Finding
Adi Da > Sonia
The Fulfillment of My Heart-Longing,
and the Fulfillment of an Indian Prophecy
Sonia
Sonia has been a devotee of Adi Da Samraj since 1996. In
1972, her parents migrated into the U.S., where she was born and raised. After
graduating from Harvard University in 1997, she worked as a Human Resources Director
for five years and then as a Waldorf teacher for two years. Currently she is living
and serving in India.
Outwardly, everything in my life was going
well. I was 19 years old. I had a loving family and friends, I was attending Harvard
University with the intention of becoming a physician, and I could see myself
living a life of contemplation and service. Still, I felt like something
was missing. No matter how balanced and idyllic my life appeared to be, I felt
a sense of limitation and a fear of death.
During the summer
of 1995, I volunteered in a health clinic in Gujarat, India. The place where I
worked was very inspiring — there were illiterate villagers treating each other
for common ailments such as tuberculosis and malaria, and even the poorest children
had the most beaming smiles on their faces. Later that summer I visited the sacred
mountains of Rishikesh in the Himalayas. I stayed in an ashram for a week and
lived out another ideal — of living a secluded, contemplative life in the mountains.
However,
I was also feeling more and more wounded by the suffering I saw everywhere in
India. It was very difficult for me to walk down a street being approached by
beggars and lame individuals, women and children in abject poverty, sleeping on
the streets with no food and no hope. It was such a stark contrast to the life
I was leading back in the U.S., or even the life my middle-class relatives were
leading in India. Such immense, inevitable suffering… I remember many times crying
and calling out to God, “He prabhu, ye teri kya maya?” (“Oh Lord, what
is this incomprehensible paradox of Yours?”)
A couple of years
earlier I had been introduced to the Teaching of Adi Da Samraj, and during my
trip to India I was reading The Incarnation
of Love, a selection of excerpts from His Teaching. I began to recognize
the futility of my search and how no object or experience (even if it were spiritual)
was entirely satisfactory. I really needed help and guidance now, because the
ideas and experiences I had been holding on to up until now were breaking down
and I did not have much ground to stand on. I had been on a spiritual search for
five years and after meeting many pundits, yogis, and gurus, I began to recognize
that Avatar Adi Da Samraj was the one teacher who spoke directly and poignantly
to my heart: “Even The Fullest Realization Of Love Is A Wound That
Never Heals…”
I was still not clear why guru-devotion is necessary
in spiritual life, but I felt it was something I should explore. This is when
I began to approach Adi Da as His devotee. The first time I had darshan of Avatar
Adi Da Samraj was in November of 1996, a few months after being formally initiated
as His devotee. I was sitting in a large room at the Mountain Of Attention Sanctuary
along with other devotees, chanting and waiting for Avatar Adi Da Samraj to arrive.
When He walked into the room, my heart leaped with the recognition “He Is Here!”
— the one whom my heart had been yearning for — for eons, it seemed, since ancient
times. All the pain of life seemed to be resolved by His Appearance here, as if
I could now rest my heart in Him.
Beloved Adi Da Samraj walked
into the room with a regal elegance and sat down gently in His chair. I was still
in awe, but I managed to go up near His chair, offer a flower at His feet and
prostrate in front of Him in devotional surrender to Him and then sat back down.
During the darshan occasion I could not take my eyes off of His beautiful Face
— He was so utterly vulnerable. He looked around the room at each one of us, His
eyes looked full of compassion. While sitting there, the cells of my body seemed
to be melting and dissolving in an indescribable happiness. Then, the sense of
“me”, that separate self sense, was utterly vanished, without any effort on my
part.
I had been practicing meditation, pranayama and yoga
for a few years now and begun to experience greater balance and peace in my life
— as if I were a balloon being blown up more and more. But in the company of Avatar
Adi Da Samraj, it was as if the balloon had popped and I could finally breathe
freely! I had never experienced anything like this, and was so happy and grateful
to be so released, and to also feel so intimately embraced in His Heart.
A
few months later while driving near my house, I had some profound experiences
that I can only attribute to Avatar Adi Da’s Grace, since they appeared and disappeared
without any effort of my own. I felt a shift in my ordinary awareness, almost
a kind of disorientation. I could not feel my usual mind, my usual sense of limitation
as the body. Instead, “I” was everything and everyone and this was incredibly
blissful. Every gesture or movement was full of ecstasy, even the blinking of
my eye or the turning of my head. Everything seemed to be Shining and there was
only Love-Bliss-Radiance. I realized through direct experience, in those few moments,
that the world was not “maya” as I had thought it to be. Rather, its substance
was only this bright, radiant blissfulness that I also felt was identical to Adi
Da Samraj.
Of course, I tried to “hold on” to this experience — it was
so deeply intoxicating and profound. I wanted to stay in this state forever, but
as soon as “I” tried to hold on to it, it disappeared. Adi Da Samraj writes about
this in Da Love-Ananda Gita,
“Total psycho-physical oneness (or inherently Love-Blissful Unity) can be (apparently)
lost, by the total psycho-physical act of self-contraction (and, thereby,
of apparent separation, separateness, and separativeness).”
In the
years following that first darshan occasion and that experience of “Love-Blissful
Unity”, I went through an ordeal of purification at the foundation human level
of life, what Avatar Adi Da Samraj calls “the first three stages of life”. During
this time of purification and strengthening, I did not practice as a formal devotee,
although I still felt devotion to Adi Da Samraj. I continued to practice meditation,
study, right diet, and yoga while working and living an ordinary life. But no
matter how hard I tried, I could not duplicate the state of Love-Bliss that I
had experienced in Adi Da's Company, and I realized the sheer futility of trying
to achieve such a state by doing sadhana on my own, without my Beloved Guru’s
Grace and the Guidance of the community of His devotees.
It
had been almost seven years since I had darshan of my Beloved Guru and my heart
was aching to see Him. I was given the chance to have darshan of Adi Da Samraj
at Da Love-Ananda Mahal, His Hermitage Sanctuary in Hawaii, in March of 2003,
so I traveled there for a weekend retreat. During the darshan occasion, a classical
Indian musician was playing a beautiful, somber melody on the sarangi,
and when I saw my Beloved Guru I began to weep uncontrollably. Deep in my heart
I was so grateful to see Him again. At one point in the darshan occasion He stood
up and looked at each person. He looked at me directly in the eyes for a few moments,
and I felt an intense, laser-like spiritual force enter my eyes and descend down
into my heart. But the intensity of His force was overwhelming, so I put my head
down in a gesture of collapse. At the end of the darshan occasion, Adi Da Samraj
put His hands over a bowl of dates. When He left, the dates were passed out to
each person as Prasad [a Blessed gift]. I saved my
dates to take back to Chicago where I could share them with my family.
About
a week later, I took a date out of my purse, and as soon as I touched it a current
of spiritual power entered my arm and “I” began to melt in Love-Bliss! I had been
raised Hindu and had eaten prasad hundreds of times before but never had it contained
spiritual power. My heart deeply bowed down to Adi Da Samraj in that moment. I
now understood the true esoteric significance of “prasad”. Who can transmit Love-Bliss
so freely and potently, even through a piece of fruit, that it dissolves the ego-“I”?
Growing
up in the modern world, I had dismissed the ceremonial puja [sacramental
worship] and bhajans [devotional songs] that I had seen my mother do as
merely empty rituals. They were beautiful and I knew that she was doing them out
of devotion and faith in her idea of God. But it seemed to me that hers was conventional
religious practice, focused on the “outer” forms of worship and not on developing
the “the inner life”, which I was more attracted to. Basically, I had dismissed
Hindu religious ceremonies as empty outer rituals, a hopeful attempt to please
deities and receive material fortune in life.
More and more,
however, I am beginning to realize that there is no real difference between “outer”
and “inner”. The material world is not maya (illusion) from which we need
to dissociate. Rather, it is progressively outshined in the “Bright” Love-Bliss
Radiance Transmitted through the Grace of Avatar Adi Da Samraj. As devotees, our
sadhana is focused on devotional remembrance of Adi Da Samraj and surrender to
His Eternal “Bright” Love-Bliss State, while the “material” world (and even all
of conditional existence) is understood to be a modification of His Divine Conscious
Light. This is certainly not my daily experience, because usually I wake up feeling
identified with this mortal body-mind. But the experience of “Love-Blissful Unity”
and many similar experiences in Avatar Adi Da Samraj’s Company serve to remind
me of this truth.
My heart is beginning to flower in the recognition
that Adi Da Samraj is the one who was prophesized
by Upasani Baba. He is re-establishing in me, through Spiritual means, an
esoteric understanding of my own Vedic heritage that I had previously dismissed.
I
have no idea what good karmas I must have done in my previous lifetimes to be
born as His devotee while He is alive in the body, but I am eternally grateful
to my Beloved Guru, Avatar Adi Da Love-Ananda Samraj.
