This kind of direct and instantaneous recognition of Adi Da as Spiritual Realizer would be repeated in a somewhat different way by members of the Fijian culture many years later, when Adi Da established a Sapta Na Sannyasin Hermitage on the Fijian island of Naitauba. The Fijian residents on Naitauba described how they immediately felt Adi Da's "mana" (Spiritual power) and related to Him accordingly, with the respect and reverence due to a great Spiritual being. They even gave Him a title, Dau Loloma ("The Adept of Love"), as a way of formally acknowledging their recognition of Him. Adi Da once mentioned that, in principle, a single sighting of the Spiritual Realizer should "motivate a lifetime of practice". He shouldn't have to write a single book of instructions. What to do would be obvious to anyone who had the spiritual sensitivity to recognize Him as Spiritual Realizer. He recently elaborated on this theme:
The "Teaching Years". What the Indians and the Fijians who immediately recognized Adi Da as a Spiritual Realizer had in common was a non-Western cultural setting. People growing up in such a cultural setting were raised with a sensitivity to greater-than-material forces and beings. This was particularly true in India, where Spiritual Realizers had lived and been recognized and revered, and used as the primary means for Spiritual Realization, since time immemorial. In contrast, the Western devotees who came to Adi Da had no such cultural advantage — we generally have little or no spiritual sensitivity. Indeed, being raised in a fundamentally materialistic culture (despite a little religious belief here and there), we all had a serious cultural dis-advantage! We were far from being raised in a culture (like the traditional Hindu culture) that encourages one to be "disenchanted with the world" (a prerequisite for recognizing Him, as Adi Da writes above), or a culture that recommends one find a Spiritual Realizer for the purpose of Spiritual Enlightenment. We instead were steeped in a worldly culture that encourages us to embrace a life of materialistic self-fulfillment, and whose anti-authoritarian ("me" as the only authority) stance and adamant commitment to materialism makes devotion to a Spiritual Master — the longstanding traditional (and present-time) means for Spiritual liberation — a kind of taboo. For such people, it made sense to a Spiritual Master like Adi Da to first take them through considerations in which they freely experimented with all their obsessions — money, food, sex, even spiritual experiences — and by which He artfully led them to realize that none of these were Perfect, Eternal Happiness or Divine Enlightenment. This was the approach that the great Master, Swami Vivekenanda, had recommended many decades earlier, after living among Westerners and studying their liabilities:
It also bore some similarity to an approach used by the great Spiritual Master of the late ninetheenth and early twentieth centuries, Shirdi Sai Baba, which Adi Da often paraphrased as, "I give people what they want, until they want what I want to give them." [1] Thus, during His "Teaching Years", Adi Da used Crazy Wise means to reflect His devotees to themselves, and to help grow us out of being enchanted by the world and our obsessions with money, food, and emotional-sexual relationships.
The "Teaching Years" and the unique Life-Process associated with Adi Da's Divine Incarnation. Adi Da has always associated His Incarnation here not only with the Divine State He calls the "Bright", but with a unique Life-Process as well — His Divine Incarnation process — that has gone through recognizable stages and transformations. These stages correspond to changes in the manner in which His Divine Being is integrated with His mortal body-mind. We generally refer to the "Teaching Years" as that period beginning when Adi Da started teaching in Crazy Wise manner in 1973, and ending on January 11, 1986. On that day, a radical shift occurred in the nature of Adi Da's Incarnation. For a period, He lost bodily consciousness, and the body nearly died. But then He re-integrated with the body in a completely different manner, in which the body was no longer oriented toward functioning in the "Teaching" mode — the mode of placing attention on others and becoming them, in order to reflect them to themselves. Adi
Da's "Teaching" mode was only fully compatable with an early stage of His Divine
Incarnation. Indeed, even as early as 1974, He was already expressing this viewpoint,
when He gave the book Garbage and the Goddess the
subtitle, "The Last Miracles and Final Spiritual Instructions of Bubba Free John",
and spoke of relaxing His active Teaching Work and being "merely present" Spiritually
to communicate the Divine State to devotees. And several times during the period
between 1973 and 1986, He would describe various death-like experiences that would
coincide with yet a new configuration of Adi Da's integration with His body-mind.
Even after January 11, 1986, the Divine Incarnation process
continued to unfold, and on April 12, 2000, a further significant milestone in
that process was reached, in which He entered into what He describes as the final
("Divine
Translation") phase of His Incarnation here. The "Teaching Years" and the maturity of the gathering of devotees. Particularly after January 11, 1986, the continually evolving Divine Incarnation process made it increasingly difficult for Adi Da to enter the Teaching mode of intentionally reflecting devotees to themselves by giving them His attention. The process was instead coinciding with what Adi Da referred to as His "Divine Self-Emergence": the ability for His Divine State to be transparently communicated through His body, and for devotees' contemplation of His Divine State (via the means of His human form) to be the sufficient means for Perfect Divine Self-Realization. To put it another way: after January 11, 1986, His own process was making it increasingly easier for anyone to practice the ancient Walk-About Way: the way of wordless recognition of, and response to, Adi Da as Spiritual Realizer, without any necessary attention to devotees on His part. Even so, Adi Da's devotees in general "didn't get it", and continued to relate to Him in the same way they did during His "Teaching Years". Indeed, up until a few years before his death, Adi Da continued in His ordeal of taking a profoundly ordinary group of people and transforming them into a "culture of recognition"; with attention and energy free from the usual worldly preoccupations of money, food, and sex; and capable of practicing the ancient Walk-About Way. And for this purpose, until recently, He had been required to continue to work with individuals or small groups of devotees at times, in order to still do the work of reflecting them to themselves, so they could grow into the true practice. So even though Adi Da's "Teaching Years" are formally associated with the period from 1973 through January 11, 1986, you will still see more recent examples (on our site and in the literature of Adidam) of Adi Da's "Crazy Wisdom" or "Teaching" Work. Over time, these instances were increasingly less frequent, and increasingly less active or dramatic in form. In the last few years of His life, Adi Da continued to serve as a "reflector", by virtue of His State — but without any effort, or attention required on His Part:
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