However, the people who came to Adi Da in those early years were largely young Americans, stuck in the Sixties and full of all the nonsense of pop spirituality.
Many of the stories are profound, some are heartbreaking, some are infuriating, and others simply unbelievable, unless you were there or had shared a similar experience. Such was life with Adi Da Samraj, every day like a ride in a fighter jet, cruising over uncharted territory.
The journey of a life is structured with an intelligence, albeit one that is largely unconscious in us. Discovering that intelligence is one of the wonders of a human life.
Part I My Childhood and Adolescence
Chapter One Hollywood Child
In fact, from where I was sitting, they seemed to have nothing to do with each other. The most extravagant “good life” wasn’t much protection at all from life’s shocks and losses.
think the exercise all day in the clean mountain air prepared me for the lighter, more pure vegan diet. Transitioning to Adulthood
I wanted to know, since people around me were assuming I had it all, and I knew I did not. All the great names and stuff were just the scenery of my youth, nothing special. I didn’t feel they were “my people” in “my wonderful world,” and the Hollywood scene has never defined me or my self-image.
things. In college, though, I found myself wrestling with two questions: “Who (or what) am I really, behind this social appearance?” and “What makes me feel and act and think the way I do?”
Before having children, our life was filled with adventures of skiing, traveling, and beach parties.
Once we settled in Malibu, I started reading some of the early alternative health books, and I experimented on myself with diet, juices, fasting, and enemas. Then, in 1962, at age thirty-five, I opened the first health food store in the vicinity, the Malibu House of Health.
After a few months, the store began to fail. The manager had good intentions, but did not know the difference between yoga and yogurt. I took over.
Sometimes as I would sing, the beauty of the song would open my heart so wide, I would choke up with tears.
In that moment, I saw no difference between people, whatever their appearances. Old or young, rich or poor, black or white, we all were just humans. Only in the superficial sense are we different. This was not philosophical for me.
I felt the truth of this unity, deeply, and that unity seemed to be closer to “reality” than what I assumed with my ordinary mind rambling on from day to day.
Up to this time, I had only been interested in yoga as a way of improving my life. After Gina’s birth in 1957, though, something deeper than yoga postures changed in me. I found myself madly in love with God again, three feet off the ground, in constant joy and wonder at the earth around me. I told my father this awakening was like being hit over the head, neither something I could control nor something I had asked for. He understood, and he told me he had had some blissful experiences himself at one time. He tried to turn me on to Christian Science.
felt no subject-object distinction between me and the flower.
At the end of one class, with everyone lying on the floor in the dead pose, I looked up and saw three tall, white angel-figures hovering over all the bodies there. I did not know what they were, or why or how they were there, but I definitely saw the angelic figures clear as day. They felt benign. As people got up to leave, the angels receded into nothing. Even more strangely, I did not find this odd or startling.
In the vision, I was overcome with a yearning to see and know God. I heard a kind, male voice say, “You did not achieve Enlightenment in that lifetime, but you will succeed in this lifetime.” Then the scene faded from view and I fell sweetly into deep sleep.
After a week I stopped the exercises, but the experiences—some wonderful, some horrible—continued for more than a year. Apparently I had prematurely stimulated some psychic centers in the brain with just that little bit of breath control. I had no clue that I was entering into an awakening of the deep psyche that would persist.
I became psychically attuned to people and to things, knowing instantly their meaning and purpose in my life. I again fell madly in love with God, in swoons that lasted days. After reading one of the books in bed at night, I would turn off the light and experience flashes of light in my head accompanied by a kind of electric shock throughout my body—often a dozen or so such flashes before I could get to sleep. These experiences did not frighten me, but
I also experienced this agapē, or “Divine love,” for humanity as a whole. I was ready, if asked, to give up my life, even for unknown persons on the street, if it would bring them closer to God. Nobody asked, fortunately, because I had two young children and a husband who might have had something to say about it.
Over the next several months, whenever I tried the breathing exercises after yoga postures, I would feel myself leaving the body, and this did scare me. While watching a home movie of my father, I had the terrifying experience of feeling rapidly sucked out of the body. “Enough is enough,” I thought. I began to seek out my former yoga teachers to see if they could give me any advice. When Indra Devi came out to our ranch one day, I told her what was happening with me. “That’s why I never teach breathing exercises!” she said.
After two of these, I began to leave the body again. The swami advised me to stop reading all spiritual books.
This pattern continued, blissful experiences alternating with frightening ones, and they both increased in magnitude over time. So much for getting brief glimpses of the deep psyche—the door to it was now wide open, and I was searching for a way to close it. I stopped doing breathing exercises and reading spiritual literature, and some of these phenomena did abate. A few months later I gradually began to experience a formless or causeless fear, “free-floating anxiety” as it were, but much more intense. It was as if I were moving inexorably towards a cliff. I felt as though I was either going to die or lose my mind.
Years later, I read about Ramana Maharshi’s experience of the “death” experience, in which the continuous sense of self permanently vanished, and how the vanishing of the self-sense was preceded by overwhelming fear. His account and others confirmed that it was possible to go through the fear completely. After the crisis, instead of a terrible death, one would realize a significant, permanent awakening. At this point it was too much for me to surrender beyond the terror. My body and mind were not prepared for the shock.
He preferred to read the teachings of Jeddu Krishnamurti—no one needed a guru, the “enlightenment” was already inside us. Egon had his simple ranch and beach life, and that was sufficient for him. Neither of us said anything at the time, but I can see now that we were slowly drifting apart.
In some sessions, I heard myself singing tones that were deeply moving to me. I would later learn that these spontaneous movements in the body were called kriyas. Kriyas were the sign that the force was breaking through blockages and points of resistance in the body, purifying the body’s tissues, nerves, and energy centers so that they could handle an increased flow of life-force—similar to the movements of an empty, coiled hose when water is propelled through it. The pressure of the force often caused a flinging outward of limbs, vocalizations, strange breathing patterns, blisses, fragrances, chanting, feeling of extreme heat or cold, and many other strange and sudden effects.
When I opened my eyes, I looked at one of the wood posts in the center of the house and saw it vibrating and pulsating with life, surrounded by a faint aura of light. I realized everything was alive, visibly vibrating with life, even “inanimate” things like house posts and stones. It was something I could clearly see. Since I could see it with my human eyes, it did not seem extraordinary to me, just the way things were—everything vibrates, everything is transmitting energy.
Once I had received my mantra from the Maharishi and began to use it, an elaborate color panorama of what seemed to be different past lives passed before me. In one vivid scene, I was sitting with a group of people in a temple in ancient Egypt. After an hour of using the mantra, we left our cubicles. We were told to use our mantra to meditate for half an hour, once or twice a day, and never to tell it to anyone because then it would lose its power. In a corner in my room at home, I set up a screen to meditate twice a day. Once while meditating, I became aware of another presence, a tall being standing behind me who seemed to be there to protect me. Perhaps as a side effect of the meditation practice, I began to notice a synchronicity to the events in my life. Things that I needed or would think about, such as a rug for the living room or plants for the porch, would appear out of nowhere.
When driving in a car, just seeing a billboard ad for cigarettes would result in my feeling as if I had been hit in the stomach, so even a trip into the city became an ordeal.
At one of the larger events, I could see an aura of many-colored lights dancing and shimmering around the Maharishi’s body as he spoke. I was so fascinated by the light show I did not hear a word of what he said.
The event took place in her living room, and everyone sat down to meditate for five minutes before starting the social part. It was excruciating. It felt as though a presence had seized my throat and was squeezing it tighter and tighter. I had to keep swallowing rapidly to keep my throat open, breathing hard just to get some air. The five minutes seemed like an eternity to me.
As an old adage says, if you take one step towards God, He will take nine steps towards you.
One day, shortly after I met him, Michael was working in his garden when suddenly he passed out of the body. After he was pronounced dead, Michael’s body was brought into the house. Michael re-entered the body, and all his life signs returned. On returning to ordinary consciousness, he could not recognize anything or anyone for three days. When speaking about what was happening during that short time, Michael likened it to re-living thousands of years. He often talked about his “past lives,” or the pattern of deaths and rebirths that brought him to this lifetime.
I quickly learned another lesson from Michael—one’s spiritual transformation depended upon a clean and strong body as a vehicle. Michael had great respect for the body, and he often reminded us how fortunate we were to be in physical bodies so that we could undo the wrong patterns of our previous births and free ourselves from their effects by right living in this life. Reflecting a fundamental attitude of Tibetan Buddhism, Michael said there were always many thousands of souls in nonphysical realms waiting for the opportunity of a human birth to purify the soul of its base urges. A human lifetime was therefore a gift to be cherished and rightly used.
When Michael took on students, the first thing he had them do was undergo a series of colonics. Sometimes he would have the new student go on a fast. Over the course of time, he put me on cleansing diets: rice for ten days, carrot juice for eight days, grapefruit for three weeks every spring, cherries for twelve days in the summer, grapes for three weeks in the fall. All these served to purify the body, and I could feel them making me more receptive to subtler energies as well. Through personal experience, I learned that our energy came not only from the foods we ate but also from the sun and through the breath. High energy was directly related to proper elimination, especially of accumulated toxins. In all of these disciplines, Michael was showing his students that spiritual life was a serious matter that involved one’s whole life, not getting a one-time initiation or even daily meditations with a mantra.
Michael’s primary communication was not a dogma but an attitude. He regarded the whole universe to be the play of God and, therefore, everything and everyone to be a part of the manifestation of God. The central purpose of one so attuned to life was to “commune with God,” he said.
“Don’t operate from the mind—operate from the heart.” By “the heart,” he did not mean the physical heart, but the locus of deep feeling and connection to all things that lies at the core of one’s being. He said, “Gather everything in your life and condense it, and take it down into the heart. Let the mind drop into the heart and stay there.”
Michael had all his students do the twelve breathing exercises of his friend and spiritual compatriot, Dr. Hanish, in order to develop the subtle body and the higher senses. I was determined to awaken the kundalini, so I practiced these exercises diligently. Michael had me do a yogic breathing method of blocking the right nostril during the day with a piece of cotton and blocking the left nostril during the night. I did this daily for several years while practicing the eighth breathing exercise. At times I developed burning sensations in the left shoulder blade area as if a deep purification was taking place there.
As if on cue, that same day Michael sat me down and said, “You don’t have to go through the kundalini yoga if you go into your heart. You are already self-realized. You just have to accept it. The mind has to accept it.” What Michael was describing was a practice in the branch of yoga called jnana yoga. Wrestling with the central proposition of jnana yoga highlighted my spiritual problem. The mind sees “me” as a separate being, separate from everything and everyone.
He said, “There is no difference between me and you. You cannot exist without God, and God cannot exist without you.”
Then, quoting Dr. Hanish, he said, “Everything is complete in my heart, there is nothing that I could desire.” He added, “That state is beyond description. There are no words that can even approach it.”
A spiritual life in relation to God involved the discipline of diet; undergoing purification of the body, emotions, and mind; and doing everything in accord with divine law with ever-increasing integrity and sophistication. Michael demonstrated these attitudes in every action he did, whether planting a tree, playing the cello, cooking or healing.
I was not aware of it at the time, but I had used the Chinese principle of yin and yang—that too much fluid creates dampness and mucus in the body; and that salt dries it out. This was my first experience at discovering that I could heal myself and that the word of medical “authority” was not always right.
Egon milked four goats every day, and we had fresh eggs from our chickens. This lifestyle was not only the way I raised my family, but also the way I began learning about healing.
Dr. Hanish taught a whole way of life, including diet, healing, philosophy, breathing exercises, a system of Egyptian yoga postures, humming exercises to stimulate the glands and awaken the higher subtle functions of the brain, the use of colors to heal, as well as astrology and the use of magnetism. He taught the use of sex for the purpose of regeneration—a highly taboo subject at the time. Openly speaking about sex and sexual energy at that time in America cost him dearly in the public eye.
The Importance of Diet and Breath To Dr. Hanish, eating was just as much a science as breathing. He taught: “Do not eat because of habit, or it will have you by the neck. Eat whenever hunger arises, such as after a good day’s work. Eat for the purpose of perpetuating cell formation and getting all the good out of the food consumed. When out of humor or irritable, do not eat.” He wrote a detailed book about diet describing rules that seemed quite radical in the early part of the twentieth century.
When people came to Michael, he could psychically see the root of their trouble and the condition of their body, blood, organs, as well as the level of toxicity.
I learned that the human body was a delicate balance between positive and negative forces—the yin and the yang—and between the elements of earth, air, fire, water, and ether. A lack or an excess of any one of these would lead to an imbalance, called “disease,” and, if the imbalance went too far for too long, it resulted in debilitation or worse. Every day I saw anew the human body was far more than meat, organs, bones, and chemicals.
He could see the life force move through the meridians (paths or circuits of energy), and he could tell me what effect they had on his body.
With this rod, I could determine whether something was fit to eat or if a certain medicine would be good to take. I learned to tell the difference between a toxic substance and a benign or healing substance. Later on, I could detect whether an object had been blessed or empowered.
“Matter” is not a “lump”. It is not, in and of itself, the defining characteristic (or limit) of “reality”. Truly (and even from the point of view of twentieth-century exoteric science), “matter” is Energy (or Light). And Energy (or Light) Is (In and As Itself) Inherently Indivisible (or One, Only, and Indestructible).
I brought him some supplements, including chlorophyll and some lung herbs. I lent the couple my juicing machine, and I showed his wife how to make fresh juice and how much to give him. I told her exactly how to give him the supplements.
brought him some supplements, including chlorophyll and some lung herbs. I lent the couple my juicing machine, and I showed his wife how to make fresh juice and how much to give him. I told her exactly how to give him the supplements.
week before the actual performance, though, she would disappear. Michael told me she was an alcoholic. When she got too stressed, she would hide out and drink. He had tried to help her, and he had succeeded for a while, but she invariably fell back into her binge drinking. The first time I heard this had happened, I drove down to Manhattan Beach and found her drunk.
I woke up with a start. I felt there might be some spirit or entity in Lorelei that wanted revenge for my helping her. This was one of my first encounters with these kinds of forces and omens, and I had no idea how to handle it. I judged Lorelei’s situation to be beyond my capabilities. I knew I should step back from it.
This confirmed to me the importance of looking for head damage and how such damage could affect the health of the body of an animal or a human even many years after the injury. Queen Mary
I spoke with Michael about it, and he said, “She hypnotizes people—she has to, to get anybody to help her in her condition. That’s why I didn’t want you to treat her.” Her constant feeling of illness was due to resentment she was always carrying around. This resentment manifested as various symptoms in her body.
One morning I had a vision during meditation. Pat and I were both monks in a Tibetan monastery, wearing the long robes of the order.
In addition to learning about healing, I was getting a continuing education about how our unconscious communicates to our conscious mind, how conditions in the unconscious can manifest as symptoms and even attract or cause events.
After studying with Michael for fifteen years, I came to a point of desperation. I felt bound up in everything, as much as before I met him. I did not feel free or lighter, as I had imagined I would feel after so long a time practicing a spiritual discipline. I had learned how to practice as a healer, and I was a spiritual aspirant of some seriousness.
I still had all my fears and obsessions, as well as my nagging inability to emotionally cope with situations. As before, I struggled daily with awkwardness in expressing myself, with my ever-present sorrow, and my search for relief. I still was possessed by a strong desire to contact the “greater reality” I had tasted at points in my life.
None of these pursuits had led me to a final truth, or even a consistent path with consistent growth. None had produced the joy and ecstasy I had tasted earlier—madly in love with God, three feet off the ground. All my searches had returned me to myself once more, and it felt increasingly empty.
The guru finds the devotee (or vice versa, however it works) most often when the devotee has come to a point of what Adi Da called “positive disillusionment” with all seeking. In other words, the spiritual seeker often comes to the point of having experienced and learnt the futility of self-effort in spiritual matters.
Death is utterly acceptable to consciousness and life. There has been endless time of numberless deaths, but neither consciousness nor life has ceased to arise. The felt quantity and cycle to death has not modified the fragility of flowers, even the flowers within the human body. Therefore, our understanding of consciousness and life must be turned to that utter, inclusive quality, that clarity and wisdom, that power and untouchable gracefulness, this evidence suggests.… The Heart is that understanding, that true consciousness, that true life that is under the extreme conditions of life and death. Therefore, it is said, that One that is neither born nor come to death, not alive as the limitation of form, not rendered in what appears, and yet It is the Living One, than Which there is no other, appearing as all of this, but eternally the same. There is only the constant knowledge and enjoyment of the Heart, moment to moment, through the instant of all conditions of appearance and disappearance. Of This I am perfectly certain. I am That.{3} This first page hit me like a bolt of lightning. I knew this was what I had been looking for all these years but had never found. I could tell that the book was not written from the vantage point of an ordinary mind but by someone whose realization was much wider and deeper.
Michael himself gave me a hard time. He said no master or realizer could compare to Sri Ramana Maharshi. He was not interested in reading any book by Adi Da. I didn’t argue with him. He would have to see for himself. When Michael finally did accept the seriousness of my interest in Adi Da, he became jealous and disheartened. I’m sure he felt that our relationship had changed irrevocably.
What people ordinarily think of as religion or Spirituality is a search to get free of the sensation, the…
All the usual paths are, fundamentally, attempts to get free of that sensation. That is the traditional goal. Indeed, all human beings are involved in the search—whether or not they are very sophisticated about it, whether or not they are using specific methods of Yoga, philosophy, religion, and so on. When you begin to consciously observe that root-motivation, this is what I call “understanding”. When you begin to see the root-form of your own activity—which is your suffering—that self-observation becomes self-understanding. When (through the great ordeal of Real Spiritual life) such self-understanding becomes absolute, most perfect—such that there is utterly, absolutely, no dilemma, no form in conscious awareness by which to interpret existence, such that…
The second concept of significance was “vital shock.” As Adi Da defines it, the vital region is the middle of the human body in the general…
But release is not a matter of looking into your memory and discovering the source of these incidents in the past—it is a reaction to life itself. Life is its own shock. The “me” is the center, the core of this contraction. The suffering cannot be relieved by any means; this…
As fate would have it, my father had fallen and broken his hip just before I found the brochure. He was in a Beverly Hills hospital. I could visit him and then continue on to the bookstore, which I then did twice a week. One never knows the why of such coincidences, especially when they occur so timely around spiritual pursuits.
Without effort, my mind “fell into the heart”—what Michael had been telling me to allow it to do for years. My thoughts stopped and my heart region opened, expanding me into a great peace. I swooned in what seemed like a bottomless love. I couldn’t hold onto this wonderful state by any effort of my own—it seemed to have been given to me in that moment as a gift.
This was the first of many demonstrations to me that Adi Da’s presence and energy were not limited by space or time. Through his teaching and presence, I felt actively instructed and guided by him.
Like many other devotees in the community at the time, I had dreams of Adi Da. In several of them, I ended up in a state of blissfulness just from being in his presence in the dream.
This dream had a prophetic feel to it, and its symbolic meaning eventually played itself out in life. As he describes in The Knee Of Listening, Adi Da’s perfect enlightenment or “Divine Re-Awakening” occurred in September 1970. After he established the Melrose Avenue storefront, for many months he continued to drive to and from Hollywood to his house miles away in Laurel Canyon. He arranged for the publication of his books himself, negotiating with the lawyers and printers. He wrote all the checks and paid the bills in his office behind the Satsang Hall on Melrose. He chaired the board meetings regarding the ashram’s affairs. When the bookstore was first rented, he was there with the hammers and crowbars to bust up the old drywall and begin the renovation. His boundless physical energy was overwhelming to all who participated with him. Yet, as it symbolically played out in my dream, Adi Da gradually let go of the practical responsibilities of the ashram, turning them over to his devotees.
However, as unexpectedly as I had been invited, I was uninvited. I was hurt and upset, but soon I saw all this emotion as my old emotional patterning of how I handle—or fail to handle—disappointment.
In the pool were a few devotees playing some sort of wild game with Adi Da. Everyone was naked—a bit surprising to me, but being someone who worked on ailing bodies all day, I could easily accept this. Those in the pool stood in a circle with each taking turns being thrown up in the air by all the others. Shouting and hilarity echoed off the stone walls. After launching someone upwards, the group fell back as the launchee came down into the water with a great splash, followed by everyone laughing even more uproariously. Devotees tossed Adi Da upwards several time. He shouted, “Higher, higher, hit the rafters!” This was impossible, since the ceiling was way up there. But his point was clear—there was to be no holding back, of anything. I sat on the steps of the pool, timidly watching this crazy scene. I wondered what I was doing there and whether this really was a spiritual community. My past suggested that it was acceptable to seek God soberly and somberly—but not to laugh and shout and be joyous in the company of a spiritual master. I definitely had a taboo against that.
This seemingly little incident required a great effort on my part, a confrontation with myself. I had gone along with the boisterous play, but I was really uptight throughout it. I had been such a serious seeker for so many years that I had become dry and humorless in the process.
The incident required—indeed, it even forced—what Bhagavan Adi Da called “losing face,” a letting go of one’s precious self-image and…
It also became clear to me that this was his intention and design for the occasion—what he called “theater.” Everybody there saw something about their characters and went through something about it in his…
In contrast to the bathhouse, the room was dead quiet and the atmosphere serious, with a sacred aura. When it occurred to me that I could mentally ask Adi Da to remove the constriction in my heart region that prevented me from enjoying life, I prayed to him earnestly. Be careful what you pray for. As I commenced this internal prayer, Adi Da extended his right hand towards me, palm open. I began to breathe deeply and forcefully, but my breathing was out of my control and increasing in intensity. A tingling energy rose from my heart and coursed down both my arms, stiffening and bending my fingers into strange shapes. I began to cry so hard I had to lie down on the floor. Sorrow welled up from my heart and threw me into uncontrollable sobbing. I sobbed both on my in-breath and on my out-breath, sounding something like a sick cow. Embarrassed to be making so much noise and disturbing everybody in this quiet room, I tried to suppress it. Then I thought, “If I can’t let go here, where could I ever let go?” I just let it all pour out. I thought the sobbing would cease quickly, but it went on for a long while. Then I felt no specific emotion—I was just observing the whole process like a detached…
Over the next days, I reflected upon that strange, powerful, momentous day. This guru meant business. Adi Da was not the typical yogi or teacher who gave you a mantra or breathing exercises and techniques you could do at home. I saw that he was indeed a true master who really worked with his devotee, but it would not always be fun or flattering. His eyes were large and penetrating. When he looked at me, I felt he could see right through me.
This is the only secret in yoga. I mean, literally, the Guru enters his devotee in the form of Divine Light. All kinds of extraordinary experiences manifest as a result.
There is no meditative technique you must acquire. The Lord must meditate you. The Lord must enter you. And when the Lord enters you, He makes you ecstatic.{7}
When I began thinking about Bhagavan, I started weeping. I could feel in all this energy and insight his deep compassion for the unenlightened.
I finally sat up, but I didn’t have much of my usual sense of self, and in a moment I felt something like a flash of the enlightened condition—there was simply pure existence itself. That was all—impossible to describe, really. It came and went in an instant.
Darshan I was continually confronted with the paradox that was Adi Da Samraj. He seemed to function like an ordinary human being, yet his consciousness was altogether different from anybody I knew. He described his state as a constant samadhi, seeing all as Perfect Divine Consciousness. This was his permanent realization.
We often sat with Bhagavan in Darshan, which means “sighting”—an occasion where devotees formally sat before the spiritual master. While sitting, you placed your attention on him. At the time, that was the only instruction in Bhagavan’s company. Over time, I came to better understand how Darshan worked. In the subtler vibrations of our psyches, our attention to anything literally (though invisibly) connects us to it. Bhagavan’s body was the touchpoint to his samadhi, his realization of Divine Consciousness.
Many people over the years have testified to seeing Adi Da’s face superimposed upon by a succession of faces that seemed to be the faces of great saints and holy men of the past.
But most often there was the conversion, the lifting of sorrows and self-concerns, and a restoration to simplicity, clarity, and peace. Outside the Satsang Hall, Bhagavan’s unreasonable happiness and good humor contrasted sharply with the general blandness of people. After a time in Adi Da’s company, ordinary life and my ordinary mind would feel like a sleepy droning. Life seemed like problem after problem, always struggling, searching for some small consolation or pleasure that appeared for a fleet moment and then was gone, like a wisp of smoke. In Adi Da’s company, all of that repetitive cycle became so obvious, my stressed-out mind would melt away, and I would just be happy.
In Greek mythology, Narcissus left his loved one, as well as everything he valued, to gaze at his own image in a pond. He just sat at the edge of the pond, infatuated with his reflection in it, oblivious to all else. But it was only a reflection, not a real person at all.
Bhagavan called our individual, separate self-sense “the self-contraction,” because the sense of self is literally created by a curling in or contracting with the body-mind of the being. Bhagavan described how this contracting sense of self is the avoidance of one’s inherent interdependence with all other things and all other beings, to the point where it seems without even thinking that one is inside a body looking out at an alien and largely hostile universe. Therefore, Bhagavan said, one’s spiritual liberation started by one’s beginning to recognize our primary activity as “avoiding relationship,” or our being locked in our contracted state of self-identification. The good news is that, because the self-contraction is our own present activity, it can cease in any moment. As long as you are merely seeking, and have all kinds of motivation, all kinds of fascination with the search, this is not self-understanding—this is dilemma itself. But, when the dilemma is understood, then there is the clear noticing of a structure in conscious awareness—the activity of separation. And, when that activity is observed more and more directly, then you begin to see that what you are suffering is not something happening to you but it is your own activity. When this re-cognition occurs, it is like a man discovering that he has been pinching himself. He was always creating his own suffering. When he finally sees this, he does not have to go through any kind of therapy, special diet, yoga or mantra in order to be free. All he has to do is take his hand away.{8} Simple as that, apparently. At that time, I did not understand a lot of Adi Da’s teaching, but I did recognize that I was the cause of my suffering, not my parents or my circumstances or anything that happened to me. Nor had any of the desperate seeking I had done relieved me at all.
Spiritual Theater or “Garbage and the Goddess” The first half of 1974 was a period of time in Adi Da’s work called “Garbage and the Goddess.” It was a wild time, full of spiritual experiences and emotional drama for most everyone who was there. Adi Da stimulated the visions and spiritual experiences in all the spiritual types, as well as in those who had not known much about spiritual life beforehand. After the spiritual experiences of my youth and later with Michael, I had longed for the exotic blisses of the Eastern scriptures. During the “Garbage and the Goddess” period, though, I had my heart’s desire dumped on me to the point of “Please master, this is too much!” Bhagavan was relentless in also showing me and everyone around him that nothing was attained by any of the so-called great spiritual experiences, no matter how powerful. The chakra awakenings, visions of heavens and higher realms, even the kundalini rising to the crown of the head in mind-shattering blisses were all marvelous distractions for the seeker in me, but they were not the same as awakening to Divine Consciousness. Adi Da openly…
Whenever he spoke, he would continually point out that no experience permanently changed the deep sense of suffering at the core of the being. He said that experiences as well as our human bodies were mortal and fleeting, and therefore “illusory” from the…
During “Garbage and the Goddess,” these types felt left out much of the time and they had to deal with that. But Bhagavan did not himself care whether anyone had experiences of any kind. He called psychic phenomena garbage, but…
In response to the same question, Shirdi Sai Baba used to say, “I give them what they want in the hope they will [eventually] want what I give them.” Through all the blisses, visions, and ecstasies, as well as all the laughter and love, Adi Da was showing us that none of these were Perfect Truth. He wanted us to hunger so strongly for the realization of his Divine State that no experience could ever again distract us from it. No matter the topic of the day, Bhagavan would always come back to this point. To illustrate his point, he once compared those who come to a spiritual teacher for experiences or techniques to a dog coming to his master for a bone. Many so-called “Spiritual” seekers are just “Narcissus” in drag! They do not have enough gut for Spiritual life. They are not interested in the demand that is the True Guru. They are “dogs” who come to their master only for a “bone”. A dog whose mind is set on the bone his master has will do any ridiculous thing to acquire it. The dog rolls on the ground and whines and barks and jumps through hoops. He does whatever he must, until his master gives him the bone. Then the dog runs away with the bone. Such is the ordinary Spiritual seeker. “Give me initiation into your Yoga. Give me the secret mantra. Give me the breathing exercise. Teach me the ‘Kriya Yoga’. Give me…
Adi Da declared that the only “mantra” allowed in his community was laughter.
Living with a Transmission-Master Everyone transmits. All of you are transmitters. Each one of you emits invisible forces. Those forces are locked up in your limited messages, and they reinforce the same limitations in others. Because I have Realized That Which Is Inherently Perfect, I Transmit That Condition to you. Such Transmission is inevitable, and It is an absolute Law.
Since everything is transmission, spend time in the Company of the One Who Spontaneously Transmits That Which Is Inherently Perfect and Ultimate. This is the great rule, the Great Law, the Ultimate Principle of the Great Tradition.{10}
This principle simplified many things about spiritual life. On the other hand, having a guru-devotee relationship with such a being was often more difficult than just practicing yoga techniques in the suburbs, and the relationship could sometimes be quite unnerving. Frequently when I sat with Bhagavan in silent Darshan, his transmission would break me wide open, and I would re-discover how uptight, stressed out, and self-deluded was my ordinary state. I would emerge mindless and wet-eyed with gratitude for the occasion. So it was both a joy and a challenge to receive Bhagavan’s Darshan. Nobody wanted to say very much after silent Darshan with him. Over time, it was deemed best to just meditate after the occasion and to let what one had received settle in.
Her fear, she told me, was that she was going to cry, and she had not allowed herself to cry for over twenty years. She had survived all kinds of ordeals in her life, all the while refusing to feel the anguish of them. She felt that if she really allowed herself to feel that pain, the battle would be lost. This fear held her captive. As she pushed herself away, Adi Da held her tight, only releasing her when she finally started weeping. She ran into the nearby woods and fell to the ground, sobbing.
Bhagavan once told a devotee, “I give everything to my devotee in the first moment.” After the seed is planted, the rest of it is tending to it, nurturing it, allowing it to unfold in the play of life.
I would spend the weekend experiencing kriyas, states of bliss, as well as extraordinary phenomena of all the senses. Sometimes my kriyas took the form of mudras, yogic postures, spontaneous rapid breathing, sometimes laughing my head off, sometimes sobbing my head off. But regardless of the form, the physical and emotional effects would release all my cares and charge me full of Bhagavan’s energy. After I went back to Malibu, it would eventually recede. It seemed like every time I went up to the sanctuary, I had to learn anew that a true spiritual life was joyous and happy, not uptight, lean, and grim as I had lived it for nearly two decades. Then it would fade. This cycle was bothersome. I wanted and thirsted to be in the blissful state forever, intoxicated, three feet off the ground. Why couldn’t I have that all the time? More lessons were to come.
I Am Like the (First) Vibrating tuning fork—and You (As My Rightly Prepared Devotee) Are Like the (Second) Non-Vibrating tuning fork that Begins To Vibrate By Coming Into Proximity With the Already Vibrating tuning fork. Thus, By Coming Into True Sympathetic Association With Me, You Begin To Vibrate “In Sympathy” With Me—Until (In Due Course) You Become Completely Resonant With Me.{11} Essentially
I felt pretty unsophisticated around Adi Da Samraj. I was, however, maddeningly drawn to him. One night Bhagavan spoke at length about this near-crazed attraction to the God-man. In Hinduism, Krishna is described as being so attractive, the gopis (cowmaidens) flocked to him and left their previous lives.
St. Paul was struck by Divine Light, and he was instantly converted to one who only preached the…
In a similar fashion, Adi Da had distracted me from my obsession with my life and my self to the point where I just wanted to leave everything behind and move to Lake County. However, I had a husband and children in Malibu, a healing practice, yoga and equestrian students. I still had Michael to contend with. In these early encounters with Adi Da, after spending yet another mind-blowing weekend at the sanctuary, I was always left wondering how this relationship would affect the rest of my magnificently overstuffed life? I…
Other teachers I had found were trying to convert me to their way, usually a modernized, Westernized version of some ancient Oriental teachings. Yoga and meditation practices were fine and useful, but I found that they never changed the basic sense of “me,” this bewildered sense of being…
He was a true teacher—someone who would live with me, suffer me through all my self-delusion and immaturity, and guide me. His manliness and integrity were uncompromising, but eventually I saw his weaknesses and limits. I had gone as far as I could with…
Likewise, my life on the ranch and the beach, ideal by most people’s standards, did not satisfy me. All the pleasures of marriage, family, sex, travel, teacher, and healer were wonderful, but I had a greater impulse—this ordinary life,…
From the first meeting, his influence pervaded my life in dramatic and obvious forms, and in other ways more…
They thought I was the source. But I soon noticed a pattern where, upon returning to Malibu after a weekend in Adi Da’s company, I could feel the accumulated energy from my time with Bhagavan gradually diminish. After a few weeks away from the…
County. But he still would not look at a book by Adi Da, nor would he concede there could be anyone comparable to Sri Ramana Maharshi. I stopped discussing it with him. I saw the contradiction, though. Michael had said for years that…
noticed another interesting pattern when I would return to Malibu after three days up north—the stressful fears, repetitive songs in my head, and the preoccupations of mind that usually cropped up either ceased occurring…
After Darshan, when I was walking to my car, I had the impulse to buy Bhagavan a gift, a bottle of cherry juice. Because I hadn’t been asked to bring a gift, I set my intuition aside.
That weekend up at the sanctuary was another wild two days, with Adi Da dispensing his hilarity and sublime energy to everyone nonstop. On one occasion, a devotee allowed Adi Da to press his hand onto his forehead. The man started to shake vigorously, as if being electrocuted. Bhagavan calmly kept his hand there, and the devotee offered no resistance.
I knew the body had circuits, and I knew what happened when the circuits received forces greater than their adaptation, or “increased wattage,” so to speak. And I had been through a few months of “Garbage and the Goddess.” Even to me, though, this was another level. And as always, the wild part was followed by a period where most everyone in the room sat quietly. Others were gently sobbing or moaning with bliss in the supercharged space.
This led to my understanding that, whatever the level of intensity of Bhagavan’s transmission, it was an entirely benign force. I never heard a word from the participants in these wild occasions that they were afraid in any way.
Because I had decided not to bring a gift, I suffered seeing all this exchange of gratitude and bliss. My ambivalence was again right in my face to feel acutely. The next morning I saw Adi Da walk out of his house with some devotees. I had the impulse to pick a flower and to run and offer it at his feet. But again, I was too self-conscious and timid. I just stood there and let the moment pass, then suffered for weeks my regret and inability to respond.
As it often is at that time of year, it was desert hot in Lake County. Everyone was in the great outdoor pool in a riotous volleyball game.
Everyone stopped playing and stood quietly in a semicircle around us. The force within this sudden silence was so great that Doris, who had been napping in a cabin up on the hill, woke up. My eyes were closed. As the embrace continued, I could feel my consciousness rising upwards, as if to take me beyond the body. I was not capable of following Bhagavan beyond the body—I could not surrender that completely yet—but I could feel him drawing me up anyway. In this embrace, I realized there was no “one” in Adi Da’s body, no character or self-referring identity. Devotees often remarked about Adi Da, “There is no one there.” This impression is not based in some philosophy but in the recognition that he was always in samadhi, and he had no ordinary social persona.
When I gave it to him, Bhagavan looked it over and asked me questions about it. He asked me why I didn’t move up from Los Angeles to the community in San Francisco. I said I was taking care of my older teacher and rebuilding my house for my family. Bhagavan invited me to bring Michael to see him. I was flabbergasted at the prospect, but also delighted.
My heart melted as I recognized his relentless love and compassion. He was always actively working with whoever was in front of him. It didn’t stop just because the weekend was over.
I was getting a lot of practice losing face in this community. At least I had finally given him a gift.
In late August, I made plans to go to the Mountain Of Attention for a week with Michael, who was ready to confront Adi Da about some aspects of his teaching. When we arrived, we discovered that Lake County was holding its annual street fair and Adi Da would be attending it for the first three days of our visit. On our fourth day there, we were invited to Bhagavan’s house. Michael had brought a gift for Bhagavan, a statue of the head of Sri Ramana Maharshi he had sculpted himself.
During the Darshan, I saw golden light burst from Adi Da, not once, but three times. It was enough to knock the socks off everyone there, including the “veteran” devotees. It even unraveled Michael. Afterwards, Michael admitted to me that Adi Da’s realization and teaching transcended that of Sri Ramana Maharshi. This was nothing less than a conversion for Michael. It occurred in Michael after just one sitting with Bhagavan without argument or any attempt on my part to convince him. I broke down. After nearly a year of struggling with Michael to accept Adi Da, his confession broke me, and I wept—this time with tears of joy.
A Whole New Life By May 1976, the house rebuilding was finished, and I was making plans to move up north. At first Michael wanted to go with me, but later he changed his mind. He was nearly ninety now. He felt too old to make such a major change. He wanted to stay with me, as my care of him had kept him alive for many years through many crises.
Chapter Twelve The World of Dragons and the Pit of Snakes Adi Da spoke to us often in the early days, but he didn’t teach us about the way just by talking about it. He invested himself in everything devotees brought to him—the attitudes we inherited or adopted from others, as well as our presumptions about the world and about spirituality, every kind of pursuit from books. He showed us that almost all of it was nonsense in terms of real spirituality. Nothing was taboo to talk about with Bhagavan. Everything brought to him was to be investigated down to its roots. He said that this unique way of working with devotees was by associating with them so receptively—being so open to all their ideas, presumptions, fears, dreams, deep feelings and desires—that he became them. Then the process of his spiritual invasion could quicken.
When Bhagavan first began to teach in 1972, he saw that his devotees were complicated about sexuality and the powerful emotions around it. He knew that people could not grow spiritually as long as they were obstructed by the complicated attraction/revulsion in relation to desire and pleasure, the fear of loss, the refusal to love unconditionally, as well as the need to punish and complain when feeling unloved. He saw these areas of life would have to be greatly purified for any growth to be possible, and so he entered into a most demanding investigation into the dimension of human sexuality and emotions.
Human beings are generally addicted to sex. They think about it all the time. They are troubled about it all the time. Even though people may be involved in intimate relationships, they cannot incarnate feeling.
live with a mind full of random desires. They are constantly wandering and thinking about others, because they cannot live love. You are impulsed to be pleasing and to receive sexual pleasure, but you cannot incarnate love fully.
The aberration in you is lovelessness. When the heart comes into the sphere of sexual matters, it changes everything.{12}
Before One Becomes Spiritual, One Must First Become Human
Adi Da told us we must first become human, as opposed to our current adaptations, which he called “subhuman.” It was only after one became humanly mature that one could become spiritual. Only then could one become (or realize) what is Divine.
Bhagavan minced no words on the subject—the primal sense of rejection is the emotional core of the self-contraction, the ego-”I”. Bhagavan Adi Da referred to this deeply rooted feeling as “the mood of betrayal.” It is epitomized by the individual’s living out repetitive dramas of “You don’t love me!”
To make these lessons in useful ways in such a highly-charged dimension of people’s lives, he would have to “enter the world of dragons,” as he said. So he did.
This fundamental mood is down there, lying in wait, orchestrating events (largely unconsciously) and just waiting to be proven right.
At the time, however, Bhagavan Adi Da proposed that the best “cave” to overcome the illusions of self was marriage, or committed intimacy. Why he was recommending this was easy enough to see. We exhibit behaviors and play out dramas with our spouses in our private rooms that we would not even think of enacting outside the house. This “pit of snakes,” as Adi Da referred to it, is within each of us, “hell-deep,” he said. If one is to grow spiritually, the pit of snakes must be confronted and dealt with first—and such work cannot be done in a forest or cave. It can be done only in relationship and, for most people, in the context of an intimate relationship openly observed within a community—perhaps the reason marriage vows are said to be taken (in old-fashioned terms) “before God and everybody.”
My desire to stay single and celibate flew out the window with a passionate love for this fifty-five-year-old man. During the early days of our relationship, whenever I drove through the streets of San Francisco, I would see Kerwin’s blue eyes in the skies in front of me. I had it bad, as they say.
At the time, Adi Da’s instruction for devotees who were attracted to each other was to go through a familiarization period before having sex—a definite interference with one’s blind impulse. I did not know anything about this rule at the time, but Kerwin did and so he moved off the sanctuary. At the behest of the community, we waited six weeks before getting married and consummating our love. We often expressed our passion by dancing the tango before breakfast, much to the amusement of our housemates.
say goodbye to him. I had felt some guilt when I left him, but now I honestly felt it was best to just let him go.
One night while Kerwin and I were making love, I felt Michael’s presence, accompanied by a state of bliss. In the midst of the bliss, though, I also felt Michael’s disapproval of my new sexual relationship. I just noticed it and let it pass. I told no one about it. Several days later I was painting the bathroom walls while listening to music on the radio, when Dvorak’s cello concerto came on. I felt Michael’s presence again pulling me into a blissfulness, which lasted maybe forty minutes. I began to weep.
A few weeks later, I was sitting by a pool watching children when I once again felt Michael pulling me away from Kerwin—and from Adi Da—and towards him, again into a blissfulness. Michael was waiting for me “on the other side,” as he had promised me earlier. I felt this contact wasn’t right for Michael’s growth, nor for mine. I told him to go to Bhagavan Adi Da. When I felt his presence, I put both my index fingers together, firmly showing him that “you two should get together.” To push Michael away was hard for me, but I knew he had to release me and move on in order to come to rest and be happy. The next time I felt Michael’s presence occurred several months later, again when Kerwin and I were making love. Instead of disapproving this time, Michael seemed happy and even accepting of our relationship.
I approached Adi Da and asked him if he had taken Michael and dissolved him in his heart. Bhagavan paused for a long time while looking at me, as if estimating how to phrase it for me. He softly uttered, “You could say that.” It was so lovingly and humbly said, and the greatest gift I could have hoped for—for someone I loved so deeply to enjoy Bhagavan’s embrace in their death transition.
On impulse, he also painted a fish skeleton on the seabed. Bhagavan did not like the skeleton. He asked Kerwin to remove it in an exchange that has all the paradox of a Zen koan. ADI DA SAMRAJ: There is a lot in the painting about death. KERWIN: But you wrote in The Knee of Listening that “Death is utterly acceptable to Consciousness and life.” ADI DA SAMRAJ: So you say, Kerwin. But death is never acceptable to Me.
Once Bhagavan gathered with his devotees and was confronted by several people who were very facile with parroting his teaching back to him, but without the spiritual maturity to truly know what his words meant. Bhagavan saw this as a problem throughout the ashram, so he called for a one-off “wrong dharma day,” where no one was allowed to repeat any aspect of his teaching correctly. The purpose of such play by the spiritual master is to undermine the devotee’s simplistic conceptions about what his statements “mean.” The devotee is supposed to get the point that knowing the concepts is not the same thing as spiritual maturity. A frozen concept in the devotee is usually camouflaging an emotional block and is an obstruction to growth.
Being too late for the communal dinner, he poked around the kitchen and found a baked potato sitting in one of the ovens. He ate it—only to find out later it had been prepared for Bhagavan’s dinner. When Kerwin encountered the master the next day, Bhagavan humorously challenged him, “You dared to eat my potato last night?” Kerwin stammered and said, “I can explain everything.” “You can explain nothing,” Adi Da said. “Don’t you realize that I put all the karmas of my devotees into that potato?” In other words, whatever Bhagavan was actually doing with the potato, none of the guru’s actions is ordinary, for he is always working with devotees in supernormal ways.
Therefore, Bhagavan was also gently letting Kerwin know that he was doing secret work to protect Kerwin from the consequences of bumbling about the Spiritual Master’s domain.
Chapter Thirteen Through the Middle and Far East
When Adi Da heard about the trip, he gave us each a service to do for him in India as a way to keep us linked to him while away from his physical company. Kerwin was to go south to Madurai and photograph the birthplace of Sri Ramana Maharshi. I was sent to Mumbai to interview a Dr. Thakkur about an Ayurvedic rejuvenation system called Kaya Kalpa. One minute after we left the house, a request arrived from Adi Da that Kerwin and I spend one night in the great pyramid of Gizeh in Egypt. We did not find out about this request until after we returned.
Our room consisted of two simple cots with a pad but no bedding, one fan, a “lily pad” with a small bucket of water for flushing, and another room with a faucet and a bigger bucket of water for washing. We weren’t put off by this circumstance at all—our quarters were a nice change from the fancy but impersonal hotels we had been staying in. Sri Ramana’s burial site and a couch on which he had often reclined were even more potent than his bedroom. While meditating in front of the couch, memories of Michael made me sorrowful. I prayed to Bhagavan to be cleared of all karmas with Michael, and afterwards got up from meditation with a sense of peace and refreshment.
to the village and into the great temple. We were led underground to a dark inner shrine where Sri Ramana had first arrived as a young man and had sat for months in samadhi. The arati, a short ceremony of waving of lights as an offering, was repeated in this shrine.
In the interview with Dr. Thakkur, I asked for the full details of Kaya Kalpa, an ancient rejuvenation system of herbs and ascetical disciplines. Lore about Kaya Kalpa purports that it improves the circulation and the association between the heart and the brain, as well as rejuvenating the cells throughout the body. The treatment reportedly had been taken by many famous political figures and saints in India, including Sri Ramana Maharshi, Mahatma Gandhi, and the orchestral conductor Zubin Mehta. As with everything, Adi Da wanted to try it out. It became my service to research it.
I rose early the next morning to see the incredible wonder of the Taj Mahal, breathtakingly beautiful in the rising sun. The interior of the Taj is like a jewel box, with inlaid flowers of jade, lapis lazuli, topaz, and other precious gems. No human-made structure on earth is such a feast for the eyes as well as the heart. Adi Da had studied the history and architecture of the Taj Mahal. He chose a photo of this greatest monument to human love to grace the cover of his first text on sexuality.
Kerwin’s camel leader told us, “I can smell American money.” When we rode camels up to the Great Sphinx and the Great Pyramid, the camel leaders made the camels trot faster to scare us. They then asked for money to slow them down. That did not work with me, I just wanted to go faster. Maybe these critters could jump.
mosaics on the wall in many languages. We ended up in an empty underground cave. I sat down on a step in the dark, and immediately felt a strong pull to go up and out of the body. This was followed by a warmth rising up my back with flashes of light in my head. From there I fell into a deep meditation. With my eyes closed, I saw slabs of stone passing before me. They had ancient writings on them, describing, it seemed, ancient lives, perhaps mine. The slabs and writing seemed to reside in a subtle energy field, something like the “Akashic record.” Ancient teachings say the Akashic record is a kind of etheric body of the whole planet, within which every individual human psyche and all of its activity and experience are permanently recorded. Upon seeing this vision and having this sense that all history and every human intention is recorded and somehow accumulated in our collective “soul,” I was overwhelmed by compassion for the world.
I had a vision of tearing off my top garment, running forward, and prostrating myself as if begging for mercy. I was a man with black hair wearing a white robe from the waist down. I cried out in pain as I got whipped on the back many times. After this vision, I was able to return my attention to Bhagavan and invoke his presence. I released any connection to what I saw in the vision, but I had to work at it. As I kept releasing, I felt the suffering and karma being washed away, and I became increasingly lighter and more conscious. I opened my eyes to look up at a stunning blue mosaic cross surrounded by gold in the half dome of the nave.
We stayed in the ancient sector of Jerusalem, within the old walls, at a convent run by the Soeurs de Sion, an order of Catholic nuns. On the ground floor, some ancient pavements stand, and a chapel has been built there. In the rooms below stand some pavements, traditionally said to be the actual place where Christ was scourged.
I got up and began to wander in the convent. It was all in shadowy darkness. I felt drunken and possessed. I swayed through the halls. I felt surrounded with ancient spirits and the air of a terrible holocaust. I went into the chapel where it is said Christ was judged, and then I went into the cellar where it is said he was scourged. I saw the inscriptions in the floor said to have been made by soldiers while they trapped him in an ancient game and made him the “scapegoat”. The strangeness and fear quickened me, and I returned to my room.{13} In the evening, I tried to discern meaning from the psychic experiences of this day, but decided to just drop it. I could not really understand what or why any of it happened. At this point, the whole trip was feeling unreal to both Kerwin and me. The following night we stayed in a hotel in Tel Aviv preparing for our flight to London. In the evening, as we looked out over the sea, a spectacular storm broke out, with displays of lightning about every thirty seconds.
to the whole trip and all we had encountered.
all the jabbering people, and the whole scene seemed even more unreal, like a dream. As in my adolescence, I had the sense again that these people—and people everywhere—were just enacting a superficial parody of themselves. No one seemed in touch with their deep feelings. In fact, the socializing seemed designed to keep it all buried. However, I was an adult now, and I could not look out at people from this disposition with innocence anymore. It was painfully obvious to me in that moment that I, too, was playing a part in the drama.
The guru is not here to congratulate you, nor to punish you for your sins—but he works to reveal the ego, that activity of self-contraction that creates the illusion of separation from God and all the resulting dramas of un-love. That work often requires criticism and the demand that the devotee change the patterns of behavior to which he or she has adapted. That’s the ass-kicking part.
The fear-based sense of self begins to dissolve. That’s the head-chopping part. The devotee functions and participates in the world in a new way while being freed of bondage to negative patterning.
Whether loving or fierce in the moment, the guru was always a confrontation, a demand. “Karma is the inability to function,” Bhagavan said, and he constantly required us to function, to “move ass,” and thereby to move beyond the reflex of turning inwards upon ourselves in the contracted forms of self-concern, self-interest, selfishness—all of which invariably sapped energy and productivity. Our otherwise ordinary lives were the theater in which our growth was measured and observed.
This fieriness that I bring to you to correct and transform you is nothing compared to the latent energy of the great cosmos and all that it is willing and able and ready and even intending to do to you. What I bring to you is just a glow, a kind of warmth. It is even comfortable. The fire of the universe, however, is all-consuming. When the universe burns you up, you will have no complaints to make—you will not be there to complain. The fieriness that I bring to you serves only your Enlightenment. Therefore, the fact that I may seem to be angry with you in some moment is not a reflection of your karma. It is a form of my work to Awaken you, to move you out of the pattern of mediocre practice.{14} In San Francisco, before Kerwin and I went to Europe, I began healing devotees and using my dowsing rod as a tool to discern the diet they needed. Everyone was fascinated by this new technique, and I enjoyed the notoriety. When I heard that Bhagavan had some lung problems, I sent him up some alternative lung herbs and told him exactly how many to take and when.
Bhagavan’s notes to me said that I should stop all this self-glorifying healing. He said I should just “become ordinary” by finding a job in the everyday world. I cried at first, but I saw what he meant. Alternative healing techniques were my way of feeling consoled, getting accepted and feeling worthy, even superior. To abandon them was to lose a great deal of what I regarded to be myself, and this threw me into a crisis.
However, the only job I could find was handing out pamphlets for a drug store chain! I swallowed my pride and prejudice, and soon I was passing out pamphlets at 8:00 a.m. every morning at the subway station entrance in downtown San Francisco. It was always cold and windy at that hour, so I had to really bundle up.
I found a secretarial job in a big investment office. Sitting at a desk all day in an air-conditioned building was not easy for me, not after working outside with horses for so many years. After a year, I bought a redwood house in Marin County, the suburban area across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. I quit my job, and we moved into the house to renovate it and sell it for a profit—that became my “job.”
The Miracle in the Garden Revisited In 1974 during the “Garbage and the Goddess” days, Adi Da wanted to teach something about spiritual energies to Ruchiradama Nadikanta, a senior renunciate who would serve him directly for the rest of his life.
Bhagavan’s sitting in that place only once would leave a imprint of an energy field that could be detected there so many years later. That was a miracle to me. I was learning about the distinct difference between a holy place, or a holy object, and an ordinary one.
At the time, and over the years, I came to see that the guru’s touch actually caused a tangible and measurable change that was detectable via pendulums and dowsing rods. After studying dowsing with Wayne Cook in the 1960s, I had been able to measure energy and polarity changes in food and other objects. The Sanskrit term prasad (pruh-SAHD) indicates an offering to a god that is returned to the giver to consume as a form of the deity’s blessing. In the context of the guru-devotee relationship, the devotee gives a gift to the guru, usually some food, and the guru returns it transformed and blessed as prasad to the devotee. The difference between a blessed piece of fruit and an ordinary piece of fruit becomes apparent via dowsing. My experience of dowsing and locating the place of the rock where Bhagavan had once sat confirmed this principle for me.
The change in an object or place can be magnified by how it is treated after the empowerment. If the holy place is properly served, the spiritual force remains potent there, even increases in strength. Such a place is a site of spiritual transmission. The place even demands a different response from an individual who enters with casual social mind. Spiritual force can also be felt by anyone who is sensitive to it.
Whenever the weather threatened one of the Adidam sanctuaries, Bhagavan would call for weather maps and hourly reports as aides to his supernormal work with the natural elements. Often enough, as soon as he started getting reports, the storm would somehow abate. A cyclone would suddenly veer off its deadly course. Bhagavan also did this work with extreme weather events around the world.
Even the guru’s thought, or “regard,” is a form of blessing. People have known since ancient times that just to think about another person actually affects them in subtle ways. This psychic principle is the source of all the rituals of blessing, such as positive affirmations and prayers—as well as the negative effects of cursing. Even science is catching up with this principle.
undergone such rapid changes. He tested everything we brought to him about human life to see what was useful for spiritual life. He went through this process of “consideration,” as he called it, in order to create a way of spiritual life for a new world. Adi Da worked every minute of every day with the force of urgency. Every moment with him was a sprint, and every month we saw dramatic changes in the form of our lives with him. The process was made doubly difficult by the fact that those who came to Adi Da were ordinary people full of the ordinary obsessions of modern life.
Chapter Fifteen Drama Queen
In the early nineteen-eighties, he began to point out that each person is constantly acting out a deep pattern, or “script,” that is specific.
Freud asserted that the female typically harbors an unconscious desire for sexual involvement with her father and feels in competition with her mother. Conversely, the male typically desires sexual involvement with his mother and feels in competition with his father. Because these impulses are unfulfilled, every female feels, deep down, rejected by her father and projects this rejection on every other male; and below the surface, every male feels rejected by his mother and projects this onto every woman. More, everyone feels in primal competition with those of the same sex. These
He demonstrated to his devotees in a myriad of ways that people live their lives expecting rejection, betrayal, and un-love, and on that basis they reject, betray, and refuse to give love to others.
It started to become painfully obvious to everyone what a constant lunatic drama we were always enacting. We are, each and all, a “drama queen.” The self-revelations and Scrooge-like conversions during this period were stunning to me. For Bhagavan, the purpose of the dialogues was not psychological health through “unzipping oneself backwards,” he said. For him, the point was to free the being to grow spiritually.
In other words, our emotional-sexual patterns in relationships are, from the spiritual point of view, bondage to illusion, made ever stronger through repetition.
The master’s transmission stimulated in me acute sensitivity to my egoic dramas, just as an x-ray photograph of a structure throws all of its flaws into high relief. This had the effect of “breaking the spell.” Once the spell of a repetitive negative pattern is broken, one…
Bhagavan taught that just to be alive brings the obligation to actively love. He said we were never to withhold our energy from people, even people who had offended or hurt us. Instead we were to bring positive energy to those with whom we were in conflict. For example, if someone acted harshly towards you and it hurt your feelings, you would get together with the person and some others and talk it out honestly. The others there would make sure that both sides…
The devotee learned this relational discipline as an obligation. Adi Da showed us that one had to become human…
There is always something to blame, always somebody to abuse, as if somebody or some experience is the reason that you are so messed up. You are the only reason. Whatever you may have experienced in your life, it is your reaction to it that is binding you, and you must deal with your reactivity. There is nobody whatsoever to blame. In order to stop blaming everyone and everything and the universe itself and what ever you think God is, you ought to get down to dealing with yourself.…
My Turn to Be Told Bhagavan’s instruction about the need to outgrow old patterns was not new to me, but I had never heard it in such forceful terms. I had never been given the obligation to be actively loving in my relationships—not later, but right now, regardless of how I felt. In fact, I discovered that the more difficult one finds it…
It was obvious that whatever situation we were in and however old we were, there was always an ever-repeating script, regardless of the changing characters. Paradoxically, Bhagavan told us not to get obsessed with this analysis, what he called “case talk.” Instead, he instructed us to simply relate what we could recall about our early lives and receive the reflection of our friends. The group’s job was to listen and to honestly point out or “reflect” what the subject was enacting in the present moment, to show how the early life moments and patterns were still determining his or her…
I saw that I was deeply and unconsciously focused on loss,…
Consequently, I went into a panic when the group made the modest suggestion that I cultivate a true friendship with another woman.
Perhaps this is why Bhagavan Adi Da would open the emotional-sexual gatherings with the question, “So what don’t you want to talk about tonight?” By this he meant that when our patterns are unknown to us, they control us from their depth.
I could see the “pit of snakes” arising in my relationship with Kerwin as well. He could be a challenge. He was often forgetful, sloppy, and when he got anxious about something, he would become harsh with me, with his son Joe, and with others. I saw my basic anger towards men because “men leave,” as my father had done.
life. For me, Bhagavan ‘s instruction about love is summarized in his essay The Wound of Love. This essay became a particular favorite of devotees. It is often quoted among Adidam practitioners to this day because it so beautifully summarizes and epitomizes what it means to truly love. It contains all the great lessons and admonitions for the self-contracted, always-unloved and rejected ego, written in the high language of his major teaching texts.
Love Does Not Fail For You When You Are Rejected or Betrayed or Apparently Not Loved. Love Fails For You When You Reject, Betray, and Do Not Love. Therefore,…Do Not Stand Off From relationship. Be Vulnerable. Be Wounded, When Necessary—and Endure That Wound (or Hurt)…. Do Not Dissociate From one another or Fail To Grant one another The “Knowledge” Of Love. Realize That each one Wants To Love and To Be Loved By the “other” In Love. Therefore, Love.{18}
They helped me to see how I had developed a basic strategy of getting into the psychic, the extraordinary, as well as alternative and mediumship healing in order to make up for the basic emptiness I felt. I may have had a propensity for psychic experiences and some modest psychic sensitivity, but I was not fully living in this world, the one I had been born into. I saw that my history of frequent fasting and bodily purification, my always too-thinness, and the frequent dreams or feelings of flying upwards or leaving the body were all efforts from deep within me to avoid the simple fact of living in this flesh body with all of its physical and emotional threats and discomforts. This really stirred things up in me. For several days after the group, my emotional life was chaos. Everything about my character seemed false. I could see my fear of being unloved, my need to be the good girl who wants to help and cure everyone in order to get loved. But in spite of all the revelations going on—or maybe because of them—I could now feel the life force coming down into my abdomen in meditation, something I had never felt before. Blocks in my body were dissolving and centers were opening up. The clench of contraction was releasing.
Whatever the experiences of the past, the heart is not even in the slightest touched by them. Therefore, the devotion My every devotee feels for Me in his heart has no limits, no problems, whatsoever.{19} This was the good news: Yes, the ego is a pit of snakes, an emotional-sexual nightmare, but that is not who I really am. The Perfect Divine State is always the case, and I can intuit that Reality at any time. Devotion to the guru was the key that opened the door.
After the meeting with the Dutch couple, I was given some disciplines to help balance my tendencies, such as eating a heavier diet to gain weight, doing some breathing exercises to “ground” me, singing during the day, vocally expressing love and pleasure while making love, and getting together with ladies for massages and intimate conversation. Each of these little disciplines—though perhaps not a problem for other people— was really difficult for me, the emotional equivalent of running into a wall. But over time they helped to balance my life and my character. I had much more attention and energy for meditation, and I developed far more humor and ease than I ever thought I could have in life.
When the “pit of snakes” in anyone is first revealed and confronted, one’s initial reaction is usually denial, defensiveness, fear, sorrow, anger. However, soon after one accepts what is revealed, a great relief comes.
One Hindu scripture reports that unprepared individuals only “gain power for their lust in the holy places.” Likewise, when Adi Da’s transmission is received, it frequently has the first effect of exaggerating the symptoms of egoic patterning in the devotee. The mind might race out of control, sexual desires might rise up strongly, or the body might get extremely uncomfortable as toxins stored deep in the tissues are released into the bloodstream.
I was tired and hot, and could not get past my bodily discomfort and give him my attention. It was only frustration for me. The following day, he spontaneously again sat on the steps outside. It was 105F (41°C). I had been working with the horses and was exhausted, thirsty, and hungry. However, as I sat right in front of Bhagavan, I remember his admonition to “lay it at My feet,” and I began doing just that. I consciously released all my concerns and riveted my attention on Adi Da’s feet. While his hands were slowly closing and opening in mudras, Bhagavan turned and gave me his glance. All of my self-attention relaxed and my mind became clear and still. I could not even feel my body anymore. I became rested in Bhagavan’s presence without concern, now able to receive his transmission.
Intense discomfort followed by relief and bliss was not only my common experience in Darshan, but also the experience of many dozens of others in the ashram. In Darshan, something almost always came up in the devotee to be “boiled off” before the blissful part began.
The first one he used in 1972 and was called “the sunlight over the well.” In this metaphor, the guru is likened to the sunlight, and the devotee is likened to a well filled with slithery creatures that had moved into the well overnight for the cool dampness. At noon, the sunlight appears directly over the well and shines down to the bottom. The warmth and light have the effect of making the “creeps” in the well come running up the sides to get out. The well represents the deep psyche of the devotee, and the creeps are the devotee’s karmas or egoic tendencies…
You can go through the crisis of reactivity the way the usual person goes through it, without any consciousness, just dramatizing it. Or you can see the tendencies arising in you from hour to hour and remain in devotional Communion with Me, going…
See the appearance of these things as what they are. They are the signs of an eternally ongoing purifying event, like creeps crawling up out of a well into the sunshine. These things want to creep out into the landscape. But if you dramatize them as soon as they get into your eyes or your mind, you fail to let them get out of the well. When you just step out of…
Only if you live without concern while these things are arising do you allow them to pass into the landscape, to become unmodified again, not binding. They will be released if you will do the…
practice to the turning of base metal (the devotee) into gold, or the enlightened condition—a common enough metaphor in the spiritual traditions. The tapas of spiritual life is very uncomfortable at times, emotionally as well as physically. The discourse that afternoon was very sobering to the naive crowd of largely young, idealistic Westerners. It was about the “balls” required for a true spiritual practice. When my devotee understands quite soberly that life is a form of release, my devotee regains his or her true humor about the born condition and becomes able to serve others in a loving fashion. There may be years of this fire, and My devotee…
There is a great deal to learn, and there is much responsibility yet to be realized in…
While looking at all of King’s mementos and awards, I was impressed how these “exterior validations” tended to make the ego feel real and important. But they cannot protect us at all from life’s troubles, nor the consequences of our own bad choices. King’s weakness was women. While not a libertine, he was nonetheless enamored of women to the point of his personal undoing. His divorce from my mother was just the tip of the iceberg.
She reminded me what to do in a vigil to assist my father’s death transition. Such a vigil also assists the bereaved in letting go. In the case of the death of a loved one, it is natural to feel anguish at the loss, but I was wallowing in it in a self-pitying way. The instant I made the decision to do the vigil, the self-pity part stopped.
Adi Da taught that three days was the typical time for the deceased being’s complete transition out of the gross body. I started the vigil so that Kerwin could rest up from the long drive down.
I began to feel my father’s presence. He seemed confused, which was not a surprise, since his death was so sudden. I also picked up on chaos within him, probably due to his many unresolved life-situations. As I sat with him, I saw some of his tormenting mind-forms. It felt as though he was still angry with his own mother and Betty, as well as Colleen Moore, his mistress of many years. I made a point of writing down whatever came to my attention, then releasing everything as it came up.
But I kept confronting the harsh reality side. Every time I looked at that stiff, bloodless corpse during the night, I realized no matter how beautiful or wealthy or famous we are in life, this is how we end up—food for worms. Lots of people talk about that. Lots of people have written about it, “ashes to ashes,” and so on. However, I was now seeing it directly in relation to one very dear to me.
Again, though, in the midst of this palpable peace, I became aware of my father’s entanglements with women, money, properties, and lawsuits. Adi Da taught that the separation of the subtler body from the physical body after death is made more difficult by the psychic attachments and unresolved conflicts of the individual.
When I arrived, Kerwin, who had never before spoken of experiencing subtle energies, said he could feel King’s presence and his anxiety about the lingering complications in his life.
was humbled by how little I knew of this mysterious process of life, the death transition, and all the marvels of Adi Da’s intervention.
Bhagavan Adi Da said most of the non-humans were more capable of contemplating him than we were. Non-humans don’t regard it to be dangerous or threatening to enter into this pleasurable, deep swoon into the Source-Domain.
He touched these boxes with care and love before putting them in the gravesites and covering them with soil, blessing each creature. By the end of this ceremony, the air was thick with Bhagavan’s bliss. We all felt equally blessed by him, to be in his sphere and witness his love expressed, whether for humans or non-humans. Some years later a turkey that Adi Da had named “Clark Gobble” was also buried in the sanctuary zoo’s non-human gravesite.
At heart, all are one. At heart, a human being is not the slightest bit different from the reptiles, the birds, the former dinosaurs, the elephants, the plants, the trees, the wind, the sky, the microbes. Apart from their function in conditionality, all beings are the same. Human beings are not uniquely to be Saved. All beings, even all of conditional manifestation, is the Sphere of My Work.
Appearing before you in human Form, I play with you in human terms. But My Work, moment by moment, altogether, encompasses All—not only all human beings, not only all beings, but everything. I am in conversation with all beings and things.{23} Bhagavan Adi Da also had a playful relationship with the birds that lived in and around his house in Fiji. When I would massage Adi Da in the evenings,
“They think what people say is just gobbledygook.”
I ran over to the clinic and grabbed some food-grade hydrogen peroxide, which releases oxygen upon contact with microbes.
The fish started swimming around, and they no longer swam to the surface struggling to breathe. Bhagavan said, “Let’s eat ‘em,” and he laughed. Even in this small moment, he was dealing with my need to save everybody.
In doing healing-work with animals for Adi Da, I learned I had only two choices—I could function as my prideful ego, or I could do everything as service to my Spiritual Master. True service to the spiritual master gives the devotee the opportunity to grow through the rigors of creative action.
Service is another notion of the guru-devotee relationship that is often offensive to modern men and women of the West. It sounds exploitive to our secular, egalitarian culture because the spiritual principle is not understood. The spiritual master has no conventional desire to be fussed over. The consciousness of such an illumined being is free of all clinging and desiring.
The devotee is the one served when he or she does service to the guru, for it keeps the devotee mindful of the guru, and vice versa. The service relationship keeps the connection alive. That is the key.
As I found out through my own experience, the need to serve the guru cannot be a mere belief or dogma to be acted out childishly, or it just does not work.
The first is that the spiritual master is a source of grace, a transmitter of a greatly expanded and enlightened consciousness, seemingly outside one’s self like everything else. The second principle is that the spiritual master is not other than oneself. That is, behind appearances, the spiritual master is the Divine Self of all. He, therefore, sees all things, including devotees, as one with the Divine Being, or what Bhagavan called the Prior Condition. Bhagavan continually impressed upon his devotees that the Divine Being is the Prior Condition of all beings. This is the great esoteric secret.
To know everything and everyone so intimately is the guru’s sacrificial ordeal. I Submit Myself to devotees to the degree of Becoming them, to the degree of taking on the condition in which they exist, and I Teach in that circumstance.
So I Become you, I Take On your mind-force, your karmas, your vision, your state. It is not Me—it is a reflection, a mirror, a form of sacrificial participation. When I sleep at night, I experience the dreams of people, the state of mind of people. I experience very directly all of the qualities of everyone with whom I become associated, because My particular manner of Teaching does not involve abstraction from those whom I Teach. It involves intimate Identification with them.{25}
In January of 1986, Adi Da left his body in a yogic swoon. His life signs became very faint, but after a time they returned to normal awareness, and then his bodily awareness. I was not in his company at the time, but the crisis was frightening to those around him. Adi Da did not speak of his bodily crisis for a while. When he finally did speak about it, his description was beyond anything he had ever said before. He came to refer to this event as the initiation of his “Divine Avataric Self-‘Emergence’.”
The most significant of these essays were published in his expanded autobiography, The Knee Of Listening, and also later in his principal texts, The Aletheon and The Dawn Horse Testament.
Adi Da’s body was full of agony at the refusal and the lack of response—by his devotees and, by extension, by humankind altogether—to the opportunity he represented. The psychic weight of the refusal and resistance pushed him out of his fragile, ultra-refined body, threatening his connection to the body. Others who were with him at the time were afraid that he might die.
The experience of receiving Bhagavan’s Darshan shifted for me as well. Up until then, it had always been a reception of bliss and force, and that continued, though more intensely. But now Darshan was a source of awe to the point of bewilderment. How does one relate to a being who transcends the limits of humanity—while still alive and fully human—but who now is a living, breathing manifestation of the One Divine Being?
The time of familiar association with Adi Da—the revelry, the socializing and playful games, the endless talking about our egoic reluctances and preferences—was over. He said that he had already given all of the instruction on matters of discipline that devotees needed to embrace in order to make full use of his transmission.
at the time, “Now I’m calling you on it.” I felt I could not relate to Bhagavan any longer as a spiritual friend, but that I must now relate to him as the murti, or visible manifestation of the Perfect Divine Being.
No “object” is Worthy of wanting need. No Search is Fruitful. No pain is Necessary. No “other” is Worthy of futile Seeking-desire and inevitable emptiness. Neither attachment Nor avoidance is Right. No sorrow is Necessary. Fear itself is Ultimate pain, but it is Utterly Un-Necessary—Because it is Inherently and Perfectly Non-Necessary. Seeking and attaining are (Inevitably) a total loss—and loss itself is the Only Constant Discovery in every gain. The “world” of “objects”, or “others”, or “things” Already (in any moment) bites—and it Always bites back. Come To Rest—or Be Awake—Already Forever Arrived In My “Bright” Eternal Sphere and Space.{26} You can’t imagine the impact of my guru telling me, “No sorrow is necessary.” Through my entire life, the dominant emotion had been sorrow, my oldest friend. Now my Spiritual Master was telling me it’s unnecessary?
I learned long ago that you don’t get great spiritual initiations for free. “With great gifts come great obligations,” Bhagavan had said. Riding along with the descent of bliss and light were the upcoming tests and increased obligations. Bhagavan called on many of His longtime devotees to become celibate (even if we chose to remain in our intimacies) and to eat only a pure diet of raw vegan foods. These demands instantly brought up resistance, even in exaggerated ways. I had an intense craving to eat all the cookies in my kitchen cabinet. But after looking at them, I tossed them out. I instinctively knew they were not right for my body, and I would just suffer the effects of them afterwards. The craving was the automatic pattern of the body talking, not any higher intuition. To just toss them out was not even hard to do for me.
was not about conforming to an ascetic ideal, nor was it just a suppression of troubling impulses. The point of such discipline is to cease to burden the body with what it does not require to live a life devoted to Divine Realization. The recommended dietary and sexual disciplines were just the beginning of a basic responsibility that came with entering into a more profound form of the process. In that light, all forms of indulgence in sex and food, and even conventional forms of creative achievement, are considered “empty calories.” After the thrill, they only bind attention, diminish energy, and limit what you can receive. It was just obvious to me.
He sat for morning meditation in His house with those considered to be the most advanced practitioners at the time. Other devotees on the sanctuary were invited to sit in a nearby temple at the same time—3:30 a.m. Besides taking up the raw diet and celibacy, we were to meditate six hours a day and attend several occasions of devotions. All these activities were about focusing on the spiritual practices that Bhagavan had recently given about how to invoke Him and receive Him. Every day during this period brought more revelations for me. The changes, internal and external, were fast-paced, every day filled with new ways and the shedding of old ones. What seemed impossible in the morning dissolved by evening. What seemed important in the morning dissolved by evening. Nearly everyone was handed tasks that were urgent, unfamiliar, and had to be handled creatively. The whole ashram, including me, was moving at what devotees used to call “siddha-speed.” The demands came non-stop and the pace was brisk, but siddha-speed was more than that. I would reflect upon the week that had just ended, and it would seem like months had passed and a great deal of stress and negative expectation had been lifted. Spiritually, as I sat in meditation or listened to new essays from Bhagavan, I experienced directly what He was writing about—feeling His Divine Spirit-Current coming not only from above but simultaneously emanating from my heart region.
The next day it was all I could do to crawl to the bathroom on all fours. I got bored looking up at the ceiling, and I did not want to let my mind wander into self-pity, so I listened to audio tapes of Bhagavan speaking.
body. I saw how each thought, or mind-form, was only a stressful contraction of the mind, even the “nice” thoughts.
they seemed miles below my awareness. My body was still. I could not focus on any one part, but could feel my body vibrating with energy and life throughout. I was aware of a soft, swishing sound, which turned out to be the sound of the in-breath.
His eyes might well up, or His face would flush red and look unutterably wounded, in some vision or struggle no one could fathom. His eyes would sometimes roll up into His head as He let go of bodily awareness.
During a retreat in Fiji in the eighties, I had a significant revelation of this sacrifice. One day in meditation, flies were crawling all over my face and body. I was so distracted I could not meditate with any depth. I wondered: If a fly came on my Master’s face while He was sitting, would He move? This became a strong question in my mind.
I had a vision of Him pulling His chest wide open and exposing His beating, red heart while looking me straight in the eye. The vision subsided. I saw a fly land on Bhagavan’s chin and slowly make its way up to His mouth before one of the attendants could shoo it off. In the depth of His samadhi, Bhagavan never moved a hair. I had no mind for over an hour after the occasion.
He kept abreast of the great conflict of World War II by listening daily to the news on the radio and looking at detailed maps of the battlefields. As he did this, wounds would break out on his body, a kind of stigmata for the millions dying. His devotees would bathe and bandage him every day and implore him to stop. But he would just continue on, saying it was his work. He died in 1945, the day after the surrender ceremony ending World War II. Just prior to his death, he told his devotees his work was done.
Bhagavan had several times made the comment that He had been “talking to us about these [spiritual] matters for thousands of years,” a cryptic reference upon which He did not elaborate but which affirmed what many devotees had felt about our association with Him. After this occasion, the healers felt a déjà vu, as if we had done this service for Bhagavan in other lifetimes.
Soon afterwards, I received a communication from Bhagavan. I was to write a book about healing, open a clinic, treat many people, and train others in the ashram. Having experienced so many years of people regarding my healing methods to be questionable, I had been ready to retire from healing work. Now I could barely take all this praise and acknowledgment from Bhagavan. I felt on top of the world.
All I could do was observe the dramas and let everything go. On the other hand, when I meditated in one of the temples, I was enjoying the blisses stimulated by Bhagavan’s transmissions. The see-saw continued, and weeks later I recognized that both of these extremes were one big see-saw. Neither of them had anything to do with the realization of Truth. Within an hour of having this insight, I was invited to treat Adi Da again.
Instead of a meditation retreat, He suggested I go on a healing retreat, which for me meant studying His teaching, sitting on the beach, and watching the little crabs scurry around and dig their holes.
Adi Da demonstrated to residents and retreatants many times over that He “knew” about everything that took place on the Island. Stories of His supernormal knowing in this regard came so frequently, most residents just took it for granted. The entire Island seemed to be an extension of His physical body, and He declared it to be so.
prayed to Bhagavan, “I wish you always to be in my heart.” I instantly felt corrected by Bhagavan’s admonition “I am always already in your heart.”
Chapter Twenty-Two Re-Learning the Healer’s Art from Adi Da
As Adi Da taught us, once the body is established in right relationship to a freely flowing Life-Current, the healing occurs naturally and spontaneously. This is fundamental. True healing is not just a matter of eliminating symptoms, but includes ending the habits and patterns that cause one’s life to be a continuous “imbalancing act,” as Bhagavan called it. Adi Da taught that disease is simply the reflection of imbalance, and that healing is, among other things, the art of restoring balance.
Toxicity is the result of the failure to release and to eliminate. Anyone who is sick is invariably enervated or toxic or some combination of both.
My struggle was that I wanted to be the healer. I wanted to get acknowledged and appreciated by others. Initially, I did not want to acknowledge the Divine Life-Current accomplishes the change and the healing. Bhagavan taught us that the healer’s role is simply to facilitate and enable this radiant current of bio-energy to increase and flow unobstructed in the patient.
Bhagavan gave a discourse on the matter, speaking about the ego feeling trapped in a problematic body, and our constant search for the “edible deity”—becoming obsessed with acquiring secret substances that would magically rejuvenate us, epitomized in the Hindu tradition by soma.
It heals you of the entire accumulation of your developmental history of embodiment in the “world”, and It draws you into Divine Love-Bliss, beyond any consolations of the body-mind, high or low.{29}
Chapter Twenty-Three My Mother’s Demise and Death
I felt the conflict in her—choose Adi Da’s healing light or her own emotional darkness—and the darkness was clearly winning. She had been ten days by herself, disembodied, suffering her own negative mind-forms, and I felt she was frightened. To make matters worse, she had been cremated almost immediately after her death, with no time allowed for the delicate transition.
That is, in fact, what many ghosts are—those who have not completed their death transition. I could feel I had not really forgiven my mother within my heart. It seemed hopeless. How does one release a lifetime’s worth of resentment in a minute?
ADI DA SAMRAJ: You haven’t yet forgiven her. You are still talking angrily about her turning on you and throwing you out of the house. You went through the process of her death in a kind of ritual fashion, but you did not deal with yourself—your reasons for not wanting to forgive her, your expectation that she would approach you and ask for forgiveness and somehow make you feel her need for your love. That did not happen. So you did not really go through the process of forgiving her. Your process of forgiving or letting go is still waiting to happen.
You have based your relationship with her on her loving you. She did not give you that satisfaction, so you are not about to give her any satisfaction now. It is the attachment/rejection game again, not the discipline of love. The discipline of love has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you got what you wanted from her.
The discipline of love is not about justice. It transcends justice. Love is greater than justice.
ADI DA SAMRAJ: Love! No justice, no expectations, no “forgiveness”—Love! Love is its own forgiveness. Even to think in terms of having to forgive is about the attachment game.
To you, love is based on conditions, expectations. And you always feel in the frustrated position, unloved. You are always doing things for others that are love-expressions from your point of view, but there is no glow on you. You have always done healing service. There is no energy in you with all this service to others that you call “love.” If you are truly loving others, it shows all over your body. What you are doing is not about love.
You think you are loving, but you are dramatizing. You think your service is about love, but it is something you are doing to serve yourself. It is a dramatization of your problem. This dramatization is what you must consider in your life, and you must begin to change your life. You must see how you developed this particular character game and how you dramatized it in all your relationships and all your choices and all the aspects of your appearance and all the aspects of your doing.{32} In my time with Bhagavan I saw that no philosophy, no book, no self-help technique, no weekend seminar on crying, nor any time abroad in exotic lands can touch the roots of our fundamental unhappiness, nor can they replace the lifetime of hard sadhana to transcend the oedipal problems of rejection and betrayal. If I had known a bit about that before this dialogue, it was now burned into my being.
at. It was easy to see why. To keep my fault hidden justified my anger. It also kept me fixed in my pattern of self-pity and withdrawal. After the gathering, I realized that Bhagavan had masterfully summarized my entire life over about fifteen minutes. I was grateful for the gift, but now I had to change my act. At the age of sixty-six, I had to grow up. I had to love.
I felt great energy in this state because I was not expending tons of energy suppressing it and covering it up with a phony act. On the other side of the pain, I could feel the greater reality. In odd moments, it flashed— there was something magnificent and unblemished beyond the illusion of the ego-”I”. These revelations as well as the state of acute sensitivity faded after a couple of days.
I asked him to what he attributed his long life and he said, “Eliminate everything unnecessary from your life, and only do what is necessary.” This principle was reflected in his austere diet, which consisted of one cup of coffee and one idli (steamed white rice patty) for breakfast, two or three idlis for lunch, and the same for dinner.
When
terminate our formal relationship, so we divorced in 1996, but still remained friends.
After Adi Da had departed, I went into the meditation hall and fell into a vision. A curtain or a veil was pulled a bit to the side, and I felt behind the curtain this indescribable immensity that intended to annihilate me. Though the massive entity was terrifying, I simultaneously felt it held the possibility of extreme bliss, if only I could surrender to it.
The dancing gatherings with Bhagavan continued nearly every night through that December. We danced out of our minds. I was always energized by the dancing, and I did not even feel tired during the day, even though the sleep breaks were short. Meditations in the temples during this time were deep and easy for me. An hour went by like nothing, even while my mind prattled on.
process: When I followed Adi Da’s instructions—“sink down to the knees, don’t dance to the music, feel Me, dance with Me, in Me”—the light invaded the body from above. Objects in the room and all others lost their edges and shapes and appeared luminous. It was a seeing, tasting, feeling, round sensation. The body opened like a flower from the heart, bathed by the mist of the softest coolest light, expanding and enlarging itself to include every particle and person in the room—happiness in waves of love-bliss.
am extended everywhere. I am experiencing all as My own Form. I am doing the Divine Yoga for all. All is in My view, My touch-Field. No one is unfamiliar to Me. No one feels as an “other” to Me. All is in My sphere. That suggests how I Work.{43}
And the more people there are who know Me and who know this is what I am doing, and who enter into devotional communion with Me, the more means I have in the concrete field. {46}
He was not angry, nor was He trying to shock us. He was just stating the sad facts with a vulnerability that broke all hearts in the room. Bhagavan said that Adidam was a mummery—a mock drama of poseurs—if, after all He had given and demonstrated, we still remained steadfast in our attachment to our gross, superficial lives.
People have to know how to maintain their physical and psychological well-being, and not submit themselves to this decay engendered by the social world. They should look young, attractive, and even sexual, and continue to serve in ways for which they are qualified. Old age is a time of life in which people are free of social obligations.{49}
You must be free of this tendency to separate from others. You are all part of the same picture. There is no individual karma, ultimately. You must transcend not only your own apparently individual destiny and tendencies, you must overcome it in the form of all others. This is the meaning of compassion and love. This is what Enlightenment expresses. There is no private karma, there is no personal righteousness. All are involved in the same Reality.{50}
“Gold is purified through submission to fire,” as it says in one of the ancient Hindu texts. The dross has to be burned off, and that’s what was happening to me.
“Ogee Sponge,” or “Spongezilla.” No one took the sponge part seriously, but I remain Ogee to this day.
When Swami Muktananda was a disciple of his guru, Bhagavan Nityananda, he once came into Nityananda’s presence carrying a book he cherished, a sacred text. In his characteristic blunt manner, Nityananda said to him, “You do not have this book—it has you.” Likewise, Edward de Vere, the lost manuscripts, and my whole search had me. Swimming in new clues and possibilities, for weeks I was caught up in an emotional whirlwind.
From the whole adventure, I learned how easily the mind could be deluded by anything fascinating, and thus abandon everything, including what one cherished, for the sake of a goal. I was hard-humbled by this revelation in my case. With Bhagavan Adi Da’s guidance, I was finally able to relax all my stress and seeking and be turned back to the center of my life, my spiritual practice in His company.
In The Scapegoat Book, Bhagavan described the ego as not just illusory or transient, but “aggressive” and “abusive,” in denial of its “fear of entombment” and terror at the prospect of being overwhelmed by “Water” (Divine Spirit). I was cringing throughout this period—I had known about the inherent life-negativity of the egoic persona, but somehow I always assumed the darkest aspects to apply to a few really bad people, surely not to me. Now I was feeling the full force of what His words directly addressed in everyone.
Not only does the ego refuse love and relationship, but it also actively resists Divine Intervention and works to eliminate it, even collectively. This resistance to Divine Intervention is largely unconscious, but nonetheless real and highly destructive, and often involves “scapegoating” the object of fascination once the initial enthusiasm fades.
The dialogue between the two characters reflects the confrontation between the egoic devotee looking to become enlightened, and his guru, who must suffer every illusion, self-delusion, and offense from the devotee, while simply speaking and radiating the Perfect Knowledge of Divine Self-Realization.
We will lose everything at death just the same. We can learn to let it all go while awake, too, He said. In some sense, Bhagavan said, that is “spiritual life.” He told us constantly to surrender it all and we would find that “there is no harm in it.”
You have a lifetime of memories. There is a potential that does extend into the Universal Psyche. After My Divine Re-Awakening in the Vedanta Temple, I began to meditate others, and there was no more content in Me. It became an awakening to a Universal Field. This has become more and more profoundly extended until there is an unlimited extension covering everything with horrific contents. The sphere is unlimited. There are many levels to the mind. How much of it is any individual reflecting? On the other hand, there is no mind. Consciousness does not think, it has no body-mind. You presume already that you are the body-mind, a person. You reflect that in meditation, the ego-based beginner’s mode.
But, until then, a thought comes up, and immediately you think you thought it. And you do not even inspect who this “you” who thought it is. It is just a tacit presumption.{53}
The daily retreat schedule eventually settled into a daily transmission sitting with Bhagavan and three meditations (between sixty to ninety minutes each) every day. Through this feast of reception of Bhagavan’s presence, I became highly sensitized to the ego—the primal contraction that is the assumption of identity—and it was still devastating.
I observed how the ego is usually only acting out two things – “poor unhappy me” or “fantastic great me.”
lost all motivation to do the normal things I previously did for distraction. I could not animate my superficial social face anymore. I had far less interest in ordinary life than before. Though I was not moved to become a hermit, nevertheless, a deeper intuition had awakened in me. I did not ever want to lose this equanimity.
spite of being born into wealth and having many contented periods in my life, my dissatisfaction and all my failed searches for the Truth had left me empty and disillusioned as I entered middle age.
As Adi Da has written “Life can be transcended, or it can be repeated, but it cannot be fulfilled.”
Make no mistake—the true spiritual life with the true guru is the greatest grace. To transcend limitations gains one an unfathomable freedom, even in the midst of the hard parts.
so that I might learn the ecstasy of surrender to the Divine Being, the One beyond birth and death.
Although I may never in this lifetime as Antonia Vidor surrender the ego to the point of permanent enlightenment, the realities of old age and the prospect of death have lost their sting for me. I accept my inevitable death with contentment. How great is the threat of losing the life, losing the mind, losing all relations, when one has a daily practice of drowning in the mindless ecstasy of Divine Love and knowing its eternal presence?
The waves of bliss, the kriyas, and the thick, bright energy were all evident in the Dome Temple on Kauai, three thousand miles away from Adi Da Samrajashram.