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You Must Not Believe in Me
December 16, 1978
Bubba Free John (Adi Da Samraj)
Originally published in
Laughing Man Magazine
Beezone note: The following articles were published and directly addressed the Jim Jones’ Jonestown Massacre, where (909 inhabitants of Jonestown (including 304 children) died of cyanide poisoning – suicide (murder?). Adi Da’s talk (You Must Not Believe in Me) was given in December 1978, one month after the massacre.
San Francisco Chronicle – Front Page – November 21, 1978
(insert by Beezone)
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No one has more thoroughly and incisively criticized cultic behavior than Master Da Free John, and the “cult” that has received the brunt of his criticism is his own following. Since the beginning of his teaching Work in the early seventies, he has steadily addressed the tendencies of devotees to relate to him as some sort of magical being who will shelter them from the vicissitudes of life. He has time and time again decried the tendency to relate to him, to the Teaching, and to the community of practitioners in superficially enthusiastic terms, as if they had “found it.” He calls cultism a beginner’s orientation to practice, describing it as “prolonged exotericism.”
To continue reading the full article, follow this link to the Beezone Library.
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Watch Adi Da discussing the matter of ‘cultism’ and childishly following and believing in a spiritual teacher – from which the above article was taken.
“You all have heard me speak a number of times over the years about cultism in negative terms. I’ve criticized the cult of the Spiritual Master and cultic attachments that people create with one another. I myself have used this word as a negative term to criticize certain aspects of your own approach to spiritual life.
One of the primary aspects of the negative meaning I gave to the word ‘cult’ was this exclusive exclusiveness of the cult. Married people sometimes create a cult with one another. They get married, and they go off together, and they are never heard from again (laughter) except in superficial TV language with people they happen to bump into for the rest of their lives.
The same is for people who join groups that are cultic in nature. In other words, there is a certain kind of hyped enthusiasm, and people gather together, attracted to the enthusiasm itself. They accept all the dogmas with which that group makes themselves enthusiastic, and then they create themselves an enemy of the world and lose communications with the world and the process of life. We have seen it here throughout all the years again and again and again. The cultic quality, the kind of gleefulness, gleeful enthusiasm for have found “it,” you see. And that’s NOT it! That has got nothing whatever to do with this teaching and the value that I can have for you personally, nothing to do with it!”
Read more on what Adi Da has to say about cultism
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Links
Cultism is the Beginner’s Level of Human Existence
Beyond the Cultic Tendency in Religion and Spirituality and in Secular Society
