FAQs about Adi Da & Adidam > Introduction

Introduction:
"Are There Any Questions?"


Avatar Adi Da Samraj



[After sitting silently with everyone for an hour, Gracing them with His Darshan. . .]

Adi Da: "Are there any questions?

[Silence from the audience.]

Adi Da: "Everyone has understood?"

audience member: "I haven't understood. Explain it to me."

The beginning of Adi Da's first public talk,
"Understanding" (April 25, 1972)
in Avatar Adi Da Samraj, My "Bright" Word [1]


"Are there any questions?" was one of Adi Da's favorite lines when He gathered with His devotees, and from Adi Da's responses — to both the asked and unasked questions of the devotees sitting before Him (or participating in such a gathering via the Internet, from around the world) — came thousands of talks filled with extraordinary wisdom.


Often at the end of a gathering . . . He would press us to tell Him if there was anything else He could do for us. "Is there anything left over? Are there any questions at all? Do your friends not here with us tonight have any questions? Speak for them. Is there anything? We don't want to have to do this again. We will if we have to, but we don't want to have to. Is there anything, anything at all? Anything in you or in your friends I need to address?"

Leroy Stilwell
Love's Sacrifice and the Ordeal to Become Human


But from time to time, Adi Da would tell us that the deeper purpose of this exercise of gathering and answering our questions was simply to provide a means to keep us occupied — to keep us "in the Room" with Him:


All I am doing is just keeping you present while I am Present, and that is sufficient. That is the whole of sadhana. Everything else is an elaboration of that.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
Approaching the Guru: Prasad and Darshan, No Remedy


while He transformed our state with His Spiritual Transmission, dissolving the questioner in the Enlightened State of Divine Ignorance (which Adi Da also calls "Perfect Knowledge"). And that indeed was what would happen. Late in the night, He'd ask again, "Are there any questions?" And there would be none: not because we had asked every possible question, but because we ourselves had been dissolved.

Adi Da always made the point that our question-asking was founded on our chronic sense of dilemma, and was symptomatic of our egoity — the activity that is actually creating our sense of dilemma.


The Mystery of our existence is not a problem to be solved. The search for an Answer implies that the Mystery of existence is a Question. And when individuals become bound to the presumption that the Mystery of existence is a Problem or a Question, their lives become a search for Solutions or Answers in the form of experience or knowledge. . . . The only ultimate release from the presumed Problem or Question of existence is Realized in the transcendence of that presumption itself.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, The Transcendence of Attention

The real question is the state you are in. And the real answer is not in the form of a verbal response to verbally expressed dilemmas, or even apparently actual life-dilemmas. The real answer is the transcendence of your self-contracted state. . .

From the point of view of the real question — the actual dilemma — the most auspicious thing that can possibly happen is to enter into Satsang with Me. . . .

Satsang with Me is the answer. Satsang with Me is the process and Condition wherein the dilemma is undone. No spoken or written word, but (rather) the very relationship to Me, the Living True Divine Heart, is the Real answer. The answer is not in the form of an ego-serving method, a strategic technique, or a conceptual system that addresses your particular notions of human existence. The answer is the Self-Evident Manifestation of Truth, and that answer undermines that very structure in your conscious awareness that supports your entire search.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
"No 'One' Survives Beyond That Moment", My "Bright" Word


Mere thought is an eternal wanderer, the "planetary" motion of attention. If self is defined in feeling, immediately all else makes "me" think. In all these years of Teaching, I have thus wandered among you and with you. And we could thus continue forever, except for death. But we have gone on long enough that a feeling is arising, full of weariness, that this wandering will never end. Even after all of this, you still have questions. Matters of great importance, which we grasped at the beginning or on the way, have been forgotten. Already you think of turning back to any one of the previous moments of clarity in which it seemed you were Free. Therefore, it is time to understand and transcend this wandering, this Planetary Lion.

Truly, great questions are an eternal occupation. They have neither the purpose nor the ability to be answered. They are simply paradigms of dilemma, they make mind. They are the movers of attention. They are to thought what desires are to sensation. Great questions, like great desires, cannot be satisfied, they are the guarantee of motion, even though they always anticipate rest.

Now we have entertained great questions, but we do not rest. It is time to understand what we have been about. We could go on and on. Even now you are not certain if there is an Eternal Substance of Transcendental Being pervading all, or if there is only a Void of changes, so that not even one thought is linked to another by anything more than the idea of such. Likewise, you are uncertain as to whether, in the ultimate Fulfillment of Realization, there is simple identification with Formless Being or inherence in and ecstatic worship of Divinity in an unity in an Eternal Domain. Therefore, of what further use is this conversion? Only practice Realizes the Truth of these paradoxes. And practice is continuous transcendence of self-contraction. You have wandered via great questions, and now it is the questions that define your presence. The vehicle of our wandering is self. No matter where the body goes, "I" am the body itself. No matter where the mind or attention wanders, "I" am its ghost. . .

Thus, our lives are the incarnation of questions. And we seek by our questions — our very selves, our minds, and our bodies — to achieve terminal thought or final experience. But in fact there is no rest, no end to seeking, no relaxation of questions, no release from the fundamental sense of dilemma unless we understand the self-process, and in such understanding transcend the terrible motion of body and mind. There is no ultimate answer, no perfect analysis, description, or experience. Truth is in the transcendence of the question itself. The ultimate or spiritual process is not a matter of the exploitation of mind or body — but it is a matter of the intuitive and self-transcending understanding of the active body-mind. The body-mind-self is itself, inherently, a dilemma. It is in the form of a question, an illusory or futile motion toward rest or release. There is no exploitation of this problem-based motion that ever becomes rest from it. It is this observation or insight that is the foundation of true understanding. . .

From now I presume no obligation or necessity to entertain or to comment upon great questions. The true spiritual process is not founded upon ultimate descriptions of Reality, God, self, or world. Nor is that process a matter of the pursuit of knowledge or experience via the body-mind. It is simply a matter of moment to moment direct observation, understanding, and transcendence of self-contraction in Good Company. Everything is Revealed and Realized on this basis.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
"The Perfect Preparation for the Perfect Practice", The Lion Sutra


The ultimate end of. . . the search for Truth, is the confounding of the need to know. All knowledge is a reaction to the threat of experience, but the need for absolute certainties, or fixed conditions, within or without, is undermined and vanished in the mindless Humor of the Heart. When perplexity is inherent and overwhelming, the inner stresses all dissolve, and uncaused Wisdom Shines. When despair and hope are equally impossible, frustration yields to Life.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
The Enlightenment of the Whole Body


The universe is not in the form of a question.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj


All questions are self-caused, or caused by your own presumption, your own self-contraction, your own apparent separation from the Very Condition in Which you are arising. The discovery of That Which Is Reality Itself, or the Very Divine, transcends all causes and effects, all separateness, all "difference", all relatedness, all otherness, all problems, all egoity. The universe, in fact, is vanished, utterly Outshined.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, October 20, 2004


I hate to tell you this, but when you really get down to the core of the Teaching you begin to realize that you are not going to be given any answers at all. There are no answers contained at any level in this process. But there is a certain influence that will destroy your questioning. I certainly hope you can make contact with it. As a matter of fact, I am it.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj


The answer to every question is devotion.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj


My Divine Avataric Transcendental Spiritual Presence Dissolves "questions".

My devotees have noticed this over the years — and the dissolution of "questions" has (likewise) been noticed, for thousands of years, by those who came into The Company of True Realizers.

When you approach The Adept-Realizer as a seeker, you arrive at the "front door" with all kinds of "questions" — and, yet, once you "come inside" and sit down, your "questions" suddenly melt.

The "questions" are simply not there any longer, because Reality Itself Is Perfectly Prior to that which gives rise to your "questions" — Perfectly Prior to "self"-contraction, Perfectly Prior to presumed "problem".

The Vanishing of your "questions" — in Devotional Communion with Me — Is The "Answer".

Therefore, if you are My devotee, I call you to Realize That Which Is Perfectly Prior to all your "questions", Perfectly Prior to your presumed "problem", Perfectly Prior to your "self"-contraction.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
Part Eight: Radical Transcendentalism, The Aletheon


Questions are just expressions (or forms) of dilemma. People live as a question. People live life as if it were a question, as if life were always looking for meaning or an answer, as if they were always looking for the meaning of life. The expectation that life should be meaningful is a lot of nonsense. There is no meaning to be grasped. There is only the sense of dilemma to be undone. When that dilemma is undone, there is no answer. There is also no question! There Is Only the Fundamental Divine Reality, and It is Intrinsically Self-Evident.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
"Guru, Faith, and Divine Communion", My "Bright" Sight


In a real sense, the purpose of this section, FAQs about Adi Da and Adidam, is similar. We are happy to answer your questions about Adi Da and Adidam as best we can! But answering questions cannot relieve the chronic sense of dilemma that motivates us to ask questions in the first place (since the actual source of that sense of dilemma is egoity itself — the unconscious activity of self-contraction); and answering questions cannot "cause" the Revelation of the Divine that is the starting point of true practice of the Way of Adidam.

At best, effective answers to questions can serve useful secondary purposes:

  • They can convince one that there really is something extraordinary about Adi Da and Adidam, something worth the investment of substantial time, energy, and life to explore further.

  • They can relieve one of (or at least reduce the force of) personal obstructions (doubt, anxiety, etc.) that may otherwise be preventing the Revelation from occurring in one's own case.

The very first thing Adi Da did during His first public gathering (on April 25, 1972) was to simply sit silently with everyone for an hour, gifting them with the Revelation of the Divine. It was only then that He asked, "Are there any questions? Has everyone understood?", demonstrating right from the start the secondary (but supportive) role of His Teaching Work in relation to His Revelation Work.

Thus, the true (and greater) purpose of this section, FAQs about Adi Da and Adidam, and this site altogether — and, indeed, the Way of Adidam altogether — is to help link you up with Adi Da's Spiritual Transmission, to the point where you yourself (and your questions) are dissolved and the Divine is Revealed.


Avatar Adi Da Samraj



RETURN TO "QUESTIONS ABOUT ADI DA AND ADIDAM"



[1]

Adi Da's first public talk, "Understanding", is also available as a CD.

 

Quotations from and/or photographs of Avatar Adi Da Samraj used by permission of the copyright owner:
© Copyrighted materials used with the permission of The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as trustee for The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam. All rights reserved. None of these materials may be disseminated or otherwise used for any non-personal purpose without the prior agreement of the copyright owner. ADIDAM is a trademark of The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as Trustee for the Avataric Samrajya of Adidam.

Technical problems with our site? Let our webmaster know.