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 Crazy
Wisdom > The Way That I Teach
"The
Way That I Teach"
Adi Da's use of Crazy Wisdom took a very
specific form: He used it for the express purpose of reflecting devotees to
themselves. This was necessary because His devotees simply didn't have the
free energy and attention necessary to recognize and meditate on the Divine State
and Person that He was Transmitting. They were completely preoccupied with money,
food, and sex, but also relatively suppressed in their awareness and expression
of those preoccupations — their energy and attention was bound up in this complicated,
double-minded egoic patterning. On top of that, they felt themselves to be spiritual
seekers, and wanted to expand their range of experiencing in spiritual dimensions.
In order to reflect devotees to themselves (so they could understand and transcend
this patterning), Adi Da made use of an extraordinary capability (as the non-separate
incarnation of the Divine, in Whom all beings are arising, and Who was responsively
moved to serve those who came to Him for Instruction and Realization): He literally
became His devotees — taking on their state, acting out their unconscious
tendencies, etc. — to reflect them to themselves.
Over the years, Adi Da made a number of summary statements about His Work
with devotees in general (and His Teaching Work in particular), including the
key essays and talks below.
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The Way That
I Teach — Adi Da wrote this brief essay in response to a traditional teacher,
Swami Chinmayananda, who questioned His method of "Crazy Wisdom" Teaching. "What
I Do is not the way that I Am, but the way that I Teach. What I Speak is not a
reflection of Me, but of you."
—1975 |
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Swami Chinmayananda
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|  My
Purity — At Muliwai House, Oahu, Hawaii, Adi Da wrote the essay, “My Purity”
(which is later published in The
Enlightenment of the Whole Body), describing the Sacrificial Ordeal of
His work with devotees. "My way with devotees has always been dramatic, an
adventure of friendship and excess. I have always driven them to lessons and changes.
But they have also always failed and fallen back. Therefore, now they will be
given the Grace of time, to mature in one another's company, and to transcend
the destiny of the usual man."
—June 14,
1978
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|  The
Future of My Work — A talk given on November 1, 1981. "My Work in the
past . . . was a process of awakening people through intelligent consideration
of their self-contraction and the presumptions based upon it. All of that involved
an intimate, personal, theatrical relationship with people. And it is precisely
that intimacy, that personal Work with people, that I have now abandoned."
—November
1, 1981
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 The
Divine Life and Work of the Spiritual Master: Excerpt — This talk was published
in The
Bodily Location Of Happiness. "Whether my birth and my association
with people can represent the force of some great age, a great transformation
of the world, is to be seen. My work can be relatively modest and local, as Shirdi
Sai Baba's work was in his lifetime, or my work can be associated with a global
transformation. It will depend on recognition, surrender, and acceptance of a
lawful order of existence by many, many, many people."
—January,
1982 | | |
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|  I
Am More Like You Than You Are — Adi Da's early Teaching was a process of His
Submission to devotees through His Divine Ability to identify with our human limitations
and sufferings. Adi Da gave this talk during that Teaching period. "I meditate
on My devotees and I become them. I become exactly them. I take on all the limitations
that they are. I become just like them. I become more like them than they are.
I become exaggeratedly what they are. I become what they are altogether, while
they remain only what they can express in the midst of their limitations, their
self-consciousness. I become them completely. Thus, that which I 'Consider' with
you is the very thing that I have actually become by meditation on you. I Submit
to devotees as to the Divine Reality, just as they turn to Me in the same fashion.
This is the unique form of My Teaching Work."
—September
15, 1982
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 An
Open Letter To All Who Would Find Heart-Breaking Freedom — Twenty-four years
after He wrote His response to Swami Chinmayananda, Avatar Adi Da spoke in summary
terms about that entire period of "consideration" and about His Teaching-Work.
"My 'Consideration' of emotional-sexual life was a profoundly important and
absolutely necessary part of My Teaching-Work. In the history of the Great Tradition,
there has never been the freedom — or the understanding — to enter into the full
'consideration' of emotional-sexual life and bring that 'consideration' to completion.
The entire Intention of My Work with My devotees has been to allow people to live
in Freedom."
—1999 |
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|  Walk-About
To Me: My Self-Submission-Time Has Come To An End — Adi Da's Final Statement
contrasting His Teaching Work (in which He submitted Himself to His devotees)
and His Blessing and Awakening Work (in which His devotees must "walk-about"
to Him), and the profound (and profoundly sobering) reasons underlying why His
Teaching Work could not succeed. It appears in Part
22 of The
Aletheon. "It has now been conclusively demonstrated to Me
that My 'Method' of Self-Submission did not work, and cannot work, and would not
ever work. The fact that My 'Method' of Self-Submission did not work is a profound
matter, with the greatest implications — not only in terms of My Own Divine Avataric
Work, but for humankind altogether.
—September
7, 2007
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