Finding Adi Da > Chris Tong > Part I, Chapter 8

Positive Disillusionment

This is Part I, Chapter 8 of Chris Tong's book, Finding the Divine In Person and Waking Up From the Dream: Part I, Chapter 1.

To actually become Adi Da's devotee and fully take up the Way of Adidam, one also has to go through a process Adi Da calls "positive disillusionment".[1] We are born here with karmic patterns and forces that powerfully drive us to continue in our ordinary destiny, lifetime after lifetime.[2] In order to participate in a Greater Destiny, we must not only find the Guru, who makes such a Greater Destiny available (and recognize Him as a "Spiritual Transmitter" of such a Greater Destiny); we must also become dis-illusioned with our ordinary destiny and whatever keeps attracting (and binding) us to it. Without going through such a dis-illusionment process, we might formally become Adi Da's "devotee", but we won't actually progress in the Way of Adidam, because, as Adi Da once put it, we'll have one "foot" in spiritual life and one "foot" in the world, and the bigger "foot" will be the worldly one.

Life can be repeated or it can be Transcended but it cannot be fulfilled. Avatar Adi Da Samraj

The possibility of true spiritual life, or participation in the graceful process of liberation in the prior, Divine Reality, begins only when there is conviction in the functions of life and intelligence of the inherent suffering of manifest existence (its essential dilemma or self-contradictory condition) and the fruitlessness of all destiny and action to produce liberation or true happiness (since all action is separative, self-defining, and a realization of limitation). . . . When the conviction of suffering and hopelessness matures to the point of profound psychic and psychological disorientation from the conventional theatre of experience, ordinary or extraordinary, so that there is heightened sensitivity to the intuition and influence of the Divine Reality, then the individual becomes circumstantially related to the stream of true Teaching and, at last, to the direct influence of the manifest Guru. Avatar Adi Da Samraj, Epilogue, No Remedy

You are profoundly committed to having life work out good. You seem to think that it is supposed to, that it must, that life is supposed to work out to fulfill your middle-class, rather "Western" presumptions about the "good life". And, in addition, you want to do ego-transcending practice and Realize. In other words, you do not seem to function on the basis of a perception, an intelligent perception, that conditional existence is inherently limited, and filled with suffering, is not going to fulfill itself, and is ultimately fruitless. And you cannot be committed to Realization without that intelligent perception. You are grounded in this "Western" collective ideal of the "good life", that imagines you are born to be fulfilled, satisfied, kissed, cuddled and congratulated, and immortalized. No one who has ever Realized has functioned on such a basis. The absurdity of that proposition has to be seen through. . . You can practice in the context of ordinary living, and in love, and with compassion, and with a sense of humor, and a capability for delight, also — but free of that absurd vision of "self"-fulfillment, and the equally absurd vision that the universe is going to fulfill itself. To do practice is to be obliged by a Great Purpose. It is to be obliged by the Purpose of the transcending of egoity and What can be Realized in that case, and only in that case. It is to be obliged by that Purpose — obliged; not only committed, but obliged. Not only interested, but obliged. Every moment of existence, then, becomes a test relative to that obligation. Every moment of existence is a moment in which you can abandon the principle of ego-transcending practice, relinquish that obligation, or maintain the principle of ego-transcending practice. If you get weak, precious, "self"-conscious, reactive, and so on, you relinquish the principle of ego-transcending practice, and you relinquish your Great Purpose. To do ego-transcending practice is to pass tests. It is not to make an arrangement or a bargain with life or the Divine. It is not to persist in mediocrity. It is to pass tests, such that the body-mind-complex goes through changes (progressively) and makes an always greater and new demonstration. It is a hard school. It is a difficult life, based upon the commitment of life to the Great Purpose of transcending life, transcending the body-mind-complex, transcending the cosmic domain, transcending limitations. The Reality-Way of Adidam Is Realization — the transcending of all of that, Liberation from all of that, Freedom, Utter Freedom. Avatar Adi Da Samraj November 22, 1987

I remember a particular moment which epitomized that process of positive disillusionment in my own life. I was at "the top of my game". It was 1989. I was a world leader in my special area of Artificial Intelligence (AI).[3] I was an award-winning teacher, and I and my Ph.D. students were making breakthroughs in the hot new area of knowledge compilation, where you can describe what you want a software program to do, and the AI system writes a program to do that.[4] We had papers in all the major AI conferences, and I was constantly being called upon to lead workshops, edit books about my field, be on the editorial board of major journals, etc. We all sensed that AI would emerge as one of the leading areas of interest in the world in the coming years,[5] and being leaders and pioneers in a potentially world-transforming field was very exciting.

In short, from a spiritual perspective, it was the kind of worldly success that could keep me karmically bound for lifetimes!

I recall an afternoon when I found myself heading toward a bar in a classy hotel in Orlando, Florida. I was the "program chair" for all the engineering and manufacturing papers being presented at one of the major annual AI conferences: the Conference on AI Applications. And I was joining my fellow conference organizers for a pre-conference drink. I felt like I had "made it", and was meeting up with the members of a very "elite" club that afternoon — and was now one of them.

I entered the bar, and saw the chairman of the program committee sitting there. We waved and smiled at each other across the room, and then I sat down at the bar with him and joined him for a drink. We made small talk for a while about the conference, and our lives altogether, and then fell silent, sipping our drinks.

I sat there and, in the deepening silence, I was able to take a good, long look at the man. I suddenly realized: he was miserable! And his face mirrored my own unhappiness. For all our accomplishments, for all our success, we weren't happy. Not very. Not really. In all those years, there were a few pleasurable moments when we basked in the recognition of our peers, or, outside our careers, we shared some enjoyable times with our family and friends, or were blessed with some relatively rare personal moments of peace or illumination.

But, as the old song goes: is that all there is?

I knew from my study of Adi Da's Teaching, and my growing intuition of the nature of Reality based on my growing response to Him, that the answer was a resounding NO! But, even knowing this, how easy it would be to let my life continue to slide by rapidly, in effect (if not by intention), just settling for the modest pleasures and successes of conventional life, and never actually Realizing anything greater . . . and then we die.

That moment, and what that man's face revealed to me about my own limited, karmic destiny, were the culmination of a longterm process of positive disillusionment with conventional life that had been going on for years, ever since the crisis of faith I had experienced at Columbia University. I would eventually leave the academic world a few years later, when Adi Da invited me to do so, to serve His Work instead. But in some sense, my emotional and psychic departure truly began in that moment.

That dis-illusionment with the karmic path of my life was "positive dis-illusionment" in exactly the sense Adi Da meant that phrase: it freed me up for a Greater Alternative. . . becoming Adi Da's devotee and practicing the Way of Adidam.

Chapter 9

FOOTNOTES

[1]		"Positive disillusionment" is closely related to what Adi Da refers to as "the lesson of life": really getting the point that one cannot become happy (through egoic seeking that attempts to change circumstances and "become happy" as a result); one can only be happy already (through present-time Communion with the Divine, enabled through Adi Da's Transmission).
[2]		Adi Da's view of Reality includes reincarnation, which he instructs His devotees to seriously consider as part of their studies in support of their practice of the Way of Adidam. (More from Adi Da on reincarnation can be found in His book, Easy Death.) There is a growing body of evidence in support of reincarnation, most notably, the extensive work done by Dr. Ian Stevenson, which involved his travelling around the world and documenting 3,000 cases of children having "past life" memories that he personally confirmed (by identifying the places and people in their "past life" memories and actually finding and then visiting those places and people in present time). For more, read Dr. Stevenson's books, which include Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, Children Who Remember Previous Lives, and Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (1997). Feeling the reality of reincarnation often plays an important role in the process of positive disillusionment. In the West, our focus is on "just this one life" (whether we are materialists who don't believe in survival beyond death, or we are raised in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic view of a single life, followed by a final spiritual reckoning). As a result, we tend to put a lot of emphasis on living this one life, since it is over all too soon. In the East, where the presumption of reincarnation is common, a different orientation arose. If you live forever, not just eighty or so years, then everything is seen in a different light. Circumstances that seem interesting or at least tolerable (if they only last a few years), don't seem so if one realizes they are going to last forever, or they are going to repeat (in one form or another) forever. Rather than wondering how to make this life as fulfilling as possible, one begins to wonder: is there some alternative to the otherwise interminable cycle of births and deaths, and all the suffering and separation I must suffer when each life (mine and the lives of those close to me) comes to an end, over and over again? In this way, the growing conviction of the reality of reincarnation serves the process of positive disillusionment, in which one becomes open to a Greater Alternative than materialistic self-fulfillment.
[3]		What I actually was interested in was the nature of consciousness; but Artificial Intelligence was about the closest one could come to studying consciousness (certain superficial aspects of it) from within the sciences.
[4]		"Knowledge compilation" is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence in which researchers develop program-writing programs called "knowledge compilers": programs that are given knowledge about some task and how to do it, and which then automatically create ("compile") programs for doing that task, that drew upon the knowledge we had provided. For example, we might give our "knowledge compiler" a lot of knowledge about the task of creating architectural floorplans for a house; the knowledge compiler would then automatically write a program that would actually perform that task (and perform it efficiently). For details, see: Chris Tong, The Nature and Significance of Knowledge Compilation. IEEE Expert [now known as IEEE Intelligent Systems], 6(2), April 1991. Chris Tong, Wesley Braudaway, Sunil Mohan, and Kerstin Voigt, Reformulating Constraints for Compilability and Efficiency, in Proceedings of the Workshop on Change of Representation and Problem Reformulation, Pacific Grove, CA, April, 1992. Wes Braudaway and Chris Tong: Automated Synthesis of Constrained Generators. IJCAI 1989 (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence), Detroit, August 1989. pp. 583-589. Kerstin Voigt and Chris Tong, Automating the Construction of Patchers That Satisfy Global Constraints. IJCAI 1989 (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence), Detroit, August 1989. pp. 1446-1452. Chris Tong, A Divide-and-Conquer Approach to Knowledge Compilation. Chapter 11 of Michael Lowry and Robert D. McCartney, editors, Automating Software Design. AAAI Press, December, 1991.
[5]		The DaVinci Robotic Surgical System, similar to the one used by my surgeon to remove my prostate in 2017. He directed the surgical system while sitting almost the whole time at a computer screen, assisted by joysticks. The year was 1989. It would take a little longer than we had expected (another 34 years, in fact!) for AI to assume the role on the world stage that we were predicting for it back then — it appears that 2023 was the real breakout year for AI, with the colossal impact of ChatGPT. But during that entire time (from 1989 through 2023), AI was emerging in less apparent ways (not always realized to be "AI" in the public mind): advances in the AI field of computer vision (that started in the 1950's), with applications in facial recognition technology, biometrics, controlling industrial processes, medical image analysis, etc.; advances in the AI field of speech recognition (that took off in the 1970's), with applications that include talking to your phone or computer (e.g., Siri or Alexa) or your car; advances in the AI field of natural language processing (that began in the 1950's), with applications including language translation tools like Google Translate; advances in the AI field of robotics, with applications in manufacturing, self-driving cars, domestic robots like Roomba, medical robots like the DaVinci Surgical System (see right), that allows a surgeon to perform a surgery mainly sitting in front of a computer screen, with a joystick (I had my prostate removed with the help of such a system!), food processing robots, space exploration robots like the Mars Rover, etc; advances in the AI field of automated game-playing (one of the earliest areas in AI), with applications in video game-playing, computer chess (in 1997, the AI program, Deep Blue, defeated the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov), computer Go (a harder game than chess, but an AI program finally defeated the human world champions in 2016-2017), Jeopardy! (IBM's Watson computer beat the best human players, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in a two-game match in 2011); and advances in the AI field of Machine Learning, with numerous applications in a very broad range of areas (including chatbots like ChatGPT).

Chapter 9