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Bubba Free John THE WAY THAT I TEACH - Talks
on the Intuition of Eternal Life
Chapter 13 You Do Not Know What a Single Thing Is (As this talk opens, Bubba is speaking of an object he has received, a "Z stones." The lore around this kind of stone, Bubba says, is that they were produced by men who lived in previous great cycles of ancient time on earth.) BUBBA: Many thousands of years ago in previous yugas,1 or cycles of time, men used to wear "Z stones" around their necks or on their bodies for protection from the implications of their sinning. They did not rely on the "Z stone" itself—the "Z stone" was simply a fetish that represented a cultural obligation that they personally assumed. When things became really difficult, they would be relieved of their difficulties magically, through their ritual association with the mechanics of the universe, and this liberation would be reflected in the "Z stone" they wore on their bodies. Legend has it that men in those ancient times lived to be hundreds, many hundreds, of years of age. But in the span of our possibilities in this yuga, this great epoch, at twenty to forty years old we are all very close to being at least hail way through our lives! And you know very well you can go in an instant! Luckily, a yuga lasts thousands of years. You can be reborn many times, you see. 1. In Hindu philosophy, a yuga
is an age, or cycle of cosmic time, generally encompassing
12,000 years.
But what if that is not even true? Maybe all those who have died were completely snuffed. Maybe in that moment, just for a moment, you briefly lose self- consciousness . . . maybe that is it! If you observe only the mechanics of the fleshiness of things, it is very easy to believe that death is the final event. But if you are possessed by the Vision of the infinite and eternal circumstance in which we live, and are able to be sensitive to the totality of your living, not just the fleshy part, then you already know very well that death is just a moment. It all goes on. I personally can vouch to you, for whatever it is worth, that life is eternal, that consciousness itself is without end, without beginning. You are all involved in something that will continue for billions upon billions, magnified by geometrical numbers to the fiftieth billionth power, of years, for Eternity. But, just as now, you will have no memory then. You will be the representation of the past, but you will not remember it. Not only that—no matter what arises, in the eternity of lives that confront us, you will never know what even a single thing is. Look at this "Z stone." All kinds of people have been associated in their lifetimes with this stone, and they all were as confused as you. They were all trying, struggling in this place, without definition, totally confused and mystified. And you all also admit, tacitly, to the necessity for confusion in Mystery. If there is Mystery, not conceptual knowledge, no content or hope that informs you, you all think that there must be confusion. But as a matter of fact, no matter what happens, confusion is not necessary. Mystery, or Ignorance, is our real Condition. Consider this ashtray. This very ashtray itself is the object that I have used for some time now to demonstrate and consider this necessary philosophy, or "love of wisdom," relative to Divine Ignorance. This is the object I have used. And I have said to you on occasion, and it remains true even to this day, that, from a practical point of view, from a chemical point of view, from an aesthetic point of view, from the point of view of any kind of ordinary discipline of knowing, you may know all kinds of things about this ashtray and its origin and its content. But no matter what you may know about it, before and after and while you know anything about it, you do not know what it is. I mean what it is . . . is . . . you have not the slightest knowledge of what it is. And none of your experience increases your awareness of what it is. This same logic pertains to everything. No matter what you may come to realize by experience about anything, you still do not know what it is. All of you belong to this realm of ambiguity. None of us knows what any other human being is. We just simply do not know it. In our practical involvement with one another, we know about one another—but we do not know what we are. Knowledge, in other words, does not penetrate to this degree. It never has. This failure is not just a reflection of the silliness or stupidity of ancient beings. It is also fundamentally a reflection upon our own existence, and also, therefore, upon the existence of all other beings who have ever lived. The atoms that are in this ashtray have existed for perhaps twenty billions of years—far beyond the mere five billion of the earth. They come out of the manifest cosmos, from the center of the explosion that manifested everything. We know very little about anything, ultimately. And we do not know what it is in fact. Thus, our mind itself, our own existence, is totally, unqualifiedly, inevitably, irrevocably, and irreducibly Ignorant. No one, regardless of his or her sophistication or experience, no one, not even myself, knows what a single thing is. Not what anything is, you see. This presumption could have been made at any time in the past, and it can be made at any time in the future. No matter how much experience intervenes, no matter how sophisticated men and women become, no matter how much we may know about anything through experience, we still do not and will not know what it is. What it is. What is a shape, what is a place, where is it? We do not know that. That is not what we know. We presume something about that ultimate affair that is like knowledge, but in fact, we do not know. All that may be said about our consideration, our understanding, our belief, our experience is this: Not only now, but not at any time in the past, in any civilization, even the most magnificent beyond belief, nor in the future on this earth in any great moment, nor in any other occasion, any planet, any place, in all of the manifestation of existence, does any individual know what anything is. Ignorance is the Principle of existence. This is absolutely true. We do not know what anything is. We are totally mindless, and totally beyond consolation or fulfillment, because there is no way to know what anything is. The only thing you can know about anything is still about it. But you do not know what it is . . . is . . . is ... or why it happens to be. You have not the slightest knowledge of what it is. And no one has ever had it. Not anyone. Not Jesus, not Moses, not Mohammed, not Gautama Buddha, not Krishna, not Tukaram, not Bubba Free John, no one has ever known what a single thing is. Not the most minute, ridiculous particle of anything. No one has ever known it, and no one ever will know it, because we are not knowing. We do not know what anything is. The summarization of our existence is Mystery, absolute, unqualified confrontation with what we cannot know. And no matter how sophisticated we become by experience, this will always be true of us. This Teaching, then, will never be transcended. Upon this absolute Truth we must build our lives, and I must build my Church. This Truth is summary, unqualified, irredeemable, irreducible, and absolute. It can never be changed. No matter what sophisticated time may appear, no matter when, in the paradox of all of the slices and planes of time, any moment may appear in which beings sit together as we do, oblivious to Infinity, no matter what time may appear in which men and women consider the moment, no one will ever know what anything is. That is the Truth. Becoming submitted to that Truth is spiritual life. It leads you to the transformation of all other occasions. All the possibilities of your experience are transformed by this disposition. Obviously, then, it is very important to realize this Ignorance, because it is the only digit at Infinity that can transform your existence. Everything else only modifies your existence and amounts to a contraction in your consciousness, a summation upon a point. We exist in the moment of Infinity. Look—everyone who ever looked like us has died. Every one of us will die. In the meantime, we are capable, in the form of our structure, to experience all kinds of things, to be associated with all kinds of influences. But if we abandon this Truth, this Understanding, this Intuition of the nature of our experience, all experience will accumulate upon us. We will, therefore, adapt to experience in itself, and we will become the reflections of it. We are awakened at Infinity only if we can realize that the fundamental point of our existence is not knowledge at all. There are no answers. This is the whole point. We do not know at all. We do not know where we are, we do not know who we are, we do not know what we are. We do not know what the future is, we do not know what the past is. We are trying to look good—but we do not know. We are trying through the force of experience to achieve a summation that glamorizes us, but we do not know what anything is. That is the point. This Realization does not move us to go within at all. It moves us, shattered, into the present pattern of relations at Infinity. No matter what arises in the configuration of our experience, we still do not know what anything is. All the accumulations of our experience move us into moods, attitudes, presumptions, but we still do not know at all. Where is this place? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it, exactly? I mean, really? We haven't the slightest idea. Nobody has any idea. No matter who may claim your worship, nobody knows. Some people may look better than others, but still, nobody knows. DEVOTEE: Bubba, this description of our existence implies extreme vulnerability. BUBBA: On the basis of this logic, in which we do not know what anything is, in which we are not in control, it is clear that we are not even created by anything Objective and Absolute. We are in a Condition of absolute, unqualified Mystery. That Condition is what obliges us in our attention and our feeling. That is what it is to be a man or a woman: to be rested upon Infinity without any consolations whatsoever. There is no Truth within. There is no Truth in the past, and there is no Truth in the future. Having no consolations, we exist in this moment, floating in space, wherever that is, totally sublimed, beyond consolation or belief, without the slightest fraction of abstract verbal consideration to console us, without the slightest fleshy prominence standing out against Infinity to make us happy. That is our Condition, you see. That is the Truth of it. That is it. That is all there is to it. And it is not an answer. There are no answers in it. All your struggling for information, for answers, is just more of the same old foolishness. It is open- ended. You go to your death without knowledge. Thus, you also go to your life without knowing. Nevertheless, there is an obvious Law: Everything does change. Everything prominent passes. Everything that appears is temporary. And, therefore, the Law of the universe is change itself, the sacrifice of everything present. Having realized that there is no knowledge, having seen that everything changes, how shall we live? Even though nothing comes from it, the ultimate pleasure to which we may sacrifice ourselves is at best someone else's pleasure. What if you were to sit down to dinner and eat a lobster? You might enjoy yourself, but it would be dead. And if it had been able during its lifetime to conceive of this meal as the ultimate moment toward which it was progressing through sacrifice, even so, the moment of being eaten is totally unavailable to its consciousness. Thus, there is no moment toward which you move by sacrifice. Sacrifice is simply the Law, the disposition of love. Sacrifice is inherently happy, inherently free. It has no answers. That is all I can tell you. It is not that I can tell you concretely that something will happen. Yes, things will happen, but they will also pass. Yes, you will survive your death, I can guarantee you that. But you will survive it in another form that also dies. Everything will change. Thus, it is not in time that we have the Eternal Vision. It is in the moment, in our disposition, in our love, in our sacrifice, by throwing everything away and being totally willing to be dead. You are not only free in this moment, you are also profoundly happy, and ridiculous. No one is here to give you any answers. There is no Creator Deity in charge of you, like a parent. There is no such Person, no God, like that, nor any Spiritual Master like that. I am here to instigate this love, or sacrifice, in you, and there is no answer, no result. The act itself is the happiness. If you can begin to become fully sympathetic to this argument that I bring to you, then you will simply be happy and completely bereft of answers. If you can sacrifice to me, then there is something else to be Realized—but I do not want to tell you about it. I have died in my own lifetime. It has been so many years ago, it is like my familiarity with some of you, almost half of my life. But there was a time—actually I do not know whether you can understand this or not, because it occurred before I was born, in the process through which I became born—in which there was Realization beyond time and space. I have animated that Realization throughout the stupid adventure of my life. To you my life may be inspiring, but to me it is stupid. To me, to be submitted to this kind of argument, this working out of living forms, is a torment, and completely terrifying. I do not think you are so sensitive to it, because you still like to indulge yourselves. To me it is all terrifying, every single moment of it, unless there is the Intuition of God and of Eternal Life, the motive of sacrifice and of present happiness, not the tendency toward future happiness. The moment of sacrifice is itself happiness. It is simply free. There is neither knowledge nor content in that moment. That is it. That is the absolute summation of God-knowledge. No one, including me, will ever tell you anything better. That is it. Now, work it out, and die. Having said that, I know damned well that billions of years from now I will be sitting here explaining this to you. I will. I am not coming back, because I will never leave. I cannot. I would wish it, I would want it, I would love it if there were some "Independent, Absolute, Alternative Reality" that would absorb me and that I could go to at the point of death. But you see, I cannot leave. I am submitted to the mechanics of things just like you, except that I am the body altogether, whereas all of you are ambiguous, inward, and reluctant. So will be sitting here in some form or other, in some place or other, with even you individuals, for billions upon billions of years, just as I have sat with you already, for billions of years, the very same people, and others as well. We have argued this matter for countless years, beyond earth, before the great explosion that produced the material universe and into the total future of it. DEVOTEE: Bubba, you are communicating a consideration here to people who have not totally assumed it. But in the future we will be able to assume it. BUBBA: It would seem that way, wouldn't it? But since I can never leave, it stands to reason that you can never change. Certainly you will all become better, but that betterness will be the ordinariness of that new time. DEVOTEE: But in the practical sense of our ordinary life. . . . BUBBA: In your ordinary life it is simply a matter. of whether you are happy or not. Are you happy? Will you give it up? Will you be mad? Will you be without information, without answers? Will you be faced on Infinity? Just as you are right now? It is completely mad, you see. DEVOTEE: But there is a sense. . . . BUBBA: The sense that you are happy is your own self-possession. There is not even that. There is simply this mysterious affair that is always happy, without cause. That is it, not all your presumptions that you are happy, that you are giving it up, that you are in love. It is all the same old absolute Magnificence. It is not the same as a moment of deja vu, as if it had already happened. It has never happened, and it always has happened, this moment. Select any moment, and I am still telling you this. What a ridiculous matter! What a plan! Consider the configuration of our relations. We sit here relatively happy. But consider all of the other billions upon billions upon billions of beings. Not just the other billions of human beings on earth— consider the billions of beings in this room. Every time you take a breath—are you all breathing while I am talking to you?—you suck in and snuff out billions of beings, tiny, organized, self-conscious, knowledgeless, stupid, defenseless, incarnate entities. In your breathing, in your ingestion, in your thinking and talking, in your loving and your lovemaking, in everything that you do, you are responsible for the murder of billions of beings every day. And you are no more important than they in the scheme of Infinity. It seems to you that you take a little while longer in life than the amoeba on your eyebrow, but what do you amount to? You are eaten, snuffed out, murdered, pulverized, shaken in your snuffing, just like all of these poor little creeps, and there is no opportunity for happiness except through the Intuition of the Real. If the Real manufactures all this devastating insanity, that is its business. Our business is to be happy, to Realize the logic that is at the core of God and remain happy. Without that Intuition, there is no way to be happy in the face of mere experience. Somebody recently told me he saw a construction worker who suffered a terrible accident. Demolition workers were smashing a building, using one of those incredible, giant, lead balls to crush a wall. I don't know how it happened, but the lead ball hit the man in the head as he stood on a scaffold. He survived, but with only about one third of a face. The rest of it was a concave, smashed, disgusting mass. Such a possibility is also yours. It does not make any difference how much you love, how much insight you enjoy—you could be snuffed out. You may even continue to live in that kind of wretched form. I read a story some weeks ago about a soldier in the Viet Nam war. The man in front of him stepped on a bomb or a mine and a fragment of shell hit the soldier above the eyebrow and leaped through his brain. Now half of his brain is missing—they had to amputate half of his brain! You can experience that. The possibilities for life are not just magnificent, they are disgusting. If you are committed to the "Great Plan" itself, you must admit that you can suffer far more than you can enjoy. Now that you have appeared in a form, there is far more to suffer than there is to enjoy. You must give it all up. All of it! The enjoyments and the torments. And then you will enjoy the Vision of Eternal Life and move through the paradox of changes in God. I do not know why that is, you see. I do not know why that Vision is the only possibility for happiness—but it certainly is the only possibility for happiness. Whether there is a future beyond death or not is for you to discover. All the dead are heroes, but nobody knows about them. Nobody knows where they are, or what it is. What a life! What a moment! DEVOTEE: What a plan! BUBBA: Yes. So let us not be stupid and cruel people. Let us be a little more humorous and loving, and acknowledge our friends compassionately. All of them are fleshily presented, and dying. All of our women friends, all of our men friends—everyone who lives is dying and is confronted with the most incredible circumstance. All are deserving of our love and compassion, and also of our demand for the discipline of love beyond self-possession, so that they too can enjoy the Intuition of this happiness. All of us are dying. All of these shapes get snuffed out with trembling stupidity and insanity. When the body dies, the brain becomes active for a moment, it begins to show you lighted shapes and to dissolve you beyond the elements. First you get fleshy, and then you get watery, then you get fiery, then you get airy, then you start screaming and nobody can hear you, and the body shakes all over the place, and then you are dead. I certainly wish you could acknowledge it while you are alive. If you can, you will love somebody, and if you cannot, you will not. And let us not pretend that we exist in a Disney world of beauty. This life is many-sided, and we do not know what it is. And our happiness depends on the total inspection of this life. Let us recognize the situation we are in and become manly on the basis of this observation, so that we may be lovers and friends. Let us acknowledge this terrible circumstance and be happy, and stop placing stupid obligations on one another. We exist in a place that is open-ended, an edge to Infinity, and we are dying. The only way we can comprehend this complication is by sacrificing it and becoming lovers and friends. Nothing else that you may project in your lifetime can change that. You are still a fleshy, homely being that can be crushed by circumstance. You all, however, are still organized around your experience and your possibility. You have not gone mad yet. You have not become disorganized yet in God. You are still profoundly oriented, in your desiring and the mechanics of your motivation, toward ordinary things. Some of those things make you look good and some of those things do not make you look good. That is the summation of your life. But spiritual life is about Truth, not about a cure. It is about the inspection and recognition of this torment in which we live. Having penetrated it, you may realize the Sublimity that transcends this life, but you will not realize something else. You will just enjoy the capacity to be free while alive, so that this life may pass away. It must pass in any case. Bubba is not listening to voices, you see. Bubba does not have any visions. I have had visions, I have heard voices. I have done everything that you yet look forward to, enclosed as you are in the first two stages of life. You think, "Oh, beyond here it is all so beautiful." I can just hear it. Nonsense! All of it is a torment. All of it is stupid. All of it is terrible, until you penetrate it and become free, objectless, diffuse, and absolutely unqualified Happiness. Then everything will fall away from you, and you may be restored to the light-speed of Existence even while alive and also at your death, and far less of the paradoxical eternity of manifestation may be your destiny. But in life itself I cannot promise you any more. Sooner or later you must come to this point of absolute despair in which you will be awakened to absolute Happiness. And when you have become awakened to absolute Happiness, life will fall away. In the meantime, you will be a lover, you will be happy, you will generate the force of Infinity to your friends, but you will die, and so will they. There are no answers in this lifetime. And that is it.
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