A Study by Beezone into the Ecstatic Claims of Adi Da Samraj
Comments by readers woven together into one essay
We each have our unique relationship with Adi Da. As teacher as friends, students, critics,disciples, devotees. That venerable relationship to the spiritual master is far more important, in my opinion, than whether we can accept Adi Da’s later claims as being exclusively the One.
When I was a student of Adi Da assimilated a different understanding of Avatar from Adi Da, which seems at least at first to be contradictory to exclusivity of Divinity:
As he said:
“No apparent or exclusive manifestation is in itself the Avatar. Only the whole is the Divine manifestation without exclusion.Therefore, the Guru is not the Avatar in that exclusive sense. Mankind is the Avatar…God doesn’t exist in the exclusive sense…And the Guru lives as the Present Divine, not because he has attained anything, but because he has been undone.” The experience of relationship to Master Da seems to me more significant than any “theology” “opinions” or “dogmas.”
Claims such as what we’re talking about are very appropriate for the community of devotees but seemed “off putting” to a general public who most likely will react to “claims” without first allowing the reader to read stories for herself & be moved in her own particular way.
Maybe this is has more to do with devotion and a more private relationship and truly can’t be translated to public claims?
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I don’t believe in his Completing Revelation but I do believe in an evolving continual one.
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I don’t think Adi Da is a fraud nor should he be ignored. I do feel that great Realizers’ sayings to their intimate circle of devotees tend to get translated into institutional “only-oneness.”
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Stated most strongly, some already are saying that these kinds of claims are self-evidently grandiose, preposterous, unhelpful, & are readily explained by psychopathological diagnoses which is supported by the dysfunctional state of the current Adidam gathering.
Something can be said about how this is a special kind of speech, in a specific context.
Adi Da’s speech here is strong, and it is directed to his devotees as a powerful form of transmission. Understood thus, it can be appreciated.
Evaluating and rejecting it as if it were only literal speech fails to make full use of it.
Personally, at the level of my sane rational mind, I can’t accept these claims in literal, everyday terms.
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There’s also the level of my direct experience of Adi Da, which has been so mind-blowing and humbling that I know most of all that I don’t know and would never want to dare to put Him into an ontological box.
I know that my limited faculties cannot presume to know that he is not the first and only, and maybe even the last 7th Stage Realizer.
Even if it seems dangerous to seem to believe that he is all That, I’m more comfortable with ongoing silent contemplation of the Mystery of His being than inclined to yakety yakking about him as if my verbal mind can capture the Mystery of Existence and of Him in a series of relative definitions and ideas and assertions.
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As educated Westerners, find it particularly disturbing because we have seen through the false claim made by Christian Churches that Jesus is the “One and Only”, we are conditioned to be extremely skeptical of such claims.
So your essay basically comes from this perspective: we are conditioned by our times and culture, so how do we really know?
Thus, Silence
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I too question why He needed to be so blunt and controversial… esp. since He made plenty of statements about there being other 7th Adepts prior to the 1990s —
Yes, I do believe Adi Da is probably the BEST 7th Adept to ever appear…. but not the first, last, and only.
By following Adi Da’s OWN DEFINITION as what constitutes the 7th Stage Realization, I find countless examples of 7th Realizers in previous history.
What I don’t see is 7th Stage TEACHINGS, in most cases, and Here is where I feel Adi Da is Most Unique…. not in the Realization, per se, but in the embodiment of it.
Which is basically what I truly feel Adi Da Himself is pointing to by saying He’s the “First, Last, and Only” 7th Stage Adept.
When I see Only God and God Only, it makes not one hoot of difference Who is Best — it’s all about Seeing God Here & Now & Forevermore. Nothing will dissuade me from this vision, for it is the Truth… not even historical “confessions” by Gurus. There IS Only One God or Consciousness Itself, the Bright… so all else is noise.
But this is one of the largest obstacles to getting others to accept and appreciate Him as Avatar.
The best thing to do is establish a relationship with Him and find out for yourself — but that’s hard to do if He’s saying such extreme statements to begin with…. so yes, blame it on our culture and the future!
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Personally, I like your pt-of-view that suggests this is how it seems from His Perspective — and that’s what I tend to think: Bhagavan Adi Da was consumed by his enlightened state, for he was in it at all times, thus from his perspective, how could anyone in the past exceed this?… and so it is…
I do not worry too much about it (though it does bug me), because I have sat in front of Him and let him know I see no difference between him and me and God, that just because he was on the chair and I was on the ground at his feet, there was NO DIFFERENCE — ONLY GOD is present — and all He did was weep at this recognition and we swooned together, gazing into each other’s eyes seeing and knowing that Real God is Only Consciousness Itself which is Love-Bliss Divine… so it’s all good, for it’s all God.
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I appreciate your article Ed, as it standsthoughtful and well-considered.
As for me, outstanding comment of Adi Da’s re the classic Mahavakyas of the Upanishads (Tat tvam asi and the like) comes to mind: such statements are confessions of realization, not statements of fact.
From another angle: the problem here may originate, in effect, in a kind of meta-category mistake.
Our minds tend to categorize things and then reify the category. Thus we might presume the reality of a category Seventh Stage Realizer. However, it seems virtually certain to me, having now studied dozens of realizers from different traditions, that every realizer is completely unique.
I’m recalling the discussion of this topic by Ken Wilber and Georg Feuerstein in What is Enlightenment? #12, Fall/Winter 1997. THE Seventh Stage Realizer, Adi Da could only be the one and only one ever born. I recall Ken and Georg agreeing that the more advanced the spiritual practitioner, the more unique and individuated they become. Even more fundamentally, it is a scientific fact that no two humans are identical. Thus the uniqueness of realizers must hold as a corollary of the uniqueness of all persons.
That still leaves Adi Da’s professions of completing the entire Great Tradition.
Here, it’s my view, only time (maybe a hundred years or so) will tell.
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To do justice to the subject one would have to really examine the many points Bhagavan has made relative to the subject of his Realization and cultism in general (remembering along the way that this Way of life is filled with contradictions and offenses).I realized early on that the only way I could stick with Bhagavan as my Spiritual Master was to go with the heart attraction that brought me to him in the first place, accepting the fact that, at the level of logic and reasoning, I would forever be doomed to endure the tension and frustration of 2 diametrically opposed memes.
Regarding his confessions of Realization, he never said there could not be 7th stage Realizers and in fact had every intention of producing a few (in some lifetime or other). But he always made the distinction between the Realization and the Guru function (in this case the 7th stage Transmitter-Realizer).As for the “First, Last & Only” and the “Only By Me Revealed” declarations, it is my belief that he was referencing the uniqueness of his Siddhis. Why he had to repeat the latter statement in every other paragraph on every page of the later literature beats the shit out of my over-stressed gray matter 🙂
Maybe we can think of it as “Divine copyright”.