The following article is a series of transcripts from tapes Bubba made on a portable recorder operated by Jerry Sheinfeld, who was traveling with Bubba and serving him. Bubba would occasionally sit down in a quiet place at one Ashram or another and talk about the teacher there and his community, often in quite critical terms, from the point of view of understanding. He might also speak of other teachers and broader topics-for instance, the distinction between yogis, saints, and sages, and the function of the Siddhas - but he always brought the discussion back to his particular work and the role of the community of his devotees.

This selection, of transcripts includes an important letter which Bubba sent back to the Ashram, then located in Los Angeles, and a partial transcript of the talk he gave to the Ashram the day after he returned.

Bubba began this talk, which was taped at Swami Muktananda's Ashram, by discussing the distracting artifices of traditional spirituality in contrast with genuine sadhana in Satsang. He talked of the devotee's responsibility to maintain Satsang even in mediocre moments.

Bubba then distinguished between the cultic and the authentically spiritual communities in both their internal and external activities, and between the cultic and the true Guru.

JERRY: I was looking around at the people here and thinking about the people in our Ashram. The seeker type seems more sincere, more into the spiritual path. The people in our Ashram were hustlers and topless dancers and are not sincere.

BUBBA: There are just as many hustlers and topless dancers here, except they all wear saffron robes and false faces. As soon as they stop chanting and going through their cultic routine, they are, again topless dancers and hustlers, because the routine doesn't really change anything. It just distracts them and gives them another game to play temporarily.

True sincerity is not that social quality we regard as sincerity. It is a quality that is naturally alive in a person who understands himself. All these cultic forms of concentration of attention and absorption don't produce this kind of self-knowledge. They distract a person. Everything here is calculated to fascinate and distract you, to enforce your attention. There is one fundamental law involved in all forms of sadhana, the yogic law that you become the thing that you concentrate on. So all forms of sadhana here are ways of concentrating on what ultimately are supposed to be forms of the Divine-mantras, chants, the Guru's form, what the Guru does outwardly, all the images and pictures - so that you become more and more absorbed and ecstatically distracted. But this path is untrue because it does not undermine the principle that is being absorbed and distracted. As soon as the source of distraction is taken away, the individual falls back into the state he was in to begin with.

True sadhana is the undermining of the principle that is exploited in these traditional places. That is why it doesn't have the artifices that a place like this has. A place like this is very attractive because it is so full of external routine, just as communism and fascism can be very attractive because they are so black and white, so orderly. Modern forms of crazy politics are the secular forms of traditional spirituality. But the truly human qualities are not rigidly ordered and precise. That kind of order is enforced, external.

Whenever the genuine principle of the spiritual process is brought to bear, it is a dangerous affair. From social, traditional points of view, you lose the artifices that are native to these external approaches, both the so-called "spiritual" and the secular. That doesn't mean a genuine Ashram needs to be disorderly. Order is natural enough, but only order based on real functions, simply ordinary things, not on artifices that are attempts to get beyond yourself, to get ecstatic. Doing ordinary things is orderly enough. Chanting has its place as a moment, not as a perpetual attempt to become absorbed. It is an occasion, a pleasantry. It's enjoyable from a genuine point of view, but once it becomes repetitive and constant, it is another method. It should only be used to the degree that it is natural, functional, appropriate.

All these grinning, gleaming faces don't have any happiness underneath them. They have an intense desire, an attempt to be free of the unhappiness. That's what those manifestations are. They are based on unhappiness, not real happiness. Real happiness is just free, radically free. It is not associated with a mood or a facial expression or any of that sort of nonsense. All that is unconscious ecstasy. People desire these traditional artifices because they are suffering, and it is obvious that bringing these things into an Ashram brings order and certain qualities that we associate with spiritual life. But if they are brought in at all, they must be brought in at appropriate times and in natural ways.

Creating an artificial environment essentially handles people's disturbances, their neuroses, and their gross pride. They feel relatively at ease, and they walk around being soupy and spiritual all day, thinking they are doing sadhana. All they have done is remove the gross influences from their lives. But that's the condition under which sadhana in fact begins. You must penetrate your core of ordinariness.

In true sadhana you are dealing simply and directly with your state, your atmosphere, your ordinariness. It is truly perceptive to see that in your actual state, your very presence, is disturbance, completely independent of qualities that condition you are obviously disturbed. But your very presence is that disturbance. You can see that there is no genuine rest in you, except a mediocre experience of no disturbance which comes from without or within. When those gross disturbances are removed, you begin to see that your actual state, your very presence, is disturbance, completely independent of qualities that may appear to you. It is always this contraction. You begin to see that. You see it in your ordinary moments of relative ease and happiness, not just in your neurotic highs and lows, but in this neutral state in which there is no peculiar event. When you begin to see it then, understanding has begun. But people buy out at that point. Instead of truly becoming perceptive and carrying on the real activity of consciousness, they just enjoy that neutral time until the next disturbance arises or the next high arises. The highs and the lows are too baroque, they are not fundamental, they are extraordinary. This ordinariness is an omnipresent quality against which all other qualities play. The secret of understanding is in recognizing that.

JERRY: The average life is all highs and lows. There is no ordinariness. If a moment is ordinary, it is simply comfortable.

BUBBA: It has a certain artifice of pleasantness, but if you truly become sensitive, this minute is just as disturbed as your obviously disturbed moments. In those moments, those gross, heavy moments, you are being disturbed by some apparent event that has come about. In this ordinary sense you are disturbance itself.

JERRY: There is no feeling of chakra contraction or gross vital center contraction.

BUBBA: But it is taking place in its most subtle form. If it were not, you would have no separate self sense. You wouldn't hold onto mediocrity, which is itself a form of desire. The desire to be undisturbed manifests as mediocrity. Some people think that is being spiritual. But it is just being mediocre. People generally don't have any tolerance for that mediocrity for long periods of time, so they always return to the highs and lows. They are both forms of distraction, of standing outside yourself. Even the lows, the disturbances, the aggravations, are forms of distraction, fascination with qualities. In fact, most people pursue those. As a respite from that, some turn to this mediocrity and think that it is spiritual. It is just a particular state. A capacity for this mediocre pleasantness, this moveless happiness without any great intensity:

JERRY: There is no intensity. That's that feeling of boredom I said I had. There is no life, there is nothing happening.

BUBBA: If you penetrate that, then the natural force of consciousness creates great intensity, and it is utterly independent. Whereas this mediocrity is still dependent. It is held onto as an alternative to the highs and lows, the dualities.

It is the responsibility of the devotee to maintain the quality of Satsang, but in the crucial moment when he is mediocre, he tends to abandon it. That's why he must grasp it as a responsibility and, in spite of his tendencies, maintain it. People are very willing to maintain it when things are going bad. All of a sudden they are super-devotional. When they are very high, all of a sudden they are super-blissful. When they are just mediocre, when the qualities have apparently come to rest, they go back into the soup of unconsciousness, they abandon the quality of Satsang, they are irresponsible. So the devotee must see that he does that. He must begin to see his own activity under those conditions as well as these conditions that are high and extraordinary. He must see how he functions when things come to rest, how he becomes bored, complacent, and lifeless.

JERRY: You have to stay absolutely conscious at all times.

BUBBA: That's why, in a traditional place like this, there are so many details that a person is responsible for managing hour after hour, acknowledgments he makes to the Guru at certain times and places, doing certain things. It is a way of enforcing the attitudes of one who is in Satsang. But if the formalities of the community are the entire means for maintaining this quality, it is just an artifice. It is not that the community must establish formalities for a person to follow hour after hour, just to be sure that he acts as if he were in Satsang. The individual must be responsible for it. If he fails at it in our Ashram, that is what he does, and he doesn't have this liturgy to perform that makes him appear to be living Satsang. The qualities of Satsang disappear, and that becomes obvious to him or is pointed out to him in a difficult moment.

JERRY: Satsang sometimes becomes confusing to me. I have feelings about you and thoughts of happiness, comfortable peaceful space, feelings of God and my true nature, but without the actual experience of all this. These feelings of bliss and all the things that have happened in meditation with you are some of the things that I think of as Satsang. I guess there is nothing concrete about Satsang.

BUBBA: Satsang is a condition and a process that must be alive in you as a process, as an activity that's ongoing at any moment. When it is not, it degenerates into the form of an idea. That is why you must continually create it and enact it. You must function as Satsang. You do not have to worry about it then. It is a relationship that must be lived. It must be demonstrated outwardly, without mediocrity, without fawning. When it is lived very concretely, you don't have to be concerned about what it is, trying to remember events in time in the past when you felt very much that you knew what it was. It is simply the condition of devotional relationship to the Guru.

JERRY: That is the case, that is what I feel. That's the thing that occupies me. I guess if I just continually live that process, the transformation takes place.

BUBBA: In the midst of living Satsang you observe your turning from it, and this produces observation in you. This observation develops over time and becomes an insight, an inclusive, penetrating insight. Previously you were passively involved in this reflection of your qualities, but when this insight arises, you become active as that insight. That insight becomes the principle of consciousness. It enters into the process of existence from moment to moment in the form of enquiry.

Previously you lived Satsang with the Guru and passed in and out of your tendencies. You began to see them with more clarity and they were pointed out to you again and again. So that insight developed and penetrated many different forms of your distraction. When that insight is alive in you, you move into the experiences that arise from moment to moment and enquire of them. At that point understanding begins to become an intense process. At that point the quality of Satsang begins to intensify, and you become less concerned for this cycle of phases and lapses. Moment to moment you have penetrated the quality of experience, so you are alive in Satsang continuously and creatively. Until this insight arises, your consciousness is only passively alive in Satsang:

In my Ashram people are continually reminded of me. I don't mean verbally. Of course, things get said at certain times, but we are spending far too much time talking. We need to function with one another as individuals who are in Satsang and in whom there is at least the beginning of this intelligence. The more people function in Satsang, the less there is to say. The less they function in Satsang moment to moment, the more time they spend rapping to one another and telling one another where they are at, because Satsang is not a function for them. It is just a kind of status.

People are always shrinking from Satsang into some mediocrity or self-concern or some aggravated state. They don't maintain the devotional relationship to the Guru, the force of the Guru has no effect. It is not active in them. The Guru is out there somewhere, and they are moving around and touching him every now and then. But the devotee maintains continuous contact. It is only the devotion of the devotee that provides a channel for the force of the Guru. If there's no real devotion, no literal devotion, no functional devotion, the Guru is turned away, the Guru has no way through. A mediocre person gains nothing because he is only obstructing the force of the Guru. Nothing occurs in such a one.

JERRY: It is good to know why. In this Ashram everyone just says, "Turn to the Guru, "Guru -kripa,"' but they don't say why and they don't understand. That's the force of God coming through the Guru as a separate entity.

BUBBA: The true Guru is not some superman. He must always become nothing so that the Divine Siddhi becomes active. God's Siddhi is perfect, absolute, so it is not by becoming a perfect superman with all kinds of overwhelming, fascinating qualities that a person awakens to the Divine activity. It is only when all that is undermined and no longer active in him that the Divine Siddhi appears spontaneously. The Guru, then, is a unique presence and a unique process.

Above all, he is unique by virtue of the fact that he can enter into a concrete, living relationship with people, and they likewise can enter into a concrete, living relationship with the Guru. He has a living, material form, and that makes it very tangible.

JERRY: As the Guru sheds the physical body, is it the Divine Force that becomes alive in the disciples and other people who live in relationship to the Guru?

BUBBA: Sure. Then the devotees of such a one become the functional means for the presentation of that Force in the world. They have that living relationship with the Guru, who is now gone in his ordinary human form. Their relationship is unbroken, so the activity, the Divine Siddhi that was the Guru continues to manifest through them as a community.

JERRY: You really have to be straight and strong to carry that through.

BUBBA: It stands present in the community, not necessarily in the form of another individual who does this, or has the same responsibility. In some cases a Guru leaves behind a devotee who has the same function and extends it. But the purpose of all such Gurus, even if they do follow one after another, is to create a community in which the Siddhi is alive, in which it is the living presence, the living condition.

JERRY: Can a spiritual community continue indefinitely?

BUBBA: Sure.

JERRY: Yet, I guess traditions develop as it starts taking hold, and so it usually dies.

BUBBA: Well, various traditions become established. There are various customary ways of dealing with the functions of life. They do tend to become rigid. That is why there must be a living community in which the individuals are alive in this Siddhi and function in it from hour to hour, day to day, becoming wise, becoming capable of dealing with one another in Truth. Then the Divine function, which is all that the Guru is, manifests in a lot of ways within that community.

JERRY: The world is ready for that, huh?

BUBBA: Well, there must be at least four or five people! The only problem is that these communities tend to become not communities, but cults. They tend to be centered in the personality of a Guru, directed to that Guru as a form of fascination.

It is the community re-enacting the ritual of the ego that people all enact individually. So they never become a community, and they never turn outward and become functional and truly live this Siddhi. They remain inward directed, always concentrating on this one who is gone. I have told you that the Guru comes to manifest that Satsang that existed prior to his physical birth. People don't relate to that. After the Guru's death they try to relate to that Satsang that he apparently generated during his lifetime.

So they go around trying to remember what he looked like and carrying that whole cult of his personality, instead of truly living the Divine Satsang that he was here to communicate while he was alive.

JERRY: Even while he is alive people pick up little traits that the Guru has, manners of speech and style of dress.

BUBBA: Most of that is gentle enough and really not overwhelming. The cultic tendency is always there, whereas Satsang and the work of the true Guru is an anti-cultic process, a radical process. People always tend to create the cult. The Guru is always dissolving the cult, undermining the cultic tendency.

JERRY: What happens in the case of this Ashram? Baba doesn't undermine the cult. I am sure he is functioning as a mirror, reflecting it back to those that are personally involved with him. But for those who aren't personally involved with him, he is very available as the object of their cultic desires.

BUBBA: What is being created here is the traditional cult of the Guru. That doesn't mean that the real process can't go on for some, but it requires great intelligence in them.

JERRY: Is there any advantage in the cult?

BUBBA: No, it has no fundamental value at all. It is just another separative human game. It is the same thing that is the ego. It is the same thing that is suffering. It is a form of contraction, separate self sense. The separate identity, compulsive mentalizing, endless proliferation of distinctions, dualities, motivations, desires, and tendencies - a cultic community is made up of those things, just as the individual is made up of those things until he understands. When he understands, he breaks that whole process down. He obviates it and lives in a totally different way. The same occurs in a spiritual community. It breaks the tradition of cultic existence, turns out of this self-centering, and becomes a centerless community, a functional community. It deals creatively with the elements of life, and because it has no center, it becomes an instrument for the Divine Siddhi.

The signs of a cultic community are just as obvious as the signs of the ordinary man. People involved in the cult of some Guru or some teaching are fixed in attitudes of identity, endlessly communicating from the point of view of a fixed identity, so they are endlessly anxious about those who do not believe as they do, who do not have the same cultic fixation they have. It makes them anxious if people don't have the same point of view, the same attachment, the same imagery. So they are always very defensive. They are always defending their practice, their point of view, they are always arguing the lackings of non-believers or those who have not yet been acquired to their cult.

Those who are truly alive in the spiritual community don't create an offense. They don't present themselves in an antagonistic association with others. Those who live in the spiritual community are genuinely free, free of their own separate self sense, free of the endless multiplication of differences, distinctions, and thoughts. They are not endlessly fabricating a great defense and influence over others. They live very naturally. When it is appropriate to carry on conversations, they do. But it is their happiness, their openness, their non-contraction that is the instrument they have for serving others, not their arguments, their self-concerns, their cultic attachments and tendencies. Those are all obstructions. It's their non-obstruction, their non-contraction, the absence of the cultic tendency or the inward turning, that allows them to be an instrument for the Force of the Guru, for the Force of God.

Rather than endlessly scattering force in the various forms of desire to be expansive and acquire everything to itself, the spiritual community is a functional order. It doesn't move by arbitrary motivations. It moves in appropriate ways, creatively, through the medium of the appropriate structures of existence. There is beauty and harmony in individuals and communities of that kind. Such communities fit very well into the world, whereas the cultic community doesn't fit into the world at all. The cultic community must be out somewhere, away from everything else, just as the ordinary individual is Narcissus and must be alone.

The cultic community is invariably apart from the world because it is playing the game of Narcissus. It is looking in the water, reflecting its own qualities. The small cultic community is always at odds with the worldly community. Whereas the true spiritual community certainly isn't sort of flowing in the streets with all the craziness of the world, but it is able to deal with the human world. It doesn't take itself out of the human community. It maintains connections to it and deals with it naturally. Those who live in the spiritual community maintain all the ordinary functions. They don't abandon the world.

Here in Baba's Ashram everybody is an ascetic. They are tending to be swamis and yogis. It is very separative, very cold. It has no juice. There doesn't have to be a sex game going on in the true spiritual community, but there must be the natural life functions. The cultic community is always tending to abandon function. It always seeks some status. The true spiritual community doesn't abandon function. Function is its continual test. The ordinary functions of life test you constantly. You are always shown your own tendencies. Whereas if you remove yourself from the functions of existence, no test can go on. You sit in the soup of artificial spiritual pleasures all day. Function is the medium of testing devotees, function in the most natural relational sense.

The more natural the flow between the spiritual community and the larger community, the better. The tendency is always to create the cult, the separate community, just as the ordinary person tends to create the separate individual isolated from functions. The longer the community exists and the more people it includes, the more there seems to be a professional core that separates itself from the world in order to do the Ashram's work. This is the seed of the cult. It happens that it is necessary for some people to live in the Ashram and perform its functions. It has to be that way, but they must understand the liabilities and not get hung up in the artifices of the cult. That is done by maintaining a natural relationship with the environment. So it is generally best for people to be householders or, if they don't happen to be married, to live with people to whom they must be responsible from day to day. It is best for them to hold jobs and to have ordinary work to do. Don't just work inside the Ashram, but go out and be among other people. The larger an Ashram becomes, the more like the world it tends to become. Even if the spiritual community does become so large that it doesn't have that much obvious commerce with the larger world, it will still have all those tendencies. As long as it doesn't become an artificial environment where everybody sits in caves, the larger spiritual community will contain all the usual functions. A large spiritual community will have all the ordinary means of survival, just like a town.

JERRY: That's how it runs here.

BUBBA: Not an Ashram like this place, but a town is the appropriate situation for a spiritual community. In a town all the ordinary functions are lived, whereas the cultic community is isolated from functions like this Ashram. Only a certain core of the people here live in the world of commerce, and they provide huge amounts of money so that this relatively small group of professional cultic types can maintain their illusion. If all these individuals built this Ashram and had to keep it alive and do what is necessary for it to survive from day to day, they would have a very different relationship to it. This place is created by the wealthy few, and everyone else here lives like a saint in a cave without any responsibility. If the spiritual community is a town, however, every individual is responsible for his own living and for the contribution of a significant amount of his income to the maintenance of the facilities of the spiritual community. This is much better. There must be a few large sources of money as well, but it is sufficient for most individuals to be responsible for their income and for the maintenance of the Ashram.

JERRY: That is part of the demonstrative, devotional approach too.

BUBBA: The secret of the spiritual community is contained in this notion of the cult and the cultic tendency. The members of the Ashram are continually returned to the observation of themselves as a community, just as they are always returned to the observation of themselves as individuals. They will see this cultic tendency and always undo it. The community must be responsible for doing that.

Ganeshpuri is a good example of a cultic community. There happened to be this extraordinary individual and everybody turned toward him, asked him for spiritual things and material things. The whole form of the community was to turn on this individual, this man, Nityananda. They never turned outward from him to fulfill his function in the world or in their community. Now the man has been dead for twelve years and everybody is still turned toward the center. There is no creative community there. It is a cult.

JERRY: You turn people back upon themselves and bring them to function outwardly in a new way, while Baba sort of acquires them. Your function is absolutely different from that. You are not acquiring people. You are actually moving them away, turning them outward.

BUBBA: There is danger in working that way with people, because they do get turned away. But over time a certain few begin to grasp the process, and they create a genuine community, They eventually create the core of the Ashram, which then begins to grow geometrically, just as we have one couple and they have children and those children have children and after a couple of generations we gain hundreds of new human beings. The beginnings are small. The Ashram could be made to grow very quickly. If I went out immediately now and created all kinds of fascinations, promises, and influences, and just acquired people, we would get auditoriums full. But it would have no reality. It would just be an enthusiastic cult of fascination.

JERRY: If you brought them in that way, you wouldn't be able to turn them toward spiritual life anyway. They would only want experiences.

BUBBA: People would only want to be fascinated with me then. I dislike that completely.

JERRY: You are not terribly fascinating.

BUBBA: It's true. Fascination is the sheer motivation to be absorbed and made ecstatic by concentration on something to the exclusion of everything else. There is a difference between fascination and devotion.

It is the Guru's responsibility to turn people in on their fundamental activity, even though that endangers his cult. The creation of a cult should not be his point of view. He has a peculiar function to perform in relation to individuals - he must serve their transformation. He can't do that by simply being a fascination, becoming the center, the idol of people's minds and lives. Then he becomes a thing. That's the Guru and his status. The Guru must exist as a function. He must be a paradox for his devotees. He must be elusive, he must never take a fixed position.

JERRY: People come here to get a devotional, religious feeling, and when they walk out, you see that they haven't done anything, they have only put on a pretty dress, or a pretty suit....

BUBBA: People who come to me are uncomfortable, You feel uncomfortable around me. The function has died out if people can come to the Guru and be comfortable and happy and be given all kinds of sweets and goodies and pleasant things to do, and not be forced into that situation in which the crisis in consciousness must occur. If that situation is not created in the Guru's presence, he is not living that function. He is denying it, he is taking on the cultic function, becoming a fascination and acquiring others.

JERRY: You're in a dangerous place because you are a threat to all of this. Many of Muktananda's disciples feel uneasy around you. One of them asked me why you are so quiet, as if your silence were a threat. He feels uncomfortable about approaching you. One of the American disciples says he feels uncomfortable around you, and yet he has asked me some things, and I said you are absolutely Guru. He asked me if I think you are a Siddha Guru, and I said absolutely. That directly threatens their state, so this is a very dangerous place for you to be.

BUBBA: The motivations of both those people are obvious. I'm working with those two guys every time I see them, and that is why they feel uncomfortable. I am dealing with their approach, their tendencies, their desires. I know what the two of them are up to, so naturally they feel uncomfortable because I'm not fulfilling what is expected. Even though they may never have a serious involvement with me, I'm providing an instrument for the crisis, at least in this social way, whereas at this Ashram they are only coddled and fulfilled. I am always working to undermine this activity, so it makes people uncomfortable. If they begin to live the process that the Guru initiates, then of course they can have the pleasures of that intimacy with him, but they must never abandon that true process of understanding. The crisis is allowed to go on in them, but in natural ways, not in the form of neurotic difficulties. Whenever they slip into Narcissus, he nails them again in some way until they can begin to be responsible for that process themselves.

The approach to the Guru is always difficult, because it is not the outward approach, it is the inward approach to the Guru that is significant. The Guru must maintain an outward condition that is like the inner process, so the apparent unavailability of the Guru is an instrument for this crisis. If he just keeps handing it out, making people happier and happier (or what they think is happier), fulfilling them, patting them on the head, making promises, generating energies, he never provides the instrument for their turnabout.

I must maintain a relationship to people outwardly that is coincident with the approach that they make. This American you mentioned wants to be palsy-walsy with all the great ones. That's his number. He likes famous and great and well-known people and all of that. He wants them to shine on him. That's how he gets his goodie. Baba satisfies that egoic demand of his in some way. But I'm not interested in satisfying it. I'm interested in seeing it come to an end in that guy. So I would rather be offensive to him and not kiss him on the cheek, tell him he is a good friend, and make him my friend, because the next hour he would be throwing darts at my picture. That's what he does anyway. It is better to deal with him in this way.

What did Nityananda do? Nityananda never had anything to do with anybody. Other such masters in the past haven't just been a pal to everybody. It's bullshit. They always worked on the ego, to destroy that principle through the medium of the conscious process, not artificially through the means of experiences, outer conditions and functional conditions, visions and influences. That does nothing to the ego except give it more things to own. The egoic principle is there, so it is possible to give it mantras to recite and inner sounds to hear and inner lights to see and visions and interpretations of reality. You give it all that, and the ego takes it all up and becomes fatter and fatter, more and more glorious and happy and full.

JERRY: I was speaking to several people, and one of them said, "Why doesn't Franklin mention the blue pearl in his book?" People were talking about the different experiences, and I said, "Well, experiences aren't the Truth. They are just experiences."

BUBBA: People want experiences because they are very unhappy, they are upset, they are disturbed. And the having of experiences calms them down, makes them feel full, distracts them from their real state. But the Truth is a radical condition in which there is no self, no ego, no separate motivation, no fulfillment. It's the absolute undermining of the ordinary state. You can't bring a person to that by degrees, by fulfilling him. You must undermine that principle from the beginning, moment to moment. You must take the floor out from under the person and bring him to a direct confrontation with his condition.

If that occurs there can be experiences. There may be experiences along the way. People have experiences in our Ashram. They are just not taught as the goal or the Truth. Experiences are not the principle of our work. Obviously, Siddhi is active in our work, and people do have experiences, but they don't have any ultimate significance. The same process of understanding must go on whether those things occur or not, so I don't make positive recommendations about them. I don't lead people to hold on to them. The more people are having them, the more I teach another way, to produce the crisis in those who are having such experiences.

JERRY: I remember people used to have kriyas' and all of a sudden you said, "Don't indulge the kriyas."

BUBBA: Whereas at another time and place I have said in what sense kriyas are acceptable or appropriate. The teaching is always alive in the present.

JERRY: It shows people that you are beyond the point of view of experience. You are talking about the limitation of experience.

BUBBA: But this radical activity of understanding, founded in Satsang or prior Divine Communion, is the evidence of true Siddhi. It's not a formula. I don't have any "idea" whatsoever about what I do. I don't have any conceptualization of what I should do or what I should say. I don't have it pre-figured in any way. It is all spontaneous. It is very clear and very obvious to me, but it's not based on any formulas, any formalistic descriptions, any certainties. None of that exists. There are no such systematic graspings. There is nothing. All of this is simply a spontaneous Siddhi.

JERRY: The yogic approach, the Eastern approach and most of the religious Western approaches, are a great big mechanism; it's a very formalized activity. But how could it have structure when it is ultimately structureless?

BUBBA: In my own case there was an experience even of a yogic variety that was radical in relation to the whole yogic process. Up until that point I was involved with all of the experiences of the chakras and the movement of force to the sahasrar. Then, as I mentioned in The Knee of Listening, there were several nights with these pains in the head that felt like incisions. Then it was as if the sahasrar were severed, and the upper terminal dissolved.

In other words, the whole principle, the whole structure of spiritual experience was undermined. It was shown to be of no significance whatsoever. Instead of a structure of experience with seven chakras, or energy centers, and energy rising up, there could have been a toilet bowl or a suitcase in my back. It was shown to be a completely arbitrary structure - like the body could have had twenty legs, with eyeballs at the end of each one, instead of being in its present shape. It could have been something completely different. Just so, the chakras are shown to be a completely arbitrary system of experiencing and realizing subtle life. The chakra system was thrown out of the way, and all it could possibly contain was fundamentally without significance.

JERRY: That's the place that most teachers haven't gotten to, because they are still teaching that structure.

BUBBA: Right, they're speaking from the point of view of that structure, which is just like talking about the Truth as if it had the shape of your arm or physical body, like saying, "God, therefore, is shaped like this." Everybody has this childish religious image that God is an old man with a white beard and everything. The yogi teachers are getting a little subtler, and they think that God really has seven mystical lights. They are thinking, in a more subtle, magical, mystical form, but that's just as arbitrary as an old man with a white beard. God is not that either, It's just reading God through the form of certain structures that we tend to experience or feel within ourselves, but which are just as arbitrary as our external form. These centers have a certain functional significance, but they don't have an ultimate significance, and they are not the point of view of the spiritual path. That's the significance of the turnabout in my own case. There is this descending and ascending circle, but the principle of my own path was no longer attached to that process.

JERRY: If somebody tries to purify the chakra system, they devote their whole life to ascending through all the different chakras. Their ultimate goal is just to live in the psycho-physical structure without suffering distress. And if they attain that, they have been so established in that, it has been their goal for so long, that they can't possibly throw that aside and go to the Truth.

BUBBA: It would be like a gourmet giving up food and becoming an ascetic. Something very dramatic would have to occur before he would be motivated to do that. So people only become "full" by the ordinary spiritual means. In other words, it is not the full man, the fulfilled person, who is living in Truth. It is one who has realized that the only fullness is God. That requires the undermining of the ordinary principle, not the attachment of experiences to that principle, not the ecstasies that the principle can generate for itself, but the undermining of that principle itself, that ego, that contraction, that separative activity.

That's the principle of Truth, whereas the traditional way exploits the search, builds up things on this principle of the ego, helps it to acquire things, gives it feelings of relief from its own implications. The egoic individual may feel pleasure within himself, he may feel at ease by virtue of experiences of various kinds, like feeling spiritual energies. A person can feel as if he is egoless. He can be sitting in meditation and have some shakti experience and think, "I feel empty of self." You can cognize this sensation. The subtle realization of the separative one is simply enjoying that perception of being without ego, so it is just another experience.

A true undermining of the ego is not an experience of being egoless. It's the absolute obliteration of that principle of consciousness. And it is suffered. Everything in the being resists it, and it is so radical that it snuffs him out. From that point of view there is no self to be found. Such a one looks with the gaze of God. Wherever he looks or appears, he falls through everything. He sees through everything. He can't grasp his own shape. It never arises for him. So everything he sees has the same quality as his own presence. He sees nothing that is not of the same nature. He can't find a separate one.

JERRY: Does he see the activities of those around him, their contraction, suffering, and separation?

BUBBA: He doesn't see that it implies an ultimate separation. He just sees that there is the discomfort, the apparent suffering created by that activity. But he doesn't see it as a fact, some ultimate truth. It is an illusion. So the Guru works from behind the seeker, whereas the yogi-fakir sits in front of him. He sits in front of him, fascinates him, adds to him, puffs him up, blows him up, makes him happy. But the Guru works from behind him, undermines him, takes his spine out, even while the individual sits before him and looks at his body. In other words, he works from behind the principle that approaches him, he undermines that principle itself. The yogi-fakir fulfills that, as if doing so would somehow make it go away, as if that would produce realization. But it doesn't in Truth. It's a process based on the ego itself. And that is the principle of all traditional yogas and all searches.

The presence of the Guru is a kind of disturbance. It is not simply acceptable, it creates difficulties, it requires something of an individual. That has been said of all the Great Siddhas. What did Moses do? He created a lot of problems for people. Moses was a Great Siddha. Jesus was a Great Siddha. You hear all kinds of stories about Jesus, but if you see how he truly functioned, he was a very radical personality. One of the sayings that was attributed to him is, "I didn't come to bring peace, I came to bring a sword to divide son from parents, husband from wife, and brother from sister." To create divisions, to create this disturbance, to bring this turnabout, to bring this crisis, to make people truly turn to God. This would tend to disturb the order of the ordinary way of life. That is what he meant by separating brother and sister, children and parents.

The Guru's presence is a paradox and a disturbance, except for those who grasp the principle of his activity. They become his Devotees and are happy with him, because the process occurs in them without difficulty. It's a natural effect. Everyone else resists it like an execution, and they don't grasp the significance of the activity of the Siddha. Everybody grasps the significance of a kindly old man who gives you gifts. That's Santa Claus. Anybody can grasp that, but it does nothing to their fundamental suffering. It just attaches people's hopes to a lot of gifts, including what they call liberation, but they have no idea what that is,

JERRY: When people come and are not really doing sadhana, is it good for them to be brought into dilemma?

BUBBA: It contains possibilities. The person who has no capacity to deal with that will just become angry and take himself away.

JERRY: Ultimately does that have an advantage?

BUBBA: No. In itself it doesn't have any particular benefit, but it is an event in the individual's life that at some point may be fruitful if he goes on and unwinds a few more trips. Then he may begin to value the Siddhi that produces the crisis. Until a person has unwound his sought-for events, his ways of seeking for Santa Claus, and seen the dismal creation that is brought about by these means, he won't value the work of the Siddhas. He will make demands to be satisfied, he will forget it, resist it, say that it is without value, that it is crazy, that it is false.

Love, strangely enough, does not satisfy. The artifice that people go about calling love, and that tends to be fabricated in the spiritual community, is not love. It is a pleasurable radiance, but that is not love. Love brings about the crisis, love dissolves the ego, love overwhelms Narcissus. Narcissus resists love. He can't deal with love. He 'skips all the possibilities of love. He runs away from his loved one, from his parents, he runs out into the wilderness. Such a one can't deal with love. What the ordinary individuals in the cultic community think is love is not love. It is a pleasurable experience, a titillation, a zapping, a form of eroticism. The force of real love demands the dissolution of the separative principle, so it is uncomfortable to be in its presence. The thing that people are calling love and turning toward fanatically is not love, but only this pleasurable radiance. It is a good meal, it is a mere fascination. Love requires sacrifice. It requires real understanding, real intelligence, real functioning.

JERRY: Love is an activity without ego. So in order for that to happen.

BUBBA: You can't survive.

JERRY: We have to radiate love, and yet there can't be an ego there doing it. Very few people in the world are able to do that.

BUBBA: When there is no one there, there is only love. In the New Testament it says, "God is love." Well, that is true. There is no self, there is only God manifesting most primitively and naturally and outwardly as this force of love. It just washes through.

JERRY: The feeling of warmth and affection and relationship and intimacy is what people call love?

BUBBA: It is just one of the psychological artifices that we have for creating pleasure. It is not love. The force of love can be behind it. It is not that these pleasurable feelings are abandoned. They are part of our social karmas.

JERRY: So you can't say, "I love you," because that denies love.

BUBBA: Yes, it's a convention. You can say it, and, in Truth have it be the case, but it's a convention to say, "I love you." The man of understanding still uses words that are self-references because realization does not end the world, or the ordinary functions of existence, but is the principle whereby they exist. It's the principle of apparently individual existence as well. So such a one continues to use the self references, the conventions, but their implications don't operate in him.

In this Ashram spiritual life is developed into a form of show business. That's what cultic communities are. Everybody has to pretend to be witnessing a further demonstration of the absolute marvelousness of it all. There is a spiritual force here, if you want to call it spiritual. You don't even have to call it that. It is a force very common to human experience. It is just that most people are not aware of it because of its subtle nature. If a person turns toward it in a certain way, makes himself available to it in a certain way, it will produce phenomena of various kinds. This Ashram is a kind of a showplace for that process, essentially. It has a certain uniqueness. In the midst of it all, there are certain genuine manifestations.

JERRY: It is absolutely rare to have a true disciple, an absolute disciple, one who even transcends the teaching. And it should be such a joy, such a Divine relationship.

BUBBA: If the devotee is true, it is not a matter of his transcending the Guru, it is a living relationship. In that relationship, we see the perfection of the Guru and the disciple. The Guru also becomes transcendent because of the function he is permitted to perform. If he is not fit for that function, he remains the lesser, and in that case we can see a devotee who transcends the Guru. So the Guru's function is continually tested by his devotees.

The relationship between the Guru and the disciple is not a fixed quality. It is a process, a living thing. That is why there have been very few extraordinary spiritual individuals. The rest of humanity who have contact with genuine spiritual teachers have positive qualities added to. their lives by that influence, and that's essentially what it comes down to. Very few pass through the truly extraordinary transformation. That is not to say that this other kind of influence does not have any function at all. It does have a certain social function. But that social function has got nothing to do with the Truth.

The true work of the Siddhas and of the Guru is to create this radical upset. Wherever the dharma, the Truth, disappears, he appears and restores it. And the dharma disappears not just in dissipated individuals, or other lesser individuals. It disappears among spiritual individuals. So the Guru appears as a critical and radical presence in the ordinary world of suffering and illusion and self-indulgence, and also in the spiritual world.

Gautama Budda's presence was very radical in terms of the spiritual traditions of the time, perhaps more radical in those terms than it was in relation to the ordinary way of life. His teaching is a criticism of the spiritual path at that time, more so than of the ordinary way of life. That is taken for granted in his teachings. He criticized all the ritualistic and ordinary philosophical assumptions of the spiritual traditions. He lived out in the forest in India and went to all kinds of Gurus and was shown things like

Shaktipat, but his transformation was of a radical variety that precluded all that sort of stuff. He was a genuine Siddha in this sense and functioned truly as a critical, radical presence in relation to the spiritual paths of his time.

The Guru is critical even in relation to spiritual things. He doesn't just come to lay on spiritual trips because everybody is leading a worldly life. No, he criticizes the spiritual and the worldly tendencies. Both are signs of the extreme dissolution of the dharma, the way of Truth, which is radical. Both ends of this form of self-indulgence, the spiritual and the worldly, are undone by the influence of the true Guru.

JERRY: And so it is very important to get that information out, to communicate it.

BUBBA: There is a great danger in doing that. It is better to secure it first. Write it, put it into forms that can be communicated so that those who are interested in hearing such things can create an Ashram of genuine devotees, then work with them, and secure that function with people. Then, in time, the work can appear more publicly, after its existence is secured. At some point people are going to have to deal with it. People like those at this Ashram are going to have to deal with it. These cultic centers will shrink out into the wilderness away from everybody, they will break up, lose their centers, and the people in them will go running back to their homes. And the world itself will become a spiritual place, rather than always being renounced by these cults. Human beings must be released from the center that creates the cultic forms, and they must filter back into life, so that life becomes true.

This work has always been going on. The Siddhas of the kind that I am describing here have appeared as a radical influence in many cultures. Now we are moving towards a time where there is something like a great world culture, with many sub-cultures within it. Many nations of the world are sub-cultures within this greater culture. There is massive inter-communication. So our work is the entrance of that radical influence into this larger world.

Because it is such a large world in which there is a lot of inter-communication, perhaps there is a chance for the work to grow. That doesn't mean it will take hold instantly. It will still take time, but it is a different situation than what existed 2500 years ago when Gautama Buddha was up in Northern India. In those days, to get a communication from there to down here in the South of India might take generations. Now communications can be put out in such a form that they will maintain their original state over time. We have things like written literature, technical media, and fast transportation, and these things make it possible for communications to take place freshly, quickly, unchanged by time and space. So in relation to Muktananda and the work that he represents, I stand as Gautama did to the teachers of his time. It is a radical relationship to all of that traditional artifice.

Here, Bubba briefly discussed Sathya Sai Baba's cult of the Avatar, motivated devotion, and miracles, and the difference between involvement with that and genuine love.

The reason Sathya Sai Baba talks about the Avatar is that his path is the feminine, bhakti path, and the traditional devotional object of the bhakta is Krishna. The traditional imagery of the bhakti cult is the relationship between Krishna and his gopis. Sathya Sai Baba plays Krishna. He takes on this archetypal role because that's the quality of the sadhana that he wants to turn people on to. But when that's taken over into Western terms, the Westerner thinks that he is like Jesus or that he is God in the exclusive sense. None of that is so. He's a very different kind of person than Jesus. He is taking on the archetype of Krishna. The teachings in the Bhagavad Gita are the same sort of rap that he gives out.

There is a difference between imitating Krishna and being an Avatar. Krishna was, or at least he comes down as, a mythological figure. There may have been some person behind all that many thousands of years ago. But, if we can speak of him as a Siddha at all, there is a great difference between being such a Siddha in a different time and place and imitating that one,

in the mythological, mystical, archetypal terms Sathya Sai Baba does. The Avatar is a drama in a symbolic sense, not in a living sense. In fact there is no Avatar. There is no such thing. The idea of the Avatar is a particularly Hindu idea which comes from the idea that the Divine principle is above and beyond the qualities of manifest life. The Divine has come down and shown itself, shown the way and then goes away. In other words, he is an exclusive manifestation. The Siddhas are not different from God. But they are not Avatars in this exclusive sense, because God is always here. The one who was to come is always already here. The Avatar is always the one who is about to come, coming, going, finally coming, but that's not the true nature of God. God is always already present. Part of the teaching of the Siddhas is that there is no Avatar.

Sathya Sai Baba, then, is carrying on a symbolic drama of Krishna and his gopis, and he carries, along with that, because of his karmic past, various yogic siddhis. As I was saying before, the witnessing of these siddhis, the witnessing of miracles does not bring about the transformation that people suspect would occur if they could see a miracle. When you're seeing it, it's completely matter of fact, it's nothing like you would imagine. You "imagine" because of your doubt and your emptiness. You imagine that if you could see miracles, then that would prove that there is God or something or other. You think that. all of a sudden you would be full of fantastic faith, discipline, morality and beauty just because you had seen a miracle. This is because you think that the absence of miracles or your belief in them is a result of loss of faith. But if you sit down and you see these miracles of Sathya Sai Baba happening, it's just very matter of fact. He produces vibhuti8 and this and that. You see it, and it does absolutely nothing. There is no reaction because the Truth does not occur as a reaction. The miracle doesn't motivate one to Truth, it motivates one to something else, toward the bhakti cult, toward the method of loving the guru and God until you become like the guru and God, but that is not genuine love. When there is genuine love, the search is unnecessary, the search is undone, there is already the quality of realization in Truth, in God. To turn on to something in order to realize God is not to be turning on love, it is to be turning on to a certain effect, a mood.

The seeker turns on to bhakti, but the man of understanding, and those who live the way of understanding, love. Love is the force that is natural in relationship, love is unobstructed. Love is not that mood, an attitude that you turn on and call devotion. That is not love, that is nothing. That is a form of the search, that is looking for something to occur as a result. Love is very natural and spontaneous. It is the fullness that exists when there is no obstruction.

Sathya Sai Baba is essentially functioning as a saint, while Muktananda functions as a yogi. A saint is a little bit more than a yogi, a little broader than a yogi, and less limited to certain types of internal phenomena than a yogi.

Sri Ramanasramam - Tiruvannamalai

ON ARUNACHALA HILL

Arunachala is the holy mountain in South India that Ramana Maharshi regarded as a perfect manifestation of the absolute Divine. After his awakening in his late teens, he spent his entire life there, and over time an Ashram grew up around him. Bubba and Jerry climbed a little way up the hill in the early evening to make the tape from which the following transcript was taken.

Bubba first talked about the functions of yogis, saints, and sages, and the realization and manifestation o f the Siddhas, including Maharshi among others. He mentioned his recent contact on the subtle plane with Nimkaroli Baba, a yogi well known in the West as the Guru of the American teacher Baba Ram Dass. (Nimkaroli Baba died in October, just two months afterward.) Bubba then talked about the attitudes of Western seekers in India and the incomplete and exclusive understanding of the teachers at whose Ashrams such people tend to become fascinated. After describing the full teaching and function of the Maha-Siddha or very Divine, he indicated the importance of the true spiritual community as the vehicle of that teaching and function. He went on to discuss Maharshi's life, teaching, and Ashram in detail.

BUBBA: At Sathya Sai Baba's Ashram we saw miracles, saint-working. In this place there is the absolute force of the Heart Siddhi, the work of the sage. The phenomena peculiar to the yogi, the saint, or the sage may influence a greater reaction or perception in you or they may not. In any case, you did witness the drama of those awakening to yoga at Muktananda's Ashram, and you did see the miracles, the making of this ash, by Sathya Sai Baba. Here you're not very sensitive to the force of Ramana Maharshi's presence, but even if you were, you would see that in itself is not the point. The experiencing of the effects of these various spiritual manifestations is not itself spiritual life. The importance of pilgrimages is not that you go and get something, that you go and something happens to you, but that you go and no matter where you go you do sadhana. So, the importance of pilgrimage is the same thing that is important about staying at home. You do sadhana. These spiritual places do not create your spiritual life, and they don't necessarily give you energy for spiritual life. They don't do anything of that kind. They may have such an influence in your life if the moment of consciousness in you coincides with the moment of meeting the manifestation in one of these places. So in my own case the going to various places and teachers has always coincided with dramatic spiritual events. That doesn't mean that this is what is supposed to happen because you go to these places. It is just the way it happened in my own case. The significance of all these places is your sadhana. The thing that comes across there, the quality that is in these places is not of ultimate consequence. The quality is always, really, ultimately asking for your sadhana.

I have spoken about how there are yogis, saints, and sages, and how the Siddhas transcend or include the functions of all these. Nityananda was a great yogi who made himself so open to the Divine that he functioned as a Siddha. He included the functions of the saint and the sage.

Sri Ramakrishna is an example of a saint who transcended his own sainthood and purified it by not getting attached to its glamour, its game. He lived as a Siddha, so he included some of the functions of the yogi and the sage. Maharshi lived so perfectly as a sage that he transcended its limitations and functioned as a Siddha. He included in his own life the qualities of the yogi and the saint as well.

The yogis speak about the Guru and the transforming internal life of yogic phenomena. The saints talk about God and devotion to the Light of the world. And the sages talk about the Self and the realization of the one Reality. The Siddhas transform and include all of these functions and undermine the limitations of each of these functions. Their function is perfect. They also speak of the Guru and of God and of the Self. A Siddha is simply one whose quality may be that of a yogi, saint, or sage, but who functions so purely within it that he transcends its limitations and so functions as a Siddha.

Then there are Great Siddhas, who embrace all the qualities from the beginning and who themselves don't appear through one of these specific categories. That doesn't mean that they themselves are any greater than these other Siddhas who have particular qualities. These Siddhas who have a particular quality come at a particular time and place for a particular reason, just as a Great Siddha does. All of those true ones are the direct manifestation and work of the Divine in the world. Buddha, Jesus, Moses, and Krishna were Great Siddhas. In recent days Ramakrishna, Nityananda, and Maharshi are important because they represent and also transcend the specific qualities of the saint, yogi, and sage.

Muktananda is a yogi, but he doesn't transcend and purify his own function, so he becomes more and more involved in its glamour. He fails to serve the ultimate, perfect function of the Siddha and so makes the function of the yogi self-limiting. He limits it by taking on the glamour of the exclusive Guru. Sathya Sai Baba is a saint who has become attached to the glamour of that which limits the saint. He talks about God but he's busy trying to be the Avatar, so he has become involved in the illusion that is the limitation of the saint, just as Muktananda is involved in the illusion that is the limitation of the yogi. So these two are not true Siddhas. They are certainly remarkable men, but speaking from, the point of view of the perfect teaching, they are self-limiting.

Sri Aurobindo was involved in an intellectual dharma, in an animation of the great traditional way of this country, in creating a new approach, a synthesis. But he doesn't have any of that intensity of the Siddhas. In his way he is really very mediocre. There is a glamour attached to his limitation that people confront from the very beginning, and that in itself prevents the way of Truth. He is fundamentally a yogi type, particularly interested in the internal processes of transformation. He doesn't have the devotee's feeling for the Lord or the sage's for the perfect Reality, the Heart, the Self. While he is communicating through the language of a yogi, his particular fulfillment or advancement as a yogi is not as profound as that of Nityananda. Apart from all of that, he was a pure man and did some interesting, creative, yogic work. His work is surrounded with the same artifices and limitations as Auroville. The intellectual-verbal aspects of his teaching have a certain validity and usefulness examined along with all the rest of the dharma, apart from his special teaching.

The yogis are talking about this circle of fullness, descending and ascending. That is the aspect of functional existence that they are concentrated upon. The saints are concentrated on the intuition of Light, the reflected God-Light that always stands in the Heart or Real-God. The sages are concentrated in the Heart. The yogi, the saint, and the sage each represent an aspect of the full teaching. But one who is purely, perfectly living his function as a yogi, a saint, or a sage can through his presence communicate the force of that full teaching, even though he normally doesn't talk about it.

JERRY: It is a force?

BUBBA: It is an immediate, direct manifestation. It is the Form of God. It is the fullness in the apparent individual. Behind your sense of limitation is that perfect Form. The whole universe is built on it. Everything is built on it. So one who lives as a Siddha in the world manifests that Form consciously and directly so that another, by living as his devotee, can intuitively and in other ways experience and know that same Form. The Siddhas who are yogis, saints, or sages may communicate limitations verbally in the general manner of their teaching. But if they are true Siddhas they manifest, beyond their verbal teaching, the full Form. The full teaching is served through them. The perfect teaching is in Truth the Heart, the God-Light, and the circle of force (the Fullness).

One of the things I wanted to see with Maharshi illustrates this. In my own case, there was this descent from the sahasrar into the Heart which he described, but this was followed by a spontaneous regeneration of Amrita Nadi, from the Heart to the Light above. There was really no direct statement of this in his writings, so one of the things I wanted to find in coming here was if there was in him this knowledge, this fullness,, As soon as we came into the Samadhi site last night, as soon as I walked into the room, I could feel it all over my head and all over my body. His manifestation was completely covering me. Alll night long he was working. This current was moving not just down into the Heart, but up outsof the Heart into the sahasrar and the intuition of the Light above the body, the mind, and the world. That's been happening since we got here last night, and with such intensity that it's an obvious statement to me that, "Yes, that is my Form."

So that confirms to me his fullness as a Siddha. His verbal teaching is mainly about descending into the Heart, but that descent does not exclude any manifestation. It is the foundation of manifestation, so it doesn't exclude it. The Bright, the sahasrar, the God-Light above, is its reflection, its eternal manifestation. So there is this continuous current from the Heart to the Light and then descending and ascending through the circle of life, and that is the Form that is communicated by the Maha-Siddha, God. That is the Form of all beings, all worlds.

We've been to Nityananda's Ashram and now to Maharshi's Ashram, and these are the two most genuine places we've visited. One other place, this Ashram of Narayan Maharaj, is very good. He was a Siddha too. And Shirdi Sai Baba. There is a big difference between Shirdi Sai Baba and Sathya Sai Baba. Shirdi Sai Baba would not have ceased to be as enlightened as he was since his last birth. And yet the manifestation of Sathya Sai Baba does not have the greatness of Shirdi Sai Baba. It's another quality altogether. So I can't accept the claim that he is the reincarnation of Shirdi Sai Baba. There are some similarities, of course, when he performs some of his external miracles, but there is a completely different quality. His lila, his play, is that of being the reincarnation of Shirdi Sai Baba, but it doesn't have to be taken literally. It can be taken humorously. He can take it seriously or not. But his quality is different, his function is different. He's playing the glamorous illusion of a saint, whereas Shirdi Sai Baba never did that. He always purified his own dharma, his own function, and was straight. 

Shirdi Sai Baba was basically a Saint. He manifested phenomena, but this in itself is not especially yogic, because what came through him as a Guru was not in particular the awakening of the internal process, descending and ascending. it was the awakening of the life of a bhakta, devotee. The quality of his teaching was that of a saint. Because of that intimacy with my own sadhana, the individuals most involved with our work are not Ramakrishna but Shirdi Sai Baba, Nityananda, and Maharshi. I mention Ramarishna because I have a feeling for him, and the literature of his work is very clearly, obviously that of a Saint. But Shirdi Sai Baba is more directly related to our work, because of my connection with him. So Nityananda is the Yogi-Siddha, Shirdi Sai Baba the Saint-Siddha, and Maharshi the Sage-Siddha. Since the temple of Ramakrishna in Los Angeles was the site of the terminal events of my own sadhana, I am inclined to include him also. He was a Saint-Siddha functioning as an example to devotees, just as Shirdi Sai Baba was a Saint-Siddha functioning as an object for devotees.

JERRY: You were speaking recently of an experience with Nimkaroli Baba?

BUBBA: Yes, while we were at Sathya Sai Baba's Ashram, I had a subtle contact with Nimkaroli Baba. When I left the States his was the only address I didn't have, so I intended to get it over here, but I have had it volunteered by people several times now, completely out of the blue. When we were leaving Muktananda's Ashram, this girl came out specifically to give me Nimkaroli Baba's address and directions on how to get there. Then when we went to Sathya Sai Baba's Ashram people did the same thing, even gave us a map and photographs.

One night while we were still at Sathya Sai Baba's, I went through some very strange experiences with Nimkaroli Baba. It occurred during sleep, but I was fully conscious and apart from the physical body. I met Nimkaroli Baba on the subtle plane, and we dealt with one another in a very odd way. We immediately embraced one another and then started throwing one another away. We started discarding our own forms in the face of one another and became ridiculous, singing and laughing and throwing ourselves to smithereens, until there was nothing but that very Bliss. It wasn't a vision, it was actual, not just a dream, but a completely conscious, direct meeting with him. Afterward, I thought at first that I would still go see him physically, but it has since become clear that that is not necessary.

That impulse to go see him was one of the things that came through Sathya Sai Baba. He had nothing to say to me, and there was no reason to say anything. I don't have any sort of direct connection with him, but in his presence there was this impulse to go see Nimkaroli Baba. Now the contact has already been made.

Beyond that good contact, I don't have a special relationship to Nimkaroli Baba. To me he seems to be very much like Nityananda. There seems to be a lot of the same magnitude. He is involved in this kundalini manifestation, this shakti manifestation. He also has some secondary siddhis. He has some of the quality of Rudi. I mentioned in The Knee of Listening this experience years ago when Nina and I were out on Fire Island with Rudi. Nina had this experience of shock, shakti-shock, and I had it a couple of nights later. This experience with Nimkaroli Baba was the same, except that when it occurred with Rudi, nothing like that had ever happened to me before. It was painful, I didn't want to allow that much force to flow. This time there was no obstruction. He was showing me that this kundalini manifestation was the form of his -instruction. There's some of that work going on in him.

It seems, then, that he is a yogi type, and he seems to be very good. He is very different from somebody like Muktananda, for instance. He is very quiet, living freely up there in the North. Although a lot of people go to him, he is not about to go on a worldwide spiritual salvation tour. If he ever did such a thing, I'm sure it would be in quite a different way. Most people go with flags waving and all their obnoxious numbers. He seems to be a very good, pure man, very straight. He is something like a Nityananda, maybe a Yogi-Siddha.

The most important Siddhas in relation to our work have not been embodied, that is, not limited by physical form and circumstance. Maharshi was not an embodied person in the ordinary sense. He literally was what he is now while he was alive. There is no difference here between now and when he was alive in terms of the manifestation. The difference is, of course, that he is not here in the flesh to implement the teaching to those who come here. But his manifestation is just as it was, just as pure.

I have always had specific reasons for coming to these places. I visit a place because it has a very direct and present relationship to my work. Others make spiritual pilgrimages instead of doing sadhana where they are. You see people here in India doing that. They are not doing anything. They just wander around and waste their time, blow their minds and fake it. They are not really doing sadhana. Superficial things happen, external things happen, experiences may happen to some. But the Truth must be lived. So it's important for our work to be generated in America, for it to be done there, where we live. People must be living sadhana there. That's what's important.

JERRY: Here people are not doing sadhana, they are doing a very vague attempt at it. The sadhana in our work is very specific and definite. It's really an opportunity.

BUBBA: People here are doing traditional kinds of sadhana. Some of them, the native people who live here, the most serious of them, are doing some kind of traditional sadhana, but the traditional sadhana is not really true sadhana. They are traditional people in a traditional country, and doing traditional sadhana is part of the game that goes on here.

Westerners that come through here aren't like the usual run of modern day Indians. They are just wandering, it is sort of like a ride to them. It reminds me of the way Coney Island used to be. It was a really great place. There was this area called The Steeple Chase. It looked like an Indian temple, all these carvings and sculptures all over the place, and different rides all throughout it. Very strange rides, not these little things that go around and around, but very dramatic rides, like a parachute jump from a huge tower and a steeple chase with horses that I rode all the way around the building. You came out underneath the building and walked through these mazes of moving rooms. Finally, you came out, and a clown standing there with an air hose would blow the women's skirts up in the air and everything. There was a whole stage there. Hundreds of people would sit up there and watch these women getting their skirts blown up. Then there was this rotating bowl. You'd stand in the center and you'd get thrown off into the bowl. There was another thing called the whirling pool table with moving circles and a huge slide. They were very unusual rides. They weren't like the common amusement parks that go around to carnivals and country clubs.

India is very much like that. It has that visual earth-life feeling that Coney Island had. Every Ashram you visit is a different ride, a different effect, a different game. Those yogis, saints, and sages who become involved in the glamour and illusion of their own function cannot understand the pure teaching, the teaching of the Siddhas or the true Divine manifestation. So you find Muktananda, in that conversation that I had with him before we left, having no understanding whatsoever of Maharshi. He has no experience whatsoever of the Heart and the teaching of the Truth that transcends experiences. He knows nothing about it. His understanding does not encompass it. So for him Maharshi is just a second-rate man. He can't comprehend the teaching of the Siddhas.

And Muktananda did not comprehend Nityananda. What he understood of Nityananda reflects what Nityananda generated in him, which was a piece of Nityananda. He takes that to be the whole. He takes all these yogic phenomena in which he has been involved as the ultimate and perfect Truth. Nityananda never assumed that. If you understand what little Nityananda did say, you know that his teaching was much broader. It included the teaching about the Self and God and the ultimate Reality. He was a more silent person. He wasn't involved in all these ding-dong artifices that Muktananda loves. He was an avadhut in a real sense, whereas Muktananda is stuck in the limitations of the yogi.

You also find saints who are limited to the glamour of sainthood. Not only do they not understand the ultimate Truth of the Siddhas, of the Divine manifestation, but they also tend not to generate the internal process. They merely turn people on to mediocre bhakti. They don't intensify the inner process in people, and they don't understand the position of the sage or the yogi. Many of the sage types who talk about the Self say all the rest is an illusion, the yogic phenomena and the bhakti toward a personal or transcendent God and all that are unnecessary. They talk only about this Self principle, and they have some sort of reflective awareness of it through meditative practices and self-examination. But they don't understand the position of the Siddhas or the Divine manifestation, and they do not understand even the work of the saints and yogis.

The true Yogi-Siddha, the true Saint-Siddha, the true Sage-Siddha, each of these do understand the functions of the other two, and the total process also tends to be generated in some fashion through them. Not necessarily in any willful or any intentional way, but in their presence these things arise. In the presence of Maharshi, for instance, although he did not in any way recommend the yogic paths, apparently the kundalini manifestation was at times awakened spontaneously in cases where it was appropriate, without his intentionally teaching the person about yoga. He also said that bhakti had the same goal as jnana, the same ultimate realization, and so he allowed himself to be the devotional object of his devotees. He became a Guru, in other words.

The ultimate force, the ultimate Truth of the Maha-Siddha works through all Yogis, Saints, and Sages functioning as Siddhas, but it's not clarified through them. The perfect teaching of the Maha-Siddha, of the Divine itself, includes all three functions and teachings and clarifies them. You don't find any of the individuals I have mentioned, like Nityananda, Shirdi Sai Baba, or Ramana Maharshi, talking about this full manifestation of the Heart and the Bright and the Fullness, descending and ascending. It doesn't become clarified as a teaching in their cases, although it was manifested by the presence of each. Our work is to clarify the teaching of the Maha-Siddha and also to manifest it.

At the head of all the great cultures, there is the Maha-Siddha manifesting through a perfect agent whom I call a Great Siddha. Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ, Moses, Krishna, these Great Siddhas are each the seed of a great tradition, and the tradition is created by many centuries of many, many creative individuals. It doesn't necessarily reflect a personality whose teaching is written down in black and white. That can't be found in the case of such beings. They are the seed, the origin of the spiritual force. Generally such Great Siddhas are the root of a new dispensation, a new epoch of spiritual life. The true Maha-Siddha always already exists. The true Maha-Siddha is the Divine.

In our days the Divine as the Maha-Siddha is the one who is present, and it is the spiritual community that must embody the functions of the Maha-Siddha. In ancient times an individual would tend to be the exclusive representative. He would bring God in with him and take him out with him. Now the community must be established in which these functions are alive, in which human beings live in Truth. In such a community there will be siddhis, and there will be all forms of individual qualities. Some will have more of the yogi's qualities, some more of the saint's qualities, and some more of the sage's qualities, but not in the exclusive sense. Everyone will continue to work as a member of the community as a whole.

In recent times the community has become something that spiritual leaders have wanted to put down or make unnecessary in some way. There have been all these swamis and celibate saints in the recent centuries. Now we are coming to the time when the community is again the root of spiritual life, and these exclusive forms of professional spirituality are no longer appropriate. So you find the great teachers of this century since Ramakrishna no longer recommending that people take up the professional spiritual career, but that they live in the community. Of course, there will always be individuals who, while remaining in the community, are perhaps unmarried and do not live in quite the same way that a married businessman or woman would. But fundamentally, the community is the place of spirituality. The community will be purified now and perfected. The community has for centuries been a secular experience that excludes spiritual life. That's why spirituality has had to go out professionally, outside the cities. But now it must be allowed in the community. The community must be purified so that it can be the place of spiritual life, of humor, enjoyment, and fullness.

This is a time when there must begin to be an end to all this secular politics. The political life or the organization of human beings must be based in their spiritual life. Otherwise it is not possible, because the politics of human beings tends to be based purely on selfishness and desires and arbitrary motivations founded in suffering. A true form of mutual, relational life must begin in the community, and the beginnings of that are the initiation of spiritual life. So one of the important things that we must do is create a seed community. Just as the Great Siddhas of the past were individuals who were the seeds of great traditions, my work is to create a community that will be such a seed.

My work is to create this community, to clarify the teaching of the Maha-Siddha or the Divine, and to live the Siddhi of this teaching in the midst of this community, so that it can begin to live that Siddhi, the Maha-Siddhi. It's not the same as making the kundalini rise and making things magically appear or making people have visions. Those things may occur where they are appropriate. But the Maha-Siddhi is simply the direct manifestation of the Divine Form, the Very Form in which all beings live. Manifesting that Form tends to enliven it in others and to bring about its function in them. Not because others just happen to be there, but because they enter into relationship and live those functions according to the teaching.

Sages in general are very impractical. Their teaching is non-worldly. It's not radical in the true sense. It is revolutionary, and all revolutionary forms of the teaching are exclusive. There is something that they don't include. The teachings of the sages in general excludes the world. "The world is an illusion, it is unreal, only the Self is, real." They teach that "the world is the Self," but in the form of their sadhana and verbal instruction, they tend to view everything as an illusion. Even Maharshi, at least in the form of this teaching, was one of these exclusive teachers, very impractical, always in a trance, always in this intense condition without movement, without much communication, without much function. It was years and years before he really started functioning in any way with devotees.

In his Ashram there are two types of people. There are the people who take on this quality of non-worldliness, non-activity, and there are the others who follow the tradition that was started by Maharshi's brother. He created this whole Ashram scene. Maharsi wanted nothing to do with it. These are the very intense traditional people who want to create an Ashram, a traditional spiritual place, and carry on business. That is necessary, but as a consequence, they tend to be non-spiritual, because Maharshi didn't include this functional aspect of life in his instruction. There is a conflict built into his Ashram and his teaching between the spiritual, non-worldly types and the worldly but fundamentally non-spiritual, or only traditionally spiritual types. These are the people who run the Ashram, who are generally in charge of everything, and the others are the non-worldly, easier, happier, smoother people, the ones who are the inmates of the Ashram.

This is the limitation of the teaching of the sages, and that limitation does exist in a very real way in Maharshi's teaching. I have said that he is a Siddha. He is a Sage who was by tendency involved in this limitation, but who continually purified his function so he did not become attached to the glamour and limitation of it. So he functioned as Siddha. The force of the Divine manifested through him in its fullness. But the teaching and influences in the world that came through him are all of this limited variety, this exclusive variety, just as the saint tends to be exclusive in his particular way and the yogi in his particular way.

Only the teaching of the Maha-Siddha is full and complete, not exclusive, but radical. That's why it is not appropriate for people, particularly Westerners, to take on the dharma of somebody like Maharshi. People want to take on these Hindu ways, but they don't understand their roots and causes. They don't understand where these ways lead or what they're all about. They know nothing about it. The radical teaching of the Maha-Siddha is not known. It hasn't been sifted from all the massive data of spiritual life and interpreted. So the work of our Ashram is to communicate Truth in a very clear way. Then the various manifestations that arise spontaneously in the world, the saints, yogis, and sages and wise men, all the kinds of men of experience, can be understood. They can be appreciated, enjoyed and loved, but also understood. People do not understand, so they either reject all of those manifestations or they become attached to them arbitrarily, instead of living the full Truth that exists prior to all of these manifestations. That is the teaching of the Maha-Siddha, which in itself is simply the revelation of the Divine process. No single individual is the Maha-Siddha, but there have been individuals who manifested the Divine directly, clearly, openly. We call these men Great Siddhas because they did not provide an obstruction to the Divine. But the human individual who fulfilled that function during a lifetime is not the eternal Maha-Siddha up in the sky somewhere. He was the Maha-Siddha in terms of his function. It has nothing whatever to do with his destiny as an individual.

Because of the limitations of yogis, saints, and sages, regardless of the greatness of the individual who is the seed of any particular Ashram or tradition, there is always a point where his ability to open to the fuller communication and involve himself in it comes to an end. There is always a point of resistance, a point of reaction, a point of non-acceptance. We saw that with Muktananda, and we see it also with Sathya Sai Baba.

Here, if I were to sit down and have a conversation with the most learned of the devotees who knows Maharshi's teachings, there would be a lot of basic disagreement. Because each would have to approach our work from the point of view of his tradition, the tradition of the sages. Just as the tradition of the sages in very critical ways rejects the tradition of the saints and yogis, it also rejects the tradition of the Maha-Siddha. These traditions of yogis, saints, and sages are ultimately humorless, because they are exclusive. They can't comprehend that which they exclude with their subtle dogma. They are revolutionary ways, not radical, complete, full, non-exclusive.

You notice the people who have enjoyed our presence here most are not the official types who represent the organs of this Ashram, but the old devotees, those who are very interested in spiritual life.

JERRY: All the others look at you skeptically.

BUBBA: That's the way those people treated Ramana himself. That's the way the people in Muktananda's Ashram were. There, everybody was like that. There wasn't a friendly face in that whole joint. Here at least there is some looseness. But the radical teaching represents a threat to all traditions. It doesn't make any difference what a person's game is. Whether he is an Ashram figure or a businessman, a man's ego has become attached to certain qualities. They can be so-called "spiritual" things or worldly things. These attachments are just the theatre of his separateness. The radical teaching is a threat to even the spiritual life of an individual, not just his worldly life and desires, but all his desiring, the whole complex affair of his existence is threatened by the radical teaching. Of course people are skeptical. It is a threat, a danger. It is too wild, too free. They think if they somehow did give in to it, they would have to yield to all kinds of craziness in themselves that they have never really confronted. This is one of the good things about Alan Watts' essay on The Knee of Listening. He talked about how this is dangerous wisdom. It is true. That is why traditional and ordinary people react to such a teaching. They do not react because of what the teaching is, but because of what they are.

JERRY: I was speaking to the American consul on the airplane about the work. He is very secure, stable, and accomplished, very happy, and very competent. After about five minutes, he started picking his fingernails and biting his lip. He was really disagreeing and getting a little disturbed by what I was saying, it was really bothering him.

BUBBA: Yes, I saw him in the airport. He's the kind of guy you want to slap in the face. Sickening, clean cut, satisfied, pipe smoking, everything neat and together.

JERRY: While he was picking at his fingernails and biting his lip he was saying that people aren't disturbed.

BUBBA: Yes, ultimately the Truth can't win because it's not an opponent. It can only be made to seem like an opponent. Because the Truth is not an opponent, it doesn't overwhelm and win the world. That's why many great Masters like Maharshi have taken on a role that was not that of an opponent in any sense. He was neither positive nor negative, he was just silent, passive and unobstrusive. He made no demands and presented nothing. This was the manner of his teaching, and to a great extent it is the manner of the teaching of all spiritual masters. But even such a one must in various ways take on ordinary functions, and instruct through them.

One extreme is the silent, motionless avadhut like Maharshi, and the other is the political activist. Some men in this country who are considered spiritual leaders are violently political. They take on all kinds of roles, very directly and obsessively, whereas somebody like Maharshi took on none. All this is just a sign of what life has become. It has become a secular existence that starts from the ground and works its way up. But spiritual existence starts from somewhere higher up and moves down and up simultaneously.

Many centuries ago in all countries there was this splitting of the functional order of life and its demands from the so-called "spiritual" life. Each became a profession, and Church and State separated. Centuries ago, the professionally religious and spiritual people left the cities, towns, and ordinary life. The traditions of spiritual life as celibate, non-worldly, detached mountain-cave living began, along with this traditional antagonism between functional life and so-called "spiritual" life. People have been trying to carry on both ordinary life and spiritual existence in the midst of a situation of artificial conflict, a kind of warfare that is not appropriate or true.

In ancient times there was no such division between functional life and spiritual life. It was all one. Spiritual life and teaching took place under ordinary circumstances. The Gurus or Spiritual Masters were married and lived in the community. So I am very much interested in restoring the true condition of community in which functional life is a spiritual form. Then we won't have the kind of conflict situations that you see being acted out in Maharshi's Ashram.

In the world personal existence seems to be concerned with political maneuvering and productive functioning. People get weary of that, of the drive, the competition, of having things, and they turn to spiritual life. Some are driven to turn away from their spiritual life in order to acquire things and to have pleasures. There is always this idiot problem. Spiritual life and ordinary life are always becoming attempts at a solution to this problem. But there is no such problem, and life must be lived prior to that apparent problem before there is going to be any true spirituality and functional life. In both the individual and the community, there must be the insight into this fundamental antagonism that is the heart of all social life. When that insight arises, our various activities in the world are seen as only attempts to solve an artificial problem, and the whole order of life falls into place. Everything becomes appropriate, natural, full.

There has been no such state of things for many thousands of years. Things occurred in vastly ancient times that disturbed humanity, not in a science fiction sense, but just as a result of adapting to natural and psychic conditions. This split took place. People began to handle the demands of existence bit by bit in ways that began to emphasize this problem.

The following is an excerpt from a talk Bubba gave to his devotees in Los Angeles on Prasad Day, April 8, 1973, several months before he departed on his pilgrimage to India.