The Sacred Literature and Theater
of Adi Da and Adidam

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, "Art Is Love"

The Trilogy is Transcendental Realist Art. They're using visuals of Mine which is Transcendental Realist art. But they have to understand My Literary Work is Transcendental Realist art also, and therefore, the performance art being brought to my Literary and Visual art should be Transcendental Realist art. So that is abstract art in a particular mode, and it gives all kinds of possibilities, just as I do in My Image Art Work and in My Literary Art Work which they are performing. It's not merely conventional realism, and it's not ego realism.

An aperspectival and anegoic, aniconic space should be used in the performance of The Mummery Book, The Orpheum Trilogy altogether, at least at certain times, in such a manner that the viewers can participate in that kind of space, that mode of spatial perception that is virtually infinitely fractioned and non-representational. What I'm talking about with the images that I'm making, is presenting them in a circumstance of mirroring and infinite reflectivity that extends from the anegoic, aniconic, aperspectival form intrinsic to the image itself that I've made. I'm talking about something that could be extended into the theatrical circumstance of The Orpheum Trilogy.

The full title is The Mummery Book: A Parable Of The Divine True Love, Told By Means Of A Self-Illuminated Illustration Of The Totality Of Mind. (The Mummery Book is available from The Dawn Horse press as a hardcover book and as a six and a half hour recitation by renowned actor, Ken Welsh.

The Mummery Guild (now known as First Room Theatre Guild) presented the first full length theatrical presentation of The Mummery Book during the period of November through December, 1989. The first full recitation of the expanded Mummery Book would take place at The Mountain Of Attention on January 9, 1999.

The appearance of The Mummery Book by Adi Da Samraj signals a remarkable occasion in the world of literature. It is a novel in the mode of a vast parable, in which mystical and esoteric states of awareness are fleshed in poetic imagery. It is an experimental work — what Adi Da Samraj calls a "prose opera" — that shatters the conventional limits of language and raises literary portrayal to radical levels of consciousness.

At the level of form and style, The Mummery Book is reminiscent of Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, and Joyce. Adi Da makes words crackle and swoon, pound and console with an endless suggestiveness guided by a desire to open up the reader’s heart and imagination to the possibility of transformation. . . . As playful as it is profound, as heart-breaking as it is consoling, The Mummery Book is an absolutely unique literary experience.

—from the foreword by Philip Kuberski, PhD
Professor of English, Wake Forest University,
author, Chaosmos: Literature, Science, and Theory After Modernism

Adi Da’s The Mummery Book is a most extraordinary novel indeed. While contemporary postmodern fictions claims to have assimilated the most daring philosophical experiments of the twentieth century, too many contemporary authors have forgotten the spiritual substance of these experiments, so that their literary works remain mere exercise in style. Without the slightest bit of scholarly pedantry, The Mummery Book is devoted to the real problem that engages contemporary philosophy and political theory: finitude, mortality, the critique of egoic subjectivity, and above all the affirmation of life in the face of its apparently tragic character.

Framed as an allegory, The Mummery Book employs innovative syntax and narrative strategies to challenge and disable the linear rationality that we are trained to bring to texts, and that the allegory form itself seems to invite, leading to a reading experience that is nothing short of explosive (the ‘real’ world of power and need dissolves into a mere mummer’s play) and revelatory (a new, ecstatic relationship to life is glimpsed).

Those familiar with contemporary philosophy will recognize methodological and thematic parallels with the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, as well as writers of fiction who have been inspired by this work. But unlike most postmodern fiction, style here is in the service of substance, while remaining playful. This is a book that one will turn to again and again for the insight and pleasure it offers.

Frederick Dolan, Ph.D.
Professor of Fine Arts, and of Visual and Critical Studies
California College of the Arts
author, Allegories of America: Narratives, Metaphysics, Politics

The Mummery Book is brilliant in all its aspects. It would be hard to express my happiness at the way it breaks and exposes the heart of the world. Living and working as a writer for many decades, I have not encountered a book like this, that mysteriously and unselfconsciously conveys so much of the Unspeakable Reality.

Robert Lax
poet, author of Love Had A Compass
and (with Thomas Merton) A Catch of Anti-Letters

If Dylan Thomas and Buddha shared a soul, The Mummery Book is what I would expect from such a joining. The Mummery Book is a vortex which, if you will permit it, will enliven, awaken, and rejuvenate the soul not only of this mortal life, but the soul of every existence possible. The Mummery Book is lucid, wild, an unraveling portrait of ego-life and a radiant vision of transcendence, which pass each other on the heart’s walk across the pages of this luminous book.

Robert Boldman
author of Sacred Life, Holy Death

The novel is not filled with arbitrary archetypes, but it is the product of a profound consideration that took place over several years. And there is a great magical message in it, discoverable only by those who are sensitive to it, perhaps never completely discoverable, you see. The Mummery Book is like magical texts that have appeared in magically based cultures in the past — a book of magical beings and magical creatures, a magical story, an archetypal adventure. It is a secret book, a "sealed" book, an esoteric book.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj

The billions of the Nations of every ego's claim, were kniving one another — tusk-to-tusk! And every man was man-to-man! And every woman did her part! And every household’ s weapons were Amazing! on the street! And every single body was Cut! Down — to its own size of mind! And every individual declared a separate State!

And all of humankind, as one-by-one, became a mob of Mummery. A Clacking! Pattern of mere and Clicking! "individuals" — with murderously reasonable demands!

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, The Mummery Book

The Mummery of life-and-world-and-death is a constant Melodrama — made of opposites and contraries. And life is always "self"-and-"other" — in a Growling! pit.

There is only a pattern. Patterning, in Clicks! and Clacks! Appearance, Shift, and Change. Always repetitions — and, yet, never the same.

The countless pairs are not Recognized, As Is, by the always ego-"I" — in its waking, dreaming, and sleeping, here. The oblivious little play of twos — never exactly Founders, in their One. Forever — there is only "she" or "he" or "it" or "that", and the always-remaining "I". The "I" and the "other" — forever waiting, for the One-and-Only One. The One That Always Already Is — Infinitely Expanded, Beyond the persistent point of ego-"I". Beyond the egg of attention, and its Klik-Klak visions of eternal "difference".

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, The Mummery Book

Now,
forever—
As even Quandra
is, by Raymond, loved,
in My Love-Story
in your feeling-heart—
I,
Alone— The One and Only Me
of All I Am,
and All I have,
by Happening,
Become—
must be
Heart-Found,
and,
by feeling-heart,
most truly loved,
by you.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
"The Epilogue", The Mummery Book

You can play another part. You can drop the egg.You can be My devotee. You do not have to be a mummer. Whatever you seem to be to others, you do not have to be it. Then you can flow like water through the "world" and make use of life as the opportunity of Divine Self-Realization, rather than playing your bit part in this absurd drama of universal mummery.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
July 7, 2005