Chapter 3

Sudden and Gradual Enlightenment

The Bhagavata Purana, book two, chapter two, verses sixteen through thirty-seven, freely rendered by Bubba Free John

Once the mind, or the wandering of attention in experience, comes under natural control, through intuitive insight, it should be surrendered into the prior state of awareness itself, which is rooted in the heart. In this manner, all forms of activity cease, and all objects of attention are excluded. Abide in tranquility by such means, until awareness Awakens beyond the confines of the inner being. Thus, Realize the true Self, the Radiant Condition of the soul, which naturally transcends all phenomena of the body-mind and all conditions in the eternally changing Realm of Nature.

The true Self, the Transcendental Heart, is the Divine Domain, the Kingdom of God, the Eternal Abode of the Divine Person. The Divine Person is the Radiant Consciousness that Shines through the atomic window, the illusory soul, defined and separated from the Divine Domain by egoic or independent association with experience, rather than ecstatic or self-transcending surrender into the All-Pervading and Transcendental Matrix of experience.

1. The Bhagavata Purana (also commonly referred to as the Srimad Bhagavatam) is rightly esteemed as the most complete and authoritative exposition of ancient knowledge in the literature of the Hindu tradition of spirituality. Its roots are in ancient oral traditions, but it may have been put into writing between the fifth and tenth centuries A.D. The author is purported to be Vyasa (Krishna Draipayana), a contemporary of Krishna. This "Purana" is the ultimate text of spiritual science, or the Way of the Devotional Sacrifice of Man into God. It extols the Virtues of the Divine Person, principally in the form of Krishna, and communicates the esoteric secrets of the Way in which we may Realize that One.

Such is the Supreme Realization, and It is Revealed directly to those who transcend all experiences of the body-mind, through Awakened Intuition, and who surrender only to the Divine Person, through Love-Communion with That Infinitely Radiant Consciousness.

This is the direct or sudden Method of Enlightenment. The true Self is Realized through direct and present dissolution of the egoic mind, the self-defining acts of attention, the subtle and causal coverings of the soul. One who surrenders the mind into the heart by the direct Method has transcended all desire for experience.

In that case, the Bodily Current of the All-Pervading Life, or the true Breath of Life in the body, which circulates in the body via the spinal line, becomes naturally and spontaneously polarized toward the higher brain, the brahmarandhra, the crown of the body. Therefore, the Current flows in the direction or disposition of prior transcendence of bodily and mental experience, rather than toward the generation and exploitation of bodily and mental experience, extended from crown to toe. In this manner, the mind, or the play of attention, is transcended at the heart, and the sensory body is constantly yielded into the internal Life-Current, which breaks through the upper limits of the brain and merges with the All-Pervading Radiance of the Divine Person. Therefore, at death, all the coverings of the soul are utterly dissolved in the Transcendental Heart, wherein the body-mind appears and disappears. One who thus renounces the body-mind no longer separately appears in any dimension of the Realm of Nature, the experiential Realm of Changes.

There is another Process, which ultimately leads to the same Enlightenment, after long cycles of births and deaths in the realms of subtle or ascended experience. This Method is chosen by those who yet desire the experiences of the subtle realms of mind, even though they have mastered all desires that lead into the grosser realms or experiences of the elemental body.

This Method involves the raising of attention into the brain core, the ajna chakra, below the crown of the body, via the Life-Current, or the Breath of Life, in the spinal line of the body. Attention is not directly yielded at the heart, but it remains active as the subtle mind, analogous to the consciousness of the higher and deep brain, and it is associated with the subtle counterparts of the physical senses. By such means, the atomic soul may attain the subtle body in the sky of mind, and wander, by its powers, throughout the Realm of Nature. The soul may thus ascend into the abodes of other ascended beings, who live long lives and enjoy various extraordinary powers.

But such mystics eventually and inevitably pass through many changes, becoming an ordinary sacrifice, along with all of the transitory elements of the Realm of Nature. They disintegrate and pass on, from stage to stage in the orderly illusion of phenomena, until at last they also enter into the sacrifice of the body, the senses, the mind, and the entire process of arising or differentiated attention that is the ego, the "covered" soul. Therefore, they too must finally yield the mind of self into the Radiant Heart of the Divine Person, the true Self, Who is Eternal Bliss, Transcending all selves and changes.

These are the two Paths by which souls may Realize the Eternal Bliss that is Truth, the Condition of the Divine Person. One Proceeds by gradual ascent of attention within the planes of experience, dissolving, by degrees, the coverings of the soul in the planes of illusion and change, until the Heart Out-Shines the inner being. The other Path Proceeds directly and immediately to the Heart, the Radiant Self, prior to all experience, all progress, all strategic austerity, all dramas of attention. One Path Proceeds by mystical ascent of the illusory inner self, or mind, via the Chain of Creation. The other Proceeds by direct intuitive submission of the entire body-mind into the Radiant Source and Transcendental Matrix of all phenomena.

There is no other or easier Path by which born souls may Realize the Bliss of the Living God. There is, indeed, only the Single Path, which may be followed either slowly or suddenly to the Heart. It is the Great Path of self-surrender in Love

Communion with the Radiant Self, the All-Pervading and Transcendental Divine Person. Those who "hear" this Teaching "see" the Divine Person as the true Self of the inner soul. They are cleansed, forgiven, and altogether purified of all impulses toward experience in the Realm of Nature, and they certainly Realize the Blissful Person, the Radiant Consciousness that is the Eternal Matrix, Truth, and Destiny of the World.

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There Is Only One Truth

A talk given by Bubba Free John to his devotees

 

Every level of understanding can be argued coherently.

Every stage of life is true within its own limits. But the Perfection of understanding, practice, and sacrifice is Realized only in the seventh stage of life. Therefore, all knowledge, all order, and all attainments must yield to the Wisdom of Perfection, the Wisdom of all Adepts in the seventh stage."

BUBBA: There is Absolute Bliss, the Absolute Person or Self, Who is Infinitely Radiant, whose Radiance pervades all conditions that arise as possible experience. That Radiance is itself unchanging; but all of the phenomena of experience, all of the phenomena of the Realm of Nature, are the changes, the superficial and unnecessary modifications, of this All-Pervading Radiance, which is supremely Blissful. Therefore, if we can Awaken from our sense of identification with the body-mind and be submitted into that Current of Radiance, and if we can Realize our identity with that true Self, or Consciousness, then we may enjoy perfect and eternal Bliss.

There is only one Truth, but there are two ways to realize it. Truth may be realized directly and absolutely, or it maybe: realized gradually. The disposition of God-Realization involves a single intuition or turnabout in our consciousness, in which we are moved to become a sacrifice through surrender, or Love-Communion with the Divine. But there are two paths whereby we become perfectly absorbed in the Divine. One is sudden or direct, and the other is circuitous.

The gradual path of enlightenment is a way of moving through the levels of phenomena, through the chain of Creation, ultimately to Realize the Divine Condition, but, in general, not in this lifetime. It is a matter of progressing by stages, first transcending this gross birth of the "covered" soul, and then moving on to transcend the subtle births of the soul. This roundabout path, this "Great Way of Return," involves first of all hearing the argument about our ultimate Destiny, and then taking up a life of renunciation. Through strategic renunciation, attention is turned away from the gross realm of possibility into the Life-Current of the body-mind, and then attention is moved, via that Current, along the spinal line toward the internal brain centers and into the subtle conditions of the mind. This is the path of mystics or yogis. There are many versions of this approach to Enlightenment, but they are all essentially a matter of placing the attention in the internal Life Current of the body-mind, moving it upwards, bypassing the lower or gross bodily phenomena, and fixing attention in the various regions of the brain core. (That is, attention is maintained at the position of the brain core, which is also named the "third eye" and the "ajna chakra. " It is the position of the higher or subtle mind. And from this position the various "lokas" or realms of subtle experience or subtle mind may be viewed or otherwise visited and known.)

The merging of attention and the Life-Current in the experiential phenomena of the brain core is not God-Realization. It is interpreted as such by mystics and yogis, but in fact it is simply a disposition in the tendency of the body-mind to move away from the gross level of phenomena and toward the mental or subtle psychic states. A yogi who has fixed his Life-Force and attention in the brain-mind has not realized God or the Self. He has transcended the grosser elements while alive, but after death he moves into other births in the subtle dimensions of the Realm of Nature. His attention lies in the spectrum of subtle possibility. Therefore, he moves into subtle forms in higher and subtler worlds of experience. Thus, it is not Self-Realization that occurs when the attention is placed in the Life-Current at the brain core. Rather it is experiential transcendence of the lower spectrum of the possibilities of experience. Independent and mysterious experience still lies in the future for such an individual. He has not been liberated into Self Realization or true God-Realization. He is still moving toward It.

The direct Way or sudden path of Enlightenment, the Way of God or the Way of Truth, has nothing whatever to do with the destinies of attention, the destinies of the ego or the separated consciousness. It is the Way of insight into the very gesture of attention itself. It is the Way of engaging in the natural process of God Communion, which is surrender of attention. The sudden Way is not the manipulation of attention in gross or subtle levels of experience, but the surrender of attention itself at its root, which is in the heart. Once this process has been Realized perfectly, then the Heart itself is realized to be the Infinite, the Absolute, the Perfect Divine. In that Realization there is absolutely no necessity whatsoever to any experience. The present life or body-mind continues its term, and it is lived in the natural way that is appropriate for one who lives in Communion with God. But it does not contain within it the seed of its own repetition. Therefore, at death there is no migration. The body-mind is returned to the elements, high and low, and the consciousness is withdrawn from the realms of attention, just as the Life-Force is withdrawn at death from the physical body. Thus, the conscious being is absorbed in the Absolute.

In the case of the mystic or the yogi, however, the attention remains vagrant at death. It is still moving toward phenomena. Therefore, when such an individual dies, he migrates. He leaves with the Life-Current through the mental region of the eyes, or with the feeling of attention rising through the top of the head, Therefore, the soul follows attention, or the mind, into the higher worlds of experience.

It is only the true devotee, the one who is oriented to God rather than to the futures of attention, who transcends all possibility. He transcends all the realms of phenomena, not by acts of will or acts of attention toward objects and possibility, but through Awakening to the source of attention, the true Condition of consciousness. Thus, the true devotee Realizes the Condition in which experience is not necessary. Attention, or mind, is Trans formed at the heart, and the bodily Life-Current, liberated from all bondage to the mind, or the tendencies of attention toward experience in the body-mind, is released into the All-Pervading Radiance via the upper terminal of the brain (above the brain core), and in all directions to Infinity.

As long as you are attached to the mind and body, you must keep these states active. You must continue to have experiences in order to give yourself the sense of existence. If they tend to slow down, or if they tend not to have enough newness to them so that you become bored,, then you feel uncomfortable and threatened. And when the body is dying, you feel terrified, because you imagine that you need the body and its associations in order to exist and to be Blissful. Truly your Condition is inherently Blissful in God. No experiences of which we may speak are necessarily associated with It. It is an absolute Condition, in which there is no independent gesture of consciousness, but only simple absorption in the Infinite Blissfulness of God.

The devotee on the direct path to Enlightenment is Awakened by the Teaching of the Spiritual Master, and he enters into a natural order of life in which he transcends all of the urges toward experience, subtle and gross, mental and physical. He transcends the-body-mind altogether. He does not go up or down by tendency, but, rather, he becomes absorbed at the heart, and via the heart, in the Absolute Divine, Who is All-Pervading and Transcendental. And when the eyes of the heart open, and the devotee is identical to the true Self, then all the phenomena that arise are seen to be only modifications of that Radiant Self with which the devotee is identical. There is no necessity to the world then. It is simply a temporary condition, created by past associations, and when it has fulfilled its term, it ceases to be. Thus, at death the devotee does not go up or down or in or out. He is not changed in t at moment, but a simply abides in the Bliss of God Realization. He is Translated into the Domain of that Bliss absolutely, without associations with phenomena that tend to distract and literally dishearten him.

The Way of Divine Ignorance is the Communication of this sudden and most direct Way. In this Way, these mechanisms by which the yogis and mystics ascend into subtle planes of the mind are inspected, re-cognized, understood, and transcended, but not exploited. It is intended to be a brief process. The way of yoga or mysticism takes many lifetimes, but the process in the Way of Divine Ignorance is radical; therefore, it is not intended that you spend your entire life moving through the stages of inspection. The stages of practice in this Way are not stages of the perfection of any experiential condition. They are stages of responsibility for the conversion of consciousness, in which a natural order is established in the psycho-physical being. That order is without urgency, without self-exploitation, and the individual rests more and more profoundly in surrender into the All-Pervading Current (rather than the internal current of the body-mind) and the very Consciousness that Eternally Transcends the body-mind.

Whatever you have not transcended, you must fulfill. That is the Law. Merely to have come into the Company of the Spiritual Master during your lifetime does not mean that you can escape all possibilities. You must live this Way. You must fulfill the Way in literal transcendence of the possibilities of experience. You must enter into the blessedness of God-Realization while alive. Otherwise you will tend toward human or somewhat higher than human destinies after this life. If any tendencies remain toward anything other than Communion with the Absolute, then those tendencies will be fulfilled in experience in the future.

To be absorbed in Communion with the Absolute is not what is difficult. What is difficult is to move attention up and to force it into subtle realms, separating yourself from the natural bodily attention-that is difficult. Arranging a benign future in the midst of experience, controlling your attention to yield beautiful destinies-that is difficult. To be a saint or a yogi is difficult. It involves a great deal of self-manipulative effort and a creative capacity for delusion. The Way of God-Realization is the Way beyond illusions, the Way beyond phenomena of all kinds, in which there is no identification with the cycle of attention that moves out of the Condition of pure Consciousness. There is no identification with the body, with the mind, with phenomena of any kind. There is natural, very simple, and very direct Communion with the Absolute. It is Perfect. It is not difficult.

Thus, it is said that there is no good reason to do what is necessary to get to Heaven, any more than there is any good reason to exploit yourself on Earth. The only Way whereby we are liberated is to be a sacrifice in Love-Communion with the Absolute God, Who is All-Pervading, Who is the Infinite Energy, and Who is Transcendentally Present as the very Self or Condition of our Consciousness. If we will practice that sacrifice, then we are liberated from our illusions, from our self-possession, from our urges toward the fulfillment of experience, and we cease to migrate from life to death to life through changes, but rather we are entered into the Divine Domain, the Absolute Perfection of Bliss, which may not be described from the point of view of psychophysical existence, or identification with the body-mind.

That Condition far exceeds, by infinite multiplications of itself beyond Infinity, the blessedness and blissfulness that may be realized through any satisfaction in human form. And we may be a sacrifice into that Realization of God even while living in a human form. It is not necessary to have a higher form, because the human form is structured in perfect intimacy with the Matrix of the universe. The Living Divine is manifested at the heart, so we need not go up into a more subtle body in order to make this sacrifice.

In the process of this Way of Truth we become a voluntary and spontaneous sacrifice, in which there is no holding on to any phenomenon whatsoever, no holding on to the body and its possibilities, no holding on to the breath, no holding on to manifest existence or to birth, no resistance of death, no reaction to the world, no reaction to the cycle of phenomena and inevitable changes. There is no holding on to thinking, no holding on to mind, no holding on to hopes for subtle distractions, no holding on to any mystical efforts toward sublime circumstances. There is simple, natural absorption in the Divine Reality-not effort, not urge, not any gesture of attention, but simply absorption itself. In that absorption, or dissolution of attention, all phenomena become unnecessary, and their seed, which is the gesture of attention, is transformed in God-Realization. The conscious being is not destroyed; it Realizes its Condition in Truth, which is not the inward being of the body-mind, but the Absolute Divine. The independent soul realizes that Condition only through its own sacrifice, its release from its own gesture of attention and association with phenomena. Only in that utter transcendence of the urge toward experience does the atomic soul Realize that it exists at Infinity.

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The Obligation to Awaken

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The Law cannot be transcended. We are under an illusion in the world, but we are also under an obligation. To transcend the illusion is not also to transcend the obligation. The illusion is broken only through present or every moment fulfillment of that obligation.

The illusion is that of independent existence, separate from the Absolute or Divine Existence in which all conditions and beings are arising. The obligation is to Awaken to the Absolute or Divine Condition and to be a total and perfect sacrifice into It via every kind of experience or function that arises, until there is only the very Divine.