Have you ever noticed that existence is generally lived in terms of friendships, intimacy with lovers, private relations, and the solitude of individuals? Your personal situation is where you find real love and real love is where the oh-so-quiet presence of God is found -- not in crowds.

Crowds and collectivities of people always project power into a leader and behave politically and lovelessly toward anyone who does not join in. Always. Crowds always hype you into a communal mind and debase and demean the individual, creating a state of mental conflict, self-doubt, a feeling of unworthiness, confusion, and a loss of happiness. (And, as you have noticed, they tax your energy and money.)

The only time people are unequivocally happy in crowds is when the "leader" of the crowd is happy, or when people seem to be winning the approval of the "leader" of the crowd. (And who made him leader of anything? Each person in the crowd lost her/his individuality to the leader.)

A room full of people is loss of soul. Just look at the pictures of the followers of Frank (Adi Da) in his new book See My Brightness Face to Face (especially the back cover). Every devotee is in a goofy state of projecting his/her own Spiritual Truth outside himself/herself. Every one is in a state of identification with the guru, and has lost the sense of personal spiritual worth that is so important for real spiritual awakening.

The old cliché is that home is where the heart is. That's the plain truth. It is in the microcosm of family life, the quiet life of small numbers of sharing hearts that the macrocosm is found. There is no outside to it, only an inner wholeness. Where three are gathered there are mother, father, and child...the Divine Trinity. Add more children, add a few close friends...and you have Heaven. You don't need anything else to complete the Great Work.

That's living religion...that's what's most precious and sacred...not a room full of worshippers around a flesh and blood idol who belittles married intimacy as "the cult of pairs".

You must value your own intimacy, for that is the alembic of the Awakening Self. Great and profound meaning is found in your relations with your lover and your children and your close friends. The "religious" cults will spend lots of energy trying to convince you that your private life is "Narcissus" or sin or self-limiting unrelatedness... The great taboo of Adidam is that anyone should have their "own" spiritual experience or understanding or enlightenment. And this taboo cuts out the heart of what enlightenment is really about.

Who is Narcissus? Narcissus doesn't practice intimacy, or the mutual surrender of real love. He practices posing as the image of God. Narcissus has completely devalued the divine in others, and become obsessed with himself from the outside, a man in a thousand photographs, a man posing for the adulation of crowds...

Sound like anybody you know?

Narcissus is uncomfortable in situations of mutuality, i.e., real love. That's why Frank makes it so difficult to meet him, and why he plays the politics of approval-disapproval with those who do get close to him. He is afraid of you, unless you are dominated by his image and by your assumption of his "authority". Don't even think about having a face to face conversation wit him, just you and Frank together in a room, in the mutuality of one-on-one. Narcissus loves the protection of crowds and the politics of crowds, where he can compete for and ultimately dominate attention.

But Christ dies alone, marked as a criminal. Buddha preaches seclusion, in mindfulness hidden from the mad eyes of the world. Patanjali speaks of "Isolation", in which consciousness is perfectly grounded in itself, as the highest state of yoga. Krishna is hidden in intimate embrace with his consort. And Ramana Maharshi, in the end, is simply an obscure and puzzling old man, drifting off to the Unknown, and only he knows what he knows...

Only you know what you know. You must understand that all the macrocosm is found where your "I" is most aware of your "I am" -- in the continuum of the Self. It is your own life, the life you are given, that is your doorway to the Divine. You weren't born to play an extra in Frank's movie. You were born to reveal God in the microcosm of your private life, in your intimacies.

It is you who stir the water of your own awareness. It is you who will one day find yourself in the conscious position of seeing that your whole life was a series of ripples created in the water by your own hand. You will withdraw your hand and the water will become still. The ripples were interesting, involving for awhile...but they only last as long as YOU stir the water.

Who will remember you and know of your passing? (Who remembers the billions who have already passed?) Who will accompany you into the mystery of the Heart? The Heart Itself will be your mystery, and it won't wear a smiling/frowning mask or ask you to worship it for eternity.

Sacrifice all the idols. (They certainly are determined to sacrifice you!) Dare to be alone and with your lover and your children. Disown, disrespect and feel distaste for the God who demands to be worshiped in bodily form. No such God ever appeared, nor will such a God ever appear. That figure is a sign of the adversary of the Spirit of Truth. It seduces even the real saints to a realm of religious fantasy, in which the Self is just sucked out of them, until they experience Self-dissociation, and Realization becomes an unattainable goal ever-hidden behind the Oz-mask of the "guru".

Reality is not a consensus mind, nor an object of belief. It is never found in crowds. It is only found where you are.

Reality, Self-realized, is the ultimate taboo of the cult of Adidam.