In the last post, I talked about meditation as medicine. Yesterday a friend handed me a copy of: The Dreaded Gom-Boo or The Imaginary Disease that Religion Seeks to Cure. A Collection of Essays and Talks on the “Direct” Process of Enlightenment by Da Free John.
This material is really fantastic, as is all of Adi Da’s work. I’ll quote some of what really struck me here.
From Chapter 2, Tell me True – Have You Got the Gom-Boo? by Da Free John
“We start out naively seeking to know and to experience as a way of becoming expansive and happy and ultimately fulfilled. But our search does not become Happiness. The more we know and experience, the less happy we are as a general tendency, because we are qualifying the presumption of Being the more we experience, the more we know, the more we observe in the conventional sense, the more we analyze and see how we are functioning and how Nature works. Thus, people come to a point of weakness and despair, a feeling of bondage, as a result of the egoic elaboration of their possibilities, and they approach the Sources of Truth, communicated through religious and spiritual culture, as if seeking a cure for this dilemma, this Dreaded Gom-Boo, that is the basis of traditional religious culture.
In truth, the religious or spiritual process has nothing at all do to with the Dreaded Gom-Boo or its cure. It has nothing to do with the disease you want to make the premise of the spiritual process. The first thing you must do when you truly become involved in the process associated with Truth is to understand, and, immediately, directly, presently, to transcend the disease that you seek otherwise to cure. The pursuit of the cure of the disease is the same activity as the one whereby you first acquired the disease. It is a version of the disease, something you do because you are diseased. It is not another process than disease. At most it involves a different relationship to the disease. Whereas previously you unwittingly did everything that compounded the disease, now you want to do everything to get rid of it. The search for the cure is still another way of being diseased. It is not the Way of Truth. It is not the Way that I Teach. It is not true religion or true spirituality. True religion, true spirituality, is the process that takes place when you are already well, when you are in your Native position, when you are established in Truth, Happiness or Reality.
The spiritual process is to understand how you contracted this disease, understand the mechanics of your presuming it always in this present moment so that in every present moment you will be established in the Free Position, the Position of Happiness, Truth, or the presumption of Being. The spiritual process, then becomes the magnification of non-disease, prior Happiness, the prior presumption.”
Da Free John. The Dreaded Gom-Boo. (1983). The Johannine Daist Communion. pp. 44-45
Svaha 