1st stage of life – First stage of life – Laughing Man Magazine – Seven stages of Life – 7 stages of life





“The liability in the first stage of life is attachment to
an experiential state of undifferentiated physical unity
with the elemental dimension of the world. It is the
tendency toward dependence on what is finite. It is the
tendency toward unconsciousness, or a dependent, vague, and
sleeplike awareness of experience.”
The Way of Translation of Man into God –
CHAPTER
7: The Enlightenment of the Whole Body


The First Stage of Life

The first stage of life concerns the origination and
earliest development of the human being as a psychosomatic
entity. In this talk, given on March 1, 1980, to a group of
some fifty students, Master Da Free John takes In original
and humorous look at the spiritual implications of
conception. The question he addresses, and which any
thoughtful person will have asked himself, is, “How does a
collocation of molecules composing the reproductive cells
amount to a living being?”

Master Da talks about the “holocaust” of ejaculation
which destroys millions of living beings-the semen. He draws
our attention to the fact that even reproduction involves
death. Only a single sperm will survive by fertilizing the
ovum, thereby giving birth to a human organism. The sperm
has thus a tremendous potential. Shifting to another level
of consideration, Master Da points out that we all have a
comparable spiritual potential. Yet, how few “survive” to
attain the seventh stage of life! This talk gives one a
sense of the tragicomic dimension of existence with its
infinite cycles of self-replication. But it also conveys a
feeling about the inherent Mystery of it all.

In our research we have found that all the genuine Adepts
have been remarkably humorous. Late in Ramana Maharshi’s
life, doctors recommended that he should have his legs
massaged daily. This turned into a competition between
devotees who were clamoring for spiritual merit in this way.
Ramana Maharshi would occasionally volunteer to massage his
own legs so that the merit would accrue to himself! Sai Baba
of Shirdi loved to play practical jokes on his disciples. He
would surreptitiously put certain herbs into their- tea’,
which would stimulate their digestion to the point of
diarrhea. Narayan Maharaj, a great twentiethcentury saint of
Western India, was known by his devotees to be the funniest
man alive, and when he told a joke, his laughter would drown
everyone else’s.

Similarly, people have always been struck by the
imaginative and persistent humor of Master Da Free John.
This kind of humor is ‘noted in the recognition that life,
with all its cyclic repetitiveness, is really non-binding
Play. But the unenlightened mind fails to see the humor in
it. The humor of the “usual man” is merely irony; the humor
of the God-Realizer is a blissful expression of his freedom
from all arising conditions. Occasionally when a devotee
comes to Master Da with a problem, he has been known to
respond with a laughter so infectious that the troubled
individual would soon be laughing along with Master Da and
everyone else. He would find that the laughter undermined
his self-dramatizing concern, giving him the strength to
creatively face his difficulty.

The following talk on the “spermatic being” illustrates
such free and humorous spiritual consideration. Master Da
offends all of our preconceived notions, at times poking fun
at what we know of the mechanics of reproduction. And in
doing so, he not so much provides us with a new dogma about
how it really works but rather leaves us with a sense of
regenerated freedom from all the seriousness of the
reproductive business.


The Seven Stages of Eternal Life – Laughing Man
Magazine
Table of Contents

 


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