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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
— 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.
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.
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
photo courtesy Hal Okun
(click to enlarge)
