Everything Was Love-Bliss Radiance

John Metcalfe

John Metcalfe is a New Zealand devotee who served Adi Da as His dentist from 1991 until Adi Da's Divine Mahasamadhi in 2008. He visits Adi Da Samrajashram Sanctuary in Fiji two to three times a year to be on retreat and to serve resident devotees and Fijians with dental work.
John Metcalfe

Once when I was about to serve Adi Da with dental work, I became very involved in self-doubt, feeling that I was not up to the job. At a certain level, I was also angry at having to concentrate on details of dentistry (instead of just contemplating Adi Da).

In other words, I was just contracting into my "separate self". At the same time, I realised there was no way that I could extricate myself from suffering the presumption of a separate self.

When Adi Da entered the room and sat in the dentist chair, His Radiance of Love-Bliss and "no separation" filled the room, and suddenly it was easy for me to prostrate before Him and release all this suffering at His Feet.

On sitting up again, everything was Love-Bliss Radiance, and there was nothing to do, just be that. It was a timeless moment.

Then after a while, Adi Da raised one of His eyebrows in a querying manner, and the feeling arose in me that there was something that needed to be done, but I couldn't remember what it was. . .

Finally, I realised I was there to do some dentistry!

So, still full of this Love-Bliss non-separateness, I got up, adjusted the chair, and carried out the dental procedure with care and attention to detail in the realm of body-minds, while still pervaded by this Love-Bliss-Fullness of non-separateness that is Consciousness Itself.

* * *

Time and time again in serving Adi Da as His dentist, I found that, when I was close to His Bodily Form, the sense of being a separate self dissolves in His Ecstatic Bliss. . . and yet there is still the ability to function as a body-mind. The two things happen simultaneously, and that is part of the Mystery.

Amazingly, the feeling-recognition of Bhagavan Adi Da — miles away from His Physical Body, as well as after the death of His Physical Body — is still exactly the same as what I have described feeling while serving very close to His Physical Body. This sense of being dissolved in Bhagavan's Love-Bliss is His Eternal Gift of reminding us that we too are Pure Radiance, Prior to the presumption of "separate self", and yet still in the world with "open eyes".