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Excerpts from talks given by Bubba Free John to his
devotees in 1973 and 1974 "You must begin to become a little sensitive to your
capacity for illusion, your capacity for fascination, for
obsession, for distraction, for unconsciousness. You must
begin to be responsible for that." Every person tends to
become profoundly involved in the qualities of his own
experience at this moment, whatever those qualities are. So if you happen to be having particularly intense
internal meditative experiences, some sense of energy, of
profundity, of silence, you tend to become involved with
that, concerned with that, identified with that, hopeful
about that. If something is happening to you in the
circumstances of your life that is particularly exciting, or
particularly saddening, or particularly extraordinary in one
form or another, positive or negative, you tend to become
involved with that, concerned with that, hopeful or losing
hope over that. So we are all always involved with whatever
it is that is happening, and I am continually having to
redirect people from the excursions they make into their own
self-meditation back to the whole affair of this intelligent
life of understanding. The spiritual process takes place in consciousness. The
fundamental process is in consciousness, not in all of the
functions with which consciousness tends to be associated.
So you have experiences of changes in the body, experiences
of movements in the vital and in the nervous system, visions
in the psychic dimensions, and insights in the mental
dimension, and these are all modifications of your
functions. But the fundamental event is in consciousness,
and consciousness is continuous. Consciousness is itself
unmodified, so the real spiritual process is an ongoing
present conscious affair, and we must be responsible for
it. All life is itself change, limitation, so the spiritual
process isn't begun merely by the initiation of experience.
The spiritual process is only begun when consciousness
begins to become the overriding function or factor of
continued existence and becomes a force in life.
Consciousness itself masters and creates the ultimate
transformation of life by making life responsive to the
Divine, but experience itself is just the modification of
life, the modification of functions. You could have a vision
every five seconds for eternity, but it would not produce
the ultimate event of conscious life. A "spiritual" experience is a sign of something taking
place, but in itself it does not represent something you can
hold on to. It will change, and in itself it will be undone.
All of these insights and experiences are just a meal, just
fertilizer at last. They themselves are always disappearing
and becoming obsolete, but the true force of spiritual life
is implied in the midst of them. They are themselves a kind
of demand, but not a path. Because they are dying, they may
serve the ultimate realization by which they are mastered by
consciousness. Experience never comes to an end. There is no
end phenomenon, because the consciousness in which phenomena
arise is itself the ultimate Reality. But that very
consciousness must become the presence in which you live, by
which you represent yourself, rather than the functional
drama to which you tend to make your very consciousness
subject. When I was in college, I made a decision to exploit the
possibilities of life. Then, at a particular point the
crisis of consciousness intervened and made that whole
program unnecessary. I experienced all kinds of things that
we ordinarily call life during that time. But not
everything. How could everything have been experienced? This
moment was not experienced. Being you was not experienced.
Just a certain range of experiences, ordinary and
extraordinary, common to what we call life, was endured. But
the crisis occurred. Even at the point when the crisis is
perfect in you, you will not have experienced everything.
You will not have experienced what is going to happen to you
in the next moment. The next moment's experience is not
necessary for your transformation if the crisis occurs in
this moment. Therefore, no experience is necessary or
identical to Truth. Just so, the devotee is free of the process of
experience. He is already free. He already is in Satsang. He
already understands. So while all kinds of experiencing may
be going on, he already lives the principle of Truth.
Experience does not create Truth. Experience only serves the
Truth in Satsang. Conditions serve the Truth. Conditions are
generated in Satsang by the Guru, and they produce the
phenomena of crisis that are useful in Satsang for the
conscious transformation of individuals. But without this
Satsang, the conditions are simply that. People have
experienced vast amounts of possible things. But this
experiencing has not made them free. The Guru uses the capacity for experience in his devotee
as an instrument for his transformation. The way he does
this is by creating conditions, external and internal. But
if the way of experience were the way of Truth, then the
Guru would create some sort of an institution where people
could experience everything very quickly. He would find all
the instruments for creating experience. But the life of
understanding is not in itself a way of having experiences,
resisting experiences, or controlling them. It is a matter
of understanding yourself in this moment under the
conditions that exist, seeing the precise activity that is
your own. You must continually return to this principle of our life
together, this Satsang, and make all your experiences the
instruments of this sadhana. No matter what is arising in
your life, within, without, in between, every instant of it
is another condition in which understanding is appropriate.
Under no conditions is obsessive involvement, positive or
negative, with conditions. themselves appropriate. All
conditions are sadhana for one who is understanding, and all
are forms of bondage to one who does not understand. You
must begin to become a little sensitive to your capacity for
illusion, your capacity for fascination, for obsession, for
distraction, for unconsciousness. You must begin to be
responsible for that.
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