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.

Earth-Fire Temple today

This story appears in the following sections:
Empowered Places and Things,
Extraordinary Evidence, and
The Mountain Of Attention

FOOTNOTES

[1]		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.