An Educational Excercise
Preface
Note to the Reader:
This essay is an interpretive and educational reflection on a dialogue between Adi Da Samraj and a devotee that took place in 2004. Beezone does not possess the legal rights or copyright permissions to publish or reproduce the original dialogue in full. Therefore, what follows is not a verbatim transcript, but a narrative synthesis and commentary drawn from the content and spirit of that conversation.
Our purpose here is not to substitute for the source material, but to offer a thoughtful interpretation of Adi Da’s communication—especially as it pertains to the nature of spiritual experience, the limits of psychological consolation, and the critical difference between literal belief and esoteric truth. We encourage all readers to engage the original source materials published by the Adidam Sacred Archives or Adidam Literature if they wish to study the full dialogue in context.
The Gift of Release, The Trap of Experience:
A Dialogue with Adi Da Samraj
In a late-evening gathering in 2004, a devotee named Robert stepped forward to speak with Adi Da Samraj. His voice was reverent, his tone sincere, as he began not with a question, but with gratitude. He thanked Adi Da for a Blessing Puja that he felt had protected his son, during military service in Iraq. “He felt Your Descent most strongly when he visited the Mountain of Attention,” Robert said.
Adi Da replied simply: “Tcha.”
But Robert had more to offer than thanks. He brought with him a question—a question that carried the full weight of his spiritual past: his upbringing in Christian Science, his near-death experience from untreated appendicitis, his later conversion to what he called the “born-again” Christian experience. And central to his question was a moment of psychological release—a deeply felt episode he once interpreted as salvation, through the figure of Jesus.
“I felt my sins lifted off my shoulders,” he told Adi Da. “Jesus was taking responsibility for my life.” It had happened while reading the story of the thief on the cross—where Jesus, as written in the Gospel of Luke, promises the condemned man, “Today you will be with me in paradise.”
Adi Da interrupted gently but firmly. “How did he know Jesus was innocent?” he asked with a smile. “Presumably he hadn’t met him. He didn’t know why they were hanging him up there. You see—this is a story. Simply.”
That comment opened the floodgates to a torrent of deconstruction—not as rejection, but as revelation. Adi Da began to peel back the layers: the mythic fabric of early Christianity, the political emergence of orthodoxy under Constantine, the destruction of alternative sects and gospels, and the reduction of myth to propaganda in the service of state and church power.
“People who become involved in being Christians… are like religionists in general—naive adherents to a tradition. They haven’t the slightest idea where these communications came from for real, and have no basis for believing them other than their will to believe them.”
Robert listened intently. Still, he was searching for a way to understand that experience of grace he had once felt. Was it real? Was it spiritual? Was it, as he now hoped, a first intuition of Adi Da’s Presence?
Adi Da answered with unwavering clarity.
“What you’re describing is not a spiritual experience. Especially—it’s a psychological experience. Feeling forgiven. Dependent, not threatened. Restored to comfort. It’s virtually the same experience a child has when being embraced by a parent after a scolding.”
In that moment, Adi Da turned the entire architecture of conventional religion upside down—not out of scorn, but from the compassion of liberating truth. What passes for salvation, he explained, is often the psyche’s longing for safety, clothed in religious imagery. The figure of Jesus, the story of the cross, the experience of guilt and forgiveness—all real enough in emotional terms, but still within the bounds of the self-contracted body-mind.
“It’s a psychological sensation with particular, immediate causes,” he said. “People have these kinds of experiences under many different circumstances… while drinking alcohol, listening to comedians tell jokes, or watching women disrobe.”
The room laughed. But Adi Da wasn’t mocking Robert—he was pointing to a universal human pattern: the tendency to absolutize personal experience, to mistake the comfort of the psyche for the transformation of the being. To cling to an event—however sweet, however numinous—as if it were the Divine Itself.
He then widened the lens again.
“There are people seriously believing just about everything, one place or another on earth, right now. And it really doesn’t make any difference what anybody believes, except to them—in their limited disposition.”
And with that, Adi Da unmasked exoteric religion for what it has become: a game of social egos, each armed with their myth, their sacred book, their version of salvation—and their righteousness.
“Most of religion sits in that category of human enterprise,” he said. “Exoteric religion is not about esoteric revelation. It’s about control, social cohesion, and often abuse.”
Robert then asked whether Constantine’s imposition of a single official Christianity had been a disservice.
“To whom?” Adi Da replied. “It’s just the way religion goes. Religions become great by political support, not by virtue of truth.”
And yet—amid all the critique, all the stripping away—there remained the original longing: the felt need for real salvation, for real Grace. Was there any truth, any spiritual reality at all, behind these myths and feelings?
Adi Da didn’t deny that something greater can be revealed. But he warned: if the individual clings to the sensation, rather than turning beyond it—if he makes the experience itself the focus—then it becomes another form of egoic possession.
“Even if there were some experience of My Spiritual Presence felt in descent in the body, I’d still have to tell you the same thing,” he said. “The practice is not to turn on that experience, but to turn to Me.”
Again and again, Adi Da returns to the point of true sadhana: not to remember, not to believe, not to console oneself with past events or stories—but to turn beyond the self-contraction into actual Communion with the Divine Person.
Robert sat quietly. He had begun with gratitude. He had recalled trauma, redemption, guilt, healing, and deep longing. Now he was being returned to the only place where Truth can be Realized: the present moment, unburdened by memory, turning beyond experience itself.
“Be healed,” Adi Da said finally, “by transcending your own egoity and negativity.”
And in that gesture—cutting through belief, myth, sensation, and history—Adi Da offered not just critique, but the only true consolation: the invitation to Realize what is Always Already the Case.