The Enlightenment of the Whole Body

A Rational and New Prophetic Revelation
of the Truth of Religion, Esoteric Spirituality, and the Divine Destiny of Man and Woman
by Bubba Free John (Adi Da Samraj)

1978

Table of Contents

THE WAY OF THE TRANSLATION OF MAN INTO GOD

Chapter 4
The Vision and the Way of Eternal Life - We Are the Food of God - God and Doubt

Nothing but Divine Communion is Freedom

God Is the Identity and Force That Lives Everyone and Receives Everyone -
The Vision of God Is in the Transcendence of Experience - God Is the One in Whom We Are Sacrificed -
God Is the Truth of Life, Not the Parental Source of Future Fulfillment -
The Radiant Life of God - Faith Is Bodily Surrender to Life - The Vision and the Way of Eternal Life - Love of Life - The Natural Disposition of Man - The Heart Is the Living Center of the Regeneration and Sacrifice of Mind and Body - Death and Eternal Life - Death Is the Way to Life - Come and Live This Way with Me -
The Prophetic Fire of God's Life
This World Is a School - What Are True and False Religion, Spirituality, and Mediation? - Sheep, Goats, Wolves, and the Manly Few Who Are a Sacrifice in God - The False Viewpoint of Religious and Spiritual Cultism - The World That Awakens the Man - This Teaching Is the Prophetic Fire of God's Life, Not the Signal of a New Age of Peace - The Urgency of the Teaching - My Work Is Necessary, but It Must Also Fail - The Revolution I Propose - Man Is to Be Mastered and Liberated, Not Indulged and Escaped - True Religion

The Bodily Parts and Illusions of Narcissus

The Way of the Whole Body Being - Moving behond the Techniques of Eastern and Western Man - The Bodily House of Narcussus - The Three Disturbances - Narcissus is the Thinking Mind - The Truth of the Whole Bodily Being - The Argument of the Whole Bodily Being - Awakening from the Word - The Bodily Origin of the Idea of God as the Root, Source and Cause of the World - The Ultimate Identity of the Brain Is the Current of the Whole Body - Mind vs Intellgence

PART III

Real God is not the God of abstract or unchanging permanence and the survival of fixed selves. Real God is the God of changes, the God of the moment to moment transformation and dissolution of selves in the Transcendental Condition of Reality.

It is not by righteous, aggressive, or self-destructive conceptions of our personal condition and the ultimate Condition of all beings and things that we are liberated into Happiness and Truth. Rather, it is by awakening to the freedom to release the whole body-mind of person in the moral sacrifice of love and the transcendental sacrifice of radical spiritual intuition that we Realize Truth and Happiness and God.

True Prophecy Is the Purification of Human Culture

I .

Love-Communion with the Divine Person is essentially a matter of direct surrender of the body-mind, via all kinds of right activity, into the All-Pervading Life-Current and Transcendental Consciousness, which we may intuit at the heart. It is a Process that transcends body and mind in self-transcending Ecstasy, under all conditions.

But that Process may also be described and considered in terms of the various aspects of specific psycho-physical change that necessarily occur over time. And, even though it is a Process that goes on continuously, in the form of every kind of activity, it must be aided, quickened, and epitomized by certain kinds of formal exercise, such as prayer and meditation.

Therefore, many religious and spiritual cults have developed around this ancient Way. And they have all achieved uniqueness through specialized descriptions of the various aspects of the developmental Process and its associated religious and spiritual exercises. If we add to these differences the historical and cultural setting of each tradition, and the association of each with particularly exemplary human individuals, we can see the essential sources of difference and ultimate conflict between historical cults. And if we can thus understand the limitations of even our own religious and spiritual presumptions, we may become able to be restored to the Essence of the Teaching and the Way of Truth.

II.

In the essays I have written for The Enlightenment of the Whole Body, I have frequently criticized popular and historical religious and spiritual cultism. This is because such cults are taken day may come when the common man is again submitted to the Living God, rather than to his own desires and the hopeless powers of this World.

The various essays in The Enlightenment of the Whole Body were written spontaneously and at random. Each represents a consideration of the total matter of Truth and its Way, but each engages that consideration via a critical examination of particular aspects of traditional or conventional understanding or practice. The intent of this collection of essays is to serve the practical Realization of self-transcending God-Communion. Therefore, what is written here is critical, in the positive, creative, or Prophetic sense of the term, but it is also and primarily Revelatory. Those who study this Teaching must be purified of their own failures to meet the Mark, but they are also offered the Enlightened alternative, which is a fully considered and perfectly conceived approach to the Living God and the Realization of the Single and Absolute Divine Destiny.

Chapter 4

The Vision and the Way of Eternal Life

The Essence of Transcendence - A free rendering of the Bhagavata Purana, book eleven, chapter 14, verses twelve through fourteen, by Bubba Free John

The pleasure of those who desire and possess experiences of all kinds is not even remotely comparable to the Bliss of one who surrenders to Me and transcends all experience in Me, by Realizing Me as the true Self, the Transcendental Condition of his own soul. Such a one is always already Happy and Full of Pleasure. He no longer depends on bodily satisfactions, nor is he disturbed by the inevitable changes in his experience. He has transcended the motion of attention in the body, the senses, the mind, and all the subtle reaches of his higher being. He no longer seeks for any state or place, but only Abides in Me. He does not seek to become equal in Power with the Creator. He does not desire paradisiacal glories in the Heaven Worlds. He does not crave dominion or power on Earth, or in the lower Worlds of Elemental Nature. He does not seek or hold on to the psychic and astral powers of mysticism and yoga. He does not even cling to the notion of bringing experience to an end, and an end to the cycles of birth and change and death. But one who Loves Me and always Communes with Me quite naturally transcends all possible phenomena, and he simply Abides in the Bliss of the Radiant Self, whatever comes and goes.

We Are the Food of God and is the highest structural expression of Life on Earth.

There is no other creature or process comparable to him on Earth. It is only through Man, and not through lower-adapted creatures or the elemental proceedings of the Realm of Nature, that the spiritual and Transcendental qualities of Divine Life can become manifest.

The human individual is not generally born with a native capacity to exercise his highest structural potential, but each individual is born into a circumstance in which, through the play of adaptation, he may eventually Realize and even Transcend the highest structural destiny of Man. Man can learn only his most rudimentary lessons from what is less than himself. Therefore, the human individual cannot depend on the workings of Nature or the testimony and demonstration of other creatures for his Life-Lesson in Love, or Transcendental God-Communion. Nor can any individual depend on the mass of immature human beings if he is to gain the Lesson of Love and fulfill Life as Man.

We are each inherently obliged to fulfill the Law in human form-to be Love. Love, or the spiritual and Transcendental Realization and Incarnation of God, comes into expression on Earth only through Man, or else it does not appear at all. It is through Man that the higher potential of Earth can be Realized and Shown. Therefore, do not aspire to what is merely active in the Realm of Nature. Do not aspire to the level of creatures and elemental processes. Do not aspire to the mediocrity and subhumanity of the usual man. Rather, be Inspired and Instructed by the Spiritual Master, the True Man. Be Inspired to Incarnate Love, Ecstasy, Divine Communion, Radiant Life, and all the Excellence of Man in God. Transcend yourself in God-Love, and fulfill the Man by Sacrifice, or constant Ecstasy.

In our subhuman childishness we look to feed on God, the Real, and all that exists. We are violently motivated toward food, pleasure, and survival. We are summarized in the demand to be sustained and satisfied. We seek the Edible Deity, in order to contain Him and control His Powers of Life. But our bodies and minds are obliged by the Law of Sacrifice. The inherent and Divine demand that pervades the structures of Man is the demand that we be a sacrifice to the Purpose and Person of God. We must feed the Deity with all our feeling acts. We are the necessary food of God. We must consent to be eaten, to be ecstatic, to be the offering of the body-mind or self in God-Communion.

Those who fulfill the Law in human form do not feed on God, or contain Him within themselves. Rather, they surrender themselves in God and are Translated into God through their ecstasy. They do not contain Him. They are Him, since they have ceased to be themselves alone.

The most ancient human act or symbol of God-Communion is the offering of food to the Living God and to the Spiritual Master, the True Man. It is the sign of primal human understanding-that we are to be a sacrifice to the Radiant Reality that is the Transcendental Condition of the World. Our own Force of Life must be granted to God and to the True Man. We must feed the Truth with our own feeling sacrifice, the offering of the bodymind. Then the True Man and the very Divine may, in turn, function as a Process of Conversion, Transformation, Transfiguration, and Translation in our own case. In this manner the True Man and the Living God Incarnate as those who participate in GodCommunion through sacrifice.

If we do not consent to be Love-to feed the Deity through all our acts-then we are surrendered to ourselves. And those who are recoiled upon themselves are wrung dry by all their years of satisfaction. The sated heart yearns for relief from the Mystery of birth and death. Therefore, become this Sacrifice, since the Radiant Power of the Living God is always ready to Incarnate as your own Life of Love.

Ecstatic. You have no clarity, no understanding, no capacity to transcend your own reactivity and isolation. Find yourself in that position, and then you start wondering if God is Real or if God Exists. But God is Reality. God is Existence. The mind may know doubt, but it cannot know what God, or Reality, or Existence is. The Divine is, therefore, beyond knowledge and doubt, which are only ordinary conventions of mind and experience. The Divine is Realized only through ecstasy, or self-transcendence, beyond knowledge and doubt. The Living God may be neither doubted nor known, but only Realized. God may only be loved.

Therefore, you must become oriented to this Way of Life, this Way of Divine Ignorance. Through Awakening to the intuition of the Divine, the unprovable and undoubtable Divine is simply, tacitly obvious. God is simply Reality. God is the Process of Existence altogether, and God ultimately Transcends the Process and the manifestations of all manifest experience.

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God and Duobt

We today talk about God as if one could thoroughly deny that God Exists. The puzzlement about whether or not God Exists is not a true question at all. There is no genuine doubt that God Exists. Obviously you did not create yourself, nor can you sustain yourself independently, nor can you spontaneously uncreate yourself. You can only be confused by illusions of doubt, and these illusions can create the sense of separation from the Living Divine. Such doubts are only illusions whereby we become self-possessed, self-destructive, loveless, and incapable of Ecstasy.

We are lived. We are part of a Great Process that is ultimately mysterious, a Process in which we do not know. God, or the Inherent and Transcendental Reality, clearly Exists. Each of us is inherently obliged to relate to the Divine through love and to fulfill the Law of sacrifice that is Revealed to us in every moment of existence. The Divine Reveals Itself, in our sacrifice, through intuitive illumination, and through a process of psycho-physical transformation and ultimate Translation of self into the Real. Only the Awakened devotee truly understands or Realizes the Nature of God, the Reality of God.

There is no justifiable reason to doubt the Divine Reality. Doubt is simply a reflection of ourselves, our reluctance to fulfill the Law of sacrifice and to become Lawfully oriented to Infinity. Doubts about whether or not God exists are descriptions of Man in his recoil from Infinity. Impenetrable doubt cannot be logically justified in the midst of things. Concepts or beliefs about "God" may be doubted, but that which is Divine and Eternal is always perfectly obvious-and, therefore, inherently beyond the conventional disposition we feel as doubt.

You are always "capable" of doubt, because doubt is a condition of yourself. It is a form of contraction. And when you involve yourself in contraction, you become mad-neither relational nor Realized in Truth and as the Very and Transcendental Radiant Reality of which all worlds and things and beings are only an illusory, temporary, and playful modification.

God is All-Pervading Radiance and Transcendental Consciousness. God is what has traditionally been called "Spirit," or the Great, Perfect, and Most Holy or Unqualified Power and Life. The Worship and Realization of God is, therefore, imageless, prior to knowledge or conception, prior to subject and object, prior to self and body and relations and worlds. God is the Condition or Truth of all conditions. God is Perfect Ignorance-that is, Perfect Transcendental Consciousness, within which everything arises and changes and disappears, spontaneously, without necessity or ultimate knowability. God is Radiance, or Love, the Force Field that Pervades and Supports and Moves and Receives and Lives all conditions.

To Worship and Realize God is to be a Sacrifice into Truth, Transcendental Consciousness, or Divine Ignorance, prior to all knowledge, all thought, all experience. To Worship and Realize God is to be a Sacrifice into Radiance, All-Pervading Life, or the Divine Power, prior to all forms, images, perceptions, consolations, and beliefs. To Worship and Realize God is to be a Sacrifice into the All-Pervading Transcendental Identity, and, therefore, it is to be pervaded and oneself transcended by Identification with the Divine.

NOTHING BUT DIVINE COMMUNION IS FREEDOM

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God Is the Identity and Force That Lives Everyone and Receives Everyone

The God who is Truth is Worshipped and Realized by devotees in the Way of Divine Ignorance. Real God is not a God who is to be identified with visions and the subtle subjective planes of an alternative Reality. Nor is God necessarily associated with only benign or desirable successes in our ordinary lives. All of that is transcended in this Way. God is to be Worshipped and glorify, permanently fulfill, and immortalize ourselves as we are. The discovery of the Divine through true hearing, intuition, self observation, functionally appropriate discipline, and responsible higher growth permits us to be at peace with the mortal or finite destiny of our present independent form and circumstance. We become capable of self-release or sacrifice in the case of the Intuition of the Real.

Therefore, we must awaken to the Reality that obliges us to be born and to change and to pass out of sight-or else life is a tormented absurdity and a mean, unrescued center of illusions. Those who awaken to the Divine Reality and become a continuous sacrifice into it find each moment to be either a passing lesson, or a test, or a temporary blessing in the Mystery of Amazement in which we appear and to the State of which we are always dissolving.

The arising of lives and of all changes is inevitable. Our responsibility is to be the fulfillment of the Law, which is sacrifice or love. Thus, we will persist as selves and changes as long as these persist, but we will in every moment be the release of these into the Reality or Intensity that is their Source and Bliss.

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The Vision of God Is in the Transcendence of Experience

The Living God is All-Pervading and Transcendental. The Divine Person is the Great Spirit or Perfect Consciousness that Lives the World and is Present to the intuitive or native feeling of all beings.

The Divine Person has no specific, fixed, and independent Form. God is not truly object or other to Man. The Divine Person may be experienced to be any manifest form or all manifest forms, but that One has no ultimate Form that does not otherwise appear as a possibility within the total Realm of Nature, high or low, subtle or gross, psychic or physical. And the total Realm of Nature is itself Pervaded and Eternally Transcended by that One. Therefore, in Truth, the Divine Person is simply the prior and Eternal Condition of every condition, every experience, and every being in the Realm of Nature.

All the forms we might experience, high or low, and which we might consider to be the Divine Form, the Ultimate Vision, are simply moments of experiential possibility. As such, any form that we might consider to be God could just as well be considered to be what it appears to be apart from any special or fixed identification with God.

Even so, the Divine Person is Real-even Reality Itself. And we may enter into direct Love-Communion with that One in every moment. And we may acknowledge the Glorious Presence of that One in the form of any or all forms in our experience. But that One remains All-Pervading, Transcendental, and utterly beyond the knowledge we acquire or contact through experience. To Realize God is to be Free of everything, since everything is only a moment passing into God.

Therefore, only this Vision of God is the Vision in Truth. It is the Vision Realized in Divine Ignorance, or the radical understanding of experience. One who is possessed by this Vision may experience many wonderful and terrible things, but the Living God remains the Eternal Refuge, the Blissful Paradox of Totality and Truth.

Realize this Vision, this Understanding, and so be free of all desires for the experiential attainment of God-Vision. All experiences come and go, while the deluded consciousness, the experiencer, survives all changes and is not Free. Awaken from the pattern of desire, high and low. Do not seek to attain the Form of God via any experience. See through the illusion of all such seeking and every such attainment. Stand Free.

Your own body-mind defines you. Therefore, you seek God as a similar but Great Form. But God is not truly attained. God is not better shown in colors than in stone. God is the Truth, the Condition, the Consciousness, the Radiant Bliss, the Love in which this moment is appearing.

Do not pursue God as a form of experience. Rather, understand the motive and the limiting power of all experience. Through this Understanding, you will Awaken to the Divine Vision in Truth, the Transcendental Intuition of God.

We may not finally Realize the Divine Person in the forms of experiential possibility. God is not the fulfillment of the bodymind, the independent self. God is not truly shown to the mind that concentrates, high or low. God is Realized only through our sacrifice, our self-transcending Intuition and Love, our bodily surrender of mind.

When we Awaken to this Understanding, then we Realize that One under all conditions, and that One Radiates as the Fullness wherein every experience is superficial, unnecessary, and even happy. Then every moment is the Vision in Truth. The Self of God is not within us. Rather, we inhere in that Radiant Self whenever we are surrendered and dissolved in Ecstasy, or Love, Translated beyond all the limits of this body-mind.

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God Is the One in Whom We Are Sacrificed

The Divine Reality, or God, is not ultimately the Savior of our lives. The Divine is That to which our lives must be a sacrifice. Indeed, it is the intuition of the Divine that permits us to live as a sacrifice rather than a Narcissistic, reactive, and self-possessed struggle for ultimate survival.

The Truth is not that we survive forever as we now are or conceive ourselves to be. Nor is God, or the Divine Reality, the Instrument of such permanent survival, immortality, or salvation. We are necessarily changing and mortal in our present structural form. But we tend to react to this sense of our destiny by seeking to protect,

Teaching, the argument of Truth, and "see" the Teacher, who awakens the whole bodily being to the disposition of the heart. In that "hearing" and "seeing" of Revealed Life, we must be moved to love and to faith in relation to the Divine. We must suddenly become ecstatic and relax the body-mind, wholly and in every part, into the All-Pervading Current and Process and Wisdom and Destiny in which we are appearing. Only from that moment can we live in Happiness, Fullness, Humor, Blessedness, and Great Almighty Wonder of Beauty and Grace.

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God Is the Truth of Life, Not the Parental Source of Future Fulfillment

The Truth that is God and Life is sufficient in and of Itself.

We are not truly separate from That. We are happy only in ecstatic or self-released Communion with That. To release the entire body-mind into Communion with the Radiant and Unknowable Divine Reality is happiness. It is not that the act of such release produces effects in us that are happiness. Rather, the sacrifice, or Communion itself, is happiness.

God is not, in Truth, That which produces experiences that fulfill us and make us happy. God is the Reality or Condition that is our freedom and happiness. To Commune with the Divine is to be released from the absurdity and torment of independent psycho-physical existence. The Truth or Condition of the bodymind is the prior, unqualified Reality.

Therefore, we must Worship the Divine whole bodily, and so abide in our Condition or Truth or God. We do not Worship God in Truth if we merely hope and demand to be given immortality, bodily or psychic fascination, or any other objective or subjective fulfillment of our psycho-physical birth. We Worship God in Truth only if we surrender to the Divine Condition Itself, and abide in That, free of the body-mind, Awake to the Real Condition of the stream of events. Just so, the Unqualified Truth is not other than the Life or Radiance of which self and experience and world are only temporary and unnecessary modifications.

To Worship the Living God in Truth is to Realize the Free Condition of "I,'' the body-mind. It is to be free, in the Present, of the dilemma of independent, self-possessed existence. It is not to cling to self, the body-mind, and to seek its fulfillment or survival. It is to be free of the entire absurdity of independent and limited existence, and all that it may seek or acquire.

Therefore, to Worship or Commune or be a Sacrifice in God is not a matter of self, or any hopes and beliefs about the future, or any despair and knowledge about the past. It is a matter of freedom and happiness itself, or Realization of the Divine for Its own sake. Nothing but Divine Communion is necessary for happiness. Nothing but Divine Communion is freedom. Those who surrender to Life beyond all knowledge may continue and enjoy or suffer every kind of apparent experience as the Play in which Life incarnates. But, in any moment, their happiness is only in the Truth of that Life, and not in experiences themselves.

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The Radiant Life of God

Life is God, and God is Life. The Process of Life is our --A Situation. We may, in reactive and mortal fear, contract from the All-Pervading Field and Transcendental Radiance of Life, and so we may live a loveless and self-possessed drama of doubt that reflects no Wisdom, Freedom, or transcendence of Death. But whenever we are most Awake, only Life Radiates as all phenomena.

The radical intuition of the Radiant Truth of Ignorance is the Awakening to the Living God, the Eternally Present Divine. And those who so Awaken are moved to a personal, moral, higher psycho-physical, and altogether sacrificial or ecstatic Way of Eternal Life. Eternal Life is Dissolution or Translation into the Divine Condition, even while alive. It is not a matter of the survival of self, or of the raising of the independent self to a realm of more pleasurable circumstance. It is a matter of the ecstatic sacrifice of the self, the body-mind, and all psycho-physical limits of experience, into the Radiant Life and Unqualified Consciousness that is the God, Mind, Subject, Person, and Truth of the World.

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Faith Is Bodily Surrender to Life

The truly human individual is expressed via the heart, or the feeling-intelligence. That summation of Man transcends and masters the vital-physical, emotional-sexual, and mentalintentional structures "below" the heart. It provides a way for the psychic and supramental structures "above" the heart to awaken, grow, and also be transcended. The heart is the bodily epitome, and the disposition of Communion with the Divine Life-Radiance and unqualified Consciousness of the Real.

At some point in the cycle of our living, we must awaken from our reactive sleep below the heart and our romantic fascinations with what is above the heart. We must suddenly "hear" the Teaching, the argument of Truth, and "see" the Teacher, who awakens the whole bodily being to the disposition of the heart. In that "hearing" and "seeing" of Revealed Life, we must be moved to love and to faith in relation to the Divine. We must suddenly become ecstatic and relax the body-mind, wholly and in every part, into the All-Prevading Current and Process and Wisdom and Destiny in which we are appearing. Only from that moment can we live in Happiness, Fullness, Humor, Blessedness, and Great Almight Wonder of Beauty and Grace.

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The Vision and the Way of Eternal Life

We do not live. Life lives as us. We do not survive. Life survives us. The individual body and mind are only temporary expressions and stepped-down modifications or lesser intensities of Life, which is Absolute Instensity, or Infinite Radiance. The individual is not an inherently independent "entity," radically "other" than all other "entities." The individual is only Life alive, and all who are alive (or filled and lived by Life) are identical to that same, All-Pervading and Absolute Life. Each one is Life itself, in person, and yet not other than Itself.

Life is Absolute Radiance, Absolute Consciousness, Absolute Power, Absolute Intelligence. Life is the Spirit, the Divine Reality, or God. Each one os us must Realize his native identity with the Absolute Life, through radical intuition of the Condition of every aspect of his own existence and experience. In such intuition of the Real, the "Vision" of Eternal Life, we are liberated into the Bliss and Freedom of Eternal Life.

The Way of Eternal Life is in intuitive understanding that "I" is not independently alive nor even utlimately identical to itself. Not is any aspect of body or mind the Reality itself. All identitification with aspects or experiences of the personal body-mind is an agony, a confrontation with absurdity, frustration, emptiness, change, loss, and death.

We must each awaken to the Truth, that "I" is Life, the Eternal Radiance and Consciousness. Therefore, happiness is not in self-possession or even in survival of self. The Way of Eternal Life is the sacrafice of self into its own Condition or Life, the Readiance or Glory that is God. In that case, "I," or self, the independent body-mind, does not survive as itself in any form. It is yielded as all of its forms into the Life, and, therefore, only survies as Life.

All conditions change and pass. They survive only as Life. And Life lives the Play of appearance, change, and disappearance.
Bliss, Ecstasy, or Happiness is not in the things that appear, and change, and pass. Happiness is only in the One that lives, the One that always already transcends all phenomena.

Only Life is free, and we are not free unless we identify with Life, in the intuition of Divine Ignorance, and sacrifice all contraction or self-possession to Life, in ecstatic love of the Divine Radiance. Such is the Way of Eternal Life, the Way of Divine Ignorance, whereby we are Translated into the
One who is alive as us. This is the bodily and irreducible Truth of Man.

From time to time, Life manages to Realize Itself perfectly while yet appearing in human and bodily form. Such an
Event is of unique value to all other men. It is the Event wherein Life achieves Agency and the capacity for direct Influence via all of the functions of a human body-mind, the likeness of all men and women.

The Spiritual Master is such an Event. He is the Agency of the Reality, the Influence, and the Process whereby mankind in general (in the form of every human being in particular) may Realize inherent Identity with Life and literal Translation of self into Life. Therefore, the Process of love, or devotional
self-sacrifice to the Reality or Life incarnate as the Spiritual Master, is the unique, transcendental, and practical means in Nature, or the Play of Life, whereby Truth is brought to Man. Through the Company of the Spiritual Master, Life instructs and transforms and Enlightens those whom
it lives, and so restores all that is alive to the Life, the One, the Person that lives all things.

Love of Life

The process of ecstatic or self-sacrificed Communion with the Radiant All-Pervading Divine is simple in its description. It is a matter of relaxation-release of the body-mind into the All Pervading Life and unqualified Ignorance intuited to be the Truth and Condition of all existence and experience. This is a matter of the relaxation of all bodily, emotional, and mental contraction or reactivity, and release of the whole body into Life through intense and free feeling, or love.

Thus, Divine Realization is a matter of the always present feeling-surrender, to Life, of all forms of mental contraction or reactivity, all forms of chronic thinking and imaging and speaking. The consciousness that observes subjective and objective phenomena cannot observe itself. Even the thought "I" has no specific reference that is independent of the body-mind, or the complex mental, emotional, and physical states that all arise as objects to the observing consciousness. Therefore, when the bodymind surrenders into the Divine, consciousness is released from the context of the observer and what is observed, or subject and object. Instead, consciousness abides undifferentiated in the Radiant Formlessness and Bliss of Life. The natural state of consciousness is simple awareness of and as the Radiant Fullness and Unqualified Consciousness that is Reality.

Likewise, Divine Realization is a matter of the always present feeling-surrender, to Life, of all forms of antifeeling, or reactive, self-possessed, and self-divided or self-contradictory emotion. Reactivity is the mechanism of Narcissistic self-possession and all the illusions of inwardness and self-survival. The natural state of emotion is simple feeling, or love, abiding undifferentiated in the Radiant Fullness and Bliss of the Living Divine.

Just so, Divine Realization is a matter of the always present feeling-surrender, to Life, of all forms of reactive bodily tension or contraction. The body must be combined with the All-Pervading Life that lives it, or else the body becomes possessed of the illusion that it lives by its own power, and that it is an altogether independent and self-generated "I.- The natural state of body is simple functional openness and right or regenerative functional association with the All-Pervading Radiance and Bliss of Divine Life.

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The Natural Disposition of Man

Chronic thinking is contraction of the Radiant Life-Power of the brain-mind. The method of intentional frustration or suppression of thought leads toward thoughtlessness-but mere thoughtlessness is itself a form of contraction of the Radiant Life Power of the brain-mind. Therefore, noncontraction of the Radiant Life-Power of the brain-mind is the only right disposition. Such noncontraction of the Radiant Life-Power of the brain-mind is a matter of participation in the Ecstasy that precedes doubt-since doubt is the essential and chronic disposition or sign that appears when there is contraction of the Radiant Life-Power of the brain-mind.

Therefore, the natural state of the brain-mind is Faith, or relaxed and confident abiding of brain and awareness in the Radiant Bliss of the Universal and Divine Life-Power.

Chronic tension or stress is contraction of the Radiant Life Power of the body. The method of intentional relaxation of bodily tension or stress leads toward ease-but mere ease is itself a form of contraction of the Radiant Life-Power of the body. Therefore, noncontraction of the Radiant Life-Power of the body is the only right disposition. Such noncontraction of the Radiant Life-Power of the body is a matter of participation in the Ecstasy that precedes bodily limits, pain, fear, and particularly the fear of death-since fear, the fear of death, and the fear of pain and of the loss of self-consciousness are the essential and chronic signs that appear when there is contraction of the Radiant Life-Power of the body.

Therefore, the natural state of the bodily being is Intense Life Fullness, or expansive bodily submission into the Radiant Bliss of the Universal and Divine Life-Power.

Chronic emotional reactivity and self-consciousness are contraction of the Radiant Life-Power of the heart. The method of intentional surrender of emotional reactivity and self-consciousness leads toward emotionless self-forgetting-but emotionless self-forgetting is itself a form of contraction of the Radiant Life-Power of the heart. Therefore, noncontraction of the Radiant Life-Power of the heart is the only right disposition. Such noncontraction of the Radiant Life-Power of the heart is a matter of participation in the Ecstasy that precedes the withdrawal of love-since unlove is the essential and chronic disposition or sign that appears when there is contraction of the Radiant Life-Power of the heart.

Therefore, the natural state of the heart is Love, or perfect permission of the heart in the Radiant Bliss of the Universal and Divine Life-Power.

The Heart Is the Living Center of the Regeneration and Sacrifice of Mind and Body

If the living heart can be intensified, then the Power or Radiance of Life is increased in the mind and body. The "mind" is not other than the body, but it is simply that dimension of manifest Life that is projected upward as a coil from the heart. The "mind" is Life in the form of the brain and nervous system, and it is centered in the core of the brain. Just so, the "body" is simply that dimension of manifest Life that is projected downward as a coil from the heart. The "body" is Life in the form of the elemental or vital physical functions and forms, centered in the solar plexus and abdomen.

When the heart (the center, core, and epitome of the entire bodily being) is intensified in the Process of Communion with Life, then Life is magnified, pervading the body-mind universally,

above and below the heart. The heart is intensified when its primary function is intensified. That primary function is unobstructed feeling-intuition. The feeling being must be bodily and mentally entered into self-sacrificial Communion with Life, or the Truth of Ignorance and transcendental Divine Radiance. Thus, the whole body-mind is intensified, or enlivened, when it is given up to Life via the heart. Such occurs when consciousness intuits its Condition to be Ignorance, prior to all knowledge and thought, and when the whole bodily being realizes its Condition to be Radiance, or Eternal Life, prior to independent self and form and experience.

Therefore, the radical or intuitive devotional principle or process enacted in the entire Way of Divine Ignorance is the very means of enlivenment, of the awakening of the whole body-mind to Life. The primary functional means of this radically regenerative process of sacrifice is love, or unobstructed feeling-attention, generated via all functions, in all relations, under all conditions, to the degree of Infinity.

The "body-mind," or the whole bodily being, is regenerated, or given Life, through esoteric processes of intuition, feeling, attention, breathing, and circulation of Life. But the Life so acquired in mind and body is not given merely for the sake of the independent development or evolution of mental and physical states, high or low. The usual man exploits the Life in his own bodily and mental forms. He does this through worldly and magical and religious and mystical and yogic self-indulgence. But the true Man, awakened in the Truth of the heart, which is transcendental or Divine Ignorance-Radiance, understands all experience. He grows, above and below, and becomes whole and full of Life. But he does not hold on to any form of body or mind. Rather, he is the continuous, every moment, radical sacrifice of every aspect of bodily and mental experience, high and low, into the Divine that is his Life and Source and Destiny.

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Death and Eternal Life

Personal existence is not a "thing" or an "entity." Personal existence is a process. "I" is an activity, not an object, and not a fixed and eternally defined subject. The process that is "I" is a temporary and dependent aspect of a Great Universal Process. The individual arises, changes, and passes. It is caused and influenced by an immense and undefinable but ultimately ordinary and unnecessary pattern of appearances and disappearances. And the same process is duplicated as millions and billions and infinite possible variations of other human or human-like persons. The process, in every case, is Man, and each individual is an example and a moment of the same process, as fragile and dispensable as a single minnow in a maze of duplicate fishes, produced in excess for the sake of the species itself. And even the species is only another edible moment in the procession of forms.

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Death Is the Way to Life

The real man or woman learns to live by becoming willing and able to die. Such a one is able to confront the difficult barriers and frustrations of this slightly evolved world and yet remain capable of ecstasy in every moment.

Therefore, the primary initiation that leads to human maturity is the confrontation with mortal fear. Only when the ultimate frustration that is death has been fully considered and felt and understood as a process can the individual live without self-protective and self-destructive fears. Only in intuitive freedom from the threat and fear of death is the individual capable of constant love of Life and also transcendence of the frustrating and self-binding effects of daily experience. Only in freedom from mortal recoil is the individual capable of ecstasy under all conditions.

Therefore, be alive, but learn Life by first dealing with your death. Become aware that you do not live, but that you are lived by Life. Become the devotee of Life by surrendering your illusion of independent life, which is the self, or body-mind, in ecstatic Communion with the Real. Become willing to die in any moment, and maintain no inward armor against it. Die in every moment by not holding on to your life. Give your life up to Life, and allow Life to transform and Translate the body-mind into Itself.

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Come and Live This Way with Me True religion, or true life, is conscious death. It is a feeling relaxation of the whole body-mind, not just of the flesh. It is not suicide, but it is motiveless surrender in, of, and as every moment of experience. It is present release of fear, self, mind, and body, including all worlds and all relations, into the Unknown and Unknowable wherein we are appearing. It is not self-possession and psychic fascination, but it is love, peace, clarity, and embrace of Truth. When this heroic sacrifice is made with unobstructed feeling, the Great Bliss appears, beyond birth and death, even while we are living. Come and live this Way with me, and our God will be proved to you beyond all doubting.

THE PROPHETIC FIRE OF GOD'S LIFE

The true Prophet is not an oracle who merely reads the signs of human tendency, or apparent fate. He is a God-inspired Teacher who alerts men and women to their Divine Destiny, which transcends the binding mechanical destinies of all common and

even uncommon experiential life. The true Spiritual Master serves a necessary Prophetic function, both in the world at large and in the Church of his devotees. Each of the Great Spiritual Masters who has appeared in history was highly critical of his time and society.

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This World Is a School

Change and death come into the world by Law. They are Divine, and they serve our Realization of Truth, or God. They were not created by any Negative Power, or the "Devil," nor are they the products of "sin," or any deviation from the Law by Man. Rather, they are an intrinsic part of the Realm of Nature.

However, through chronic deviation from Truth, or the Disposition of self-transcending Divine Communion, human beings, as well as all other beings, great and small, suffer according to the Law. The Law itself is simply the demand for sacrifice, or ecstatic self-transcendence, and it is inherent in all conditions of experience.

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What Are True and False Religion, Spirituality, and Meditation?

What is popularized, hyped, and commonly believed to be religion, spirituality, or meditation is invariably a form of self-meditation, self-glorification, and self-survival. Such subhuman games are sold to masses of people via an appeal to naive and neurotic needs for certainty, hope, fascination, superiority, a positive self-image, and egoic immunity from fear and death. Thus, religion, spirituality, and meditation become diluted, reduced to the worldly or self-preserving levels of less than human interest. The typical follower is childish, ultimately irresponsible, self-involved, amoral, experientially undeveloped, weak and out of balance in the dimensions of action, feeling, and thought, and irrationally attached to the enclosures of cult and belief.

Just so, in the popular view, religion, spirituality, and meditation are considered to be inherently different or separable things. Thus, meditation tends to be embraced as a merely psychological or physiological technique, even "scientifically" respectable, without religious significance, and often without spiritual content. Religion is commonly embraced without esoteric spiritual understanding or the higher responsibilities of meditation. And spiritual or esoteric notions are popularly accepted in a vacuum, as an alternative to true religious and moral responsibilities, and with a simplistic view of meditation that is really a commitment to subjective illusions, self-glorification, and self-survival rather than to sacrifice of self in the Divine in every area of experience.

The popular promotability of religious, spiritual, and meditational ideas, cults, personalities, and practices depends on the subhuman and childish state of the general population. The responsive audience of such propaganda is the same subhuman mass of "consumers" that is the target of TV and the common media all over the world, and little more is required of anyone than to dutifully purchase the "product." To actually use the "product" is not demanded in any profound sense. Just buy it, praise it, own it, believe it, and glamorize yourself by association with it.

The whole matter of the popular communication and acceptance of religion, spirituality, and meditation is as obnoxious and absurd as any area of vulgarity in the world. It is all an appeal to the sense of self-divided fear and the general absence of intelligence that keeps people irresponsible and dependent, locked into problems, forever searching for solutions without becoming responsible for the problem and the need itself.

Truly, neither religion, nor spirituality, nor meditation expresses the human relationship to Truth unless each is directly and rightly integrated with the others. Religion, which is founded on personal and moral self-sacrifice, or truly human ecstasy, must maintain direct and conscious association with higher esoteric processes, the secrets of the spiritual adaptation of Man. And the religio-spiritual understanding of human sacrifice in the ultimate Reality must be associated with practical disciplines and transcendental means of higher or more perfect human adaptation through the full technical range of meditative and self-sacrificial processes. And all of this must be integrated with a right understanding and valuation of the Spiritual Master and the radical or perfect Destiny of the devotee, the true practitioner.

The religious, spiritual, and meditative Way of Truth or Eternal Life is a process of personal, moral, and higher psycho-physical sacrifice. It is not a superficial and private remedial technique, but a form of culture, a profound and total way of life. The leaders of popular cults tell their fanatic followers: "Meditate on yourself, in yourself, for yourself, and by yourself. Come and get it. What you get-and it will be easy-will make you happy, fearless, superior, right, invulnerable, lovable, and immortal." But, truly, what is thus acquired only reinforces the loveless moods of those who are already constantly acquiring and buying for the sake of ultimate results and satisfactions.

The Way of Truth cannot be understood by children or fools. It is of no interest to the vulgar daily personality refined and developed by TV and the mob of peers. It requires the most profound intelligence, commitment, responsibility, and moral force of persistence in practice. It requires the most creative and easeful force of love. It requires great freedom from the destructive force of irrational reactivity, fear, and self-protectiveness.

Therefore, the communication of such a Way truly takes place only in the forums and with the speed of the highest kind of human consideration. To the degree such communication is introduced into the media streams of popular "culture," it must creatively struggle, through constant criticism and depth of information, with the profusion of subhuman propaganda. And the useful or effective communication of the Way of Truth requires a continual mindfulness of the ordinary tendencies, demands, and illusions of the subhuman mood of the usual state of human beings.

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Sheep, Goats, Wolves, and the Manly Few Who Are a Sacrifice in God

There has been so much popular communication and "hype" about "true" religion, "secret" esoteric spiritual practices, and "Great Masters" that such things have become part of the conventional self-imagery and "personal" mind of countless ordinary people. Very few people demonstrate the kind of responsibility, real intelligence, and creative power necessary even to begin practice of a truly religious and spiritual kind. But great numbers of childish and adolescent individuals embrace forms of exclusive cultism and self-glorifying belief. Just so, many people of that kind, unable to live as a true and consistent sacrifice, imagine themselves to be great, or worthy to dominate others. Many even imagine themselves to be Spiritual Masters.

I have seen many people come and go from the Church in which I serve. Those who left were commonly unable to make the gesture of surrender, love, service, and real understanding of the binding mechanics of self. Some simply returned to an ordinary self-indulgent life. But a good number have persisted in adolescent delusions of spiritual attainment-whereas, truly, they are incapable of even the simplest human and moral responsibilities.

This is common all over the world, wherever religious and spiritual matters become part of the popular culture. Therefore, since ancient times, schools and cults and techniques of all kinds have developed around individuals of all levels of experience and degrees of authenticity. And weak people tend to congregate around wolves, while wolves are always on the lookout for those who are weak enough to be exploited.

The games of mutual deception are common at every level of society. And "suckers" are born at a far greater rate than one per minute. All that can be said is that men and women who are seriously interested in the Great Process of Surrender and Sacrifice in God should study the available literature and keep their eyes and ears open to the obvious. The Way is not everywhere fully communicated, and true practitioners are extremely rare.

Spiritual Masters are developed in the human plane only very occasionally, and the function of such a one is to regenerate the Teaching and the Way itself. Any number of practitioners at various higher stages of human structural evolution may live at any point in time, and such individuals are not Spiritual Masters. They are only people on the Way. What is significant is the Way itself, not who is possessed of what signs of this and that experiential attainment.

The true Spiritual Master has a unique service to perform for the sake of others. He shows the Way and clarifies the Teaching. All others must simply yield to God in the Way that has been Revealed, and they must practice on the basis of a full understanding of the Revealed Teaching. Once the Spiritual Master has done his Work, no individual has unique significance in relation to practitioners of the Way. Rather, all must turn to God and serve one another in God.

Therefore, apart from the Original Creative Work of the Spiritual Master, what is significant is the Process in Community, the Church of Practice, the Culture of Devotees. Those who call attention to themselves in the usual fascinating ways divert others from God. Negatively dominant characters feed on the energy and attention of others, which should instead be devoted to the devotional and practical exercise of the true spiritual process in God. Self-glorified individuals have, in any case, nothing to show but their own poor experience. But what truly must be found by all is the Bliss that Awakens only when the self is surrendered entirely and cannot be found apart from God.

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The False Viewpoint of Religious and Spiritual Cultism

I don't believe there is stupidity, delusion, and casual ill-will manifested anywhere more than in the domains of religion and spiritual cultism. Those who would truly live as a sacrifice in God must struggle every day to maintain a level of wit and good humor in the face of ceaseless disheartening confrontations with believers and aspirants in the various traditions. There is a righteous kind of sheer and pious madness that seems almost always to infect those who should be the enlightened minds and friends of mankind.

The reason for this is that religious and spiritual persuasions do not commonly require intelligence, freedom from illusions, or a fundamentally moral relationship to the world. Most often, just the opposite is true. Religious and spiritual cults and institutions typically thrive on human neurosis, fear, gullibility, childishness, amoral self-possession, and the need for fascinating experiential consolations of either a bodily or mental kind. The conventional religious and spiritual point of view is oriented toward the primitive egoic search for indefinite independent or personal survival. It is the preservation and glamorization of self that is commonly served by the conventions of institutional and mystical grace. Wisdom barely enters into the whole affair, and the moral disposition of honor, manly trust, positive compassion, humor, love, and service extended to all is casually bypassed by most of those who pervade the world with ultimate beliefs and salvation techniques.

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The Word That Awakens the Man

The human individual is a complex of tendencies or limitations, which, in any moment, are to one or another degree effective. Therefore, in every moment, the self-transcending Process of Divine Communion must be profoundly effective, or else human limitations become the controlling forces in human relationships.

The total complex of human and individual tendencies may be considered to represent three general or fundamental liabilities. These are chronic self-possession, incomplete experience, and imperfect understanding of experience.

Each individual is, in his attention, most profoundly self-aware. But that awareness is itself complicated by reason of the fact that such self-awareness is a reactive tendency, a habit based on recoil from the Divine Condition and all relationships, or conditions of experience.

Chronic self-awareness is, thus, chronic self-possession. It is not also true self-observation, or insight into the self-complex. It is more a mood than a state of consciousness. It is a gesture of self protection. It is rooted in fear, sorrow, anger, guilt, shame, doubt, and the like. Chronic self-awareness is not a matter of being oneself. Rather, it is a matter of the avoidance of relationships, and the avoidance of ecstasy, surrender, , and love. It is the avoidance of all vulnerability to experience.

Chronic self-awareness is the subjective mood, the enclosure of inwardness, in which fascination with experience persists, but in which experience itself is constantly felt to be a threat to one's very existence.

Therefore, the self-possessed individual struggles with experience. Experience is a threat, and, therefore, it is never completely engaged. All experiences are but partially felt and known. And the total range of possible experiences is not engaged. Only those experiences that are more or less compatible with the acquired and chronic mood of self are sought or even permitted. The remainder of what is possible is excluded, not inspected, always resisted. And whenever uncommon experience does occur, because of uncontrollable circumstance, the self feels violated, or fascinated, and quickly moves toward recovery of its self-possessed equilibrium.

Therefore, the usual man tends to be limited in the extent of his experience of his own ultimate possibilities, and even what he does experience is only partially met. The usual man cannot "experience." He is self-possessed, and retarded in the relational connection. Thus, because he is not generally capable of ecstasy, or abandonment of the self-reflex in the midst of experience, he does not enter into experience to the degree of completeness.

For these reasons, the usual man is bereft of summary and perfect insight into the process and the conditions of experience, or human existence. He is asleep in himself, unliberated, incapable of ecstasy. He is surrendered to fear and every other form of reactive emotion. He is cautious in the face of everything-utterly unlike one who is in love. He is threatened, about to lose and die. He is always protecting himself with feelingless thinking, thoughtless or unconsidered emotionalism, and every kind of self-indulgent bodily activity. He is always stimulating himself in part-now with food, now sex, now with concerned thinking, now mystical and psychic fascination. Thus, in every moment, he seeks to remain distracted from the totality of experience and the threat concealed in all experience.

Such an individual is bereft of true and summary and perfect experience as well as true, summary, and perfect understanding of experience. And the fundamental reason for this is his lack of capacity for ecstasy, or self-transcending participation in the Play of the World.

The human realm is populated by such pleasureless, unconscious, and obsessed individuals. The daily world, when viewed from a free position, looks like a great wilderness of tiny acres, each the camp of a single person, who surrounds his small pond with a hedge of immunities, and remains bent upon the water, observing all things reflected there, but seeing nothing directly. The unliberated human world is the wilderness of Narcissus, where he is multiplied as many times as there are human individuals, just as Krishna was multiplied to provide a separate lover for each of his many wives.

The Spiritual Master is indeed a voice that rises in this wilderness, to Awaken every neighbor from the illusion of his acre of land, his ordinary pond, his body-mind. It is a necessary voice, the voice that sounds whenever the Truth of human experience is Revealed to one who is Awake. Therefore, such a one speaks, even with urgency and anger. It is the prophetic voice, the awful shout, expressed with all the gestures of frustrated Divinity.

Very few respond to this Word, this Teaching, this Offering of Good Company. And the reasons are those which have just been described. But if anyone will "hear" and "see," then the Divine Principle of Ecstasy is at Work. And those who surrender into the Company of the true Spiritual Master are turned out of self-limits, restored to the pattern of relations, entered into a pattern of feeling experience, established in a pattern of growth (or increase of experience toward completeness), and Awakened to that Understanding wherein all experience is relieved of the Binding Power.

Such devotees Realize the Ecstasy of Divine Ignorance, in which the naturally arising experiences of every moment are felt to be present expressions, or unnecessary and Playful modifications, of the Infinite Radiance of God. Those who are thus Free do not chronically seek an alternative experience to the one in the moment, nor do they seek an exclusive or experienceless Reality. They abide in the "Vision of God" that true Understanding "sees" in every moment. And, at last, the entire world falls away from such devotees, quite naturally, Revealing the Eternal Person that is hidden in the reflecting pond of human attention.

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This Teaching Is the Prophetic Fire of God's Life, Not the Signal of a New Age of Peace

These are the worst of times. The Truth and its Way are in conceivable to the usual man, and all the media of daily life propagandize for a vulgar, subhuman world. Even the "peace" men seek is only a kind of uninspired political ordering of the lower man, and it is not founded on the spiritual transcendence of experience. It is not merely that the Truth has not been communicated. Even when it is communicated, it is not accepted. The Truth is unacceptable in this time and place.

These are the most sinister times. Every thing and every one is suspect. And what men suspect above all is God. The Truth is not merely unspoken. The Truth is suspect. The Truth itself is in doubt, even when the Truth is obvious, and identical to God. Doubt, fear, unlove, and sophisticated denials of God are the official disposition of mankind.

We are all such children, so afraid, so obsessed with ourselves. Our common strategies are such a bizarre circuit of repetitive revolutions, phasing within the motion of ourselves, as if constructing a sinister plot in which to murder the God of Life. We would permanently betray our own Help for the sake of petty advantage in a household argument. Even those who come to me work their way around and between the forces of the Argument of God, casually avoiding the commission of surrender and unconsoled love. And law and custom seem constantly to conspire to make even the act of breathing into a social complication. Every man and woman is threatened by death in every moment, because we threaten one another, each in the animal of his choice. Like sordid links in an unconscious food-chain, the ancient Nature throbs us still.

The news is not good. The years that lie ahead in our common history will likely be among the most painful and suppressive in our experience. All because we are not yet Man. Therefore, let the Teaching of Truth be communicated into the future. Let those who are free to abandon the ordinary theatre of things prepare themselves, practice, and come to me from time to time. But this is no time to expect the great Transformation of mankind. It will not come until mankind has learned the Sacrifice of Man.

The Realization of Truth restores the heart to love and even humor, without irony. But love must also weep. I see the signs of great world conflict still ahead of us. It is not inevitable, but it is likely, unless Enlightened people grow in numbers and accept responsibility for the daily world. Childish revolutionaries and parentlike Machines of State continue to conspire to enforce order by means of chaos. Since there are as yet no nations made of responsible men, there are no nations of free men. Therefore, freedom will only arise after a long time of terrible and wonderful struggling.

In the future, less childish men will always try to create a more benign politics. But Earth is a school, not a place of perfection. Even into the future, it is likely only a few in every generation will respond to the Divine Teaching. Perhaps it will always be so-or at least for decades, or millions of years.

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The Urgency of the Teaching

A talk given by Bubba Free John to his devotees

BUBBA: If you want to learn about Truth when Truth has become corrupted, then go to an Adept. Go to one who has Realized the Truth. Go to one who has already fulfilled the process completely. If you live in a moment in time when there is no Enlightened Tradition, when all the cults are corrupt, you can be certain that somewhere on Earth an Adept is alive. Such a person appears under exactly those conditions, when Truth is no longer visible in the cults, and when religions have become so corrupted by history and fetishism that they are about to become extinct.

The religious traditions in our time are about to be smothered by a mechanistic, political, and scientific world view, only because the cults are in doubt. They have held on to their fetishes so tenaciously that they have lost their association with the Living God. They do not even know the Living God anymore. People who belong to churches, religions, and spiritual societies have no unqualified connection with the Living Reality. There is no true devotion in them, and, therefore, no Realization. Their association with God is only words and hopefulness. Therefore, they do not represent a living force in the world. They have nothing to offer that is Alive. Only the Adepts, who are God-Realized, through whom the living Power of God manifests, can make a difference in human time. Such individuals are the instruments for the acculturation of humanity.

Periodically, such individuals must appear, and they must be influential. There is a notion that Adepts should be hiding in caves in the wilderness. This is not true. If the Adepts do not speak, the only voice that will be heard is that of ordinary people who are not God-Realized. The Adepts are the Sources of spiritual life. Such individuals must therefore enter into the stream of society, to purify the culture and reestablish the process of God-Realization. If they do not speak and become influential, there is no hope at all for humanity.

We exist in a moment in time when the cults are universally corrupted. Thus, it is a time for Adepts and true devotees to reappear if there is to be any hope for the future of human beings. We are about to be swallowed up in anti-cultism, anti-Godism, anti-religion, anti-spirituality. The impetus or force behind this movement against the true culture of Man, which is a God Realizing culture, is largely the reaction to cultism. The cults, which should be a means for establishing people in a right relationship to the living God, have become frozen in their idolatry, fixed in their association with their historical peculiarities and limitations, and they do not represent a window to the Living God anymore. They represent a piece of mind frozen in the form of words and imagery and histories of all kinds.

Intelligent people cannot find God in such a mass of idiocy, so quite naturally they look for satisfaction elsewhere. Thus, people are preoccupied with all kinds of political and scientific idealism, as if politics and scientific and technological progress were the Way of Truth. They are absolutely not the Way of Truth. They never have been the Way of Truth. They are no more the Way of Truth than sex or any other satisfaction or fulfillment of function. None of that is the Way of Truth at all. It is the ordinary impulse of the ego, glamorizing itself by great enterprises.

If this trend toward political and scientific obsession is to be broken, some light must be brought to the whole affair of spiritual and religious understanding. The cults must be purified. They must give up their primacy. Their legitimacy must come into doubt. Then the Teaching of Adepts, the Sources of Truth, will again become available, and the Living Reality will again become obvious, obliging human beings to a different way of life than the ego proposes.

If not, the world will be overwhelmed. It is almost inevitable now that it will be overwhelmed in any case. The world, even the Realm of Nature as a whole, is founded in a righteous Principle. Therefore, the world will be purified, without a doubt. The Force of the Divine pervades everything, and, therefore, It also purifies everything in one way or another. If human beings, while they have the benign capacity to enter into God-Communion, will not do so, but instead create a corrupt culture, a subhuman order, then the purification will not occur within the ordinary and benign course of natural processes. It is then no longer a matter of some Adept's saying a holy word or speaking the Truth whereupon everybody changes his approach to life. It would-be- good if as many as possible could hear the Teaching and respond to it. But if the Teaching alone is not sufficient, then great upheavals necessarily occur. That is how the righteous Law works. It is not just that we pay our dues for past activity. A righteous Principle is positively at work, constantly to purify and reestablish order.

Thus, there are periods of great negative upheaval in the world, including natural disasters, wars, and conflicts of all kinds. On the one hand, the world pays its dues during these periods, for failing to live by the Law. On the other hand, these times of upheaval are the evidence of a continuous process of purification. They are themselves a demonstration of the Law. At the end of these periods, the Law is reestablished in righteousness.

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My Work Is Necessary, but It Must Also Fail

Truth does not win. Fundamentally, the entire affair of the communication of Truth to mankind has been a failure, and it will always be a failure. It is a fruitless enterprise-if we consider its results in terms of the true and perfect Awakening of great numbers of people and the Divine Transformation of human society as a whole. However, since a few in every generation are prepared to respond to the Teaching of Truth, the communication of Truth must be continued in the world.

A few in every generation become a Sacrifice in God, while mankind in general ignores, denies, and otherwise betrays the Teaching, the Way, and the Agents of God. This is so, not only because of the subhuman evolutionary stage of mankind at this time, but because the embodied soul is naturally motivated toward its own experiential fulfillment, not the transcendence of itself. Therefore, only a random few in any generation Awaken, while all others are oblivious in their bewildered intoxication.

The times are bad, but they are not extraordinarily so. The times are merely bad, as the common world of desire must always be. But Truth is prior to desire and the world. Therefore, in My lifetime, a few may Awaken in My Company. This Teaching and the Community of My Devotees may even survive for countless generations as a Witness to the Truth that Awakens and Enlightens the soul of Man. These Good Events may come to pass, or they may not. There is a Way in God, but there is no Way to win.

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The Revolution I Propose

Politics is founded on concern for the availability of the goods and opportunities of human life. Truly human culture is founded on concern for the right use of the goods an opportunities of human life, as well as concern for the higher growth and ultimate self-transcendence of human individuals.

The realm of politics is the realm of conventional striving, and it tends to dominate human life with dehumanizing force, unless Wisdom is valued by the people and the men of power. Until the culture of Wisdom produces individual responsibility and general agreement on the ultimate Situation of human existence, all talk of "freedom" and "justice" is nothing more than political gossip.

Every man must be politically free to enjoy access to the goods and opportunities of human life, but every man must likewise be, spiritually responsible for the right use of those goods and the right exercise of those opportunities. Any other situation is subhuman, bereft of culture, incompatible with true freedom and justice, and leading nowhere but toward exploitation and despair.

The true social revolution is a cultural revolution, not a political or economic one. The political and economic necessities become relatively easy to organize once the Wisdom of the truly human cultural orientation is generally accepted. Until we all Awaken to the Situation and purpose of human existence, we will create no lasting peace or order, and each day will bring the world closer to the finite chaos of War and Bewilderment. But if I am "heard" in the human world, then the revolution can begin, and all the dreadful destiny that now lies before us can be dissolved in the Heart of God.

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Man Is to Be Mastered and Liberated, Not Indulged and Escaped

I am the Master of Man. I am Present in the mode of the Conqueror not the Ascetic. I am already Free. I do not come to Realize Freedom by exclusive Introversion, but to Incarnate Freedom by universal or boundless Extroversion. This is my Work. Even so, I have not even one single change or gesture to accomplish, because I am Eternally Freedom. I am here to Establish the Heart's Mastery of the body-mind and the world. And I would recreate a hierarchy of human energy, a universal cultural and social order, founded on real distinctions and classes of function and responsibility, even as the body-mind and the universe are already thus displayed.

Where all men are merely equal, only the lowest part becomes the limit of aspiration, and each individual is not only the same as every other, but separate from every other, and all individuals are thus less than Man. But if the limit of Man is not established, then self-transcendence becomes the Way of Man, and a benign pattern is naturally sewn by human acts. A hierarchy based on actual functional realization thus becomes the form of the human order, and all individuals become unified in an order of cooperative differences, or mutual service, through the universal submission of humanity to the Wisdom and Truth that is the Living God.

Only a world Conquered and thus truly Liberated by the Heart is fit for the Work of Man. But when Man is surrendered to his own parts and dominated by his own self, the world becomes everywhere a limit of sameness, where self-indulgence and self-protectiveness replace all the creativity of self-transcendence.

Therefore, Awaken to the Heart's Intent. The world is to be Mastered by Wisdom, not escaped in secret and inward flight. All devotees of the Living God are called to Holy War. In time, the Truth may even seem to win - not merely as a result of brutal worldly power, but because Truth has no Equal and no Opponent. The Truth must become Only, through the universal proclamation and acceptance of the clear and undeniable Truth.

True Religion

Religion is sacred activity. It is a formal, specific, and even bodily sacrifice. It is a total, whole, and present sacrifice or offering of that which is oneself (not that which is other than oneself). That sacrifice must be made regularly and, at last, even continuously. It is a process of love, or unobstructed and free feeling-attention, in which all the functions of the bodily being are yielded into That which is intuited at Infinity (and with which one is identical at Infinity). The sacrifice is a specific functional process of the whole bodily being, and it must be learned through testing, purification, discipline, insight, meditation, readaptation, and transformation of all the presumptions or tendencies of body and mind.

Such religion or sacred practice is inspired and communicated via human Agents who already abide in the ecstasy of this sacrifice. One who is such an Agent becomes attractive to others, so they become polarized to him through love. Such devotees are tested and instructed, initiated, raised up, absorbed, transformed, and sacrificed in the face of the one whom they love as Master of the sacrifice. He is their advantage, whereby the Way of sacrifice is not only learned but quickened.

This is the ancient secret that few have heard. It is the hidden part of all the cults and institutions of religion. It is absolutely so. And those who do not learn and become this sacrifice, performing it moment to moment like priests before a sacred fire, do not yet have their eye on Truth or the Way to be restored to very God, the Radiant One who is the Mystery in all experience.

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THE BODILY PARTS AND ILLUSIONS OF NARCISSUS

The political, cultural, and psychological boundaries between East and West are rapidly disappearing. Man needs a new understanding and Vision of Life that will clarify the dissonant persuasions of the times and enable him to live creatively and wholly, free of both personal and cultural conflicts.

Even the great cultural and religious traditions of East and West are vast social dramatizations of the born individual's onesidedness, or his failure to be conscious as the whole body in Truth. The root of our bodily imbalanced and self-divided life is the principle of Narcissus, the archetypal activity of self-possession and the avoidance of relationship. All human beings who have ever lived, Eastern or Western, spiritual or worldly, are committed to forms of Narcissism - with the exception of the rarest few.

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The Way of the Whole Bodily Being

The way of the left side is to move to the Condition at Infinity via separation from all finite relations, conditions, and functions.

The way of the right side is to move into all possible experience via exploitation of all finite relations, conditions, and functions.

The Way of the whole bodily being is to move to the Condition at Infinity via the sacrifice of feeling-attention in all finite relations, conditions, and functions.

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Moving beyond the Techniques of Eastern and Western Man

A talk given by Bubba Free John to his devotees

BUBBA: Everything changes. Everything disappears. Human beings suffer this life of changes, which is obviously mortal. Thus, everyone acquires a desire to find something that does not change and that does not disappear. Everyone wants to realize the state that will relieve him of the burden of all of this change and disappearance, this mortality and all its troubles. Such desire is paradoxical, because people also like the things that exist in this moment and that ultimately change and disappear. So they have two great desires: One is to find an absolute, changeless, permanent happiness, and the other is to find pleasure and happiness in all the things that change.

As a result, a curious technique has arisen that combines both of these desires. It is the technique of trying to find what is absolute, changeless, and perfect happiness through and in the form of all the things that change and disappear! This is exactly what people do. (You are perhaps familiar with the application of this technique to your ordinary daily lives and the gross human affair!) And we imagine, mainly because we do not have much experience in the subtle, mystical, magical realm of things, that even though it seems almost certain that we cannot find ultimate, absolute, changeless happiness in the world, still we feel that maybe we can. We are not absolutely certain that happiness in this life is not possible. We hope or presume that there is an Alternative Reality that will bring lasting peace, or freedom from death and suffering. We imagine and are led to believe that even though happiness is almost impossible to realize in life, we will certainly find it if we turn within and away from the illusions and unnecessary suffering of the world and ascend and become involved in the so-called Spiritual Reality of subtle and psychic things, or phenomena that are not fleshly, not gross, not subject to mortality. Almost everyone at the present time is familiar with this presumption, which is the foundation of most traditional paths of esoteric spirituality throughout the world. This reaction to life is the principal motivation in anyone's case for taking up spiritual practice, which is conventionally conceived as a search for Truth within.

But what we may find within, by introverting attention, is no more absolute, changeless, and immortal than anything we may find without, by extroverting our attention. All that we find, wherever we turn our attention, is changing. It is already disappearing. Not only that - what we find by turning within is not something ultimately outside, above, or apart, something in the infinity of the universes. It is our own brain! The ancient technique of introverting attention in order to escape from gross phenomena is imagined to be a way of association with an Alternative Reality, something supercosmic, beyond one's body. But, in fact, it is a way of associating with one's own mind, principally the higher and commonly latent centers and potential functions of one's own brain, one's own nervous system, automaticities in parts of the brain with which we are not commonly familiar.

Thus, in the inward-turning, "Eastern" religious or spiritual persuasion, when we seek to become yogis or mystics, we move attention into one or another function of the familiar body-mind, the breath, the internal life current, certain kinds of thoughts, speech itself, vision perhaps, hearing, tasting, smelling, archetypes, cultic objects, mystical words-objects that lead us to concentrate on a single functional part of the body. And by concentrating on that functional process of the bodily being to the point of absorption, we may follow the lines of the nervous system back to the brain. Then relatively involuntary experiences arise shakings of the body, dreamlike phenomena, involuntary emissions of the brain, flashes of light, and sounds. We may enjoy these experiences for a while; then they pass, and we can only return to our conventional gross awareness.

For thousands of years people have been doing just this, especially in the East, but also in Western esoteric cults. It is what yogis do. The introversion of attention via the ordinary functions of the bodily being is taken up as a solution to the dilemma, fear, and mortality of our gross embodiment. And this procedure does produce extraordinary effects, which are then often proclaimed as transcendental truths. For instance, if you focus on the process of sight, you will be led through the structures of the brain to the terminal in the upper rear of the head from which sight originates. At that point you will have stopped seeing. You will also have withdrawn attention from the currents of the body and basically you will be aware of nothing whatsoever. And yet somehow you will be conscious, because you are still embodied, still alive, yet without any objects of awareness. You will feel the "great unity." You will say to yourself, "This is God!" When you finally are successful at this internal strategy, this is what happens. It is called "nirvikalpa samadhi, " or trance absorption without conception of form. Before you achieve this final success, you experience trance absorptions that include spurious emissions of the brain in the form of flashes and images. That state is called "savikalpa samadhi," or trance absorption via mental forms.

You cannot escape this body-mind by introverting attention. The ancient dogma, however, is that you can, and it is fitted to the naive presumption that is stated in the ancient formula "as above so below; as below so above." It is presumed that, if you can enter into more subtle awareness of your own body, the subtle dimensions within correspond to the subtle dimensions of the cosmos. This is a purely naive presumption. It is a magical presumption. It is not true in experience. Fundamentally, what we experience by inverting ourselves upon the nervous system are all the potentials of our own body-mind that belong to the nervous system and the brain. And, yes, we do see something about the subtler physics of things, but we do not see anything directly, exclusive of the medium of our own psycho-physical selves. There is no escape in such absorption, nor any freedom. We are still looking at a part of our own form. Human beings are not commonly familiar with the full "anatomy" of the whole body, or bodily being, which includes both gross and subtle centers and possibilities as manifest extensions of the heart, or the prior and conscious Nature and Condition of the body-mind. What is within and above may be mysterious and exalted relative to our ordinary, gross, waking consciousness, but it is not other than our own form. Going within is ultimately just as fruitless a technique for finding what is Absolute, Unqualified, Perfect, and Unchanging as the extroverted tendencies, the interests and desiring of daily life in which ordinary people are involved.

The traditional process of introversion is nihilistic, ultimately. It reduces the world and manifold existence to nothingness. And in the process of extroversion there is an ultimately eternalistic search. The extroverted being, the typical "Western'' man, exploits all of the patterns of the gross, earthly realm. (The game of extroversion is the characteristic cultural strategy of the West, but it is of course represented in Eastern cultures and Eastern individuals as well.) The extroverted personality wants to attain objective things that are desirable, and he wants them to remain his forever. He wants to be fulfilled on the basis of the exploitation of gross functions themselves (body, emotions, physical energy, the thinking mind). He wants vital or earthly fulfillment to be absolute fulfillment. He wants to create utopia, physical immortality, unchanging relationships. Even his religious impulse is toward a Perfect and Changeless World, either in this life or after death (in contrast with the introverted path, which ultimately leads to the annihilation of the world and the manifest self). But, you see, the world never does come to an end. It never does stop changing. Never. Everything is always changing, and so the strategy of extroversion is futile. It is not that we must worship disappearance. Things also continue, and they constantly reappear. There is an eternal cycle of appearance and continuance and change and disappearance. But all that has appeared or can appear is also changing and disappearing. Our happiness must be based on this recognition.

Thus, the urge to find what is changeless in the form of this endlessly changing pattern within and without is frustrated at last. And this is the truly spiritual discovery. This discovery is the moment of Transcendental Awakening. It is the way into the life of Truth. When there is the realization that Happiness, Truth, God, Reality, or Eternal Blissfulness cannot be found on the basis of the exploitation of any kind of experience, internal and introverted, or external and extroverted - when there is that discovery, then we have begun the true inspection of existence. Not a single experience, within or without, is hopeful, promising, or ultimately liberating.

Paradoxically, it is in the moment of perfect frustration of the search for Happiness that there is awakening to the Principle that is Happiness. This moment corresponds to the understanding that neither the introversion nor the extroversion of attention, neither internal nor external experience, ever realizes what is Transcendental Happiness, or Perfect Enjoyment, but only discovers temporary modifications and permutations of one's own mortal psychophysical condition. The internal exploitation of life is a gesture toward everything that we consider to be mind, leading toward the annihilation of ordinary awareness. And the external, or extroverted, exploitation of experience is a gesture toward everything we call ordinary life, the "real world," the body and its pattern of relations. It is a gesture toward a perfect, eternal body, an eternal world, eternal relationships. But neither of these strategies is a gesture toward Truth. Both are only reactions to life, tormented and fruitless searches for true happiness and freedom.

The principal criticism offered in this Teaching or Way of Divine Ignorance is the criticism of the quality of life as Narcissus, the avoidance of relationship, the self-possessed, self-oriented, selfmeditative reaction to existence. In its introverted form, this reaction becomes all the desires and desperate striving for a glamorous inward life. In its ordinary or common extroverted form it is simply the anti-relational tendency of consciousness. The action and realization of existence as Narcissus characterizes everyone, Eastern and Western. People need not necessarily have an interest in a deep inner life. Even the most exaggerated extroverted activities of Westerners are still representations of this same self-meditative disposition, the avoidance of relationship.

Undoing this contraction, this separation in the midst of Infinity, is what the Way of Divine Ignorance is all about. And the initial aspects of the process involve the transformation of your introverted and extroverted Narcissistic life into a relational life, a life of literal love. The core of the process is the relationship to the Spiritual Master. The essential discipline of religious and spiritual life is relationship, principally in the ordinary life of service to others and in the relationship to the Spiritual Master. The spiritual process is relationship itself, the disposition of Radiance, or love, not any form of extroversion or introversion of attention. It cannot be described in terms of what you do to yourself or your changes of state or belief. This relational process involves, ultimately, the dissolution of every vestige of the self-possessed contraction from Infinite or All-Pervading Existence. It is a matter of breaking through this self-possessed, Narcissistic movement of the being. The characteristic dramatization of this movement differs from person to person, culture to culture, and East to West, but in all cases it is essentially the same recoil. And to break it down, to penetrate it, to become a sacrifice to Infinity, is profoundly difficult.

The Way of Truth, the Way of Real Life, is not the satisfaction of internal or external desires - not the fulfillment of this structure, high or low, inside or outside - but it is the sacrifice of all of it, through love, or the perfect yielding of all feeling and attention to Infinity under all conditions, to and through all relations, via every part or function of the whole body-mind. The Way of Truth is neither the exploitation of the external life, nor the exploitation of the internal life, but the perfect sacrifice, or surrender, of one's independent body-mind, this illusion of independence that we are struggling to glamorize and make survive. This Way is a unique process, not like strategic introversion or strategic extroversion. It is not self-manipulative. It is in fact the sacrifice of self, of the whole body-mind. It is love in the most literal and radical terms.

You become that upon which you chronically or most essentially meditate. As long as you persist in the meditation of your parts, you continue to appear in those forms. When the gesture of existence becomes sacrifice, the intuitive sacrifice or yielding of all experiential conditions, then you are Glorified, Transformed. In this Way, or Process, all of the functions of the body-mind become ordinary. They no longer bear the burden of Infinity. One can live an ordinary life without inherent frustration or recoil. One can engage with humor in the play of human relationships. It is only in the traditional solution, the introverted path of life, that one becomes strategically ascetic, trying to cut off the grosser or physical part and entering into the subtler or mental and supermental part.

But in the disposition of our Way, the Way of Truth, there is no strategic orientation or disorientation in relation to any of the parts of the bodily being. There is, rather, a right relationship to every part and function of the bodily being. We must have a right relationship not only to things toward which we might negatively orient ourselves by tendency, but also to those things toward which we might be positively oriented. Such a right relationship is essentially sacrificial in nature, Radiant, founded in the Intuition of the Condition that is Truth, rather than in self-possession. It is a relationship of right and Lawful use, not of deluding and degenerative use. Those who practice this Way assume the position of "no prior restraint" toward all aspects of the bodily being, including everything above and below, including sexuality and the higher, intuitive centers of the brain, as well as food and the verbal aspects of the brain. We have nothing but a positive orientation to the whole body and all its functions-but they must be lived in Truth.

In the course of this Way of Divine Ignorance, there occurs the awakening of every center and part of the bodily being, and the natural integration of every center into the unified life of Truth. There is an awakening, gradually, in due course, of a right relationship to every function of the bodily being. One continues to live an ordinary life, but one is obliged to transform it, to make it an expression of this Law of sacrifice rather than an expression of the need to be perfectly fulfilled by something that is limited, changing, ultimately frustrating. Therefore, to enter as total sacrifice, or love, into both our ordinary human relations and the higher or transcendental functions of life is the true form of '`asceticism," or the process of transcendence. There are dimensions of this practice in which the individual is turned upon the traditional yogic, internal, or subtle objects, but these things are not made an end in themselves. They are a moment in the lesson whereby we come to make this Sacrifice perfectly.

Thus, there is a functional progress, via the stages of this practice, in the literal sacrifice of the whole body-"I," or the bodymind. It is a progress that becomes more and more esoteric, or beyond conventional understanding, and that, over time, includes more and more of the subtler aspects, functions, and centers of the body-mind. This sacrifice is not a kind of suicide, you see. Suicide is a destructive gesture toward oneself. There is no self-destructive motive in this sacrifice. It is the yielding of the self through love, through functional relaxation of the knot, the contraction of consciousness, the avoidance of relationship. The final and ultimate stage of this Way is a process in which even the cells of the brain, even the nervous system, even the fleshy body, even the whole world and all its relations are liberated into their prior Condition. The realm of manifestation is relieved of its solidity. It has become transparent, and it ultimately dissolves.

So it is by the sacrifice of the whole affair of this body-mind through perfect or radical Intuition, Divine Communion, or sacrifice in the truest sense, that we are literally translated into the Bliss or Radiance that is Eternal and that Pervades all existence. That Reality is not at the root of the nervous system nor at the end of the world in time. It is Present. When we Realize It, we are Dissolved in It. Ultimately, we vanish-not only out of present sight, as in death, but out of the entire space-time cycle of action and reaction, or illusion and change. The Perfect Devotee not only Realizes the Inherent Bliss of Existence, but he is Liberated out of the scheme of souls in manifestation and Translated into the Scheme of souls in God, beyond the World of Man.

Narcissus is the fundamental archetype of all human suffering and illusion-but he takes many forms, depending upon the unique qualities of the individual, and also upon the cultural or social tendencies of men in any time and place. In earlier ages the vitalphysical body was the focus or seat of man's waking sense of identity. Now that locus is the thinking mind or brain. Thus, Bubba Free John addresses our identification of "I" with the thinking mind and our sense that "I" is in the head and brain, within or even separate from the physical body.

The key to our Awakening to the true Condition of "I" is the integration and sacrifice of the total psycho physical body in the heartfelt "hearing " of the argument of Truth and "seeing " of the Spiritual Master, who represents the ultimate evolutionary and Transcendental Realization of Man. The Spiritual Master illumines not only the conflict between the thinking mind and the lower, vital body and desires, but also the lower mind's suppression of the higher psychic and intuitive faculties of the brain. Thus, he heals the devotee of the torment of bodily self-division, and he draws him into the clarity and ecstatic wisdom of Radiant Ignorance, which transcends every kind of Narcissism.

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The Bodily House of Narcissus

The true psycho-physical "root" or "center" of the human body-mind is the entire body-mind itself, rather than some center within the body-mind. Thus, the reactive contraction that separates the body-mind from the All-Pervading Life is the reactive contraction of the entire body-mind, which curls upon itself in every part, toward self-possession and problematic commitment to the survival and fulfillment of the independent -U'

However, the characteristic signs of that self-defining reaction to Life in the case of the usual individual may be read in a specific organ and function complex. Thus, the usual individual displays chronic psycho-physical tension at the perineum, anus, genitals, navel, solar plexus, heart, lungs, throat, mouth, face, spinal line, and brain.

The bodily "base" or "floor," which includes the anus, perineum, and sex organs, is the common functional "lock" that separates the individual or whole body from the foundation that is Life. Likewise, the bodily "ceiling," which tends to be created by reactive "locks" or chronic tensions at the mouth and the visual, verbal, and speech centers of the brain, creates a continuous and unpassable barrier to aspiration and intelligence. All the rest of the body-mind composes the "four walls" of self-enclosure.

Only when the "door" or "window" of the heart awakens the whole and entire body-mind in the intuition and spontaneous love of Life, or the Divine Ignorance-Radiance, does this house and hedge of Narcissus dissolve in the ecstatic Regeneration of Happiness.

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The Three Disturbances

The chronic disturbances of Man separate us from our Real Condition of Divine Illumination, Freedom, and Bliss. These disturbances relate to the three primary functional dimensions of the human individual-that is, the physical, the emotional, and the mental.

The chronic disturbances of the physical being are reactive contractions, or recoil from Life, in the form of disease and general ill health, pain, toxemia, enervation, and obsessive desire for the consolations of food, sex, company, and the objective goods of human existence.

The chronic disturbances of the emotional being are reactive contractions, or recoil from Love, in the form of fear, shame, sorrow, guilt, anger, jealousy, and so forth.

The chronic disturbances of the mental being are reactive contractions, or recoil from Faith, recoil from Absorption in the Absolute Personality of God, recoil into doubt, deluded thinking,obsessive mentalizing, and all the consolations of knowledge in relation to experience.

Therefore, the Way of Divine Ignorance, which is the Way of Eternal Fullness of Life, Love, and Faith, is a matter of responsibility for all of the chronic disturbances of Man, so that there may not be the slightest difference between us and the Absolute Divine Personality and Condition that is Reality and Truth.

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Narcissus Is the Thinking Mind

The usual man is trapped in a loveless orgy of knowing what is. He must be liberated into the moral and spiritual ecstasy of irreducible Ignorance and Love.

The usual man is self-possessed and self-divided. The two halves of his brain and of his body as a whole are in conflict, even out of communication with one another, like a divorced couple. Thus, his sense or conception of life is one of inherent dilemma, as if the universe were frustrated to the degree that it had become a mortal self, and it fears to fall in love again.

The usual man conceives of human existence as a problem, or a primal and irreducible dilemma, and he seeks solutions by exploiting his own separate parts, or all his capacities for experience. He is reactive, and subjectively oriented. Yet, he is motivated toward experience and repetition of experience in the functional and outward realms with which he is already familiar.

The usual man is in fear of the loss or death of self, of defined body and conceptual mind. He is bound to the solutions of Narcissus, or the habits of self-possession, founded on self-division. Narcissus is himself the waking state, the conscious or verbal mind. The usual man is bound to this state of consciousness and defends it with all sorts of rational nonsense. He feels threatened by the nonrational dimensions below and above the verbal mind, below and above the conceptual or knowing mind that defends him against both the unknown and the unknowable. He recoils from the subconscious and the unconscious, the wordless realms of feeling and energy. And he remains bound to his life of self-defense against the powers outside verbal consciousness-so that he remains unaware of the realms of superconsciousness and intuitive ecstasy above and beyond the verbal mind and the knowing self.

The usual man seeks knowledge, solutions, and power-to control what is beyond knowledge and beyond the waking or verbal states of mind. He is often mean, righteous, rational, blithe, and apparently fearless. He is always weak in love, in sacrifice, in sensual sensitivity, and in understanding of the essentially selfless or undefinable nature of the body-mind itself.

If we can discriminate between our mechanical and our truly ecstatic ways, if we can awaken from our self-divided mental and bodily states, if we can be shaken out of the subjective and selfdefining recoil from the unknown and our own vulnerability, then we can be the ecstasy of self-sacrifice and "see" the Vision of Eternal Life. If we can be awakened from the inherent sleep of the verbal mind, if we can identify with the formless fire below the brows, if we can relax the tension at the brows and so release the brain to the truly awakened mind above and beyond thought, then we can feel we are not self or limits but a living process moved to ecstasy beyond the body-mind.

The usual, contracted, verbal man is always asking questions, trying to find a way to be comfortable in the chair of the body. His reveries are all so correct, punctuated with symbols that gesture at great matters. But he cannot rise or fall. He is frozen in the dream of certainties, the mysticism of a rationality that excludes what is above and below the thinking mind.

The usual man seeks control by all means, since he fears that he and even existence itself are out of control. He makes sublime sighs whenever he sees something orderly. But he does not understand that all order is an arbitrary design, made of repetitions of like things.

Order is Truth to Narcissus. He dies for the sake of order. He dies because of order. He is self-possessed, possessed of the duplication or repetition of everything he wants to continue to be. He repeats himself, literally. He is fixed upon himself, the symbol of certainty. At last, unable to yield to what is more than self, below thought, above thought, outside the thinker, he contracts upon himself, imploded on the instant of thinking.

There must be awakening to the Condition in which we are appearing, and which always exceeds our situation. We are born to ecstasy, or release of belief in the independence of consciousness and existence. We are obliged to awaken beyond our fearful defenses, the motives and solutions of Narcissus. No matter what arises, and no matter how familiar we become with any factor of experience, we never know what even a single thing is. The whole body-mind is the mind, and it is not conception, knowledge, or selfpreserving certainty. It is Ignorance, the ecstasy of participation in the centerless Consciousness and limitless Radiance of the Real World.

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The Truth of the Whole Bodily Being

The Truth of the whole bodily being is not to be found by appeal to the separate dispositions of either the right hemisphere of the brain or the left hemisphere of the brain, the right half of the body or the left half of the body, the extroverting or the introverting tendencies. Truth, or Reality, is not itself contained in either the vital or the mental realms of the bodily being. Rather, the Truth of the whole bodily being, or body-mind, is intuited in the unified or balanced consciousness, in which all the parts are in an harmonious equalization and relaxed beyond their objects into the radical (rather than extended or reductive) intuition of the Condition or prior Intensity of all experience.

Therefore, the Truth is not specifically within, nor without. No differentiated experience or concept, high or low, contains It or is It. Truth is intuited whole bodily, that is, through sacrifice or yielding of the entire body-mind to the intuition of the Real Condition. Such Truth is not a concept, a finite objective experience, or anything past or future. It is the prior or absolute Intensity that is the literal or Real Condition of all arising phenomena. To abide in the intuition of that Condition is to abide in or as that Condition itself. And to abide in that Condition is to be free of the limiting and deluding and motivating force of all conditions, high and low, while at the same time to be humorously and compassionately and creatively related to whatever arises moment to moment.

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The Argument of the Whole Bodily Being

The argument of the right side, the Occidental religious impulse, is directed toward the man, the living human being, and urges him (or her) toward a moral enlivening of his relations to others, to the world, and to his own mysterious Source.

The argument of the left side, the Oriental religious impulse, is directed toward the consciousness in Man that precedes all his faculties and relations, and the argument urges toward inwardness and ascent toward transcendence and reductive Realization of prior undifferentiated Oneness.

The right-sided view tends toward multiplicity, dualism, exploitation of things in themselves, and irreducible engagement in the mechanics of apparent experience. It also promotes a mystical (mysterious) consciousness in relation to events.

The left-sided view tends toward singleness, monism, and separation from things and relations and the mechanics of apparent experience, at least at the gross level of the body-mind. It promotes a spiritual (transcendental) consciousness in relation to events.

The argument of the whole bodily being, the impulse in Reality or Truth, is not a synthesis of the left and right, East and West, but a radical impulse that is free of the independent limitations of each side. It is free of the illusions of things and relations in themselves, as well as the inward faculties and the illusion of independence of any form, condition, or Condition. It stands Present in the form of the unqualified intuition of the Condition of the whole bodily being, and thus rests in transcendental Awareness. However, it is natively committed to non-independence, or freedom from recoil and inwardness relative to the Process wherein all conditions are arising. This does not mean, however, that it is committed to conditions in themselves. Rather, it participates or is a Sacrifice in the Process of all arising. Thus, it abides in Radiance or Bliss even as the world and all relations come and go. It is moral and mystical, transcendental and spiritual in the most perfect sense.

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Awakening from the Word

The conventional culture of contemporary Man is primarily a culture of the verbal mind and the discrete or discursive languages of the left side of the average or common brain model. Thus, it is a culture that tends to be dominated by verbal and other discursively symbolic language systems (such as the potent visualism of television and movie theatre, which make inverted use of visual or spatial and right-brained phenomena in order to serve the purposes of the verbal or discursive mind). The contemporary individual is propagandized constantly by exclusively left-brained appeals, powerful verbal influences, promises of ultimate egoic glamorization and fulfillment, and the parentlike authority of analytical "knowledge." Our experience and our understanding are dominated and determined by these means-so much so that the media of discursive mental culture, such as television, and all other officially reported knowledge, are more fundamental to us than what we experience in our living relationships and our intuition of the ultimate Reality. The "word" has finally become our Parent, and we are being eaten alive.

The exoteric or common order of verbal and left-brained culture is the daily "TV world" of verbal conventions and commonly communicated "knowledge" or "news." But there is an esotericism or esoteric cultural core that is tending more and more to dominate the lives of individuals. The political and common social world of our too-spoken lives is the exoteric level of the dominating influence in our common culture. But the esoteric order that is the inevitable extension of our verbal or left-brained world is tending more and more to dominate us, whether openly or more or less indirectly, like a secret and high priesthood. And, like all high priesthood's, the Super-Church of our time is in league with the State, and ultimately seeks to control the State.

The scientific, rationalist intellectual, and technological core-culture of our social order is the secret esoteric "Mother Church" of the left-brained congregation of ordinary people. It is through the growing and pervasive influence of this exclusively left-brained esoteric or most highly developed core of our verbal culture that the holistic, intuitive, psychic, or right-brained communion with the conditions and the Reality of our world is being gradually eliminated as a possibility. In ancient times, the exoteric and esoteric influences that dominated the daily culture were predominantly right-brained and hallucinatory, and this exclusivity produced its own symptoms of imbalance. But in a fully evolved human culture, the right and the left, or the psychic-holistic and the mental-analytical, aspects of the human potential must be mutually integrated and balanced, and then the whole and entire body-mind must be submitted to the All-Pervading Life and Divinity that animates us. If human societies cannot evolve into whole brain and whole body levels of adaptation, then the human being and the human world will inevitably be reduced to a mechanical and self-possessed destiny that is mortal, loveless, and absurd.

It is not that the rigorous and intelligent use of the verbal or discursive mind is not necessary. It is indeed culturally necessary. And both scientific and technological advances can do much to improve even the political and economic as well as intellectual estate of mankind. But the exclusivity of that influence and its pervasive philosophical disposition toward the contracted, analytical, and independent or analyzed-self orientation are a negative extension of the egoic or exclusive and self-possessed disposition of the individual in his fear. From that exclusive viewpoint, the pattern of totality may be analyzed, but the viewpoint itself cannot be sacrificed into the pattern, nor can the ultimate and All-Pervading Reality or Condition of the whole and of every part become the dominant factor in the daily life of the individual or the society. Scientism and the left-brained predisposition can produce an age of analytical knowledge but not an age of faith (in the highest sense). Therefore, we must be culturally and personally awakened to the Mind and Intuition that is obvious only to the whole brain and the whole body-mind, or else the Parental Word will slay the Radiant Children of our Mystery.

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Conventional spiritual, mystical, yogic, and even magical and religious techniques are all of a single design. They are each an attempt to focus the attention of the individual on one or another phenomenon or function of human or psycho-physical experience, and, by raising attention to a state of concentration, and then contemplation, to trace that phenomenon or function back along the psycho-physical (generally neurological) lines of its transmission or communication within the bodily being, to its terminal or root-source in the brain.

The most common subjects of such concentration are the functions of sight, hearing, touch or sensory awareness, thought or speech, and the vital "breath" or Life-Current of the nervous system. Actually, any phenomenon or function of the bodily being may be chosen, according to the individual's inclination or state and stage of practice. Thus, emotion, desire, functional sexual awareness, the senses of taste and smell, progressions of ideas archetypes, intuitive consciousness, and so forth may be chosen. But all lead to the same event: a temporary and exclusive sense of undifferentiated unity, and the illusion of ultimate release from the double-bind of mortal experience. Such is conventional "samadhi" or "equanimity," the goal of traditional practice.

Once any phenomenon or function has been inverted or traced to its psycho-physical root in the brain and stabilized there, that same function or phenomenon may, when again externalized or returned to its objects, be used more freely by the individual, and more as a means of communicating a conventional sense of wholeness and freedom to others-even of projecting to them the energies or states of awareness the successful practitioner has himself realized. But the whole affair is quite ordinary, human, and even mortal still.

Once all of this has become clear, the strategic inversion of attention and of functions toward brain terminals becomes, at best, an instrument for regaining a certain balance, but, at worst, a source of illusions and a method of imbalance or even insanity. The whole process ceases to be ultimately attractive or fascinating or hopeful-no longer a viable or salvatory means, in itself, to Realize Truth, or God, or Reality "Itself," or a destiny more than mortal, or even a supracosmic transportation. The inversion of attention via the processes of our psycho-physical signs is an ancient method of human fear. This technique of our own bodily design is the key to the origin of our traditional ideas about the ultimate Reality, such as: "God" is Causeless Cause, Origin and Source, the Head or First of all causes, Independent or Beyond the world and mankind and the individual. Likewise, the extroversion of attention via the design of functions is the key to the origin of our sense of independent or separated existence, and of the world as a pattern that exists independent of some Independent, Unknown, but implied Source or Cause. But, truly, we do not know any such "Truths. " We do not know what even a single thing is, and the internal and external are equally a Mystery, inseparable from one another, and simultaneous with one another. When this is our certainty, the bodily being is set free from both introversion and extroversion as independent problem and solution oriented strategies of ultimate release. Then we Awaken to radical intuition of the Real Condition of the whole and entire bodily being and all other arising phenomena, and the process of dissolution of the illusions and consolations of independent existence truly begins.

The Ultimate Identity of the Brain Is the Current of the Whole Body

The verbal mind is to the brain what the external vital organs (mouth, anus, and genitals) and the lower vital functions are to the extended body. Aspects of the functioning of the verbal region of the brain correspond to the general processes of connection, reflection or duplication, reception, assimilation, discrimination of contents, distribution, healing, fortification, elimination, creative generation, native pleasure, and even regeneration.

When the language activity of the brain is reinforced to the point that it is more or less continuous, the whole body becomes possessed by the illusion that "I" is exclusively identical to the verbal and differentiated consciousness. Thus, thought becomes chronic, constant, out of control. There is fear of the loss of thought as well as anxiety about the inadequacy of thought-that is, the vulnerability of the self to experience, on account of the absence or weakness of knowledge. "I" and thought are felt to be identical. The self is believed to be exclusively within and above, in or at the brain.

This is the chronic state of the usual man. Observe it yourself. When you consider your foot, doesn't it seem to be "down there" ?

The verbal and brain identification of self is merely a sign of arrested organ adaptation, like neurotic fixation on the organs of the mouth, anus, or genitals. It is a sign of neurotic or problematic adaptation in the third stage of life. One must awaken as the whole body confession of self and become a total sacrifice, through radical intuition and love, into the All-Pervading Divine Radiance and the Unqualified Consciousness or Divine Ignorance that precedes all mentality, high or low.

Chronic thinking is chronic self-definition and lower brain fixation. It is self-possession, rooted in the thought "I." But the thought "I," and every other thought, is only a modification of the transcendental Current that is central to the entire body-mind, and that is not contained by the body-mind, but that pervades it and all other conditions of experience. Indeed, not only the thought "I," but even the entire body, which is the unthought "I," arises as a present modification of that Current. The entire body-mind and all conditions in experience, high or low, are merely unnecessary modifications of the All-Pervading Current that is the Divine Reality and Condition and Source and Destiny of all beings, things, and worlds. The body-mind is always already identical to that Current. This Realization is Liberation, or prior Freedom, and it necessarily quickens a Process wherein the body-mind is Translated or Dissolved into the Absolute Radiance and Unqualified Consciousness that are the prior and Divine Nature of the Current of the body-mind.

To think and yet to be without this intuitive understanding is to be insane, like Narcissus. It is to suffer self-illusion, and the inability to love, or consistently to live as ecstatic self-release, in relationship-the inability to be a moment to moment sacrifice of all that may be felt as self or as a support to self and its loveless, independent survival.

To be obliged to think without ceasing is to meditate on the thought "I," and all of its predicates are like a hedge about the brain and the independent self. Even the presumably Divine Attributes found in subtle form through yogic brain-contemplation are ultimately nothing more than predicates of the separate self-a means of independent survival of the brainlike "soul" rather than sacrifice of the self entirely.

The usual man thinks compulsively, and pursues verbal stimulation like an addict. Most of his thinking is a mediocre reflection or casual duplication of verbal forms (or "ideas") that pass around and through him like TV and gossip. The purpose of his thinking is simply to continue the consoling procession of self-meditative predicates.

The process of active, creative, and intuitive consideration of experience ultimately penetrates the cycle of thought and of brain fixation, whether conventional or yogic. Such consideration ultimately transcends thought and all other bodily self-limits, through radical intuition, or surrender of self-contraction, in the Radiant Current and Divine Ignorance of the Real.

Until such intuitive transcendence is stabilized and intensified to the point of Translation, a profound discipline and process of personal, moral, and higher psycho-physical purification and regenerative adaptation must be awakened and maintained through "hearing" and "seeing" in the Company of the Spiritual Master. Then even thinking must be made a voluntarily generated and directed or concentrated process, leading beyond its chronic contents, and ultimately transcending all contents, including the thought "I. "

As long as thought is chronic, it is merely self-meditation, and a support for loveless, obsessive, fearful, and mechanical existence. The thoughts that surround and glamorize the brained self are common food, or an excretion to be released, or an orgasm like spasm that thrills and degenerates the "inner man" and his body. Only when intelligent consideration presses beyond the mechanical, verbal, and repetitive affair of self-meditation, beyond the realm of self-contraction and the self-preserving search for solutions to conceived dilemmas-only then does the mind become a regenerative sacrifice, opening the brain to radical intuition of the Current of Reality. When the whole and entire body-mind is so sacrificed through intuitive love, or unobstructed feeling, then the body-mind is Transfigured and Translated into the Blissful Current that is its Source, Support, Unqualified Self, and Destiny.

Therefore, the brain self, mind, or procession of thoughts must become ecstatic. This is the foundation of the entire Way of Truth. The consideration of the argument of the Spiritual Master must persist until there is true "hearing." Such "hearing" is characterized by thoughtless intuition of the radical Condition of Ignorance. And devotional surrender to the Spiritual Master must be done in every moment to the point of "seeing." Such "seeing" is characterized by responsive and whole bodily feeling-attention, or loving Communion with the Divine Radiance, the Current of Life, under all circumstances.

The intuition of Ignorance, therefore, awakens the confession of self or soul as the whole bodily being, rather than the inward soul or the subjective brain and nervous system. And such confession is itself manifest as self-transcending or ecstatic Communion with the Radiant Reality through the nonreactive force of love, which is the Power of Life. Such a Way of Life, or Love, intense and free, beyond thought or self-possession, ultimately becomes Translation of the body-mind into the Fullness of Divine Ignorance-Radiance itself.

Mind vs. Intelligence

The reason we are so confused, misdirected, and unspiritual is that our consciousness has been made to adapt to the views of men who have not been Enlightened by the Realization of God. We are a mind rather than intelligence. We do not openly Commune with what Is, and the One Who Is. Therefore, we must be liberated from false adaptation and self-defense, and we must be restored to the primal or ecstatic disposition of Divine Ignorance in the midst of all conditions. Then we do not resort to man and mind, but we are sensitive to conditions themselves, prior to speech and self. The brain and nervous system can then Commune, or Abide in unobstructed continuity, with the Current and Process of Existence, and the Great Secret will be revealed to consciousness.

Enlightenment of the Whole Body

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