Reading Beyond the Literal: A Listening Approach to the Word of Adi Da
A Reflection on Chapter Twenty-Seven of The Dawn Horse Testament
A Beezone Study
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Preface: Reading Aham Da Asmi with Subtle Attention
The passage under consideration comes from The Dawn Horse Testament, Chapter Twenty-Seven, in the essay titled “Aham Da Asmi. Beloved, I Am Da.” This sacred text written by Adi Da Samraj, is a radiant and profound assertion of the Divine Person’s eternal and universal presence. For many readers, the language of this text communicates a direct and revelatory truth—a declaration of the divine identity of Adi Da and of the timeless, boundless nature of divine grace.
And yet, in this exercise, Beezone not approaching the text only with devotional reverence or metaphysical affirmation. It is a necessary call to read with Adi Da’w word with precision—to notice not only what is said, but how it is said. To listen, not only to the revelatory claims, but to the conditions woven into them. This is a call to the discerning heart—to that part of us capable of seeing that divine truth is not merely stated but transmitted in a structure of relationship.
The Excercise
The specific sentence we will examine appears, in its complete form, as follows:
“Now, and forever hereafter (as Me, and in and through all the only-by-Me given and giving practices, instruments, and agents of the only-by-Me given and giving Way of the Heart), the Divine Awakening Grace of the Eternally Living and Only One (Who I Am) is present and active here (and even everywhere, if only I Am there proclaimed and My Revelation all made known).”
At first glance, this may appear to be an absolute declaration—an affirmation of the omnipresence and self-activating power of divine grace. And indeed, the language of presence and universality is unmistakable: “now, and forever hereafter… present and active here… and even everywhere…”
But at the very heart of the sentence lies a conditional clause:
“if only I Am there proclaimed and My Revelation all made known.”
This is the pivot. This is the inflection point at which metaphysical assurance turns into listening activation. Grace is indeed present and active—but not unconditionally. It is present and active through Me, in and through the practices and instruments I have given, and wherever I am proclaimed and My Revelation is made known.
This sentence does not merely assert a transcendental truth; it describes a living process—one that requires the mutual participation of the Divine and the devotee (or any listener/reader), the Giver and the receiver, the Transmission and the one who confesses it.
To read this sentence properly is to resist the temptation of spiritual transcendental idealism—the tendency to assume that because grace is proclaimed to be everywhere, there is nothing further to do except ‘turn’. On the contrary, the very form of the sentence reveals that grace becomes active in relationship, through the dynamic of proclamation, practice, and revelation being made known.
Literalism and the Loss of Transmission
The sentence we are exploring—like much of Adi Da’s instruction—is charged with presence, rich in spiritual import, and precise in its expression. And yet, if one does not bring a discriminative mind and a feeling-intelligence to the reading, the depth and function of such a sentence can be lost entirely.
There is a great danger—subtle, but real—in taking Adi Da “at His word” in a merely literal way. To do so is to flatten his transmission into a set of abstract proclamations or metaphysical doctrines, rather than to receive his speech as a living communication that must be felt, entered into, and relationally received.
Language, by nature, is an abstract medium. It refers to reality; it is not, “in itself” reality. Adi Da himself was deeply aware of this limitation, and he consistently pointed out that his words—though necessary—are always a means, never an end. His speech is a form of siddhi—a spiritual transmission occurring through the medium of words, gestures, presence—but not identical to the words themselves.
To read him without discrimination is to unconsciously separate what is being said from what is truly being communicated. It is to assume that meaning is carried solely in the form of the words, rather than in the total context in which those words are arising—his being, his presence, his revelation, and the living relationship between the Divine and the reader.
Literalism, in this sense, becomes a kind of spiritual abstraction. It treats language as a container of truth, rather than as a vehicle of participation. It subtly removes the reader from relationship with the speaker, and places the reader in the position of a passive receiver of words and informed revelation—when in fact Adi Da’s Word is always calling the reader into self-transcending communion; and therefore his transmission.
This is especially dangerous in a sentence like the one we are examining. The first half sounds universal, sweeping, comforting:
“The Divine Awakening Grace… is present and active here and even everywhere…”
But then the sentence turns:
“…if only I Am there proclaimed and My Revelation all made known.”
If one skips lightly over this clause—or treats it as secondary or decorative—one walks away with a false absolutism: the comforting idea that grace is universally available, requiring nothing from us. This is a profound misreading.
The actual structure of the sentence makes it clear that grace is not abstractly available; it is relationally responsive. It flows through the Way given by the Giver, through the proclamation of the One proclaimed, through the making known of the Revelation that must be known. This is not the language of metaphysical assurance—it is the grammar of relationship.
Listening While Reading: A Required Discipline
To read Adi Da’s Word rightly is to listen while reading—not merely intellectually, but existentially. Listening, in this context, is not the passive reception of content; it is the active, whole-being openness that allows transmission to occur. It is an attunement of the heart, not just the head.
Adi Da’s language is not merely descriptive; it is performative. It does something—if we allow it. But to allow it, we must read with the same quality he always emphasized in right devotional life: reception, recognition, and response.
This is why he did not simply write books to be studied like philosophy, nor poems to be admired like literature. His words must be entered with the whole body-mind, with feeling, with breath, with vulnerability, and above all, with the willingness to be undone by what is revealed.
To do otherwise is not only to miss the point—it is to turn Revelation into rhetoric, to freeze the Living Word into dead form. And this, Adi Da warned, is the beginning of religion’s fall from grace.
“I pointed out that devotees tend to make me into a nonentity. You dehumanize me for various reasons, one of which is that you have rather abstract notions about the state of the Spiritual Master. You tend to think that the Spiritual Master is somehow exclusively a transcendental state”
If You Can Come to this Realization, Then We Can Make Our Agreements.