A Morning Coffee Chat at Starbucks

A Morning Coffee Chat at Starbucks

• Ray: A long-time reader of Adi Da, fluent in paradox, mysticism, and esoteric non-dual teachings. Aware of psychology, but increasingly skeptical of its limits.

• Martin: A Jungian at heart. Introspective, deeply respectful of dreams, symbols, and the inner life. He’s recently encountered Adi Da and is both intrigued and unsettled.

Scene: A corner table at a noisy Starbucks. The hiss of espresso machines, mild jazz overhead, and a bustle of early commuters. Ray and Martin sit across from one another, deep in conversation. Two half-sipped lattes sit between them.

***

Martin: So let me see if I understand what you’re saying. Adi Da believes there’s no actual individual in the ultimate sense. But still insists that you have to become a well-rounded, responsible, fully developed person before you can even begin to Realize that there’s no person there?

Ray (smiling): Yep. That’s the paradox. You can’t bypass the human—you have to live it completely. But only so you can finally go beyond it.

Martin: Okay, but that’s just… confusing. Jung says individuation is the process of becoming your full Self. You integrate all these parts—shadow, persona, anima. You grow into wholeness. There’s deep meaning in that. Even dreams point you in that direction.

Ray: And Adi Da would say: yes, but even that entire structure—Self, psyche, dreams, archetypes—is arising within the illusion of separateness. It’s all part of the play of ego. It’s not wrong, but it’s still within the theater.

Martin: So he just dismisses dreams?

Ray: No, not dismiss. He acknowledges their function—especially in the earlier stages of life. He mapped that out in his Seven Stages of Life. But from the seventh stage point of view, dreams are just more appearances. They’re not sacred messages from the unconscious; they’re the echo of the self-contraction at a subtler level.

Martin: That’s a hard sell. I mean, when I dream I’m being chased through a labyrinth and wake up feeling like something important’s trying to break through—that’s real. It moves me.

Ray: Yes. But what’s it moving? The presumption of someone being moved. That labyrinth dream is like a flare going off inside the ego’s own drama. Jung sees it as meaningful, directional. Adi Da sees it as an effect of identification with a someone who needs to be moved somewhere.

Martin: So everything’s just an illusion? Even this conversation?

Ray: As long as we’re identified with point of view, yes. It’s all an apparent modification of what he calls the Divine Self-Condition.

Martin: You mean Conscious Light?

Ray: Exactly. It’s not something you look at—it’s what everything is arising in and as. Not a point of view on the world. It’s what remains when no point of view is being assumed.

Martin: But I feel like a point of view. I feel located. I look out from behind my eyes.

Ray: Yes. That’s the self-contraction. That’s what he calls the ‘fist’—like you’re closing your hand, continually, to be someone. But it’s an ongoing act. It’s not something that happened once in childhood. It’s happening now. Always now.

Martin: And the past? What about the idea that my history shapes me? That I’m carrying generations of conditioning?

Ray: You’re carrying an idea of past, in the present. The so-called past is not back there pushing you. It’s a narrative arising now. There is no force from the past—only your identification with the idea of it, now.

Martin: So even evolution, history, trauma…?

Ray: Appearances. Necessary at one level—but ultimately non-binding. Non-necessary. Adi Da says: the world, including time and causation, exists only from the standpoint of egoity. From the Divine Condition, there’s no ‘before,’ no ‘after.’ Only a radiant, indivisible Is-ness.

Martin: But doesn’t that make life meaningless?

Ray: No—it makes it inherently free. It frees you from the illusion that you’re defined by story, by cause, by karma. Meaning becomes a kind of dream-loop. You break the loop not by denying it, but by seeing its emptiness.

Martin: Jung would say meaning is what keeps the soul alive. Even if it’s provisional.

Ray: Adi Da would say: the soul is an appearance within Conscious Light. It’s not ultimately real. But Realization is not deadness—it’s radiant, alive, utterly intimate. But not personal. Not relational. Just… Real.

Martin (pausing): So why develop at all? Why not just sit on a cushion and wait for the whole thing to dissolve?

Ray: Because unless the egoic structure is matured, you’ll just be dissociating. Adi Da says spiritual practice is not for the unripe. You must be capable of being transcended. And that means you’ve done the work—become responsible, relational, emotionally coherent. You’ve stood up.

 

“That is all anybody is doing unless they are understanding it, being responsible for it and entering into the eternal incident that is spiritually communicated to them in this moment.

That is the only way you can do something different than everybody else in the world is doing. And there is no magical release from the past, there is only responsibility for it. Once you become responsible for it and adapt to the eternal incident in the moment, then the past starts becoming obsolete because you are adapting in a new way. The reason it hasn’t changed yet, even though you’ve thought about your life for years, is that you haven’t adapted differently.”

Become Responsible

 

Martin: So individuation is like building the scaffolding. But then the fire comes and burns it down?

Ray: Exactly. Or the sun rises, and the scaffolding is revealed to be made of mist.

Martin (grinning): That’s beautiful. And probably infuriating.

Ray: Only to the one who still thinks he’s holding something.

Martin: So no final answers.

Ray: Just the falling away of the questioner.

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Notes

🧩 Adi Da’s Paradox of the “Individual”

1. The “Individual” as a Necessary Apparent Condition

Adi Da insists that spiritual realization is not for the immature, the dissociated, or the unintegrated. In his language:

• One must be “psychophysically whole”.

• One must have passed through the first six stages of life with relative maturity.

• One must be capable of emotional vulnerability, relational integrity, intellectual clarity, and responsibility for attention.

In other words: there must be the appearance of a coherent, functioning “individual” who is capable of spiritual recognition and real practice.

This is where Jung and Adi Da seem to converge, at least functionally: there’s a necessary integration of the psyche before transcendence of the psyche can occur.

2. The “Individual” Is Not Ultimately Real

Yet, Adi Da always adds:

The “individual” is not a real or permanent entity—it is an activity of self-contraction, a presumption of separateness.

Even a mature “someone” is still a someone—and that is the illusion that must be undone.

So while he encourages the development of the individual, he does so only so that the apparent individual can stand in conscious relation to the Divine and be transcended.

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🎭 A Useful Analogy: The Actor and the Role

You can think of it like this:

• You must become a good actor—clear, responsible, grounded in the role.

• But then you must wake up from thinking the role is who you are.

So Adi Da’s “individual” is like an actor who knows he is playing a part—and eventually recognizes even the actor is a mask, arising within the Divine Radiance.

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💡 Implication for Practice

This is why Adi Da is not advocating:

• Renunciation of the world in an immature or dissociated way.

• Anti-psychological or anti-developmental “shortcuts.”

• Mere spiritual bypassing.

Rather, he insists:

One must become capable of being transcended.
The ego must be grown to the point that it can be undone consciously.

In fact, without such development, the spiritual path becomes distorted. People will:

• Interpret Realization as a personal experience.

• Turn spiritual teachings into myths of attainment.

• Or worse, claim realization without the actual fire of transformation.

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🔁 Bridging Back to Jung

Here’s how we can bring this full circle with Jung:

• Jung’s individuation is a process of becoming psychologically whole.

• Adi Da’s first five stages are a process of becoming functionally whole.

• Jung stops at the Self as archetype—the divine within the individual.

• Adi Da moves beyond the Self—not just divine within the individual, but no individual at all, only the Radiant Condition.

So: Jung builds the vessel; Adi Da breaks the vessel.

Both are necessary.

 

🧠 Carl Jung: Individuation and Archetypes

1. Individuation

Jung’s process of individuation is the psychological unfolding by which a person becomes whole. This is:

• A movement toward integration of unconscious and conscious contents.

• The recognition and harmonizing of the ego with the Self (capital “S” Self).

• A lifelong process of making the unconscious conscious.

Jung believed that the psyche is structured with archetypes—inherited forms or patterns common to all humans, such as the Shadow, Anima/Animus, Hero, Wise Old Man, etc. These are not personal but collective, and they organize experience, dreams, myths, and religious systems.

In short, Jung sees the world—including dreams, myths, and inner symbols—as meaningful, necessary expressions of the psyche’s attempt to reach wholeness.

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✨ Adi Da: The Radical Non-Necessity of All Forms

Adi Da, by contrast, speaks from the seventh stage standpoint, where the ego, the psyche, and the world are already presumed to be illusions—arising entirely within the non-binding, non-necessary field of the Divine Self-Condition.

He sees:

• Dreams

• Archetypes

• The entire field of mind and myth

…as part of the apparent play within the conditional realm—what he often calls the “gross, subtle, and causal” planes—all of which are still modes of egoic identification.

The dream world and the waking world are not two realities, but two levels of the same illusion—both are arising within the same field of present-time self-contraction.

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🔁 The Key Contradiction: Meaning vs. Outshining

In Jung’s system, the unconscious is teleological: it “wants” to bring the ego into union with the Self. In Adi Da’s understanding, that entire movement is a distraction from the Truth that there is no ego, no separate self, and no process toward Truth—only the contraction that must be seen through.

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🌀 Dreams as Threshold or Distraction?

• Jung: Dreams are meaningful; they are the language of the unconscious guiding the individual toward wholeness.

• Adi Da: Dreams are also illusions—arising in the same space of appearance as waking life. Even lucid dreams, visions, or astral events are part of the subtle egoic matrix.

Here’s how Adi Da puts it (paraphrased):

The “meaning” of dreams is a stage-based interpretation. They may serve a purpose in earlier stages, but from the seventh stage view, they are not sacred messages—they are appearances within the illusion of self.

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🕯️ A Bridge? Or a Clean Break?

You might say:

• Jung offers a path through the dream—through the archetypal, symbolic, and mythic—to wholeness.

• Adi Da offers a fire that burns the dream entirely.

One heals and integrates the dream world.
The other transcends and dissolves it.

But both see the world and psyche as shaped by more than the personal ego—and that is the shared territory.