There is no end to the possible suffering in this dimension and there is absolutely no end to the delusions of human beings. So spiritual life is not a way of fulfilling this life in any conventional sense. It rests upon the most absolute revulsion to the consequences of every moment, of every breath. This earth is one of the hells, and you, like all human beings, are possessed by worldliness, by the point of view of your birth, your experiencing, the illusion of your separate power and pleasure. My wrestling with people has come to an end, but I want it to be very clear between you and me what I have represented to you in my play with you over the last five or more years. Because some of you, I think, believe somehow or other that in your self-possession you represent spiritual life or this Teaching, whereas in fact you represent a degradation of it and an illusion.
I was not born into a traditional religious culture. I have no conventional society to which I belong, of which I am a monk or a representative. I have appeared in a society in which there is no spiritual tradition, no way of dealing with an individual like me, no way of dealing with a process of this kind, no way of recognizing it and truly making use of it.
When I began to take up my teaching work, I clearly understood that I was going to have to bury myself in the world in order to awaken devotees. If there were to be devotees ultimately, I would have to pass through the lower, ordinary life with them, and make lessons in that play with them, make lessons out of all the possibilities of conventional fulfillment. That conventional fulfillment includes everything from typical life pleasures to conventional, so-called spiritual and psychic enjoyment. So all of my work has been a process of engaging in play with people on the basis of conventional possibility, living it, exploiting it, allowing it to show itself altogether as experience, as consequence, in order ultimately that you might enjoy that revulsion to the destiny of this birth that would enable you to take up the spiritual process truly.
There is no spiritual culture here, practically no culture whatsoever. Look at the street you came up out of tonight( That is where you all come from, and that is where I teach. Not in order to recommend all of that bullshit, all of that terror and disease and delusion and stupidity and obsession and craving and torment, but to live with people in such a way that they might enjoy a revulsion to all possibility in itself, all fulfillment, high or low, that is latent in the tendencies of this birth. And so, at various stages in my play with individuals, you have seen me live and work in every possible way. At one or another time, everything from the most exotic psychic and conventional experience to the most ordinary fulfillment of social life was, in one or another way, represented, communicated, lived among you, and never at all for the sake of those things in themselves.
You have not understood me if that is what you thought I was up to. These experiences are not the point, they are not Truth. Every way of life that you pursue on the basis of experience, high or low, making experience the principle of your future, is ordinary destiny, the usual life leading to death. It is not spiritual in any sense whatsoever, whether its content is psychic and more subtle or very gross. The lessons of your life with me should be very clear to you in your own body-mind. And yet I do not think they are very clear to all of you, because I see so many of you intending to persist, righteously persisting, in a way of life that has nothing whatever to do with spirituality.
Everything is passing, all this flesh, all this mind. There is no freedom from rebirth and illusion unless while alive you are literally existing in another dimension. Literally! Such an existence is not a matter of philosophy, of feeling good, of all the conventional horseshit that people put together. You may return to this human kind of birth after your next death, if you are lucky, but you will return to it without any recollection, without any more capacity than you now enjoy, driven as you are now, confused, obsessed, without the least distance in you from this arising here, bound to it, craving on the basis of it, having no capacity whatsoever to be distinguished from this body-mind. This will be true of you unless while alive you literally begin to exist in another condition, in another "place." Then, at death, and also while alive, you may go there and not come back here.
2006-06-22 20:56:27
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answer #6
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answered by soulsearcher 5
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