Motivation for This Article

This is Part 1 of Chris Tong's fourteen-part article, A Framework for Exegesis: Understanding Adi Da's Word in Context.

Because the Web is full of Adi Da's Teachings, from 1970 through 2008 (often posted with little or no context, not even the book it appeared in, or the year it was spoken or written), the staff of Adi Da Up Close regularly gets questions that stem from people getting confused about the mix of pieces they are reading out on the Web. Many of their questions take the form: Adi Da said X in 1974 but said Y in 2008 — don't these statements contradict each other? (For just a couple of examples, see our articles, Views on other Adepts and Use of the term, Avatar.)

While we could continue to answer each of these questions individually, it has become clear to us that what is really needed is a general framework that provides a full context for rightly understanding anything Adi Da said at any point in His Work with devotees. This article is a first attempt to provide such a framework, and a suite of tools for effective study of Adi Da's Word in any particular passage, and of His Wisdom-Teaching altogether.

Many of these questions come from a natural confusion of the kind we have described, stemming from all the different versions of the Teaching out on the Web. But some questions have their source in "anti-Adi Da" websites, whose creators have hunted down such seeming inconsistencies in Adi Da's Word with a kind of "gotcha" mentality, trying to imply that any apparent "inconsistency" is somehow evidence of something "nefarious" going on behind the scenes. Some of these insinuations are not capable of withstanding even five seconds of real scrutiny. (For example, the suggestion that Adi Da published a full account of His association with Scientology in the original edition of The Knee Of Listening, but then removed it in later editions to "hide" His association with Scientology, falls on its face just by our stating the obvious: if Adi Da wanted to "hide" it, why did He write so fully about it in the first place?) But one of the things that becomes crystal clear as one studies the full history of Adidam and Adi Da's Teaching in all its forms over time, is that all changes (real or apparent) in Adi Da's Word have very clear, positive, and compassionate motivations behind them. Here are some of those motivations.

Adi Da found a better way of saying something, or a different way of saying something. He was well aware that different kinds of people might understand or be penetrated by different ways of communicating the same point.

Adi Da felt His devotees had enough spiritual maturity that He could reveal more directly Who He is to them. And through them, the world — to the great benefit of all beings who could take advantage of the Offering He was communicating. While the communication that one is a unique incarnation of the Divine is a more difficult and provocative communication to make to the world (especially a world imbued in a materialistic viewpoint), someone who actually is a unique incarnation of the Divine is obliged to make that communication in crystal clear terms at some point, regardless of how much reactivity it might engender, because that person would otherwise be depriving countless beings of the possibility of God-Realization.

Adi Da rejected something that He had concluded (through extensive "consideration", observation and experimentation) didn't work, after all. His communications about the nature of Reality have not changed fundamentally (because His Realization did not change after 1970), though they've been greatly expanded. But His communications about some aspect of the practice of Adidam — the means for Realizing Reality — have always been contingent upon devotees actually being able to demonstrate that they could do it, benefit from it, etc.

Adi Da's communications about some area of practice would often be updated as He took into account new studies or research in that area. By "new studies", I mean studies in areas like diet. For example, relative to diet, we as a community have "considered" many different possibilities (for example, even experimenting for a time with "instincto therapy", where one smells alternative foods and chooses what the body needs right now on that basis), until Adi Da converged on the maximally raw, maximally green diet described in His Source Texts.