Preface
Note to the Reader:
This essay referencing a short video clip that follows is an interpretive and educational reflection on a recorded talk given by Adi Da Samraj on November 6, 2004. Beezone does not hold the copyright permissions to reproduce the original transcript in full. The following is a narrative synthesis and commentary drawn from the content and spirit of Adi Da’s communication.
The purpose here is not to substitute for the original source, but to illuminate the profound questions raised by Adi Da regarding the nature of self, the presumption of identity, and the illusion of historical continuity. In this talk, Adi Da deconstructs the very foundation of egoity, exploring the quest not for the historical Jesus, but for the historical self.
We encourage readers to engage directly with the published works of Adi Da Samraj through the Adidam Sacred Archives for a full encounter with His Teaching Word.
Beezone
The Quest for the Historical Self
Adi Da Samraj, November 6, 2004
(Video clip below)
In a gathering hall in 2004, Adi Da Samraj opened a profound inquiry. He began not with a doctrinal statement, but with a literary reference. Albert Schweitzer’s classic The Quest for the Historical Jesus had, He observed, become a kind of academic archetype—a title now echoed in books like The Quest for the Historical Israel.
But what if the most fundamental question of all was being overlooked?
“The most fundamental book that could be written,” He said, “would be The Quest for the Historical Self.”
And so began one of the most incisive dismantlings of the egoic presumption ever given.
Every human life, Adi Da proposed, is in some sense this quest—a search to locate, define, and preserve a fixed, knowable, personal self. But He did not frame this as a philosophical abstraction. Instead, He turned the inquiry toward His listeners directly:
“Right now, are you experiencing yourself as an actual, defined, describable, knowable self? Or is it just a convention of presumption?”
From this point forward, Adi Da led a careful, unrelenting deconstruction. What we call “self” is nothing more than a composite of sensations, memories, assumptions, and mental pictures. And yet we speak the word “I” as though it references something fixed and real.
He pressed the point through lived example. A devotee described losing his memory after an accident, unable to recognize even close friends—and yet still feeling like himself. But what was that self, if memory, relation, and recognition were all missing?
“He was disturbed,” Adi Da said. “Why? Because he couldn’t pin the ‘memory portrait’ on it.”
In truth, no one remembers all their memories. No one perceives their entire body. No one knows the expressions on the faces behind them. The so-called “self” is an assemblage of fragments, glued together by habit and reinforced by social interaction.
“You say ‘I, I, I’ and everybody scratches one another’s back and says ‘you, you, you.’ Et cetera, et cetera. But none of it is ever actually experienced. Never.”
The laughter in the room was not mere entertainment. It was the shock of recognition.
In moment after moment, Adi Da peeled back the conventions: the loss of hair, the shaving of a beard, the memories that fade, the sensations we cannot register—none of it points to a consistent self. Even perception, He noted, requires time. You never experience the body in the present. You experience it only after it has already passed.
So what, then, is this self we defend? This self we fear losing in death?
“If the self-contraction were utterly relinquished, and no presumption of separate self-existence were made, what is left?”
The answer: Only That Which Is Always Already the Case.
Adi Da named the root illusion: the presumption of a historical self—a definable, trackable “me” with a past and future. But that self, He asserted, does not exist. It is not merely unverifiable. It is never experienced. It is a lie, repeated out of fear, isolation, and social agreement. We are taught to perform the self, but not to inspect it.
“When you say ‘I’, you are indulging in a fiction of self-reference. You are not actually experiencing a separate self.”
And yet, He added, this fiction has consequences. It creates a world of mummers—puppets costumed in ego, playing roles with no one behind the mask.
“Everyone is faking. There isn’t anyone.”
What is Real is not the one who says “I” but the Condition in which the saying arises. What is Real is not the thinker, but the Reality in which thoughts occur. Not the body, but the Radiant Field in which the body arises.
This, Adi Da declared, is not reached by tracking the “I” thought back to a source. That is the method of the sixth stage path—a noble but conditional pursuit. Divine Realization, He said, is not a matter of “finding the source of the I” but of being That Which is Always Already the Case.
“When the self-contraction is transcended, there is nobody there. You find yourself out.”
And what is left, when the contraction ends? Not madness. Not void. But Radiance. Unity. The indivisibility of the arising world. The Outshining of all illusion.
This is what Adi Da called the seventh stage Realization—not the peak of egoic effort, but the transcendence of all seeking, all method, all self-reference.
“It is not about starting out with a world or with a self and finding its source. It is about having transcended all of that.”
To live this understanding, He emphasized, is not to abandon compassion or morality. Rather, true compassion flowers only when the illusion of separation ends. Morality imposed on ego is always fragile. True benignity arises spontaneously when the ego is gone.
In the final moments, Adi Da returned to the beginning: to the world’s great religious quests for historical figures. These are diversions, He said, distractions from the deeper, more terrifying, more liberating question:
Do you exist as a separate self? Right now? Truly?
And if not—what, then, Is?
He waited. The room was still.
“Well,” He said finally, with a smile, “there isn’t.”
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