The
Miracle in the Garden:
The Empowerment of Earth-Fire Temple
Part
of Avatar Adi Da's Work has been His establishment of particular
places at His Hermitages and Sanctuaries
as holy sites, especially Empowered by Him. There is a remarkable story behind
the establishment of each one of these temples. The first one, now called "Earth-Fire
Temple", was Empowered at The Mountain Of Attention Sanctuary during the Garbage
and the Goddess period in 1974, as a result of a miraculous event.
It particularly expresses the nurturing-female dynamic of energies, and so is
served principally by women devotees. It is now also associated with a nearby
site of characteristically male energy, called "Skyway Temple".
Ruchiradama
Nadikanta came to Avatar Adi Da in 1974. From the very beginning,
she has consistently demonstrated a unique capacity to serve
Adi Da and practice the Way He has given. She is one of
the two present devotee members of His Ruchira
Sannyasin Order.
This
account is from The Promised God-Man Is
Here, by Carolyn Lee, Ph.D.
Shortly after coming to Avatar
Adi Da in May 1974, Ruchiradama Nadikanta (then Elizabeth
Brown) broke a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary that belonged
to Avatar Adi Da. During her first weeks and months of participation,
she continued to break things frequently, thereby earning
the name "Buster Brown" from Avatar Adi Da.[1]
At the same time, she was also in charge of the vegetable
garden being planted at The Mountain Of Attention, and this,
too, was problematic. Nothing would grow! Therefore, Avatar
Adi Da decided, as He later put it, "to show her something".
Ruchiradama Nadikanta: On my first
night at The Mountain Of Attention Sanctuary, I broke a statue
of the Virgin Mary belonging to Beloved Adi Da. I was horrified
that I had done this and carried the broken statue to where
He was sitting in the main room of His residence. Most Graciously,
He gently chided me and then repaired the statue Himself, gluing
it back together and touching it up. Then He returned it to
its original place. A day or two later, He said to me: "Come
with Me down to the garden. I am going to bury the Virgin statue
there."
 Everything
had been going wrong with the garden. The plants were not growing very well, and
it was overrun with goats and gophers. Even on the afternoon that Beloved Adi
Da walked down with me to bury the statue, we had to chase all the chickens away! Beloved
Adi Da dug a hole in which He placed the statue that I had broken. He placed it
in the ground standing upright and facing out to the garden. He was very intent.
He laid His hands on the statue with great intention. Then He very gently covered
it over with dirt. I helped move all the dirt around it to completely fill the
hole. Then He patted the ground on top of the site and He told me to place a stone
over the statue to mark the spot. He laughed and said humorously that the Virgin
was going to be the "garden fairy". He told me that, by placing this statue in
the garden, He was placing His own attention there. This event, He said, would
take care of the garden. It all seemed rather odd to me.
The
next day, Beloved Adi Da and I and a few other devotees went
to the center we had on Polk Street in San Francisco
during the '70s and stayed in the city for a few days. When
we returned to the Sanctuary, I walked down to the garden
and my jaw dropped open in amazement. The garden had suddenly
become a teeming jungle! The tomato plants had grown a couple
of feet and were displaying big green tomatoes. The squash
had become huge-stalked plants leaping out all over the garden.
There was an intense vibratory energy throughout the garden,
and not a rodent in sight. The
tomato plants had become so tall that they needed propping
up, so I asked one of the groundskeepers at the Sanctuary
to build supports for them. When the supports were built,
he hammered the first of them until it seemed solidly fixed
in the ground, but when he turned away, the whole structure
fell over! This happened with every support. Soon the groundskeeper
was walking around in a daze, saying, "I can't stand it — there's
just too much vital energy here. I'm going to lie down under
a squash plant and disappear!" To avoid being enveloped in
the vines of a huge squash plant, he made his escape!
Walking
away from the garden that day, I met Beloved Adi Da. In amazement, I told Him
what was going on in the garden. He received this news without the slightest surprise
and invited me to turn around and walk back down to the garden again. As we entered
the garden, I felt again the intense vibratory energy. He stood silently scanning
the entire garden, and I felt Him "Meditating" the garden. Beloved
Adi Da said, "You are the witness to My Miracle in the garden. Why do you think
I put the statue of the Virgin Mary down here?"
I was astonished, and I did not know how to relate to what had
happened in the garden, or even to His question to me. It was simply beyond my
comprehension in the moment. So, instead, I decided to "think nothing of it".
Numerous amazing Demonstrations of Beloved Adi Da's Spiritual Power had occurred
throughout the "Garbage and the Goddess" time, so why should this be so unusual?
I knew that it was a Demonstration of the Divine Power of Beloved Adi Da, the
proof of His Divine Presence Pervading everything, but I was not prepared to have
any response other than nonchalance about the entire affair. Beloved was
constantly working with my materialistic and non-miracle-oriented mind. He gave
me the simple Instruction to tell this Leela
to other devotees. So I followed His Instruction. Gradually, as I began to describe
what had occurred, I connected emotionally with what had taken place. I became
ecstatic. My whole body felt the impact of the Miracle. I felt Beloved Adi Da’s
Power of Transformative Influence on everything seen and unseen. I could see in
the simple incident in the garden that He had transformed the energy associated
with the vital growing plants, the animals, and the entire energy-field in a miraculously
short period of time. Tomato plants just don’t grow that big in three days — and
gophers, mice, and chickens don’t just all of a sudden, out of the blue, decide
to leave a vegetable patch. This was unusual! I began to feel the significance
of the entire event of burying the statue in the garden and the intense manner
in which Beloved Adi Da had done this. I realized that He had Empowered the garden
with His own Energy. I allowed myself to fully feel the ecstatic Mystery of this
occurrence. And I saw that I had to give up my presumption that I "know" what
is happening in the world. Later,
Beloved Adi Da said that the event was an expression of the same kind of influence
that people associate with places like Findhorn, but He had done it as a Spiritual lesson
for His devotees — not for the sake of the flourishing of the vital energies of
Nature in themselves. To make this into an ongoing lesson, Beloved Adi Da asked
that I serve Him in creating a temple site where the statue of the Virgin Mary
had been buried. He asked that I do puja at that site daily, a puja of Invoking
Him and worshipping Him. In this manner, He was giving me and others the means
to deepen our awareness of the Mystery of His Work with the world. Avatar
Adi Da had invested Himself in that spot in the most tangible and specific way,
to Empower the site as a place of concentrated Invocation of Him. The fact that
Beloved Adi Da had Empowered this site with a statue of the Virgin Mary was a
source of much "consideration" for me. What was the relationship between this
Virgin Mary statue and my Beloved Guru? From reading The
Knee Of Listening and hearing Beloved Adi Da speak
of the years of His Ordeal of Divine Re-Awakening, I knew about His relationship
to Christianity and the Virgin Mary. I knew that His Divine Re-Awakening was coincident
with His "Husbanding" of the universal "Mother-Goddess", the "Divine
Shakti". Therefore, because it was constructed over the buried statue of
the Virgin, Earth-Fire Temple represented the universal "Mother-Force" to me,
and, at the same time, I felt the "Mother-Force" to be simply another Form of
Beloved Adi Da. As I continued to Invoke and worship Beloved Adi Da at this site,
I became more and more sensitive to the Mystery of Beloved Adi Da's Revelation
of Himself both as Consciousness Itself and as the universal Shakti, or Energy.  In
the years since He created the temple site, Beloved Adi Da has occasionally walked
down to Earth-Fire Temple with me. On one occasion, Beloved Adi Da Revealed a
secret to me. He entered the temple and placed His staff on the burial site of
the statue and stood "Meditating" the site altogether. Then, as He turned to leave
the temple enclosure, He said to me, “I buried Myself here.” Beloved
Adi Da always Grants the understanding of His Mysteries not only through His Word
of Instruction, but through His life-Play with His devotees. Over all these years,
through this simple Miracle of the garden, Beloved Adi Da has been Giving me measureless
Gifts of Instruction about the Nature of Reality and of the Revelation of His
Forms. He Is Consciousness, and He Is the "Shakti-Power". There is no separation.
This story appears in the following sections:
Empowered Places and Things,
Extraordinary
Evidence, and
The Mountain
Of Attention
FOOTNOTES
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Adi Da's broad sense of humor
never passed up a good pun, and the obvious reference
here is to Buster Brown's first name, "Buster".
But often when one looks deeper into the "casual
words of the Divine Heart-Master" one can find
other levels of meaning as well. For example, "Buster
Brown" was a cartoon character who was always
getting into mischief, but who also had a serious
side, and would often be used to communicate important messages. Over the years, Ruchiradama Nadikanta would become
one of the most advanced practitioners of Adidam, and would be one of Adi Da's primary communicators.
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