Sex, Laughter, and God-Realization
a talk by Da Free John (as Adi Da was then named)
September 7, 1975
<<<(1) MASTER DA FREE JOHN: Three fundamental disturbances appear to the solid order of your life. These are sex, laughter, and God-Realization. Wherever these three appear-sex, or pleasure, laughter, or nonseriousness, and God-Realization, or perfect Understanding-they upset the form of life. They are all forms of Ecstasy, of Formlessness, of unconditional Happiness. For that reason, all three are in various ways suppressed, manipulated, prevented, falsified, culturally excised from your daily lives.
(2) Sexuality is an obsessive cultural concern, and men and women are always involved in suppression, manipulation, and non-enjoyment of their sexuality, or of the pleasurableness of existence. As a result, life is not lived as something that is fundamentally pleasurable. Is it? [Laughter.] Whenever there is enjoyment to the point of Ecstasy, to the point of no concern whatsoever-ragged pleasure-it is frightening. You feel like something is coming into the world that is going to destroy your life, destroy the order of society. Thus, you do not allow it to appear except in little ritualized moments that you have fitted into your life.
(3) Along with the fact that every individual is conditioned to suppress, control, and manipulate the sense of pleasure and its animation, there is the whole affair of being serious, being humorless, being a seeker, someone in dilemma, a mortal-being a person. [Laughter.] Likewise, whenever there is the suppression of pleasure, there is also no humor. And where there is no pleasure and no humor, there is no God-Realization! There is no comprehension of your Nature and Condition. Such comprehension is not even possible. It can be said of pleasure, humor, and Divine Realization that none of these is truly possible without the others. If it were, perhaps your life in this Way would involve quite a different condition than I call you to. In that case, I would simply say enjoy yourselves, exploit yourselves, create as many exotic pleasures as you possibly can all the time, laugh your ass off, and simply believe in God. [Laughter.]
(4) However, this is not a useful recommendation. To do this would not amount to Truth. It would not amount to Realization. You can exploit yourself to the point of pleasure, you can be put in the mood of humor, and you can feel sympathetic with the Realization of the Divine. But you cannot Realize these without the awakening of the conscious process in yourself. Thus, conditions must be provided to permit your self-inspection and a crisis in consciousness. Ultimately, the devotee's life is a life of pleasure, including sex, a life of humor, and a life of God, but it is dependent upon the conscious process,1 which must be lived.
(5) Just so, there is no Divine Realization in Truth without humor, without pleasure. No one who is humorless and pleasureless has Realized God. And you, because of the nature of your whole life, assume by tendency that those who have Realized God are supposed to be humorless, lifeless, pleasureless, silent, and elsewhere. Right? The images you have of saints and mystics and Realized men are all humorless and pleasureless. These images always imply that such beings are involved in something somewhere else, and if they start to laugh, unwind, dance, and enjoy themselves-this makes them suspect. That is what you think, isn't it? [Laughter.] Thus, people become very offended by me. They think I am only being the Guru and doing my Work when I sit absolutely silent and appear very serious and inward and holy. But this is not true.
(6) DEVOTEE: Master, you said the conscious process occurs prior to laughter, sex, and Divine Realization. Does the conscious process exclude those from the beginning?
(7) MASTER DA FREE JOHN: No. It is simply that until one takes such a position, the arising conditions of experience, of the mind, of consciousness, and of life are all karmic in their force. They are all bound to the strategy of Narcissus, of limitation, separation. The whole affair of manifest existence, from top to bottom, may not be lived in Truth, as a fulfillment of its own Law, prior to perfect Realization. In the process of that Realization, the conditions of existence are lived in the form of disciplines, in the form of conditions that serve the crisis in consciousness. As the conscious process arises in the case of any individual, more and more of his life becomes a matter of responsibility, of Happiness, and therefore it may be lived and enjoyed truly.
(8) Thus, the process of sadhana2 is shown in the form of the increased capacity for Happiness, not merely in an exclusive, compartmented superconsciousness, but even dramatically in life. It is Happiness. Spiritual life is not about becoming less and less capable of life or less and less interested in it-not at all. True spiritual life is Illumined and Happy, not obsessive. You are not always experiencing the same pleasure, always exploiting the body, and so forth. Rather, with the Realization of your Real Condition comes Happiness in the body, which is reflected in your life as the capacity for enjoyment, even through your ordinary human functions.
(9) The man of understanding is Free in his sexuality, Free in his body, Free in his mind, Free in his pleasure, Free in his humor, Free in his laughter. And he is Free in his God-Realization. He is not bound to any limitation by virtue of a limited mysticism. The Free man is absolutely Free-not just a little bit free, not cut off from life. The nature of his Freedom is not humorlessness and non-pleasure relative to the world. No, in his Freedom he becomes capable of humor in life, capable of pleasure or enjoyment in the forms that are arising. That is the fullness of God-Realization. All the humorless, pleasureless forms of experience that are often associated with God-Realization in the traditions are not God-Realization in Truth.
(10) DEVOTEE: It seems that a person who is capable of pleasure would not exploit that capacity. In my experience, exploitation comes from the lack of being able to get pleasure from anything I do. It is a search for pleasure that is never gratified.
(11) MASTER DA FREE JOHN: Yes. But what may look like exploitation from the frustrated point of view of the usual man is dance to the man who is Free. Look at how exaggerated the universe is. Look at how exaggerated the Earth is compared to all these monotonous human beings. The Earth is always in upheaval. Earthquakes are happening, there is every kind of weather, things are growing and dying, and creatures are eating one another. Life is a mad and lusty affair, apart from what human beings are always doing! The Earth and sky and other creatures do things that you would not even consider doing. [Laughter.]
(12) You are offended by all of that! So you want there to be heaven. [Laughter.] In heaven there are no earthquakes, no bad weather, no creatures eating other creatures, no death. Right? This is a reflection of your own strategy, your reaction to life. The typically human strategy is not something that you especially have worked up on your own. All human beings are involved in it. We communicate it to one another through social forms, through the genes, and through the racial mind.
(13) DEVOTEE: When I hear about the kind of Freedom you are talking about, my reaction is that I could be that Free only as long as I was doing what God wanted me to do. I have a sense that the Divine is overseeing my Freedom.
(14) MASTER DA FREE JOHN: The Divine is not overseeing that Freedom. The Divine is that Freedom. Apart from the Realization of the Divine, the exploitation of the capacity for pleasure in the body and the mind, mere laughter, and mystical experiences are fundamentally negative, karmic realizations and are part of the violence or separativeness of the drama of human life. But in the case of Perfect Enjoyment, that Perfect Realization that is the Divine, all of these qualities then become play, non-karmic in nature. The very same things that are lived as karma or limitation by the usual man are lived as the Divine Play by the man of understanding, the true devotee.
(15) DEVOTEE: Does that mean that nothing really interferes with Realization? It always seemed to me that it was my responsibility to not encroach upon the possible Realization of others, to live that Divine Freedom from the point of view of not affecting the states of other people.
(16) MASTER DA FREE JOHN: I don't know how you could do that. You are always affecting the state of others even before you do anything. We are not merely bodies, even from the conventional, manifest point of view. We are energies, and we communicate conditions to the psyches of one another without speaking a word, without making a single gesture. Even by trying not to affect one another we still do it.
(17) Our communications are like radio and TV signals. All you do is turn on the set and the signal appears. And your set is always turned on. [Laughter.] Your signals are constant. You are always affecting others. You cannot take the humorless, impotent point of view that you are not going to affect others and have that really be true of you. You must see that you are always affecting others already, and they are affecting you. Knowing that, engage the real process that is not bound to such concerns, such strategies, in which you truly become radiant in a benign form. That is liberating to others.
(18) DEVOTEE: You said that sex, humor, and God-Realization are three basic states or conditions. Are these the only three?
(19) MASTER DA FREE JOHN: They are good enough! [Laughter.] In sex or pleasure, the body and the life-force are overwhelmed. In laughter, the mind is overwhelmed. In God-Realization, the self is overwhelmed. When all these three are enjoyed, everything is overwhelmed, and the world is exploded. That is the dance of Siva, the Play of God.
(20) The world is the Play of God, and it is already Free. It is already Madness. You think of it as some very solid, humorless something, but when you really see it, you will see the Madness of it, the Play of it, the Formlessness, the Ecstasy, the Happiness of it. Now you are weighted down by your considerations, by your assumption of a separate sense, by your striving. As a result, you see the world as an illusion, as a condition of suffering, and there are many things about the world and about yourself that you do not like. These are the things you suppress and hope will go away or be brought to an end by Jesus or someone. [Laughter.]
(21) There is no Divine life without understanding all of that, without the perfect knowing of it, the perfect playing of it. That is heaven. There are worlds of all kinds, but heaven is not true unless it is the same as God-Realization. Such Realization is compatible with the appearance of any world. There is no place that is literally heaven. There are places that are better than this, I can tell you! [Laughter.] But they are not heaven. Compared to this place, maybe they are. But apart from the ordinary point of view, this world is just as heavenly, just as Ecstatic as any that I have ever been to certainly. I play with people and tell them about how I have been sent to this bush place in the outer regions to perform a heavy gig when I could be in some really wonderful place. [Laughter.] But I say that just for fun.
(22) God or the Totality of everything does many things, and it all amounts to Play from the Divine point of view, but for you only some of it is playful. Only some of it is fortunate. Only some of it is happy. The rest of what God does is likely to be threatening, terrifying. The Divine brings an end to things, for example. We do not want to think of that as being Divine. We want to make God responsible for all the good things and make everything else the devil's creation. As soon as you start believing in the devil, you are in deep trouble.
(23) DEVOTEE: Master, the Buddhist idea of shunyata, or emptiness, seems to represent a quality of realization that cuts away the pleasure of sexuality, and it seems not to have a lot of laughter except in rare instances.
(24) MASTER DA FREE JOHN: Such descriptions of so-called realized men would have to be considered in terms of the conventions of their appearance, rather than in terms of any detailed philosophical analysis of what shunyata is or what it contains. Clearly, humorlessness, the absence of a positive life-orientation, and so forth are not the signs of enjoyment in Truth. They are signs of limitation and fixation upon possibilities within the world that are not themselves Truth.
(25) It is true that there is nothing, that this is void. But you do not make it void. "This is void" is not a declaration or a principle by which to suppress the world. It is an Ecstatic communication about the world while it continues. It is Divine Play, in other words. It is possible for such a description to be compatible with perfect Divine Realization.
(26) However, if there is no humor, no fullness of life, no joy, no real Freedom in the midst of arising phenomena, there is no God-Realization, no Realization in Truth, no Nirvana. This is Nirvana. Some within the Buddhist tradition have confessed this, and from the little we know about them, we may assume that they were very lively and humorous people.
(27) There is no compassion without humor. There is no love without pleasure. There is no Freedom without God-Realization. What is called compassion from the conventional point of view of religious motivation is a strategy, an attitude, not real compassion, because humor is not realized, Divinity is not realized, the pleasure that is Life is not realized. Such compassion is assumed as a method for attaining realization, but it is not compassion any more than loving your neighbor as a moral creed or religious motivation is love. It perhaps enables you to manipulate your life in various ways to produce the social conventions that we call love, compassion, and so forth, but these are purely conventional. They have social value at best.
(28) When you are capable of life as Ecstasy, as real enjoyment, then you can love. Then you have no option. Then you are only love. When your humor is complete beyond any limitation, beyond the possibility of being undone, then you are compassionate. Then you are only compassion. When God-Realization is perfect there is only God. Then you are Free. Values that are socially benign may be communicated to society from the point of view of such Realized individuals, or from the point of view of those gathered around them, but such values are not fully true expressions in an individual until there is perfect Realization.
(29) DEVOTEE: It seems that what people tend to do is cling to changes in consciousness as truth. But I see the inappropriateness of that yogic search. The pleasure you are talking about tonight has to do with real spiritual life.
(30) MASTER DA FREE JOHN: Yes. As long as there is identification with the separate subject and its adventure, the pleasure, humor, and God-Realization of others is a threat. You must come to a point of being present with a degree of manliness, man or woman. You must begin to live on the basis of what you have understood, what is obvious to you, the revelation of your sadhana.
(31) Then you will be an enjoyer in spite of the news, in spite of the homely and ordinary and mediocre appearance of others, and you will be capable of humor in spite of the humorlessness of the cultural, spiritual, and social traditions by which we ritually bind one another. You will be capable of being Happy. You will know the Divine to be your own Nature and Condition, in spite of all the grim-faced saints and all the dogmas to the contrary. In that case you will be useful to others-not until then, however.>>>
Namaste!
Jim |
