Money in Adidam



Adi Da Samraj directing the construction
of the first Adidam bookstore
(Los Angeles, 1972)



This section is organized as follows:
    1. The Adidam Prosperity Puja

1. Introduction to Money in Adidam


Never Become Weak In Managing The practical Affairs That Are Necessary To Secure The “Radical” Reality-Way Of The Heart In Perpetuity. Always Undermine the conventional “point of view” that, If one Is “Spiritual”, one (Inherently) Has Nothing To Do With money. Always Allow A Positive Understanding Of money To Be Openly Communicated Throughout The Global Cooperative Cultural Gathering Of My Devotees. Therefore, Always Create Arrangements That Support Your individual and Collective Responsibility For money. Do This Maximally and Collectively. Such Responsibility Is A Real and Most Serious Dimension Of Right Practice Of The Only-By-Me Revealed and Given “Radical” Reality-Way Of The Heart. Understand Your Responsibility.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
Sutra 31, The Dawn Horse Testament


Money in Adidam serves two purposes: the "lower" and obvious purpose of paying the bills for everything that requires money: from the buildings to the book publications — read Chris Tong's article; and higher esoteric purposes based on spiritual principles — read James Steinberg's article.

 

Money and "Spiritual Legitimacy" — Chris Tong's introductory article addresses a couple of common, but mistaken notions about money and spirituality: someone who is "spiritual" should have nothing to do with money (making it, using it, etc.); and any spiritual or religious organization that makes money a requirement rather than a "pass the basket" voluntary matter could not possibly be "spiritually legitimate".


Chris Tong
   

James Steinberg

Money and the Guru — James Steinberg presents the spiritual principles underlying the giving of money, service, and energy to the Guru. His presentation includes traditional stories, stories about Avatar Adi Da, and Adi Da’s basic Instruction. The primary principle is the mutual relationship between the Guru and devotee: the Guru is giving His devotee the gift of His Spiritual Transmission — the means for the devotee's liberation — 24 hours a day. Gifts of money, service, and energy are part of what the devotee gives back for the relationship to be spiritually lawful.

 

2. Stories About Money in Adidam


2.1. The Right Disposition Toward Money


My Work with you in the domain of money, as with food and sex, is about unlocking the cramp in what I call "the vital" (centered in the solar plexus) — so that the life-force can enter the body and flow unobstructed.

When there is a grasping, fearful attitude toward money, equating money with personal survival, then the psycho-physical nature of money as energy is blocked. Thus, whether money is available or not is, ultimately, a Yogic matter.

The process beyond the first three stages of life has to do with participation in the dimension of energy. Money is energy. Money will manifest only through a shift in the level of energy in your individual and collective lives.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
December 3, 2000


As My devotee, you should live in a community where you share all the goods and energies of life. Everyone should live as well as possible, but the concepts of sharing and cooperation are basic to equalizing the trends toward egoic accumulation as well as basic to releasing you from relational bondage. . .

As My devotee, your fundamental activity is not to accumulate but to eliminate, to release, to stand free. . .

The ego is the principle of accumulation, the self-bound knot, the "castle in the air", the superior, self-protected adversary of all other beings. Therefore, understand yourself Spiritually, and in real human terms begin to practice a personal discipline that characterizes true renunciation, or commitment to Happiness rather than emptiness, and on that basis, become capable of a different way of living with other people whereby many great and beautiful things can be created and enjoyed by everyone.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
"The Taboo Against Owning and Knowing Too Much"


 
Money and True Security — Three stories by one of Adi Da's patrons, Terry Cafferty. In the first story, Terry learns a lesson about letting go of his tight grip on money as his source of security. In the next two stories, Terry's brushes with death (and the extraordinary Grace that saved him both times) would reveal the True Source of Humor, Security and Eternal Life.

Terry Cafferty
   
         
 
Charles Campbell

I Aready Knew I Had Won — Charles Campbell talks about how he came to Adi Da, and how he came to work in the Sacred Archives.
   


2.2. Being a Patron of Adidam

In 1983, an individual patron offered the island of Naitauba, Fiji, to Avatar Adi Da. Because of this magnificent gift, the entire Life and Work of Adi Da Samraj began to evolve in ways that were not possible before. Naitauba offered Avatar Adi Da a pristine, protected place to do His Spiritual Work and an opportunity to establish a unique Seat of His Divine Presence for all generations to come. (The soon-to-be-published book, The Eternal Stand, tells the extraordinary story of how, over the course of three decades, Adi Da transformed this two-by-three-mile island in the middle of the Fijian Koro Sea into the most Empowered Sacred Space and Hermitage Ashram on the planet.)

Gestures such as this from individuals of wealth and influence have been made to Spiritual Realizers throughout history. For example, Gautama Buddha had a major patron, a merchant called Sudatta, who was passionately moved to provide for Gautama and His monks and who called on others to respect and celebrate and accommodate the life and work of the great Spiritual Realizer living in their midst. Gautama greatly blessed Sudatta and the story of Sudatta's exemplary generosity is preserved to this day in the earliest annals of Buddhist history.

The Divine Work of Adi Da is so vast, and rich, and complex that the opportunities for specific forms of patronage are endless. This generation has the unique responsibility of ensuring the survival in perpetuity of Adi Da's Gift of Adidam, and for the preservation of His Work, in all its many dimensions, for all time.

To serve Avatar Adi Da's Divine Work in these ways through patronage, or through one's position of influence in the world, is to transform one's own life and destiny, and, potentially, the life and destiny of countless others, in a most auspicious and enduring way. To learn more about how you can help, click here.

 
Dennis Duff

Growth as a Patron — A story by Dennis Duff about commiting to being a patron and learning how to do that.

   


2.3. Creating Community Businesses


Create a stable practical and financial basis for the community of My devotees — for instance, by buying properties with others of My devotees so that you do not pay rent; and by creating community businesses to keep money within the community. If you fail to create such a stable foundation for this community, you undermine My Work.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj

Although the businesses that can be established as community businesses will depend on the resources in each [regional] community, you should work to create your own businesses so that My devotees may earn their living within the community of the Way of Adidam rather than working for conventional enterprises.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj

If you will do everything that you do cooperatively, you should dramatically reduce the costs of living, and you should be able to produce large amounts of income, not only through personal income-producing work but through all the collective enterprises of cooperative community.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj

You all have incredible potential and you don't even realize, everybody needs bread — why not make a bread business, then? Everybody needs clothes, vitamins — why don't you do Master Foody Moody? People get turned on with this and that. Why don't you make some business out of it? Why don't you do things together, pool your funds, get down to it, make a few billion. You act like you're independent of one another and keeping it up close. Then you get stuck in the technicalities, the legalities, the bureaucracy of your little bit of exchange and you reduce your income that way. You people could make immense funds just with twelve-hundred. Do your real mission and you get thousands upon thousands, and share the wealth with one another. So much you people could do. You're so separate and independent about it, you can't figure out how to do it.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, "The Absorptive Samadhi of Devotion to Me"
The "Brightening" Way Talk Series, December 29, 1995



 
Unimagined Success — Roger Briggs' story of living by the Guru's Instruction on money and community businesses, and living in the disposition of faith.

Roger Briggs
   


2.4. The Adidam Prosperity Puja

"Puja" means sacramental worship and invocation of the Divine in a bodily active manner (in contrast with, say, meditation). In an Adidam Prosperity Puja, participating devotees engage in a powerful, collective form of the Devotional Prayer of Changes and sacramental worship of Adi Da. It is a time when the participants invoke Adi Da's Divine, All-Accomplishing Power and specifically visualize abundance and growth and relinquish all presumed limitations to prosperity.


This is the secret of effective puja: to participate in the world as a psychic phenomenon, not as a something you hammer out with your left brain, hoping that something will happen as a result of your merely external, physical acts. You must awaken to the psychic plastic of the waking state and realize that through changes of attitude, through surrendering things in the Divine, you can make changes in experience and the world. You must have the same free and liberal attitude as when you are awake while dreaming. You know that the dream figures are hallucinations and that when you can freely change your mind or attitude, all of a sudden conditions change.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj


In devotional Communion with Me, you associate with, participate in, and draw upon My Own Virtue. That is the Secret of devotional Communion with Me.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
"I Will Be Incarnated Countlessly Through My Devotees", Ishta


Each year, a particularly potent form of the Prosperity Puja is offered at The Mountain Of Attention Sanctuary, with the entire worldwide community of devotees participating. (The sacred occasion is streamed live on the Web.) During the Puja, the name of each individual who participates is read and offered into the fire.

2017 Prosperity Puja at The Mountain Of Attention
2017 Prosperity Puja at The Mountain Of Attention
photo courtesy Hal Okun
(click to enlarge)

Here are just a few of the many stories from devotees who have participated in a Prosperity Puja, and who tell of what happened when they invoked Adi Da's Divine Power.

 
Handled!

Handled! — For one devotee from New Zealand, overcoming her own resistance to participating in the Prosperity Puja led to the Graceful overcoming of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and the fulfillment of her heart's desire to be with Adi Da at The Mountain Of Attention.

   
         
   
The Transformation of My Relationship to Money and Energy — A devotee describes her participation in the very first Prosperity Puja at The Mountain Of Attention in 1979, and how it completely transformed her.

The Transformation of
My Relationship to Money and Energy
   
         
 
Handled!

Showered with Challenging Blessings — Participating in a Prosperity Puja always links the devotee with Adi Da's Divine Blessing Power. At times, that Blessing can take challenging forms, and in this story, an Australian devotee describes how she learned to cooperate with the labor pains associated with a spiritual rebirth in her relationship to money and business.

   
         
   
Within 30 Days. . . — After being downsized out of a job the previous year, a devotee participated in her first Prosperity Puja. Within 30 days, her life was completely different.

Within 30 Days. . .
   
         
   
From "Dead-In-The-Water" to Alive, by Grace

From "Dead-In-The-Water" to Alive, By Grace — Charles Syrett tells the story of how his invoking Adi Da's Grace through the Devotional Prayer of Changes and participating in a Prosperity Puja resurrected a 'dead-in-the-water' business opportunity, the very morning after the Prosperity Puja took place.

   

I am looking to convert the course of money and energy and power in the "world" away from egoic purposes and make it flow like a river toward the Divine. This is My Work with the Divine Goddess, the Energy of Existence Who is "Husbanded" by Me and One with My Divine Being. I am Working to make this "Husbanding" real at every level of the conditional reality. This is what My Universal Blessing-Work is about—to bring into manifestation what I have already Accomplished in seed-form. A far greater force of "conductivity" and "Invocation"—beyond the presumed limits of the physical reality and the ordinary mind—must occur.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
December 3, 2000


2017 Prosperity Puja at The Mountain Of Attention
2017 Prosperity Puja at The Mountain Of Attention
photo courtesy Hal Okun
(click to enlarge)

Da


Quotations from and/or photographs of Avatar Adi Da Samraj used by permission of the copyright owner:
© Copyrighted materials used with the permission of The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as trustee for The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam. All rights reserved. None of these materials may be disseminated or otherwise used for any non-personal purpose without the prior agreement of the copyright owner. ADIDAM is a trademark of The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as Trustee for the Avataric Samrajya of Adidam.

Technical problems with our site? Let our webmaster know.