Finding
Adi Da > Chris Tong > Part I
(Finding the Divine in Person) > Chapter 1
1. My Earliest Darshan
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| This is Part I, Chapter 1 of Chris Tong's book, Finding the Divine In Person and Waking Up From the Dream. | |
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 my mother just before she entered the convent (click image to enlarge) |
 Adi Da, age 17 |
Many years later, after I became Adi Da's devotee, I told my mother about Him. I showed her some of His books and showed her pictures of Him. She recognized Him immediately! She told me that, in her Autumn 1957 class, she had had a student named Franklin Jones, who stood out in her memory because, after class, He would always be down at the front of the classroom with a crowd of students gathered around Him.
Thirty-one years later (in 1988), Franklin — Adi Da — would give a talk ("One More Monkey") that drew upon this curious notion of "different kinds of infinities" that my mother had taught. And, as was His way, He turned it into a profound lesson about Spiritual Realization.[3]
Being surrounded by people spontaneously attracted to Him — like Krishna and the gopis — seems to have been an ongoing occurrence in Adi Da's life, even from early on. Here is another story, about Adi Da's time as a student at Stanford University, from John K.:
I was told a story by a retired professor from Stanford about his experiences with Franklin Jones (when Franklin was a graduate student at Stanford). This particular professor was an Indian-born Hindu who taught philosophy at Stanford. He did not have Franklin as a student of his, but he remembered him.
It was an interesting conversation. The professor was skeptical of gurus. As he put it, he had seen too many "abuses" in India. So, he was dubious about where Franklin Jones "wound up."
But he did recall Franklin was very charismatic and captivating and would often "hold Court" in the cafeteria where many students would gather around him listening, entranced.
This professor attributed all of this to "Franklin's charismatic personality and notable intelligence".
 my mother and me (click to enlarge) |
So, even though I cannot remember it directly (and even though I will never know the full nature of its impact on my life and its course), any story about my relationship with my Guru must begin with the earliest time He Graced me with His Darshan! He would have been 17 at the start of that Autumn 1957 class, turning 18 on November 3.[4] [5]
* * *
This story unfolds largely in chronological order. But my mother does appear again once more (in 2009), and so I am going to jump ahead in time, and tell that story right here, because it flows directly from what I've just described about her.
After having been in the convent
for a decade, searching for God, my mother had the great Grace
of teaching an entire course with Adi Da — the Very Divine,
incarnate in human form — in her classroom. She would again
receive Adi Da's Blessing through me and my wife, Mary, as His
devotees — something Adi Da has described is the case for the
families and friends of all His devotees. During my mother's life,
even though she had shown me she had a spiritual sensitivity to Adi Da, her strong
belief in Catholicism kept her from acknowledging Him as the Divine.
But when my mother passed in 2009, Mary (who helped spiritually link my mother with Adi Da, after my mother's death) had a clear, unshakeable vision, and the most extraordinary meditation she had ever had, in Plain Talk Chapel at the Mountain Of Attention. Even though the actual meditation hall was dark, in her vision (which lasted an hour and a half, and prevented her from moving), the room was filled with brilliant White Light. The White Light was shining from Avatar Adi Da. She saw my mother kneeling at Adi Da's feet, smiling, extraordinarily happy, radiant in His Light. My mother was looking up at Him in rapture, her arms outstretched toward Him, the recognition of the Divine shining in her face, her lifelong search for God finally coming to rest in Him.
The Way of Adidam is a Way of relationship, a Way of mutual gift-giving. My mother had given Adi Da a gift, in the form of some of humankind's greatest concepts of infinity. . . And, in the end, she gave Him her heart as well. Adi Da, in turn, gave her the Gift of Infinity Itself. In the Infinity of the Heart, what goes around comes around!
FOOTNOTES
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[1]
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More about my father can be found in this Wikipedia article. |
[2] |
"The study of different kinds of infinities" may sound like a very strange notion (it is!), but here's a way to get a quick feeling for it. We know that if we start counting: 1, 2, 3, and so on,
we will never come to an end. For example, whatever large
number you give me (say, 3 gazillion), I can always give
you one more: that number plus one (3 gazillion and one).
The title of Adi Da's talk, One More Monkey [3],
is a riff on this mathematical argument that there are an
infinite number of counting numbers because there is always
"one more". So we can say the number of counting numbers
is "infinite". Mathematicians give the special name "aleph
null" (the mathematical symbol is So if you ask, "how many are there?" of anything, even if there are an infinite number of "them" (whatever they are), if you can count all of them (even though it would take forever), then the "number" of them (from a mathematical perspective) is aleph null. But here's where it gets interesting. . . Most people would presume that you can take any group of things, even an infinite group, start counting them, and eventually you'd hit every single thing in that group (even though it might take a gazillion years before you reached and counted some particular item in that group). But, amazingly, mathematicians have shown that there are groups of things that are infinite in a very strange way: they aren't countable. You can't come up with a scheme for counting all the items in the group, no matter how clever you are, even if you were given an unlimited amount of time to do the counting. No matter what approach you have for counting the items in the group, it will definitely miss counting some items in the group, no matter how long you're given to do the counting. Mathematicians say that such a group of things is not only infinite, but uncountably infinite, in size — in other words (strangely enough), a larger infinity than the counting numbers! What's an example of an uncountably infinite group of things? The points on the number line between 0 and 1. No matter what counting scheme you can come up with, I can construct an irrational number with an infinite number of digits in it — something like ∏ (pi) — that your counting scheme will miss, no matter how long it is given to count. As you might guess, once mathematicians "opened the door"
and allowed in two different kinds of infinity (countable
and uncountable), with one bigger than the other, then there
wasn't anything stopping them from going the next step,
and conceiving of a much larger variety of infinities. That's
exactly what the study of transfinite numbers is all about,
and aleph null is only the smallest transfinite number.
There's "aleph one" ( And how many transfinite numbers — how many different kinds of infinities — are there altogether? A transfinite number, of course! |
| [3] |
Adi Da's talk, One More Monkey, can be heard here. Here is an excerpt:
"Wag" means "a comical or humorous person; a joker; a witty person". |
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| [4] | Knowing Beloved
Adi Da's extraordinary love for children and babies, I
have a fantasy that He might have held me in His arms on one
of the occasions I was in my mother's classroom with Him.
. . But I'll never know for sure. (My mother had already passed
by the time this occurred to me, so I was not able to ask
her.) In any case, I am profoundly grateful to have been in
the room with Him as a baby — an incredibly auspicious beginning
for a human life! |
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| [5] |
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)
to the infinity that is the total number of counting numbers.
),
"aleph two", etc. 
