THE LAUGHING MAN Volume 3, Number 1 The Mystery of the Spermatic Being a talk by Master Da Free John March 1, 1980 Section I THE PSYCHO-PHYSICAL PROCESS MASTER DA FREE JOHN: According to some schools of Hinduism, the being is born, or rather first appears, as a spermatic individual in the father. Most of you have probably seen photographs of live sperms. They look like tadpoles with little heads bright with energy. Anatomy books, however, always call the sperm the "sperm cell," as if it were not a being but only a cell. Yet you would not call a tadpole a "frog cell." The sperm is a living being. Although it may never become anything more than a sperm, it has an individual existence, and if it develops further, it must and will be transformed. The man, then, is the life-bearer. It is in the father that the living being first appears, that even millions of living beings actually appear. The woman does not truly give birth to the living being, since the living being does not originate in the mother but enters the mother at the moment of conception and becomes associated with the egg, which is simply a cellular mass of genetic material. The egg does not show the signs of moving and having any kind of individual existence. It is living material that is, in effect, a transformer. If the spermatic individual can enter into association with the egg—in other words, if conception can take place—then what happens in the womb of the mother is something like what happens in the cocoon of a caterpillar. During the nine months of fetal life, the living being is not active or mobile but is rather in a state of deep rest. It is passing through a profound transformation whereby it becomes capable of functional associations that will define it as something quite different from a sperm. In other words, the individual that emerges at the point of birth from a woman does not represent the same kind of functional consciousness that the sperm did. But although its functional consciousness is profoundly transformed, the essential living being is exactly the same one. The newborn baby is nothing other than the living sperm in a highly transformed state. Birth, then, begins the next stage of the individuals existence just as the butterflys emergence from the cocoon represents the caterpillars next stage of existence. What if people concerned about abortion today began to understand the life process as it truly is? What is our moral relationship to all these millions of beings so casually thrown away by people in "fun" sex and self-manipulation, or just dissolved into the body of the father without the opportunity for conception? Is an abortion performed a few weeks after conception more a death than what occurs when a man ejaculates and loses millions, I mean multi-millions, of sperms? (Laughter.) Every orgasm is a holocaust! Millions of living beings—the same kinds of beings as those that ultimately emerge as human beings through the wombs of women—are released in the male orgasm. They are used not for conception but just for fun. (Speaking to the men) We must become very self-conscious so as not to release these tadpoles into the environment so freely! DEVOTEE: It should be made illegal for a man to have an orgasm. MASTER DA FREE JOHN: Exactly. If people really understood the process of birth, male orgasm would become illegal, just as now some people propose that abortion be illegal. But then just to be a man would also seem to be a capital crime (uproarious laughter) since the man is the life-bearer. As a man, you are constantly producing these living beings. They are wide awake and swimming around in the body right now. Men are constantly giving birth to these living beings. WOMAN DEVOTEE: But ejaculation is not as difficult as childbirth! MASTER DA FREE JOHN: I think you would have to be there to find out! (Laughter.) (To the men) Little do they know what we suffer! (More laughter.) Constant birth pains. The sperm is a kind of fish-like creature, very lively, with a radiant energy center, basically a life-impulse. But each sperm has a sexual identity, male or female, and each has the capacity either to enjoy the destiny of becoming a human being, or to remain a guppy and become absorbed in the males body, or to be ejaculated and to perish. Most sperms do not have the opportunity to enter the cocoon phase and to emerge as the "butterfly" that is a human being. Each of us has had just such a fish-like existence. Each of us actually lived in the watery medium of the bodies of our fathers. We have each lived in an ocean, or a river, as a tadpole-like being, and there were millions of others whom we knew there who ecstatically flowed with us in this fluid medium, developing from a latent molecular or cellular state in the body. The male, insofar as he retains the sperm in his body, is said to absorb great life into himself. In contrast, the pleasurable exploitation of sexuality by a male whereby he throws the semen from his body is a literal loss of life, even a loss of companions. (Laughter.) DEVOTEE: Master, does the sperm or the egg incarnate? MASTER DA FREE JOHN: The sperm that makes it to the egg incarnates. The other sperms do not incarnate. They terminate. DEVOTEE: Do you mean that all the qualities of the being that incarnates at the moment of conception are already in the sperm to begin with? MASTER DA FREE JOHN: Yes. The spermatic being is the one who is transformed. Think of the sperm as something like a caterpillar. When it reaches the womb of the woman, it enters into a cocoon-like state. When the sperm contacts the egg, it encloses itself just as the caterpillar spins a cocoon around itself. The caterpillar remains in a latent state while it passes through a process of cellular transformation and finally emerges as a butterfly, just as the human being is transformed in the womb, finally to be born and to begin its life cycle. DEVOTEE: Does the state of the two people at the moment of conception literally determine which sperm wins? MASTER DA FREE JOHN: Conception is a very mysterious process that must be examined if we are to see how it works out altogether. What is the significance of the fact that generally only one sperm reaches the egg? Are all those sperms really many? In fact they are all clones of the father, and each is simply the existing Being, the infinite Radiance of God. Thus, they are not really many except in their manifestation, just as we are all many only in our manifestation. DEVOTEE: Then why are the born beings different from one another? MASTER DA FREE JOHN: The father, who is the life-bearer of the essential being, also represents a genetic quality of his own. He clones all of his own children, each of whom has its particular genetic characteristics. The mother, in whom the egg mass develops, also represents genetic characteristics that come through her line of inheritance. When these two combine—the egg mass and the living entity in the form of the sperm—the unique individual is developed. All the sperms are the same except at the most exterior, manifest, cellular level. They are the same at the level of essential existence or the energy of the being, although each of them has the body of a sperm and is an apparent individual. Each sperm has a potential to produce a male or a female in association with the egg, but most sperms will not produce a human individual. Most will not come in contact with the egg mass and thus be permitted to enter the cocoon stage and emerge as a human being. The spermatic being is minute compared to the egg. To a sperm the egg is big! As a sperm you are so small that you do not have any difficulty locating the egg when you start getting close to it You see it ahead, very obvious, down the channel, while you are just booming along with all the other guys. As soon as you see it, you become very active as you all try to beat one another to it. (Laughter.) The sperms are a little bit like societies of bees and other insects that develop one queen and a superfluity of males (or sperms) to fly after her. Just so, the human male develops a superfluity of sperms. Eggs, however, generally develop one at a time. In other words, while living beings are being sacrificed by the millions, inert eggs are as rare as pure gold! As a sperm you and millions of companions made a great sacrifice on that night your parents embraced, however gloriously they did so or not. (Laughter.) You and millions of your companions, all of you brightly shining there in that river of elixir, were drawn out into the ocean it seemed, or suddenly scattered like flying ants released from the mud hive to chase the queen. All fifty million or more of your companions died that night. And you—how is it possible?—you out of all those millions were permitted to be metamorphosed so that you could contemplate the Mystery as we are presently doing it. What happened to all those millions of others that night? How terrible that every last one of them died! How terrible that there are billions of us here now flying toward who knows what, and we are all going to die! This existence is a hopeless flight in the night toward death, the urge of Nature to repeat the cycle. A death that occurs in the moment of reproduction has a terrible aspect. It causes us to consider whether we are born to eat or to be eaten, to consider whether we are born to be eaten in this cycle of reproduction or whether we are born to be. To be or to be eaten—it looks like "to be eaten" is it! Even reproducing is eating and dying. On some level, at the level of this consideration, for example, our perception of the world is dreadful. Likewise, if we examine our experience in another way, we can see things about it that are beautiful and very hopeful. There is far too much that is beautiful, dont you think? Well, maybe not. There is not enough that is beautiful, nowhere near enough! (Laughter.) Imagine if we were informed of this fact of existence when we were young—that every one of us has the possibility to live forever in more and more glorified forms, until any one of us can become the very one God, in person, the only Person. But (chuckling) it is not known who will be the one who will survive to the very end, and only one in your generation will survive to the next stage. What if only one person on Earth, or one person in each generation, would survive in a glorified condition? All of us have the possibility to be that one, but only one of us is going to be it. What if that were actually the case? What a mad, mad world it would be. (Speaking to the three pregnant women in the room.) All of us men here are pregnant right now and just three of you women are. We men must relax and take care of ourselves! (Laughter.) Things would change a lot if we could appreciate these facts of our reproductive functions. The style of our lives in community could very well change. I have become a little weary from batting my head against the world out there. I think the women ought to take over. (Laughter and cheering from the men.) I would not mind staying home and cooking and sewing (much laughter) and jawing with the other guys, and letting these ladies confront that animal out there. I am ready for it! MALE DEVOTEE: We should stay home and take care of the sperm. MASTER DA FREE JOHN: They are alive in you right now. We must devise a method whereby we can enable a maximum number of our spermatic children to survive. In some sense many of them become part of the father, and perhaps that is a part of the process we should maintain—it is good to keep them intimate with you. (Laughter.) But if you are going to send your spermatic children out—earlier somebody was talking about a sperm bank. Instead of sending off millions of sperms, only one of which will have a shot at conception, perhaps you ought to collect them and keep them alive in a place they like. Maybe some sort of aquarium, some sort of fluid environment where they can survive and have some semblance of a lifetime. (Laughter.) Then, when it comes time for reproduction, deal with it much more conservatively. "Artificial insemination" is a plastic term for the process, but select a certain number of them sufficient to guarantee conception. Such a greatly superfluous number need not die, you see. More than one would be necessary certainly, but select, say, two thousand at a time. And then before you send them on their mission, have a party for them. (Laughter.) You know how the quality of the semen changes from day to day based on your physical state or your mood. If the sperms were removed from the male body first and placed in an optimum environment, they could be conditioned for the reproductive moment. Train them like an army. Speak to them as Krishna speaks to his warrior Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita: "Remember me and fight!" (Applause.) Then, instead of sending the entire fifth army out just to get one egg, send out a platoon. You know what happens during sex. For a moments pleasure—zap!—bereft of fifty million living beings to support you in your old age. A man is an army of souls, but if he throws them out, ultimately he finds himself alone. Every coin in his purse spent on women. Therefore, from this moment I institute a renunciate order for men. (Cheers.) All married men may feel free to join it. If they are married and have children, they should arrange for their dependents support in the community setting, but they will be otherwise free of all conjugal obligations. Basically, they should live with other men, maintain strict celibacy, do body-building exercises, and eat a lot of meat.1 (Laughter.) DEVOTEE: We would be in training like commandos. MASTER DA FREE JOHN: This is exactly the way traditional yogis think. For them life is a kind of warfare against everything that woman represents as an attractive force to relieve them of the army of their native power. However, we say, "Oh, the yogis are ascetics. We are householders. We are Westerners. We understand this sexual thing. We are more sophisticated. We can realize God and simply live a healthful, relatively conservative sexual life." And even zing it every now and then, you know what I mean? Throw it all away. "What the hell," right? But, maybe, just maybe, these yogis are right. Maybe we should conserve every last drop. (Laughter.) And maybe we should start conserving it now before we get too old and can no longer raise an army. Every time you have an orgasm you are the greatest killer since Attila the Hun! In one night with your wife you murder fifty million souls! (Laughter.) Section II THE TRANSCENDENTAL REALITY MASTER DA FREE JOHN: The magical significance of women is that they represent the possibility and the force of transformation. The mystery of the male is existence itself, unaccountable existence, spontaneous existence. The woman does not give existence to beings. She is the machine, as Nature itself is the machine, of the transformation of beings. In some schools of Hindu philosophy, the "jivas" or individual beings—souls that appear in the realm of the feminine Principle, "Prakriti," the realm of Nature—are regarded to be priorly and independently existing. Jivas do not have any beginning or end. They are not given birth by Nature, but they are constantly transformed by association with the conditions of Nature. To realize its true identity, prior to transformations, changes, and experiences, to realize its inherence in the masculine Principle, the "Purusha," the Radiant Being, the absolute Radiance prior to changes, is, for the jiva, liberation. But then the jiva must realize that the Matrix of changes, the Prakriti, the Shakti, the transforming Power of Nature, is also nothing other than that same Radiance, which is mysteriously transforming itself without ever losing its fundamental Identity. This same being, or jiva, that was the sperm and entered into the cauldron of transformation in the egg of the mother, emerges and goes through a life-cycle, just as the sperm emerges and goes through a cycle. The jiva goes through a cycle of transformation, but it does not go through a cycle of existing and then not existing. The child did not exist before conception and birth as a human being. It previously existed as the spermatic being. And what was its existence previous to that, before it differentiated itself as an identifiable and moving cellular mass? It inhered in the energy that is associated with the head of the sperm. It inhered in the Domain of Life. The destiny of this spermatic being, this central being, can be seen in the biophysics of Nature as the transition from sperm to embryo to fetus to human baby. Even so, the central being is not at any point separate from the Living God. It is not created in the womb. It appears spontaneously, always inherently identified with the fundamental Radiance, prior to the transformability represented by Nature. The particular trend of the consciousness of the being, or its cause and effect associations with the realm of manifestation, influences its destiny after death. But fundamentally the living being is always already identical to the Divine Condition. Thus, it is possible that, while alive, and from the point of death, it transcends the limiting force of the cauldron of Nature, the realm of mutability or change. It can control the future, its destiny, and it can utterly transcend the matrix of transformation—not only the egg and the womb and the mother, but the world itself. A HOMUNCULUS ("little man") When the spermists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries examined sperm cells under their microscopes, they believed that they saw a future human being in miniature. Are we not injected into the cosmic scheme like sperms thrown into the egg? We are mysteriously entered into a condition of ceaseless transformability, as if to be born and change and die were the summation of who we are, whereas actually we fundamentally always already exist in a Condition of perfect identification with that which is Eternal, Absolute, Transcendental. This has always been the essential Spiritual discovery. If we examine the portion of our history that we can see in the original appearance of the sperm and its destiny, then we can see that the physical description of our early history corresponds with the elaborate, philosophical estimate of our true Condition that is found in spiritual philosophy. On the one hand, spiritual philosophy points to the separability of the essential being from the transforming Matrix of Nature, the inherence of the being in the Domain of the Purusha, or the absolute Divine Being. On the other hand, we are told that the living being can, by transforming its understanding or its relationship to the pattern of changes, transform its destiny within the pattern of changes. Both of these philosophical points of view describe the same condition that seems to be represented by the sperm, prior to conception and after conception. What, then, is the actual identity of the sperm? You know from your medical textbooks that in the male body a certain number of cells eventually develop into sperms. But what is the nature of a sperm, apart from its cellular, material appearance? Why do photographs of sperm always show light emanating from their heads? They all appear to have light in their heads. The body of the male is like the body of the female, in that it too is a place where the original living entity is received and goes through a process of transmutation. In the fathers body the entity becomes the sperm itself. It already has associated features. It is already a living creature. It is born in the fathers body. But what is its identity prior to the cellular transformation in the male body that makes it a sperm? If we look at a photograph of a sperm we intuitively identify the sperm with an essential livingness, concentrated most profoundly in the head as light. We intuit the same livingness in every living being. There is this fleshy stuff that goes through all its changes, and there is its associated mind or creature consciousness, but fundamentally there is simply this living being. The mystery is not its capacity to be or to experience. Rather, the mystery of the spermatic being is the fact of its existence itself. How does that which is immutable, pure light enter into the realm of mutability or change and take on forms and experience a destiny? How does a tadpole become a human being? Well, it is a mysterious or, rather, a magical process. But the mystery is the mere existence of the livingness of the being, because as soon as it dies, all that beautiful transformed stuff is just a pile of shit. It is all over. The universe in itself and the changes of existence in themselves are just a torment, something with which we struggle constantly, a magical association that binds us to processes of change. What is mysterious is the Transcendental nature of existing. DEVOTEE: Master, to trace the origin of the being, we must follow it to the original cell that is governed by the sperm of the father. And then, obviously, that sperm was governed by the sperm of the fathers father, and so on. MASTER DA FREE JOHN: Yes. Essentially there is only one individual. All individuals are the same being except that they associate apparently with different states of change. Associated transformation differentiates us, but at the level of our fundamental existence we inherently feel a sense of identification with one another, not a sense of differentiation. The original entity that passes through the process of transformation and is born as a human being is still present as the individual when it is born. It associates with transformations, a body, circumstances, changes, a life-cycle, but the original being or entity constantly exists. It refers to itself as "me" and "I." It is simply the conscious being associated with all the phenomenal conditions of change, experience, and embodiment. The same one that is the sperm is sitting here right now as each one of us, aware as the self and conscious. It feels itself mysteriously and magically associated with changes, it feels the ability, the necessity, and the obligation to be associated with change, while at the same time it is constantly and tacitly aware of simply existing. The traditions of spirituality are filled with literature that calls the attention of the being to this immutable dimension, the merely conscious dimension of itself prior to all forms of change, and that calls for such a profound immersion in that original identity that there is literal transcendence of all of the phenomenal aspects of the being, all of the associated phenomena of the magic of changes. Thus, one becomes established simply in that fullness that is the being. This is called Self-Realization—in my language, the sixth stage of life. But even Self-Realization must be transcended in God-Realization, or the seventh stage of life, whereby the essential being and the realm of change are both recognized to inhere in, and arise as modifications of, the Radiant Transcendental Being. SUGGESTED READINGS RELATED TO THE FIRST STAGE OF LIFE At the end of each section we offer a list of books that will give the reader a further understanding of the characteristic point of view represented by that stage of life. These publications are selected from the 4000 titles which comprise The Seven Schools of God-Talk, a bibliography compiled by Master Da Free John, eventually to be published by The Dawn Horse Press. In future issues we will present additional books related to each stage in general and also to the specific topics featured in the magazine. Most of these books can be ordered from The Dawn Horse Book Depot, P.O. Box 3680, Clearlake, CA 95422. Gribbin, John, Genesis: The Origins of Man and the Universe. New York: Delacorte Press, 1981. Hatterer, Laurence J. The Pleasure Addicts: The Addictive Process-Food, Sex, Drugs, Alcohol, Work and More. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1980. Sabbath, Dan and Hall, Mandel. End Product: The First Taboo, New York: Urizen Books, 1977. Shelldrake, Rupert. A New Science of Life. London: Blond and Briggs, 1981. Simpson, George Gaylord. The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of Life and of Its Significance for Man. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. Ghandi, M. K. The Nature Guide. Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1966. Smith, David W., ed. The Biologic Ages of Man. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1978.   top of page The Seven Stages of Eternal Life - Laughing Man Magazine Table of Contents

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"The perfect among the sages is identical with Me. There is absolutely no difference between us"
Tripura Rahasya, Chap XX, 128-133