|
|
Bubba Free John THE WAY THAT I TEACH - Talks
on the Intuition of Eternal Life
Chapter 14 The Secret: of Divine Translation BUBBA: The Spiritual Master's attention to his devotee naturally transforms the devotee into Bhava Samadhi. But the devotee's attention must also rest in the Spiritual Master. You become what you meditate on. Thus, if your feeling-attention is made a sacrifice, so that it becomes absolute feeling-attention, love, or sacrifice to the Spiritual Master, then there is a perfect link between you and the Absolute or Divine Condition. By this means you are lifted out of all the conditional states of life and birth in any form. Therefore, spiritual allegiance to the Spiritual Master is the highest function of existence. It is the single advantage not only of human beings but of all beings. It is a unique function in nature. If we are mediocre in our attention to the Spiritual Master, if our relationship to him, or her, is conventional or casually indulged while we continue to be driven by tendency, then the function of the Spiritual Master is forgotten. It is denied. It is not effective as described. Only the ego will deny the Spiritual Master or the Divine. The ego wants to do it himself. Do what himself? Be himself. Be untouched. Since you become what you meditate on, you should meditate on, or give feeling-attention to, the Absolute, which, in the form that it is given to you, the Form of the Spiritual Master, is your highest advantage. Thus, the devotee knows the secret of Divine translation. The Power of Truth is what he finds in the Spiritual Master, not some conventional child- parent game of ordinary allegiance. The relationship between the Spiritual Master and the devotee is a spiritual connection, which demands the attention of your whole being. Your whole life must be submitted to the Spiritual Master, not on the basis of childish motivation, but on the basis of true hearing and true seeing, of intuition, of Truth. Thus, the responsibility for devotees is to realize the disposition wherein they are no longer turned away from the Spiritual Master on the basis of conventional reactions, and they can whole-heartedly yield themselves to the Spiritual Master, like the fools they must be in order to realize God. DEVOTEE: Recently some of us who sit with you in formal meditation were talking about an experience we have in common in the meditation hall. There is a sense of light that emanates from you. It is not always a visual perception, and it is more like an intuition than a physical experience, but it is very clear. BUBBA: That Radiance is the manifestation of the direct Realization or Intuition of Bhava Samadhi. There may also be secondary experiences of lights or physical blisses or visions. As the spectrum of colors is to light itself, these experiences are secondary to the intuition of Bliss, which drives you out of your ego position, through feeling, through absolute attention and merging in the Infinite. The devotee is constantly given the intuition of the Absolute. But because he, or she, adheres to the ego and to apparent divisions of the body-being, he does not recognize fully the significance of his intuition of God. It is too ordinary an experience. He may feel a little relieved, a little blissful, but still he is unable to be completely given over to the translating Force of the revelation of the Spiritual Master. Therefore, his practice is a matter of growth in the Divine Company of the Spiritual Master. The initiation into Communion with God is given constantly, but it is not fully realized by the devotee. He is initiated piece by piece. He is converted by degrees and begins more and more to recognize the significance of the Condition of the Spiritual Master. He begins in an essentially casual relationship to the Spiritual Master, perhaps respectful, but based on the kind of allegiance that an interest in the Teaching and a little bit of turning toward the spiritual possibility can create. Nevertheless, as he persists in that sympathy, he is constantly initiated into the Absolute Condition, drawn into higher dimensions of experience and responsibility, until the Sacrifice of God becomes his sacrifice also. Thus, the devotee enjoys the same destiny as the Spiritual Master. His practice is not quickened by virtue of the creeping earnings of the ego in its mechanical efforts at yoga, but by virtue of submission and translation. The devotee is driven along the conscious current of the being into the Absolute Condition, whereas the usual man, in his self- possession, glamorizing himself by all kinds of associations and mechanical efforts, cannot give up anything. The devotee can pass directly into Bhava Samadhi—that is his potential. As it works out in practice, it is a matter of growth, but even so it may be realized in a lifetime. Then even the destiny of heaven becomes unnecessary, not just the destiny of being reborn in the gross world. The transformation of existence depends upon attachment to the absolute Ignorance-Radiance, which is beyond conception, beyond objectification, beyond self and independent consciousness. It is without forms, without a standpoint, without supports. It is absolute ecstasy. We grow into the capacity for that enjoyment only bit by bit, because it is terrifying to the ego. The ego is simply the contraction of feeling-attention, which occurs on the basis of adaptation to functional states. Therefore, as we are released or purified from our attachment to functional states, we become more and more capable of that Sacrifice into the Absolute, which appears to be nothing from the point of view of experience, and therefore is terrifying to the ego. You must be willing to vanish completely, to be completely obliterated. You will become capable of that sacrifice only by degrees, because your fear is profound. The frigidity of feeling-attention is most profound in you, because of your experience, your adaptation. Therefore, the process of God-Realization is a matter of time and practice. It need not be infinite time, as it is for the ego. The ego will also return to absolute dissolution in God, but only when the whole cosmos dissolves! The devotee who enjoys the intuition that is already the dissolution of self-possession may enter into that Realization long, long, long before the grinding halt of the universes. And you know how long it is between now and the grinding halt of the universes. There are billions of years even until the end of the earth. There are countless years, aeons of time beyond conception, until the dissolution of everything manifest. And the ego will dissolve only at that point. In the meantime, unless we realize God, we will have to go through the revolutions of experience, through arbitrary intention, arbitrary stimulation and attachment, through all the torments of dreaming existence in every plane, aeons upon aeons upon aeons of times, because there is not a fixed amount of time from now until then. And we must take into account all the time that the ego may manufacture in dreams. So time is ultimately without end. Because of infinite time, all your experience is two- sided. There is fulfillment and there is aggravation at the same time, in the midst of every possible event, high and low. When you become sensitive to that dilemma, then you become capable of sympathy with the Teaching of Truth and with the revelation of the Spiritual Master, who is beyond consolations. He is zero, like death, Siva to the ego. But when the devotee is aligned to the Spiritual Master, when the Spiritual Master is worshipped by the devotee, then that zero becomes absolute Blissfulness. But until the individual is a devotee, he flees from the Spiritual Master; he is always tussling. When the point of submission comes, then he is full of gratitude, happiness, blissfulness, ecstasy. He is able to drink with the Spiritual Master—and also to sit with him in formal, silent, meditative Communion with the Infinite Reality. He is able to be happy in the present, not to acquire happiness through any mechanism of experience, but to be happy, to be totally without self-possession, without holding on to a single experience. When you hold on to nothing and therefore have no experience, then you realize the sublimity of your Condition, which is not within. God-Realization is not a matter of fixing within, turning within, holding within, holding to anything. It is a matter of absolute dissolution.
|
|
|
