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6. Did Adi Da Himself Need a Spiritual Master?

Chris Tong, Ph.D.


This is Part 6 of Chris Tong's six-part article, Why Great Spiritual Realization Requires a Spiritual Master.

In part 1 and part 2 of this article, we described why a Spiritual Transmission Master is functionally necessary for Spiritual Realization. But some readers of Adi Da's life story try to make the curious argument that they shouldn't need a Spiritual Master like Adi Da because, after all, didn't Adi Da Himself "abandon" all Spiritual Masters, and Realize the seventh stage Realization "on His own" in the end?

This actually is a major misunderstanding of Adi Da's life story. Adi Da was born already Awakened. The primary story of His early life was not the story of an ordinary person like you or me, eventually Realizing the seventh stage of life, having some Spiritual Masters along the way but eventually "not needing" them. It was, rather, the story of the Divine Person directly acquiring the body of "Franklin Jones" at birth, and, over time, conforming it to Himself completely. So even "Franklin Jones" had a Guru: the very Divine Person! But that was because Adi Da was the very Incarnation of the Divine — a "once in the history of the universe" occurrence. Avatar Adi Da Samraj


[My Appearance] in this world is the sacrificial embodiment of the Divine Consciousness, or the "Purusha," as it is named in the Hindu tradition. Such a life is Divine, but it is also paradoxically associated with all the limitations of human existence. I entered this world without dissociation from the Divine Conscious Being, the Great Purusha, the ultimate Divine, but I have also been given all the limits of human experience. The force of the Divine Consciousness keeps me Awakened and transforms the process of life as I live it, but I must also suffer the limitations of born existence in the process. I have suffered a human lifetime as if I were unenlightened.

This is how the Purusha breaks through space-time and into human time, by taking up precisely the limitations, even the unconsciousness and the un-Enlightenment, of the human individual. Yet the force of the Realization of the Divine is so profound that the ordinary destiny of the human individual or incarnation is constantly undermined and his or her limitations transcended to the point that suddenly the same human being, with full consciousness, Realizes that he is the Purusha. Such a Realization is given occasionally in human time, and such is my own Realization. I was born Franklin Jones, on Long Island, but the process of my existence has yielded a more and more profound Awakening that I am God, that I am the Purusha. . . .

The ordinary devotee does not Awaken at birth with that consciousness. Only God, the Divine Being, Awakens with that consciousness in the plane of human beings. The devotee Awakens to the Divine at last through surrender, yes — this is the Great Secret of the Way of Truth, the Way that I Offer to all.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
The Divine Life and Work of the Spiritual Master


Adi Da did have Spiritual Masters during His lifetime, but they were not actually the prime movers in His Process of Re-Awakening, because their Realizations were not the equivalent of the ultimate, Divine Realization with which He was born, and to which He Re-Awakened:


There are all kinds of ordinary associations with My Birth. I Submitted to an ordinary Body in an ordinary circumstance — in the West. But that Submission has nothing to do with My Nature and Identity, nothing to do with the Profundity of experience that has been Mine since before this Birth, and all the while that I have been "Doing" My human Lifetime, That Submission required many passages through ordinary life limitations — but even in the midst of such limitations, My Own Nature and State, My Own Divine Samadhi, kept Breaking Through — and that is where the Great Incidents of My "Sadhana Years" came from. And those Great Incidents are also the Means by which I was able to Discriminate between, on the one hand, the phenomena that were arising in My experience (both the ordinary life-experences and the Spiritual phenomena that, in subsequent years, arose in association with various Teachers and traditions) and, on the other hand, the Very Divine Self-Condition and the Divine Nature of Ultimate Realization.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, August 15, 2004


So it really doesn't make sense to make an analogy between ourselves and what Realization requires in our own case, and a Divine Incarnation like Adi Da, and His Process of Re-Awakening (having already been born Divinely Enlightened).

Nonetheless, the rest of us have access to the very same advantage Adi Da had: we are Blessed beyond words to have the very Divine Person as our Guru. But that has been made possible for us through the Divine Incarnation that is Adi Da — "Adi Da" is the functional means the Divine has manifested that enables the rest of us to have access to the Divine.


All of My "Years of Testing-by-Experience" were associated with Identification with the "Bright" Itself, My Own Self-Nature, Self-Condition, and Self-State. . . I Give you the Gift Which I, Myself, Am and by Which I always Benefited in all My "Years of Testing-by-Experience" — the "Bright". Commune with Me, give yourself to Me, “Locate” and “Know” Me, be in Me. Then you have exactly the same Advantage I had in My apparent "Years of Testing-by-Experience" — the Gift of Identification with the "Bright", Myself.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, July 8, 1995


An ancient text says: "Mankind does not know. Only the Horse knows." Therefore, you must grasp the tail of the Horse, the God-Realizer. . . . The Horse takes you — I take you — Where there is to go.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj


My "Sadhana" — made by My Submission to the conditions of ordinary (and extraordinary) human life — established the Pattern of the Way of Adidam. Such is the Pattern within which all My devotees (now, and forever) will participate.

My devotees participate in that Pattern by virtue of their devotional and Spiritual relationship to Me — and not otherwise, by virtue of some seeker's effort to replicate the Process as It was shown in My Own Case (although, obviously, there are elements of the Process that will inevitably become evident in My any devotee's case). The practice in My Company is not a matter of attempting to replicate what I Did in My "Sadhana Years". It is simply a matter of entering into moment to moment (self-forgetting and Me-remembering) devotional communion with Me. Such true heart-Communion with Me is access to the Pattern of My Avataric Divine Presence here.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, December 21, 1998
(p. 600, The Knee Of Listening)


The humanly incarnate Spiritual Master is Divine Help to the advantage of those in like form. When My devotee enters into right relationship with Me, changes happen in the literal physics of one's existence. I am not just talking about ideas. I am Talking about literal transformations at the level of energy, at the level of esoteric super-physics (beyond the physical limitations you characteristically presume), at the level of the Unlimited Condition of the Divine Conscious Light. That transformative process is enacted in My devotees in (and by means of) My Divine Avataric Company.

The relationship between the Adept-Realizer and the devotee is not a matter of conceptual symbolisms or emotional attachment to some extraordinary person. The true Guru-devotee relationship is real physics. Therefore, because they can make unique use of the Offering of the Adept-Realizer's Company, it is to the special advantage of people when an Adept-Realizer (of whatever Real degree) appears in their midst. And that advantage is Unique in My Case, because I have Revealed and Given the Complete Reality-Process, Which culminates in Most Perfect (or seventh stage) Divine Self-Realization.

Real Spiritual life has nothing to do with the childishness people tend to dramatize in relationship to the Spiritual Master. I Criticize that childish (or dependent) approach more directly than most people do. Others are merely petulant about the necessity of the relationship to the Spiritual Master, in the "self"-righteous mood of adolescence. Both the childish approach and the adolescent approach to the Spiritual Master are forms of destructive nonsense and must be overcome. However, the mature, ego-surrendering relationship to the Spiritual Master is absolutely Lawful and necessary. Those who object to that relationship might as well object to the relationship between the Earth and the sun.

Most people are willing to sacrifice things, but not themselves. They are willing to pay cash, in other words, for a quick salvation. Such "religious consumerism" is an ancient ritual of worship, but it is false and futile. True worship is the surrender of your own body-mind-"self" in Truth Itself, in the Living and Transformative Company of the Spiritual Master. People absolutely resist such surrender, because they know nothing about it. Human beings are, in fact, subhuman in their present level of adaptation. Devotional surrender of the egoic "self" represents a future stage of development for humanity as a species. In their present actual, literal psycho-physical condition, human beings are incapable of such surrender. They must be drawn out of that limited condition, and into another state of existence. And it is as far to go from where they are now to Most Perfect Divine Self-Realization as it is from the amoeba in the primal mud of the Earth to a human being. Every aspect of your existence — even the body — must change dramatically.

There is an unspeakably profound difference between the condition of the usual egoic iindividual and the Condition of the Divinely Enlightened individual. If imagined in "evolutionary" terms, that difference is an an inconceivable leap. However, there is a Real Process for making that leap, and there is Help for it: the devotional and (in due course) Transcendental Spiritual relationship to Me, the Divine Avataric Master. In other words, something in the Super-Physics of the universe makes it possible for the Divine Conscious Light to Avatarically Incarnate as an apparent human individual, for the Purpose of Bringing others into the Sphere of Divinely Enlightened Existence. Therefore, just as the relationship to the Spiritual Master (of one or another degree) is the supreme Principle of Spiritual life in general, the relationship to Me is the Supreme Principle of the Reality-Way of Adidam. . . .

If you enter into the devotional relationship with Me, then the Divine Process begins to duplicate Itself in your case. It is not as if you are a robot that is being transformed by some computer — no. The Process is a living and human relationship to Me. But that Process has nothing to do with the conventional "doctor-patient" and "mommy-daddy-baby" games. Irresponsible people cannot enter into this Process. . . .

You must be responsible for yourself at the human level, and in a profoundly uncommon way. You must live the discipline of ordinary life. You yourself must be love under all ordinary, daily conditions. You must make this change in your life. There is no way whereby you can be relieved of this necessity — and nobody else can do it for you. Nevertheless, all of that ordinary responsibility simply prepares you for the right relationship to Me (in and As My Divinely-Avatarically-Born bodily human Divine Form and Person).

I Am your Unique Advantage, because I Am Present in the same kind of bodily form as you — Manifested via the same kind of physical structure, the same kind of nervous system, the same kind of brain. In My Case, however, all these mechanisms are Conformed to an Absolute level of Functioning, such that your entering into Communion with Me brings changes even at the level of the psycho-physical body that you present to Me.

No abstract Divine Principle can serve you in that manner — because the physics of this Process must be directly Present, and the bodily (human) Demonstration of the Process must be Present in a Form that can do its Work in your case. That Work is My Purpose. My Divine Avataric Self-Incarnation Fully Manifests the State of the Ultimate Physics of things — Which is your Potential, but not your actuality at the present time. The "abstract Divine" and the powers of the universe are not (in and of themselves) organized for the sake of the immediate transformation of human beings. If people truly enter into right devotional and (in due course) Transcendental Spiritual relationship with Me, they will (inevitably) Realize the process of transformation characteristic of the only-by-Me Revealed and Given Reality-Way of Adidam.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, "The Super-Physics of Divine Enlightenment"
Part III, The Aletheon

 


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