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Bubba Free John THE WAY THAT I TEACH - Talks
on the Intuition of Eternal Life
The Seven Stages of Eternal Life BUBBA: In the traditions of spiritual culture, the development of a human being has often been described in terms of seven stages, each spanning a period of seven years. There is a rational basis in Awakened Wisdom for this scheme. That basis is the very structure of the body-being of every human individual. We are a composite of elements and of functional relations, a coherent life-form expressed via the nervous system and brain, and levels of mind that may consciously reflect not only the gross or "material" (earth) realm but the realms of life-energy and all the cosmic (subtle) realms or media of light. At the root of this psycho-physical system is the heart, the primal organ or locus or epitome not only of life but of consciousness in man. It is here that the presumption and conception of egoic independence, or the separate "I," arise in every moment. It is on the basis of this presumption that the human individual is predetermined to a reactive life of fear, vulnerability, flight from mortality, and a universal constitutional state of contraction. That contraction encloses consciousness in the limits of skin and thought, and it separates the whole body-being of man from the Divine Radiance and Perfect Consciousness that is otherwise native to it and eternally available to it in every part. The Way of Divine Ignorance, which I teach, is a complete Way of life . It is not merely a system of self- applied methods of inwardness or of exclusively external and worldly functional improvement. It is a whole culture, lived principally among others who do likewise, and in complete touch with every level of our structural humanity, from the gross physical to the subtle and transcendental ranges of Light. The presumption of independent conscious existence, rooted in the heart prior to mind, and expressed as forms of contraction or self-definition at every functional level of the body-being, as well as in all relations, is the present foundation of the conventional and chaotic "culture" or habit of adaptation of most human beings. Therefore, if we are to be adapted (or readapted) to another Principle than the ego, or independent and separative self, we must likewise become involved in a total culture of that alternative. The culture of the Way of Divine Ignorance may also be related to the traditional scheme of seven stages of growth. But it is founded on the Awakening of the heart from self-possession to free feeling-attention, via all functions, in all relations, under all conditions. Indeed, the whole Way is the Way of the heart. The first three stages purify and readapt the whole body- being via the life heart, the gross physical epitome. Thus, they involve the foundation growth of the vital- physical, the emotional-sexual, and the lower mental, including the will, or integrated responsibility for the whole of the common human foundation. The first three stages of life, each traditionally encompassing seven years of growth, are a process of ordinary human incarnation, the movement into the apparently autonomous, or individual, psycho- physical condition via birth (the first stage, from birth to approximately age seven), and the emotional- sexual adaptation that follows birth (the second stage, from ages eight to fourteen). And we must realize an integrated, whole body responsibility for that incarnated condition (the third stage, from about age fifteen to about age twenty-one). In the stages beyond the third stage of life, the dimensions of the psychic and subtle ranges of consciousness develop, maturing in states of awareness that some people have called "cosmic" knowledge and subtlety. What is revealed in these later stages are forms of experiential knowledge, or gnosis, of the dimensions of existence that are more subtle than the physical, but still expressed within the range of human experience. It is "cosmic" knowledge in the form that human beings can realize such knowledge. But however great such gnosis or experience may be, it is still a form of human development. It is not God-Realization. The first seven years of life and the first stage of human culture are the time of the development of the vital or living physical being. Other functions may also be developing then, but it is especially the time for physical development. In the beginning the individual is a "babe in arms," without responsibility of any kind and essentially without response to life. He lives a calm, sleepy, vegetable-like existence. At this stage of growth, the physical nature is not impinging on the child. He lives in a kind of dream state even though awake, free of concepts, not differentiating between the more subtle forms of consciousness and the waking or physical forms. Gradually he begins to adapt to the functional structures of physical existence. Therefore, in this first stage we see the development of coordination among the functions of the body. And that adaptation is appropriate. It is not that he loses something by turning outward to physical existence. Adaptation to lower, physical life is absolutely necessary. He is preparing the ground for responsible adaptation to higher life. In the first stage of life, then, there is only minimal development of responsibility for the emotional and the mental faculties. The mental life at this stage is primarily a process of adaptation of attention, not of conceptualization. There is a functional mind, and the individual can learn rudimentary skills, such as reading and writing. But we cannot expect the individual during those initial seven years to become a true intellectual or moral representation of human integrity. The level of experience to which he or she is adapted in the present bodily form is too rudimentary to provide the vehicle for a truly creative intellect. This is true even of prodigies. They must first adapt to the human condition through experience. Neither can we expect a range of sophisticated relational emotions or heightened sexual capacity during this time. If the child is a prodigy, with possibilities for intellectual or sexual development, and we exploit those possibilities without giving attention to the functions he should be developing at his actual stage of life, then we will eventually see an aberrated adult. He may be a genius at mathematics, but an idiot from almost any other point of view, because he has not adapted to forms of experience that inform the mechanical mind of what is above, below, other, and greater than itself. As the child approaches the seventh year, from perhaps five to seven years of age, his emotional and also his concrete linguistic or mental development is beginning to become a little more sophisticated. Emotional responsibility is thus clearly required. He must begin to live in relational terms and to learn how to deal with the real existence of other beings, human beings especially! In the second stage there appears the potential of full relational feeling and the necessity for responsibility for the communication of life-force and sympathy with its vital processes. Thus, the individual develops an expanded bodily life through the extension of feeling, and he also becomes sexually aware, even very early in life. In this second stage he should develop a more sophisticated awareness of energy and healthfulness, of breathing and of bringing energy to others. The morality of love itself finds its seed form in the second stage. The second phase of life is the time of the development of the etheric, or emotional-sexual, life, of polarization to etheric life, of feeling alive and flowering, as the primitive physical sense, which once was the primary goad to living adaptation, begins to submit itself to awareness of the greater world of energy relations, the living world wherein solidity gives way to animation and rapid changes. It is the time of the development of sexual polarization (or sexual character) and sensitivity, and of emotional life based on the forces contained in sexual differentiation. Emotion and physical energy of every kind, including sexuality, are simultaneously awakened as parts of the same process. Blood and breath, circulation, and bodily rhythms are also developed during this second stage of life. In the third stage, the lower functions of mind, including will, intention, and self-control, and general integration of the living being in its relations should begin to develop. The weakness of this level of development, or the absence of the cultural demand for it, is the basis of the conflict that commonly appears at puberty. Not only has the individual developed physically by this time, but he has also developed an emotional and sexual presence. Then suddenly the suggestion of the functions of will and intention arises in him, accompanied by the social demand to be responsible, to control himself, and to develop himself mentally. The conflict between his readiness to throw himself into a life of self-indulgence (the habit of wasting life-energy) and the new demand for a life of self-control is the conventional theatre of puberty. The third stage of life should be the cultural moment in which the individual is clearly confronted with the obligation to be responsible, independent, and loving. Otherwise, the relative dependency of his earlier life will become a source of weakness, withdrawal, negative reactivity, and destructiveness in relation to himself and others. When the second stage is essentially mature, generally from twelve to fourteen years of age, the individual should be acknowledged, even by his parents, to be "unparented," to be essentially responsible for himself (or herself), but within the context of a total educational or cultural structure that will guide him in his adolescent development. From this time on, he is to adapt to life from the point of view of intentional responsibility, until he is capable of being an integrated human being in the common world of human functions and human relations. Thus, in the third stage, the mind as intention and will must be integrated with the whole complex of feeling and activity that are an ordinary human life. It is in this stage that the individual must learn what the matter of life is all about, what relations are all about, what sexuality is all about (without indulgence of the sexual functions), and it is also in this stage that he actually begins to practice moral responsibility for the relational context of human life. Thus, the typical rebellion of the adolescent is not necessary. His essential independence is to be acknowledged, not threatened or prevented. He may even move out of his household to live in an educational environment with others of the same age or stage of life. It should be clear that he has been accepted into the sacred culture of the larger society, and there he (or she) is to learn his mature obligations and be instructed in the right use of his lower functional potential relative to a future in which he must also grow into expanded psychic and spiritual dimensions of existence. The incidents that inform his life from day to day must remain the essential responsibility of the cultural or sacred group into which he has been integrated (presuming such a group exists, as it does in our Church), and that order of his life should be maintained until his moral maturity is acknowledged, generally between the late teens and the age of twenty-one, when it should be presumed, based on evidence, that this individual is now able to live a truly human and spiritual life. From that time, he should be free to combine himself with the world and, as in the case of our own Church culture, to continue to develop the sacred life of higher development as well. But he has learned what he can learn about body, emotion, and mind in themselves, and now he must go out and live them in further. practical and intellectual education, work in the world, and marriage. Among the principal and most significant adaptations that the individual must realize in this stage is the adaptation to his sexuality. Most present-day teenagers, adapted to the world with only partial acculturation (and, therefore, only partial humanization), are suppressed by the parental enclosure, required to be childishly dependent, even into and beyond their second seven years, rather than to move toward responsibility. When the individual is a teenager, in the society of high school, he gets rebellious. He acquires a secret life hidden from his family and the older people who are responsible to him. He starts to exploit himself emotionally, physically, and sexually, and to do so even violently and stupidly. Thus, we truly serve our children only if we set them free within the cultural circle of the wise during their teens. Then their nature will not be suppressed, but brought into a very mature relationship to that stage of life in which we all must realize truly human control over body, emotion, and mind, and a devotion of these to spiritual practice. Actual sexual contact should not be part of an individual's life until he (or she) is mature in the third stage of life. Only then is he prepared for true sexual intimacy, and only then should he be encouraged to live it in actual relationship. And he must be instructed in not only the generative but the regenerative and esoteric functions of the sexual process. A life of sexual and personal exploitation is the result of being a reactive, psychologically dependent personality as a teenager. Such an individual is able to differentiate himself and feel his own life-strength only by extraordinary acts of independence through self-indulgence, promiscuity, manipulation of self and others, and so forth. The principle of the exploitation of life that we all commonly learn in our conventional relations simply must not be learned or reinforced. Individuals must see that independence based on self-indulgence and exploitation of bodily experience is a false principle, that it has nothing to do with Wisdom, with spiritual life, with Realization of Truth, or with being a human being. That principle is false, not only relative to sexuality but to the whole of life. The usual man empties himself in all kinds of ways. He exploits himself, to acquire pleasure because he does not feel pleasure inherently. Rather, he always already feels a contracted or reactive condition, a dilemma or suppression of 'body, emotion, life, and mind. He is not a spiritual person. He is not consciously involved in the Divine Process. He probably thinks there is no such process. Therefore, he basically uses up his life, as his sexual tendencies and habits clearly demonstrate. Orgasm is a principal method people exploit for the sake of pleasurable release. They feel pleasure temporarily, but ultimately they empty themselves. Conventional orgasm is a reflex that discharges the life- force. But people commonly are not only addicted to orgasm, but they believe it is a healthful practice. In a true culture of human adaptation, the regenerative conservation of the vital force is realized through instruction in the third stage of life. The psycho- physics of diet, health, and sexual intimacy, as well as the Law of Sacrifice, fulfilled through unobstructed feeling-attention in all relations, must be learned before we are prepared for the human world. Since most people have not grown to maturity in such a culture, the so-called human world of our time is peopled by subhuman, immature, and uninstructed individuals who know practically nothing about the spiritual order and ultimate functional destiny of human life. Thus, the principle of the conservation of life-force, the psycho-physics of the conservation of energy or of life, must be realized in the third stage of life. When this principle, understood relative to all life-functions, becomes the foundation of the practice of life, then the individual may become not only sexually active but maturely present in every common way as a human being in the world. In that third stage of human development the individual takes a period of time, before he or she proceeds, to stand back and re-examine the conditions of adaptation—physical, emotional, and mental—on the basis of which he or she has become committed to the egoic disposition of "you don't love the." The ego is the activity of Narcissus. It is contraction from Infinity, the action of unlove. The avoidance of relationship is simply unlove; however, because of our arbitrary adaptation to incarnation, unlove becomes a metaphysical disposition, the "ego." But the ego is not some person, point, or entity. A separate identity is not its true significance, although that is part of our conventional reference to it. The ego is the action of non-sacrifice, of contraction, and this action is a normal part of the vertical, developmental movement of our human potential. In the first two stages of life, we naturally develop a sense of autonomous, independent existence. Usually we adapt to it through some experience, or experiences, that we interpret negatively in order to justify our demand for love, our persistence as unlove, our lack of faith, and our anxiety in the midst of life. But in the third stage of life we must become responsible for that egoic action, responsible as feeling-attention, as the heart, as love. Only then can we proceed into the fourth stage of life. Only then can spiritual life begin. The general culture of the first three stages naturally belongs to the first twenty-one years of life, but men and women in general fail to complete these stages to maturity because of reactive adaptation to the false, or egoic, principle. Thus, most "adults" are only bordering on the awakening of a life committed to love, the life of the heart and of psychic awakening. They phase back and forth from actual commitment to love and spiritual ascent, but spend most of their time in various forms of problematic concentration in vital-physical, emotional-sexual, and lower mental dilemmas of will, morality, belief, and conventional knowledge. The reason for this is that the first three stages of their adaptation are immature, so they are still foundering in childish and adolescent motivations of character, the theatre of the struggle between dependence and independence. And this chaotic, subhuman struggle will continue to bind the individual and human societies as a whole until there is release from the ego, the contraction of the heart and the whole body-being, the commitment to separation, avoidance of relationship, loveless self-possession, obsessive self-indulgence, doubt, and unconsciousness of the Source, Light, Love, Living Food, and Eternal Life by which all things are sustained forever. II BUBBA: The usual man does not become responsible for the contraction that is the ego. He thinks the ego will dissolve when it is merged in the sahasrar,1 that he should go about increasing his experience, acquiring consoling experiences through various methods - for instance, by taking drugs. In this way people stimulate and glorify themselves egoically in their independence. But the spiritual process rests upon the moral foundation of responsibility for this egoic action of unlove, or the avoidance of relationship. Only when the heart is released from that egoic contraction, in real responsibility for the egoic dramatization that is separation, can human beings realize the true incident of Communion with God, rather than the false incident of glorified independence. Only through responsibility for the disposition of "I love you" may we continue to grow in our ordinary, evolutionary way and at the same time be God- Realizing in our disposition. 1. The sahasrar is the highest chakra and terminal goal of the yogi. It is associated with the crown of the head, the upper brain and higher mind. What people conventionally regard as spiritual life is simply growth, in the evolutionary sense, along the vertical line of human possibilities. But that psycho- physiological evolution is not what true spiritual life is. Spiritual life is the realization of Truth within the conditions of this experiential evolution to which man is already psycho-physically disposed. In other words, this development of experience, or this psycho- physical evolution of the being, is not itself the Truth. It is our potential. As we grow in any stage of life, at any stage of experience, we must spiritualize our existence. We must realize the Divine as the Condition of all conditions. The possible experiences themselves and varying degrees of subtlety and knowledge are not God-Realization, however high they may be on the scale of human potential. This understanding of spiritual growth is just the opposite of the usual man's belief. He thinks that manipulation of the vertical dimension of his being, turning his attention inward and performing various yogic processes, is spiritual life. But such practice merely serves the experiential evolution of human potential. Because of the drug culture and other social and environmental influences with which people are presently involved, particularly in the West, and because of the arbitrary adaptation to life that we are brought to realize in our chaotic, random culture, people have become involved with what they think are spiritual matters, but which are really essentially occult matters related to human potential, psychic phenomena, or developments of the higher nervous system. People engage in these practices quite arbitrarily. They become involved with these phenomena just as people of more limited experience indulge sensual pleasure such as eating or sex. The motivation toward experience is the same in both cases. If we simply engage ourselves in experience, high or low, we have not realized Truth. We have realized our human possibility only from the limited point of view of independent existence. The true Condition of the whole body-being exists prior to the movement toward experience. The essential Nature and Condition of the living being, the spiritual dimension of human life, the dimension of God-Realization or Truth, is the dimension of the heart.) It is the horizontal dimension of the being. All the vertical dimensions of our experience, high or low, must be realized relative to the principle of the heart. It is fundamental. Only when we become oriented to the heart, responsible as the heart for the dimensions of our human and structural possibility, do we begin to spiritualize our existence and, through sacrifice, submit mere experience to the dimension of Truth. You do not realize God, or even become involved in spiritual life, by merely employing manipulative techniques that produce temporary experiences within the structural potential of human existence. You cannot find some esoteric technique that may turn you inward or some teacher whose influence may stimulate your nervous system and expect your experiences to have anything whatsoever to do with God- Realization. You may enter into the spiritual dimension of life only on the basis of a moral transformation of the whole body-being, the re-orientation of the whole body-being to its Condition in Truth. Before a person can move on to real spiritual practice, he must become truly responsible in the third stage of life, a responsibility that people who are currently involved in so-called spiritual matters tend to bypass and fail to acknowledge. They are making the egoic dilemma of their adolescence the foundation for spiritual practice. Thus, their so-called spirituality is not at all spiritual. It is essentially psychological and subjective. It is egoic. What they must do instead is to realize the third stage of life. It is perfectly normal for the egoic presumption to persist in the third stage of life, but it is certainly not supposed to be the principle of your whole life! First you must integrate with the gross functions, incarnate, and feel yourself independently. After the initial stages of growth, however, this lingering egoic presumption becomes not only the sense of independent existence, but also the sense of separation from Infinity. In the case of the usual man, separation is the principle by which he acts and by which he becomes associated with his potential. And that separation is "sin." Sin is not forbidden pleasure; sin is "to miss the mark." It is, regardless of the experience in this moment, high or low, to be possessed by the ego, to be separate, to be meditating on your own existence rather than living as a sacrifice to Infinity through love. This is the essential point that I want to make: The third stage of consideration, acculturation and humanization of the living being, is a necessary foundation in which to realize the moral and truly spiritual disposition of the heart. On that basis the whole body-being is set in motion and may grow again. If you do not pass through that transformation, it literally does not matter how much psychic experience you may acquire in the future, or how intellectually clear you may feel about everything. You still must undo the disposition of the ego before you can grow fully into the next or fourth stage of life. Because these stages are spiritual stages, the true and eternal stages of life, they are not merely descriptions of the vertical dimension of human potential, but of the synthesis of the vertical, or structural, development of the being with the horizontal dimension of the heart. They are inclusive descriptions of the whole body. People think that the ego dissolves when you realize Nirvana. But you must be responsible for the ego long before that! You must be morally responsible before you can spiritualize your life in the higher stages of adaptation. Otherwise you engage all the consoling illusions, and spiritual life remains based in the ego. You start calling the ego the "soul." You perhaps purify the sense of independent existence of some of its lower tendencies, but you continue satisfying that independent one with the consolations of higher tendencies. People also think that tendencies, or karmas, are effective only below the heart. They are active above the heart as well. Karmas are the persistence of patterns of experience that are based on your adaptation. If you are adapting only to the lower dimensions of possible experience, then your karmas are of that kind. When you awaken to higher potentials of experience, then your karmas are of that kind, because you have adapted to the higher structural possibilities. Thus your "visions" become your karma. Most people are tending to bypass this third stage of life (the development of the lower, intentional mind and the life of the will), this transition between the egoic, ordinary, and essentially infantile and adolescent dilemma into the responsibility that is truly spiritual. At best, they are moving into the vertical dimension of potential experience. They are not living a spiritual life, because the dimension of the heart is not their responsibility. They are locked in self-possession, the way of Narcissus. It does not make any difference what their experiences are - they are serving only the independent one. That is why the contemporary spiritual movement, particularly as it appears in the West, is essentially a hype. It has fundamentally nothing whatsoever to do with the realization of the spiritual foundation of existence. It has to do with improving yourself and your situation by getting distracted, acquiring experience. Self-improvement has nothing to do with God, and as a result the contemporary spiritual movement is largely an affair without honor. People treat spiritual literature like dime novels and then presume to be full of spiritual understanding, when in fact they have not even become responsible for their lower obsessive life. Altogether such an approach dishonors the Divine cause. No sacred occasion is lived in that whole movement. There are only personalities without integral understanding of what everybody is really living and what true spiritual life is all about. People do not want to go through the stages of preparation. They want to hear about "enlightenment," come over and get their initiation, and then call themselves spiritual. But you have to grow, to change, to prepare yourself, to struggle with all of those functions that you have adapted to arbitrarily. There must be real growth, real adaptation, a real transformation of the whole body-being in all relations. It is not a matter of achieving a new level of understanding and then automatically becoming spiritual. No—you must fully consider your practice and change what you do. You must fully re-adapt in the third stage of life, fully transform your orientation to the functions of life you have already developed, before you can move beyond them. It is a slow and gradual process. There is no way it can be done in a weekend. You must study the considerations relative to your ordinary life and observe yourself over time. Having observed yourself, you may become responsible for repetitive patterns of unlove and chronic reaction. The third stage of life takes time, as it takes time for the physical body and the emotional life to grow. It need not take seven years, but it very well might, or even longer. When you are fundamentally responsible for the egoic disposition you may enter fully, consciously, morally, and spiritually into the true incident that is the foundation of spiritual life, the foundation of the fourth stage of life, or the real beginning of this Way of Divine Ignorance. In the fourth stage, when one enters the stream of spiritual life, all of the dimensions of the being that lie below the heart are already adapted to its true disposition, which is love, and the heart is freed of its egoic presumption, its contraction. Only then can you truly enter into spiritual realization of higher dimensions of human development, the dimensions that exist above the heart. Real preparation, adaptation, and testing must precede the fourth stage. When you are responsible as "I love you" and have demonstrated such maturity in the company of other devotees, then you may be initiated into the spiritual dimension of the Way of Divine Communion. At that point the Spiritual Master becomes your advantage. Until then you may say that the Spiritual Master is necessary, but in fact he is not. The notion that "I was initiated by Umpty-ump, and now he is drawing me into the seventh plane" is a lot of nonsense. It is just not true. The Spiritual Master is a real function, a function that you realize is useful, that is an advantage, when you enter into the dimension of real spiritual life. You are initiated into that Company on the basis of responsibility for the ego, for unlove, for the avoidance of relationship. Then you can see the advantage that the Spiritual Master represents. You see quite clearly the beauty and clarity of the true Teaching. Then you become free of your ambivalence, your egoic argument, your self-possession, your particular hedge. We adapt the whole body to the point of view of each level of our experiential potential in vertical, or ascending, order. First we adapt to the physical dimension (in the first stage of life), then to the emotional-sexual (in the second stage), and then to the mental, or "will," dimension (in the third stage). In the fourth stage the dimension of the heart or psychic being as love, rather than as the contraction of independence, or Narcissus, awakens, making possible the integration of the whole body-being, above and below the heart. In the fourth and fifth stages the kundalini-shakti,2 or lower psychic dimension, awakens, and then the dimension of the midbrain, the higher psyche, awakens and projects itself upward toward the limits of the body-being. Individuals tend to view this development as a movement toward cosmic dimensions of experience beyond the head, beyond the crown, beyond the sahasrar. But this movement is primarily the development of the potentials of the brain itself and its human ability to contact the more and more subtle ranges of its own conditional and psycho-physical existence. Then in the sixth stage the contraction of even such exalted mystical and transcendental awareness is penetrated, and attention comes to rest in the Heart, as Self-realization or Jnana Samadhi.3 But when you have fully realized the human structural possibility, there is still an infinity of potential structures in which to awaken and by which to experience all the dimensions of existence. Clearly the realization of the spiritual process is not simply the awakening of human potential. The realization of this process is the spiritual orientation to our potential, the disposition of sacrifice. We must go beyond the merely human dimension. That is what the seventh stage of life is about. It is more than merging into subtle experience. It is the discarding of all that we are, whole bodily, to Infinity, beyond all knowledge, without knowledge. It is simply absolute non-resistance, non-recoil from Infinite blissfulness. Thus, we are ultimately translated out of the limited human form. Spiritual life is about such translation, not the acquisition of some yogic state or the glorification of the physical in itself. Such effects may occur, but they are purely secondary, just as all the vertical dimensions of our adaptation, though necessary, are also secondary. 2. The kundalini or kundalini-shakti is the "serpent power" of esoteric spirituality. It is the wry Creative Power of the universes, but it also lies dormant in man, coiled at the base of the spine. It may be awakened spontaneously in the yogic practitioner, after which it ascends within him, producing all the various forms of yogic and mystical experience. Bubba indicates that the internal spiritual force is eternally awake, but man is not awake. Therefore, he recommends no efforts to awaken this force itself, but puts all attention to our awakening to the prior, eternal and always present Nature and Condition. In the course of such spiritual practice, internal force may be awakened as a secondary event, but it is regarded and dealt with in quite a different manner than is recommended by the yogis. 3. "Jnana" means Self-knowledge; "Samadhi" means spiritual Consciousness or Equanimity, Balance. Jnana Samadhi is the exclusive fall in the Heart, wherein there is no qualification by any condition seen, heard, or felt, high or low. It is conscious Bliss or Self-realization, prior to and exclusive of objects. Jnana Samadhi is the final realization of the Way of Re-cognition, the third stage of the Way of Divine Ignorance. Only a subtle tension remains in Jnana Samadhi. It is the tension created by the spontaneously exclusive (object-rejecting) force in this state of Intuition. Thus, this exclusive tension is at last also re-cognized, or "known again" to be a form of contraction or suffering. Then there is the awakening of Sahaj ("easy, natural, effortless") Samadhi, and the beginning of the final and eternal stage of spiritual practice, the Way of Radical Intuition, which ultimately matures as Bhava Samadhi, the ultimate Condition of Radical Devotion and Bliss. This discussion is
only a brief sketch of the progressive awakening of the
whole body-being of man. For a complete account of the
esoteric progression through the seven stages of life,
including the experiential and conscious developments of the
stages of the Way of Divine Ignorance and their
correspondences in the great traditions of esoteric
spirituality, see The Paradox of Instruction: An
Introduction to the Esoteric Spiritual Teaching of Bubba
Free John, by Bubba Free John, 2d edition, revised and
expanded (San Francisco: The Dawn Horse Press, 1977).
The significance of the seventh stage is that we are transfigured in the perfect awakening of the heart, or absolute responsibility for the sense of independent existence, even as the body. We realize responsibility for the subjective ego in the early stages of development, but we become fully responsible for the body itself as the ego or "soul" in the sixth stage of life, in the stage of Self-realization, or Jnana Samadhi, which matures into Sahaj Samadhi.4 In that freedom the whole body-being becomes a sacrifice, and the body itself as ego is released into the Infinite. This sacrifice leads to the ultimate translation of the whole body- being into the Divine Radiance, beyond all ordinary human destinies. If you raise your attention out of the lower dimensions, you may have subtle experiences, and at the point of death you may be drawn into realms of experience that correspond to those higher levels of attention. But that phenomenon is not God- Realization. It is the realization of more subtle levels of manifestation. God-Realization occurs when the whole body-being and all of its content, all of its structural adaptation, is released into Infinity, is not held onto, and is realized to be only the modification of That which is intuited to be the Real, prior to all conditions. No objects are held onto in the seventh stage. There is no light, no sound, not any phenomenon at all objectifying, that is held onto as Truth. It is all understood. It is all sacrificed. Thus, in the seventh stage of life we are translated into the Divine. We have no archetype within the human structure to enable us to know in advance what that Destiny is. We only know in the completeness of this human structure, as the whole body-being, that That is the process in which we must be yielded. But there is no prevision of the Divine to guide us in that Translation. The Divine is Revealed, but there is no way of containing that Realization within the structures of the human being, even in its highest and most subtle orientation. We are simply drawn to another Destiny beyond this cosmos of our human structure. There is no way to say anything about it except that we are obliged to make this sacrifice. 4. Sahaj Samadhi is the realization of the Condition of all arising, in which whatever arises is seen to be only the modification of the prior Divine Condition. It matures as Bhava Samadhi, which is the Truth of Sahaj Samadhi. You can wait to do it at the end of eons of time of involvement with the dimensions of experience predetermined by your structure. Or you can enter into it fully within this lifetime. Within a relatively short period of time you can be translated out of thin human dream absolutely, in its fleshy gross expression, its subtle expression, its higher, transcendent possibilities, and all the causal potentials that are invisible and silent in the heart. All of the structures of experiential or objective, subject-object destiny are made a sacrifice in the seventh stage. In the seventh stage we realize true spiritual life. Everything before it is preparation for that perfect sacrifice. Religion, or specific sacrifice, is learned through the testing and awakening of responsibility in the first six stages of life. Many who are involved with what they think are spiritual approaches to life attach themselves to extraordinary people, yogis, saints, and sages. But the experiential realizations of yogis, saints, and sages do not fully represent spiritual life. They represent the development of human potential. The realizations of yogis, saints, and sages represent aspects of these first six stages of life, none of which in itself amounts to Truth or true spirituality. In those stages we are prepared for the seventh stage of life. And the Realization of the seventh stage of life is the essence of the Teaching and demonstration that I represent. That Realization is the Way of Truth. The heart is its foundation, and the heart must be realized and made the foundation of the six stages of preparation, so that our Destiny becomes Divine only, not any of the heaven worlds or the lesser worlds, nor any destiny for which we have the structural predisposition, but only the Divine itself.
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