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VOL. 3. NO. 4. 7-8/80. Good Company True Religion is a Great and
Creative Struggle Renunciation and the Renunciate
Order of the Free Daist Communion
VISION MOUND Volume 3 , Number 4 JULY/AUGUST 1980 Good Company DA FREE JOHN: For many years now I have assumed the
formalities of submission and service in relationship to the
people who have responded to the Way that I Teach. I
abandoned years ago the relative informalities and concerns
associated with me when I was called "Bubba," or brother,
when I met face to face with relatively small numbers of
people to consider, and argue, and describe this Way of
life. Now the name by which people refer to me is prefaced
by the name "Da," which is a kind of title traditionally
used to refer to one who teaches, renounces himself, or
gives of himself in the service of others. The same term or
title, which literally means "to give" (and does not, in our
usage, mean "father," or "yes," or any of the other meanings
that may appear in European languagesis also used as one of
the Names of God in the ancient traditions. It refers to the
quality of radiance, self-giving, or self-renunciation and
transcendence, and when applied to a human Teacher, as, in
this case, it is applied to me, it is a kind of title, just
as swami, avadhoot, bishop, pastor, and rabbi are
titles. "Da" is, in a certain application, a Name of God. The
Spiritual Master, who speaks ecstatically about the
Realization of God, may be referred to or related to via a
word or name with the same general meaning, but simply
signifying the service of giving the Teaching to others.
Nothing negative or strange is intended, nor should the
tendency toward a "cult of personality" be understood by use
of the name Da in reference to me. The use of the name Da in
reference to a Spiritual Master or Teacher acknowledges that
in relating to the Spiritual Master, who has practiced
ecstatic Communion with God, one is relating to a servant of
the universal Divine, not to someone whom one might
foolishly believe to be an independent and self-contained
incarnation of the Creator. The relationship to the
Spiritual Master, as ones relationship to everyone and
everything, is a natural aspect of ones constant Communion
with God. Therefore, use of the name Da as a title of
reference to the Spiritual Teacher is actually a device that
prevents cultic attachment to the human personality who
Teaches within the church. You must turn to God, not to me as a pseudo-God, an idol,
an obsessive object of attention. The true relationship of
anyone to me is described in our literature and in the
esoteric traditions in general-and that relationship has
nothing to do with mere cultic enthusiasm. If there is ever
any tendency in our church to create a cult around me in
which God is basically forgotten and in which the way I look
or what can be believed about me is the only consolation,
then that terrible and deluding tendency must be overcome.
You must become focused in the Divine, Who is All-Pervading.
Then you may also understand something about the nature of
the Spiritual Master and accept the help of the Spiritual
Master in the form of his transmitted instruction, the
community of those who study his Teaching, and the holy
places that he establishes for devotees. The ecstatic speech of the Spiritual Master is not about
himself. It is about the Condition of everyone - that is
what makes it ecstatic . It is about unity with the Divine;
therefore, it is about God, not about self. It is the
assertion of a person speaking in ecstasy about unity with
God, inherence in God, speaking from the point of view of
self-transcendence, loss of self, ecstasy. Such speech is
not "me"-it is God, it is God-Realization, ecstasy in God,
loss of self, so that only God is perceived. That is the only sense in which you must understand my
ecstatic speech to you. It is not about me. It is the
realization that comes with "me-transcendence,"
self-transcendence. If people look at me and say "You are
God" but really do not have any feeling for God otherwise,
then they are falsely aligned to me and they make an idol
out of me. They have not realized that I speak ecstatically,
that I realize God through self-transcendence and that that
Realization is the same Realization all may enjoy. There is
a usefulness that I may serve in your life of God-Communion,
but it is not at all the same as your making an idol out of
me and basing your happiness on some sort of consoling
objectification of me as Divine. It is only in self-transcending God-Communion that you
can have a right relationship to me. Any other kind of
relationship to me is false. This is not the first time I
have said it is false! The literature is filled with my
criticism of the wrong interpretation of the ecstatic speech
and presence of the Spiritual Master. It is filled with
criticism of the wrong interpretation of the relationship to
the Spiritual Master. I maintain a formal relationship to
the membership of the church, so that they will not abuse me
by trying to make me an idol, trying to contain God in this
skin. I have not realized God by containing God in this
skin! It is by transcending this skin and this mind that God
has been realized to be absolute and all-pervading, my own
Condition. It is not me with a small "m" that is God. This
body-mind is not God. God is the Condition of the world.
This is my Realization, which I can proclaim to you. In the midst of that Realization, this body-mind achieves
an uncommon function, as is the case for anyone who matures
in the higher aspects of spiritual life. An incomparable
Radiance communicates through that person and is felt by
others. That is the Radiance of God-no doubt!-and it does
not have its position, its origin and its limiting identity,
inside that person you see before you. If I alone am God,
then whenever I leave the room, you are separated from God.
How absurd! The confession "I am God" is ecstatic speech
about the transcendence of "I," the dissolution of
identification with the limitations of the separate
body-mind. It is a confession about the Condition of
everyone and everything. It is foolishness, it is madness,
it is Divine speech, and it should be understood as such and
not used to suppress whoever speaks in those terms. Throughout the history of religious traditions, ecstatics
have suddenly started to speak in the mood of God-Communion,
having transcended themselves. Such God-Realized men and
women say foolish things such as "I am God," and immediately
they are punished for it. Jesus was persecuted for it, as
were many saints and Adepts in all traditions. We have
burned people at the stake for realizing God and for
speaking ecstatically, because we took their ecstatic speech
to be blasphemy! The many terrible deeds that have been done
in the past in the name of righteous piety have done a
sorrowful injustice to many great souls and, likewise, they
have prevented the masses of humanity from acquiring the
great gift of spiritual Wisdom. The Truth is as I have just described it to you and as I
have described it many times before: The Spiritual Master is
not God in the sense that the individual body-mind before
you is exclusively God. The Spiritual Master has Realized
spiritual oneness with the Divine through
self-transcendence. The Divine is operative through the
Spiritual Master just as the Divine is operative through all
beings in all kinds of ways. Perhaps God is shining in some
unique way through the Spiritual Master, thus making him or
her useful to instruct you and to be good company and to
radiate initiatory force. But the Truth of Life for all
beings is God-the eternal, all-pervading, absolute, infinite
Being and Radiant Life.
VISION MOUND Volume 3, Number 4 JULY/AUGUST 1980 True Religion Is a Great and Creative Struggle DA FREE JOHN: People really are sinners, as they have
been described in all the religious traditions. They are
programmed by nature to contract and turn upon themselves,
programmed by the threat of death, programmed by difficulty,
action and reaction, and mortality. All of these influences
cause people to dissociate emotionally from the Living
Divine and therefore to dissociate from one another, thus
infecting the body-mind with all kinds of strategies,
patterns, difficulties, phasing. This is the way it
is-everybody is a sinner. Everybody is Narcissistic.
Everybody is tending to turn away from God and one
another. Therefore, people cannot simply by hearing me give a talk
or by sitting with me from time to time expect their unlove
to vanish. There is no such salvation in this gathering or
in any other religious gathering. Unlove does not merely
vanish. To transcend this native tendency toward
self-possession is a creative struggle. I can give people
energy and insight into that struggle, but the struggle is
theirs. It has never been given to me to replace anyones
responsibility for that struggle. Because you are sinful or tending to turn away, you have
sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed in your struggle to
transcend your loveless habits. You suffer in your intimate
relations and your friendships, you suffer in relationship
to other members of the church, you suffer in relationship
to your past associations and to the world in general. Every
human being and therefore every organization that has ever
existed suffers from sin. Sinners who accept the burden of accomplishing a great
thing tend to disturb that great thing. They tend to
mutilate it and fail to serve it altogether. Sometimes they
may even succeed at it, but it is a very difficult affair. I
have consistently tried to purify this religious
organization, reorient it, reestablish it, confront it
constantly with the sinfulness, the self-possession, the
mediocrity, the ineffective patterns of its members. And clearly there has been progress in a positive
direction over these eight years. We are not a church that
established itself eight years ago in allegiance to certain
principles of behavior, belief, structure, and dogma. The
members of this church were ordinary people, street people
or dropouts from some aspect of conventional society. But
they were interested in my consideration and in engaging
that consideration in my company. As a result of our continuing consideration, most of
these same people have grown out of their self-indulgent and
exploitive habits of life into a right emotional and
psycho-physical understanding of all aspects of personal
existence. That understanding, that process, that
commitment, characterizes the Teaching and the practice and
obligation of church members, and it has characterized that
practice for several years. Our honest commitment to that
practice should be obvious to anyone who will observe just
exactly what has gone on in this church during its entire
history. We have never had any intention not to do a good
thing with this church, and we must remain strongly
committed to doing that good thing if we are to make what is
essential in this church survive. Criticism may be appropriate, and clearly self-criticism
is best. Religious organizations must respond to criticism
from without and they must deal compassionately with
themselves and with others. But on the other hand, the
wholesale damnation of non-establishment religion must be
confronted, criticized, and undermined in honorable and
intelligent ways. Therefore, others must be given an opportunity to see
what we are doing, to observe what we are all about, to see,
as we do, what is positive. It is a natural fact that all
good things remain essentially unobserved by the negative
mind. Thus, the hostile critics of religion conclude from
their analyses that all religious gatherings are paranoid
and dangerous. The anti-cultists are committed to paranoia,
destruction, and loveless visions. We must not submit to
that paranoid vision and its destructive energy. In the traditional sense, a "cult" is simply a group of
people gathered together with a shared intention. There are
cults of baseball players, of rock stars, flowers, and
Persian cats, cults around TV news reporters-Walter Cronkite
has a cult. Where more than one person have their attention
on the same thing, there exists the structure of a cult.
This is an ordinary structure of attention; it is not
inherently negative. Life involves concentrating on matters
of interest and often with many people at the same time.
Cults become negative only when they develop on the basis of
immaturity and childishness, of self-possession rather than
self-transcendence, of fear rather than love, of illusion
rather than understanding and wisdom. Thus, we must overcome
the tendency toward negative cultism always. The Teaching of
this church is full of such criticism of the cultic
tendency, just as our process as a church has always been
characterized by self-criticism. It must be possible that someone who has fulfilled the
esoteric approach to God can be available to other people.
It must be possible! Such a possibility must not be the
object of suppression and taboos. Religion is supposed to
have been given freedom in this country. The sphere of
religion and the relationships between people at the level
of religion are supposed to be set apart and kept sacred.
Yet in the wake of the paranoid reaction to Jonestown and
the practices of certain cults in the public and the rise to
prominence of the Ayatollah and all the rest of the threat
to life at the present time, people think that religion must
be destroyed unless it appears in the form of downtown
Christianity-which is itself nothing more than the dominant
cult in our society. Religious freedom is at the foundation of this country,
because the authors of our Constitution recognized rightly
that religion should be permitted to function and not be
subject to slanderous, suppressive, destructive, angry, and
vengeful tactics. No religion deserves such treatment, no
matter how unconventional the religious practice or
community or institution. We should not oblige religion to
be conventional. Religion must be allowed to be whatever it
is, whatever its members agree that it is. Religion must be
a sphere of freedom. The truth is that people just have difficulty being
associative. They tend toward dissociation, and therefore
they have troubles in life. When they become involved in
organizations or create organizations, they breed problems.
To create a church requires compassion and the ability to
transcend yourself, to criticize yourself, and to
reestablish your humor and your right intention. It is a
creative and difficult process. It is difficult to be a
human being! In this church we do not promise a gleeful salvation.
Rather, we completely and totally and constantly acknowledge
that this process requires maturity, that it is difficult,
that it requires you constantly to encounter limitations in
yourself. You are not invited just to come and believe in ol
Free John and smile your days through-that is not what real
life is about at all! And we never communicate that that is
the way it is. Communion with God is not a matter of
believing in any case, but it is a matter of transcending
yourself, of surrendering, of cutting through it, of
growing, of relating to the Living God instead of to
concepts and arbitrary rules. Such a practice is difficult because we are alive and our
bodily mechanisms are immature and unevolved. For the same
reason, it is very difficult to create an organization
founded on true spiritual practice. Thus, we are working
very hard to discover what kind of organization, what kind
of organized participation with one another, can be made to
work. No matter what that form of organization is, it will
still sometimes cause difficulty for people and frustrate
them. We will try to avoid that as much as possible and
correct it when it happens. The church is trying to establish itself as an
organization of people who live this Teaching. The church
makes available a Way of life within a community of people
who are good company for that Way. The members of this
church are not related to me as a cultic idol. Fundamentally
they depend for their relations on one another, on the
Teaching, and on the Divine directly.
Volume 3, Number 4 JULY/AUGUST 1980 Renunciation and the Renunciate Order of the Free
Communion Church An Essay by Da Free John The first three stages of human growth are ordinary
stages of functional adaptation. They are stages of
psycho-physical ego development. The ecstatic process
developed in the fourth stage of life is the origin of true
self-transcendence, and it provides the basis for the fifth,
sixth, and seventh stages. Therefore, as maturity in the
fourth stage develops, the quality of ones existence becomes
more and more self-surrendered and ecstatic, and the process
of ones existence becomes less and less oriented to the
development or fulfillment of the self-based programs and
lower or exclusively vital level conceptions of life. Just
so, as one matures beyond the fourth stage of life, the
conditions of existence as defined and limited by the vital
or merely physical self and its possibilities and relations
become more and more obviously unnecessary, trivial, even
vulgar, burdensome, and fruitless. And the sense of
unqualified Existence, fullness of inherent Being, and
spiritual Reality or unconditional Radiance becomes more and
more profound and transformative. Therefore, as one matures in the fourth stage and beyond,
the quality of self-transcendence becomes effective and
ultimately prevails. This manifests as a growing sense of
inherent freedom and growth of the qualities of equanimity
and inherent desirelessness. At some point, these qualities
become manifest as a natural force of renunciation, or the
presumption of transcendent freedom in relation to the
functions of human existence and the experiential adventure
of human bodily and psychic relations. Thus, the quality of
love, expressing an inherently free character, gradually
replaces all of the programs of self-based desire and the
motivating hopes for physical and psychic fulfillment of the
limited human character. This process of truly spiritual growth is not negative.
It is not due to mortal fears or the psychic illusions of
inwardness. It is simply an expression of the Realization of
the freedom inherent in ultimate God-Communion. Somewhere between maturity in the fourth stage of life
and the ultimate developments of the seventh stage of life,
the liberated being becomes fully established in
acknowledgment of Divine freedom relative to all aspects of
human psycho-physical existence. When the acquired
obligations of human birth are fully transcended, the
continued existence of the individual becomes free of the
force or implications of all mortal, experiential, and
circumstantial limitations. Then the individual is present
only as spiritual love, free of the self-defining and
self-limiting power of all the positive and negative
consequences of past, present, and future human
activity. All of this is to say that motiveless renunciation, or
truly humorous and free transcendence of the human
circumstance, is inevitable in the course of the Way that I
Teach. Therefore, at some point in the process beyond
maturity in the fourth stage of life, the individual
necessarily acknowledges his Condition in God and becomes a
true or motiveless renunciate. In my own case, acceptance of
the broader conditions of outer renunciation could not occur
until I had fulfilled the obligations of communicating the
Teaching to devotees, through consideration of all ordinary
and extraordinary (or evolutionary human activity. But this
obligation has been fulfilled, and for several years I have
been gradually moving out of the roles and motives related
to the Teaching work that has occupied me since . As a
result, I have become established as a renunciate within the
community of our Church. Over time, some of the devotees who
have long practiced in my company have also become awakened
to the true quality of renunciation, and they will likewise
establish a renunciate order within the Church. In the face of the necessary burdens of human
circumstance, the only freedom is in Divine Wisdom,
spiritual ecstasy, practical self-transcendence,
desirelessness, equanimity, and natural or motiveless
renunciation. Only such a disposition is the ultimate, true,
and mature fulfillment of the Way that I Teach. I now
finally declare my renunciation of all worldly concerns and
all necessity to be involved in active attention to the
lives of devotees. The Church itself is, as always, the
responsibility and concern of devotees themselves-as is
their practice and all their relations with one another and
the world. I have retired to a natural seclusion from such
things, and I am not concerned with nor will I make
extraordinary efforts relative to the mundane affairs of my
existence. The Church should continue to be guided by the
Teaching itself. All devotees are the bearers of a new and
living tradition. My work is finished. I am at peace. Some others will, now and in the future, gather in the
same spirit of renunciation within the Church. They will, as
a group, act as transmitters of my written and verbal
instructions for the esoteric order and the general
gathering of devotees of the Living God. Those who do not
actually enter the renunciate order should, when
appropriate, simply go on to practice in the esoteric order
and become natural renunciates in due time. All members of
the renunciate order itself should be sustained in their
ordinary needs by the Church, which they have served and
will continue to serve. (The membership of the renunciate
order should be limited to a number representing the needs
of the Church and the ability of the Church to sustain them.
Others may enter the natural mode of renunciation at any
stage, but they should sustain themselves, or else be
sustained by some arrangement with their friends.The
renunciates should cooperate with one another to do selfless
and self-yielding service in natural ways within our Church,
and they should also perform the priestly and educational
tasks that are their rightful service at the level of the
renunciate order. All renunciates and all devotees should
serve one another in love, depending entirely on the Living
God, in Whom we inhere, Who sustains and lives us all, and
Who alone is the destiny of this world and all beings. So be it. I trust devotees and the very Divine for the
future course.
VISION MOUND
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