of the psychology of Western people who get wearied or complicated by the play of outward life, and so, by reaction, like to withdraw, to go within, to go to the left. That withdrawal is one of the classically conventional solutions to life, but it is not spirituality. It is not spiritual life. Yet, the game of the subjective dream world is what people usually consider to be spiritual. In that sense, India is the Disneyland of spirituality. Going to India is like going into your own imagination-all the illusions of subjectivity are enshrined there. All those temples and ashrams are shrines to the left-sided view, the interiorizing, subjective, subtly or mentally oriented way of life. In India you hear all about renunciation and detachment. From the common Indian point of view, renunciation means withdrawal, separation from functions and relations. But such separation is not true renunciation or true detachment. True renunciation is to love to Infinity, to love absolutely, to love to the point that you are releasing what you love. Such loving is not the same as exploiting some object that you are holding onto for its own sake, but neither is it the left-sided view of separation. The people we saw in India, sitting around working on themselves, basically having no energy in their relations with one another, passive in their orientation, and inward-they might as well be in a rest home somewhere. People who have renounced relationship are not happy people at all. There is no sign of happiness in them. What does unhappiness have to do with spiritual life? Nothing, obviously! Yet there is just as much to criticize about the Western world in its right-sidedness. We spent last summer here engaging and considering all of the possibilities of the gross, worldly life, and we came to the point of abandoning that right-sided principle in itself. This trip to India represents the same consideration applied to the left-sided tendency, the antirelational tendency, the inward, subjective tendency. The result of this essential consideration is the realization that spiritual life is the sacrificial orientation of the whole body through love. It is not inwardness in itself, or the left side and upper coil of the body being. Nor is it outwardness in itself, or the right side and lower coil of the body-being. It is unobstructed feeling-attention through all functions, in all relations, under all conditions. People must understand what the practice of this Teaching is-it is not the left-sided path, nor is it the right-sided exploitation of ordinary life. It is not the withdrawal of energy, nor is it the exploitation of things in themselves. It is to live the principle of love, but not the principle of love as it is conventionally understood. It is feeling-attention brought into the field of all functions and all relations under all conditions. It is to be present as Radiance. It is to be committed in love to relations, to live them fully, to realize, then, the Lawful discipline inherent in relations of love. The fundamental problem of man is attachment to the subjective illusion of inwardness, separation from relations, and therefore the failure of love, the failure of service. Thus, you can see why so much of my work involves purifying people by making lessons in life. Such theatre has been necessary because of the weakness and inconstancy and lack of commitment of human beings in general, who are tending in two conventional directions. On the one hand, they are always wanting to go out and blow their minds-drink and smoke and sex and live the wild, outward, Western life. But on the other hand, the opposite tendency is also present in everyone in the cycles and phasing of their attention and feeling. That tendency is to think that spiritual life is the game of turning within and working on yourself, manipulating yourself, doing it yourself, acquiring certain experiences through either self-manipulation or vicarious association. Both the outward and the inward tendencies represent the failure of love, the failure of the real process, or sacrifice of the whole body. Thus, people approaching our Church are constantly phasing in their relationship to this Teaching and to their own Spiritual Master, because of their alternating left and right sided tendencies, inward and outward. This trip to India was a dramatic
symbol for the left-sided tendency, that specific
justification for the failure of love, service, real
spiritual life, and commitment to this Way and this Company.
But its purpose was also to make a pilgrimage of sacrifice,
to yield the left-sided drama entirely. Many of you expected
me to make a grand tour, meet all the types, go to all the
places, and then come back with grand stories. But I simply
went to the ashram of Ramana Maharshi,4 the last
point of contact in India that was of significance to me,
and to nowhere else. And then I just threw all the rest of
it away. I went only a few miles away to the Poondi
Swamis5 and gave it all to him, because he
represents the cultic figure in its most classically absurd
form. The Poondi Swami is really what it is all about for
the Indian who makes an idol of subjectivity out of the
Divine. The subjective idol is not Truth, not God.
4. The late Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950) was a great Sage of South India. Through direct spiritual Communion with the Maharshi's living Presence, Bubba Free John's own perfect Realization was confirmed beyond all doubt in August, 1973, during Bubba's first visit to Maharshi's tomb and former places of residence. 5. The Poondi Swami is a
classic representative of the traditional practice of
kundalini yoga, which seeks to awaken the dormant
life-force, or Creative Power of the universes, that lies
coiled at the base of the spine in man, and merge it into
the subtle light of the brain via the manipulation of
internal energy processes. The Poondi Swami's practice is to
give yogic initiation into this awakened energy through
ceremonial ritual. He is literally approached as a Divine
statue or object, and ceremoniously worshipped in the
classic South Indian manner-ritually bathed with butter,
sandalwood paste, honey, milk, and other foods, and then
ritually washed, in the same manner as a piece of statuary
considered to be a representation of the Divine.
DEVOTEE: You said that the Poondi Swami is like an icon in one of the temples. BUBBA: He and all the rest of them.
People are willing to do puja,6 to perform little
rituals, little formal games inside or outside themselves,
and they want to call that spiritual life. The true puja is
the sacrifice of the whole body. It is the life of love. It
is the spiritual process in its radical form, as I have
described it. It is a whole lifetime of constantly mature
participation in the spiritual process. Such participation
requires constancy, commitment, intelligence, clarity, love,
feeling-attention, energy. Commitment to subjectivity is, by
contrast, the withdrawing of energy, the withholding of
feeling-attention, the failure to love. It is just as much a
failure as all the outward, wild, gross activities that
people tend to. But generally people do not consider sin to
be the failure to love. They think that sin is the
indulgence of the senses. They think their subjective
orientation is in the God-ward direction. But that is
absolutely untrue, you see. Subjectivity is just the other
side of the body.
You are free of these two tendencies, self-indulgence and subjectivity, when you have inspected them to the point that you can maintain your commitment to real life with some stability. Then you can live the true discipline, the whole body discipline, the true puja or sacrifice of the whole body, which is what has been demanded by teachers in the past and which I also demand. Such sacrifice is the end to all of the exclusive rituals of the left side and the right side, the external sacrifices, the sacrifices of things that you are not, whether goats or the body. The sacrifice must be what you are-you are the sacrifice, not Jesus, not a goat, and not the body that you separate from. The whole body is the sacrifice, gross, subtle, and causal, physical, mental, and egoic, not through a process of withdrawal, but through a living process of existing as the whole body yielded to Infinity. Self-indulgence and subjectivity
are great psychological tendencies. The qualities of right
and left are strategies that appear in the dramatization
that is everyone's life. They are always there, confusing
people about the whole matter of spiritual life. If you look
for wisdom to either the right or the left side, you will
not find it! You will find only confusion; you will find
opposition to something that you are already considering to
be true. The left and right sides together are an argument;
they are in phase with one another, polarized to one
another. Therefore, they are constantly moving you through
cycles in your orientation. The play between them is just
stuff, you see, the content of experience. In response, you
must simply presume the Lawful conditions of existence,
considering this Teaching, living in my Company, and living
the essential disciplines as they are communicated. True
life has nothing to do with dwelling on tendencies, left or
right. Those will appear in their own way, but they are
neither to be dramatized nor to become a matter of concern.
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