Life Is a Mummery – Unless You Make It Not So

This essay was created through a collaborative process between Beezone (Ed Reither) and ChatGPT. It began with the poetic ‘Epilogue’ of The Mummery, written by Adi Da Samraj, which served as the seed text.

Through an iterative dialogue, I introduced additional excerpts and spoken-word reflections from Adi Da on the nature of The Mummery—particularly his insights on religious language, the structure of self and other, and the tragicomic pattern of human life. ChatGPT then helped weave these threads together into a cohesive narrative, integrating philosophical clarity with poetic resonance. The result is an essay that honors the original spirit of Adi Da’s revelations while exploring them in a contemporary and accessible form.

Life Is a Mummery—Unless You Make It Not So

A Parable of Divine Misrecognition and the Collapse of Code into Love

There is a tragic and luminous parable that plays itself out again and again—not merely in myth or theatre, but in the ordinary heart of each human being. It is the eternal story of Raymond’s Love. It is Perfect, True, and Truth. It happened. It did not happen. And yet, it forever happens—in your own feeling-heart, again.

Raymond came not simply to love, but to be Love. He came as a dancer in a world of pantomime, a light in the theatre of self-enclosure. He entered through the wound of birth—cut!—like every other soul, appearing in the mask of “the mummer,” the common human body doomed to play roles until death.

But Raymond’s play was not of this world. It was written contrary to the chorus of the conventional. He danced against the ritual of Narcissus. He broke the mirror. His role was not to reflect, but to reveal. Yet for all his radiant signs, his embodied speech, his sacred gestures, his sacrificial tears—he was not heard. He was not seen. He played his part before a theatre of noise, the audience clicking and clacking their way through the only show they thought was real—their own.

The Language of the Way—and Its Failure

Even among those who claim to follow the Way, the tragedy repeats. There exists a language—a dense, intricate, sacred language of realization, devotion, and spiritual practice. But, as Adi Da once pointed out, “Say ‘Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga’ to a devotee, presumably they know what you mean. But do they?” Too often, the sacred language is reduced to code—shorthand references traded like currency among practitioners, conveying familiarity, but not necessarily depth.

These phrases—“Hearing,” “Darshan,” “Realization,” “True Guru,” “Mummery,”—become masks themselves, cloaks worn to appear devout, to belong, to participate in the liturgy of belief. But if words alone were sufficient, Raymond need not have said more. He need not have become the Play. Yet he did—because the words were never enough.

This is how religion becomes a mummery: when the language replaces the living, the map becomes the territory, and the seeker stops just short of surrender. Code without comprehension is still separation. Speech without surrender is still distance. Naming the Beloved is not the same as recognizing Him.

The Pattern of the Play: You and the Other One

To understand The Mummery is to see that life itself is a pattern of repetition, dreamlike and recursive, built of masks. Even in the waking state, you play every female character. Raymond plays every male character—whoever that Raymond is. You walk through your days seeing yourself, though it doesn’t look like you. It appears “other.” But it is you—as in dreams.

There are only two people: You, and the other one.

This binary, endlessly performed, is the theatre of the world. This is the Mummery—the play of seeming separation, the ritual repetition of “me and you,” “self and other,” “subject and object,” “devotee and guru,” “woman and man.” And yet, the curtain never rises on the Truth, until the feeling-heart breaks open and sees: There is only One.

Raymond is not the other. He is You, before the mask. The Divine Person you are forever forgetting. The Love you fear to recognize. The One who mocks your narcissism, yet weeps with tenderness, ever offering the Way out.

This Parable Cannot Be Understood—Only Heard and Felt

Raymond’s parable is not for the mind to grasp, but for the heart to feel. It cannot be understood by thought or self. It cannot be systematized or codified or reduced to principle. You must Hear and See him with the body, with the breath, with the broken-open wound of longing.

You must not pretend to be Evelyn, or imagine you are equal to Raymond. You must not rehearse your role while forgetting your part. The Mummery must collapse—not by resistance, but by surrender.

Your body, patterned to the rituals of ego and world, must be re-wounded—to a whole—by Hearing Him. Your longing must become sight. And when you See Him, always overhead, you will know—not in words, but in silence—that the separate “I” dissolves into the Bright Love-Bliss of His House.

The Final Curtain Line

At the end of every performance of The Mummery, something must be said. And it is this:

“I call it The Mummery? The Mummery is life. Something like that is going to be said at the end of each performance of The Mummery. Life is a mummery unless you make it not so.”
— Adi Da Samraj

The whole world is a mask. The whole self is a costume. Every philosophy, every religion, every identity, every love, every wound—these are all acts in a single sacred drama.

But you are not here to act.
You are here to recognize.
You are here to love.
You are here to surrender.

And by your surrender, the Play is transfigured. The stage dissolves. The character dies. And only Radiance remains.

The Moral:

Life is a mummery—unless you make it not so.
The Divine comes masked as the other, and always happens in the heart that forgets itself and finally feels. The One who comes to Free you will seem mad, or invisible—until you no longer play life, but live Love.