from The Gospel of FreeJohn:

Now when Frank was in Lake County, in the house of the Leper, there came unto him a woman, his daughter, having an alabaster box containing a very precious cigar, and he put it in his head and lit it...

...OK, this 16th century English is a little tough to grok so, basically, when the devotees saw this, they were thoroughly ticked off. They said to Frank, "What's the deal with this over-priced cigar? It's not even that great -- Hal Okun could have got you perfecto Cubans for $25! What a fucking waste!! We coulda sold this smoke for a lotta cash and given it to the ex-devotees who are suing us!"

To which Frank replied: "Whadya giving my kid a hard time for??!! She has done me a great service. You will always have the poor, and the litigious but me smoking a stogie...you will not.

For in that the daughter (who, by her own website diary had posed swimming nude, for cash), hath put this cigar in my mouth, and she did it to hold me in my body, for truly a good cigar would keep any Godman (or even a Koorlaptkornamargian Adept) from discorporating.

Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also this, that this woman hath done, be told for a memorial of her and of this tasty rolled leaf.

And, oh yes...it goes on to explain how Judas accepted the 30 pieces of silver to betray his Master, he was so angry about the cigar..... Secretly he had planned to take the cigar and smoke it himself...

I wonder what that cigar would be worth today if you took inflation into account?... Oh, and while yer at it, check out FreeJohn: 25...

...Inasmuch as ye have lit the cigars and cigarettes of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Elija the prophet

FROM Sioux:

Col recently posted this quote from Seth: "Words are used to tell of an experience, but they obviously are not the experience that they attempt to describe. Your physical subjective experience is so involved with word thinking, however, that it is almost impossible for you to conceive of an experience that is not thought-word orientated."

I was recently reading about Tim Leary and the early Harvard LSD experiments. Leary's team gave LSD to artists. The artists loved the LSD experiences but, to the Harvard team's dismay, the artists were almost completely inarticulate about their experiences. Words were not their medium.

Leary's team had much more success in learning about LSD experiences when they switched to giving it to writers and poets. Words were their medium.

But did the artist's inability to articulate their experiences mean they were somehow less valid?

This issue may be important when discussing various self-proclaimed realizers/gurus. Is it possible that we (and they?) judge states of realization by the articulateness of verbal accounts? Adi Da claims, for example, to categorize variously realized beings into his 7 stage scheme by studying the verbal accounts of/about past realizers. (This obviously begs the question of why Da isn't capable of communing directly with past realizers rather than limiting himself to their recorded works--but that's an argument for another day.)

My questions are: Do you have to be highly articulate to be a great realizer? Similarly, must you have a towering intellect?

Both Seth and Adi Da would seem to agree that words are not the experience. One of Da's (and Freddie Lenz's, for that matter) main claims to fame is in fact his non-verbal communication. Darshan . . . shaktiput . . . you get my drift. Pilgrim has talked movingly about the value and power of Da's non-verbal transmissions.

So again, are there any inarticulate realizers in our midst? I suspect so. If we agree that articulateness and intellect are not required for realization, then we are in a bind if we try to say that anybody was more or less realized than others based on verbal accounts.

In short, I am suggesting that any number of realizers can (and probably do) exist who do not account for their realization verbally--just as the artists taking LSD were unable to give a verbal accounting of their experiences. And if these inarticulate realizers don't tell us about their state of realization, we have no way of comparing it to other accounts of realization.

IOW, how could somebody claim one or another realizer is the Greatest of All Time when we mainly rely on accounts from those realizers whose method of teaching is through verbalization? It seems the scales are weighted in favor of articulate verbalizers. Maybe such comparisons can't be made at all . . . ?

Any ideas?

FROM Hereward:

Please be aware I am shooting from the hip in what follows. I am also totally "unqualified" to make the assertions I make. So you are welcome to shoot me down. I welcome you to shatter my illusions if you can.

I also beg you to show me that the "heart" evident in the teaching is to be found in the "path" of the practice.

I am going to criticize some specific aspects of the Daist Way, mainly in the area of life disciplines.

1. MONEY MATTERS In order to be a fully practicing member of Adidam you have to pay a tithe of ten percent of your gross income. Due to the fact that governments take a large slice off the top first, this ten percent of gross works out to more like 25% of net income (so I've been told).

Now, if I were living in a communal setting, where many resources were shared and where community projects and activities required funding, the loss of that income would be compensated by the other benefits. I don't see a problem with that in principle, however in practice I would want to be pretty damn clear that this money was being used for the benefit of my own local community and that surpluses remained with the local community rather than being funneled into various global enterprises. I'm not saying that Adidam should not have global enterprises and businesses, either, but if these are being funded off the backs of tithing devotees, that is corrupt and exploitative. The business side of Adidam should function as a business. There's nothing anti-spiritual about that - its just part of the practical, functional side of life. Many religious groups fund themselves this way, and I can't see anything wrong with it.

If I were not living in a close communal setting with lots of shared costs I would not pay such a tithe and to demand it is outrageous.

As I understand it, the justification for compulsory tithing within Adidam is along the lines that people need to learn to that money is energy, and how to use that energy etc... Well, that argument strikes me as extremely dubious. Not everyone will learn to control and magnify material wealth, just as not everyone will learn to play a musical instrument or understand pure mathematics. Each person is unique. Each person has something to offer which is of value. This is what should be encouraged, because this is what will ultimately repay the larger community, which is humanity (this is meant to be a "World Religion" after all), in ways that we can not yet even imagine. People can be treated as worker drones, certainly, but treating them thus is a denial of the Spirit within them, and therefore a repudiation of the non-dual essence of Adi Da's seventh stage teaching.

2. DIET I agree with everything Adi Da has said about diet. A summary statement of my understanding about right diet would be that the most important aspect of it is not what you eat but why you eat. We tend to eat for lots of reasons other than the physiological requirement. Understanding of what those other reasons are (rather than an a priori adoption of some arbitrary set of rules about what you should and shouldn't eat) is the crucial thing. Understanding, for example, how we look to food to provide substitutive satisfactions, to amuse ourselves, to escape from boredom or depression is the only real way of freeing oneself from unhealthy eating habits.

Despite Adi Da's own masterful exposition of the "food problem" however, it would seem that Adidam is stuck in a rut of rules and prohibitions regarding food. What is the purpose of that other than control? Why make acknowledgment of a person's practice in the Way of the Heart dependent on whether or not they drink coffee? The only reason I can think is because it's a way of extinguishing their independence. This is a typical cultic tendency, all the more offensive since it cloaks itself in the guise of a highly enlightened food philosophy. It sends certain subliminal messages to devotees:

a. They cannot trust their own intelligence and self-observation in relation to vital/physical existence.

b. The desire for disallowed foods is a sign of their "failure" in practice.

These two presumptions reveal the dark underbelly of cultic manipulation. They have nothing to do with truth and real understanding. They completely false, self limiting delusions. I really feel deep sympathy for anyone who has been sucked into that warped view of reality.

3. SEX I don't particularly care that the girls get these emotional/sexual considerations. I would like to know however how much sexual intrigue there is in the Daist community at large. I would like to know what is really going on. My experience is that what goes on at the top tends to percolate down through the ranks. And whereas an enlightened Siddha practicing sexual yoga with his worshippers may be a compassionate and uplifting experience, the emulation of that behaviour by less evolved egoicaly driven beings further down the chain may not be so nice. This is just speculation I hasten to add, but it is justifiable.

4. PRACTICE The most upsetting thing of all about this so-called world religion is its inaccessibility. What are you afraid of guys? Why prevent the "lay public" from worshipping the Sat Guru? Are you all completely paranoid or what? This eternal vow thing is really just another brain-washing trick. It appears you only want people involved if they are fixated (in a Freudian sense) on the Guru. No fixation, no satsang.

Again, this need to prescribe and prohibit and otherwise control every aspect of worship has no place in the philosophy of seventh stage realisation. It is a grotesque mockery of the teaching. I keep wondering, is it deliberate? Is Da just deliberately messing with our heads? At the end of the day I MUST hold Da accountable for this, even though I love his crazy ways and his beautiful words. He made his own choices along the way, and this is the outcome. As it is, it's not usable. It looks wonderful from certain aspects, but I fear it is not a path with a heart. This is a sad realisation for me.

regards, Hereward.