COMMENTARY ON THE DIVINE FIRE OF ADI DA SAMRAJ

(Response of "Smoke", a long-time Daist devotee, posted on The Ken Wilber
Forum 5-13-99.)
 
see: http://www.shambhala.com/forums/wilber/new_messages2/6670.html

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A few words about the current debate/tar-and-feathering ritual over Adi Da
(depending on who’s posts one reads).

About the Today Show ax-job: A terrible piece of hit-and-run journalism. No
effort whatsoever was made to achieve any balance, understanding,
intelligence, perspective, or humanity in the piece. A dishonest bit of
snookering, in the worst traditions of yellow journalism. No mention made
that Boyd Maston was a fundamentalist Christian lighting the fire under the
latest group of heretics to cross the cultural divide.

One small example: Franz Bakker was interviewed for five hours by old Boyd,
during which he answered every question they asked as reasonably and
intelligently and maturely as he could, though it became obvious that all
they were after was dirt. At the end of the five hour “interrogation” Franz
finally flipped them off with a 30-second moment of frustration, and guess
what? That’s the sound-bite they used. And that’s all they were interested
in -provoking an angry sound-bite that they could use to make us look as bad
as possible.

Boyd and his producers had promised us a balanced show, and on that basis we
naively granted them all kinds of access, including filming on the
Sanctuary, interviews, etc. The truth is, at no time did they ever even
consider doing a balanced piece. They were after shock-schlock, and the buzz
around NBC at the time is that they had a real scandal with all the
ingredients for a national melt-down on their hands. It didn’t work out that
way. After the piece aired, NBC got so much negative feedback (and not just
from our small numbers) that they canceled an already edited third show in
the series. Their own investigation after-the-fact concluded that it was a
hatchet-job, and old Boyd’s then-rising career gradually fell by the
wayside.

Of course, you have to wonder how we really expected it to go differently,
considering Adi Da’s utterly unconventional manner. Extremely naive
expectations on our part. The notion that mainstream journalism would be
capable, much less even interested, in understanding Adi Da, is just plain
absurd, and we should have known better. And Adidams must learn to live in
humor with the absurdities of the public world, just as we must live in
humor with our own private absurdities.

But enough of all that. The meat of this whole matter is an esoteric
spiritual one that directly confronts the question of what Adi Da has been
up to all these years with His unconventional, humorous, absurd, Divine,
intoxicated, boundary-crossing, excessively loving, intensely sexual,
indulgently sensual, purifying, abusive, in-your-face, out-of-sight,
Divinely Self-Centered, Me- Centric, street-wise, ass-kicking, best-dressed,
cheap suit clinging, bondage-breaking, Eternal- Bond-establishing, self-
revealing, Self-Revealing, asserting and denying Teaching Demonstration. 

I think it has been pretty well demonstrated and even accepted by almost all
here that Adi Da, for better or worse, is a genuine esoteric Adept. Some
might call Him a Black Magician, some the Divine Incarnate. Whatever the
qualification, He’s not just a charismatic nut. Whether that makes Him more
dangerous or not is obviously at the heart of the controversy, and also at
the heart of His Work altogether. Obviously my point of view weighs in
heavily on the Divine Incarnation side of the equation, but I don’t deny the
other points of view as valid, considering the point of view itself. So one
more time I’ll express my feelings and impressions of Him and His Divine
Work with all of us.

The discoveries Adi Da made very early in His own spiritual practice can be
seen to govern the whole of His life and Teaching Work, both before and
after His Re-Awakening in 1970. One of those discoveries was that there was
absolutely no fixed truth to life itself, or to spiritual life, no
foundation of conduct or criteria or convention, however true and good,
which could not be contradicted by some other truth. This left Adi Da with
only one option, as He saw it - unconditional surrender to everything, high
and low, good and bad, that arose to experience, without any conception of
how it would turn out, whether he would simply go insane and die or not. He
didn’t so much choose as he found that He had no option but to live utterly
spontaneously, and respond spontaneously to whatever presented itself to
Him. And I don’t just mean a little spontaneously - I mean completely. He
lived the life that everyone fears to live, for good reasons. 

That spontaneous surrender to experience made a fool of Him, a libertine, a
bearer of all- experience, and a knave, as He later wrote. It also utterly
Enlightened Him. People on this forum often endorse the Wilberian notion of
“include and transcend”. That’s exactly what Adi Da did and does, not just
intellectually and conceptually, but literally, down to the flesh and stink
of life itself. He literally embraced all the contradictions of life, and
continues to do so, confounding any attempt to make non-contradictory sense
of Him. Life is a contradiction, plain and simple. And the transcendence of
the contradiction requires the complete embrace of the contradiction, not
the unraveling of it and the living of a non-contradictory life based on
non-contradictory principles, because such principles do not exist. Every
principle by which one might live can be contradicted by another, opposing
principle.

Of course, philosophically many here would even agree with this. But
literally, no way. Nobody wants to live in total contradiction, with no safe
haven of non-contradiction to call one’s home. Everyone wants their niche in
the scheme of things. And no one wants a spiritual Teacher who will
contradict everything, leaving no safe niche to fall into. We all have our
limits beyond we say “no”. And Adi Da is the Incarnation not only of the
Divine, but of all the contradictions of life that He has embraced on the
Way to Divine Realization. There is literally nothing about Him that is not
a contradiction, except Himself, as Himself, as the One that includes all
contradictions.

In the controversies we all talk about, what does it always boil down to?
It’s emotional-sexual stuff. As JCB points out all the time, it’s not all
about sex. It’s also about power, and control, and abuse, and emotional
sensitivity, etc. But that’s all what Adi Da calls the “emotional-sexual
problem.” And that’s the primary “theater” of Adi Da’s operations.

Why is that? Why not spend all His time on poetic profundities? Or just
being the unproblematic Adept everyone wishes He would be, even thinks He
could be if He’d just settle down and stop rampaging through town like a
Godzilla-sized baby-Dionysus. Instead, He seems to go out of His Way to make
Himself appear as problematic as possible. As full of contradictions as
could be. A joke, even. A cosmic pretension, as Muktananda eluded to. A foil
for everyone, including His own devotees.

One of Adi Da’s early discoveries, proven to Him once again when He began to
Teach, is that the central matter of spiritual life, of life itself, is an
emotional-sexual one. The primary dilemma of the universe, even, is an
emotional-sexual one. Even the division of the One into Two, male and
female, Consciousness and Energy, is essentially an emotional-sexual
division, that seems to require a great search for Unity and end to all the
contradictions of the two. It is a problem about love. It is Raymond and
Quandra, eternally paired in a search for one another.

Adi Da’s Teaching Work, almost from the beginning, has involved the most
intense emotional-sexual theater any Adept has ever engaged in -arguably
that anyone anywhere has ever engaged in. And all of that emotional-sexual
theater has been contradictory, embracing not just the good and the
beautiful, but the bad and the ugly. Even His embrace of contradictions, as
JCB pointed out, has not been an even-handed one. Even the ideal of non-
preference is not something He has exemplified. He has just as often chosen
preference. And then rejected His preferences.

He has been the most loving character that anyone of us has ever known.
Those who know that love crave it to the point of sickness. And they also
know how that craving left unfilled soon becomes resentment, hatred, and
rejection. He has also been the most abusive character any of us has known.
Oh, sure, in the outer realm He’s not very severe in that department, but on
the emotional-sexual level of pure feeling, He can tear your heart out more
Adeptly than a million genocidal maniacs. He knows exactly where everyone’s
buttons are, and knows exactly how to push them. And He always pushes them
more and further and deeper than anyone wants them to.

In fact, He is positively compulsive about doing so. He can’t help Himself.
He feels compelled to Work with this emotional-sexual matter in whatever way
it is presented to Him. And in doing so He will violate every social nicety
we have constructed to protect our emotional-sexual inner life from being
tampered with. He will deal with people right up front in whatever manner He
is spontaneously moved to do so. He has no advance plan about it, any more
that He had an advance plan for the whole of His spiritual life. He may ask
you to have sex on the floor with everyone watching and video-cameras
rolling. I know people for whom that was the first contact they ever had
with Him. I know people who were given the most loving and sweetest hugs
that broke through all their emotional armor. He may completely ignore you.
He may want to know everything about you. He’s never treated two people the
same, but has spontaneously dealt with whatever was in front of Him in a
unique manner that is almost indecipherable. It can appear to be madness,
and it can appear to be the most insightful “therapy” ever devised.

And yes, beware putting yourself before Him, because He has no real control
over Himself. Not that He can’t exercise control when that is the
spontaneous movement of His Work, but His only reason for being alive is to
purify and Teach and Bless and move people to transcend this emotional-
sexual problem that prevents the “Bright” from being our conscious
Realization. So yes, put a ten-year-old girl in front of Him, and He will
deal with her. And there’s no telling how He will deal with her, because He
always does it differently. He may even have her take off all her clothes in
front of a crowd. He may embarrass her. She might feel it to be the single
worst moment of her life. Or, He might do something completely loving and
beautiful, and she might remember it as the single greatest moment of her
life. Either way, He is Working with the emotional-sexual life of the person
before Him. (I don’t know what the truth behind the ten-year- old’s story
is, but I’ll assume for the sake of discussion that it’s true enough).

And He doesn’t always even care if the person before Him consciously chose
to submit themselves to Him that way either. He deals with them anyway,
because they are right there before Him. Many of the people around Him in
those early years had hardly a clue as to what they were getting involved
in, and He dealt with them anyway, even their cluelessness, in the same
spontaneous Divine mode of surrender that He had always dealt with His own
born body-mind and its tendencies. Not by employing some method, even the
“method” of Crazy Wisdom as employed in Vajrayana. That tradition is a
precedent of a kind for what Adi Da does, but it’s not the same thing at
all. He even deals with people in public, regardless of who they are, and
you never know how it’s going to turn out. 

I remember one little story about Him going to a doctor’s office in SF one
day back in the 70's. Normally, the devotees serving Him arrange to have
everything handled down to the split-second so He isn’t left waiting around
aimlessly. And there’s a good reason for it. They had a car waiting just
outside the medical building for Him, but it was a busy street and a cop
came by and insisted they move the car right away, just as Adi Da was on His
way down. So the devotee drove the car around the block to come by for
another pass, but traffic was heavy and it took a few minutes. So Adi Da was
left outside on the sidewalk with just this one devotee, waiting for the
car. And the devotee could tell Adi Da was starting to get intense, just
standing there, watching the people pass by. After a couple of minutes, Adi
Da leaned over to the devotee, and said, “Get that car here now. There’s no
telling what I might do.”

And there’s plenty of examples of Adi Da dealing with public people in the
most extraordinary way, crossing all boundaries, really getting into the
emotional-sexual depth of people’s lives in a profound and spontaneous way,
just as He does with devotees. What a lot of people don’t understand is that
Adi Da’s manner of keeping His life private, and making Himself generally
unavailable to even most of His devotees, is not just a way of protecting
Him from insensitivity on our part (though it is that also), it’s a way of
protecting devotees from over-exposure to the Fire that He Is. As the
traditions used to say about awakening the Kundalini before you are ready
for it, that it can drive you insane, is also true of being given too much
exposure to Adi Da. It will drive you mad and burn you up. That’s why access
to Adi Da has to be very carefully managed, and finding the right
equilibrium is not an easy thing to achieve.

The real issue is the emotional-sexual one, however. That’s where everyone
is truly stuck, dealing with the matter of love, rejection, hurt, and
separation, regardless of their stage of life. It doesn’t matter if you’re
in the first stage of life or the sixth, it’s still the real matter before
everyone’s heart. It’s not just a second-stage adaptation that’s over and
done with once you get properly adapted to ordinary relations. That’s just
the time when it gets most basically developed in the human growth cycle.
Adi Da deals with it in every stage of life, including the sixth, until the
love- relationship to Reality becomes utterly overwhelming, beyond all
separation, all rejection, all hurt and withdrawal. Free life is simply an
Infinite, Passionate Love-Bliss Fire. Utterly spontaneous embrace of the
whole of life, in every part and parcel, good, bad, and ugly, as Divine
Play. Not just philosophically or intuitively, but through direct Divine
Recognition of everyone and everything beyond every reason for withdrawal
and every unconscious act of reactive separation. 

And so it is inevitable that Adi Da’s Divine Play with this emotional-sexual
problem will seem problematic to everyone, in one way or another. The
reactions on this Forum are no different that should be expected. The whole
world and everyone in it, myself included, is suffering from the very
emotional-sexual problem that Adi Da has been dealing with in devotees, that
He dealt with in Himself, that is the crux of our suffering. 

The reaction to Him is not to be dismissed, therefore. It is exactly the
response to be expected, to be observed, to be understood. Even the response
of targeting Adi Da as an irresponsible lout, and this very explanation of
mine as merely an excuse for that irresponsibility, is to be expected. There
is no rational “answer” to these charges, except that of understanding
itself. And so they will go on, seemingly forever, until there is no
emotional-sexual problem out there. And until then, we will all be wondering
if Adi Da isn’t just pulling the wool over our eyes. It is a Paradox that
will not be resolved by this Forum, by my words or anyone else’s. 

The real matter is understood by observing your own emotional-sexual life,
inner and outer, until there is a primary insight into the core nature of
the problem itself. As Adi Da has written from the beginning, understanding
is the observation that you are always seeking, only seeking, that your
entire problem is the search itself, not anything more than that. The effort
to resolve this problem of love is the problem of love. The endless blaming
of others for our loveless life, no matter how justified we might seem to
be, is the very thing which creates “otherness” and lovelessness. And the
process of being free of all of that requires us to see and feel and
consciously be all of that. And the Guru serves the devotee not just by
showing Him That which is always already Free of that lovelessness, but by
showing us our own lovelessness, even deliberately, it would seem, provoking
our most loveless response by offering us every reason we might use to
justify our loveless reactivity. 

The thing about Adi Da’s behavior is that it is identical to the spontaneous
Siddhi of the Divine. The Divine will also provoke this same response from
beings. People think the Divine Blessing only takes the form of wonderful
experiences of Enlightenment are the most deluded of all. To the contrary,
true initiation into the Divine Process also involves the most horrible
descent into the suffering and problematic horrors of life in its most
degraded and even subhuman forms - on every level of the being. We just
don’t recognize those, generally speaking, as Blessings. We take them as the
problem itself, to be solved, which they are not, and cannot be solved. We
are the problem. And so the Divine Process involves being thrown back upon
ourselves, upon our own horror, our own Narcissism, our own lovelessness,
time and time again, until we notice and understand our own responsibility
for it.

Anyone who imagines that they can grow into the Enlightened Way without
going through this revelation of the horror of their own separative activity
is truly mad. All the promises that religion seems to offer (or that
worldliness itself seems to offer) which bypass this self-understanding are
lies, no matter how heartfelt and well-intentioned. The Way of direct
response to the Divine Person is not a Way of easeful surrender into God’s
loving embrace, but the most profound Fire of self-revelation and Self-
Revelation, simultaneously Given. “The hand that slaps you hands you the
symbol also.”

Adi Da’s Divine Madness is not what everyone fears it to be. And yet it
naturally provokes that fear all the same, because that fear of the Divine’s
Madness is the very obstacle to the Divine Realization we are all seeking,
and yet have been unable to attain through seeking. His Divine Madness is
the means by which that fear becomes conscious in us. And once conscious,
even partially so, that fear can no longer merely be projected onto others,
or onto Him without it nagging at our conscience. It becomes something that
we know we are going to have to deal with in ourselves, somehow, some way.
And the Way to deal with that fear is also provided by Adi Da’s Divine
Madness. To persist in the relationship itself is all that is necessary, in
the midst of the fear and the madness.

And when fear is gone, what is there? The Freedom that is beyond all
structures, all conventions, all mind, all morality and ethics, all points
of view, all of life, and yet which is the very Source and Foundation of all
the cosmic and human structures, all morality and ethics, all of life. That
is what Adi Da is inviting everyone to, and that is what He lives by.

He is not the traditional religious or spiritual Adept, by any means at all.
He is Divine Madness Itself, which is another Way of describing Infinite,
unconditional Love-Bliss-Happiness.

His Way is understanding itself.

Smoke