Julie Anderson – Introduction to Beezone Interview Series

 

Beezone Talks with Julie Anderson

An introduction

Julie Anderson, 2016

“The ego is at war with two disciplines. The discipline of the body-mind and the discipline of attention.”

Adi Da Samraj, The Principle of Retreat, May 1986

 

“Who’s stronger, ego or the Divine?” When I read that question in an old Crazy Wisdom magazine, asked to Adi Da by a devotee, it stopped me in my tracks. To my ears, that question summed up ‘Sadhana’, the conundrum of Enlightenment.

Julie Anderson, formerly Kanya Samarpana Remembrance (also Swami Dama Kalottara Devi, and a number of other names) asked Adi Da that question at a time when she was about to leave Adi Da’s personal and intimate company in 1992 after 17 years.

The article “The Real Practice of Guru Devotion” went on to explain how Julie had recently withdrawn from the Free Renunciate and the Gurukula Order after reality considerations. As I read I wondered, “What could have happened in those reality considerations that didn’t happen during 17 years? Julie had been as close to Adi Da as anyone since coming into His company in 1976. She was considered an advanced practitioner practicing in the higher stages of life. She served and devoted her life completely to Adi Da and his work, and now she was leaving? What did she see in those reality considerations that required her to withdraw from His company AND who was stronger, the ego or the Divine?

Julie Anderson was no ordinary person. From the moment she came into the company of Adi Da, she was brought into his personal and intimate company. As you will read in the upcoming interview series on Beezone, Julie was unique, and for reasons beyond even her understanding, destined to be with an Enlightened Master. She was in the center of the major teaching demonstrations and the cultural and spiritual revelations that took place from 1976-1992. She had been tested, challenged, given great gifts, and had proven herself beyond any measure many ordinary people had been incapable of achieving .

So, what was she doing now? I decided to find out, but it wasn’t that easy. I started my search at the end of 2015.  The people I knew had only a vague idea of where she was. It took me awhile but I finally found her email address and wrote her an introductory email asking for an interview. Her response was welcoming, surprised, and as could be expected, cautious. She didn’t know me and didn’t even know the Beezone existed. In her email it appeared that she had not only not been very connected (or interested) in the World Wide Web, but also she had not been connected to the community or the happenings in and around Adidam. She was living in a beautiful but remote part of Australia running a vacation resort with her husband Nick.

Because of her background, and at times controversial exposure in the national media, her caution was understandable. Fortunately for me, it didn’t take long for a mutual trust to be established and a real conversation to begin. It has now been nine months since our talks began and within the next couple of weeks, I will begin posting some of our dialogues. As you can well imagine, they are filled with leelas, observations, life stories, and a profound and intimate understanding of Adi Da, His work, and the lessons she’s learned in her 40 year relationship with Him and the community of His devotees.

I invite you to join me in my talks with Julie and to answer to the question of, “Who is stronger, ego or the Divine?”

***

Interview Table of Contents

A Note from Julie

Blessings! I am making this communication via Beezone as a means to explore, remember, understand more deeply and make available the story of my life with Bhagavan Adi Da. Its a deep samyama for me and I am grateful to Ed Reither for this auspicious opportunity and how this gift has come into being. 

Coincidentally, my communication may be useful to you the reader in providing a means to reflect on your own life experiences with Adi Da or in relationship to your own spiritual practice and life adventure.

Given I am not currently a formal practitioner of Adidam, my communication is a personal one and it is not intended specifically to be a guide to anyone’s spiritual and life practice. Adi Da has made it abundantly clear that if anyone is serious about His Teaching, they should embrace the full details of practice which He has clearly communicated. Any response made or opinion formed in regards to his offering is a personal matter of responsible free choice.

Whilst I am very serious about my transcendentally spiritual relationship with Adi Da, for some time and for now, I have not chosen to embrace the full details of His Instruction in regards to participation within the formal Institution and Culture of Adidam. This is a personal matter and not a reflection about anything otherwise. There are no “sides” of any camp that I sit within. My heart is filled with great respect, gratitude and profound loving compassion for all devotees that I share a history with. 

Om Sri Da Love Ananda


Reality Consideration

A method of teaching-submission that (Adi Da) often called “reality consideration”. His expressed intention behind such consideration was to expose egoity in all of its forms, low and high, in order to enable human beings to enter into the “egoless Process of Divine Self-Realization”, or the seventh (and ultimate) stage of life. To this end, Adi Da spent decades in face-to-face dialogue with devotees, openly examining human life and spiritual realization in minute detail. In every such consideration, he says, he was addressing humankind as a whole—dealing with the root error that produces the universal pattern of non-realization, its attendant illusions and sufferings. – Anthony Costabile, AVATARIC REVELATION AND THE RESTORATION OF SPIRITUAL CULTURE: ON THE LIFE, WORK, AND PASSING OF ADI DA SAMRAJ AND THE PRESERVATION OF HIS SPIRITUAL LEGACY (PDF file).


Back to interview


Chapter 4 – The Dawn Horse Testament

The Way of The Heart begins with the process of listening, or a “reality consideration” of the conditional self and how it operates as self-contraction.

This becomes hearing, or most fundamental self-understanding, operative as the free capability for self-transcendence.

When sympathy with the self-contraction has fully relaxed by these means, the beginners original feeling-motive toward self-transcendence is uniquely magnified and activated, such that it becomes a directly and comprehensively effective impulse.

When that impulse has become really effective, the same feeling-motive, or open heart, goes on to the next stage of the Way of The Heart, which is seeing, or heart-attraction to my spiritual (and spirit-baptizing) presence.

This spiritual heart-response permits an infilling with the divine spirit.

And that infilling permits the fully responsive practice of the Way of The Heart, so that, by stages, the theatre of egoity is outgrown in the fullness of divine self-realization.

As spiritual, transcendental, and divine realization becomes profound, the transcendental divine self-position is assumed more and more directly, and conditional nature, conditional others, conditional body, conditional mind, and conditional self are transcended in the self-radiant and transcendental divine self.

Therefore, it is realized that there is only the transcendental divine self, and that the not-self is an illusion or an illusory play upon the transcendental divine self.

Thus it is realized. There is only love-bliss, self-existing and self-radiant. And, by merely being that, the deluding, binding, and joy-suppressing power is transcended.

Adi Da Samraj – Chapter 4 – The Dawn Horse Testament

***

Interview Table of Contents

 

The Real Practice of Guru-Devotion

Julie Anderson, 1980