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The Dawn Horse Number 6 (Volume 2, Number 4), 1975.
Editors introduction: 'Death Is Not Your Concern,' Bubba Free John criticizes men's (and woman's) preoccupation with possible forms of personal survival after death, and insists that falling into the Real Condition during life rendrs all such concerns obsolete. This talk was originally published in shorter form in the July, 1974, East West Journal. The editors of that magazine rquested a piece by Bubba on the subject of death, and this present article is a fuller rendition of the talk Bubba subsequently gave to his community. From a talk by Bubba Free John to his devotees on February 18, 1974. A shorter version of this talk was published under the same title in the July 1974 issue of the East West Journal. Listen to FULL talk - Death Is Not Your Concern
There
is no idea that lasts beyond your final breath.
This massive philosophical and psychological
defense that people create through a lifetime of
seeking, all this goes, just like that. It is so
fragile. And they wind up after death in the same
condition, or worse, with more from which they must
be purified. But the individual who understands the
functions of life and the mind and his relationship
to them is released from dependence upon the drama
that the usual man exercises in the midst of his
functions. At the point of death such a one goes
through the same rip-off process as any other one,
but he is released, truly. He passes into a
different functional existence, relieved of the
secondary bondage that the usual man has to deal
with, everything that causes the usual man to drift
back, unconscious, to lesser states and confusions
and mysterious conditions. So it is better to
understand the mind than to create philosophy with
it. The fundamental condition of consciousness is
what passes beyond this life, not your philosophy
and all your ideas and experiences. Such things
don't have the strength to pass from one room to
another. You can't even hold on to your philosophy
or your mantra when you pass by a cross-legged nude
on a couch! So what do you think happens from life
to death and back to life again? As soon as a
desire or some intense condition arises, philosophy
and the usual practices go out the bottom. If your
little search is that fragile during life, what do
you think occurs in the midst of such a profound
event as psycho-physical death? It is not just the body
that you are not. It is also the psyche that you
are not. People who get involved with spiritual and
philosophical matters like to consider they are not
the body. They like to pursue out-of-body
experiences. The yogic phenomena are hopeful in
this regard. They project you into psychic
dimensions that are free of the common physical
limitations. But there is no ultimate distinction
between the psychic and the physical. There is a
psycho-physical condition manifest in the infinite.
The psyche and the body may not be perfectly
separated. There may be experiences in which there
is a sensed or felt separation between them, but
ultimately there is no separation. (What is psychic
and what is physical are essentially the same
condition.) So the Divine realization, perfect dependence on God or radical inherence in the Divine Reality as the condition of life, is not just getting out of the body and going into some cosmic place or some psychic place or some astral place. It is also passing out of the psychic, out of all the things that you identify within consciousness, all the kinds of thinking, self feelings, memories. All of that is also abandoned in the perfect ecstasy of Satsang or Divine enjoyment. The "other" world is the inside of the outside. What was within you during life becomes your environment after death. And the measure of the purification that will occur, or the depth of your involvement with the phenomena after death, is the quality of your true spiritual life, the quality of Satsang in you, the quality of your present life as a devotee in God. Whatever the tendencies that may move the apparent individual into various dimensions after death, those experiences can be brief and essentially subliminal and dreamlike if the force of the life of the devotee in its truest sense is active in life, allowing him to pass out of these conditions quickly into something great. Why shouldn't there be form after death? It's all an amusement anyway. Understanding is not passage into the soup. One who understands is already in the soup. This is the soup. The absolute, infinite, unqualified Divine is the consciousness of one who understands. And he doesn't have to die in order to realize that. All of these worlds, all of these possible apparently limited dimensions are forms of enjoyment for him in which the Divine is still the Condition. So he is fully capable of passing into other kinds of forms, other dimensions, subtle worlds, transcendent worlds, sub-worlds. He is free to become a Shiva lingam somewhere. His condition is flexible. But it happens in God. But there is no reason to be concerned about the quality of the phenomena that will arise after death, any more than there is reason to be concerned for the quality of phenomena that arise while you are alive. Every instant of concern locks you into a fragment, a limitation, both while alive and after death. There is no resort but to the condition of Satsang, which is unqualified relationship to the Lord or inherence in the already Divine Condition every moment, through the death experience and beyond the death experience. And the intensity of that pure Satsang is what guarantees the ultimate event in every moment. Conditions or experiences themselves do not determine us. The Divine does. If you live in the Divine, any event, any apparent condition, ceases to condition your quality and your humor and make it something less. So one who has become free in God is truly free. He no longer has concerns about whether he will appear or not appear, in what shape he will appear, or anything like that. He is happy, and God is sufficient for him. That is the Condition to be in. Only that Condition permits appropriate purification to occur. Only that will allow you to be drawn into happiness wherever you may arise. Because of our position in the midst of things, we tend to think of death over against life. But when we begin to understand, then we see the whole process, the transforming event that manifests as living, as experiencing, as dying, as all of that, as a continuum, a single process. Because of the fixed position of Narcissus, the eternally recurring mortal, the seeker tends to think of death as a fundamentally physical event. Because he is frightened, he likes to think of it as something that stands over against his psyche. He likes to think of how the psyche perhaps survives, that individuated consciousness, that sense of forms and complications and images and ideas and experiences and memories. But when he begins to understand, he sees that death is a psycho-physical event. It is not merely a physical event, but a psycho-physical event, in which not only the body dies, but the psyche also. Just so, while alive we must enjoy wisdom relative not only to the body and the world, but also to the psyche. We must be equally free of the search for God, Truth, or Reality, the whole preoccupation with dilemmas and inwardness. The life-death process is a transformation, a necessary and ultimately happy transformation, in which one's fundamental existence is being realized. But when the individual examines things from the point of view of Narcissus, who is fearful and separate, he cannot tolerate this endless transformation. He has no tolerance for the psychophysical life or death. When he begins; to assume his mortality and feels he cannot escape it, he tries to think of how to escape psychic transformation, or psychic death. But the entire transformation must occur. And when the resistance to radical transformation breaks down, then the fullness of that transformation is enacted, and ecstasy is continually realized with greater profundity in the midst of this endless transformation of existence. So one who understands not only at some point allows physical death, but he also allows psychic death. And if he is smart he allows it while alive. Then there is no ultimate fear represented by these transforming events. Then he doesn't have to defend himself against them with philosophies, descriptions, dogmas, experiences and various kinds of psycho-physical rigidity. He lives fully and creatively. He passes through psychic death while alive, and enjoys genuine understanding of his relationship to the body or the various bodily states. He becomes capable of bodily death. Such an individual has a totally different kind of relationship to the ending of his own apparent life than one who is prepared through the instruments of seeking. The seeker looks forward, through the vision of his consolation of his fear, to certain kinds of fixed phenomena. But one who understands allows the radical process to take place. He is not interested in being consoled by any fixed event or any limited realization. He rests or allows himself to be rested in the Divine as his Destiny or Condition. To the degree one lives in Satsang while alive, death is not a threat but an instrument of the Lord. One who enjoys the Divine as his Condition, regardless of his apparent condition at this moment, has grasped the principle in which perfect happiness is the only possible destiny. He no longer has to be concerned for his temporary, immediate or future condition. While living in the Divine, while living in Satsang, he begins to see the spontaneous transformation of his existence into forms of happiness while alive. The decline of his vitality, or the transformation of it toward the event of his psycho-physical death, begins to become transparent to him in the Divine and ceases to be frightening. He sees that he can grasp the enjoyment of God under all conditions. And in the event of his psychophysical death, he sees it then as well. He doesn't go into the black. He passes into happiness, always in newer forms. But death for the seeker is a fascination; it is unknowable, it stands over against his life. The seeker, who is not truly and radically living in God while alive, is fascinated with this whole death possibility and the possibility of being psychically separated from life. He actually aids the decline of his life in an unnatural way, because the fascination with death serves death through the agencies of his subconscious and unconscious life. Whereas there is no unnatural need to die at this moment, and there is no need to separate yourself out psychically from any function or condition of life or death. This life is the Divine manifestation at this moment, and no manifestation is of any consequence to you at this moment other than this present or living one. This is the condition you are presently given in which to realize God. Your death isn't being held out to you as that great event in which you are going to have to be busy with the whole possibility of realizing God. This moment of life is already such a condition, and in the moment of death that will also be such a condition. There is no reason to bring death on. There is no unnatural reason to leave this world. For very real and unreasonable reasons this psycho-physical manifestation is given to you to deal with, and it is fitted to the qualities of your karmic and pre-conscious dependence. It is a continual test, and it contains the continual possibility for lessons, for freedom, for liberation into the Divine, for humorous life in God. So this life is very much the appropriate business to be up to, not philosophical and traditional spiritual considerations about how to get out of it. You are not ultimately released from life except in the fullness of the enjoyment of God. The human manifestation is unique, and the traditions have valued it. They have valued it above the apparently glorious, heavenly states that may be lived in subtle worlds. In man there is the capacity to move through all functional conditions, all limited states, all subtle states and all Divine states. It's possible to realize the Divine absolutely in human form. This capacity is not enjoyed by beings in the subtle worlds any more than it is enjoyed by chickens in this world. So the human state is valued. And in traditional spiritual communities people become very serious about the fact that they are alive in human form, and they become very seriously involved doing self-transcending sadhana. But there is no call for seriousness at all. There is never any call for seriousness. There is no reason to be serious about anything whatsoever. You must already be happy, already full of humor. There is no fixed world. In this world, which is essentially a vital manifestation, everything seems so fixed and solid and moveless and not capable of being influenced by your mere mentalizing. But even this world is not fixed, as you begin to see as soon as you fall into God and become humorous. Then you see how unfixed and fluid this world is, and how unfixed and fluid the condition of the vast, infinite cosmos is. It is all fluid, shapeless, and unreasonable. The God-world is God. And when you fall into God, then every world becomes the God-world, because you are constantly intuiting the Divine therein. You can't analyze the possible conditions and make sense of them. There are countless, infinities of possible conditions for all beings, enlightened or not. So you can't measure them. You can't determine your future, your destiny. Your only real destiny is the Lord, and the Lord is also your present Condition and eternal Condition. Only by falling into that and remaining in it and becoming alive in it fully with all your functions, only by doing that are you doing appropriate sadhana. And if you are doing that, you can allow the Divine to manifest your forms without concern. There are great dimensions, great cosmic possibilities. You may drift into them and enjoy a kind of mortality that seems immortal. There are worlds' in which longevity is intensified almost to the point of immortality. But it is not literal immortality. Those very worlds themselves are declining and going through cycles, so there is no fixed condition. There is no condition to be maintained other than the Divine, the Real, Eternal Condition. There are siddha-worlds and angelic worlds, endless kinds of worlds which cannot be conceived from the point of view of man. If you look out into the night at those infinite numbers of stars and planets, what you see is just one little tiny galaxy. Through a large telescope you can see thousands of galaxies, in which there are billions of possible worlds. And yet these are only those visible within this little portion of the light spectrum, this narrow little vibration in which we conceive visibility. All these visible galaxies that we can see are perhaps something like a single cell on the big toe of what seems to us to be a gigantic person. But he's perhaps a little troll in some other world much like this one. You can't analyze the possible conditions in the worlds and the planes of consciousness and come out having gained some knowledge or having fixed for yourself some superior spiritual destiny. Investigating the possibilities of existence can only ultimately confound you. It is a kind of suffering, and it serves you like suffering, in that it makes you fall apart and only at last yield to the Divine. All these endless, endless possibilities are being lived by the Divine, who is a single, absolute Person. The event of a human death in the midst of all of that is nothing. Everybody attributes so much importance to it and wants it to be something so terribly profound. Whereas the human psycho-physical death is not even worthy of being called a minor incident among the worlds. And in the midst of the path of your own ultimate existence, it is not even a minor incident. It just seems important from the point of view of fear. It seems important to the mind because the mind's fundamental function is to defend the ego. It is a hedge around the sense of separate existence. As such the mind is always set against desire. The mind and desire are two opposing principles. Desire is always moving you toward a formless, transcendent condition. Desire is always shattering the sense of separation. Desire is always moving you toward union, toward concentration on what is outside yourself, toward attention in something beyond this knot of self sense. While desire is moving you, you are also continually obsessed with the mind. And the mind is always trying to create a hedge around the ego, to continue this sense of separate existence. So life is a conflict between these two movements: this enclosure of mind and this explosion of desire. Both of these movements assume the ego or the sense of separate self. Desire wants to remove it and mind wants to reinforce it and make it immortal. Thus there are two possible exclusive solutions one that is like the mind and one that is like desire. Men are seeking this return-to-the-soup nature which is something like exclusively following the path of desire. But they also seek this eternity, this immortality, this fulfillment of a personal kind. So there are two grand programs, two grand solutions. And they are both manifestations of what is fatally a conflict. Life is fundamentally being lived as a conflict between these two principles of mind and desire. The ego, or the sense of separate self-existence, is the hidden principle that makes mind and desire ultimately serve only contraction, separation, suffering, illusion, mystery. The Truth is not in following the path of mind or the path of desire, following the path of self-transcendence or the path of self-fulfillment. The Truth is not in either of those things but in understanding, comprehending, the principle that underlies this adventure of life which is always the realization of conflict. When that is understood, when the separate self sense no longer is the principle of your manifest existence from moment to moment, then the whole program of mind and desire is loosed, undermined, undone. And at the root of your existence there is the continuous intuition of the fullness of the Divine. That intuition transforms mind and desire and makes life quite a different thing, even though it appears to be the same old thing. One who has understood in this fundamental way is happy while alive. He continues to think and use his mind and psyche, apparently, like everyone else. He continues to act and be moved, apparently, like everyone else. But these are no longer the principles of his existence. He is no longer founded in them, because he is no longer founded in separate self-existence and the drama of Narcissus, which is enacted in terms of mind and desire. It is not death that is significant, but the living process of understanding, or radical consciousness in God. That process, that understanding, makes everything from lunch to death something new, something known in Truth, no longer a matter of concern. It makes the vast cosmic process no longer a matter of concern. So this whole profound philosophical consideration of death is appropriate only in the case of the seeker, who is still bound to the dramatization of the adventure of Narcissus. And such an individual is very much concerned with his own death, with his own destiny, his own spiritual destiny. Such a person is always interested in hearing all about the way it is after death and all the planes of consciousness and all the cosmic dimensions and transcendent dimensions. And if he is able to believe it with some sort of intensity for one reason or another, he feels somewhat consoled by these descriptions of things. But the man of understanding sees the smithereens of the worlds and knows them to exist in the great Consciousness, not merely in space. He knows the worlds themselves are not fixed, nor do they represent any fundamental limitation to his state. The man of understanding knows absolutely nothing about what will happen after death, any more than he knows what will happen in the next moment while alive. He may hear rumors in the world and in his mind about what might tend to occur, but he is not involved or concerned with the fixing of future events in his own case or in any other case. He is involved with the process itself, instantly. He is always involved with the whole process, as a conscious event in this moment, and now in this moment, and now in this moment, and now this moment. So he is not a man of concerns or of programs or of descriptions. He is utterly free of all that. He has become always already ecstatic. And for such a one there is therefore no straightforward description of Reality, or of the cosmos, or of life. Only God is apparent to such a one. Only the paradox survives. |
"The
perfect among the sages is identical with Me. There is
absolutely no difference between us"
Tripura
Rahasya,
Chap
XX, 128-133
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