Praise for Adi Da, long forms

Praise for (long forms)

Ruchira Avatar Adi Da Samraj

and His Wisdom-Teaching

by volume

(“historic” order)

Knee of Listening 
(1973, 1978, 1984 ed.)

Foreword

by Alan Watts:

Although I do not know Franklin Jones [now Adi Da]
personally, what he says, and says very well, is something that I have
been trying to express for thirty-five years, but which most people seem
quite reluctant to understand—as if it were too good to be true. The point,
with which Krishnamurti and the ancient Chinese Zen masters also agree,
is that there is no progressive method by which the liberated and awakened
state (moksha) can be attained. This state of being and consciousness has
innumerable names—mystical experience, enlightenment, self-realization,
cosmic consciousness, union with God, not to mention Sanskrit, Chinese,
and Arabic equivalents but none of them are satisfactory because it is
altogether beyond words. Striving after this state blocks the understanding
that it is already present, as does also a kind of purposive not-striving.

There are, for example, those who try to live completely
in the present, the Eternal Now, by attempting to be fully concentrated
on what is at this moment—as in the Theravada Buddhist satipatthana discipline
or Gurdjieff’s “self remembering.” I am not quarrelling with this. Franklin
Jones also tried many methods. But all along it should have been obvious
that all consciousness, all experience, is of nothing else than the eternal
present. Memories of the past and anticipations of the future exist only
now, and thus to try to live completely in the present is to strive for
what is already the case. This should be clear to anyone. The same principle
applies to striving for nirvana or union with God by means of so-called
spiritual exercises. There is no actual necessity for a road or obstacle
course to that which IS.

But there are two main reasons for the persistent attachment
to spiritual methods. The first is that, being ignorant of what we have
and are now, we look for it in the future, and therefore can be beguiled
by all those gurus who pick our pockets and sell us our own wallets. They
promise marvellous states of consciousness, ecstasies, psychic powers,
and transportation to other levels of being. So what? If you were managing
the entire universe—which in one sense you are—it would be absolutely
necessary for it to appear that a lot of things were out of control. Does
the ventriloquist want to dine every night with only his dummy?

The second is the beguilement of spiritual pride, which
is also the same thing as a sense of guilt. “I am not worthy to attain
this exalted state unless I have suffered, unless the teacher has beaten
me, unless I have sat in a cold, dark cave for three years, or practiced
za-zen with my legs aching for hours.” Anyone silly enough to think this
way deserves all the pains he must endure. Nothing is more ostentatious
than deliberate humility, nor more egocentric than projects to get rid
of egotism. These are strong words, but not uttered in a spirit of condemnation,
for those who undertake such projects may, by so doing, realize very clearly
that they are futile. But then they may return as gurus thinking that this
is the only way to realize the futility of spiritual ambition, and then
“lay their trip” upon others without asking themselves, “Is this trip really
necessary?”

As I read Franklin Jones—especially the Epilogue,
which is worth the price of the book—he has simply realized that he himself
as he is, like a star, like a dolphin, like an iris, is a perfect and authentic
manifestation of the eternal energy of the universe, and thus is no longer
disposed to be in conflict with himself. Dangerous wisdom—and yet fire,
electricity, and technical knowledge are also dangerous. But if you genuinely
know this, it is nothing to be proud of nor humble about. It is just what
is so, and there is absolutely no necessity to parade it by defying social
conventions, on the one hand, or by coming on as one who is extremely holy,
on the other. The hapless Rasputin was, perhaps, an example of the first
case, and Meher Baba of the second—though he had a jolly face and a lively
twinkle in the eye.

It should be understood that none of this is to say
that one should not practice yoga or any other type of meditation. I myself
use some of these disciplines, not to attain anything in terms of spiritual
rank, but simply to enjoy them, as if I were playing a musical instrument
or preparing a Chinese dinner.

Now to say what Franklin Jones is trying to say is
like drawing an asymptotic curve—a curve which is always getting nearer
and nearer to a straight line, but only touches it at infinity. Perhaps
it could be said that his curve is approaching it a little faster than
some others, knowing, however, that there is no hurry. Beyond words, in
the silencing of thought, we are already there.

Rancho Saucelito, California.

April, 1973

Alan Watts

(Watts was in the process of becoming a student of Adi Da at the time
of his death.)

author, [ The
Way of Zen ] [ Joyous
Cosmology ] [ Tao
of Philosophy ]

[ Nature,
Man and Woman ] [ The
Wisdom of Insecurity ] [ Taoism
: Way Beyond Seeking ]

[ Buddhism
: The Religion of No-Religion ] [ On
the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are ]

This
Is It, and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience

The
Way of Liberation : Essays and Lectures on the Transformation of the Self

Alan Watts Electronic University

---

Knee of Listening
(1991
ed.)

Foreword

by Bill Gottlieb:

What you hold in your hands is not just a book. It
is an  invitation and an opportunity, a doorway to Joy. It is the
Autobiography of Sri Adi Da’s early Life, the sacred Story of His Birth
and evolution as “Franklin Jones”. Let me tell you about my first encounter
with this Graceful Gift, with The Knee of Listening.

The year was 1975 and the place was the Catskills,
gentle mountains a few hours north of New York City. I was living on the
top of one of those mountains, at an old resort that had been purchased
and renovated by a Spiritual organization, and meditating four times a
day. My life—I thought—was dedicated to an ancient Spiritual goal: to
move attention to deeper and deeper levels of the mind until I clearly
realized the silent source of the mind, the blissful Self of Transcendental
Consciousness.

There was a small library there of Spiritual and religious
books, and one day while browsing, I noticed a very unusual title: The
Knee of Listening. The Spiritual Teacher on the cover seemed so alive,
so present—there was no anxiety or reserve in His eyes or His posture.
And since I loved to read books by or about Saints and Yogis, I took it
with me, looking forward to a few hours of pleasure and inspiration.

I did not know that my world was about to be turned
inside out.

For I had not encountered one more Saint or Yogi or
Sage, one more holy struggle to realize God. I had encountered a Spiritual
Realizer Who was completely and mind-shatteringly unique. He was born in
a state of perfect Divinity, a state He called the “Bright”—the living
Radiance of absolute Consciousness, the living Form and Power of the formless
Reality. He then intentionally sacrificed His awareness of the “Bright”
and took on the human and limited personality of “Franklin Jones”. And
He did all of this with a great purpose, with a mission of remarkable Love:
to experience every form of human pursuit and human satisfaction, from
the most intense physical pleasures to the highest esoteric realizations
of Yogic mysticism and even the realization of pure Consciousness exclusive
of all phenomena, and to understand and transcend all of it, to reveal
the limit and futility of all of it, to show that the seeker is “Narcissus”,
always alone, always intent only on himself. And, eventually, to re-Awaken
to the present and perfect Reality, to Divine Being, to the “Bright”. Yet
this recapitulation and transcendence of human experience was not for His
own sake, for He had been born as the “Bright”. It was to Communicate the
Perfect Divine Way of God-Realization to humanity—not the path of seeking
for God, as if the Divine were absent, but the Way of present Communion
with God.

I read all of The Knee of Listening—the Spiritual
odyssey of Franklin Jones; the summary insights and ecstatic proclamations
of “The Meditation of Understanding” and “The Wisdom of Understanding”
(the two sections at the end of the Autobiography)—in a sweat of astonishment
and joy. Never had I encountered a Spiritual Teacher with such Divine simplicity
and sophistication, such clarity of understanding, and with a beauty of
verbal expression that went beyond aesthetic perfection to a vibrancy,
an energy, a mantric power that clearly was Communicating the Divine Itself.
I knew I had found the greatest Spiritual Realizer that had ever lived—He
was alive, now—mysteriously appearing as an American in His thirties.
And His message that God was to be enjoyed in the present, not hoped for
in the future, spoke directly to my heart.

But I did not respond, at least not right away. During
the next fifteen years I developed a complicated life of seeking, eventually
admitting to myself that my “Spiritual” practice was an empty ritual and
abandoning it to concentrate in a life of pleasures and an increasingly
successful career. But for all those years, I continued to read the books
of Sri Adi Da, continued to listen to His Call,for understanding and a
relationship with Him. Then, in 1990—heartsick with the mediocrity and
destructiveness of my life; knowing that my job and my intimate relationship
and all my other satisfactions would never create true Happiness; deeply
in need of His Help, and feeling, for the first time, that understanding
would not be possible without His Grace; and realizing, too, that the only
reason I was waiting to respond was . . . because I was waiting—I became
His devotee.

And now, to the joy of all His devotees and all who
support His Work, and to the benefit of the world, there is a new, greatly
expanded edition of The Knee of Listening, timed to celebrate the
twentieth anniversary of the beginning of Adi Da’s formal Teaching and
Blessing Work in 1972 and the publication of the first edition of The
Knee of Listening that same year.

I can only tell you that I was even more captivated
when I read this edition than when I read the first. I was so struck by
the utter humanity of Franklin Jones, by how fully He had allowed Himself
to embrace the ordinary and extraordinary appearances of human life. I
saw more clearly, too, how “Franklin Jones” was a Spiritual epoch in the
Life of Sri Adi Da. How Franklin had achieved every Spiritual experience,
every sought-for insight and revelation, every goal known to the sacred
traditions of humankind—and finally transcended all goals and all experiences
by penetrating every illusion that limits awareness, and re-establishing
Himself in the present Perfection of Divine Being. And I was moved again
by the beauty of His character—by His compassion, His vulnerability, His
courage, His uncompromising commitment to the Ordeal of bringing the Divine
Person into the human sphere.

Yes, I fell in love again with Franklin Jones—but,
really, I fell more deeply in love with my Guru, Sri Adi Da Samraj. For
I have sat at the Feet of Adi Da; I have seen with my own eyes His obvious
and Glorious Divinity; and I could feel more clearly than ever that “Franklin”
was a paradoxical persona, the first step in the Emergence of the most
beautiful Form in the universe, the Radiant Body of the Divine World-Teacher.

Reader, the true importance of The Knee of Listening
is not that it is the Story of Franklin Jones. Its true importance is that,
through the life of Franklin Jones, the way was prepared for the Revelation
of Sri Da Avabhasa, the “Bright”—the One Who Gifts us all in every moment
with the Grace of His Reality; the One Who Is the most complete Source
of Divine Wisdom and Blessing in the world, encompassing and transcending
all traditions and experiences in His magnificent Person. I have felt the
Blessing Power of that One. He has transformed my life utterly, rescuing
me from the dismal repetitions of satisfactions and disappointments, allowing
me to Commune with the Love and Freedom that He Is, Giving me—and everyone—a
purpose for living: to celebrate and honor the Appearance of the Divine
One, the Reality of God alive on Earth.

You can begin your relationship with that One through
reading this book. It was His first public Revelation, the first form of
His voice to reach the world. I urge you to open yourself to the Life that
fills these pages. It is a Life Lived for your sake, for your Happiness,
for your Freedom. If you are wearied by what Sri Adi Da calls the “hopeful
hopelessness” of life, by gaining only to lose, by achieving pleasure only
to return to pain, then consider the Reality of Sri Adi Da: The Divine
Person is here to Bless and Awaken you and all beings to our blissful Identity
as God. The opportunity has never been so great.

Bill Gottlieb

editor, New
Choices In Natural Healing

former Vice President and Editor-in-Chief, Rodale Press

---

Scientific Proof
of the Existence of God

Will Soon Be Announced by the
White House! (1980)

An Appreciation

by Robert K. Hall

Adi Da talks sanely about real sanity. His subject
is always the same: a way of living this human existence without fear and
without obsession. He talks about surrender to God as only one who has
done so can, with luminous clarity and ecstatic precision. But those are
just words. To appreciate the good fortune we all enjoy from his being
here on earth, one has to meet him in the heart as well as in the mind.
He is a man of God and he talks of a way through the heart to direct experience
of God. At times his words appear out of the murk of human ignorance like
fireworks in a July night sky. It is hard not to hear him!

This is a difficult book. At times the language soars
to such esoteric subtlety that only another adept could understand. In
between the peaks of ecstatic language, though, are long stretches of very
straight and shocking description of the human condition. Adi Da reminds
us that we are declining, out of fear, to live our lives in harmony with
the creative life force. He points to our obvious failure to give up the
fear of living fully in the moment. Over and over he challenges us to give
up the contraction of fear around the heart so we can get on with the creation
of community among all people that is based on loving contact with each
other and with the Divine.

In our world of political chaos and potential nuclear
holocaust there must be many men and women who are awake to the madness
around us and ready to hear the voice speaking in these discourses. I pray
that this book inspires them to expand in love and to become guides for
the millions who are still blinded by fear and mistrust. The need for truth
is urgent.

Robert K. Hall, M.D.

Co-founder, Lomi School and The Gestalt Institute
of San Francisco

---

Foreward:

On Heroes and Cults

by Ken Wilber

Knowledge is not democratic; creativity is not egalitarian.
I realize that sounds contrary, but consider: When we want original, concise,
and brilliant insights into any field of knowledge, we almost always go
to the acknowledged masters of that field. In physics, we look to Newton,
then to Einstein, then Heisenberg and Schroedinger and Wigner and Bohm.
In biology, we go to Lamarck and Darwin and Wallace, then Morgan and Muller
and Watson and Crick. In psychology, to Freud and Adler and Jung and James
and Piaget. And why not? Genius is genius, and the more the better.

Although that is what we do in fact—consult the geniuses—I
sometimes think we all like to imagine, on the contrary, that enduring
knowledge is discoverable by all and sundry, that insight is democratic,
that you and I could produce the same truths given the right opportunities.
That is probably not the case, however, and the practical fact is that
humanity has always relied on, and looked to, Heroes—real Heroes, men
and women of great genius, men and women who happen, for one reason or
another, to be able to see more, understand more, create more, and know
more, than you and I can at our present level of evolution, or adaptation.

People are always the philosophers of their own levels
of adaptation, and—how can we deny it?—some are more adapted to, and
grounded in, the Reality of Truth itself, whatever the particular field
of knowledge through which that Reality might express itself. And those
individuals, so grounded, have simply been in fact the Heroes of times
past and present. They were and are the Heroes of the True, or the Good,
or the Beautiful—and ultimately they are all simply the servants of our
own evolution.

This does not mean that these Heroes—the Einsteins
and Darwins and Freuds and Nagarjunas—have a higher status than you and
I, because all people are equal in the eyes of Divine Mystery. But it would
be fair to say that they do serve a higher function: seeing and communicating
those truths that you and I cannot or have not yet seen and understood,
truths that are to you and me only potentials

And, I will soon argue, Ruchira Avatar Adi Da Samraj
is a Hero—a quite extraordinary Hero at that.

Yet, in America (as well as the world at large, I think),
we have an awkward stance towards Heroes. I mean real Heroes—actual geniuses,
men and women of truly brilliant understanding. It is as if we all wshed
to deny that read Heroes could be among us, since—I suspect—we all hold
out the dream that we, that you and I, could and should be our own Heroes.
To acknowledge a real Hero seems to deny our own worth, and so we are terribly
suspicious and sometimes downrght antagonistic towards any who might rise
up, in these democratc and egalitarian times, as a real Hero. Let our “heroes”
be movie stars, let them be astronauts looking for rocks on dead moons,let
them be tacky politicans—but real Heroes? real above-the-crowd geniuses?
Why, we seem to say, they exist only in the past, far away from our own
hoped-for heroics.

And especially religious Heroes, Spiritual Masters,
true Adepts in the Divine Mystery—let them abound, we seem to say . .
. but only in the past, only yesterday. I cannot be the only one who marvels
at the fact that some forty million Americans accept, as absolute truth,
that miracles were performed in the past, that someone way back when walked
on water, healed the sick by touch turned water into wine and fish into
feast, raised the dead, and healed the lame. Yet none of those Americans
would accept any of that if it happened now, here, today. Oh, we all would
like to think that we could recognize one such as Christ if he returned.
But the sad historical fact is just the opposite: We—you and I—have from
the start rejected our true spiritual Heroes when they walked among us,
and, if history is any guide, we would probably do the same thing today.
It seems that, while they are alive, real Spiritual Masters are met with
benign neglect (or worse). The fact is that Christ (or Buddha or Moses)
might already have returned—and been summarily rejected. What evidence
could we offer otherwise, given our past performances?

I do not want to sound moralizing or condescending
about this—I am in no position to do so. It is just that the issue of
real Spiritual Masters is so complicated, so touchy, so sensitive, so complex—and
I only want to set the problem in the strongest possible terms so as to
point out what is involved. We seem to have mixed emotions about Heroes
in any field, but we become almost hysterical in our reactions to spiritual
Heroes. The point is this: All true spiritual Heroes are, while alive,
by and large rejected, shunned, denied, or worse (consider the horrendous
fates of Giordano Bruno, al-Hallaj, Christ, Eckhart). But while all true
spiritual Heroes are initially shunned, not all those shunned are true
spiritual Heroes. And we—you and I—will simply have to try to decide
who is a Divinely empowered Master, and who is a fraud, or, at best, whose
realizaton is incomplete.

This problem has today reached a critical point with
the events of Jonestown and the growth of so many apparently strange cults.
The world at large now looks with even more terrified suspicion upon any
movement that appears “cultic”—that is, any group, large or small, centered
around a “heroic” or “charismatic” leader.

“Cult” is the new anathema; cult is the new terror.
But here again we face the same dilemma: All truthful and beneficial causes
are initially “cultic,” but not all cults are either truthful or beneficial.
Examine any major historical phenomenon, and you will find it is cultic:
headed by a Hero surrounded by devotees. This is not necessarily bad. How
could the American Revolution have survived Valley Forge without the hero—figure
of George Washington and his cultic followers? Where would modern psychiatry
be without Freud and his slavishly cultic disciples? Or on the religious
side: Christ and his cult of disciples, Buddha and his cult of monks, Krishna
and his cult of devotees. Could we seriously wish that none of those cults
ever existed?

Politics is cultic; religion is cultic; philosophy
is cultic; even science is cultic—and cults, in the broadest sense, simply
represent groups of those who acknowledge and try to follow in the steps
of the Heroes of a particular field of endeavor. But, as I said—and it
is worth repeating one last time—while all truth is initially cultic,
not all cults are truthful. We in the West have a long list of cults and
their Heroes that we generally think are harmful: Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini,
and, closer to home, many of the new “cultic religions” that enslave rather
than enlighten. But please notice: What makes these movements deplorable
is not the fact that they are “cults,” nor the fact that they have “heroes,”
but the fact that they are based on ideas or principles that reasonable
men and women would eventually agree are erroneous or immoral or even heinous.
But whatever you think about moral or immoral heroes, can you start to
see how extremely tricky is the problem of followers, of truth, of heroes,
of cults?

And so: Adi Da is a Hero and Adi Da is surrounded by
devotees. What, then, are we to make of this spiritual Hero? Realize that
we cannot reject him simply because he is viewed as a Hero. And realize
that we cannot reject him simply because he has dedicated followers. Rather,
we must look to his teaching, look to his life, look to his example, look
to his message. We would not deny such “due process” even to a common criminal,
so let us not deprive our potential Heroes of at least equal courtesy.

What, then, do we find? Let me offer a personal opinion.
I have put forward four or five books and some thirty-odd articles devoted
to a synthesis of Eastern and Western religion and psychology. Freud and
Jung and Adler, Piaget and James and Sartre, Hinduism and Buddhism and
Taoism, Christianity and Islam and Zen—I have spent my life studying these
systems, profoundly sympathetic with their concerns, sincerely interested
in their insights. I myself am no hero, but I honestly think that, by now,
I can at least recognize genius, real genius when it comes my way.

And my opinion is that we have, in the person of Adi
Da Samraj, a Spiritual Master and religious genius of the ultimate degree.
I assure you I do not mean that lightly. I am not tossing out highpowered
phrases to “hype” the works of Adi Da. 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.

I would hope that I would not make such a bold-faced
statement without being able to support it. And so, consider: If you survey
carefully the world’s great and enduring religions, you tend to understand
that, taken as a whole, the great spiritual paths announce four or five
major themes. Islam is based on the truth of only-God; Christianity, on
the truth of only-Love; Buddhism is based on the truth of no-self and no-seeking;
Judaism, on the truth of the Divine as formless and imageless Creative
Power and Mystery; Hinduism, on the truth of formless absorption in the
unmanifest; Christian mysticism centers on the descent or reception of
the ‘Holy Spirit”; and Taoism grounds itself in “Eternal Flux.”

From a slightly different angle, the great world religions
can be divided into three major classes. The first is the “path of yogis”—the
path of hatha and kundalini yoga, which deals with all the “energies” leading
up to the highest centers in the core of the brain. The second is the “path
of saints”—the path of subtle halos of light and sound secreted within
and beyond the higher brain centers, the path of realizations apparently
beyond gross mortality. The third is the “path of sages”—the path of formless
absorption and meditation in the causal realms of consciousness itself,
the realms of only-God, beyond manifestation and beyond any form of the
subject-object dualism.

And here is my point: The teaching of Adi Da includes,
even down to the minutest of details, every one of those five major themes
and every step of those three major paths. I personally have found that
not one significant item of any of the great religions is left out of Adi
Da’s teachings. Not one. And it is not just that these points are all included
in his teaching: They are discussed by Adi Da with such brilliance that
one can only conclude that he understands them better than their originators.

One cannot help but reflect on why Adi Da’s teaching
is so balanced and basically complete. I think one of the reasons is that
Adi Da himself has tested, and passed through, all of the major paths as
we discussed briefly above. Although born natively predisposed as the Ultimate
Transcendental Consciousness, he himself underwent years of discipline
in and re-adaptation to perfect Ecstasy in God, an evolutionary discipline
that, because of its completeness’ seems destined to be revolutionary as
well. He spent years in the disciplines of the “path of the yogis,” under
the acknowledged teacher known as Rudi (Albert Rudolph or Swami Rudrananda).
He spent years in the “path of the saints,” meeting and then surpassing
the well-known Master of the subtle realm named Swami Muktananda. Beyond
those stages, he “met,” “saw,” absolutely acknowledged, and gracefully
bowed to such transcendentally awakened saints and sages as Swami Nityananda
and Sri Ramana Maharshi. At the summit of those paths, he seemed then to
stand complete, possessed of a teaching and pointing a way that included
and transcended all through which he has himself passed.

Perhaps you will disagree with my intepretation of
Adi Da’s life. But I think you would ae least have to agree that his intellectual
brilliance and moral fortitude mark him as a true Hero—a beneficent hero,
a good hero. Disagree with him if you want; fail to be moved by him if
you choose—but please do not toss him off as a “weird cult hero.” Besides,
Adi Da himself has spoken out so often against “cultic hero worship” that
it would be very odd to overlook his own thoughts on the matter.

From the start, in fact, cultic hero worship is precisely
what Adi Da has tried to expose and argue againse. And he was doing this
years before the present-day national hysteria about “cures” and “hero-frauds.”
And he has spoken out not just against the cures of so-called spiritual
masters, but againse cultic allegiance in any ultimate form: scientific,
political, religious. Six years ago, as but one example, he was already
explaining that “the cult of this world is based on the principle of Narcissus,
of separated and separative existence, and the search for changes of state,
for happiness. All of the cultic ways are strategic searches to satisfy
individuals by providing them with various kinds of fulfillment, or inner
harmony, or vision, or blissfulness, or salvation, or liberation, or whatever.
But the truth is that there is no such one to be fulfilled. Therefore,
it is the fundamental responsibility of all to continually undo the practice
of the cult. Such a cultic existence has no fundamental value at all. Not
only hasn’t it any value, it is an absolutely negative influence in the
life of persons.”

Adi Da acknowledges that certain (truthful) cults have
an intermediate function—as we said, all truths tend initially to be cultic/heroic,
so why press it? However, as Adi Da puts it, “The negative tendency in
cultism is the tendency to forget that mere enthusiastic association with
an object, an idea [whether of a new scientific discovery or of an evangelical
revival], a person [a hero-figure] or whatever, is basically a superficial
or ‘beginner’s’ state of mind. All mere enthusiasm, or belief, or ritualized
consciousness is at the novice level of human existence, and if it persists
beyond its appropriate term [emphasis added], ie becomes an expression
of either childish or adolescent neurosis.” Such has been Adi Da’s stance
from the start, and such remains his stance today. In this book he states
unequivocally—and probably for the thousandth time—”I don’t believe there
is stupidity, delusion, and casual ill-will manifested anywhere more than
in the domains of religion and spiritual cultism.”

Ah, we may say, Adi Da speaks against other cults—from
science to religion—but what about his own? Does he not encourage his
own cult of Heroism? Does he not also ask and claim followers? Is he not
himself the perfect example of the new cult Hero?

Those are harsh questions, but I think they are ultimately
fair, and so deserve a fair answer. First of all, Adi Da, like any genius,
is and will forever be surrounded by a group of followers. There is no
way to avoid that, and no reason to—any more than we would want to prevent
Jung and Adler and Rank and Jones from gravitating towards Freud. Eventually,
Freud was wildly praised by Jones and wildly denounced by Rank—so what?
When we judge Freud, let us look to Freud, and not hold him responsible
for the vicissitudes, often irrational, of his followers.

But more importantly, we have the whole example and
teaching of Adi Da himself to those who would be his followers. And nowhere
is he more critical of the “cultic” attitude than he is towards those who
surround him. This is a short foreword, and so I will not inundate you
with supporting quotes. But make no mistake about this affair: I have never
heard Adi Da criticize anyone as forcefully as he does those who would
approach him chronically from the childish stance of trying to win the
favor of the “cultic hero.” Look at his writings, and you will find the
constantly repeated argument that those who see him as a personal, cultic
hero do not see him at all, but are merely involved in narcissistic self-love
and “movie star” fantasy-hallucinations about their relationship to him.
I have seen no other Spiritual Master take that anti-cultic stance from
the start so consistently, so forcefully. Fortunately, I do not need to
document that point—Adi Da’s writings are in print, dated from the start,
and thus what he has been saying for the last seven years can only be taken
more seriously—not less seriously—in light of the recent “cult disasters”
and belated national panic about “cults” in general and “hero-frauds” in
particular.

The last thing I would say is this: Perhaps your approach
to Da Free John will not be that of a pure devotee; perhaps it will not
even be that of a helpful “friend” of his work. But it is becoming quite
obvious that no one in the fields of psychology, religion, philosophy,
or sociology can afford not to be at least a student of Adi Da Samraj.
At least confront the teaching; at least study what he has to say; at least
consider his argument. Since he is indeed a true Hero—an authentic and
supremely enlightened Spiritual Master—please make use of him while he
is alive, while he can serve you in direct, living relationship. Do not
repeat the past mistake of denying such a Spiritual Master while he walks
among us. Do not meet him with benign neglect. Do not wait until decades
or centuries after his death to acknowledge what he is. As a simple start,
study his written teaching. And I think that if you will work carefully
through even one of Adi Da’s books, you will find you have been taken apart
and put back together again in a form that will be only Mystery to you,
only Release in God, only Radiance in the Divine, and only Joy in the obviousness
of it all.

Ken Wilber

author, The
Spectrum of Consciousness

One
Taste : The Journals of Ken Wilber

Eye
to Eye : The Quest for the New Paradigm

Sex,
Ecology, Spirituality : The Spirit of Evolution

The
Essential Ken Wilber: An Introductory Reader

A
Sociable God:Toward a New Understanding of Religion

Up
from Eden : A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution,

The
Marriage of Sense and Soul : Integrating Science and Religion

The
Eye of Spirit : An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad

The
Atman Project : A Transpersonal View of Human Development,

No
Boundary : Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth

Quantum
Questions : Mystical Writings of the World’s Great Physicists

The
Collected Works of Ken Wilbur; Essays on Transpersonal Psychology

Grace
and Grit : Spirituality and Healing in the Life and Death of Treya Killam
Wilber

editor, The
Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes: Exploring the Leading Edge of
Science

consulting editor, Journal of Humanistic Psychology

[ Ken Wilber
Online ] [ Ken Wilber’s more
recent essays  from beezone]

---

Easy Death
(1983, 1991)

1983 edition:

Forward by Kenneth Ring

Just after beginning to read the manuscript of Easy
Death, I had to break off in order to travel to Boston where I was
scheduled to give a lecture on near-death experiences. As often happens
on these occasions, there were several persons in the audience that evening
who themselves had had such experiences—and they wanted to talk about
them afterward. From six years of public speaking on this topic, I have
learned to listen carefully to such informal accounts; there is something
about these direct testimonies, heard for the first time, that compels
one’s total attention.

A slender, bespectacled young woman of about thirty
began to describe her experience. It was at first, she told me, most unpleasant.
This was because she felt that it was her ego that was dying—and that
part was an extremely painful process. But once she had surrendered to
it, she continued, she had experienced a feeling of transcendent bliss
and supreme well-being. Concluding her narrative, she said, “If you really
want to know what death is like, pay attention to yourself as you are about
to fall asleep.”

Easy Death.

I must confess that, under the circumstances, I found
this whole episode just a bit unsettling, for what this woman was telling
me—as you will quickly confirm for yourself—seemed a perfect and succinct
summary of what I had been reading only the previous day in Adi Da’s book.
Even more strangely, I cannot recall ever before having talked with a near-death
experiencer (and I have encountered hundreds during the course of my research)
who described an ego-death in conjunction with a near-death experience
nor one who had explicitly recommended observing the pre-sleep state itself
as a rehearsal for death.

Naturally, this little bit of synchronicity left me
feeling that I had just received a gentle nudge in order to remind me that
it was indeed time for me to read this book. And, as I did so, I certainly
found abundant reason to feel deep gratitude for the uncanny way the Universe
has contrived to send out its memos. You will of course discover your own
reasons for appreciating just how this book has found its way into your
hands at this particular time.

To be sure, the awareness of death is always timely,
however motivated we are to avoid thinking about it. Yet in our own society
it has not always been topical. It was the Thanatology Movement—now nearly
a quarter-century old—that began to change this state of affairs. Gradually,
the repression of death, the last taboo, was lifted, and we were finally
able openly and publicly to discuss our feelings and our fears about death
itself.

It was in the mid-1970s, however, that the concern
with death exploded into a kind of mass public phenomenon. Elisabeth Kubler
Ross, who had already won widespread acclaim for her pioneering work in
the area of death and dying, began to speak in well-publicized fashion
of the existence of what would soon come to be called “near-death experiences.”
Shortly afterward, psychiatrist Raymond A. Moody, Jr., published his enormously
popular book, Life After Life, arguably the most influential book written
in this century on the subject of death and dying. The work of these two
physicians alone was sufficient to galvanize a good part of the Western
world to become deeply absorbed with the experience of dying—and with
the implications of their findings for “life after death.” And in their
wake, an entirely new field of thanatology—near-death studies—has surfaced
to consolidate their insights and to further research and applications
related to near-death experiences. As a result of these efforts and the
continuing publicity the mass media have given to this phenomenon, most
people—at least in the United States—now believe they know what it is
like to die and what will happen to them afterward.

If one traces the history of this entire death awareness
movement, then, one can discern a gradual collective progression from fear
of death through fascination with death (stemming from reports of near-death
experiences) to the beginnings of an acceptance of death. Despite these
advances, however, it has become clear that we have yet to reach any profound
insight into death. All of this indispensable insight has been blocked,
at least in part, by certain distortions that have arisen from the study
of near-death experiences and the popular interpretations of them that
have inevitably followed.

Easy Death has been written in an attempt
to expose these distortions and to offer instead not merely a corrective
reading of these experiences, but a wholly encompassing teaching concerning
the nature and significance of the death process. In Adi Da’s vision, the
meaning and implications of near-death experiences are, then, radically
altered, and our understanding of these experiences is placed in an entirely
new light—and quite literally, as you will see!

For example, in the essays and discourses that comprise
this book, Adi Da explains why it is an error to regard these experiences
as promising personal survival—and why so many people have succumbed to
that interpretation; he also explains why people can be falsely beguiled
by reports of these experiences into thinking that they will be permanently
elevated into an enlightened state upon their physical death; and he shows,
too, that the experiences people relate after coming close to death are
by no means unique to near-death crises, but can occur in a variety of
conditions where there is dissociation from the physical body. In addition,
he provides a full account of the interplay of neurological, psychological,
and psychic factors that together will determine the form of the near-death
experience. The framework he offers to us here is again not to be found
in either the popular or scientific literature in near-death studies. In
all these ways—and in others you will discover for yourself—Adi Da undermines
the conventional understanding of this phenomenon and reveals its hidden
and deeper meanings.

But please understand—despite Adi Da’s recurrent references
to them, this is not a book chiefly about near-death experiences. It is
really an extended discourse on death itself from the viewpoint of a fully
realized Western Adept. Though you will have to read the book itself in
order to appreciate the profundity and clarity of Adi Da’s teaching here,
his essential message can be summarized as follows:

To die properly, one must practice dying in every moment.
It is the ego itself that must die, however, and this is effected by learning
to surrender oneself fully into what Adi Da calls the Radiant Transcendental
Being, or Ultimate Reality. Surrender, then, is the key both to dying and
living, for only through surrender, complete and total, can one awaken
to the fact that there is only the Radiant Transcendental Being. It is
not merely that That is there for us at death; it is our real Ecstatic
Self—our True Identity—now. Awakening to That is akin to awakening from
a dream, but one cannot expect thus to awaken at the moment of death if
one does not practice conscious surrender in the moments of life. For one
who is Awake, the moment of death itself is, as Zen Masters are wont to
say, “no big deal,” since one is already fully identified with the Radiant
Transcendental Being. For one who can se the moment of death to awaken,
there is “easy death.” For all others, there are a great variety of what
I suppose could be called “lazy deaths”—deaths that bring post-mortem
conscious experiences that, though they may be beautiful for some, are
permanent for none and will in turn be followed by other experiences and,
for most, eventual return from subtle worlds to the physical realm. Adi
Da’s teaching about death is, in a nutshell, about how to avoid this latter
fate.

While his teaching is clearly designed to provide the
student with a deep esoteric understanding of death, it is also intensely
practical (as Part V in this book in particular will demonstrate). In the
longest and, to my mind, the most important chapter in the book, entitled
“The Cosmic Mandala,” Adi Da has given a talk that contains at once the
heart of his teaching and specific instructions concerning how to apply
it at the moment of death:

. . . the best discipline at the point of death, or
in the midst of the death process, no matter what they have done all their
lives, is to relax and to release all hold on the body and the mind and
states of attention. Transcend fear through surrender, and ultimately a
visual representation of the Mandala [the visual manifestation of the Radiant
Transcendental Being] will appear. When it does, keep your attention to
the center of it. Do not be satisfied with lesser representations of the
Mandala such as a golden light, or a bluish light, or any other light.
Keep holding to the center until the entire Mandala appears, and keep holding
to the center until you move into the white field. Even though this exercise
will not be sufficient for movement into the white field permanently, it
will be a purifying gesture that generally will serve your transition .
. .

On that same visit to Boston I referred to earlier,
my wife and I happened to stay overnight with some good friends of ours.
Before we went to bed, I noticed a book of Aldous Huxley’s writings called
Moksha (Liberation) and asked if I could borrow it. Later, while idly browsing
through it, I found myself reading an excerpt, not from one of Huxley’s
own books, but rather from that of his second wife, Laura Huxley. In her
book, This Timeless Moment, she recounts how Huxley himself died. After
she had, upon his request, administered an injection of LSD, she sat quietly
with him and then intoned:

Light and free you let go, darling; forward and up.
You are going forward and up; you are going toward the light. Willingly
and consciously you are going, willingly and consciously, and you are doing
this beautifully; you are doing this so beautifully—you are going toward
the light—you are going toward a greater love—you are going forward and
up. It is so easy—it is so beautiful. You are doing it so beautifully,
so easily . . . You are going toward a greater love than you have ever
known. You are going toward the best, the greatest love, and it is easy,
it is so easy . . .

Easy Death. Again.

And, from Laura Huxley’s account, it does appear that
Aldous’s death was peaceful indeed, with no sense of struggle evident.

So both at the beginning of my most recent journey
and at its end, I seemed to hear Adi Da’s teachings spoken or written through
the words of others, while his own book waited for me at home. How curious,
I thought. How fitting. Perhaps it is time.

I suppose I should say that I myself have never met
Adi Da and am not formally associated with him or his community. But I
think I will be speaking for many others who also are not themselves students
of this great Adept when I express my indebtedness to him for the insights
he has striven to communicate through Easy Death. In his
writings and, I am sure, by his personal example, he is transmitting to
us the greater meaning of what near-death research has only dimly seen.

Perhaps it is time for all of us to begin to walk the
road that leads to Easy Death.

Prof. Kenneth
Ring

author, Life
at Death

Lessons
from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-Death Experience

Heading
Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience

---

1991 edition:

Forward by

Richard Grossinger

Since I began reading spiritual literature at the age
of nineteen, more than twenty years ago, no book has changed my view of
the universe more profoundly than Easy Death. Ruchira Avatar
Adi Da Samraj has spoken directly to the heart of our human situation—the
shocking reality of our brief and unbidden lives. Through his words I have
experienced a glimmering of eternal life and view my own existence as timeless
and spaceless in a way that I never did before.

We live under the shadow of death; we cannot evade
it; we cannot minimize it. Science, politics, and the modern media all
try to propagandize us into seeking absolute fulfillment on this plane,
but any happiness achieved on that basis will be superficial and transient.
We exist in preparation for an extraordinary experience that everyone has
undergone, even the ordinary aunts and uncles we view in old photographs:
“They have been zapped out of this experience.” They have gone on this
mysterious journey, no matter what and how they lived. And we will follow
them, each and every one of us.

Yet Adi Da is extraordinarily thorough in his criticism
of false assurances—things we tell ourselves that will make no difference
in the end. The actual experience of death will overwhelm any planning,
any memory. The cosmic shock of death will not suddenly enlighten us and
make it possible for us to transcend. We should not rely on the inevitable
improvement of our insights in a purgatory or heaven, or some vague guess
of another chance after reincarnation. One may nurture the best of intentions
for merging with higher planes, but under the actuality of the transition
between lives, everyone will be returned inevitably to where they really
are. The universe has no other way: “You cannot even hold on to your philosophy
or your mantra when you pass by a crosslegged nude on a couch! So what
do you think happens from life to death and back to life again . . . in
the midst of such a profound event as psycho-physical death?”

The answer lies in cultivating attention and full joyful
surrender before death. Adi Da’s “easy death” is a willing, conscious giving
back of life. You surrender not because there is nothing left in the end
and you are obliterated and extinguished anyway, but because there is nothing
to keep and the law that has given you life in the beginning requires surrender
at its end.

In this way, death becomes a necessary experience,
“a radical fast,” Adi Da calls it, since it purifies us of our elemental
aspect, our gross self. If we feel there is nothing other than this gross
self, that does not reduce our reality; ideas can no more destroy than
preserve whatever is our soul. Even if we feel we must be something more,
that in itself does not create something more. “Knowledge is never more
than knowledge about—and knowledge about is confounded by death. There
is no knowledge about things that is senior to death. Death is the transformation
of the knower…. Death is a process in which the knower is transformed,
and all previous or conditional knowing is scrambled or confounded….
To ‘consider’ death is fruitless, since the knower is what is changed by
death.”

Part of Adi Da’s comprehensive teaching on death is
a description of the process of moving through the subtler aspects of the
brain and nervous system into the source of mind and phenomena through
the mechanics of attention. His teachings are an unmythologized expression
of the wisdom that may also be found in ancient guidebooks such as the
Tibetan
Book of the Dead. He depicts the vision of the Divine “Brightness”
in star-form and of the surrounding Cosmic Mandala
(a vision that may serve as a guide to the newly dead person), and he presents
it from a variety of angles and perspectives.

It is precisely because our attention is so stubbornly
attached that great Adepts humanly incarnate that transcendent Divine “Brightness”
and attract human beings to meditate upon them, realize the inherent Divinity,
and transcend all of these limiting mechanisms of egoic attention and energy.
And the call to devotion to him as such a window to the Divine Reality
is the essential message of Da Avabhasa in his teachings, and of his devotees
in their many remarkable testimonies, in Eay Death.

The book closes by showing once again that death is
simply another experience in life. If one sees life clearly for what it
is, then, as he points out, death will not represent a major change at
all; it will be simply a relocation, as from California to New Zealand.
If life is surrendered before death, it will not have to be surrendered
under duress at the time of death.

I would caution the reader against assuming that what
you will find here is in any way consoling assurances. Here is a matter
of life and death, presented with searing absoluteness, with the only alternative
requiring supreme self-sacrifice both while we are alive and when we die.

Specifically, Da Avabhasa warns us against taking too
seriously the spiritual literature on life after death. After all, he points
out, people brought back to life from near death give egoic interpretations
of these states in order to reassure themselves that they are going to
a peaceful and shining place and will be among loved ones. He offers no
such consolations.

In a dream we are surrounded by people who are aspects
of our own psyche. If we are told by one of them that we are dreaming,
we may hear it, but it is part of the chatter of the dream and does not
alter our dreaming. During waking life we are also aspects of a dream,
but it is the dream of the Radiant Conscious Being. In the dream of this
being we are all the same person. And so, in this book Adi Da tells us,
in essence, “When you Awaken, you will Awaken to and as the very same Being
that I Am.”

Richard Grossinger

author, Planet
Medicine; The Night Sky

[ Out
of Babylon ]

---

The Transmission
of Doubt

Foreward

by Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D.

No doubt about it, we are living in a time of transition.
Today, we are beginning to realize that human and therefore inevitably
all consciousness is itself capable of undergoing a radical evolution. 
And thus it is quite timely that The Transmission of Doubt appears. The
originator of this volume is uniquely qualified to say and write what he
does at this time. He has managed to tunnel through (a quantum-physical
tunneling-through, not a classical-physical hurdling-over) a barrier that
has been erected and strengthened, albeit for the “right” reasons, by the
Western-Industrial-Academic-Scientific establishment to “make our lives
better.” The barrier that Adi Da points to, from the vantage point of one
who has “quantum-physically” tunneled through and erected a signpost on
the other side for all to see and understand, is the human ego.

According to the “dogma” of traditional science the
universe is dead. Life arises through the setting in motion of all that
has occurred, is occurring, and will occur from some central “point” in
spacetime, back in time to the “Big Bang.” Evolution is mechanics arising
from and out of that impossibly-difficult-to-imagine earlier aeon. Thus,
all life is fundamentally dead. When we die, that’s it. Science as a tradition
studies the physical domain of the universe and claims that all that is
is physical and therefore dead.

Yes, psychologists exist. But they too are victims
of the establishmentarian viewpoint. So, too, the psyche is physical and
dead.

Adi Da asks us to consider the universe as a psycho-physical
whole. It is simultaneously mechanical and living. From my view of modern
science or the “new physics” called quantum mechanics, Adi Da’s Teaching
rings remarkably true. According to this view, the living observer is not
passive and dead but active and participatory and always disturbing, in
a non-causal manner, the mechanisms of purely physical phenomena. In other
words, purely physical phenomena do not exist separate from the observer.

Thus, the ego or the artificial barrier that separates
that “internal sense of I-ness” from all the rest of the processes going
on in the whole, total, impossibly vast, all-time-pervading, light-like
expansive YOU-NIVERSE is, in spite of its overwhelming power of submission,
an illusion, which traditional science has managed to maintain erect through
its adherence to the falsifiable lie that the universe is rationally dead
and mechanical.

Adi Da puts down hard traditional science. Yet, this
criticism is not to be taken as scientific phobia. It is more a “wake-up
call” to those who are on the “edge of our time,” able to realize that
a transition to God-Realization as the (yours and mine) only true Condition
existing both beyond and within the barriers of spacetime is occurring
NOW. The simple recognition of this fact of existence alters radically
the human condition and allows the mechanics of self-contraction through
fear (which is the ego) to be witnessed in each and every one of us by
each and every one of us.

Thus, the “wake-up” call is loudest for the rationally
trained minds amongst us. The Adept’s argument is radical, logical, pervasive,
coherent, and certainly consistent with my view of the new physics. It
even offers the chance of further scientific enquiry—a new physics of
the Spirit is within our grasp now.

Of course, doubt is likely to arise in the rationally
inclined reader. It certainly arose in me when I first became acquainted
with Adi Da’s Teaching. Doubt is a universal process which arises naturally
through the quantum processes of the Principle of Indeterminism (as first
put forward by physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927), or as it is sometimes
called, the Uncertainty Principle. Read on anyway. This is no usual religious
espousal. As intellectual as you are you will find Adi Da’s arguments compelling.

The Adept Adi Da invites us to be as intelligent as
we are capable of being. He calls this “supreme intelligence.” He points
out that the ego and the scientific mind also want to serve humanity by
conforming to reality. But the reality that ego and science conform to
is a false reality. This illusion of reality is conceived through “self-abstraction
and the objectification of existence,” which arises from the desire of
non-participation (let Johnny do it, I’m too tired) or self-contraction
(which makes us all too tired because it takes up so much of our energy
and time to maintain our egoic masks).

In chapter 9, “Philosophy Is a Stress-Based Activity,”
Adi Da speaks about control and our lack, or illusion of abundance, of
it. This “control” (which arises from the concept of “counter-roll” or
stopping the rolling motion of an object by one’s devisal means) appears
to us as “real.” We talk about self-control, will power, body dexterity,
etc., and dream of machines that are our willing slaves “under our control.”
According to quantum physics such control is clearly impossible at the
most fundamental level of atomic and subatomic existence. Thus it is that
the desire for more and more control must end in unhappiness and further
feelings of defeat, fear, and narcissism.

Even the simple realization that we are truly incapable
of controlling anything will help us to realize that that desire for control
is a trap. This in itself may not awaken us to our true Condition, but
it will at least appear to the sleeplike dream we all walk in as a clarion
call. The universe demands egos. We have responded to that demand by worshipping
them, elevating them to impossible heights of illusion supported by traditional
Western thinking and rational thought all over both hemispheres.

Adi Da is not on an “ego-trip.” Careful consideration
will reveal that the ego that may be felt to arise while reading his writings
is none other than the reader’s. Adi Da is inviting us to enter the disposition
of God-Realization in the “seventh stage of life,” the highest Realization
of humankind according to the Way of Radical Understanding as taught by
him. It is then, as he puts it, that his “real Work in life begins.” For,
Enlightenment or God-Realization is only the beginning of the whole spiritual
adventure.

I invite you to consider this profound man’s wisdom,
to awaken with me to hos clarion call, to revitalize the enquiry into science
which will once and for all end the “transmission of doubt.”

Fred
Alan Wolf

author, Parallel
Universes: The Search for Other Worlds

Taking
the Quantum Leap: The New Physics for Nonscientists

The
Spiritual Universe: One Physicists Vision of Spirit, Soul, Matter, and
Self

The
Eagle’s Quest: A Physicist’s Search for Truth in the Heart of the Shamanic
World

The
Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche
& Physics Meet

---

The
Divine Emergence (1990)

Foreword

by Richard Grossinger

In our usual understanding of things, spiritual biography
is perhaps an implicit contradicdon. Biography represents UBios”, literally
the writing of a life, the same life of creatures and cells described by
biology. And the journey of the spirit’ if it is acknowledged at all, appears
to lie outside of time and space. Its “experiences” are unconditional.

The life story of Heart-Master Da Love-Ananda “answers”
(and refutes) popular abstractions about spirits and spiritual energies:
Spirit is not an it. When the Divine Consciousness mysteriously incarnates
in the Form of a Person, we have the special reality of a Being who is
also unconditional. In this book Saniel Bonder, a devotee of Heart-Master
Da, acknowledges that trying to put such a Life into a biography is “like
trying to photograph a hurricane, or to lasso a comet, or to travel into
the heart of the Sun”. Yet this biography, while taking issue precisely
with the notion of the Divine as a mere abstraction or a metaphysically
conceived other-dimensionality, demonstrates that there is no inherent
separation between the unconditional Spirit and Life. The “plot” of such
a story is not transcendence or initiation but the universal opening of
the Heart.

Thus, where Divine Energy contacts the world of history
as an apparent Individual, a narrative emerges, a story unfolds as the
journey of the spirit leaves its imprint on the passage of time and space.
The Divine Emergence of The World-Teacher is the story of Uthe Divine Person”
moving through history. We glimpse the impression on the world of “Bios”
transcending conventional reality.

In the truest sense of the Avatar, the Process of the
gross and deeper personalities and of the transcendent, free nature (what
I would call the “Spirit-Seed”) evolving from Franklin Jones into Heart-Master
Da LoveAnanda has recast the latter half of our twentieth century. And
the portrayal of the unique life of a Divine Incarnation as a fmite human

individual signals that it is possible for others to
be drawn by grace into the same Condition of transcendent freedom.

This story weaves ordinary life experiences with extraordinary
Revelation, thus providing us with a crucial understanding of not only
how much love the Master of the Heart brings into the world but how much
sorrow He encounters in so doing. That is the meaning of story-telling
here. Reflected in His own chosen Personality as a Western man HeartMaster
Da confronts precisely the depth of exile and pain present in all of our
experiences. Here we have the incredible tale of a Teacher Who so loved
His Disciples that not only did He choose an Incarnation in the West to
meet them but when His Disciples would not adopt His Form, He adopted their
Form to show them their own reflection. The result of this sacrificial
effort was His Divine Emergence, which marks a new chapter in epochal Spiritual
History.

Richard Grossinger

author, Planet
Medicine; The Night Sky

[ Out
of Babylon ]

---

Divine
Distraction (1991)

Forward

By The Reverend Thomas E. Ahlburn

After years of searching for a trustworthy Spiritual
path—twenty-five years in the ministry, long walks in the sweet Kentucky
woods with the late Trappist hermit Thomas Merton, wonderfully happy meetings
with His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet, and countless other encounters
with high lamas, monks, Zen masters, tantric yogis, nuns, priests, rabbis,
and gurus—it all comes down to this: A God-Man—a human being in full
conscious communion with the Divine—is alive on our planet today. This
is the surprising good news. It’s what this book is all about.

While studying for the ministry, I had occasion to
read what I took back then to be merely “religious tall tales” or “holy
exaggerations” about the great Spiritual Adepts of the East and other incarnations
of the Divine. I was fascinated by this sort of thing, even drawn to it—especially
to stories about the magic and mystery of Tibet—but I was full of doubt.
If ever there was a skeptical star, I was born under it. Early on, I found
myself at odds with the Christian tradition. It wasn’t long before I began
to distrust Eastern religiosity as well. As far as I was concerned, high
spiritual states and meditative practices resulting in enlightenment or
God-Realization sounded far too good to be true. Alas, like many of my
ministerial brothers and sisters in the West—even the most highly placed
and acclaimed—I was reluctantly willing to settle for much, much less
in life and religion. After all, I thought, God is really only another
name for human hopes and ideals. Truth to tell, it must be admitted that
we human beings have created all the gods in our pathetic attempt to “save”
ourselves. All religions are inescapably cultural affairs, human deliverances
through and through, not transcendental revelations or windows on the Divine.
At least that’s the way things seemed to me.

Happily, life didn’t go this way for James Steinberg,
the author of this book. And for good reason. He has met that rarest and
greatest and most wonderful of beings, an authentic God-Man. What is more,
he has answered his Spiritual Master’s pervasive, absolutely uncompromising
love. As our author makes abundantly clear, responding properly to uncompromising
love is not easy. Only on the strength of uncompromising responsibility
can one hope to adequately respond to uncompromising love. Which is to
say, the heart must always already lie open to the God-Man’s call.

Difficult? I would think so. Indeed, what could be
more difficult for self-cherishing beings like you and me than rightly
responding to such love? Indeed, the author indicates that he is always
falling short of the Divine’s demand in one way or another and having to
be set straight. Still, isn’t opening to the Divine what human life is
really all about? James Steinberg claims that it is, and this book certainly
dispelled any lingering doubts I may have had about his claim. It is clear
to me that he has found a gracious way leading out of and well beyond our
world’s spiritual discontent.

I believe that ultimately this book is for everyone,
despite the doubts some of us may have at the moment. No matter who we
are or what we presently say or profess to believe, we all share a deep
and heart-felt pathless urge for the Divine, or what transcends ordinary
life and suffering. I feel sure that James Steinberg would claim that this
deep and heart-felt pathless urge is itself the Work of Sri Adi Da Samraj.
I have come to believe that it is. Furthermore, I am convinced beyond any
doubt that this “Divine Distraction” will finally have its way with all
of us—as some of my Buddhist friends say—even to the last blade of grass.
It is the way of things, and Adi Da is Himself this Way or this Path.

What a wonderful book! After weighing my words carefully,
I do not hesitate to say that my encounter with the story told here has
been one of the most important events of my life. I don’t know how else
to put it, except to say that I feel like I’ve come home that my long search
is over. I am extremely grateful to James Steinberg for such a warm, direct,
honest, and sound communication of what the Guru-devotee relationship entails—its
great joys and testing trials. Of course, this book is not about James
Steinberg. It is about Sri Adi Da. The Sat-Guru is the great happy and
loving light shining through these pages. There’s no mistaking this.

This is all we need to know and understand: This book
is about the greatest Spiritual Master ever to walk the earth. Seeing this,
attending to this truth, we need not walk in the dark any longer. Adi Da
reveals the ultimate truth residing in the human heart and at the heart
of all religions.

Rev. Thomas E. Ahlburn

Senior Minister, First Unitarian Church,

Providence, Rhode Island

[ a
few sermons ]

---

The ego-“I”
is the Illusion of Relatedness (1991)

Foreword

by Gene R. Thursby

I am honored to have been asked to contribute a brief
statement of appreciation for Sri Da Avabhasa’s The ego-“l” is the Illusion
of Relatedness. In this book, a remarkable Adept displays the revolutionizing
wisdom that makes him justifiably known to the world as a “Heart-Master”
who awakens others.

With a masterful skill that is engaging from the beginning
and then becomes more and more deeply appealing, Sri Adi Da demonstrates
how a whole range of traditional formulations of esoteric wisdom are both
recapitulated and transcended in what He calls His “Way of the Heart”.
He reveals their inner logic and the meaningful pattern they form when
they come to be understood as components of what He calls the Great Tradition
of spiritual teaching.

Although not myself a devotee of Sri Da Avabhasa, I
readily acknowledge His singular accomplishment in so clearly expressing
this insight into the spiritual nature of reality and so effectively developing
it to serve as the basis for a complete way of life. This is a framework
for a vital, living, transforming practice that anyone can undertake. And
if you become truly serious about it, you will be enabled to grow Spiritually
to your utmost capacity within this lifetime. This point is made clearly
in a testimony that opens the book, “The Key to This Turnabout”, by one
of Sri Adi Da’s most advanced devotees, Kanya Samatva Suprithi. What she
professes and He proclaims is that the one great Accomplishing Principle
at the very center of His Way of the Heart is none other than the person
and the reality of the Heart-Master, Sri Adi Da Samraj Himself.

In the ancient Siddha tradition—and in Zen Buddhism,
Hasidic Judaism, Sufi Islam, Eastern and Western mystical Christianity,
and other authentic spiritualities that participate in the timeless wisdom
of the Great Tradition—the most subtle and profound transmission takes
place in the direct contact between the devotee and the Adept. The remarkable
book that follows here is an invitation to such a meeting. This is reason
enough for it to be regarded as scripture. Weigh its words carefully, and
be open to the possibility that Da Avabhasa’s presence beyond the words
will inspire you to choose a direct and transformative relationship to
Him. Because of this book, you may be moved to change your whole way of
life.

Gene
R. Thursby, Ph.D.

Professor of Religious Studies,

University of Florida

author, The
Sikhs

Modern
Hinduism in India

---

Feeling
Without Limitation (1991)

Foreward:

The Difference Between self-help and True Help

by William Gottlieb

I have spent my entire career writing and editing self-help
magazines and books. From avoiding an accident to zapping a zinc deficiency—if
there was a way to feel better, I did my best to let America know. But
no matter how much or what kind of self-help advice I gave—no matter how
savvy the expert I quoted or how practical the breakthrough I reported—
I knew every piece of how-to help I offered was a bandage, a holding pattern,
a brief interruption of one undeniable fact:

Everybody who read the magazine articles and the books
I wrote and edited—even if they followed every word of advice was still
going to be unhappy.

Sure, they might improve their lives. They might lose
some weight, or be kinder to their kids, or sleep a little better. But
any improvement would be like lipstick on a frown.

Because no change that anyone makes can eliminate the
very thing that all of us want to change the most: the constant parade
of problems through our thoughts and feelings, and the accompanying sense
of never having enough, of never being truly satisfied, of never feeling
really happy, our heart’s hunger fed—now and forever.

That is why it is my great privilege and pleasure to
write a foreword to this small book—because it truly offers Help.

I capitalize that word because the means of Help is
a Person with a Message greater than any change, any improvement, any seeking
for more. He tells us that there is no ultimate self-help—that the self
can never become fully and finally Happy. But He also tells us that beyond
this limited, suffering self there is the Divine Self—the
Being of Joy and Freedom, the Infinite Consciousness that is the Very Source
and Substance of Life. And He tells us each and every one of us—that this
Reality, this Identity, this Happiness that He calls the Heart”, is true
of us now, and It can be Realized.

The Person of Whom I speak is Adi Da Samraj—the Speaker
of the central Discourse of this booklet. He has Realized the Divine Self,
and He Offers a way for eveyone to Realize that same Happiness. There is
much written here about what Adi Da has Taught and about Who He Is (and
I would like to acknowledge that the various contributions have been threaded
together with commentary by my friends Saniel Bonder—whose book The
Divine Emergence of The World-Teacher led me to deepen my relationship
with Da Avabhasa—and Carolyn Lee). But before you read this book, I would
like to leave you with this thought:

The Wisdom of Adi Da, the Wisdom of the Heart, has
the Power to lead you to Happiness. My advice—the best advice that I have
ever given—is that you allow yourself to explore the supreme possibility
that He suggests, and to avail yourself of the true Help He so Lovingly
and Freely Offers.

Bill Gottlieb

[former] Editor-in-Chief, Prevention Magazine Health
Books and

former Vice President and Editor-in-Chief, Rodale Press

editor, New
Choices In Natural Healing

---

Polarity
Screens (1991)

Preface

by George Fritz, Ed.D.

AIthough the invention of the device known as the Polarity
Screens is properly attributed to L. E. Eeman about seventy-five years
ago, I am sure almost no one today would know about this remarkable tool
for relaxation and energy equilibration were it not for the recommendations
for its use given to us by Ruchira Avatar Adi Da Samraj. Those recommendations
were given in the context of a uniquely sacred approach to life in general
and to the healing arts in particular. The publication of this small volume
properly situates Adi Da’s recommendations regarding Polarity Screens in
the larger context of His comprehensive Teaching.

It was through Adi Da’s references to Polarity Screens,
appearing within His extensive and extraordinary literature, that I first
learned of them. Soon, not only myself and family, but also friends, and
later also my patients, would try the Polarity Screens and would feel themselves—usually
for the first time—as energy. It is the sort of shift in perception that
can change one’s life!

It certainly changed L. E. Eeman’s life. He was suffering
chronic pain (a condition today suffered by approximately 30-40 million
individuals in the U.S. alone), and he cured himself through the use of
the screens. To get pain relief, many will try anything, even techniques
which to the eye of conventional perception, stripped bare of any sensitivities
to bioelectric flow and balance, appear as quackery. But when they work
(as often is the case, for instance, with biofeedback or acupuncture),
people care only that relief may be available.

Not only do Polarity Screens work, but also, as in
the previous cases of biofeedback and acupuncture, scientific studies are
now being conducted which appear likely to confirm the positive anecdotal
reports of the many individuals who have successfully used the screens.
The applications are legion: not only as an antidote for the myriad conditions
of stress and pain, but also to enhance an alternative learning process.

However, it is important to note how the prevailing
culture (characterized by materialistic conventions of perception and presumption)
is capable of reducing everything appearing in its field, including Polarity
Screens, to its own least common denominator. Thus, acupuncture becomes
merely an analgesic or anaesthetic wholly explicable by mechanisms of nerve
stimulation; biofeedback becomes merely relaxation, achieved by nothing
more than muscular release; and Polarity Screens become merely a stress
and pain antidote, easily explained away as the balancing of skin electropotentials.
The energy dimension, and by further extension the “great presumption”
of Being itself, are systematically excluded.

This is where the present volume represents an invaluable
service. Its emphasis is to remind us that by the use of simple procedures,
like those of the Polarity Screens, we can readily feel the energy dimension.
Then, it may become clear to us that we appear mysteriously in a field
of energy—or, even more fundamentally, we may come to feel that we appear,
as energy, in a Field of Mystery.

I confess I would not have been blessed to feel and
contemplate these things had it not been for Adi Da’s “Bright” Presence
and His provocative Teaching literature. Therein, discussion of even the
most seemingly mundane topic, such as the proper arrangement of a pair
of copper plates and cables, can Open the being to a greater truth. Such
opening, as can be achieved with Polarity Screens, is not Enlightenment.
Still, if the energy dimension can be felt as real, then what else may
be ultimately Real, even though usually eliminated from consciousness by
my chronically contracted perceptions? It is important to find out.

(Dr. George Fritz is a psychologist, specializing in
pain control through biofeedback and acutherapies, and maintains a private
practice in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.)

---

The Hymn of
the True Heart-Master (1992, 1995)

Forward

by M. P. Pandit

The institution of the Guru occupies a pivotal position
in spiritual life. Whichever the tradition, the role of the Teacher is
of cardinal importance. To the devotee as well as the practitioner of any
chosen discipline, the Guru represents God, the realization of Whom is
the object of every seeker. And more: In rare cases the Guru actually embodies
God and facilitates the attainment of identity between man and the Divine.
Such a Guru occupies the heart of the disciple as the Master of his being.

Guru Gita, “Hymn to the Guru”, is an
ancient classic in the spiritual tradition of India celebrating the greatness
and splendour of the relationship between the disciple and the Master.
It shows the Way, and if one knows how to enter into the heart of the utterance,
it is itself the Way. For thousands of years it has been chanted on the
lips of countless aspirants, and it is known to have dissolved many an
obstacle on the Path and built up a melting relation of love between the
devotee and the Lord.

Ruchira Avatar Adi Da’s The Hymn Of The True Heart-Master,
though originally based on the inspiration of the ancient Guru Gita, has
a unique quality about it inasmuch as it has been carved out of the heart
of a great, presently living Master out of compassion for aspiring humanity.
Heart-Master Adi Da speaks from his transcendent consciousness and addresses
himself as a Personal Form. In an authentic tone his Voice speaks: “The
devotee should always Remember and Invoke the True Heart-Master by Name.
The Name of the True Heart-Master is the Name of the Great One. The Great
One is Present to serve devotees in the Bodily (Human) Form of the True
Heart-Master…. Therefore … meditate on His Spiritual

(and Always Blessing) Presence, and on His Very (and
Inherendy Perfect) State…. And … remain always intimate widh the True
Heart-Master’s Constant Blessing and Awakening-Power.”

There is a state of being in which there is a mighty
pulsation of Bliss and Power overruling all man-made conventions and standards.
Only those who are ready to go beyond themselves and their prepossessions
can taste the ambrosia that flows out of such a Heart-Master as Adi Da
Samraj. This spontaneous hymn of invocation is an invitation to such privileged
souls to partake of the Banquet.

I do feel this Hymn will be of immense help to aspirants
for a divine life. I am thankful that I had an opportunity to read and
benefit by it.

M. P. Panditauthor, TheUpanishads;
Gateways
of Knowledge

Traditions
in Sadhana : Studies in Tantra, Veda, Yoga, Philosophy and Mysticism

[ Wisdom
of the Veda ] [ Sri
Aurobindo and His Yoga ] [ More
on Tantras ]

[ The
Yoga of Knowledge ] [ Dictionary
of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga (ed.) ]

[ Kundalini
Yoga : A Brief Study of Sir John Woodroffe’s ‘the Serpent Power’ ]

[ Vedic
Deities ] [ Yoga
for the Modern Man ] [ The
Yoga of Love ]

[ The
Yoga of Self-Perfection ] [ Yoga
of Works ] [ Traditions
in Mysticism ]

[ Mystic
Approach to the Veda and the Upanishad ]

[ Traditions
in Occultism ] [ Occult
Lines Behind Life ]

 

[ M. P. Pandit is a widely recognized scholar in the field of Yoga and
the Indian Spiritual tradition. He has written or edited more than eighty
books of the Spiritual legacy of India, including works on such ancient
classical texts as the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Tantras, and the Bhagavad
Gita. He is Secretary of Sri
Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India, and has been a practioner of
Yoga there for over 50 years.]

---

The Method
of the Siddhas (1992, 1995)

Foreward

by Ray Lynch

In the fall of 1973, I walked out of a bookstore in
Portland, Maine, with a copy of The Method of the Siddhas under
my arm, wondering about Siddhas, their “method”, and what was in it for
me. I had no idea how profoundly this book would affect my life, but somehow
I was ripe for its truths. At that time, I was many things: ex-Texan, respected
lutenist (in New York City), gentleman farmer (in Maine), observer of life
(everywhere), seeker of truth (armchair). I was thirty years old and had
already achieved noteworthy unhappiness. I had also just received a warning.

One week before, while strolling across my front yard,
I was surprised by a sudden and shocking vision: A gigantic pit opened
up just in front of me, and, as I peered into its darkness, I knew with
uncharacteristic certainty that if I didn’t change the direction of my
life, I was going to fall into the pit and die. The synchronicity of these
events seemed meaningful, and I read The Method of the Siddhas with
an intensity proportionate to my newly perceived nearness to the precipice.
Halfway through the book I realized that I had found my Teacher.

The Method of the Siddhas presented something
new to my awareness: a man who understood, who was clearly awake, who had
penetrated fear and death, who spoke English (eloquently!), and who was
alive and available in California! His words cut across years of enthusiasm,
seeking, and suffering while giving the best description of my predicament
that I had ever encounted. He spoke the Truth and certainly didn’t glamorize
or minimize the ordeal required for its Realization. I worried about that
part, feeling that I would not be able to do everything that He was going
to ask of me, that I was unqualified for the kind of uncompromising relationship
being offered. But He was my only true option, and I soon found myself
on a plane to Los Angeles, lute in hand, heart in stomach, grateful for
something more real than the pit.

How can I summarize the years that have passed since
then? Adi Da’s first words to me, whispered in my ear as we embraced several
days later, were, “Stick with Me.” Later that week He did something equally
straightforward but, at the time, quite inexplicable: He threw me a pear.
I was sitting on the floor in the far corner of His office when He picked
a pear from a bowl of fruit on His desk and, without a word, threw it across
the room to me. I caught it, but I didn’t understand it, so I merely smiled
at Him. I had come in haste, unprepared and in great need, and I failed
to notice that I had brought no gifts. Giving was something I had to learn
(and am still learning). When I caught that first pear, I could have understood
and given Him all my suffering then, but I didn’t, and so over the years
Adi Da (never reserved in His Giving) has thrown more pears my way. His
Gifts, I have learned, come in many guises, some delicious and immediately
edible, others much more difficult to stomach. The most nourishing and
useful ones, oddly, are often the latter.

A year later, Adi Da threw me the most difficult (and
most useful) such “pear” in my experience. To appreciate its effect on
me, you would have to understand the overwhelming and seductive attractiveness
of the Company of such a free Being, passionate in His living, completely
open, totally committed to those around Him, and full of humor. I had come
to Him because I wanted to be free and happy, as He so obviously was, but
after spending only a little time with Him, I found that my priorities
had shifted: At the top of my list was the desire to simply be with Him,
Enlightenment was second, maybe third. In those early years, being with
Him, being “accepted” by Him, being “liked” by Him, was everything.

Now, I had recently married Kathleen (also a devotee
of Adi Da) and had begun a relationship which was proving to have, well,
a lot of local color. One evening Kathleen and I were at His house when
I walked into one of the rooms and saw Kathleen and Adi Da sitting on the
floor talking together. Apparently they were talking about me, because
as soon as I came through the door, He looked up at me and said, “I don’t
like him either.” It was like the moment just before impact when wrecking
an automobile. I felt the bottom drop out as my worst fears about myself
were confirmed. My mind reeled and something in me shut down as I refused
to understand what had just happened and, instead, pushed the whole incident
below consciousness.

Over the years my relationship with Adi Da continued,
but our physical contacts became rarer. (He had since established His residence
in Fiji while I was still living in California.) Slowly, and with some
difficulty, I began to understand and accept that God (or the God-Realized
Adept) was under no obligation to “like” the ego. I saw that my demand
to be “liked” and “accepted” was not only immature but actually insulting.
How could the ego, self-contracted and deluded, maintain its position in
the presence of Consciousness and expect to be congratulated Given my posture,
His comment was not merely beautifully timed but truly kind. It was clearly
a Gift, a pear of the first magnitude, and I had managed to suppress it
for years.

As the meaning of all this was dawning on me and I
began feeling the humor of the incident, my Teacher pulled another pear
from His bowl and drove home the real point, rounding out the whole affair.
A friend who had just returned from Fiji reported that Adi Da, in the midst
of a completely unrelated conversation, had abruptly looked up and asked,
“Does Ray know that I love him?”

I was so moved by this gesture on His part that I almost
failed to fully consider the question, and to acknowledge that, as the
ego, I was more comfortable with being “liked” than with being Loved perfectly.
His love was a challenge, because it was so complete, so unreserved. It
had nothing to do with anybody’s preferences. It simply couldn’t be contained,
and it spilled out, unexpectedly, into my life.

It also spilled out into my dreams. The dreams (and
there were many during this period) almost always dealt with the great
theme of this book, namely the Guru-devotee relationship (or Satsang).
One series of dreams, which went on for more than a year, consisted exclusively
of telephone conversations. Whenever I called, Adi Da always answered and
often spoke with great passion on the nature of our relationship, sometimes
pleading and weeping for me to understand. “Satsang is everything!!” He
shouted over and over, “Nothing else matters!”

Several years ago, after too long an absence, I traveled
to Fiji to be with Adi Da once again for a short while. This time I came
with my arms as full of gifts as I knew how to make them. Our first meeting
occurred in formal Darshan-sitting with Him for the simple purpose of viewing
Him and feeling into His Presence. I was sitting in front, eager and somewhat
nervous. He came in and sat down, and I was stunned by what I saw. The
mechanisms which normally filter my perception were suspended in that raw
and most beautiful moment. All the old protective scar-tissue covering
my heart was ripped apart. As my heart opened, I saw and felt Him fully,
as Reality, and I was pervaded and unhinged by the Truth of His Confession:
Love is a wound and it will never heal. It was all given in the first ten
seconds. I spent the rest of the hour weeping, as did He, as the mutuality
of our relationship sank into my being. I was finally understanding the
“method” of the Siddhas. Satsang is Love and Love is mutual sacrifice.
That is simply the way it works, and there is nothing anyone can do to
change it.

Three weeks later, on the day before my departure Adi
Da surprised me with another pear. At the end of my last Darshan, He gave
me a framed photograph taken a few weeks earlier. The photograph showed
us embracing. Below the photograph, but in the same frame, carefully dried
and pressed, was the flower I had laid at His feet when I first arrived.
His Gift to me was as unexpected and as powerful as the embrace had been.
It summarized perfectly everything I had been shown over so many years
about giving, about relationship, about love.

How can I summarize the life I live with One who Gives
so much and Loves so well? I haven’t the words but I can look at that photograph
and it’s all there. What the photograph shows is fully expressed in The
Method of the Siddhas and could be grasped instantly. But we seem to
need time, and so the Adept, graceful as always keeps reaching into the
bowl to remind us Who He is and, ultimately, Who we are. This book is a
reminder and, as you read it, my best advice to you is, heads up! You may
not see it coming, but a huge pear is being tossed in your direction.

Ray Lynch

composer; Sky
of Mind,  Deep
Breakfast, No
Blue Thing

Nothing
Above My Shoulders but the Evening

[ Ray’s Homepage
]

---

Twirling
& Jet Lag (1992)

Introduction:

Of Time Zones and Timeless Happiness

by Bill Gottlieb

Every year I travel from New York to Germany to attend
the Frankfurt International Book Fair. And every year I suffer the bane
and burden of international travelers—jet lag. For a few days, my body
feels like a piece of lost luggage—misplaced and battered and wondering
why it ever left home. When I want to be working I’m weary. When I want
to be weary I’m wired. I’ve lost my passport to normal life.

But this year I didn’t suffer from jet lag—not a bit.
For all my body knew, I could have flown from New York to New Jersey. What
did I do differently? Why did I feel so good?

I followed the Instructions of my Guru.

Now, that might not be the answer you were expecting.
For one thing, jet lag remedies are fairly standard—move around on the
plane, don’t drink alcohol en route, get some exercise when you arrive.
For another, people don’t usually associate the word “Guru” with a treatment
for jet lag. But my Guru—the Divine World-Teacher and True Heart-Master,
Adi Da Samraj—is a completely unique Spiritual Personality. He has thoroughly
explored every (and I mean every) area of human life and the process of
Awakening to Divine Reality, and He has created a Wisdom-Teaching of unparalleled
scope and profundity—which even includes specific methods for preventing
and alleviating jet lag.

This year in Frankfurt I used those methods: a basic,
simple exercise called “twirling”; an easy, relaxing Yogic posture; and
Polarity Screens, a device that balances and energizes the body. All three
of these methods are discussed in this booklet, which is offered to you
as a Gift of Adi Da’s Instruction—a leaf from the forest of His Wisdom.

But it is my hope that this booklet does more than
help you feel better after your next long trip. It is my hope that it attracts
you to find out more about Adi Da and the Way of the Heart—the Spiritual
Process of understanding and transcending all the discomforts and dislocations
of time and space. The Way of the Heart is lived in relationship with Da
Avabhasa, Who has Realized His Conscious Unity with the Eternal Reality
of Divine Being, and Who Helps Awaken His devotees to that same Realization.

Reader, I am a businessperson: I supervise a staff
of 80 people who create editorial products that generate yearly sales of
$170 million. I am tough-minded and practical. I am not a believer, I am
a doer—which is why neither my heart nor my pen can stay quiet about Adi
Da. I became His formal devotee in January, 1991, and since that time He
has transformed me—His Grace has showered me with the Gifts of human and
Spiritual growth For the ftrst time in my life I am capable of love—released
of my obsession with the need to be loved free to give my energy and attention
to others. I have easly given up various self-destructive habits like smoking.
I no longer feel in doubt about life’s purpose, or confused by the conflicting
currents of my own desires. But more than all this—and at the source of
all of these changes—is my active love relationship with Adi Da, “The
Realizer, The Revealer, and The Revelabon Of The Divine Person”. Yes—the
Divine is here in human Form here to Instruct, here to Love, here to be
“The Necessary Sign Of God, That Authenticates God and All Auspiciousness
To Man”.

My hope and my prayer is that you begin to respond
to what you read here. That you begin to feel the beauty of His Word and
His Wisdom. That you, as a weary traveler in time and space, allow yourself
to feel your heart’s need for a Greater Destiny—for the Perfect and Transcendental
Divine Rest of Ruchira Avatar Adi Da Samraj.

Bill Gottlieb

[former] Editor-in-Chief, Prevention Magazine Health
Books and

former Vice President and Editor-in-Chief, Rodale Press

editor, New
Choices In Natural Healing

---

The Order of My Free Names
(1995)

Swami Muktananda’s “naming letter“

 

---

(Return to DAbase Main Page)