Adi Da Up Close
Audio/Video Library

A video excerpt from an Avataric Discourse given by Avatar Adi Da on November 6, 2004, at Adi Da Samrajashram.

The complete Avataric Discourse (nearly four hours long) is available on the DVD, There Are No Historical Selves. In this Discourse, Adi Da elaborates His assertion that although we refer to others as "you" and ourselves as "I", we have never really experienced any such separate entities. Furthermore, the self-reference is a reference to a fiction, a convention from the society of egos.

ADI DA: You refer to yourself every time you say a sentence because that's how sentences are supposed to be constructed, and yet you have no experience of that "self" that you keep referring to. You don't experience it any more than you experience the room. You can experience "yourself", so-called, from the point of view of the moment or what could be called the "late time' of every perception and thought. It's the "late time" because it's after when it occurred. But it's called the present because it seems to be happening now.

Tags: Avataric Discourse   DVD  

Avatar Adi Da responding to questions from devotee Andrew Johnson in 1975. Adi Da humorously criticizes the abstract, intellectual questions Andrew is bringing to Him, that have nothing to do with Andrew. The kind of question from a devotee that would touch Adi Da's heart and draw out His response is one based on the devotee's deep need: he or she is at the edge of their practice, and is stuck, not knowing how to continuing growing, and in great need of the Guru's guidance.

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In this talk from 1975, Adi Da talks about the physical, subtle, and transcendental levels of Spiritual Realization.

This talk about cultism was given on December 16, 1979, three weeks after the Jonestown Massacre. Adi Da mentions how He has always criticized all forms of cultism, including "the cult of the spiritual master", which devotees have created around Him repeatedly. In the "cult of the spiritual master", members of the cult make Him the center of a club in which everyone feels good because they're members of the club and they've "found it", unlike the rest of the world. But devotees who turn Adidam into a cult fail to actually practice and Realize anything; they get sidetracked from actual practice by the "feel good" energy they create in each other's company. Adi Da is here not to be the center of a cult, but for us to Realize Him.

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"The Dreaded Gom-Boo, or the Imaginary Disease That Religion Seeks to Cure" was the primary talk given by Adi Da at Da Love-Ananda Mahal (in Kauai, Hawaii) during a period of His Work with devotees (September 9, 1982 - February 4, 1983) that focused on renunciation. Many of the talks and essays from this period were included in a book by the same name, The Dreaded Gom-Boo.

This audio begins with a testimonial from one of the devotees who participated in the "Dreaded Gom-Boo" gatherings with Adi Da. The actual talk begins at 1:25.

The focus of this talk is a startling and humorous insight: All religion seeks to cure us of an unreal disease, which Adi Da humorously calls the "Dreaded Gom-Boo". This disease is our constant presumption that we have somehow "fallen from Grace" and are in need of the salvatory "cure" of religious belief.

Adi Da uproots this religious conceit and illusion by confessing (based on His Own Realization) that we are always already present and alive in and as Divine Being. The "good news" of Adi Da's Way is that, in present Communion with the Divine (made available through Adi Da's Spiritual Transmission), we need not seek to be cured, but must only feel, observe, understand, and renounce the very activity of seeking itself, and thus be restored to our native Happiness and Freedom. This insightful, liberating message cuts through thousands of years of religious and mystical dogma and beliefs by revealing a radical spiritual way eminently suited to the needs of modern men and women.

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In this short video clip from 1988, Adi Da talks to His devotees about what is required, in any moment, to open the doorway from "here" to the Divine Domain. He describes how devotion to Him and His "Brightness" is the means for locating the "loka" (place) of His Spiritual Transmission and for growth in spiritual practice (ultimately, to the point of Divine Translation).

In this excerpt from an Avataric Discourse from October 19, 2004, on Adi Da Samrajashram, Adi Da talks about the Great Tradition. He describes The Basket of Tolerance as a tool for transcending religious provincialism and the limits of one's cultural upbringing. Through use of such a tool, one is relieved of one's "belief systems", but is also made increasingly aware of the Reality-based Way that truly liberates.

The complete Avataric Discourse is available on the DVD, Human History Is One Great Tradition. Subtitles in English, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Finnish, Polish, Czech, Chinese, Japanese, and Hebrew. Also available on CD.

Tags: Great Tradition   Avataric Discourse   DVD   CD  

Adi Da has identified three character types associated with human egoity: vital, peculiar, and solid. Because they represent primary obstructions to human and spiritual growth, He has given extensive wisdom on how to identify these strategies, and how to transcend them. Adi Da's teaching on these three types has appeared in The Dawn Horse Testament; No Remedy; and The Eating Gorilla Comes in Peace ("The Imbalancing Act").

In this video, Beezone editor Ed Reither talks with teacher Frank Marrero about Adi Da's teaching on these three character types.

Tags: character types  
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Adi Da communicates esoteric secrets about the nature of His Divine Incarnation, at The Mountain Of Attention Sanctuary in 1988.

A "human being" is comprised of a gross personality (a physical body) and a deeper personality (a subtle body), both arising in the Divine Consciousness.

In most human beings, when the physical body dies, the deeper personality reincarnates, associating itself with a new physical body.

In the extraordinarily rare case of a Divine Incarnation, the physical body of a great Spiritual Realizer dies, and the deeper personality is so profoundly submitted to the Divine that the Divine is able to incarnate through that deeper personality. Such an extraordinary vehicle was provided to Adi Da through Swami Vivekananda and Sri Ramakrishna, upon the death of Swami Vivekananda in 1902.

While all beings arise in the Divine, most people live completely unconscious of their Source, and even great Spiritual Realizers are aware of (and are lived by and as) the Divine only to a certain degree. In the rare case of a Divine Incarnation, the Divine is consciously animating the gross and deeper personalities of the human being, and progressively conforms the gross and deeper personalities to Itself completely, over the lifetime of these vehicles.

In the course of fully preparing His human Incarnation for its Divine Purpose of Awakening all beings, Adi Da needed to completely conform the "gross personality" (the physical vehicle) and completely transcend all remaining limitations in the deeper personality, to the point where "there's nothing left of the gross or the deeper personality but the ash".

In this excerpt from an Avataric Discourse given at The Mountain Of Attention in early 2006, Adi Da responds to a devotee's question about the difference between sixth stage and seventh stage non-dual Realization. He also distinguishes between the "imperfect" sixth stage practices in the Great Tradition, that involve the body-mind in a conditional activity of turning the faculties to Consciousness Itself; and the Perfect Practice of the Way of Adidam, which does not involve the body-mind at all, but involves a Self-Abiding in Consciousness Itself that is an Acausal Gift of the Divine.

Tags: Avataric Discourse  

Adi Da talks about how being in the Company of a Spiritual Realizer is the best possible use of one's life, but it doesn't guarantee Realizing the Master's State, because Realization depends on the practitioner as well.

[Note: The video ends a bit abruptly, in the middle of a sentence.]

Tags: Avataric Discourse  

In this 1973 talk, Adi Da Samraj responds to a question from a student about the tendency to either suppress, rise above, or indulge emotional states. He makes clear that "doing something else" - namely, the sadhana - is a different (and inherently right) alternative to all these other choices, in every moment.

Adi Da talking to devotees in New Zealand in 1988.

He responds to a devotee who is wanting to go beyond his "limitation on love". Adi Da makes the point that this is not possible merely via idealism and will. One's current limit on love is due to an as yet uninspected resistance to love. Only through self-understanding (and disciplines that serve self-understanding) can one transcend this limit.

An hour-long interview with Meg McDonnell, author of Tasting the Moon: Adventures in the Meaning of Life, the story of her life, in which the focus is the 33 years she spent in Adi Da's Company.

Interviewer: Ed Reither of Beezone.

Tags: leela   Meg McDonnell  

Adi Da speaks about our failure to notice the Divine Reality and why this is so: self contraction of the body-mind as "Narcissus", the separate self.

Tags: self contraction   Avataric Discourse