|
|
Bubba Free John THE WAY THAT I TEACH - Talks
on the Intuition of Eternal Life
It is not that there is a taboo against inwardness, images, etc. - so that you are to watch yourself and react whenever such conditions appear - but you should constantly, in every present moment, apply yourself to the Lawful exercise of unobstructed whole body feeling-attention in relationship. In that case, it is not a matter of worrying when subjective forms arise. There need be no such concern. In every moment, simply return with feeling to the present play and you will see how the inward reflex becomes less and less effective. In freedom there is native delight. In delight we are free to communicate intimately and to Commune most profoundly with every fraction or pattern of the manifest cosmos, high or low. Once the Intuition of Ignorance awakens, the Expression of Radiance necessarily follows, and we enter freely into the patterns of this Paradox of existence. We enter in love, delight, the Royal Awe. Such a one has only minimal "work" to do with his life. He transforms his life from the self- effort of work to the blissful pastimes of inspired living. Such a life handles its grosser tasks quickly and economically, and remains most of the time engaged in the vigorous contemplation and friendly fierce communication with everything. Bubba Free John Chapter 7
Whoever Loves in the Present Is Not Bound BUBBA: The core of the being is the heart, not the head or the navel, but the heart, the function of feeling-attention, the unobstructed emotional connection, or communion with everything through feeling. That function is the principal one, and the realization of spiritual life depends on that function, on its becoming active. However, each of you now has problems, doubts about yourself, and ways of acting from day to day that represent the obstruction of feeling. Therefore, you must re-adapt yourselves to this function of the heart. Your obstructed feeling is a reflection of your childhood. As a child you adapted to what you observed, but as a child observes it. To a child, who is very primitive and not yet socialized, all of the casual things that adults do seem violent and aggressive. In one way or another they impinge upon and inhibit the feeling response of the child, so that he or she begins to become obstructed emotionally. Either the child is capable of manifesting only reactive emotions, emotions of self-involvement or recoil - fear, sorrow, anger - or he or she becomes emotionally deadened, stuck in chronic lack of feeling. Thus, the child learns to control his feeling life, perhaps by using it up in hysterical and reactive emotion, or suppressing it in defensive mentality, or excluding it altogether in physical desiring and self-indulgence. The feeling dimension is the same as the sexual dimension. They are one dimension, the emotional- sexual, or the etheric dimension,1 even the dimension of the heart. In our childish adaptations, we very often become adept at being mental, functioning from the upper extreme of the body, or being vital and self-indulgent, operating through the lower extreme of the body. But the feeling dimension is crippled in everyone. The person who contracts defensively around the mental function is chronically incapable of feeling. The person who functions obsessively in physical and vital ways, all body and no feeling, is likewise crippled in the feeling dimension. The apparently emotional person, who seems always to be feeling, most often is only able to feel reactively, only able to feel the emotions of recoil, the self-involved emotions. Such a person is basically stepping out of the relational play of life and escaping through hysterical emotion. 1. In Conscious Exercise and the Transcendental Sun, by Bubba Free John, the etheric dimension is described as follows: In the physics of the worlds, ether or energy is the senior and most subtle of the gross elements, which also include solid, liquid, fiery, and gaseous substances (the ancient esoteric elements of earth, water, fire, and air). Ether, the most subtle state of gross or material appearance, is the all-pervading element of the physical universe, analogous to space 'itself. The etheric dimension of force or manifest light pervades and surrounds our universe and every physical body. It is the field of energy, magnetism, and space in which the lower or grosser elements function. Thus, your "etheric body" is the specific concentration of force associated with and surrounding- permeating your physical body. It serves as a conduit for the forces of universal light and energy to the physical body. In practical terms of daily experience, the etheric aspect of the being is our emotional-sexual, feeling nature. The etheric body functions through and corresponds to the nervous system. Functioning as a medium between the conscious mind and the physical being, it controls the distribution and use of energy and emotion. It is the dimension of vitality or life-force. We feel the etheric dimension of life not only as vital energy and power and magnetic-gravitational forces, but also as the endless play of emotional polarization, positive and negative, to others, objects, the world itself, everything that arises. The heart dimension
ultimately encompasses more than the etheric or feeling
energy, but it is through the etheric dimension that we
contact the heart in our play of
life.
The problems we have in functioning from day to day and our failure to realize God, or Truth, are both the consequences of the contraction of the heart, or the feeling being. If the heart is obstructed, we become obsessively physical, emotional, or mental in our play of life. Likewise if the heart, or the feeling dimension, is obstructed, we cannot realize God, or Truth, or the Real Condition. Both great aspects of our existence have a common seat, the heart. Therefore, the practice of real, or spiritual, life is to exercise the feeling devotion of the being, to come alive at the heart, and therefore to inform with unobstructed feeling the mental and the physical functions that surround the feeling nature. If we feel into our relations, then all our old adaptations, which are forms of rigidity, or the failure of feeling, will gradually fall away. Likewise, if the heart is awakened, we ultimately will realize the true Condition of our manifestation, which is not independent consciousness at all. DEVOTEE: Then it is not the body itself that is a limitation, but the fact that the only thing I feel is the body. I do not include the feeling dimension of the whole being. BUBBA: When you recoil from feeling-intuition, you collapse into identification with the body, and thus you suffer the illusion that you are inside it. At birth you were simply the whole body, and you as the body (or body-being) enjoyed perfect Communion, feeling, or intuition of your true Condition. But the shock of birth caused a recoil from Divine Communion. That recoil affects all of your behavior, all of your development in the future, until you penetrate it. It is the sense that you are inward to the body, that you are subjective, that you are a point, an independent awareness, not a feeling, diffused Condition, but a specific, feelingless particle of awareness located somehow inside the body and subjective. Thus, you suffer all of the usual emotional, mental, and psychic disabilities as you develop. As the functions of the body-being grow and mature, you adapt through this recoiled position, the original reaction of birth. And all of the shocks that you accumulate from the unenlightened, unloving, and unfeeling actions of others, from the apparent feelingless activity of the environment, and from the horrors of the world - all of these shocks reinforce the recoil from feeling. Therefore, you must become rooted in your natural disposition and presume again the position of the heart or the feeling being. Now you feel yourself to be isolated as a separate awareness, surrounded by flesh and thinking. But that perception will begin to break down once you have adapted to this Way by presuming the feeling position again, by pervading the mental and the physical dimensions with feeling, by becoming responsible for feeling-attention in every moment. Then the whole affair of spiritual practice becomes simply the maturing of that response. DEVOTEE: We are not really prepared to approach you until then. BUBBA: Yes, that is right. You must prepare yourself for this meeting, so that you are unobstructed in your approach to the Spiritual Master, in your feeling. Otherwise you will take hold of the effects of your meeting with me and worship them as idols. And so many do. They want to imagine that they are realized, that they are yogis. They always think that they are related to me through some sensation or other that is private to their own separate existence and that they can manipulate through various means in their living room. Many people are involved in such delusion. They stimulate themselves by their proximity to me and their involvement in the activities here. But you must approach the Spiritual Master without obstruction, without recoil, without self-reference. Be simply present in my company, and the Presence of God will communicate itself to you. You must be able to feel through the effects of reactions, the self- possession, the inwardness, and the thinking, and abide as feeling-attention, not only on the formal occasions of our being together, but characteristically, constantly, ultimately. It may very well be in your contact with me that effects are generated in the energies of the body and their movements; these will attract your attention. Just so, you may experience the awakening of mental and emotional reactions. All the adaptations you represent may be awakened, moved around, set aside, and some other relatively private sensation, emotion, or thought may take their place, such as a kriya2 or a vision, that sort of thing. Spiritual practice, though, in Truth, is to feel through all these effects, to pass beyond them, to let them be whatever they are and to let them rise and fall without concern. When you abide as feeling-intuition, the natural relationship, then the Presence of God will show itself as it truly is. And it will draw you into Communion. It will not leave you in self-possession, surrounded by the artifacts of your own living. These are not God; therefore, they pass. Everything native to you, or established as you through adaptation, dies! It all dies. The physical dies, the etheric shape dies, the mental dies, and all these memories and experiences. It all goes. So you must pass beyond the effects that arise in all dimensions, into God-Realization. Whatever effects, conditions, and experiences arise, they do not then interrupt the blissfulness of existence. They may be lived as they are, without ultimate stress. They have no necessity. Their falling away has no ultimate significance, because you are already established in the perfect Condition, or Happiness, that is not changeable and that does not depend on effects. 2. Kriyas are
spontaneous, self-purifying physical movements that arise
when internal, spiritual force is activated in the body.
These movements may be experienced as thrills in the spine,
shaking of the spine, spontaneous compulsion to assume
difficult yogic postures, etc. They may occur during
meditation in the presence of the Spiritual Master and in
the general course of internal intensification which occurs
in the life of Divine Ignorance.
DEVOTEE: It is interesting to observe the activity of the mind in relation to the body. I can see that when I am simply active as the body, the mind is free, too. I know that in my own case I am not free as the body. I am perpetually thinking about the obstruction, identifying with it, and contracting through concern. BUBBA: Constant thinking is just one of the many signs, all of which represent a single activity, the contraction of feeling at the heart. These signs in themselves will not change or become quiet until the fundamental activity that they represent is undone. Truth is not a thought of any kind; therefore, the Truth is not realized through thinking. On the other hand, the Way of Truth is not to stop thinking either. The Way of Truth is another thing altogether. If you will simply bring your energy and attention to the living of this Way, you will also notice, if you will stop being concerned about it at least for now, that the mind ceases to be a problem. It may or may not become quiet on the one hand, but on the other hand whether it is quiet or not makes no difference whatsoever. Now you are taking on the form of your thoughts as they arise. They define you. When you realize them to be simply modifications of the Condition of which you are natively certain, then they have no consequences. They do not have to be stopped. You do not have to do anything with them. And on that basis all thought falls away eventually and becomes unnecessary. Now you exist as the modification, as the thinking, as the one who is thinking, as the one who is subjective to the thinking, is changed by the thinking, cannot differentiate himself or herself from the thinking, is obliged to think, cannot feel, cannot be realized, cannot realize his or her true Condition. Clearly, thought is a dilemma for the time being! On the one hand you see that the thought is false, that it never becomes Truth. On the other hand, your reaction is to try to do something about it, but that does not work. You must simply do something else. Your commitment must fulfill the Law through the practice that is given in the Teaching of Truth, the practice that makes sense to you in your hearing. Then you will notice over time that the mind achieves a certain economy. 1 t ceases to be unruly, just like all the rest of your functions. The breath changes, the mind changes, the body changes, the emotions change, all the reactivity and negative emotions change. But now not only do you feel you have no control over thinking, you feel that you have no control over chronic emotional states, reactions to events and circumstances in life. You do not feel that you have control over the breath - it is not full and natural and balanced and even and pleasurable. It is always changing - it is shallow, it is fitful, it is controlled by emotion and by thinking. And the body is constantly getting too fat, too skinny, you have this and that problem about it, it is getting too old, it is too immature, it is too sexy, it is not sexy enough. So it is not just the mind that you have no control over - you have no control over anything. You do not have any control over the sense that you are this independent, separate, vulnerable someone who is confined to all of these reactions. It is not just mind or thought that must cease to bother you, but the whole affair of your life has to change. But it does not change, as you begin to realize through the hard knocks of trial and error, by trying with all your strength to manipulate it into something different, manipulating mind, emotion, body, energy. Manipulations do not do it, not even mystical yogic manipulations, religious and spiritual manipulations. None of it works. But what does transform a reactive life is falling naturally into Communion with our real Condition, the Condition of the heart and of the whole body, and adapting the whole being to it. Thus, the discipline is feeling. What you are used to calling feeling, however, is very intellectual. It is reactive emotion, not feeling. Anger and sorrow and fear are not feeling at all; they are recoil of the emotional being. They are the inability to feel, they are the frustration of emotion, they are not true emotion. True emotion is not obstructed. True emotion is love, radiance, feeling-attention - that is emotion! The rest are not emotion. They are contractions of your ability to feel, just as all the endless chattering in your head is not thinking, not thought. That is not the mind. It is the inability to use the mind, to use attention, to think. True thought is a very intuitive Whoever Loves in the Present Is Not Bound 139 process. It is not running words through the machine of the brain. It is pure, direct, open, complete attention - that is the mind. DEVOTEE: You once told us that we have to feel with the head. BUBBA: The only way you can truly think is to feel with the head, but now when you concentrate, you contract the muscles in the head, you obstruct the brain, you knit the brow! You do not feel with the head, in other words. You do not trust the head at the natural, feeling level. Truly to think is to open the mind, to relax the head, to feel and radiate with the head, and in all relations to be available as pure attention. That is thought - consideration, the meeting itself, the Communion itself, without obstruction - rather than your present collection of verbiage and memory. If you allow this feeling-attention to be the mind, you will discover that you are very intelligent. The mind will become clarified, and memory will become natural to you, not something you have to be concerned about. It is very natural to remember. It is not natural to be able to read a page of a telephone book and remember it. Some people can develop the ability to do that, apparently naturally and without trying, but it is not natural to contract the mind in that kind of memorization. The mind is open. It is not contracted. It has no difficulty in maintaining the awareness, the so-called knowledge, the familiarity, of its essential content of existence. Therefore, you may naturally remember whatever is important. Genius, or great mental ability, is simply a sign that the unobstructed force that manifests all of us is available to the functional mind. Everybody has the capacity to grow in that way by not obstructing the head any longer, not contracting with the head any 140 THE WAY THAT I TEACH longer, by feeling with the head. Then the head becomes radiant. In the usual man, the deep centers of the brain do not commune with the feeling energy that surrounds and pervades the brain. They make only a fitful connection with it through tiny pulses in the cells. When the head is allowed to feel without obstruction and becomes love, then even the deepest convolutions of the brain are in natural Communion with the pervading energy of existence, of which everything is the modification. Likewise when you become love at the heart, or the middle of the body, you are in natural Communion with the absolute and all-pervading Reality. And if you become love, feeling-attention, energy in relations, as a living body-being, then the whole form of your relations changes. You become effective, you become happy, you enjoy life, you enjoy self-control, freedom from obsessive self-indulgence. Obsessive, repetitive self-indulgence is only necessary because we cannot already feel good. We are not already feeling pleasure. If you are already in a pleasurable, feeling state you are not obsessed with self-indulgence. Your reasons for having a drink in celebration are not obsessive. It is just an occasion. But the usual man who is obsessed with indulging himself cannot feel already in the state of pleasure. He needs exaggerated conditions in order just to feel, to have a sense, at any rate, that he is feeling pleasure. Thus, he becomes addicted to excesses because he does not already live in the condition of pleasure, happiness, or fullness. He cannot feel, in other words. If you cannot feel, if the core of the being, the heart, is not active, then at the physical level you must indulge yourself in all the ways of gaining pleasure, from orgasm to drugs. If you cannot feel at the level of emotion, then you cannot live a life of love, you cannot be intimate. If you cannot feel with the head, at the level of mind, Whoever Loves in the Present Is Not Bound 141 you cannot enjoy clarity of mind nor consider things as they truly are. Thus, feeling must be awakened from head to toe and from toe to crown. It must become natural to you. It must become your discipline. You do not by tendency live by feeling from the heart, so you have adapted to the obstruction of feeling, to the recoil of the ego. You do not by tendency have the ability to live a feeling life, or a life of love. Your tendencies are of another kind - they are obstructed and separative. But through hearing the Teaching of Truth you realize commitment to the discipline and the obligation of love. Part of the discipline of the Way of Divine Ignorance is not to be concerned about the continuation of your old adaptation, the physical, emotional, and mental signs of your old way of living. Allow them to come and go, rise and fall, without concern, without dramatization. Live the discipline of love, physically, vitally, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. By living that commitment as a discipline, you will see the old adaptations fall away and become unnecessary and obsolete. New adaptations of existence naturally come into being when you change your act. It is as simple as that. But you must persist in this discipline. You cannot indulge in playing with yourself and falling back constantly. You must become stronger in your hearing of the Teaching so that you do not fall and then collapse under concerns and low-grade dramatization. You must be stronger than that to bring feeling-attention into the present. Do not be concerned when subjective stuff arises. It eventually disappears, if only you persist in feeling-intuition. The "feeling" or "love" recommended to devotees is not an egoic or conventional act. It is realized by Grace and spontaneously generated (re-awakened or re-permitted) in the case of one who hears the Teaching to the point of Ignorance. Therefore, in the Way of Divine Ignorance, negative emotions, obsessive desires, and chronic thinking, as well as fixed or inappropriate forms of outward activity, are not to be suppressed. Such is a conventional egoic strategy, founded in the absence of hearing and Revelation. In that case, the trapped impulses will only disturb and obstruct the whole body. Rather, accumulated conditions of existence are to be released. They are to be made a specific sacrifice, whenever they are indicated by any tendency. In that moment, feel through the tendency. Release it, through the breath cycle, into the all-pervading Reality and Presence. Feel into the Presence absolutely and constantly. In other words, all tendencies are simply fixed reflections of old activities or adaptations. And all tendencies are, therefore, dissolved or made obsolete by present sacrificial devotion, or unobstructed feeling, as the whole body, into the Infinite Reality and Presence. Such unobstructed feeling into Infinity is love, or Radiance. If it is lived in the moment of any tendency, the tendency itself is dissolved or made unnecessary and ineffective in that moment. If the devotee consistently lives in the form of sacrificial devotion or love, active as remembrance and service, felt via the breath, then the whole body is lived as Radiance, and all its parts and artifacts dissolve into a present harmony in that Radiance. Thus, action becomes true or appropriate, thoughts rest, reactive emotions dissolve in unobstructed feeling, and a natural or native economy brings order to the whole body and its destiny. All accumulated tendencies become obsolete in this Way, and the life of tendency is replaced by the presently intuitive, free, creative, and inspired life. Whoever loves in the present is not bound. This is the Law. Where there is love there is release of karma, or the effect of the past. To love is to be "forgiven," or released from past unlove and the destiny past unlove creates through accumulated reactions and the tendencies established by past experience. To love is to be happy or Radiant as the whole body to Infinity. In this manner, the past, in the form of mental, emotional, and physical tendencies, will not be dramatized. The past becomes unnecessary through love. Love is primal freedom. Love is the supreme science of life. It is Communion with the Real, the very Divine. It is the principle of transformation, of moral and spiritual healing and growth, of meditation, of Realization. Love is the evidence and proof of our freedom. Whoever is not active in this principle has not yet heard the Teaching of Truth, regardless of how much extraordinary worldly or psychic power and experience he or she has known. There is no religious or spiritual
"salivation" or "forgiveness" independent of this principle,
wherein all righteous attitudes and all destructive
compulsions are shown to be the absence of love and God. All
accumulations or tendencies are disproved and dissolved in
present love, which releases self, and thought, and all
knowledge, high or low, and reactive emotions, and all
repetitive and reactive patterns of action into the Infinite
and to Infinity. Such love is not merely felt within but
whole bodily, through all actions, and in all relations,
under all conditions. Such is the spiritual discipline of
devotees in the Way of Divine Ignorance. And it is made
possible by the Revelation of the Presence of Real God in
Communion with the Spiritual Master, who is a spiritual
sacrifice to and for all devotees.
The Spiritual Master
communicates the Teaching and Reveals the Way at every stage
of our new adaptation. As such he is an ordinary agent of
the Light, to which we should turn with love, and not
dependence but responsible surrender. He is not a parent,
but the awakened Agent who abides as love to Infinity, and
in all relations, and in relation to whom we discover the
prior Reality as Grace, quickening our new adaptation and
liberating sacrifice. He does not ultimately draw us to
himself, as an objective and independent entity, but he
serves our awakening, through spiritual relationship to him
(wherein we Realize Communion with the Real), to the very
Condition that is his own Realization. He is the direct
agent of the Real Condition. He is not other than that
Condition because he is surrendered, beyond all agents or
relations, to that Condition. Therefore, the Spiritual
Master is the advantage of all true men and women.
|
|
|
