As the incarnation of the Divine Person, Who is the Source of the entire conditional universe, and Who is animating the entire universe in every moment, Adi Da had the extraordinary ability to literally become any one of us in any moment, get a perfect reading on that person's internal state, and then reflect some aspect of that internal state back to the person using His Own body to animate it, enabling His body to become, in effect, a behavioral mirror by which the devotee can see himself) — which can profoundly help serve that person's self-understanding.

Here's a personal example of this. I remember one occasion where Adi Da was speaking to a group of devotees in a gathering in Hymns To Me on Naitauba (in Fiji). Suddenly, He swung around in His seat to face me, and started shouting at me very loudly. It threw me into a state of shock. An then, in that state, even though at one point He was asking me a question, I couldn't respond to Him. I was completely frozen. And I could see that other devotees in the room also were confused, because they too couldn't make sense of why He was suddenly shouting at me. He continued to look at me, letting me sit in that state for a while, and then He turned away, and moved on to something else.

However, as I sat there frozen, I felt an immediate connection between what Adi Da was doing and my father yelling at me when I was a child, a fairly regular occurrence, often unjustified and always abusive. I could see that I was recoiling internally, fetus-like, in the face of Adi Da's energy, just as I did when I was a child with my father. I realized that I needed to grow beyond that childhood pattern of recoil, to the point where, no matter what energy was thrown my way — whether by life in general, or most especially in relationship with my Divine Guru and His being able to do whatever He needed to free me — I needed to be able to receive it without recoil, and stay in relationship with Him.

And so, after I recovered from the shock, I felt it as a wonderful lesson, and a far more compelling Instruction when presented to me through a spontaneous incident like that (without me being able to prepare for it or armor myself against it), than, say, through a therapist merely talking with me about my relationship with my father. In this case, I got the lesson instantly and viscerally! And because I had gotten the lesson, Adi Da never worked with me again in that way. Moreover, at a profound level, the transformation that occurred in me as a result allowed a deepening of my reception of Adi Da's Spiritual Transmission from then on.

Adi Da made extensive use of this Divine Ability in the early years of His Teaching His devotees. He would use it to paint a graphic picture of some aspect of the devotee, in a way that held the potential for instaneous self-understanding, because of the perfect accuracy of the mirror, and the way it gave an even exaggerated portrayal of one's hidden tendencies, making the tendencies very obvious. In my case, for example, He was holding up a perfect mirror of my worst experience of my father — so that my psyche could be free of the reaction to it, once and for all.

Naturally, in order for devotees to benefit from this behavioral mirroring, they had to recognize it as that. If instead, I had mistaken this for Adi Da Himself shouting at me, I would have completely missed the point, and lost out on the mirroring's potential transformational power.

For this reason, Adi Da made sure His devotees correctly understood this way He might interact with them, and instructed them to not misinterpret His behavior in such moments as "Him":

Adi Da's "becoming" any devotee He placed His Regard on was a profound capability! And it took no planning or intention. Adi Da "became" any of His devotees spontaneously, the instant He placed His attention on them, based on the principle, "You become what you meditate on":

And when I say He becomes you "instantaneously", I mean "instantaneously". Here's a personal experience of this.

I was one of a small group of devotees, kneeling before Adi Da as He stood before the brass gates of His residence, Aham Da Asmi Sthan, on Naitauba. He looked at each of us in turn, as is often His way. He turned to me briefly, perhaps for a second, and then His gaze moved on to the next devotee. But in that second that He was looking at me, a single tear fell from His right eye during that briefest of time spans.

An occasion similar to the one I am describing

I remember being very moved by seeing that, and, when I wrote to Him later that day, I mentioned it and tied it to what I presumed was His love for all of us. It would only be much later that I realized that I was seeing. . . me! In that mere second, He had become me, right before my eyes — so instantaneously and so much more fully "me" than me that a teardrop had even fallen from His eye. He was painting for me the picture of my own tendency to be sorrowful, allowing me to become conscious of it and released from its unconscious possession of me if I took fullest advantage of this reflection. (He mentioned this in passing on another occasion — at Club Rat — where I was made up like a clown, and He instructed me, "Allow yourself to feel your sad clown face". Over the course of the time I was in His Company, I was completely and Gracefully relieved of that tendency to be sorrowful. As I write this, there isn't a trace left of that tendency.)

Of course, in the next second as He gaze moved on, He had "become" the next devotee. And then in the next second, the next devotee. Who knows what they were seeing being mirrored back at them. . . An absolutely extraordinary Divine Power!

One morning in early 1997, at the Mountain Of Attention, a group of devotees were kneeling, alongside the path that Adi Da walks on His way from His residence, The Manner Of Flowers, to Ordeal Bath Lodge, awaiting His "walk-by Darshan". As Adi Da slowly walked down the path, He would stop in front of each devotee for a brief moment, give them His Regard, and then walk on to the next devotee.

A "walk-by Darshan" occasion similar to the one I am describing,
on the path from The Manner Of Flowers to Ordeal Bath Lodge
at The Mountain Of Attention
(click image to enlarge)

On this particular morning, I was going through a profound emotional ordeal. It was all I could do to stay in the disposition of devotion and be in Divine Communion with Adi Da as He stopped in front of me and gave me His Regard. A couple of hours later, I received Notes from Him. He said He felt I might be bodily ill, and that perhaps I should see one of the doctors in the Radiant Life Clinic — the equivalent of a "doctor’s office" at The Mountain Of Attention, but with an expanded suite of health tools, principles, and modalities.

I knew that, in the brief period He had looked at me, Adi Da had "become me". And when I read His Notes, it suddenly occurred to me that, even when you "become someone" and have a "perfect reading on their state", that doesn't automatically provide you with a guidebook on how to interpret that state. It's something like when doctors get a "reading" on the state of your body through lab test results. But seeing the various numerical measurements for different aspects of the human body, and seeing which values are outside their normal range doesn't automatically tell the doctor what exactly is going on. That requires further work and years of expertise and training in medical interpretation.

So in "becoming me", Adi Da clearly had "read" the upset that was going on in my body-mind. But His initial interpretation of that upset was that it was a physical upset, rather than an emotional one (since He made no reference to an emotional issue). Of course, the psyche and the soma are very intertwined, so no doubt my emotional disturbance was also manifesting in physical symptoms as well, which He was reading.

I had seen something like this before in some of Adi Da's gatherings with devotees. Adi Da would be listening to a devotee talking at length to Him; suddenly Adi Da would stop the devotee to say, "so that's what you meant!" As with when He "became me", even though Adi Da had a perfect reading on the internal subjectivity of the devotee who was speaking to Him, at times it still could require further skill and probing on His part to fully make sense of exactly what He was reading in the person He had "become". And that helped me understand all the better something He had once said: "I am not omniscient. But I am very psychic!"

* * *

In the first two examples of Adi Da "becoming me", He duplicated the state of my body-mind in His body-mind, and then allowed His body-mind to be behaviorally animated by an aspect of my state (my father yelling at me in the first example, and my sorrowful tendency in the second example). But in the third example, He "became me", He duplicated my state in His body-mind, and so detected the turmoil my body-mind was going through — but without behaviorally mirroring it in His Own body-mind. So when He "became us", He could choose whether to allow that further animation to happen — or not. Most of the time when He was interacting with us, He chose not to mirror us in that way. And in His later years, there was increasingly less of that behavioral mirroring altogether.

So far, PART I of this book has proceeded largely in chronological order. We have gotten to early 1997 in this chapter. However, the next chapter jumps forward in time to 2010 and 2019. That’s because most of my story between 1997 and the present is about my recent service to the Adidam Mission — and so you can read about it in PART III (Serving the Adidam Mission), Chapter 3. (Note, however, that that will jump you into the middle of the story of my service to the Adidam Mission. If you want to read the full story starting in 1989, read all of PART III.) We will now close out PART I with a couple more chapters that fit best here in PART I.