Readings from Adi Da's Teaching

Avatar Adi Da Samraj at work writing in Picture Perfect Art Studio, 2006

A number of extended excerpts from Adi Da's Teaching appear throughout this site. We've collected them here in one spot for your convenience.

The Way of Dissolution and The Way of Experience: Excerpt — This talk was published in Garbage and the Goddess. "That is why I was always saying, 'This experiential life you are getting into is not it.' I had to repeat this admonition again and again, while at the same time I continued to generate uncommon experiences in those who came to me."

—August 11, 1974

Swami Chinmayananda

The Way That I Teach — Adi Da wrote this brief essay in response to a traditional teacher, Swami Chinmayananda, who questioned His method of "Crazy Wisdom" Teaching. "What I Do is not the way that I Am, but the way that I Teach. What I Speak is not a reflection of Me, but of you."

—1975

My Purity — At Muliwai House, Oahu, Hawaii, Adi Da wrote the essay, “My Purity” (which is later published in The Enlightenment of the Whole Body), describing the Sacrificial Ordeal of His work with devotees. "My way with devotees has always been dramatic, an adventure of friendship and excess. I have always driven them to lessons and changes. But they have also always failed and fallen back. Therefore, now they will be given the Grace of time, to mature in one another's company, and to transcend the destiny of the usual man."

—June 14, 1978

My Work Is Necessary, but It Must Also Fail — This essay was also published in The Enlightenment of the Whole Body. "It is a fruitless enterprise — if we consider its results in terms of the true and perfect Awakening of great numbers of people and the Divine Transformation of human society as a whole."

—June, 1978

The Future of My Work — A talk given on November 1, 1981. "My Work in the past . . . was a process of awakening people through intelligent consideration of their self-contraction and the presumptions based upon it. All of that involved an intimate, personal, theatrical relationship with people. And it is precisely that intimacy, that personal Work with people, that I have now abandoned."

—November 1, 1981

The Divine Life and Work of the Spiritual Master: Excerpt — This talk was published in The Bodily Location Of Happiness. "Whether my birth and my association with people can represent the force of some great age, a great transformation of the world, is to be seen. My work can be relatively modest and local, as Shirdi Sai Baba's work was in his lifetime, or my work can be associated with a global transformation. It will depend on recognition, surrender, and acceptance of a lawful order of existence by many, many, many people."

—January, 1982

I Am More Like You Than You Are — Adi Da's early Teaching was a process of His Submission to devotees through His Divine Ability to identify with our human limitations and sufferings. Adi Da gave this talk during that Teaching period. "I meditate on My devotees and I become them. I become exactly them. I take on all the limitations that they are. I become just like them. I become more like them than they are. I become exaggeratedly what they are. I become what they are altogether, while they remain only what they can express in the midst of their limitations, their self-consciousness. I become them completely. Thus, that which I 'Consider' with you is the very thing that I have actually become by meditation on you. I Submit to devotees as to the Divine Reality, just as they turn to Me in the same fashion. This is the unique form of My Teaching Work."

—September 15, 1982

Sadhana Hurts — ADI DA: "Suffer the heat of this sadhana every day. That is it. Not the heat you think you are suffering because you are failing, but the heat of succeeding, the heat of doing it. That is it! God is not a tit or a genital hanging down out of the top of the universe. God is that which is Realized only through transcending your egoic self."

—December 19, 1987

An Open Letter To All Who Would Find Heart-Breaking Freedom — Twenty-four years after He wrote His response to Swami Chinmayananda, Avatar Adi Da spoke in summary terms about that entire period of "consideration" and about His Teaching-Work. "My 'Consideration' of emotional-sexual life was a profoundly important and absolutely necessary part of My Teaching-Work. In the history of the Great Tradition, there has never been the freedom — or the understanding — to enter into the full 'consideration' of emotional-sexual life and bring that 'consideration' to completion. The entire Intention of My Work with My devotees has been to allow people to live in Freedom."

—1999

Walk-About To Me: My Self-Submission-Time Has Come To An End — Adi Da's Final Statement contrasting His Teaching Work (in which He submitted Himself to His devotees) and His Blessing and Awakening Work (in which His devotees must "walk-about" to Him), and the profound (and profoundly sobering) reasons underlying why His Teaching Work could not succeed. It appears in Part 22 of The Aletheon. "It has now been conclusively demonstrated to Me that My 'Method' of Self-Submission did not work, and cannot work, and would not ever work. The fact that My 'Method' of Self-Submission did not work is a profound matter, with the greatest implications — not only in terms of My Own Divine Avataric Work, but for humankind altogether.

—September 7, 2007

The Wound Of Love — From The Dawn Horse Testament. "Love Does Not Fail For You When You Are Rejected or Betrayed or Apparently Not Loved. Love Fails For You When You Reject, Betray, and Do Not Love. . . . Therefore, The Most Direct Way To Know Love In every moment Is To Be Love In every moment. In The Way Of Adidam, My Devotee Is Founded In This Capability By Virtue Of his or her Constant Communion With Me (and, Thus and Thereby, With The Divine Person, Reality, or Truth)."

Who Is Truth? — From Scientific Proof of the Existence of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House! "Who or what is Truth? Truth is not a person, or a thing, or a knowable object, or a thought. Truth is a Process."

A Call to Freedom of Choice in Religion and in Sexual Practice — This essay appears in Adi Da's annotated bibliographical work, The Basket Of Tolerance. "Truly, in a democratic society, every human individual must be free to choose his or her own form and manner of religious (or, otherwise, philosophical) commitment and practice. And, because sexual practice is necessarily based on the particular views associated with one's own personal, and (possibly) religious, or, otherwise, philosophical understanding, every human individual within a democratic society must be free to choose his or her own form and manner of sexual practice and sexual commitment."

Right sexual self-Discipline Is Yogic, ego-Transcending, and Happy — This essay appears in Adi Da's annotated bibliographical work, The Basket Of Tolerance. "Rather, the progressive transcending of sexually related ego-bondage is a matter of self-understanding (and intelligent, voluntary relinquishment of the ego-based sex-mind), and also of self-disciplining control and conservation of sexual energy, and consistent, intentional conversion (or re-direction, or inward and upward reversal) of the (otherwise downward and outward) flow of sexual energy. This process of self-understanding, relinquishment, control, conservation, and conversion requires (and, more and more, magnifies) a profound and positive (and, altogether, right) change in one's participation in (or relationship to) the sexual (and emotional-sexual) process."

On the Love of Children and the Essence of Spiritual practice — These three talks were previously published in the Conscious Childrearing Series, Booklet One: Love, Wisdom, and Happiness in the First Three Stages of Life (1995). "Children are wonderful. I am in Love with children. A very strange thing that only parents know is that you actually fall in love with your children. You do not merely love your children. You fall in love with them. You are deeply in love with your children, and you cannot imagine ever being separated from them. Your relationship to your children teaches you about love."

Death Is a Freedom-Ritual of Self-Sacrifice — This passage is an excerpt from Avatar Adi Da's literary masterwork, The Mummery Book. It also appears in the Epilogue of Adi Da's book, Easy Death (and is republished from the Easy Death website). The protagonist of The Mummery Book, Raymond Darling, speaks his final resolution of the problem of life and death, which he has uncovered and investigated throughout his story.

What Is More Than WonderfulIs Not Threatened — This passage is an excerpt from Adi Da's book, Easy Death.

Note: Throughout His "Source-Texts" — the books that summarize His Teaching — and particularly in His primary Source Text, The Dawn Horse Testament, Adi Da frequently capitalizes words that would not ordinarily be capitalized in English. For more about the very specific significance of this capitalization scheme, click here.