Extraordinary Evidence > Adi Da & Awareness > Mad Talking Dance

The Mad Talking Dance

Leroy Stilwell

Leroy Stilwell has been a formal devotee since 1976. He is one of the founders of this website. You can read his biographical information in the About Us section.

Leroy Stilwell It was a gathering during the 1986-87 Indoor Yajna at Adi Da Samrajashram in Fiji. We had been with Beloved Adi Da probably since seven o'clock that evening. I can't recall right now what the principal consideration had been with Him earlier, but it had been something related to the new book He was developing called The Basket of Tolerance. That conversation had lasted several hours until the effects of drinking Fiji Bitters [a popular Fijian beer] crossed us over to singing opera and then to dancing.

Something very interesting to me happened during the first and more sober part of evening. This particular evening I happened to not be so actively participating in the conversation with Adi Da. I was being more observant of what was going on instead. I would watch Adi Da respond to questions and watch devotees ask them. In this more passive mode, a kind of shift in consciousness occurred at some point. I began to clearly feel and almost tangibly see and hear devotees as a "point of view". What I mean by that is it was somehow tangibly obvious that they were there, speaking to Adi Da, obviously actively presuming themselves to be a separate someone, and speaking from a "point of view" that was clearly limited and fixed, locatable, in time and space.

I would then look at Beloved Adi Da and listen to Him, and there was absolutely nothing of that perception. He was there responding, for sure, but He projected absolutely no point of view. It was not that He was being eclectic in His Responses, or anything related to the apparent content of the discussion. It was on an entirely different level. His Responses were just happening. He Himself was just Happening. Just as obviously as devotees were projecting their "time-space" limitation, Beloved Adi Da was just and simply there, with out any "time-space" limitation or self-presumption whatsoever.

Six or seven hours later, we are drunk and dancing. I am sitting on the edge of the slightly raised platform we called the "dance floor". Popular rock and roll type music was blaring and Adi Da was dancing in the middle of the crowd of devotees. I became aware that He was saying things, so I consciously directed my attention to His voice. He wasn't talking sentences, He didn't seem to be trying to make sense. He was just "talking". Then I heard something I understood — it was something I had just thought, or maybe just "said to myself". He continued to talk. Then it happened again — He said out loud something I had just thought — verbatim, the exact words of my thought. Then later again, maybe a couple of more times. You can imagine it was a bit startling. Adi Da's Mad Talking Dance went on for about 5 to 10 minutes or so, then the dancing wore down and that seemed to be the end of the evening — well, it was around 2:00 am — and Beloved Adi Da left.

After the gathering we went to the ashram kitchen to eat before going to bed. This was part of Adi Da's general Instruction to us during gathering periods. We would eat some sort of grounding-type food before going to bed to help counter the etheric weakening effects of drinking alcohol so that we were less liable to intrusion by negative etheric forces and spirits.

In the kitchen I told a friend of my experience in the gathering. When I spoke about Beloved Adi Da's "Mad Talking Dance", another friend who overheard me confessed that he had had a similar experience during that dance.

Well, over the next couple of days I asked several of my friends what their experience of the evening was, and it turns out that several had noticed the same thing — that during that "Mad Talking Dance", Beloved Adi Da was Speaking their thoughts as well.

I don't know if absolutely everything He was saying that evening was the thoughts of those around Him, but I wouldn't doubt that was the case. But whatever one could say was going on, it was a demonstration to me of Adi Da Samraj's unique relationship to everything in His Sphere, be it His Identity with it, His State of non-separation from it, or His Condition of inherently defenseless vulnerability to it.