Finding Adi Da > Aniello Panico > There Is More To Life Than This

Anyone Can Be Transformed

This story originally appeared as Chapter 12 in the book, Drifted in the Deeper Land.

There Has Got To Be More to Life Than This

On April 19, 1968, I turned thirty-three — and I was about ready to end it all. I had worked my way up from the poverty of my early life on the streets of New York, and now I was a successful businessman, living in Los Angeles. I had a loving wife and four great kids, a beautiful home, three new cars, interesting friends — I had really learned how to live the good life. And even though I had had to leave school early to help support my family, I had taught myself to appreciate good literature, classical music, the arts. I was right where I always thought I wanted to be.

That day, one of my best friends called me up and said that he would like to take me out for my birthday — for drinks, to dinner, the whole thing. First we went to the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel and had a few drinks. Then we went to a restaurant — one of Los Angeles' finest — and had a great French meal with fine wines. After dinner, we went to catch the scene at one of the local jazz clubs.

Between sets, my friend and I were standing at the bar having another drink. I turned to him and told him something that had been bothering me for months, something I had never mentioned to anyone else: "You know, there has got to be more to life than this." And I was dead serious. I had everything I imagined I wanted when I was growing up, hanging out in the pool rooms and bars, starting out as an office errand boy, moving up the ladder to book salesman in Manhattan, and then finally getting promoted to Los Angeles — I had all the things I thought would make me happy. But now that I had it, I knew it wasn't enough. The feeling that there had to be more to life than what I was experiencing kept gnawing at me. My friend was about twenty-five years older than I was, so I thought maybe he had discovered something I hadn't.

But he answered me, "No, man, this is it. At some point in life, everyone has to come to the recognition that this is all there is — then you make the best of it for the rest of your life."

I thought about what he said for a minute, and then I said, "If that's the case, then I am in real trouble."

My friend tried to reassure me. "You'll learn to deal with it," he said. But he didn't have any advice for me as to how to deal with it. So I spent the next four and a half years doing everything I could to numb myself, so that I wouldn't have to face the painful feeling that, even though I was successful in a lot of ways, my life was meaningless and empty.

I never thought to look for a religious answer — I owned a bookstore with a large section on philosophy, new-age religions, and Eastern gurus, but I only carried these types of books because they sold well. I would order them by title, but I personally never read even a page. Like the whole crowd of friends I ran with at that time, I thought that I was too sophisticated to need that kind of stuff — it all seemed like hocus-pocus to me.

Since I didn't know what else to do, I started two businesses. I poured even more energy into my four kids, doing everything I could for them, doing homework with them, going to PTA meetings, taking them to baseball games, providing for them, disciplining them, telling them bedtime stories every single night — they were the one thing that made sense in my life. But even that wasn't enough. I started drinking and using social drugs more, working later hours, going out on the town more.

All this took a toll on my marriage, and I started to have terrible arguments with my wife. We had met when we were still kids, and we had worked hard together to get ahead financially and to create a good Italian family. But she didn't seem to share my feelings of dissatisfaction with what we had, and she couldn't understand my pain, so the gap between us only grew.

But that wasn't the only place I was having difficulty — I started acting out my frustration at work, too. I got angry and sarcastic with customers or salesmen in my store for no reason. I was so wound up that I actually started having heart problems. I was really worried, but I didn't know what to do about it all. I kept having the feeling, "I want to change my life completely," but I didn't have a clue as to what kind of changes would make a difference.

Finally, my marriage collapsed. Now I was in serious trouble. My kids were everything to me — I remember having to tell the four of them that we couldn't live together any more. My eleven-year old daughter said, "Dad, I feel like my heart is breaking." In that moment, mine broke too. I was not prepared for the emotional impact of losing them — I had lost the only thing I was anchored to, the only thing I had been able to invest myself in. I visited them as much as possible, I called them a lot, I did everything I could to make it okay for them and for me, but losing them nearly destroyed me.

Two or three months later, I was sitting alone in my new apartment. Instead of facing my unbelievable anguish at the way my life was turning out, I was sitting in front of the TV, eating a TV dinner, with a bottle of wine on the table. Suddenly, I felt completely repelled by what I was doing. "What the hell have I become?" I practically shouted. I threw away the TV dinner, turned off the TV, dumped out the wine and sat down to figure out what to do about the mess my life had turned into. I sat up almost the whole night trying to think things out.

I assessed my situation: I had made money, I had a lot of "things", I knew how to be successful, but none of that seemed to have any meaning. It certainly was not making me happy. My marriage was over, and I could see that the divorce had really hurt my kids, even though I did everything I could to prevent that. But even my kids and the love I felt for them wasn't enough to give my life purpose, somehow. Since the divorce I had had a couple of girlfriends, but sex and romance didn't touch the feeling I was struggling with, either. I kept asking myself, "This is a life?" What I didn't know at the time was that I was Spiritually starved. I was missing something, something very real, the most important thing there is — which is a connection to the Source of Life, to God, to the Divine. What I did know was that being successful wasn't enough. I knew that I was tormented by the feeling that something was missing, but I didn't know what it was or where to find it.

So I considered the options I was aware of at the time. I could sell my business, fly to Europe with a lady friend, and just float for a while. Maybe that would numb the pain. Or I could really throw myself into my business and build it into an even bigger moneymaker. Then I could afford even more extravagant toys and entertainments, and maybe that would distract me from the feeling that my life was meaningless. Or I could drop out and move up the California coast and try to "discover myself in nature" — pretty unlikely for a guy from New York, but I could try it. Or I could go to a shrink. A number of my friends were already in therapy and I had read quite a bit of Western psychology — Freud, Jung, Carl Rogers, Rollo May, and so on. But nothing I had read or heard from my friends impressed me as a way out of my suffering — my problem seemed bigger than anything a psychiatrist could fix.

Nevertheless, I thought about the different possibilities for hours, developing them in detail in my mind. But when I asked myself, "What would this option or that option do for what I am feeling?" nothing seemed to touch my fundamental feeling of despair. Finally, I decided that there was only one thing that made any sense — I should just check out of life altogether. I thought, "I am here for this life, and it hasn't worked out. There is nothing more that I want to get or do — I already have all the things I thought I wanted and they are definitely not worth the trouble. So why not kill myself? At least it will be over and I won't have to despair about the meaninglessness of my life any longer."

I also remember the philosophy I had at the time: I thought that you come into this life with a kind of innocence, like my kids had. Then as a result of all the things that happen to you, you build up a kind of shell. You get jaded, hard. You lose the innocence, and when that happens, life loses its meaning. Then, when you die, you get the innocence back — everything that built up during your life gets erased, and you can go on to something else. At that time, I didn't believe in reincarnation, so I wasn't thinking that I would go on to another life — I was just hoping that the innocence would be restored and that I could go on to something else, whatever it might be.

So I thought about whether or not to commit suicide for two or three days. I finally decided, feeling completely lucid about it, that I would do it on Saturday morning.

That Thursday, I spent the evening playing with my children. My ex-wife was out, so I let them stay up a little later than usual, then I tucked them in. When they were asleep, I went to the hall closet, got my hunting rifle and shells, and put them in the trunk of my car. I went back into the house to say goodbye to my kids. I rubbed each one of them on the head as they were sleeping, telling them how much I loved them and how much they meant to me. Just as I was finishing up, the phone rang.

I wasn't going to answer it, but I didn't want the kids to wake up, so I picked it up. It was an old acquaintance named Jerry, someone I'd met through one of my businesses. Jerry had experimented with a number of different meditation techniques and new-age Spiritual groups — a year and a half previously he had spent an entire evening teaching me how to relax and breathe and use a mantra while lying on the floor. In those days, I was willing to try everything, so I went along with him, but I basically thought he was nuts.

I asked him where he was. He said he was in Los Angeles. The last time we met he was living in a Yoga community in northern California, so I asked him about that.

"No, no. I got out of that. That's why I'm calling you. I am with this man, this teacher now, and you have got to meet him. I know the two of you will really get along."

I said, "Yeah? What's his name?"

"Franklin Jones," he said. (In the early days of His Work, Adi Da Samraj used the name His parents had given Him.) This sounded like just one more of Jerry's strange and useless trips. I tried to get out of it. "Nobody is named Franklin Jones!" I said. But Jerry insisted, "You should meet him."

I hesitated, saying I had no time. But he finally convinced me that he and I should at least get together to talk about it. So I went down to the address on Melrose Avenue that Jerry gave me where Avatar Adi Da and some of His devotees had set up a tiny bookstore and meditation hall.

It was Friday night — the night that Jerry managed the bookstore and the night before I was planning to kill myself. I had the rifle in my car, ready for the next morning. It seemed a little funny to be spending my last night on earth with this guy I didn't know very well and who I thought was part crackpot, but I had already given up — I had nothing better to do.

Jerry and I were the only ones there the whole night. He showed me around the place. (I remember the first thing I told him was that they needed to stock the shelves with more books. Here I was, about to commit suicide, and I'm still giving business advice!) We sat in the front and talked, but there was also a small empty room at the back of the store, behind a curtain. Jerry told me that that was the place where Adi Da sat in meditation with His students. When I poked my head into the room to take a look, just briefly, I noticed the room had an unusual quality — it seemed to contain a distinct energy, a kind of peace.

Then Jerry started telling me about Adi Da and His point of view. It didn't make much sense to me, but I did get the feeling that Adi Da would understand what I was going through. For the very first time in my life, I began to express to someone my feeling of despair and how empty my life seemed. I remember that vividly. I told Jerry everything about how I was feeling.

Four hours later, Jerry said, "I'm going to close this place up. You should go home. I'll drive you."

I had my own car, so I said, "No, you don't have to do that." Then I blurted out, "I'd like to sleep here, in the meditation hall."

Don't ask me why I said that. I had never slept on a floor in my entire life. I preferred the kind of class and comfort found in places like the Beverly Hills Hilton. It was completely uncharacteristic for me to say that I wanted to spend the night sleeping on a floor. But for some mysterious reason that I couldn't understand at the time, I really wanted to stay there. After some prompting, Jerry let me.

In the morning when I woke up, something had changed in me. It felt as though I had been touched or caressed by some kind of Graceful Presence, like my troubled brow had been smoothed — just by being in that room. I felt a peace in myself from sleeping there, a peace I sorely needed to feel.

It was Saturday morning, but I wasn't thinking about killing myself anymore. I hadn't decided not to do it either — it's just that, for the moment, I was more interested in something else. Jerry had given me a copy of the manuscript of Adi Da's autobiography, The Knee of Listening, and I wanted to read it.

The Knee Of Listening

I browsed the manuscript a bit when I first woke up, then I started to read it in earnest over breakfast, and after that I just kept on going. I spent the whole day reading — and by the time I got to the end of the book, my life had gone through a total reversal!

I don't know if I can express how excited I was by what I was reading. After years of feeling so much despair, after coming to the point of utter hopelessness — now, for the first time, someone was explaining my situation to me in a way that made sense, in a way that lifted me into an entirely new way of looking at things.

For years, people had been telling me that there wasn't any more to life than what I was experiencing — and my own life certainly seemed to be proving that they were right. I kept getting richer, and as I did, I grew more and more desperate, more and more certain that success was not enough. Here, for the first time, was someone who made me feel that, "Yes, there is more to this life! Here it is, right here!"

Without even noticing it, I read past the appointed hour for my suicide. When I finished the book, I immediately started reading it over again — I stayed up all night reading it the second time through. I couldn't put it down. This is what I had been looking for — and it had come to me just in the nick of time!

"Suffering is separation, being separate, limited, a self-exhausting capsule of life-energy," Adi Da said. "Suffering is separation and separativeness. And suffering is the primary fact of individual life. The seeker's 'problem' of life, for all suffering human beings, is how to realize life under the conditions of suffering. How to remain active, 'creative', relatively and at least temporarily fearless, optimistic, and effective?"

This was the question I had been posing to myself over and over for years, which Adi Da had stated more clearly than I could ever have myself. Then, He went on to answer the question that had been tormenting me for so long.

He said that we suffer because we falsely presume that we are separate from the Source of Life, and that the Inherent Nature of that Source is Happiness Itself. He said that everything we do is seeking — a futile attempt to somehow find true Happiness. And He pointed out over and over again that this seeking for Happiness must fail because it does not touch the cause of suffering — our presumption that we are separate. I felt immense relief. No one else had been able to explain what was bothering me, but now it was obvious that I was caught in the cycle of separation, suffering, and seeking that Adi Da was describing.

Adi Da didn't suggest another, better form of seeking. He recommended that His readers understand the presumption of separation which is the cause of seeking. Without this understanding, He explained, we would live as seekers rather than enjoying Happiness, Reality, or God now. How ridiculous! I felt tremendous relief as He described His own insights into this absurd situation.

He said that if we begin to understand the presumption of separation itself — if, with His help, we can observe how that presumption of separation happens, and how it is unnecessary — then our sense of alienation from Happiness would be relieved. If this is done, He said, then a person:

will abide in understanding, and one will not come into conflict with one's moments, one's motives, one's actions, one's reactions. One will abide now, and now, and now. And this alone, not any motive or search or effect of these, will transform the complex of one's living. And that complex will never be one's concern, to transform it or escape it or transcend it, for one lives in understanding and draws Joy even in pleasure, in egoic ignorance, in failure, in suffering, pain, and death. Only because one abides in understanding is one already Free, already liberated from one's life. Therefore, I affirm only understanding and no state or object yet to be attained. It is not a matter of purity first or at last, nor of sanity, nor wealth, well-being, goodness, or vision. All these are the imagery of search, the vanity of external peace. Understanding is the ground of this moment, this event. Therefore, Realize understanding, and enjoy it, for you alone are the one who must live your ends and all the stages of time. The one who understands, who is always already Free, is never touched by the divisions of the mind. And that one alone is standing when all other beings and things have gone to rise or fall.

It was not just that His logic made complete sense to me (which it did — my own experience proved it). It was not just that He explained my suffering to me and even validated the feelings of despair I had been struggling with (which He did, in a way that was powerfully cathartic for me). I was beside myself with excitement because He was describing the very thing I had been hoping for, but without being able to put words to it, without being able to know what it was. He was describing the hub on which my own life and everyone's life is set like the spokes of a great wheel. He was describing the Truth, the Transcendental Reality that we are all part of. He was restoring me to my own Source, to the Heart, the Divine Self. As I read I thought, "This is exactly it!"

Thus, when understanding has most perfectly Realized itself as no-seeking in the heart . . . one is the heart. All the functions of the living being become the heart. The heart becomes the constant locus of all activity. There is no separate one to concentrate in it. Therefore, one who has most perfectly Realized Existence as no-seeking in the heart. . . is Free, Blissful, "creatively" Alive. Thus, that one is not only no-seeking, which is Freedom. That one is eternally Present, Which is Bliss and no-dilemma.

The whole sad and stupid drama of my life over the past years seemed unnecessary. I felt immensely attracted to the alternative that Adi Da was offering. It's hard to describe, but Adi Da's words were more than ordinary words — they had much more energy, much more impact than anything I had ever read before. His insights weren't just ideas — they were alive. They opened me up and changed me. I felt His Wisdom flooding into my life as a kind of welcome, relieving Force. I decided I had to meet Adi Da in person. Suicide would have to wait.

Meeting the Man of Understanding

I immediately phoned Jerry and asked him what I had to do to meet Adi Da. He told me that if I came to an orientation at the bookstore on Monday night, I could "sit" with Adi Da in meditation on Tuesday night. I didn't know anything about "sitting" or meditation, but I was so looking forward to meeting Him I could hardly contain myself.

I went to the Monday night presentation. The person giving the orientation said to me, "You can go further and check Adi Da and His Teaching out, or you can resort to your other alternatives."

It was the perfect thing to say to me. I answered, "I don't have any other alternatives." And that was true!

The orientation itself was brief — only two or three people came — and we were told to return the next night, Tuesday, to sit with Adi Da.

The next day I scrambled to finish work in time to go home, take a shower, and get down to the bookstore. I was going to "sit" with a Spiritual Teacher. It was all so out of the ordinary for me — but I was really interested.

I was there on the dot. I had been asked to return the manuscript of Adi Da's book, so I brought that with me, too. My approach to the event wasn't very "spiritual" — it's just that I was tremendously excited to meet the fellow who had written this book. I had been in publishing a long time and had met many authors, but their books had never impressed me the way that Adi Da's had. What could He be like?

I entered the meditation hall, sat down with my back to the wall, wearing my horn-rimmed reading glasses, and continued to read the manuscript. Adi Da came in and, without saying anything, took His seat at the front of the room, facing the group of twenty or so people who were there that night. He looked straight ahead and then, at times, He also looked around the room, gazing at the space just above our heads. After watching Him for a few minutes, I started reading the manuscript again.

Looking back at it, I can see that this was not the most sensitive thing to do, but I knew nothing about meditation or how to relate to a Guru. The whole situation was new to me and I felt a little awkward, so I returned to what was most familiar to me — reading. After a few minutes, though, I looked up at Him again. He looked directly at me. I felt a Force emanating from Him — it was peaceful and yet energetic, pleasant but not overwhelming — and I also felt a kind of connection to Him. But I still felt somewhat awkward, so I went back to reading the manuscript again.

After a few minutes more, I looked up at Him again. This time, He was staring right at me. I began to feel a very pleasant feeling in the center of my heart. I was very warm. Even though I couldn't tell what it was, I could tell that something out of the ordinary was going on here. So I put the manuscript down and sat up straight in a meditation posture, like everyone else in the room. It seemed important to be respectful of the process that was taking place, whatever it was, and to cooperate with whatever Adi Da was doing. From that point on, I simply looked at Him.

When the meditation was over, He left the room. I got up and followed Him to a small office in the back. He was sitting in the chair at His desk when I walked in, and it was clear to me that He was not in an ordinary state of awareness. I didn't know anything about Spiritual experience at the time, but I could tell that He was in a kind of Swoon, or Bliss-State. He seemed to be "coming down" from that Swoon to a more ordinary, "functional" awareness, so I walked right over to where He was sitting, put out my hand, and said, "My name is Neil Panico, Franklin. I am really glad to meet You."

He told me to sit down, which I did. Then He turned to me and said, "What's happening?"

I was floored. All my life I had used that very phrase millions of times with my friends, with people I met in business, with my kids — all the time. It was the most familiar thing He could have said to me. I found myself blurting out to Him, "I don't know, man, I can't relate to anything or anybody anymore."

I didn't think about it when I said it; I didn't mean to lay my problems on Him — it was spontaneous, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to tell Him my darkest secret. Immediately, He reached over and hugged me. I was a little taken aback at first, but He was so natural in the way He assumed an intimacy with me.

As He held me in this big bear-hug, and as I relaxed into it, I felt the most wonderful, nourishing feeling of coming home, of coming to rest. I felt tremendous, instantaneous relief from the incredible torment that I had been carrying around — just as I had when I read His book, but even more so. The warmth and the beauty of the feeling He communicated through that hug was fantastic — and it was such a long hug. By the time He let me go, my terrible feeling of emptiness and despair was gone. My suffering of so many years was over. He had removed it.

He said, "What do you do?"

I told him what I did for a living.

Then He asked me, "Why don't you come around a little bit?"

"Yeah, I'll definitely be around."

The next day I took the rifle back to my house. I thought, "I don't know what this is about, but I've got to check it out." I started going to the bookstore and hanging out writh Adi Da in the back room.

We had the most wonderful times in the tiny back room of that little Los Angeles storefront — there were always at least a handful of people there with Him, working, talking, laughing. There was always a lot of laughter — He was so full of humor! Sometimes, He would give talks, spontaneously. And then, everything would grow quiet and He would go into meditation. The room would fill up with the incredible feeling of His Love and Fullness, His Freedom, His Humor, His Peace. We would sit around Him, basking in that Feeling, wanting nothing more than to be with Him.

A Greater Vision

Since that very first meeting with Avatar Adi Da, I have never suffered so horribly again. I have never felt that kind of terrible Spiritual despair again, not for a moment. I am telling you the absolute truth. My horrible suffering was taken away forever, absorbed by my Guru. But that was not the end of it. No, I had to enter into the process of becoming responsible for what He had shown me. I had to begin to live differently.

A few weeks later, I had a dream that Adi Da was standing by my bed as I slept. He leaned over me and told me, "Open your eyes so that you can really see." And as He did, I felt His powerful Energy, the characteristic feeling of Fullness and Love that always emanated from Him, filling me up. The dream was so vivid, so real—it seemed to me as though He was literally in my room with me, and I knew He wasn't just telling me to wake up from my night's sleep. He was calling me to wake up in the Spiritual sense.

When I woke up a few moments later, the most unusual thing had happened—I couldn't open my eyes at all. An unusually heavy crust had formed on my eyelids, and they were sealed shut. I groped my way to the bathroom and washed my eyes until I could open them again. The whole thing blew my mind—I had never experienced anything like it.

Later, when I told Adi Da about what had happened and how much it had amazed me, I got the distinct sense that He already knew about it. I felt that, because I had no background in relating to a Guru and no knowledge about Spiritual experience, He had done something very tangible, something very physical to let me know that He was going to help me see things differently. It was a very significant event for me—I felt it was the opening of my eyes to what Adi Da is about and what my involvement in the Way of Adidam would be. It was a kind of starting point.

A few days later, I had another unusual experience. It was evening, and I was sitting with Adi Da in meditation. He was sitting in His chair at the front of the room facing His devotees; I was sitting cross-legged on the floor in a group of about thirty people. Suddenly, it was as if a laser beam hit me—I felt an incredible sensation in my chest, as if my heart had been a dim lightbulb and now, suddenly, it was a bright, blazing star! The sensation was pure bliss—there is no other word to describe it—and it overtook me totally. It was a feeling unlike anything I had ever experienced or even dreamed was possible. I looked up at Adi Da with a huge, beaming grin—and He was looking right at me with such a loving smile. It felt as though He were saying to me, "There really is something else going on here." I felt so much love for Him in that moment.

* * *

In those early months of my relationship to Him, He helped me in so many ways to realize that there is more to life than meets the eye, that there is much more to existence than I knew anything about. Because of my particular background, I knew a lot about life from a typical Western point of view—I had already been through all kinds of life changes, I had had a family and a divorce, I had had successful businesses, I had tried the good life and I knew a fair bit about the pleasures of literature and of food and drink and drugs and sex. But it wasn't until I met Adi Da, it wasn't until I read that first book, that I could feel that there is so much more than all of that.

Before I met Him, all the talk I ever heard about God seemed empty, meaningless. But Adi Da made God real to me. He made the Divine Dimension of existence seem obvious, powerful, interesting—even compelling. But He didn't show me this once and leave it at that. No, He has helped me to feel—over and over again during the decades that I have been His devotee—that God is real, that Divine Love is real, that there is such a thing as a Self-Existing Consciousness that we are all part of. He is an absolute Genius at making that Spiritual Reality obvious.

Here, He gives two simple exercises that can help you get in touch with that Greater Dimension:

Set aside for a moment all of your knowledge about the universe and all your religious or scientific presumptions about how it all developed to this point in time. Simply "consider" this: why does anyone or anything exist at all? How does the existence of anything and everything come about as an accident? Where did that accident occur? Within what is it all occurring? Where is space? I cannot "consider" the very existence of anything and everything without developing a thrill in my back and head, so that it feels as if my hair is about to stand on end. You do not know what even a single thing is, or why it is, or where it is, or when it is, or how it came to be. You are confronted by an irreducible Mystery, and that Mystery is profound. If you will truly "consider", even for a moment, the paradox of the existence of anything whatsoever, you will feel intuitively in touch with the Mystery that is Reality Itself. The mind falls away in that moment, and even though you will not have come up with any "knowing" explanations for the world, you will enjoy a tacit sense of Communion with the Living Reality of the world and of your own mind and body. * * * As a second exercise, examine yourself for a moment and feel any and all forms of bodily contraction, emotional reactivity, and mental concern that possess you. If you will do this deeply and truly, even for a moment, you will become aware of your chronic state. You are, except in the attitude of total psycho-physical Communion with the Living Divine Reality, in a chronic state of reactive contraction or tension, simultaneously in mind, emotion, and body. If you can observe and feel this for a moment, you will sense how it is all a single gesture—a withdrawal or contraction from release into the condition of unqualified relationship. And once this becomes clear, on the basis of a moment of insight, you will be able to relax and feel, beyond thought and reactive emotion and bodily tension, into a sense of self-releasing intimacy with all the conditions of the world. And that release will establish you, at least for a moment, in the wordless experiential sense of Communion with the Source of Life. * * * These two "considerations", or exercises, are a moment's cure for too much knowledge about things and too much egoically "self-possessed" reacting to things. In the moment in which you stand free of the self-defining contractions of mere knowledge and mere reaction to experience, you stand in direct experiential intuition of the Divine Mystery, or Living Reality, That is the Truth of the world, and That is the very and eternal Urge to religious consciousness and the more advanced evolution of Man. Truly, there is only One Living Divine Reality or Person— who Is Absolute, All Love-Bliss. That is the Condition to be Realized. Liberation is to Realize that there is nothing but Divine Being Itself, Who is All That is, the Living One. Everything is That One, and Liberation is to Awaken to the point of inherence in That One. To surrender into That One to the point of most perfect Ecstasy is Divine Enlightenment. This is the fundamental Understanding, the secret of Freedom, Happiness, Pleasure, Marvel, Surrender, Love, and Life—because God is the Very Essence or Substance of Freedom, Happiness, Pleasure, Marvel, Surrender, Love, and Life. I have "considered" this Truth all My life, and it has thrown Me into ecstasy. When I was a young boy I was possessed of a Vision, or Intuition, of the manifested universe as a kind of atomic or molecular structure—the planets and stars being much the same as the atoms or molecules we presume to be the structural basis of our own bodies. It was clear to Me that this was exactly the case, and that the universe of worlds was indeed a fraction of the Manifested Body of God, or the Great Personality Who was the truly Loving, Existing, and Blissful One. This "consideration" coincided with a greatly Awakened sense of Bliss whenever I contemplated the extent of its Mystery. I saw that all of this world and the fearful desire to persist in it was only a superficial and changing and even terrible illusion, and that Happiness was only to be Realized in submission to the Love-Blissful Intuition of the Divine Personality with which all are ultimately Identical and with which you are, even in your present form, always in Communion. Truly, that Vision of My early childhood has not changed, but it has only been confirmed and magnified by every stage of My Lifetime of Spiritual Sacrifice, which was itself motivated by the direct and positive Intuition of God granted to Me at birth. I have realized that I inhere in the One Who lives Me. I am the One Who is actually Living this body, Who is actually Conscious of this mind and this place. The True Condition is tacitly and completely obvious to me. That is Who I Am. It must likewise become so obvious to you. You must inhere in the same One. It is only when God, or the Reality of the Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Divine Being, cannot be denied or even conventionally affirmed but only tacitly presumed (because It is obvious, no matter what is arising as experience) that you abide already or priorly Free in God-Communion. And only such tacit God-Communion, Realized moment to moment, provides the creative basis for truly human growth, higher transformation, and ultimate transcendence. That is why I Offer you the Way of Adidam. And when you respond to Me, your life takes this God-Realizing course.

The Way of Adidam is a Relationship, not a Technique

The Way of Adidam can be described in many ways, but for me it always comes down to its essence: the Way of Adidam is the relationship with Adi Da. It is a Spiritual relationship, not an ordinary human relationship, and that Spiritual relationship makes possible Spiritual Realization that no meditation technique or system of beliefs can enable.

In the early months of my relationship to Adi Da, after I became His devotee, I started to teach a course on The Knee Of Listening, my favorite book (and, at the time, Adi Da's only published book). I consider myself extremely fortunate—Adi Da spent many, many hours helping me prepare for the course, going over each paragraph in the book and explaining in more detail what He meant, what the import of the book was. I told Him then that it was clear to me that the brilliant process of understanding that He describes in those pages (and in the more than fifty books He has published in the years since) can only come alive when you are established in that Spiritual relationship with Him. It is through that relationship that Adi Da Works a transformation in you that awakens real understanding, and that affects every area of your life.

How does that relationship work? In some ways, it is very much like meeting someone and falling in love—you encounter Adi Da, you are attracted by what He has to say or something about Him strikes a chord in you, you want to spend more and more time with Him, reading His books, thinking about Him, applying what He has said to your life; you are being affected by Him. You notice, as all this happens, that you are getting happier, saner, freer. You are more capable of learning from crisis and difficulty, more intelligent about how you approach life, more certain of the Divine Process that He embodies and that we are all part of—you are being drawn into the Spiritual relationship with Him, and His Grace is starting to influence you in all kinds of ways.

As with every other serious relationship, at some point you are ready to commit yourself—that is when you formally become His devotee. Then the Way of Adidam really begins for you.

What does the Way of Adidam involve? It involves your whole life. You take on practices that orient everything you do to the Realization of Truth—how you spend your time, how you eat, how you meditate, how you relate to others, how you work, how you understand yourself, everything. But even though the Way of Adidam is complex (because it touches every single aspect of life and Spiritual growth), at the same time it is extremely simple. Fundamentally, it is about living your relationship to Adi Da, exercising it, using it as the great advantage that it is. And because Adi Da has Realized the Divine Unity That knows no separation, the Oneness That underlies every one and every thing, you can always contact Him. He is Spiritually available to you in a way that can never be limited by geographical distance or by time or by any other temporal factor. Adi Da has gone to great lengths to describe how everyone, no matter who they are or where they live, can live a Spiritual relationship to Him—anywhere, at any time.

In my own case, after that first meeting with Him, I became His devotee and took up the practices of the Way of Adidam. Instantly, and more and more over time, my relationship to Adi Da opened my eyes to a very different reality than the one I lived in before I met Him. He showed me that the Spiritual process is real, and that Divine Grace is real. He has helped me to examine every assumption I ever made about who I am and what the purpose of my life is, about what the universe is and what God is—and He has helped me to shed my limited point of view and grow in my ability to rest in the Source, in God, and to allow His Grace to open me up and transform me.

He also showed me that you do go through very real changes as your relationship to Him begins and as it develops. As you practice the Way of Adidam, you go through changes in your way of thinking, changes in your perception of things, changes in the literal chemistry of your body.

For example, once, about seven months after I met Him, I went on a trip to Mexico with Adi Da. We were there for two weeks, just the two of us. On about the third day of our trip, I got very sick. Adi Da decided to send for a doctor because I was really in bad shape, lying in bed with a high fever. The doctor told me I had "Montezuma's Revenge", a form of dysentery. I took the pills the doctor prescribed for me—and I got much worse! I became so ill that I could hardly move.

Adi Da would sit beside me and feed me soup with a spoon. He also tucked me in bed. After about four of five hours of this intense fever and sweating and delirium, He began to read out loud to me—He read a passage about Spiritual practice from an ancient Tibetan text that He had brought with Him. In this text, there is a detailed description of what can occur in the devotee when he or she meets the Spiritual Master—the book actually listed physical changes and the kinds of purifying episodes that the body of the devotee might go through. As Adi Da read these symptoms to me, I realized that this book gave a perfect, exact diagnosis of my ailment. Each of my symptoms was elaborated, literally word for word, in this ancient text! Adi Da finished reading, closed the book, and said, "So I didn't want you to think it was only Montezuma's Revenge!"

* * *

Since I had absolutely no experience with having a Guru or a Spiritual practice before I met Him, I had a lot to learn. In fact, the learning curve was pretty steep in those early months! Basically, I had to learn what an unbelievably powerful and important impact Adi Da could have on my life if I would let Him. I saw that if I cooperated with Him by practicing His Way of Adidam, changes would take place in me that were far, far greater than I could ever bring about on my own.

I also saw that He would literally give me every kind of Spiritual help and guidance I ever needed. Observing all this, I understood that the relationship to Him is the most valuable thing there is. I felt so much love and respect for Him, and I knew that He was the key to all the changes I had been through. He was the Source of the Spiritual Happiness I felt flooding my life. I cannot begin to describe how much that meant to me. Because of this, it didn't seem right to me to keep calling Him "Franklin". It was clear to me that He is not an ordinary man, so I spontaneously started calling Him "Guru". ("Guru" is a Sanskrit word from the religious and Spiritual traditions of India meaning "the one who leads you from darkness to the light". And that is exactly what I felt Adi Da was doing for me.)

When I called Him "Guru", it sounded funny sometimes, because I used it in my New-York-street-talk way of speaking, but I meant it from the heart. It was only because of Him that I was even interested in religious life at all, and knowing that helped me to understand why having a true Guru is so necessary.

DEVOTEE: In Your Teaching, You tell us that God is always already here. If that is so, then why is the Guru necessary? ADI DA: Because you do not see it. You do not know God. You think you are someplace and God is someplace else. DEVOTEE: You actually make us see? ADI DA: It is absolutely impossible to believe that there is only God, to assume it, to think it, to gather it. You cannot, through effort, realize your non-separation from God. In My Company, you begin to intuit the Dimension in which you really exist. But without My Help, you perceive this world with unconsciousness, without any idea whatsoever of what your true Condition is. So I work to produce a crisis in consciousness in which you break away from your identification with the limited conditions that are arising, and begin to fall in on your true Nature. And by that process you begin to intuit and then cognize where you really are. So I do not operate by giving you a method to realize oneness with God. That is a hopeless task. A process must be created wherein the Divine can enact Oneness with you. That is why I offer you a relationship—not merely a technique. And that is how the principle of your relationship to Me is different from the conventional approach to Spiritual life. In the usual approach to Spiritual life, you begin separate, or at least considering yourself to be separate, or un-Enlightened, and you strategically work to realize oneness, identity, union. You essentially do this by methodically duplicating the experiential path whereby some other individual realized such oneness, or felt he or she did, or intuited something about it. All the paths generated in the traditions are essentially means for duplicating the experience of some extraordinary person who claimed to have realized the Divine by that very path of experience. But in the Way of Adidam this dilemma, this search for union, is undone from the beginning. The Great Process occurs when the Divine Intervenes, Appears, Incarnates, Blesses, Teaches the understanding and transcendence of the self-contraction so that the direct Divine Blessing may be received. This is what I do. That is why I am here. I am here for this Great Spiritual Process and Purpose, which requires the transcendence of the self-contraction from the beginning, not just at the end. If transcendence of the self-contraction occurs only at the end of the Spiritual process, then the search is justified. But if you are to Realize the Divine, the Divine must kiss you, embrace you, take you over, vanish your illusion of separate self. The traditional Yogas, or forms of practice, whatever the tradition in which they may appear, are about returning to God, finding God again. The practice in My Company is about receiving God, knowing God, from the beginning. Therefore, a new Condition has been established from the beginning of the Way of Adidam. That Condition is in itself without dilemma, without any separation to begin with. The whole affair of this relationship to me and the apparent transformation of an individual is an immensely complex and paradoxical business, because I appear in human form and so do you, but there is only God from the beginning. There are many things that can be said about this process. The usual Spiritual seeker, who is motivated by his dilemma, assumes that he or she has started out to find God, or realize the Truth, or get free, or whatever, and he or she is going to do certain things to bring that about, and eventually he or she is going to get there. This is absolutely false. There is nothing anybody can do to get free. Nothing any human being has ever done has ever liberated him or her or anybody else. Liberation is God's business. I am here to Liberate My devotees.

The Power of Attraction

How does Adi Da liberate His devotees? To put it as succinctly as possible, He attracts you beyond yourself to feel and know the Divine Reality. After I met Adi Da, I started reading some of those Eastern books I used to carry in my bookstore. They used all kinds of metaphors to describe how this works—they say that devotees are drawn to the Guru like iron filings to a magnet, like rivers flowing to the ocean, like moths to a flame. In other words, the force of attraction that the Guru holds for the devotee is both natural and extremely powerful.

For example, after I sat with Adi Da for the first time, I found that all I wanted to do was be with Him. I remember once on my way to a very important appointment, I said to myself, "Hey, I don't want to do this. I want to go and see the Guru." I just veered off the freeway, jumped into a telephone booth, canceled the appointment, and went down to see Him. I had been so involved with money and so forth, and here, suddenly, I didn't care about any of it. I just wanted to be around the Guru.

Adi Da was completely different from anyone I had ever met. Being around Him literally put me in touch with my True Being. Sometimes He did specific things that helped me feel that Greater Reality—He would say or do something that was obviously intended to wake me up. But mostly, I was attracted to Him because of what He is. Even without doing anything special, He was so obviously free, so present, so perfect in how He related to every person, every moment, so full of Divine Love and life and humor. Without doing anything at all, He radiated the most impressive strength of utter self-transcendence—you could feel that He was free of all limitations, all problems, that He was rested in a way that is utterly beyond this world or any other world, and yet you could feel such a potent force of Love emanating from Him. It was clear that His transcendence didn't remove Him from life—it made Him more capable of life, more committed to loving and serving others, than anyone I had ever met. What could be more attractive? All I wanted to do was to feel that feeling more myself, to be around Him, to let go of all my egoic baggage and be in that freedom with Him.

* * *

Years later, I had the most potent glimpse of His State that I have had yet. I was sitting in meditation with a group of fellow devotees, waiting for Adi Da to arrive. As soon I as I heard His footsteps approaching, I started falling into a diffuse, blissful state. As soon as He opened the door, I was "gone", dissolved in His formless, unqualified Love and Bliss, like a salt doll would be in the ocean.

I had no sense of myself as "Aniello", no awareness of the body or the room, no sense of time or space. This wasn't frightening or disorienting at all—it was blissful, fantastic. I wasn't subject to the discomforts of the body, or its limited perceptions, or its mortality. I was still aware—in fact, "I" seemed to be Consciouness only, a universal Consciousness that was not separate from anyone or anything. I had the most profound sense of intimacy with Adi Da—intimacy to the point of complete non-separation, as though we were One Seamless, Feeling Being. And that intimacy wasn't just about the two of us—it included absolutely everything; it was infinite and eternal. It was terrific—I wasn't bound by anything and I didn't need to seek for anything, because I was already enjoying perfect Fullness. And that Fullness was Him—I could feel more clearly than anything else I have ever felt that He is the Divine Identity or True Condition that is the True Heart of everyone and everything. I have never experienced anything more powerful.

That is why, to me, Adi Da is the sublime Agent of God. He is God, the Truth, Reality-As-It-Is before we mess it up by presuming that we are separate, limited, dying. And He is here to draw everyone to Realize that same Truth, that same eternal Happiness, which can be Realized here and now, by His Grace.

Once, in 1973, I went to talk to some of His early devotees living in a different city. They asked me, "What do you think He is?" And I said, "I think He is God." There was a period of silence. I was surprised that I even said it. I had never thought of it that way before, but that is exactly how I felt. And all the years with Him have only confirmed that feeling to me more and more.

How can I describe it to you? I can tell you that He is Pure Love, because that is how I experience Him, but how can I explain that? I remember in 1973, not long after I had come to Him, I was alone with Him one night and I said, "I don't like to use the word "love", because it sounds like bullshit."

He corrected me, "No, when it is true, love is never bullshit." And I felt His Love in that moment penetrating my cool, superficial attitude, restoring me to genuine feeling in that very moment. And, true to His word, I have never seen Adi Da do anything but demonstrate Love. When you get to the root of the matter, that is what He is offering you, me, everyone—a love-relationship, a Spiritual love-relationship. And I have to tell you the truth—I have never loved anything or anybody as much as I love Him.

That is not to say I haven't tussled with Him. I have, and I still do. I am no saint, and true religious and Spiritual transformation is not an easy, overnight process. But even in my worst moments, when the tests of life and the trial of growth seemed unbearably difficult, He has always been there for me, in the most perfect and Spiritual sense. And that has made all the difference. I have found that you can always contact Him, you can always call upon that relationship. Because He is Love. And His Love is the most real and attractive thing there is.

ADI DA: Attraction commands attention. If a man walks into a room and notices the most beautiful woman there standing over in a corner, he does not have to force himself to turn from the others to look at her. Likewise, for women, there is no effort involved in discovering the most attractive man in a room. You know how easy it is to give your attention to somebody you are in love with. That is how easy it is to enter into Divine Communion with Me. There is no effort in giving your attention to that which is itself Ultimate Fulfillment, Inherently Perfect, More than Wonderful, Beautiful, Eternal, Divine. Therefore, what is supremely attractive in the manifest universe is the God-Man. All beings, male or female, must become attracted, distracted by That One. That is the ultimate means, the supreme means, the supreme Yoga. It is for this reason, you see, that I have appeared in manifested Form, in the likeness of those who are to be drawn out of bondage. Those who are distracted by Me are not merely distracted by My physical Form. My physical Form is simply an Agent for their attention. What they are distracted by is the Divine Presence, the Divine Condition, and they enter into Communion with That, into Union with That, into Unity with That, through the real process of the Way of Adidam. I am your advantage, not because I Give you a process that you can apply to yourself successfully if you bear down and give it enough effort—I do not—but because I Offer you a relationship with Me. I do not merely Instruct you and leave you on your own to fulfill My Instruction. I function as an Agent of Liberation for My devotees, those who submit to Me in love. I Awaken My devotees with the Heart-Power of the Divine Person. The Divine Influence I transmit makes the practice of Spiritual life in My Company into something altogether different from the self-generated, ego-based mechanics of all the conventional Spiritual techniques. I do not mechanically enlighten you, or give you something to do to enlighten yourself. I assume your Divine Enlightenment. I absorb you. I am you to begin with, and I consciously assume your Divine State in every function in which you appear. I assume it in your very cells and literally, actively Live you. I literally meditate you. I am in a position to do so, since I am you. The mystery of that process is how this kind of Spiritual life is generated and fulfilled. It is fulfilled from the beginning. My relationship to you is perfect. My devotee, a piece at a time, begins to become aware of the perfection I have already generated in his or her case. Fundamentally, that is all I do. I enter into relationship with living beings in that spirit, and assume the Divine in them, and live all their functions, so that complex things begin to occur. Complex things begin to occur always as a result of very simple things. Look at all the complex things that occur when you drink a glass of water! It is a very complex affair, but that act itself is very simple. The manifestation appears complex, but the condition itself is simple. If you turn a light on in a room, it falls on everyone, on everything. Basically, I do something very simple, but the evidence of that is as complex as you are, as complex as the number of places and qualities and functions in which you read your existence.

Becoming Responsible For Love

Adi Da radiates His Divinely Enlightened Condition to others all the time. When you are around Him, when you read His books, when you spend time with His devotees, you feel His "Brightness" shining on you, lighting you up, energizing you, clarifying you in all kinds of ways, just as He describes. But you cannot just be a robot or a passive character, sitting near Him like a schlump and hope to have Divine Enlightenment fall on your head. The Way of Adidam is a participatory process. In other words, you not only receive, you must also give in full measure. You must actually apply His Wisdom in your life. You must understand your limitations and go beyond them. That is part of what makes the Way of Adidam so interesting and so challenging.

In my own case, after I became His devotee, I started to observe the habits I had developed all my life, habits I had never really inspected before. I began to observe what Adi Da calls "the self-contraction"—the self-contraction being my own reaction to the wounds and tests of life: my own reaction to having been born in a world where things can hurt and where we die; my presumption of being a separate, self-enclosed being instead of remaining open, vulnerable, alive to the inherent Unity of things. With Adi Da's help, I began to see that, even though life is difficult, I don't have to compound the difficulty by adding the self-contraction to it. I started to see that I was never going to be really and truly Happy unless I released my active commitment to the self-contraction, to un-Happiness.

One time in 1978, for example, I was having a hard time with my girlfriend. Adi Da had invited us to His house—there must have been about a hundred people there all together, talking and laughing with one another, listening as much as they could to Adi Da while He spoke with those close to Him, and in general being very animated and excited about spending this time with Him. This particular night, though, I was arguing with my intimate friend.

I didn't think it was right to do that in front of Adi Da, so I took her to the back of the room. When we got there, she said something critical to me and I blew up at her, swearing at her and telling her to get lost. I am from a volatile Italian family and I can get pretty angry, as I did on this occasion.Even though I tried to keep my voice down so that I wouldn't disturb Him, Adi Da stopped talking and zeroed in on me from across the room.

"Aniello!" He shouted over the party noise.

Still in the huff of my anger, I answered back, "What?!" All of a sudden, everything got very quiet.

"Did you see what you just did?"

His question completely stopped me. It turned me around.

"Yeah, I did."

"You saw what you just did?"

"Yeah."

"What did you do?"

"I totally contracted. I reacted and withdrew and then I lashed back with my anger."

"You actually saw that?"

"Yeah."

"Great. Never do that again."

I couldn't believe He meant it. I said, "Do You really mean never do that again?" My question was part-joke, part-serious.

"Yes!" He bantered back humorously, "You saw it!"

"You really mean it? Never again?"

He was calling me to take responsibility for what I had seen, but I was still trying to jive my way out of it. I bargained, "Well, there are all kinds of mechanisms, all kinds of ways that I contract and withdraw."

But He did not relent. He said, "But you saw what you do."

I had to admit it, "Yes, I did."

It was true—as soon as He first interrupted me, I knew what I was up to and I could release it. I dropped my anger on the spot. For an angry Italian like me, that was a big deal. I would never have been able to do it without His help.

I wish I could tell you that I never expressed anger irresponsibly again, but the truth is that I have had to go through a process of growth and understanding relative to my anger (and all the other ways I enact the self-contraction) over many years. But I can tell you this—I am more responsible for my anger (and my un-Happiness in general) than I was in those early days, and I am very, very grateful for that.

* * *

Over the years, it has become more and more obvious to me that, without help, you cannot observe all the limits that you tend to place on Happiness. You need the Guru's Help, but you also need the help of like-minded people. You need the help of fellow devotees. That is why living in community is another important aspect of the Way of Adidam—all of Adi Da's devotees cooperate to support that process of inspection and change in one another.

Dealing with real life-situations and actual relationships with others means that your religious practice has got to be more than philosophy. You have to actually put it to the test and really live it. For me, living and practicing the Way of Adidam with others has certainly been a source of many lessons about the self-contraction.

Years ago, I was in a meeting with some other devotees and I said some unkind things to one of the men there, a friend of mine. What I said in the meeting was true. It was even the purpose of this particular meeting to bring these hard truths to this man. It was clear to all his friends that he needed to see these things about himself, so that he could release them and move on. But my own motives weren't all that pure, and instead of serving my friend, I gave him a hard time.

After the group was over, both of us were invited over to Adi Da's house. While we were there, I started feeling bad about what I had done. Even though what I said was true, I had said it in a way that had caused this man a lot of pain. I had really hurt somebody and I knew it.

There were a number of us there that day, sitting in the main room of Adi Da's house, conversing with Him and listening to Him talk. Usually, in those situations, I am pretty gregarious, but on this day I was quiet. I could tell my friend was hurt and I was starting to feel worse and worse about it. Generally, if I withdrew from my usual lively participation in the conversation, Adi Da would know that I was reacting to something and He would ask me, usually in some humorous way, to drop what I was reacting to and participate again. But on this day, He just let me stew.

Hours went by, and I was a total wreck. I had already apologized to my friend, but I still felt bad about what I had done. Suddenly, although I don't know what triggered it, I crossed over. As I was sitting there with my Guru and my friends, I felt an immense wave of genuine love and compassion for the man I had hurt. I felt his struggle and his pain. It wasn't any different than my own struggle and pain. I felt compassion for us both. The principle of separation wasn't operative any more—he wasn't the injured party and I wasn't the guilty party. We were both part of the same process. I felt humbled, relieved, and, above all, I felt a most purifying, cleansing force of love. Without having to do anything more about it, I felt restored in my relationship to my friend, and I felt more deeply open to everyone in the room. In that moment, out of the blue, Adi Da reached over to me, grabbed my head, gave me a big kiss, and said, "I love you."

At first I was surprised and even disoriented, but then I realized that He was acknowledging what I had understood. He was confirming the certainty in me that regret is a superficial emotion and that true remorse is deeper than that. True remorse washes away the self-contraction and the sense of separation. True remorse is a purifying force that restores you to relationship, to non-separation, to love. I had seen the destructiveness of my own un-love, and I had seen the power of what true remorse can achieve. And my Guru, by giving me the space to suffer my own activity and by so dramatically responding to my change of heart when it took place, had supported and confirmed that very process in me.

Over the years, Adi Da has helped me to examine so many of the different ways that my self-contraction manifests—all my habits of un-Happiness, from self-indulgence, vanity, anger, and sarcasm to competitiveness and invulnerability, just to name a few. And each time that my commitment to un-Happiness becomes obvious and I discipline it in the way that Adi Da recommends, it disintegrates over time. Why would I want to do that anymore? Why would I need to do that anymore? Adi Da has shown me that there is a much Greater Reality, a Great and Mysterious Enjoyment that you can "locate" when you let go of the self-contraction.

ADI DA: You must lose face in relation to the Truth. It is quite a different thing from being caught nude in the subway. You lose face by exposing yourself absolutely to God, to the Guru, to your own Nature, by becoming known. Becoming enthusiastic in the Guru's Company is very difficult. Becoming full of love and service without self-concern is immensely difficult in the Guru's Company. People do not want to do that because they interpret the Guru in human terms. They think of the Guru as another human individual, and as soon as that occurs in the mind the conflicts that you ordinarily live with human individuals arise and your separation from the Guru is sealed. But you must see the strategies that are arising in you always and see how they are wedded to the principle of unconsciousness, of conflict, of dilemma. You must see how they are always creating that, and when you see that you will become available to the relationship to the Guru.

* * *

In the early days of my relationship to Him, Adi Da played pool with me pretty frequently—and He always used those occasions to Teach me a thing or two about myself and my relationship to Him!

Since I spent so much time in pool halls in New York when I was growing up, I thought I was a pretty good pool shooter. Adi Da hadn't learned to play pool like I did when He was young—His background was nothing like mine. So, when we played pool, I always tried to show Him the respect I felt He should have as my Guru. I hedged my shots a little bit so that I wouldn't beat Him, and I would set shots up for Him, and so forth. I felt it was only right, even only fair, since He obviously wasn't raised in the streets and the pool halls, like I was.

But one time He just played one hell of a game. I started really bearing down and playing my best game, actually trying to beat Him. This particular game went on for quite some time, but finally He beat me fair and square. When He won, He slammed His stick down on the table, turned to me, and said, "Screw you, Aniello!"

I knew exactly what He was talking about. All this time, I had been the macho guy, acting superior, even condescending to Him in my macho, New-York, Mr. Cool-asshole routine. I had been trying to beat Him in another way, just as real but not as obvious—at least not to me. It was a great lesson about how I related to him as an ordinary man and as someone to compete with, rather than as my Guru, someone to approach with genuine respect and humility.

That kind of competition between men is destructive. It kills feeling, vulnerability, cooperation. And it makes Spiritual surrender and the reception of Grace impossible—how can you surrender to a Guru you are competing with? How can you receive Grace when you are in a battle with the Source?

This tendency to compete is something I have had to deal with in my relationships to all my men friends—and here I was, playing it out with the God-Man. When I finally was able to see it, and to feel how painfully wrong it was in my relationship to Him, I was so grateful to let it go. But the lesson didn't stop there.

One night, a couple of years later, Adi Da turned to me and said, "Aniello, why don't you tell us about your relationship to your father?" I had already told Him a lot about my childhood, so I knew that this was going to be more than just a story-telling occasion. I knew He was going to "get into it" with me. In addition, there were about a hundred people in the room, and I wasn't completely comfortable about having this large an audience while my emotional history was being intimately inspected. I shivered as two hundred eyes turned toward me.

But on a more fundamental level, I trust Adi Da absolutely. Sometimes His tests are difficult, but I wanted Him to do His Work with me. So I told Him again about my father.

My father was a gregarious man, who had a generous, loving, sociable side to him. But he also had a violent and angry side—he beat my mother, and even though he never hit me I felt that he abused me emotionally. I grew up feeling torn—I loved him and I hated him. While I was describing all this, Adi Da asked me questions—asking me to describe specific incidents in detail, what my feelings at the time were, and so on.

His conversation with me artfully exposed my anger at my father. I had tried to heal my relationship with my father over the years—once we sat down and, over a bottle of brandy, talked out our conflicts and our feelings about one another. But even though we had worked through things to a very real degree, I still harbored a lot of hurt. You could hear it in my voice as I talked about him now with my Guru. Adi Da helped me to get down to some core emotions that were still coloring my life.

At some point in my description, Adi Da asked me, "How old are you now?"

"Forty." I answered.

"You are forty years old! When are you going to stop blaming your father? He just did what he did in his time. He didn't know any better. He obviously loved you the way he knew how, and you obviously love him. How can you keep blaming your father?"

And I said, "Right." I didn't feel chastized by Adi Da for feeling something wrong or for being immature. In fact, I felt quite the opposite. I felt His Love in that moment, and His demand to finally grow up, and I felt Grace helping me to let go of the pain I had been hanging on to. (And, looking back, I can say that I have never blamed my father since.)

But the purification wasn't an easy one. I felt as though I had been turned inside out and all my guts were exposed. Now I wasn't angry at my father, but I got angry at my Guru instead. I was angry with Him for exposing me at such a deep emotional level, and in front of so many people. After the conversation about my relationship with my father was over, I got quiet and the conversation went on to other people, other topics.

After about an hour, Adi Da suggested that we all go down to the hot mineral baths that were on the Sanctuary property where He was living at that time. We all crowded into the largest bath—it was the size of a swimming pool—and I purposely stayed on the opposite end from Adi Da. I was angry and I was avoiding Him. But He wasn't going to leave it at that—after a while, He suggested, "Aniello, why don't you lead us in a chant?"

We often chanted to Him, as a way of expressing our love and devotion to Him. That had to be the last thing in the world that I wanted to do at that particular moment, so I didn't respond. He persisted, "Why don't you lead us in Om Nama Shivaya?" He knew it was my favorite—an ancient Indian devotional chant. So I sang at the top of my lungs for an incredibly long time. Even though I could feel the anger being gradually released as I sang, I still wouldn't give in completely.

Finally, Adi Da drifted over to me in the water. By that time, there were tears in my eyes—I had started to feel this whole ordeal in the context of my devotion to Him, how much I love Him, and how He was doing it all to liberate me. When He got over to me, He put His arm around me. I felt His tremendous Love for me. Then He threw His head back and laughed uproariously. He wasn't laughing at me—His laughter helped me more than I can say. He restored my humor and washed away my anger and withholding—not only in my relationship with Him as my Guru, but in my relationship to my father. Somehow, through the force of His Love, He enabled me to let go of the hurt and anger I felt about all that my father had done to my mother, my sisters, myself.

He had sometimes said to me, "You know, I'm not your father." Now I felt Him enacting a primal healing in me, releasing my pain, transforming my relationship to my father, to Him, and to all men, making it possible for me to let down my guard and let love in. In that moment, I could feel the difference between the Help of the God-Man and conventional psychoanalysis. I felt so fortunate—I had received far more than just insight into my angry character. He had filled me with a Force of Love that made it possible for me to let it all go and live differently from that moment forward. His Divine "Siddhi"—His Spiritual Power—had effected a literal transformation in me.

The Spiritual Transmission Master

ADI DA: Everyone transmits. Everything emits invisible forces. The stones transmit, the sky does, the TV does. Likewise, Realizers of one or another degree of Spiritual development Transmit what they are. What they have Realized Transmits itself, subtly as well as in gross ways, by what they do, by what they are, by what they feel. Those less evolved transmit their realization, and those more evolved Transmit their Realization. Because I have Realized the Heart, That Which is Inherently Perfect, I Transmit that Ultimate Condition to you. Such Transmission is inevitable—Spiritual Transmission is a literal process and not an imaginary one. I have thoroughly transcended all of the artifacts of separativeness. Therefore, I am simply and directly Present as the Force of the Divine Influence. That Influence is Radiant throughout all space-time without limitation. It is a literal Heart-Power that quickens insight and awakens the devotional response to Me. When your attention is simply turned to Me, then you are filled with happiness, love, devotion, with this intensity that comes to you through constant attention to Me. Through that channel of attention, My Divine Siddhi, or Blessing Power, is given a path. It cuts through all of your reluctance, all of your self-concern, all of your conflicts, your quality of dilemma, your unconsciousness, your commitment to neuroses—all of these qualities that turn your attention away from Me, from the Truth, the true Nature, the Self, the Divine. The Spiritual Master is a Transmitter, an Agency of Transmission, like the Sun. The Sun never sets and is never changed. The Spiritual Master may appear to others as the Sun appears in relation to the Earth. Those people see the Spiritual Master through their own minds, through circumstances, through all kinds of problems, limitations, and ordinary human signs. They do not realize the nature of the Spiritual Master as Adept, as Transmitter. They think of the Spiritual Master as an ordinary man, and they think of themselves as people who are inherently incapable of the Spiritual response. But if you truly understand and become a practitioner, a devotee, then you understand the Spiritual Master as Adept. You see the shining perpetually. You see the Transmission, the Radiant Force of Consciousness in that person. He or she is not an ordinary person. His or her body-mind is simply a material focus. But you must see beyond the local weather that is the Adept's bodily appearance and circumstance. You must see the Sun. That Sun is perpetuated in the Adept. That is why people value his or her Company. To spend time in the Company of the Spiritual Master is like getting in a spaceship and flying up into the atmosphere above the clouds. You need not even go very high. Anyone can do it! You could go up in a jet and climb above the clouds. It is only about five miles. You need only take a few courses. If you want to take a rocket to the sun, if you want to land there, that is another matter, that is a big deal. That is Divine Enlightenment. You will have to grow to be able to do that. Nobody even knows how to get to the Sun anymore. And they certainly do not know how to land on the Sun. The high art of landing on the Sun is what the self-transcending God-Realizing process is most ultimately all about. It is not silly business. It is not casually attainable. You must submit to the school of Spiritual life, and you may not bypass the process of transformation. You know what your ordinary, local self consists of, right? That thing, that stuff, that karma, that persistent structure of limitation, must be made fuel for this transforming fire. You know how resistive it is. You know what its limitations are. Well, then you know the difficulty Spiritual life represents. But it is not a gloomy process. It is a matter of constantly associating with the Sun. So, why be dominated by the weather? Go up above the clouds. The Sun is shining up there. Every day is a bright day of fine weather. What you regard to be weather is so local it almost does not exist. You let the superficial changes of life control you, as your own hormonal changes do, whereas, really, in the larger picture, when you realize a little depth, you see there is always Love-Bliss. So you must control the effect of the weather, if not the weather itself. That is the art of life. If you are wise, you know that the clouds are just a few feet up in the air and that the Sun is shining above them. The stars and the moon are up there all the time, too. The Sun shines twenty-four hours a day, not just twelve. The Sun is always shining. It never stops shining. It seems to stop shining every day, the sky gets dark, it gets light, clouds appear, it looks like bad weather is on the way. Changing weather is the perspective of the ego, of the provincial, local, childish, or adolescent character. Hear My Wisdom-Teaching and Awaken to the Ultimate Condition of things. Participate in the constant "Brightness" of Real Existence. You must know the art of that participation. You must learn the art of associating with the Way of Adidam, and then you must practice associating with it.

From the very beginning, I could tell that associating with Adi Da was like entering a radiant, blissful force field, one that is full of love and intelligence. He literally communicates, or transmits His own Realization to all those who turn their attention to Him. I could see the clarity and the changes that immediately began to take place in my life as a result of His Blessing Transmission. But I was also uninformed about Spiritual life, and I didn't even acknowledge all the different kinds of effects that Adi Da's Transmission was having on me. At the beginning, He had to point out to me the unusual mystical phenomena that would occur when I was around Him. After a while, I began to notice that extraordinary things took place whenever I sat with Him.

Often, when He sat with us, the room would fill up with golden light, and the feeling of His Siddhi, His Power of Love-Bliss, was as thick as syrup—it was that tangible in the room. I characteristically saw His face changing. It appeared to take on the form of various archetypal Spiritual figures, like Krishna or Siva or ancient Oriental Spiritual Masters. And I would feel my heart open to Him—my chest would literally become warm, infused with a very blissful feeling.

One night, after I had been His devotee for over a year, He invited me and a few other devotees to His house. It was an intense evening—He dealt with us very directly about our impediments as Spiritual practitioners. At the end of that long and rather arduous evening, He stopped talking and sat in silence, looking at a point just above my head for what seemed to be a long time.

After about five minutes, I started feeling something coming down into the top of my head. The feeling started to intensify very quickly, and after another minute or so it felt like there were millions of stars, almost like a column of incredible white light that was made up of millions of scintillating particles, pouring down into my head from above. I felt like I was literally being transformed by this blissful white light and incredible power that kept pouring into my head and into my whole body. It seemed as though I became enormous, swollen and electrified with this incredible power. If felt I was as big as the room.

The power of it was immense, and I could feel that Adi Da was literally bringing this power and this light down into me. At one point, I grabbed His arm and held Him in a very fierce grip. Over the years, I have noticed that His Siddhi has its own perfect intelligence, so I did not hurt Him, but my grip was very intense. At the same time, I started roaring at the top of my lungs—literally roaring like a panther.

In fact, I now had the most unusual sense of myself as a big and powerful black panther—while at the same time still being aware of my body in the more usual sense. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced or even heard of before. At the same time, there was an incredible energy running through my body, like a million megawatts. I had a feeling of tremendous power—not power over anything in particular, just power itself. It felt like the energy of the universe.

The whole experience literally blew my mind. After quite a long time, when it gradually subsided and I returned to ordinary awareness, I felt tremendous opening, tremendous love in my heart for Him. He was clearly changing me, changing my understanding of who I am and what this life is.

Over the years, He has Given me every kind of Spiritual experience—and it is clear to me that this is all a demonstration of His Radiant Divine Power, His Siddhi. How could an ordinary businessman from New York come up with this stuff? No way.

To underscore my point, one of my most unusual experiences of His Transmission took place after I had already been with Him for a couple of years. A number of devotees were with Him at His house and He asked everyone to leave, to go to a nearby meeting hall for two presentations that were to be given. A friend of mine was to give the first and I was going to give the second.

When I got up to leave with everyone else, Adi Da grabbed my hand and said, "No, you stay with Me for awhile." Everybody else left. He and I sat talking together, and He never let go of my hand. I felt His energy running up my arm as we talked. Then, after about fifteen minutes, He said, "Why don't you go over there now, and I'll follow you soon." So I left and walked into the back of the presentation hall where everyone else was already sitting.

There were probably seventy-five or a hundred people there, and the first presentation was already being given. As I sat in the back listening, I started to feel His Transmission invade me, as it quite often did at that time. This time, the Spiritual Force pouring in my body was so strong that I spontaneously started roaring and shaking, as though I couldn't contain that force without expressing it in some primitive, powerful way.

By now, I was used to having these phenomena and many, many other people around Adi Da had them, too. In the Hindu tradition, where they are more familiar with the effects of Spiritual energies, they use the word "mudra" to describe the poses that your body can spontaneously assume when the Spirit-Current starts flowing through it. They also use the word "kriya" to describe gestures or spontaneous movements and sounds that you might make as the Spirit-Current moves you. Even though I didn't know those words or even that such things existed before I met Adi Da, I was definitely having powerful kriyas now!

On this and many other similar occasions, I could feel how extremely powerful Adi Da's Transmission is, and I wanted to cooperate with Him. I wanted to receive His Transmission because, even though I didn't understand it altogether, it almost always felt overwhelmingly blissful. I could also feel His Divine Energy purifying my limitations and my obstructions to the Spiritual process as it coursed through me. But each time I started to have kriyas, it would surprise me. It was always so spontaneous, so unexpected—even though, at that time, it was not uncommon.

Because of all this, no one was shocked when I started roaring at the back of the hall on this particular day. Since this was a hall where we sat with Adi Da fairly regularly, it was not that unusual that I would have this kind of experience there. But I was supposed to give the second presentation!

When the first presentation was over and it was time for me to talk, I tried to stand up and walk to the front of the room, but I couldn't get up. I felt as though I were being pressed down into the floor—that is how strong Adi Da's Spirit-Power was as it came down into my body. I started feeling that I was a black panther again, an experience which I had every so often at that time.

Since I couldn't walk without shaking off the whole experience and because I didn't want to do that, I crawled up to the front of the room on all fours, roaring at the top of my lungs all the way. I had some awareness that this whole event was totally weird from a certain point of view—I mean, me, crawling on the floor and roaring like a panther? In front of all these people? But the Power I was experiencing was so authentic that those thoughts were only the remnants of my old way of looking at things and they passed in a second. Besides, everyone else in the room was being affected by Adi Da's Transmission, too—some in mudras, swooning in bliss, some speaking in tongues, some having kriyas. The entire room was glowing with His brilliant Divine Force.

When I got to the front of the room, I was supposed to give a lecture. It seemed a little absurd, given what was happening, but I made an immense effort to begin speaking. As I struggled to start my presentation, all of a sudden, Adi Da's Energy came shooting through me in the most astounding way. I mean, it was unbelievable. I felt as though I were gigantic, swollen way beyond my physical size with Spiritual Force. My usual persona was overcome, gone—I was mad with freedom, "intoxicated" with the feeling of bliss that was zapping through all my circuits. My hands spontaneously flew open in front of me, with my palms facing out to everyone else in the room. Instantly, Adi Da's own Divine Energy came shooting out my hands—it was like the most powerful electrical current you can imagine, and it was coming right out of my hands toward everyone there.

The whole place went wild. People had been feeling His Energy before, but now many more were screaming and moaning and shaking and rolling around on the ground. Everyone was overcome with the Power of His Transmission—it seemed as though the walls themselves would blow apart from the Force. It was completely powerful, completely spontaneous, completely out of this world. Then, just as the intensity of the experience started to subside a bit, the Guru opened the door.

It was as though the Sun had just walked in the room. Adi Da was surrounded by a clearly visible bright golden aura, and the Energy in the room amped up a thousandfold as He stepped into it. Now, everyone was writhing, screaming, swooning in the Love-Blissful Force-field of Divine Presence that surrounded Him. He walked through the madness to the front of the room and took His seat.

The mayhem continued—He had a look of absolute intensity about Him as He blasted away at us all with His monumental Divine Energy. After about a half an hour, He visibly relaxed. I collapsed on His lap, exhausted, drenched with sweat, and I kept saying, "It was You, it was You." I knew that the Power shooting from my arms and hands earlier, that the extraordinary, blissful feeling that had possessed me and everyone else, that the whole fantastic, other-wordly display of God-Force, had all been His doing.

As you can see, Adi Da has generated some pretty extraordinary experiences in me and in my fellow devotees. You can really get fascinated by them—I certainly did. But He has always Called us to understand that real Spiritual life is much more serious, much more real and profound than just getting fascinated with a bunch of experiences, no matter how exceptional they may be.

You can have a lot of extraordinary experiences and still be an asshole, still fail to love, still refuse to understand and go beyond the self-contraction. You can think you are experiencing God, but if you are still egoic and loveless, you are fooling yourself. So the real point of it all, for me, is that these experiences opened me up to understand how extraordinary Adi Da is.

Adi Da is unfathomable, a Great Mystery, the Power of the universe, the Very Divine. And yet at the same time, He is more intimate to us at the heart than anything else. Experiences only go so deep, but the relationship to Him goes all the way to the deepest recesses of the heart. Experiences pass in a moment, but the relationship to Adi Da is everlasting. The only truly blissful moment is when you let go of your limited sense of yourself and you are lost in Him, in His Fullness, His Mysterious Divine Nature.

The Real Miracle

One night, Adi Da asked us what we thought Divine Enlightenment was. He went around the room, asking each one of us. I heard some pretty esoteric, sophisticated, and technical descriptions of it from my friends that night, and I knew it was coming to my turn. I didn't know how I would express what I felt, but I knew that I wasn't interested in anything that was so complicated as what my friends were describing. Then Adi Da said, "Aniello, what do you think?"

I answered, "To tell You the truth, I just want to be so straight that I don't even know I'm straight."

And He said, "That's good."

Being that straight is about understanding yourself as an ego, and becoming transparent to the Divine, to Reality, to the Great Power or Mystery that Adi Da is. Being that straight is being free—free of yourself and your limits and your suffering. Being that straight is a discipline, a discipline of devotion to the Guru, of Happiness, of self-understanding. Being that straight feels like true Liberation to me, and that is what has always been interesting to me about the process that Adi Da instigates in His devotees.

One day, not long after the bookstore in Los Angeles first opened, there were two guys who came to visit. They had been all over India and they had a lot of really fascinating stories to tell about miracles and Spiritual powers and holy teachers and so on. They asked if they could come and talk to Adi Da.

The day they came I was working at my desk in the back office—in those days, my desk was just across the room from Adi Da's. So I was sitting there typing out the invoices for the book sales I had made that week, just doing my business as usual, while also trying to listen in to the conversation. They asked Him, "Why don't you do miracles?"

Adi Da was quiet for a moment and then He said, "Miracles? You want miracles? I have made Aniello [He pointed to me] into an honest man. That is a miracle!"

I choked my laughter down so that it wouldn't seem as though I had been eavesdropping. After they left, He went back to His work at His desk and I went back to mine. There was a good five or ten-minute silence, and then He turned to me and said, "Aniello, I could do things that would astound the world. But I won't do it—just for that reason. People are too fascinated by it." And He turned back to His desk.

And I tell you—I turned back around to my typewriter and I said to myself, "I bet You can!" It was so obvious to me that He could, but that He has chosen a greater Work. I have certainly seen Him do remarkable things over the years, even many miraculous things, but the most important thing He has shown me is that anybody can be transformed by His Grace. To me, that is the most important thing that He has done. Absolutely. He has shown me that I can be transformed into a truly religious person. I have never thought of myself as religious, and I didn't even really understand what religion was. But now I know that true religion is the sacred relationship to the Source of Grace, to the Guru, who is the Agent of Grace.

ADI DA: It is not any of the things that men and women do to overcome life that produces its radical transformation. It is only your relationship to Me that works this transformation of life. If you live your devotional relationship to Me, you begin to see not just the strategy of others, but your own strategy. This seeing of your own strategy doesn't particularly take the form of self-analysis, of ideas and mental "knowings" about yourself that you can dramatize continually. This form of knowledge makes your games, your separation from God, obsolete and unnecessary. It makes you responsible for your strategy. It makes you free of the dramatization of your own pattern, because you begin to see the nature of it and to understand the roots of it, the cause of it, the principle by which all your ordinary activity is governed, the pattern that supports it. And when this occurs, you become peaceful, sublime, free, blissful. The genuine understanding of a condition is identical to the freedom which is natural to that condition. But simply analyzing yourself without lifting yourself out of the ordinary principle of life is not free. Even your analysis, even your usual understanding of yourself is a form of dilemma. That is why people who know everything about themselves and everything else from a religious or psychological point of view, or some other point of view, are typically always still unsatisfied. You are always motivated to feel better, no matter what you are doing. My father, for example, was a salesman. He was always under stress, a chain smoker and all the rest. He would talk and talk and talk, all the time, always under stress. Why did he do it? He had all his reasons—to support his family, and so on. But he was an addict. He was addicted to it. He only got to feel good when he made a sale. It is like getting off in an orgasm or something. You get a little bit of good feeling by making that sale, exchanging back-slapping and grins with the other salesmen and so forth, and then it is back on the streets, back to the stress again. You think you want to be a big success. You imagine that there is a sale that ends all sales and then you will feel good forever. That is part of the illusion of salesmen—this one big hit sale after which you do not have to be a salesman anymore, because you just feel good forever! It is an illusion, a myth.You are always feeling bad and looking to feel good. You have all kinds of techniques in your life that sometimes produce a little bit of feeling good and that lead you to feel, "That is all there is—just feeling a little better here and there." You make a total life out of the stress of the search and temporary moments of minimal release, because you never deal with your divorce from Reality. You never Realize the Inherent Condition, the Native Condition of non-separation. But when you deal with the root of all of your seeking, not only does the seeking vanish, the Truth is Realized—the Truth that is Reality, that is the Divine, Which Is Self-Sufficient, Self-Existing, Self-Radiant, all Love-Bliss, not confounded, not a seeker, not separate. This is what there is to Realize, but it cannot be Realized by seeking. The Way of Adidam is religious realism, not mere observances, not mere beliefs, not consolations, not indulging in the stress of seeking or the stimulation of life associated with the search. The Way of Adidam is a perpetual "reality consideration". Real practice of the Way of Adidam deals directly with the self-contraction and transcends it with equal directness. There is one Law: You become what You meditate on. This Law summarizes the process by which I become your advantage. The Divine Fullness, or Divine Love-Bliss, the Native Condition of non-separation, or Happiness Itself, can be Realized in Communion with Me. I am the egoless Embodiment of the Divine Reality. One who is attractive. Be attracted to Me at the level of your feeling-attention.In any moment you do this, body and mind follow naturally. My Divine Love-Bliss fills them. They are calmed. They are balanced. Intuition arises. Divine vision appears. Certainty is realized. The heart opens. Thus, God is not at the end of the Way of Adidam. God is at the very beginning of the Way of Adidam. I am not merely calling to you from beyond, or giving you a philosophy. I am fully here. I come to you directly. All you need to do is find Me in My Divine Attractiveness in any moment. I am with you now, and I am available to you forever.

Epilogue

Before I met Adi Da in 1972, I was in terrible shape. Now, I feel that I am the luckiest man in the world—not because of cars or houses or money or anything else, but because Adi Da is in my life. I fully believe that contacting Him is the most fortunate thing that can happen to anybody—and I also know that if it can happen to a jabonie like me, just your average Joe trying to be successful, an ordinary guy from Brooklyn trying to have a good family and do the best he can to enjoy himself in life, it can happen to anyone!

That is why I wanted to tell you my story—because Adi Da is offering this most magnificent relationship not just to me, but to you. You may be like I was, and not know anything about how Adi Da and His Way of Adidam can help you. But if I had one thing to say to you, it would be this: you have nothing more important to do than checking out this opportunity, this transforming relationship. Find out what it is about and what it can mean to you.

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Life with Adi Da Samraj