My Brief Introduction
to the Teaching and Person of
Av at a r A d i D a S a m r a j
Compiled by Frank Marrero
“Plain Talk Chapel Series”
devoted to the Word
of Adi Da as
Franklin Jones,
Bubba Free John,
Da Free John,
and likewise to His Final Word as
His Divine Presence, Avatar Adi Da
Copyright © All materials are under the copyright of
The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as trustee for
The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam.
and
All rights are reserved with perpetual copyright claimed.
Complied by
Frank Marrero
for his own use and as gifts to his friends.
This book is for personal study purposes and is not to be
sold or used in any profit making enterprise. In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, these materials are
printed for personal use, with the possibility as a gift to
those who have expressed interest in receiving the included
information for research and educational purposes.
I am simply offering to you my own considered opinion: Adi Da's
teaching is, I believe, unsurpassed by that of any other spiritual
Hero, of any period, of any place, of any time, of any persuasion.
— Ken Wilber, philosopher, writer, Founder of The
Integral Institute, author of A Theory of Everything,
Integral Psychology, Up from Eden
It is obvious, from all sorts of subtle details, that he knows what
IT’s all about . . . a rare being. It looks like we have an avatar here.
I’ve been waiting for such a one all my life.
— Alan Watts
The life and teaching of Avatar Adi Da Samraj are of profound and
decisive spiritual significance at this critical moment in history.
— Bryan Deschamp
Senior Adviser at the United Nations
High Commission for Refugees;
former Dean of the Carmelite House of Studies,
(AUS)
Table of Contents
Introduction: Brevity ................................................. 1
Live with Me............................................................... 3
There is Only God ...................................................... 7
The Avoidance of Relationship
and the Contraction of Feeling............................... 14
The Art of the Way ................................................... 27
Divine Ignorance...................................................... 39
Divine Distraction .................................................... 45
The New Reformation ............................................. 67
Bibliography and Links........................................... 85
Introduction: Brevity
In the interest of un-mediation, let me be brief. The
teaching and Person of Avatar Adi Da are vast. This little
booklet is meant to present pithy and potent quotes of Adi
Da, arranged in a series of principle themes from the
writings and speech of this God-Man. His continuous
ecstasy, passionate love, and brightening genius enlivened
and enlightened those in His Room with Him. Therefore,
these brief quotes are best understood in the mood of
communion, blessing, and heart-moved devotion.
A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
All art herein is from Adi Da.
(see www.daplastique.com for an introduction to the artwork of Adi Da.)
A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
Live with Me
Understand and be with Me. If this is not
possible, then be with Me and understand.
— 1971, unpublished
All I have ever been doing in the Ashram is
finding ways to keep people associated with Me.
Because of their coming and going and their
inwardness and all their complications, I substitute all
kinds of things for my physical form—teachings,
dramas, celebrations, dharma instructions, practices.
All of these are just ways to keep you in My
Company. All I am doing is just keeping you present
while I am present, and that is sufficient. That is the
whole of sadhana. Everything is an elaboration of
that.
For the natural devotee, the physical form of
the Guru is sufficient. This Truth is given throughout
the traditions. Whenever the Siddhas speak, they say,
don't try to take from Me anything to do by and for
yourself. Simply bring yourself into My Company
and stay there. Simply rest your attention on Me,
sacrifice yourself to Me, sit in My physical presence,
live in My ordinary company, yield to Me everything
you experience in my company, and I will show you
My Truth.
Stay with Me and give Me your attention.
Simply live in My Company with your attention. Life
may become sacrifice, it may become all kinds of
responsibilities that are appropriate and generally
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A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
necessary. Still those responsibilities are not anything
other than this simple condition. That is the whole of
the Teaching, not only the simplest and most
appropriate Dharma for this time, but it has been the
simple communication of all the Siddhas through all
time. Even in ages when people were capable of more
technical responsibilities, this was the simple and
most direct form of the Teaching. The most graceful
Teaching is the Prasad, or Gift, of the Guru himself.
There are no complications in the simple condition of
your relationship to Me. However, if you cannot be so
simple, then you have to fulfill and become
responsible for the karmas of spiritual life, just as you
have to fulfill and become responsible for the karmas
of all other ways of life. Nevertheless, the essential
Teaching is simply to live with Me.
My promise to devotees is the same that all the
Siddhas have declared: I am with you now, as I have
always been, and I will always be with you. My
Function is without beginning or end. The work I do
in my psycho-physical form is temporary. It is done in
order to reawaken the way itself. Therefore, My
human life is only a moment. But the purpose of My
work while alive is to establish the way of Satsang,
Divine Communion, for the coming generations of
mankind.
— No Remedy, 1975
Understanding is always beholding Bhagavan,
the Form of Reality, whose center is the heart, and
whose extremities are the mind and the activities of
enjoyment. There is nothing else that is ever
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A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
experienced or known but this one enjoyment of
reality, by reality, which is reality. There is only the
one process, the one form, the one experience. It is
beholding, enjoyment, unqualified present bliss. It has
no special origination in time or form. Therefore,
cessation or change has nothing to do with it. These
things do not qualify it.
They are only the conditions of the same
primary enjoyment, as forms churning in the light,
cycling about the sun, resolving and dissolving in an
endless pattern of enjoyment, as the loved-one turns
herself before her lover.
— The Knee of Listening, 1972
Live this relationship to Me. Neither meditate
on your dilemma, nor try not to meditate on it.
Always meditate on Me. Always live this condition of
Satsang. Always do the sadhana that I will
communicate to you. If you always do that, your
concerns as well as the thing itself will dissolve. But
every time you interrupt the process of Satsang in
order to contemplate this disturbance, this dilemma,
this limitation, this feeling, this suffering, you have
turned from Me to distraction in yourself. I am not
saying you should do something to all of that. Nor am
I telling you not to do anything about all of that. What
I am telling you to do is not an action in relation to all
of that. It is an action in relation to Me. It is Satsang.
Always live with Me. Always meditate on Me.
— The Method of the Siddhas, 1973
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A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
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A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
There is Only God
This moment is the moment of reality, of union,
of truth. The only truth is radical truth. Even the
moment of self-indulgence, of avoidance, of
separativeness is the moment of reality. Nothing
needs to be done to it or you for it to be so. Nothing
needs to be accomplished, purified, undone for it to
be so. Nothing needs to be avoided, transcended or
found for it to be so. This is the greatness of truth, of
understanding, for it disarms all fear, all
circumstance, all dilemma. It is always already the
case.
We are never at any moment in the dilemma
we fear ourselves to be. Only this radical
understanding in the heart of life is the ground of real
peace and joy. All else is seeking and strife and fear.
Therefore, it is not a matter that concerns us
exclusively, apart from anything else. It is not an
alternative to any experience. It is always already the
case. This radical understanding is the only real
liberation, and it alone is the truth and realization of
this moment. Every motive is seeking. Every turning
away is avoidance. Every turning upwards is
avoidance. Every turning downwards is avoidance.
Every turning towards is avoidance. All these things
are seeking, for they are not abiding now in the form
of reality. Thus, to turn at all is to act. And every
turning will awaken the reaction of turning the
opposite way in time.
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A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
The truth is radical non-avoidance moment to
moment. It is to live this moment, this event without
conflict, directly. Where there is understanding there
is no turning, and every action turns no way at all, for
there is only radical consciousness behind it, turning
no way, knowing only great bliss.
The way is only radical understanding, which
is free consciousness. If a person begins to
understand, then he will abide in understanding, and
he will not come into conflict with his moments, his
motives, his actions, his reactions. He will abide now,
and now, and now. And this alone, not any motive or
search or effect of these, will transform the complex of
his living. And that complex will never be his
concern, to transform it or escape it or transcend it,
for he lives in understanding and draws joy even in
pleasure, in ignorance, in failure, in suffering, pain
and death. Only because he abides in understanding
is he already free, already liberated from his life.
Therefore, I affirm only understanding and no
state or object yet to be attained. It is not a matter of
purity first or at last, nor of sanity, nor wealth, wellbeing, goodness or vision. All these are the imagery of
search, the vanity of external peace.
Understanding is the ground of this moment,
this event. Therefore, enjoy it, for you alone are the
one who must live your ends and all the stages of
time. The man who understands, who is always
already free, is never touched by the divisions of the
mind. And he alone is standing when all other beings
and things have gone to rise or fall.
— The Knee of Listening, 1972
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A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
What is the Truth? We are Happy. We live in
God. The Great One is our very Being. We inhere in
the Blissful, Forceful Being of the Starry God, the
Wonder, the Mystery, the Person of Love. This is our
Situation and our Destiny.
You will never be independent. There is not
even a molecule of wood in this wall that is
independent. Nothing and no one is independent. All
of us inhere in the Great One, the Wonderful Lord, the
Marvelous Starry Person, the Delight of Being. All of
us live in That. That is our situation now. This
moment is the moment of Happiness, as is every
future moment, every moment after death, beyond
this world and other worlds, lower worlds, higher
worlds, after worlds, no worlds. It is all the moment
of infinite Delight, unless we become self-conscious
and withdraw from our relations and contract upon
our Happiness and forget It.
The Great One has magnified Itself in the form
of sexual beings, human beings, sexless beings, earth
world, form and fruit and wood and wall and space
and star and sky and cloud and tree and life and
death. The same Great One takes all these forms,
completely Indifferent, completely Free, completely
Happy in all these excesses. This is all the Great One.
The Great One creates nothing. The Great One is
everything. What a Paradox! What a Mystery! What a
Wonderful God!
— The Dreaded Gomboo, 1982
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A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
There is only God. Only God. Now many
people say that there is God, and when they say,
“there is only God”, they mean there is God. The
statement that there is only God is actually a radical
statement, because it implies that there is nothing that
is not God. Nothing! No process, no appearance, no
manifestation, not even this one, not even this
homely, little, devilish involvement of all of us, that is
not God. How wonderful that even we poor bastards
should suffer such enjoyment!
Literally there is only God. There is only one
Condition, only one Condition, not many conditions,
not a condition of which this is the manifestation.
There is one Condition, absolutely only one. How can
I say it? Let me put it this way: there is one Condition.
There is absolutely only one Condition, and that is not
other than your own Consciousness.
— Unpublished talk, 1975
Reality cannot be achieved, only avoided.
— Water and Narcissus, 1969
I am not full. I do not feel full or fulfilled. I am
lost in the Fullness. And that Fullness is that same
Fullness that includes all other beings and is their
nature.
— The Method of the Siddhas, 1973
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A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
There is only one event: Something arising. All
arising is the same mysterious fascination. Only the
Mystery is ever found, within and without. Therefore,
all that a man or woman may confront is the process
of arising, instant forever.
When the valuation of one moment or
condition over against another ceases by this insight,
then profound sensitivity is felt relative to every
instant of simple arising. And this sensitivity becomes
ultimate and radical intuition of the Condition of this
whole process of arising.
— The Enlightenment of the Whole Body, 1978
The Fundamental Current of Existence
Is Self-Existing,
Self-Radiant,
All-Love-Bliss—
and, Therefore,
All-Pleasure.
No “self”-suppression.
No ego-enforcing control whatsoever.
Consciousness Itself
and Energy Itself
(or Light-Itself)
Are Love-Bliss Itself.
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A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
Love-Bliss Itself
Is Boundless—
not controlled at all,
not merely a “point”.
Love-Bliss “Arises”
In Consciousness.
Consciousness Is the Room.
Love-Bliss Is all there is within It.
And the Room Is a Sphere. ...
The Inherent Self-Radiance
of Being
Is Bliss,
Freedom,
Happiness,
Fullness,
Non-conditional Well-Being.
This Is
Inherently The Case—
not merely the case
sometimes,
somewhere else,
after death.
The Inherent Self-Radiance
of Being
Is the Condition
of existence.
Therefore,
the Integrity of Being
is to Realise This,
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A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
Always Already.
And Real practice is
everything in a life
done to Realize This,
Always Already—
until It Is
Self-Evidently Realized,
Always Already.
And then
There Is
Just That.
And That
Is That.
— The Aletheon, 2009
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A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
The Contraction of Feeling is
the Avoidance of Relationship
What is it that you mean, that you are
signifying and pointing to, when you say or feel you
are suffering, unhappy, not at ease? You are pointing
to your own action and finding it as the experience of
separation, contraction, pain. But it is the compulsive
and presently not-conscious avoidance of
relationship, relative to the Divine Presence, and
relative to all arising conditions. When this action
becomes your responsibility, then these experiences
and concerns will become obsolete by degrees in the
action of God Communion, and then in the intuition
of your true Condition.
— Breath and Name, 1977
Recognize the primary activity, the prior
activity in consciousness. And what is the nature of
that primary activity? It has two aspects. The one is
separation in consciousness, this continual realization
in consciousness, of separation. And the other is
contraction in life. And life and consciousness are not
separable, but the peculiar qualities in which this
activity within us manifests itself are a separative
activity at the level of consciousness and contraction
in the mechanisms or functions of life. So it appears
always as identification, differentiation, and desire.
— unpublished notes, 1971
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A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
So all that a man is suffering is fascination with
the force of his own activity and experience, which
represents to him the separate self sense
(identification or "ego"), the field of differentiation
(the conceptualized world), and the endless
adventure of seeking (mysterious motivation or
desire).
— The Method of the Siddhas, 1973
You are not, fundamentally, suffering what is
happening or has happened or will happen to you.
Your suffering is your own activity. And you are
suffering from what you are doing. Thus, you also
suffer from what happens to you. Release comes by
Grace in the Company of the Divine, initially by
absorption in the true or God-Condition via a new or
true action (the Way of Divine Communion) that
makes the old action of suffering obsolete, and then,
more perfectly, by radical, intuitive insight (the Way
of Relational Enquiry and the Way of Re-cognition),
wherein you come to abide perfectly in the prior
Condition or Only God (the Way of Radical Intuition).
Since suffering is not itself a matter of your
conditions, or what has happened, is happening, or
will happen to you, but a matter of your own present
activity, which is contraction of the field of the heart
or of attention (which is felt-Radiance of the whole
undefined body), or self-definition, the avoidance of
relationship, release is not a matter of a change in
your conditions or circumstances. Liberation or
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salvation involves, principally, not a change in your
conditions but a transformation of your relationship
to or participation in forms of action. Bondage or
suffering is identical to a form of your own activity.
Liberation or salvation is release from the force and
implications of all action.
— Breath and Name, 1977
The foundation of my
Teaching Argument is this:
You are, as a matter of habit,
and in every part,
conformed to the activity
and the results of selfcontraction. It is not
possible to affirm and
Realize the existence of
God, or the Living Spiritual
Divine, or the Condition of Self-Radiant
Transcendental Being until the self-contraction is
thoroughly observed, understood, and transcended.
Therefore, all other propositions of my Teaching are
built upon the proposition of necessary selftranscendence.
The ego, or the essence of every person
(personified as "I"), is not an inner entity or subtle
essence. The ego is the activity of self-contraction.
And it is observable in the person of the "I," the body-
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A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
mind or psycho-physical persona, as the feeling of
separateness and the performance of every kind of
separative activity. Therefore, as I have indicated in
The Knee of Listening , the ego may be recognized
and transcended through consistent self-enquiry in
the form "Avoiding relationship?"
As long as you do not get the Lesson of life, as
long as you think that life is about becoming Happy,
you can blame anybody and everybody. But when
you understand the Lesson of life, you understand
that your Realization of Happiness is a matter of what
you do. It is your responsibility only. There is nobody
to blame. In fact, there is everyone to praise, no matter
what anyone does. All others are serving your
Happiness because they serve your responsibility. No
matter what occurs or what anyone does, you have
the choice to transcend your own contraction - or not.
"Consider" this: Every time you dramatize
reactivity, you are thinking you are the victim of
someone or something or some event - every time.
Reactivity is the sure sign that you have this point of
view. If you react and dramatize reactivity, you are
always blaming the event, blaming the other, instead
of introducing the self-responsible discipline into the
occasion of difficulty or stress. Always. It is always so.
— The Incarnation of Love, 1993
Ego is not an entity but an activity. It is
contraction of the field of Radiance. That contraction
is "read" as realms, worlds, or environments, bodies
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(particularly one, which is one's present face, form,
and life), desires, emotions, thoughts, perceptions, all
knowledge, and all known phenomena, high and low.
But the contraction is single, universal, present, and
utterly deluding, through the binding force of
implication. The native Condition in the midst of
conditions is unqualified heart-felt Radiance, or
undefined, whole-body Radiation, which is Love.
— Breath and Name, 1977
Narcissus is a good symbol for suffering. He
has separated himself from all relationships,
especially the primary relationships of mother, father,
loved-one, and environment. He confronts only his
own image, which he does not re-cognize as such.
Obviously, Narcissus doesn't know that the face in the
water is his own image. He does not recognize his
own image or quality as such. And suffering is in the
failure of a man to re-cognize, to know again, his own
distraction, which is his own state, his own quality,
his own modification. When he re-cognizes it, he
ceases to be enamored, fascinated and distracted. His
drama is undone by simple and yet radical
knowledge. If Narcissus understands his fundamental
activity, his insane condition will come to an end.
So all that a man is suffering is fascination with
the force of his own activity and experience, which
represents to him the separate self sense
(identification or "ego"), the field of differentiation
(the conceptualized world), and the endless
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A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
adventure of seeking (mysterious motivation or
desire). The things flashing and moving before him,
the "objects" of consciousness, imply the separate
perceiver over against the field of perception. And
where this implication becomes the point of view, the
true and prior nature of the world ceases to be
obvious. This structure goes on and on, magnified
through all forms, all the types of experience, all the
worlds of experience, all the conditions, gross, subtle
and causal, that arise. Every thing that arises is fitted
within this structure.
So it makes no difference where Narcissus
moves, what experience occurs, what technique or
search he applies to this dilemma. No matter what
occurs, he fails to know it directly. Even the Divine
Vision fails to be conclusive, because he knows it in
terms of this structure of fascination and separation. A
man is always being Narcissus until there is the recognition of this primary activity, assumption and
root of cognition. But when this re-cognition occurs,
he is like a man discovering that he has been pinching
himself. His pain was always his own event, the
theatre of his own action. When he finally sees, it is a
simple matter. He no longer needs to go through any
sort of complicated affair to get free of pain. He
doesn't have to go through any kind of therapy,
special diet, yoga, or mantra in order to be free. All he
has to do is take his hand away. Re-cognition is of that
kind.
Therefore, it is not by the elimination of
conditions or the destruction of your responsibilities
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that you are served. You are served by the
communication of your responsibilities in the
ordinary way. It is not by distracting you while you
remain irresponsible and in trouble that you are
served. It is by the forceful demand for responsibility
that you are served.
— The Method of the Siddhas, 1973
You must observe how you bring yourself back
from the Divine. You do not go with the Spirit. You do
not throw away your body, your life, and your
emotion in God. This is what you must do whenever
you Commune with me, whether I am physically
present or not. Whenever you Commune with me you
get a piece, a sniff, a taste of God. But your bodymind shuts it down, Narcissus shuts it down, you live
out your dilemma, and you must consider the
Teaching some more....
Therefore, you must prepare yourself to use
my Transmission by using my Argument-not just by
listening to it, but by combining yourself with it-to
understand the knot of self-contraction, how it works
as a mechanism that shuts down the Beauty of Infinite
Life. When you have understood me to that degree,
then you can receive My Baptism truly and begin to
practice.
The only thing that prevents the sublimity of
Spirit-Communion in every moment of existence is
the simple mechanism of self-contraction. You must
hear me, therefore. You must observe the selfcontraction and understand it so thoroughly that it is
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A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
not happening to you anymore, so that you recognize
it as your own action, so that you can enquire of it or
meditate beyond it or feel into the Life-Current, the
Divine that is beyond it, in your daily life. That is the
capability you must regenerate in yourself. It does not
exist in you now because you have habituated
yourself to shutting out the Force of God.
Therefore, the first thing you must do is to hear
me, combine yourself with the Argument relative to
Narcissus to the point of relieving yourself of the
arbitrary notion that things are just happening to you
and that you are succumbing to limitation. You must
realize that these limitations have no force at all.
Rather than just respond or react to them, you must
see the mechanism of contraction or reactivity and
know it utterly. The sense of self-contraction is just
like clenching your hand or getting a knot in your
stomach or tightening your eyebrows. You must see it
exactly as something that you do in reaction to
conditions of existence.
When you can know the self-contraction as
such, then you can be responsible for it in one or the
other of the three Ways that I describe to you. Then
you will not only experience this Baptism-all devotees
who turn themselves to me at all experience my
baptism — but you will be able to use It, because you
will be responsible for the activity that turns away
from It. Then you will become a real devotee. You will
become a practitioner. You will move through these
slices of time, these technicalities of the various stages
of practice, swiftly and directly. The essence of
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practice is this capability for self-understanding. Have
I not told you this? You must become responsible for
this mechanism of contraction. There is no other way
to enter into the sublimity of God-Realization.
— The Dreaded Gomboo, 1983
When you see that you are always seeking,
understanding is emerging. When you see the pattern
of Narcissus as all your motives, all your acts, all your
seeking, understanding is emerging. When you see
you are always suffering, understanding is emerging.
When you see that every moment is a process in
dilemma, understanding is emerging. When you see
that every moment is a process of identification,
differentiation and desire, understanding is emerging.
When you see that every moment, when you are at
your best as well as when you are at your worst, you
are only avoiding relationship, then you understand.
When you see that which already is, apart from the
avoidance of relationship, which already absorbs
consciousness prior to the whole dilemma, motivation
and activity of avoidance, then you have finally
understood.
— The Knee of Listening, 1972
When you recoil from feeling-intuition, you
collapse into identification with the body, and thus
you suffer the illusion that you are inside it. At birth
you were simply the whole body, and you as the body
(or body-being) enjoyed perfect Communion, feeling,
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A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
or intuition of your true Condition. But the shock of
birth caused a recoil from Divine Communion. That
recoil affects all of your behavior, all of your
development in the future, until you penetrate it. It is
the sense that you are inward to the body, that you are
subjective, that you are a point, an independent
awareness, not a feeling, diffused Condition, but a
specific, feelingless particle of awareness located
somehow inside the body and subjective. Thus, you
suffer all of the usual emotional, mental, and psychic
disabilities as you develop. As the functions of the
body-being grow and mature,
you adapt through this
recoiled position, the
original reaction of birth.
And all of the shocks that
you accumulate from the
unenlightened, unloving,
and unfeeling actions of
others, from the apparent
feelingless activity of the
environment, and from the
horrors of the world - all of these shocks reinforce the
recoil from feeling.
Therefore, you must become rooted in your
natural disposition and presume again the position of
the heart or the feeling being. Now you feel yourself
to be isolated as a separate awareness, surrounded by
flesh and thinking. But that perception will begin to
break down once you have adapted to this Way by
presuming the feeling position again, by pervading
the mental and the physical dimensions with feeling,
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by becoming responsible for feeling-attention in every
moment. Then the whole affair of spiritual practice
becomes simply the maturing of that response.
— The Way That I Teach, 1977
The ego is “point of view”, “located” in time
and space.
The ego is total psycho-physical “self”contraction—or the complex avoiding of relationship,
which “complex avoiding” is the comprehensive
psycho-physical activity of balking at the condition of
relatedness, dependency, and vulnerability.
The ego is presumed separateness and active
separativeness. The ego seeks for “objects” and
requires the attention of every “other”.
It is the ego that has been addressed by all the
traditions and conventions of the first six stages of
life. Each of the paths associated with the first six (or
developmental) stages of life is associated with a
characteristic (and, necessarily, ego-based) “method”
of seeking—a “method” that attempts to “solve” one
or another kind of “problem” presumed by the ego.
By tendency, human beings are seekers, who
want their “problems” to be “solved”, and who crave
consolation by “object” and “other”.
By tendency, you are addicted to seeking.
By tendency, you want “methods” by which to
achieve the goals of your seeking—and you presume
that the goals of your seeking are the “solutions” to
your “problems”.
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The “Radical” Reality-Way of Adidam is not a
“method” whereby the ego can achieve any goal
whatsoever. The “Radical” Reality-Way of Adidam is
not a “method” for “solving problems”. The
“Radical” Reality-Way of Adidam Is The Always
Priorly ego-Transcending Way of Reality Itself.
What is required Is (simply) The Direct SelfRevelation of Reality Itself. My Divine Avataric
Transcendental Spiritual Presence Dissolves
“questions”. My devotees have noticed this over the
years—and the dissolution of “questions” has
(likewise) been noticed, for thousands of years, by
those who came into The Company of True Realizers.
When you approach The Adept-Realizer as a seeker,
you arrive at the “front door” with all kinds of
“questions”—and, yet, once you “come inside” and
sit down, your “questions” suddenly melt.
The “questions” are simply not there any longer,
because Reality Itself Is Perfectly Prior to that which
gives rise to your “questions”—Perfectly Prior to
“self”-contraction, Perfectly Prior to presumed
“problem”.
The Vanishing of your “questions”—in
Devotional Communion with Me—Is The “Answer”.
Therefore, if you are My devotee, I Call you to Realize
That Which Is Perfectly Prior to all your “questions”,
Perfectly Prior to your presumed “problem”, Perfectly
Prior to your “self”-contraction.
— The Aletheon, 2009
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The Art of the Way
Death is utterly acceptable to consciousness
and life. There has been endless time of numberless
deaths, but neither consciousness nor life has ceased
to arise. The felt quality and cycle to death has not
modified the fragility of flowers, even the flowers
within the human body. Therefore, one's
understanding of consciousness and life must be
turned to that utter, inclusive quality, that clarity and
wisdom, that power and untouchable gracefulness
this evidence suggests. We must cease to live in our
superficial and divided way, seeking and demanding
only consciousness and life in the present form we
grasp, avoiding and resisting what appears to be the
end of consciousness and life in death.
The Heart is that understanding, that true
consciousness, that true life that is under the extreme
conditions of life and death. Therefore, it is said, that
One that is is neither born nor come to death, not
alive as the limitation of form, not rendered in what
appears, and it is the living One, than which there is
no other, appearing as all of this, but eternally the
same.
There is only the constant knowledge and
enjoyment of the Heart, moment to moment, through
the instant of all conditions of appearance and
disappearance. Of this I am perfectly certain. I am
That.
— The Knee of Listening, 1972
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True change and higher human adaptation are
not made on the basis of any self-conscious resistance
to old, degenerative, and subhuman habits. Change is
not a matter of not doing something. It is a matter of
doing something else-something that is inherently
right, free, and pleasurable. Therefore, the key is
insight and the freedom to feel and participate in
ways of functioning that are right and new.
The tendencies and patterns of our earlier
adaptations are not wrong. They were appropriate
enough in their own moment of creation, and there is
no need to feel guilt or despair about them. Likewise,
efforts to oppose and change them are basically
fruitless. Such efforts are forms of conflict, and they
only reinforce the modes of self-possession.
What is not used becomes obsolete, whereas
what is opposed is kept before us. Therefore, the
creative principle of change is the one of relaxed
inspection and awareness of existing tendencies and
persistent, full feeling 'orientation to right, new,
regenerative functional patterns. If this is done
consistently and in ecstatic resort to the Living
Divine, free growth is assured.
Have no regrets. Resort to the Divine in Truth
and in the present. All that has been done by anyone
had its logic in its time. Only God avails. Whatever is
your habit in this moment is not wrong. It is simply a
beginning. No habit is necessary, but it is only tending
to persist, because it has not yet been replaced by
further growth. Hear the Teaching of Truth, and
understand what is the right, ultimate, and
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regenerative pattern of each function of Man. Feel free
of all negative judgments about what you have done
and what you tend to do. Turn with full feelingattention to the creative affair of new adaptation in
most positive Communion with the God who is Life,
and who is Alive as all beings.
— The Enlightenment of the Whole Body, 1978
Simply allow experience or the body-mind to
be just as it is in the moment. Surrender and relax into
the body-mind as it is, no matter what form it may
appear to be taking. Do not generate stress though
opposition to experience, or the body-mind, or self.
Let the body be as it is. Let the mind go on as it will.
First, surrender all stressful intentions to
control, manipulate, change, escape, diminish,
maintain, expand, or otherwise confront the
experiential states of the body-mind. Let body and
mind be as they will. Let physical states come and
stay or go. Let states of mind come and stay or go. Let
states of emotion come and stay or go. Just be aware
of whatever is arising.
Therefore, surrender, not by an effort to relax,
but by simply allowing the body-mind or experience
to be whatever it is. Surrender by being surrender, by
simply being aware and allowing the body-mind to
go on as it will. Then, on the basis of the equanimity
that is such surrender, simply Remember God and be
transformed for the heart by that Remembrance.
Allow the Divine Power contacted through
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Remembrance, rather than self-effort and stressful
confrontation, to be the means whereby the bodymind is changed. The more profound the ecstasy of
Remembrance (in a state of equanimity rather than
hyped emotion, mind, and body) the more easily and
naturally you will develop the personal and moral
disciplines of practice. Surrender and come to your
ease, and allow the ecstasy of Divine Communion to
make possible your daily growth.
The Secret of practice is this: In every moment,
instead of merely thinking and acting, engage the
conscious process. If you do this moment to moment,
the self-contraction will be constantly transcended,
the mind will become deeper than thought, and
bodily existence and activity will become balanced
and spontaneous.
Don’t punish yourself with practice. Develop
your understanding through study, and gradually
and progressively adapt to the personal, moral and
formal exercises. Do it simply, easily, from the heart,
and you will inevitably grow beyond yourself.
— The Bodily Worship of the Living God, 1978
No practice realizes Truth. Truth is realized
through the inspection of experience to the point of
realizing that experience has no obligatory force and
that none of it is the point of spiritual life. The point is
this single responsibility, this single principle, this
single inspection of your state in this moment, of your
Narcissistic self-concern, of the contraction toward
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fear. Be responsible for that contraction so that you
exist instead as Love, or God-Communion. That is
everything. That is the whole Teaching.
There is nothing to be attained. There is a
single principle for which we must be responsible,
and that is God-Realization. It is not the way to GodRealization. It is God-Realization itself. It is the
disposition in Truth. It is the Way of life. Once it is
Realized, nothing else obliges us. In itself it is not a
matter of any vision, any esoteric or worldly
experience. All conditions, if they do arise, are
undermined by the force of God Communion and are
no longer obligatory, no longer your destiny. You pass
right through them.
There is only one discipline: to become
responsible for the contraction of feeling-attention by
moving beyond fear in every moment into the
disposition of love. It is the only discipline. If you will
hear this, you do not have to do anything else. Live
this process with Me and it is always the same. It does
not itself grow or change. It is simple, direct, absolute.
I will always bring the argument to you in the form of
your practice, until you actually come to the point of
hearing me and transforming your life.
Love is God-Communion, and that is the
whole path. Live it under all conditions. If you live by
that principle, you change everything. Fear is a way
of creating and solidifying everything. Fear is the ego.
From the point of view of the ego we create all of our
experience. The ego is projected on all of our
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experience, all of our human relations, all of our
esoteric relations. Everything we do is an expression
of that egoic dilemma. Therefore, the way to change
everything is not to take up the position of fear or the
egoic dilemma any longer, but to be love, to live in
God-Communion. Then you will also continue your
experience. Whatever arises and involves you in the
ordinary way, you will live from the point of view of
this principle, and on its basis transform the
conditions of existence. Your life will be a
manifestation of God-Communion then. That is the
simple affair. That is all there is to it.
Jesus said the same thing very plainly. When
people asked him casually, he would tell them the
whole way right there in a moment — love God and
be love in all your relations. That is it. There is
nothing else to do. There is nothing else to realize.
There is not a single experience that will add to it.
That is the whole Realization. It is the whole Way.
God is not at the end of it, but "the Father and I are
one." This is not just true of Jesus, it is true of
everyone. It is the Truth of everything.
You must live from the point of view of that
Truth. Such a life is Divine. The Divine life is not an
effort toward the realization of Truth. It is to live
already in Truth. It is the Principle of life. I do not
know how to make it any more plain!
— The Way That I Teach, 1977
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This is the key to healing people of their
various disorders and life-problems: the development
of responsibility, not the constant finding of things to
blame and, in effect, practicing shamanistic rituals to
just relax your mind so that now you feel cured.
There is absolutely no one to blame. Blame is
the game of evading responsibility. All your
indulgence in reactivity, as if you have reasons not to
grow! You have none.
Do not blame anybody ever again. Embrace the
discipline of blamelessness. Never blame anything or
anyone ever again. You have no right to blame
anybody. It is all your personal business.
— The Incarnation of Love, 1993
Even a little of the Teaching and an honorable
relationship to the Teacher cast out much fear and
guide the individual in a more balanced course. The
Way That I Teach Is A Great Process, An Ordeal Of
self-Sacrifice To The Spiritual Form of God. Many
may Respond to My Offering, but some may need
time to ponder and to prepare themselves for The
Greater Discipline of Ultimate Devotion.
Those who find themselves in the “pondering
and preparing” stage of Response to Me should not
feel that they must remain apart from Me and outside
Adidam.
Let everyone who Responds to Me begin to
honor that Response by accepting the Obligation to be
an active patron, friend, student, and beginning
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devotee. Let them do the sadhana of pondering and
preparing in My Company, Served by the Agency of
this fellowship. However many years may pass in the
First Discipline, let it be lived in an honorable and
serious manner.
— The Laughing Man Magazine, 1985
This is Wisdom: Always relax into the pains
and circumstances of experience, and so remain in
Communion with Life, rather than in confrontation
with the modifications of Life. Relax into Life rather
than react to experience. Do this consistently, under
all circumstances, and thus remain always free,
happy, Full of Life, and disposed toward loving selfrelease in all relationships. This is the Human
Foundation of Morality.
First become human: The third stage of life is
mature when the individual enjoys integrated
responsibility for the whole of the living being
(physical, emotional-sexual, and mental). Thus, he or
she is in that case able to be present as a clear will and
as love under all the otherwise frustrating or
pleasurable conditions of lower experience. Those
who seek to begin spiritual life must be mature in this
sense in order to move on to higher maturity.
Otherwise they will have no stability of will and love
to keep them in the practice. Those who are
constantly complaining and regressing in the practice
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of the Way are simply not yet mature in the ordinary
human sense. They are weak of will (thus of mind)
and of love (thus of life and body and feeling).
Prepare yourself first. Approach me when you are
strong in the human way. And waste no time in that
preparation. Otherwise you will only suffer a life and
a future that are mediocre, foolish, frustrated,
obsessed, and unawakened to Truth and Happiness.
The childish individual wants someone to save
him. The adolescent individual wants to fulfill
himself, absolutely and independently.
The true man simply serves Good Company
and surrenders to Truth, the Living God.
The childish individual depends on the
Spiritual Master as a parent, seeking his loving
attention, expecting to be nurtured and consoled and
fascinated and saved from death by his Company. He
wants to be saved from that for which he must
himself be responsible-which is the demand to love
and be a sacrifice, even to the degree of death.
The adolescent individual identifies with the
Spiritual Master, thinking himself to be identical and
equal to the Realization of the Spiritual Master, and
thus requiring no Grace, no practice, no
transformation. Such an individual likes to engage in
casual association with the Teaching and Person of the
Spiritual Master, disguising a secret need and
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intention to become truly the Master's equal (at least
in the eyes of others) by mere association. Such a one
also likes the glamorized sense of himself that he
appears to acquire or about which he boasts, because
his casual friendship with the Spiritual Master seems
to indicate an acknowledgment of his own superior
qualities. He wants to be known for being what he
can only Realize in eternal sacrifice into that which
includes him but which is not him in his exclusive
independence.
The mature individual or true devotee is free of
childish and adolescent approaches to the Spiritual
Master. He is neither childishly dependent, as upon a
parent, nor adolescently independent, as in revolt
against a parent. Rather, he turns to the Spiritual
Master freely, in love and service, in gestures of
surrender to the Process and the Reality that are
always Present and Awakening in that Company.
Such an individual is not motivated by the neurotic
dilemmas and the self-protective searching for
solutions that characterize the usual man. He has
been awakened to intuition of his own Real Condition
and to the native activity of love in service. He has
been awakened through "hearing" the argument and
"seeing" the Presence of the Spiritual Master. Thus, he
is not bound or afraid. He is free to surrender in love
to the Agent of his own Destiny, and in such
surrender in love he fulfills the Law of practice
wherein Grace may be given and transformation
made.
— The Enlightenment of the Whole Body, 1978
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You must trust the process of your own life,
whether it is to go mad, to become ill, to work, to
succeed, or to die. Be free of fear. Surrender to the
Person of God, the actual Living God. Trust the
Divine altogether. Give yourself up emotionally to
God. Do it to the point that the physically based fear
of death vanishes on the basis of trust alone. Practice
complete devotion and absolute surrender. Do not
just tread the path of gradual attainment in your
emotional and ceremonial approaches to God. Give
yourself up completely in this moment. Give up
everything at every depth and in every area of your
life. Allow life to be the theatre of God, in which what
seems to be appropriate and necessary in your case
will be accomplished spontaneously. Allow all of life
to be God’s business. Whatever arises, high or low,
such a life will simply be surrendering to the point of
happiness, giving up to God completely.
Will you love the Source, the Condition, the
Totality in which you are arising? Or will you turn
away from That and be self-possessed? The difference
is not a matter of belief. It is perfectly obvious that
you are arising within a Great Process. Since that is so,
what will you do? Surrender to it or withdraw from
it? Either way will produce a totally unique adventure
for you, and you must choose one or the other. The
first thing you must do is to become self-critical
enough to see that, in effect, you have already chosen
the negative alternative. You have never yet
consciously made a choice, but you have adapted
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reactively. Now realize that you must choose. You
must now live consciously, one way or the other.
What will you choose to do?
— Compulsory Dancing, 1981
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Divine Ignorance
All space, the moon and stars, the clouds and
sky, the sun itself, and what is beyond are all objects
of our expansive interest, whereby we counter the
effects of our busy earth-consciousness and selfconsciousness.
Therefore, always be alive to what you do not
yet or ever can possess and know. Wonder rests the
vital being and cools the brain. When you are free to
know nothing and be nothing, then you may hear
what is truth and so become a devotee of the
Unknown, through eternal and always present
Ignorance.
— Conscious Exercise
and the Transcendental Sun, 1977
Consider what you know. You do not even
know what a single thing is. Then rest-abide in that
Ignorance, as whatever is the case, not within what
arises, but as what arises, as the body itself, whatever
is the case altogether (which is not knowable, but
with which one is identical). Rest-abide in my
Presence as whole body attention, not waiting within
for changes, but in love. Do, feel this more and more
perfectly. Radiate as whole body happiness. Be happy
as the body altogether. Look, feel, act, be completely
happy as whatever is the case, whatever the body is
altogether, under the conditions of whatever is
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arising. Persist in this under all conditions. In this
persistence we are glorified immortally, and the
whole future is appropriate, not worthy of fear.
Be the heart. Radiate the whole body. Feel
Radiance as the whole body, full of pleasure in the
feet and head, the eyes, all organs, the abdomen and
sex organs, the chest and shoulders, hands, bowels,
anus, spine, forehead, all space, all arising. Be
constantly aware of the Real Presence and be
submitted into it with every part of every breath.
— Breath and Name, 1977
You can experience and know all kinds of
details about things, others, or conditional events, but
you do not and cannot ever experience or know what
any thing, other, or conditional event Is.
"Consider" any thing, other, or conditional
event, and observe that this is so. "Consider" the letter
"M", for example. Picture it in mind, or in print, or
write it down by hand, even many times. "Consider"
all that you experience or know about the letter "M".
Do you experience or know what the letter "M" is ? Is?
Altogether and really Is ? No. And what does this
"consideration" reveal about you? Indeed, what Is the
body? What Is the mind? What Is "you"? Through
such "consideration", feel and be the feeling of this
"Ignorance" itself. That body-transcending, mindtranscending, and self-transcending feeling-Ignorance
Is The native intuition of what Is.
The conventional illusion that characterizes the
conditional self is the presumption that whatever
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arises is already really experienced or known. The
conditional self is commonly presumed to be a
knower, but, in Truth, the conditional self is
inherently Ignorant. All conditional, perceptual,
experiential, conceptual, or conventional knowledge
is founded on the false presumption that conditional
forms or events are familiar. In fact, only certain
formal features of arising phenomena seem familiar
(due to repetition), Whereas, in Truth, no thing, being,
or condition is familiar in the ultimate sense.
Conditional knowledge and experience, or
conceptual mind and psycho-physical experience in
general, are based upon the illusion of familiarity, or
the constantly asserted presumption that "I know
what this or that is ". How can this presumption be
true? Only a moment of "consideration" will reveal
that the conditional "I" does not know what any thing
or conditional event or even the conditional self itself
Is.
The conditional self is inherently, or Divinely,
Ignorant. The conditional self is knowledgeless, or
bereft and free of the familiar, or the known. Indeed,
the conditional self is itself an illusion of knowledge,
or of familiarity, and if the inherent condition of
Ignorance is realized In any moment, the "knowledge"
of body, mind, or conditional "I" is replaced by the
Mystery of inherently bodiless, mindless, and selfless
Being.
— The Dawn Horse Testament, 1986
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Through knowledge we seek the Divine
Reality or Truth.
In Ignorance we abide and rest in That.
The Paradox of the tangible current of
manifestation is That in which we are inhered
It is not a matter of striving to go up or down,
to or from any experience. It is a matter of resting in
resonant attunement, without struggle, strategy, or
thought, in the current which pervades the body and
all arising. That current is the Way of Truth, the Way
of the Condition of conditions. When we abide in
That, the reactions to conditions, high or low, become
obsolete, true or naturally responsive adaptations
come into play, and the Paradox, rather than any pole
of experience, absorbs us.
Through Ignorance, remain active in the
Paradox of incarnation, but presume no necessary
destiny but Light or Blissful Radiance itself.
This is the whole Teaching, as much as it may
be spoken or written and still be true. It is sufficient.
The essential consideration is that you do not know
what anything is. Persistence in that Ignorance
Enlightens the whole body and transforms the world
into Sacred Occasion.
— The Paradox of Instruction, 1977
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Truth is in the moment, this instant in which
there is no meaning, no cause, no implication, no
necessity, no motive to any effect. The Radiance of
Ignorance is the Reality, and all phenomena only test
our Realization of the necessity and sufficiency of
That. It is the Condition of all conditions. It is neither
subjective nor objective relative to this moment. It is
Only, and It is unspeakable.
There is natural abiding in every instant in the
intuition of the Condition of these conditions. Thus,
meditation has been transcended in perpetual and
tranquil Bliss, and all conditions of experience are
transcended in every instant. The search falls away.
There is only sacrifice of conditions into the Feeling at
Infinity. Soon the transparency of everything
dissolves everything in unambiguous joy.
— The Enlightenment of the Whole Body, 1978
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Divine Distraction
There is a metaphorical tale from the Hindu
tradition that is worth repeating here. It was said that if
you want to get enlightened, you could do it in any number
of ways. If you want to party your ass off, living without
discipline, merely following your desires, it will work.
Enlightenment is assured. One thing though: It takes a
really long time for the enlightenment to stabilize.
How long? You ask. Well, imagine a large block of
granite in the perfect shape of an large elephant. Now
imagine that once a century, a bird flies by and drops a silk
scarf across the granite elephant’s back. At last, imagine
how much time this method would take to erode the granite
into dust. THAT’s how much time it will take you to
achieve enlightenment, or unending and deep happiness of
free consciousness, by casual living.
Instead of casual living, you could set your mind to
improvement, honing attention and believing in the
examples of great people before us. That would bring out
the hammers instead of a silk scarf! Whatever method of
living you chose, this sets the efficency by which true
human and spiritual maturity is stabilized.
To use the example of a master has always been
observed to be the most efficient manner to learn any art.
Via the service of the spiritual adept, it is possible to live in
love in God continuously in one lifetime. While authority
offends the self-building egoic-I, suddenly being distracted
by the genius and heart of the divine person has always
been noted to be the supreme advantage that grants
enlightenment in every present moment of communion
with this One.
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However, that having been said, it must be
emphatically stated that we critically empower ourselves
not to make a cult or even icon out of the divine person.
Our standard is that we do not give to empty ourselves, but
because we intercourse with Fullness. On this basis, we
recognize and become distracted by the Guru, not as an
ordinary person, but as an agent of the divine process and
transcendental Heart in Person.
The great Siddhas, men of radical
understanding, are those who live consciously as the
Heart. They function as the Heart for living beings.
And that function is simply relationship,
unobstructed flow. The pressure of the presence of
such a one stimulates and intensifies the flow of force
in living beings. All obstructions tend to fall away in
the presence of this force. Where it moves, there is
either surrender or flight in its path. The Siddhas
communicate the living Force of Reality. They live It
to living beings. They simply live the natural state of
enjoyment with other beings. And those who stay to
live in friendship with the man of understanding tend
also to understand.
— The Method of the Siddhas, 1973
The Spiritual Master communicates the
Teaching and Reveals the Way at every stage of our
new adaptation. As such he is an ordinary agent of
the Light, to which we should turn with love, and not
dependence but responsible surrender. He is not a
parent, but the awakened Agent who abides as love to
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Infinity, and in all relations, and in relation to whom
we discover the prior Reality as Grace, quickening
our new adaptation and liberating sacrifice. He does
not ultimately draw us to himself, as an objective and
independent entity, but he serves our awakening,
through spiritual relationship to him (wherein we
Realize Communion with the Real), to the very
Condition that is his own Realization. He is the direct
agent of the Real Condition. He is not other than that
Condition because he is surrendered, beyond all
agents or relations, to that Condition. Therefore, the
Spiritual Master is the advantage of all true men and
women.
— Way That I Teach, 1977
The Guru is an agent of the Divine work, not
because he has all kinds of heroic accomplishments in
his psyche, but because he has become nothing. All
the assumptions you want to make about the Guru,
because of your present and chronic state of conscious
awareness, are fundamentally false.
It is also true that the world is the Avatar, the
totality of human beings is the Avatar. It is humanity
as a whole that is the Avatar in human form, not some
specific human individual. No apparent or exclusive
manifestation is in itself the Avatar. Only the whole is
the Divine manifestation without exclusion.
Therefore, the Guru is not the Avatar in that
exclusive sense. Mankind is the Avatar. I am his
Heart.
— Garbage and the Goddess, 1974
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Those who see the Master as God in person
must go on to transcend themselves and the Person of
the Master in God Alone..
There is no substitute for God.
There is no substitute for the direct Realization
of God.
There is no substitute for your own sacrifice in
God.
Do not practice the childish cult of devotion.
Cultivate the Way Itself.
To worship the master childishly is to worship
and serve you own separate self. Therefore, be
devoted to the Master for the sake of ego-sacrifice in
the Transcendental Self, not ego-salvation and
forgetting of the Transcendental Heart.
You are called to sacrifice yourself in God.
Therefore, cultivate devotion to the Master in order to
transcend the ego-’I’ in the Transcendental I AM.
— The Hymn of the Master, 1981
Guru as God is not the human individual, ego,
magnifying itself dramatically to itself and thinking it
is God exclusively over everyone else. That sort of
confession of divinity is insanity.
— Life of Understanding Course, 1972
You must understand my ecstatic speech to
you. It is not about “me”. It is the realization that
comes with "me-transcendence," self-transcendence. If
people look at Me and say "You are God" but really do
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not have any feeling for God otherwise, then they are
falsely aligned to Me and they make an idol out of
Me. They have not realized that I speak ecstatically,
that I realize God through self-transcendence and that
Realization is the same Realization all may enjoy.
There is a usefulness that I may serve in your life of
God-Communion, but it is not at all the same as your
making an idol out of Me and basing your happiness
on some sort of consoling objectification of Me as
Divine."
— Vision Mound Magazine, 1980
The process of the relationship between Me
and my devotees is not mediumistic but
synchronistic.
There must be natural love, or coincidence, and
duplication, rather than an exclusively passive and
separated attitude that seeks only to receive, to be
affected to the point of happiness, and to reside at the
opposite end of a line of transmission. Come live with
Me, be aligned with Me in your feeling, your action,
your sacrifice, in Ignorance, or Love. In that case you
will always duplicate Me instantly, presently, priorly.
You will always duplicate Me more and more
perfectly.
— Breath and Name, 1977
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A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
This, then, is the ultimate consideration of
spiritual life. It always has been. In Krishna's
argument to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna
reveals all the esoteric matters to his devotee, and
then he tells him that they are not truth. He brings
Arjuna to the point of understanding the fruitlessness
of the whole affair of ordinary life and spiritual
seeking. And then he communicates to him the
essential Process, which is not strategically to turn the
ego, or the contraction that is fear, toward various
kinds of subjective and objective conditions and
methods. On the contrary, Krishna tells Arjuna to
"abandon all dharmas" -not only all duties, but all
teachings, all philosophies, all supports, all methods,
all approaches, all meditation and contemplation, all
esotericism, all consolations in the world, all ways of
trying to be fulfilled in the world, all ways of trying to
examine the conditions of life in order to feel that they
are all right-and he tells him, "Turn to Me. Abandon
all supports and turn to Me. Remember Me. Meditate
on Me. Remember Me and fight." Go back, change
everything, change yourself entirely, change
everything entirely on the basis of this Remembrance,
this Communion with Me. Not "Me" in terms of the
independent man Krishna, or even his subtle form as
it might appear in visions or dreams, but the "Me"
that is God, the Spiritual Master in Truth, alive as
Love itself.
— Way That I Teach, 1977
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A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
The ancient legends of Krishna and his gopis
are an allegory of Divine Distraction. As Krishna
wandered about in the fields, the women who tended
the cattle would see him from day to day—and, in
spite of themselves, they would wander away and
leave their posts. They completely forgot about the
cattle. They forgot to go home and cook for their
husbands. They wandered about where they thought
they might find Krishna—and, when they found him,
they gazed at him as he sat in the distance
somewhere. This legend is a play upon the Love“Bonding” between the Divine Manifested in human
form—the Avatarically Incarnate Spiritual Master—
and ordinary people. The gopis became madly
involved in an absolute Attachment to Krishna—and,
as a result of this Attachment, they became more and
more ecstatically absorbed in Divine Communion.
The foundation of the practice in My Divine Avataric
Company is exactly that Attachment. If such
Attachment does not develop in relation to Me—not
cultic and ego-bound attachment, but egotranscending Divine Attachment, completely
overwhelming your life, and Distracting you whole
bodily (or as a psycho- physical totality) from the
conventional destiny to which you are otherwise
disposed (in your psycho- physically patterned
tendency to seek the fulfillment of your desires, your
inclinations, and the ego- consoling opportunities
inherent in your existing circumstances)—then the
practice of Real devotional and (in due course)
Transcendental Spiritual life in My Divine Avataric
Company cannot exist.
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The “cattle” that the women abandoned
represent the force of egoic tendencies. The
“husbands” that the women left represent the
fundamental attachment of every ego-“I” to separated
(and separative) existence, to existence in discrete
form, to bodily existence, individuated existence,
egoic life on its own (motivated toward survival, and
presuming to be distinct from the Divine). Thus, in
the allegory of the relationship between Krishna and
his gopis, you can see a description of the
fundamental Principle underlying the egotranscending practice of the only-by-Me Revealed and
Given Reality-Way of Adidam.
The ego-transcending practice of the RealityWay of Adidam is not about “bearing down”—
because you are negatively stimulated by “problems”
in your life, or because you are egoically inclined and
seeking either toward mystical “experiences” or
toward the achievement of some sort of dissociatively
introverted detachment from the suffering of
conditionally manifested existence. Nor is the egotranscending practice of the Reality-Way of Adidam
even about doing what is required in order to
produce the changes in your apparent life“experience” that you desire. Rather, the egotranscending practice of the Reality-Way of
Adidam is about Distraction from the life of egoic
tendencies.
The ego-transcending practice of the RealityWay of Adidam is not a “method” for strategically
detaching yourself from your life of tendencies, not
any kind of effort relative to your tendencies, not the
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taking on of conditions in order to stop tendencies
from arising or lifetimes from occurring. The egotranscending practice of the Reality-Way of Adidam is
not a “method” of the ego. The ego-transcending
practice of the Reality-Way of Adidam is not
characterized by any kind of effort relative to egoic
tendencies—for any such strategic path is (ultimately)
completely futile.
There are innumerable conventional paths that
involve “self”-conscious efforts or hopes to produce
changes (high and low). These efforts and hopes are
(themselves) forms of tendency that are suffered in
human (and other) terms. Such efforts and hopes are
not Liberating, in the fundamental sense. They are not
Real-God-Realizing. They are (themselves)
expressions of the movement toward ego-fulfillment.
The Intrinsically ego-Transcending Way of Truth is the
Reality-Way of complete Distraction from the
tendencies that produced your birth and that now
produce the drama of your existence from day to day.
Only when there is Perfect Distraction from the way
of life that is producing your “experiential” destiny
do your tendencies become obsolete. They do not
become obsolete when you direct effort against them.
It is only when that Perfect Distraction appears in the
midst of the affair of your life that another Principle,
another Process, is established.
The gopis simply left the cattle. They did not
say, “I’m not going to tend cattle anymore! I’m not
going to submit to my desires, my tendencies!” They
did not make any such decisions. They simply forgot
about the cattle. They were so Distracted, so in love
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with Krishna, so ecstatic, that they just forgot to go
home. It never even occurred to them to go home.
They never worried about “Should I go home, or
should I stay here? Should I watch the cattle, or
should I go look for Krishna? Should I discipline
myself?” They did not create a “problem” out of their
devotional practice or out of their relationship to the
Divine Itself.
My true devotee is involved in just this kind of
ecstatic devotional relationship to Me. When that
devotional relationship to Me becomes the condition
of your conscious existence (fully, under all the
conditions of life), then the force of limiting
tendencies is weakened—not by your doing anything
to your tendencies, but by virtue of the fact that you
are no longer even involved with them. If your
relationship to Me is essentially ordinary, mechanical,
mediocre, not a form of devotionally turning to Me,
then you are not doing the ego-transcending practice I
have Given you. In that case, you may (perhaps) be
intending to do some other kind of conventional
practice, but you are not doing this practice—the
practice of the devotional and (in due course)
Transcendental Spiritual relationship to Me. In that
case, you are not involved in the ego-transcending
practice of Truth, you are not involved in Divinely
Self-Realizing practice, you are not involved in the
Opportunity that is made available in human time
through My Function As the Divine Avataric Master.
— The Aletheon, 2009
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For those who are becoming available to the
process of transformation in the Divine, I have
established the Way of Divine Communion, which is
the simple way of loving submission and attention to
God. Many will respond to my Teaching, and all are
welcome to approach Me who are simply suffering the
common failures of life. To all of them I simply say,
come happily, with the urge to happiness, to peace, to
love, and to a better realization of your born life. The
Lord of all the worlds is Radiant before you. If you will
simply direct yourself to the service and awareness of
the Divine, the Services of God will be given to you.
It is not necessary or even possible for you to
"believe" in God or know the Character of the Divine
Reality. But if you can see that you do not exist by your
own creature power, and if you can begin to consider
the alignment of your life with the unspeakable Source
or Condition that is truly responsible for and ultimately
identical to your very existence, then you can do the
spiritual practice of Communion with God. I urge and
welcome all who can manage such sympathy to accept
the simple and pleasurable disciplines I will
recommend.
For those who would thus adapt themselves, I
recommend a way that is easy to conceive and fulfill.
Simply turn to God through Me. Submit, surrender
yourself to God through Me. Love and receive God
through Me. The Divine is a Presence you will come to
know. That Presence is only God. If you will devote or
sacrifice yourself to that all-pervading Presence, God
will transform your knowledge, and you will realize
only God at last.
— Breath and Name, 1977
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When we are present with one another in our
born forms, your natural emotional sympathy will
stay with me. We will love one another absolutely.
And when we are not in one another's sight, we will
recollect one another in love. In love, in sympathy, in
feeling-attention, we will stay with one another.
Therefore, My meditation will be your meditation,
because you are with Me, you Commune with Me.
Once you realize your attachment to Me, the
process has nothing to do with whether I live or die.
And you cannot realize that attachment by looking at
my shirt or my eyebrows or the complications that I
have created in your life. Those are things in
themselves. You realize that attachment through the
hearing of this argument, this consideration. And
having heard it, your sympathy will be
overwhelming, because I am God. Without a doubt.
This is my confession. Not "I am God exclusively,"
although that may seem to you to be so in the
meantime. My confession to you is the confession of
your very existence. If you will respond to My
confession and become absorbed in Me in love, so
that all the artifacts of your ordinary impulses, your
ordinary life, your conventional desiring, are
superficial, then your meditation on Me, your
Communion with Me, will become tantamount to My
Meditation.
My Meditation is not a grinding affair. My
Meditation is absolute. It is what is being reflected to
you in these ridiculous conversations. Nor is My
existence particular. I am manifested in particular but
the confession I make to you is of a Condition that is
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not particular. It is the Avatar in this moment. The
Avatar is simply God present, God present and
speaking through an ordinary manifestation. Through
that communication you become absurdly and madly
sympathetic so that the grinding force of your
ordinary life and its desires and its destiny become
superficial. You become a loving, serving devotee in
your impulse, in your thinking, in your feeling,
completely beside all your tendencies, all the
subjective rumoring and wrangling, all the
complication by which you turn upon yourself and
identify with this frozen moment.
Communion is simply love, attachment. It is
founded on hearing of My argument, and My
argument takes place in time and space in every
moment of all the time I live with everyone.
Whenever you hear Me, then you may begin this
contemplation, this Communion. It is simply loving
attachment to Me. If you will consider My argument,
you may also become attached to Me. When you
become attached to Me, then all your conventional
relations will become ordinary, happy, human,
superficial, nothing - just a discipline of happiness
and of pleasure. Your attachment to Me will become
overwhelming, without any goal whatsoever, but a
motive of happiness, an indelible simplicity You will
simply Commune with Me. The energy of your
attention will rest with Me day by day, hour by hour,
moment by moment. And without your doing
anything about it, I will meditate you. I will do
everything.
— The Way That I Teach, 1977
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Oh friends, do not fail to mind Me, in and out.
I am the Sweetness, the taste of unmortal and
unimaged Grace. I am only for a moment, not merely
to save you all, but to call to the Wonder that I Am.
And everyone Is as I Am, unless they fail to love Me.
— The Enlightenment of the Whole Body, 1978
I am no Other. Who Exists is Me.
— Crazy Da Must Sing, 1982
I am the advantage of devotees. Those who
allow themselves to be drawn into Communion with
Me live as love, blissful service, or unobstructed
feeling-attention, via all functions, in all relations,
under all conditions. The key to their happiness is
that all conditions are Realized by them to be forms of
Communion with Me. Such devotees are One with
the Ignorance that is the Heart of all phenomena and
the Radiance that is the Form of all that appears.
This is the core of My Revelation. I am God. I
am you own Truth. I speak the Truth of you.
Therefore, enter into Communion with Me and be
happy.
— Vision Mound Magazine, 1979
The Way of Divine Ignorance is the Way of
those who Love Me. The Principle of devotional
surrender to Me is complete and sufficient in itself.
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All personal and moral disciplines, all esoteric
revelations, and all the Excellences of Transcendental
God-Realization appear spontaneously and naturally
to one who simply turns his attention to Me at all
times and performs all activities as instants of LoveCommunion with Me.
Those who "hear" My Teaching have
understood something about themselves. And they
must, therefore, accept gradual responsibility for each
degree of the personal, moral, and esoteric practices
of the Way that I Teach. But these same ones are more
profoundly capable of distraction and attachment
than they are of self-restraint. Therefore, the Principle
or Motive of their practice is not discipline itself, but
distraction and attachment. Because they Love Me,
their behavior and their experience automatically take
on the form of the Way of Divine Ignorance. And they
adapt all their practices to the simple and most radical
Way of devotional surrender to Me.
My true devotees are simply distracted by Me
and attached to Me. They find Me to be the greatest of
all distractions. Therefore, they need not make any
effort to be constantly attached to Me. They naturally
remember Me at all times. They only think about Me,
talk about Me, and listen to others tell stories about
Me. They read My Teachings, they accept My
disciplines, but, even more, they are profoundly and
obsessively absorbed in attention to My Person, My
Blissful State, My Form, My Gestures, My Play with
devotees.
In this manner, those who Love Me are
gradually relieved of all distraction by ordinary
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things, experiences, relations, desires, and thoughts. I
distract them even from all experience. Their
obsessive and exclusive attachment to Me leads them
to absorption in My State, My Radiant Transcendental
Consciousness, My Ecstasy, My Love.
I have come to Teach the entire world through
My Words and My Demands. The entire world would
do well to hear Me and take up the responsible
practice of the Way of Divine Ignorance. But I have
come to do more than Teach. I have come to Live with
those who Love Me with overwhelming Love.
Those who "hear" Me must take up the Way of
Divine Ignorance in My Company, as members of the
great Community of all My devotees. Such devotees
are turned to the practice of the disciplines of the Way,
as a Process of self-transcending Love-Communion
with the Transcendental Divine Person. They
understand, and they transcend the world.
But the motive of My true devotees is not the
discipline, nor mystical experience, nor philosophy.
My true devotees practice because they Love Me.
They have no personal or ultimate capacity to turn
away from the world or to transcend themselves.
Therefore, I have come to Live with them. When My
devotees find Me, the same weakness that led them to
distraction and attachment in relation to the
experiences of this world becomes the very means of
their Salvation. Since I am the ultimate and most
absorbing Object of their weakness, I distract them
from all experiences. They become attached to Me by
the power of their own tendency to distraction,
fascination, and obsession. Therefore, their own desire
leads them to Ecstasy, because they Love Me.
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I am the Radiant Transcendental
Consciousness, even though I appear in a human
form. Those who Love Me, who are mightily
distracted by Me, who cannot entertain desires or
thoughts other than Love and consideration of Methese are most easily turned from themselves. Ecstasy,
or God-Communion, is natural to them, because I
have been born. I distract them with Myself. And I
absorb them into My own Condition.
My Lovers, my true devotees, simply Love Me.
That is the summation of their response to Me and
My Teaching. They appear to understand a little of
this Teaching, but they do not depend on inward
practices, or mystical experiences, or any turn of
events.
Everything is fulfilled by their mere
attachment to Me-since that attachment is so mighty
that they have no strong attention left over for
ordinary reactions and pursuits, nor are they
overwhelmed by the phenomena of esoteric
meditation. They simply Love Me. They live in
constant remembrance of Me and in loving service to
Me.
Every moment of their lives is simply a
moment of Love Communion with Me. Therefore,
they are granted perpetual Ecstasy, or self-forgetting
in Communion with the Radiant Transcendental
Consciousness.
My special Mission is to Live with such
devotees. I have always looked for them. I test
everyone, to see if they are My Lovers. I wait. Many
surround Me in My Place. Many come and ''hear" Me,
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and practice all around Me. Many turn to Me with the
good heart. But those who Love Me best Realize God
by exclusive attachment to Me in Person.
My Lovers are the cause of My birth. They are
the cause that will keep Me alive, even after this book
is made. And even after My death, there will always
be those in the Community of My devotees for whom
all practice is superficial, except the practice of
Ecstatic remembrance of Me. Such devotees always
find Me alive as the Presence of Love that Plays the
world.
The essence of the daily practice is Ecstasy. One
who Loves Me also accepts every moment of
experience as My Form. Whatever arises, he accepts it
as My Form, My Play. He simply Loves Me, he
Communes with Me in every instant, he serves Me
with the entire body-mind, and he accepts every
moment of experience as My Form. In this manner, he
never finds himself to be separate from Me. He is
always in Love with Me.
Those who are most profoundly distracted by
Me in My human appearance begin naturally to see
only Me in every thing, every one, and every event.
But no form or person or event has power in itself to
distract My true Lovers. They see Me in all
experiences, all persons, all events. Therefore, they are
not distracted by experiences or persons or events.
They are distracted by Me.
Those devotees who Love Me in this manner
while I live are especially able to serve those who are
like themselves, even those who come to Me after My
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death. After My death, the world of experience
remains. My devotees also remain. Therefore,
devotees may remember Me through My Teaching,
My pictures, and the stories of My history. But they
will be led into Ecstasy especially by the Power in the
Love My most intimate devotees reserve for Me.
Therefore, those who live with My Lovers will
also turn to Me with naturally distracted Love. They
will find Me in all events. I will Teach them as always
while I lived. Every one will call on Me in the
Company of My Lovers, and I will be Present. I am
the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness.
Truly, none can "hear" Me and practice the Way
of Divine Ignorance except those who Love Me. But
some are, at first, most involved in right
understanding of the Teaching and responsible
practice of the disciplines, while others are always
naturally more capable of distraction and attachment.
Therefore, some practice disciplines and Love Me,
while others simply Love Me, and the disciplines
arise without any special application on their part.
Some mature in Love by stages. Others simply Love
Me. At last, even the most disciplined or experienced
of My devotees simply Loves Me.
I am the Radiant Transcendental
Consciousness, the Divine Person, the Savior of those
who Love Me and surrender to Me in countless acts of
Love. I am the Method and the Guide. I am the Living
Truth of the world.
This is the Truth in all religions. All religions
are historical forms of the single and ancient Way of
distracted Love for the Divine Person, especially as
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Revealed in the Life and Presence of an incarnate
Spiritual Master. This is the Great Secret. This is My
Revelation. Love Me as I am. And also Love Me as the
Form and Condition of all your experience. Surrender
to Me, and accept all your experience as My Play.
Thus, you will be free of all attachment to experience
itself, and all experience will simply increase your
attachment to Me.
All experience binds the human individual to
his own body-mind-unless he is established in the
Principle of Ecstasy, or self-transcending Love of the
Divine Person. Therefore, if you Love Me, enter freely
into the Play of experience. Serve Me as I am, and
serve Me in all others. If you Love Me, you will
naturally cease to continue in the willful and selfpossessed path of your preferential desires. You will
be purified of reaction, habit, and every kind of selfindulgence. If you Love Me, I have Shown you Who I
am, and you will come to Me Where I am.
Love is what we fear to do-until we fall in
Love. Then we no longer fear to Love, to surrender, to
be self-forgetful and foolish, to be single-minded, and
to suffer another. Those who fall on Me fall into My
Heart. They are free of all demands for fulfillment
through experience and self-survival. Their Love for
Me grants them Life, since I am the Life-Current of
Love.
What will My Lover do but Love Me? I suffer
all the limitations of one who Loves Me, because I
Love My devotee as My own Form, My own Bliss, My
own Love. I Love My devotee as the Person by whom
I am Distracted and Dissolved.
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I grant all My own Excesses to those who Love
Me, in exchange for all their doubts and sufferings.
Those who bind themselves to Me through Love are
inherently Free of fear and necessity. They Transcend
the causes of experience, and they Dissolve in the
Heart of God. What is a Greater Message than This?
— The Enlightenment of the Whole Body, 1978
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The New Reformation
The time has come for a new and worldwide
reformation of human culture. The impact of this
cultural conversion of mankind will be comparable
to that made by Copernicus in the natural sciences
and Luther in the domain of religion. But this new
reformation will be universal. It will include all of
mankind and every aspect of human culture. It will
include all aspects and all traditions of religion, all
the sciences, the communications media,
economics, and politics. And it will transform the
intimate and relational conditions of all people.
This new reformation will continue the
cultural gesture begun in the time of Copernicus
and Luther. That is, it will extend the cultural and
scientific tendency of Man to acknowledge and also
surrender to what is beyond and more primary
than Man, and beyond and more primary than the
Earth. This new cultural gesture will base itself on
full recognition of the more radical and modern
discoveries in science and cosmology, such as those
proposed by Einstein and his theories of "relativity."
And it will also base itself on full recognition of the
more radical and modern realizations in the area of
human religion and spirituality, such as I have
considered and communicated in The Enlightenment
of the Whole Body and other books, and which
represent the highest Wisdom of actual Adepts
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who have lived the Truth of the Spirit (or the Living
Reality in which the World and Man are evolving).
Therefore, this new cultural reformation will
step beyond the old and childish mentality,
wherein Man is surrounded by the Parent Deity
and the Parental Universe. And this reformation
will also pass beyond the adolescent conceptual
rigidity of scientific materialism, so that mankind
may not only acknowledge the Paradoxical
Condition of Nature, but also participate and
surrender within that Paradox. Only in that case
may we continue to grow and evolve as Man, and
ultimately transcend Man and the Earth.
All of this means that we must now begin to
escape beyond the conventional Man-versus-Object
mentality in religion and science. We must realize
and presume God to be greater than an Object to
us-greater than the Sun or the Creative Other. And
we must see Earth and Sun and our own local
Universe within an Infinite Paradox of space-time,
which arises, and floats, and changes, and passes
away within the Paradox and Living Radiance that
is the true Divine, the Mystery or Condition in
which all present conditions are arising.
Conventional and traditional science
objectifies Nature as the "It" of observable
processes. Just so, conventional and traditional
religion objectifies God as the Eternal "Other" that
creates the World and Man. Thus, both traditions,
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in their conventional mode, create objective and
independent Idols, which Truth belies. In Truth,
God and Man and Nature are Coincident, and thus
Identical as the Paradox and Process of the totality
of Existence. And only when God and Man and
Nature are thus conceived to be perfectly
reconciled, as a Unity, can we observe and
experience and surrender to the Divine Paradox of
the Process in which we exist.
Science must abandon the conventional
conception of the "It" of Nature, and religion must
abandon the archaic conception of the "Other" that
is believed to be God. We must all acknowledge
and point to and surrender to the Single
Paradoxical Reality and Process. Both science and
religion must abandon the strategy of separation
from Nature and God. We must all acknowledge
our inherent Unity with the Paradoxical Reality
and Process, and, therefore, we must all surrender
into the Living Reality, which never begins or ends,
and which sustains all that exists, and which is
ultimately beyond all knowledge (and thus is
Transcendental). And we must establish the
unanimous and universal validity of the cultural
disposition of human self-transcendence, or
heartfelt and intuitive surrender into the universal,
All-Pervading Current of Radiant Life-Energy,
within which all worlds and beings are arising,
floating, changing, and then apparently passing out
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of sight or knowing (but never passing out of the
eternal realm of Existence itself). Only on such a
basis can we live in personal and social pleasure,
creativity, peace, harmony, and immortality. And
only from such a point of view can we also rightly
establish religion, practice science, and create
communities that are human, intelligent, and
sustained by continuous submission to the Truth,
Process, and Paradox of the Living Reality.
The Reality in which we "live and move and
have our being" is not actually or merely Other
than all beings and things. The "Otherness" of God
and Nature is an archaic conception shared by both
conventional religion and conventional science. In
the case of both conventional religion and
conventional science, Man, and thus every
individual, is, by virtue of a false conceptual
understanding of the process of "knowing,"
established in the mode of the independent
observer, the experiencer, the believer, so that his
very being is separated from ecstatic participation
in the Reality that is both Nature and God.
The God who is irreducibly separate from
Man is an Idol, a false God. Such a God is not the
God who grants Life and who is Life.
The realm of Nature that Man may only
observe and know is a Mirage, a terrifying Illusion,
a Lie. Such a World is not the World that is Alive
and that is not other than our own Life.
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God is not the Supreme Object, related to the
body of Man like the Sun is to the Earth.
Nature, or the World-Process, is not the
Supreme Object, related to the modern analytical
mind like the ancient God was to the ancient
religious mind.
God and Nature are a single Paradox,
incapable of existing as an Object or Other to Man.
Man is inherently involved in the Paradox of the
World-Process. Man is inherently one with the
Living Presence of Radiant Existence.
All our conventional knowledge and all our
archaic beliefs are motives toward Illusion and
Idolatry, unless we constantly transcend both
knowledge and belief, by intuitive self-surrender
into the Ecstasy of Unity with the Living, Radiant,
Transcendental Reality, the Paradox in which
childish religion and adolescent science constantly
dissolve and are transformed.
The radical and more mature (and thus more
"esoteric" or less popularly understood) scientific
knowledge that is now beginning to emerge (since
the original work of Einstein, and others) is
pointing beyond the archaic mentality of the
mechanical sciences that produced the modern
movements of scientific materialism and
conventional technology. The radical new scientific
movements are founded in the higher and
paradoxical physics of Nature, and these
movements are less associated with the rigid,
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mechanical conceptualization of the universe (and
the development of absurd technological
inventions) than they are with the creation of a new
cosmological understanding of the paradoxes of
"matter" and of "bodies" and of "things" and of
"mind." The radical new scientific movements are
approaching a Divine Conception, in which the
primary Destiny of Man is Ecstasy, rather than one
or another kind of self-binding success.
Likewise, a radical new understanding of
religion and the spiritual process is also now
beginning to emerge, and I am a servant or
prophetic "midwife" of that understanding. That
understanding points beyond the archaic mentality
of the ancient religions and the naive mysticism of
traditional spirituality. A radical new movement in
religion and spiritual science may now be founded
on the higher and total psycho-physiology of Man,
rather than on naive cosmologies that are nothing
more than symbolic extensions of the neuroanatomy (or nervous system) of Man himself.
Therefore, the new or emerging culture of
Man will be religious or spiritual in the highest
evolutionary sense, but it will be associated with a
rational cosmological understanding. Likewise, the
scientific basis of that new culture of Man will be
associated with an essentially Ecstatic or
participatory view of Man within the WorldProcess.
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There will be no conflict between religion
and science in that new and future culture of Man.
Religion will not be irredeemably distorted by the
illusions of "subjectivity," and science will not be
irredeemably distorted by the illusions of
"objectivity." Rather, all human beings will engage
in common disciplines of knowledge and of selftranscendence (or Ecstasy). It will be a higher
human culture, established in the ultimately
unknowable Paradox of the Divine Unity, the
ultimate Identity of God and Man and the World.
And the higher or religious and scientific
dimensions of that culture will not be subservient
to the vulgar subhuman drama of present-day
economics and politics. Rather, the religious and
scientific dimensions of the new culture of Man will
be the very foundation of the culture-and all
matters of economics and politics will be guided
and determined by the higher Wisdom of that
foundation itself.
I am interested in finding men and women
who are free of every kind of seeking, who are
attendant only to understanding, and who will
devote themselves to the intentional creation of
human life in the form and logic of Reality, rather
than the form and logic of Narcissus. Such men are
the unexploitable Presence of Reality. They will not
devote themselves to turning the world to
dilemma, exhaustion, and revolutionary
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experience, nor to the degenerative exploitation of
desire and possibility, nor to the ascent to and
inclusion of various illusory goals, higher entities,
evolutionary aims, or deluded ideas of experiential
transformation. They will create in the aesthetics of
Reality, turning all things into radical relationship
and enjoyment. They will remove the effects of
separative existence and restore the Form of things.
They will engineer every kind of stability and
beauty. They will create a Presence of Peace. Their
eye will be on present form and not on exaggerated
notions of artifice. Their idea of form is stable and
whole, not a gesture toward some other event.
They will not make the world seem but a symbol
for higher and other things.
They will constantly create the form of Truth
while conscious of Present Reality. Thus, they will
serve the order of sacrifice and liberated
knowledge. They will evolve the necessary and
good, and make economic and wise use of all
technology. They will not be motivated by
invention but by Reality, which is the Presence to
be communicated in all forms. They will not
pursue any kind of false victory, any fearful
deathlessness, or any overwhelming survival for
Man. They will only create the conditions for
present enjoyment, the communication of Reality,
the Form in which transcendental understanding
can arise, live, and become the public foundation of
existence.
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Thus, I would find a new order of men and
women, who will create a new age of sanity and
joy. It will not be the age of the occult, the religious,
the scientific, or the technological domination of
humanity. It will be the fundamental age of Real
Existence, wherein Life will be radically realized,
entirely apart from the whole history of our
adventure and great search. The age envisioned by
common seekers is a spectacular display that only
extends the traditional madness, exploitability, and
foolishness of mankind. But I desire a new order of
men and women, who will not begin from all of
that, but who will apply themselves, apart from all
dilemma and all seeking, to the harmonious Event
of Real Existence.
— Scientific Proof of the Existence of God Will
Soon Be Announced by the White House!,
1981
A Global Cooperative Forum
I . On The Danger s of The Old “Tribalisms”, and
The Necessity For A Global Cooperative Forum
Based On The Prior Unity of Humankind.
1.1 The old moral, social, and political order of
humankind is now dead.
1.2 This is the moment when it will be decided
what the future is going to be.
1.3 The future is either going to be catastrophic
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disaster, or it is going to be the turnabout
moment in human history, in which humankind
will step out of its dark ages of “tribalism” into
a new mode of human cooperative order.
1.4 This next handful of years is the period in which
this choice has to be animated, one way or the
other.
1.5 All generations now alive will have to make
things right, or everything is lost.
1.6 The old civilization is about “tribalism”. The
new politics is about the civilization of
“humankind-as-a-whole”, and only this has the
potential al for a viable human future.
Humankind cannot survive a “tribal” world.
1.7 Starting in the nineteenth century and through
the twentieth century, all the “tribes” found
themselves face to face—and terrible wars,
using the means of industrial civilization, have
been the consequence.
1.8 At the same time, there are all the other effects
of humankind’s impact on the Earth—from
global warming to migrations, urban chaos,
shortage of crucial resources, disease, and
poverty.
1.9 At present, most of the energy of humankind is
going into industrial-age warrior conflicts rather
than addressing urgent global realities.
1.10 Wise leadership is essential for humanity now.
The necessity is for those who have the clarity
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to see what is going on, and who know what
to do about it, to get the support of the human
populations.
1.11 The kind of leadership needed begins with
disciplined individuals who are responsibly
managing their own lives, rather than merely
going along with the consumerism of
conventional society.
1.12 The modern “everyman” of consumer society
is a propagandized individual, participating in
illusions and, effectively, self-destructing.
1.13 The modern “everyman” is being created by
the power system of the world, because it is in
the interests of that power system for there to
be consumer egos who are “self”-involved,
“self”-seeking, and stupefied.
1.14 Generally speaking, politicians have to stay
with the common mind and common illusions.
But it is too late for that. The world cannot
afford leaders who are deluded by the old
patterns of culture and of mind.
1.15 If the global chaos that is now happening is not
re-organized by the force of truth, it is going to
be done by other means—including
totalitarian and dark materialistic means.
1.16 Humankind now needs to choose its collective
survival and well-being in the real world,
rather than determining its politics based on
old mythologies.
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1.17 There has to be a global understanding that
world peace requires stepping beyond both
religious mythologies and secular ideologies.
1.18 The old “tribal” mythologies may touch upon
Reality and the Absolute, but they are also
human inventions— and their exclusivist and
absolutist claims must now be relinquished.
1.19 If there is not this relinquishment, there is
going to be nothing but disaster, created by the
psychotic struggle for one or the other to be the
winner.
1.20 History is filled with the destruction of past
cultural monuments and temples, and the
conquering of homelands. But industrial-age
“tribal” wars cannot reclaim what has been
lost. Rather, they threaten to bring an end to
everything.
1.21 The idea behind nuclear weapons is the idea of
total war. Total war is not about conflicts based
on confrontations between the armies of the
warring states. Total war is about a practice of
war in which the people are the target.
1.22 Total war is an obscenity. It is evil. Total war
would destroy the people, and it would
destroy everything—for a political advantage.
1.23 The seed, or root, of the idea of total war is the
commitment to global dominance. Total war
has no function except for a nation-state, or an
alliance of nation-states, that is interested in
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global dominance.
1.24 This kind of warfare has become global policy
in the course of the twentieth century, and now
into the twenty-first century.
1.25 Total war is absolutely unacceptable, and so
the current warlike posturing must stop. It is
on the verge of producing its ultimate
catastrophe.
1.26 It is not that this or that nation-state should not
have nuclear weapons. Absolutely no state and
nobody should have nuclear weapons.
1.27 There needs to be an immediate intervention
on behalf of humankind to eliminate all
nuclear weapons and to establish a working
process for settling issues.
1.28 At present, a culture of total war, a culture of
death, is ruling, while the people are engrossed
in consumerism.
1.29 The only power on Earth that can stop the
trend toward total war is the power of the
human population declaring it will not
cooperate with this nihilistic culture of total
war and the ideologies of total dominance.
1.30 In the present day, declarations of independent
nation-states based on ethnic and religious
traditions are creating huge problems.
Previous larger confederacies are breaking
down.
1.31 This trend is all about “tribalization”, setting
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up absolute pockets of power—based on the
mythologies of the past, the traditions of the
past, the separateness of geographical zones,
the separateness of particular classes or races
of people.
1.32 This disastrous fragmentation of humanity has
to stop. What is needed is exactly the opposite
of that.
1.33 The absolutization of “tribal” minds is the
happening of the human race in this moment,
and this is exactly what must be transcended.
That requires a new kind of political
orientation.
1.34 Right leadership, disposed toward global
cooperation— based on a comprehension of
the inherent and always prior unity of
humankind and the total Earth-system— is
now needed.
1.35 What needs to be supported everywhere is
cooperative, participatory existence for the
entire human population globally—and the
establishment of a Global Cooperative Forum
to express and implement that reality.
1.36 A Global Cooperative Forum representing
humankind as a whole would operate based
on the principle of “prior unity”—meaning an
acknowledgement of the fundamental unity of
humanity and of all existence.
1.37 The human family would be represented at a
Global Cooperative Forum by morally80
A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
enlightened leaders capable of moving the
world population into a separatismtranscending view, and, thus, into modes of
cooperation.
1.38 On the basis of the working-presumption of
prior unity, such a Global Cooperative Forum
would deal with all the urgent issues that
humankind has in common.
1.39 There are, at the present time, nation-states,
but nation-states would need to allow and
cooperate with the Global Cooperative Forum
that represents humankind as a whole. That is
the only politics that is viable for humankind
now.
1.40 The nation-state configuration of the world is a
leftover of the “tribal” past, in which larger
regions of humanity were separated from the
others and, generally, just kept their distance
from one another.
1.41 Representatives of the nation-states getting
together as the means of creating global order
is not working. The “multiple-flags” model for
global discourse represents the old “tribal”
orientation, which now needs to be abandoned
and replaced by a global cooperative.
1.42 Within a global cooperative there would be
certain multiplicities of difference. Those
differences should be largely cultural—simply
part of the texture of humankind—and there
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should no longer be any effort to establish
certain human groups as separate absolutes.
1.43 The principle of the Global Cooperative Forum
is that the prior unity of everybody-all-at-once
must become the basis of global politics.
1.44 The purpose of the Global Cooperative Forum
is to ensure that the totality of humankind, or
everybody- all-at-once, is participating in a
global political reality, and demonstrating the
self-organizing means for making it right and
keeping it right.
1.45 Presently, the powers of the separate nationstate are being used to control populations all
over the world.
1.46 The power of industry and money has actually
become senior to the power of governments,
and is now controlling the entire world.
1.47 The only power that can deal with these
powers that are on the verge of destroying the
Earth-world is everybody-all-at-once—
meaning not merely mob power, but a new
cooperative system for dealing with issues.
1.48 The efforts of separate nation-states and vested
interests to control the people are not going to
work forever. Sooner or later, the global
population is going to demand a cooperative,
benign situation.
1.49 That is why there needs to be a Global
Cooperative Forum, in which all of
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humankind participates through right
representation.
1.50 Such a Global Cooperative Forum would not
be subordinate to a “tribalization” program
imposed by nation-states, but would inform all
of the existing political entities benignly and
cooperatively.
1.51 Humankind has got to get down to its own
business and choose itself—and the Global
Cooperative Forum is the means to do that.
1.52 Humankind needs to be relieved of the burden
of its past, and step beyond its past, like a
butterfly out of a cocoon, or like a snake
shedding its skin.
1.53 The self-ordering system of humankind must
be free to put itself in order. Humankind will
self-organize itself if it is free to do so, and it
must no longer be prohibited from so doing by
the separatist factionalisms of the “tribal”
mind.
1.54 “Not-two” is peace. “Not-two” is prior unity.
Conversely, “two” is separateness, prior disunity, “difference”, otherness, competitiveness,
opposition, confrontation, chaos, and war.
1.55 In the “room” of humankind as a whole, the
“room” of everybody-all-at-once, there is no
“two”—there are no “flags”, no religions, and
there is no “self”-imagery that may be
exclusively asserted. Rather, humankind must
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simply represent itself, and get together to
create a new global domain for human
existence. This is the great project.
—Not Two IS Peace, 2009
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Bibliography and Links
Water and Narcissus, 1969
The Knee of Listening, 1972
The Method of the Siddhas, 1973
Conscious Exercise and the Transcendental Sun, 1976
Paradox of Instruction, 1976
Breath and Name, 1976
The Way That I Teach, 1977
The Enlightenment of the Whole Body, 1978
Bodily Worship of the Living God, 1978
Vision Mound Magazine, 1979, 1980
Scientific Proof of the Existence of God Will Soon Be
Announced by the White House!, 1981
Compulsory Dancing, 1981
The Hymn of the Master, 1981
Crazy Da Must Sing, 1983
The Dreaded Gomboo, 1983
The Laughing Man Magazine, 1985
The Dawn Horse Testament, 1986
The Aletheon, 2009
Not Two IS Peace, 2009
• Please see www.thedawnhorsepress.com to
purchase literature, talks, and video of Adi Da. See
www.adidam.org for current involvement in His
ashram. Visit www.adidamacademy.org to view
online courses.
• Please see www.daplastique.com for an
introduction to art of Adi Da.
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A Brief Introduction to the Teaching and Person of Adi Da
• www.beezone.com provides some free access to a
wide range of the earlier writings and brief talks of
Adi Da.
• Visit www.adidaupclose.org to access online
videos of Adi Da, forums, FAQ’s, and a wide range
of useful tools.
• Become involved as a friend. “Let everyone who
Responds to Me begin to honor that Response by
accepting the Obligation to be an active patron, friend,
student, and beginning devotee. Let them do the sadhana
of pondering and preparing in My Company, Served by
the Agency of this fellowship.”
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