Exegesis as Means for Right Interpretation of
Adi Da's Communications Over Time

This is Part 3 of Chris Tong's fourteen-part article, A Framework for Exegesis: Understanding Adi Da's Word in Context.

Context is everything when it comes to understanding what someone means. This may be even more true than usual when the communications are of a spiritual nature. An old story from the Buddhist tradition nicely illustrates the point.

Gautama Buddha's cousin, Ananda, sat near the Buddha every day, so he was privy to all the conversations the Buddha had with devotees. One day, a man came in and asked Gautama, "Is there a God?" The Buddha replied, "Absolutely not!" The next day, another man came in and asked Gautama, "Is there a God?" "Absolutely!" said the Buddha. The following day, while Buddha and Ananda were meditating, a man approached the Buddha and asked "Does God exist?" This time the Buddha didn't give a direct answer, but instead invited the man to join them in meditation.

As you might imagine, all this was rather confusing for Ananda! So Ananda asked Gautama to explain his seemingly contradictory replies. Gautama smiled and explained it to Ananda. "When the first man came, I could see instantly that he was a believer, trapped in his belief in God, and that the best thing to serve his practice would be to shake him out of that belief, so I told him there was no God. The second man was clearly a lifelong skeptic — the best way I could shake him out of his limited pattern of chronic doubt was to tell him there absolutely is a God. Because the third man didn't have a fixed opinion, I asked him to meditate with us, so he could directly experience the truth. Ananda, I always respond in a way that best serves the person in front of me."

So context is everything, when it comes to really understanding what someone is saying! Perhaps especially if the "someone" is a great Spiritual Realizer whose purpose is the most challenging one possible: the liberation of all beings. From the beginning of Adi Da's Work with devotees and the world to the end of His human lifetime, the nature of His work with devotees — and therefore, the context of His talks and writings — was constantly shifting and evolving. Without the kind of framework we are presenting here (that pins down the specific context for a talk or essay), it is all too easy to mis-interpret Adi Da's communications.

Because Adi Da's Teaching is so vast, and has taken so many forms over the 38 years (1970-2008) in which He created it, and excerpts from all the different periods of His Communication are readily accessible on the Web, it is not too hard to find passages that may appear — at least on the surface — to say different things. (Our section, Differences in Adi Da's Teaching Over Time, is all about that.) This can be confusing, especially for someone just beginning to explore Adi Da's Teaching; and so many of the questions we receive from people interested in Adi Da and the Way of Adidam are about just such differences.

In addition to the reality that all these different versions of Adi Da's Teaching are easily accessible via the Web, it is also the case that people reading all these different versions will tend to mis-interpret them in specific ways, largely because of the preferences of the ego, and because of the Western cultural programming most of us have received.

For example, one natural tendency of the ego is to prefer Adi Da's earlier forms of communication over the later ones where He communicated His Uniqueness as Divine Incarnation and seventh stage Adept. In the original The Knee Of Listening, Adi Da used the voice of "Franklin Jones", a spiritual seeker apparently like us. We, as egos, loved that! We tended to read it and — yes — be inspired, but often in the wrong way: not inspired to come to the Realizer Who wrote the book and Who alone could grant us the Revelation of His Realization and the means (Himself) by which we could Realize the same, but mis-inspired to think the book was implying we could go off and Realize "on our own" what "Franklin Jones" had Realized (through somehow "doing" on one's own the "radical" self-understanding described in the book) . . . in other words, using The Knee Of Listening like a dog with a bone — which was not at all Adi Da's intention.

Just so, we egos loved the earlier talks and essays where Adi Da didn't emphasize His Own Uniqueness or His Divinity (these were too confrontational; they offend the egalitarian and anti-authoritarian viewpoints we Westerners have been raised on), and where we could imagine (mistakenly) that He is just one of many "Gurus", "Spiritual Masters", or "Men of Understanding", as we might (mistakenly) conclude (because of the manner in which they were spoken or written), listening to or reading many of His talks and essays of that earlier time.

For example, in the original version of The Knee Of Listening, Adi Da opens the Epilogue with this paragraph:

Obviously Adi Da was writing as one such "man of understanding". But His choice of words — including His choice of using the third person voice ("He"), rather than the first person ("I") — left it ambiguous as to just how many "men of understanding" fitting His description there could be. However, by the time He released the 2004 version of The Knee Of Listening, He had completely rewritten the opening paragraph to make His Uniqueness absolutely unambiguous:

He also changed the voice to "first person" ("I"). Both of these changes reflected His shift from "Teaching Work" to "Revelation Work". The "I" speaking as the One and Only Divine is potentially Revelatory for the reader, who can be Graced with a moment of recognition of just Who is speaking these words, through a Revelation of the Divine State of that One.

All this is implicit in the earlier versions of the book, but not obvious:

In a similar manner, Adi Da changed title of the book, What To Remember To Be Happy, to What, Where, When, How, Why, and Who To Remember To Be Happy in the 1990's, with the word, "Who", underlined.

All these changes reflect Adi Da's shift from "Teaching Work" to "Revelation Work". Because He Himself is the Revelation of Adidam (Transmitting the Divine State to all beings in every moment), the shift corresponded to a focus on Him. Because it is a Person being Revealed — the Divine Person — a reader whose heart is open can respond with heart-recognition far more powerfully and easily to the Divine "Me" in Adi Da's Words, than if Adi Da only tangentially or indirectly referred to the One being Revealed (as was the case in His earlier writings, book titles, etc.). Compare, for example,

which is information-oriented, with:

which is Revelation-oriented.

Without this understanding, however, of the Revelatory purpose behind Adi Da's change in His manner of writing, an ego — on the basis of the (largely unconscious) egoic preferences we described earlier — could compare Adi Da's earlier writings, talks, book titles, etc. with His latter ones, and concoct a false narrative about Adi Da and the history of His work and teaching, such as: "Adi Da was really hip, and a great Master early on . . . my kind of Guru! Gave me lots of great info . . . but then He 'lost it' in His later years, and got all self-promotional and megalomaniacal" — mis-interpreting the real reasons for the shifts in Adi Da's style and manner of communication.

Because such false narratives do exist, and are circulating around the Web and elsewhere, one purpose for writing this article is to provide the actual reasons for the shifts in Adi Da's manner of communicating, which make a whole lot of sense once you understand them, but are completely different from the false narratives out there. Adi Da's new focus on the Divine Me in His Word was entirely for the purpose of Revelation and liberation, and not at all for egoic self-promotion.

The contextualization framework provided here is also useful in understanding different versions of the same talk or essay over time. Typically, Adi Da would re-write some of His most important essays several times over the decades, particularly taking into account dimensions (1) and (2) of the 7-dimension framework we will be presenting in the next section: the essay would be updated to reflect the further developments in His seventh-stage process and in His Own understanding and clarification of His role and purpose here.

One approach to avoiding misinterpretation and misuse is to focus people on Adi Da's fully developed, final communications in every area of His Teaching. Adi Da Himself recommended this, and it is the approach taken by Adidam's Editorial Department. For example, when Adi Da looked at one web page I had put together for Him on the official Adidam website back in 1996, He commented:

Ideally the most refined and final form of Adi Da's Teaching would be the one everyone would be exposed to first; that certainly would be the simplest approach, for their own introduction to Adi Da's Teaching, even though all egos will still try to re-interpret even that:

However, in reality, all manner of excerpts from His earlier Word are out on the Web, and — owing to the nature of the Web — are not likely to disappear. So, practically speaking, we need to provide a framework for contextualization, so readers who do run across these earlier talks and essays can better understand their context, and so that confusion can be minimized.

But there is a second reason behind creating such a framework, that is not merely about dealing with a difficulty but rather, expressing a full appreciation. It would be inaccurate to write about the changes and evolution in Adi Da's communications and manner of communicating in any way that might suggest there was some "problem" with the earlier versions of Adi Da's Teaching, as though He were not the Divine Person incarnating here from the moment of His birth on. Everything He did — every word He wrote, every version of a talk or essay He crafted — should be treated with the sacred respect it deserves, and carefully contextualized for all future generations.

Those earlier forms of the Teaching might well have sufficed, if we had been more capable as spiritual practitioners. Indeed, that it was a creative and ongoing struggle for Adi Da to evolve the Teaching — rather than the Teaching just appearing in final form right at the beginning like Venus on the half shell at birth — is an important part of the full sacrifice involved in His Divine Incarnation.

Adi Da has instructed us to tell the full story (or "Divine Avataric Leela") of His human lifetime, which includes every moment of His life, from birth to death, and ultimately includes every word He said, appropriately contextualized:

A timeline and summary of the key events in Adi Da's life (the kind Adidam currently provides in its introductory books) is only the barest beginning of this telling (and right understanding) of Adi Da's Divine Avataric Leela. For people to really feel, and thereby most fully appreciate, the story that was His entire lifetime, the best and fullest way is to use every resource we have available to "drop" people into each moment of His life: His written word in that moment, videos and audios of Him in that moment, His Own later descriptions and understanding of that moment, His Own revisions of talks or essays that He originally spoke or wrote in that moment, stories told about that moment by the devotees who were there, articles written by devotees about that moment, etc. — but with the moment, and everything used to bring it to life again, appropriately contextualized . . . so we never lose the forest for the trees, always knowing where the story is going, even while immersed in the middle of it.

All the world's great spiritual traditions celebrate their Founders in just such a very complete manner, with scriptural scholars poring over, and providing exegesis for, their Founder's every word, action, and nuance. The devotees of the Divine Heart-Master, Adi Da, owe Him no less full an appreciation of His entire human lifetime and of the extraordinarily creative ordeal through which He evolved His Teaching and the Way of Adidam.

Indeed it is hard to appreciate that ordeal — the sacrificial nature of Adi Da's human lifetime — without actually experiencing Him directly during all the moments of His life. To have a fuller, in-depth awareness of His life story is to become aware that Real God is neither omniscient nor omnipotent (as some God-Ideas would suggest), and that the Way of Adidam was not created in a single moment, but through a profound, lifelong sacrifice on the part of the human incarnation of Real God. For this reason, Adi Da subtitled His autobiography (The Knee Of Listening): "The Divine Ordeal of the Avataric Incarnation of Conscious Light".

Having incarnated, Real God-Man had to go through profoundly sacrificial processes of "learning Man", learning His Own function (in a unique ordeal of the Divine Heart-Master), literally dying and re-integrating with the body many times over, etc. The sacrificial nature of this ordeal is not fully apparent unless one is "dropped" into the midst of the ordeal itself and one actually is able to be with the human God-Man — talking, writing, acting, interacting with devotees — sacrificing Himself in the midst of that ordeal for the sake of the great task of manifesting a Way capable of liberating all beings.

There are aspects of that sacrifice we probably will never see directly, in His talks or in videos of Him . . . like the way Adi Da would gather with His devotees for hours, and how His devotees would leave the occasion utterly "Bright"-ened by Him, while He would go home and His body would be sick for hours, having served as a kind of Divine "vacuum cleaner" for His devotees' karmas (and only those very few devotees who served Him intimately would have the direct awareness of what Adi Da suffered). But at least by seeing, hearing, and reading what is available for us to see, hear, and read, we will get some sense of what that extraordinary sacrifice — that "Intentional Entanglement" — looked like in concrete terms. And, because such glimpses will be rightly contextualized, we simply will no longer be able to look at Him as an ordinary man being friendly and social with devotees — being "Bubba" — without also understanding the profound sacrifice involved for Him. For example, there are videos of Adi Da talking with devotees in 2004 and 2005 — smiling and laughing with them, long after His body-mind was truly capable of doing that with impunity; one can see in the background, Ruchiradama Quandra Sukhapur, not smiling in the same way, much more fully aware than most of us were of the profound sacrifice Adi Da was making — the profound price He was paying — by sitting there talking with His devotees.

All of this is an essential part of the full telling of Adi Da's Divine Avataric Leela.