What Is More Than Wonderful Is Not ThreatenedMadhuka
Ranmathu
In September of 2004, my family suddenly found out that my father was diagnosed to have a rare type of bladder cancer. I was very close to my father, and it was unbearable to see him suffer. At this time, I had been a devotee of Bhagavan Adi Da for two years. The first thing that came to my mind was that my father and all of us needed Bhagavan’s help immediately. That same night, I wrote a letter to Bhagavan Adi Da pleading for His Blessings for my father. Bhagavan Adi Da had been doing "blessing pujas" for people in need of His Grace, and had performed miraculous healing for many devotees and others over the past years. Bhagavan accepted my request, with absolute compassion and love, and sent His love and blessings along with blessed flowers, ash, water, and the picture of our family covered in blessed water He had splashed onto it in blessing. When these prasad items arrived in the mail from Bhagavan Adi Da's Hermitage in Fiji, they were full of His tangible Spiritual blessing force. Opening them always felt literally as if we were opening a package full of love and happiness. My father always wanted to keep some of these prasad items with him when he was in the hospital and even during surgery. This began a nine-month period of approaching Bhagavan Adi Da for His blessings for my family. With my family's utter need for His help, and because Sat-Guru Adi Da wanted to know about my father's progress, I continued to write to Him once or twice a month for the next nine months. Bhagavan received all of these letters and repeatedly poured out His love and blessings during this period of ordeal my father went through, until his passing in May of 2005. As a person with Buddhist upbringing and with a family of devoted Theravada Buddhist practitioners, while growing up I had always thought that I was aware of the suffering and uncertainty of life. But losing my father was not something I could have prepared for. I feel that I would not have been able to go through with this heart break if it wasn't for Bhagavan Adi Da's immense Grace and instructions. In the midst of this time, on the 27th of October 2004, I was able to go on a pilgrimage to Naitauba, Adi Da’s principal Hermitage ashram in Fiji, and was fortunate to see Bhagavan for the very first time there. It was more urgent than ever for me to see Him in person. I needed His guidance in my life and also felt the need to receive His blessings for my father who was getting ready to have surgery soon after I returned. The two weeks I spent in the Hermitage island were the most beautiful weeks of my life up to then. Adi Da completely truly vanished all my doubts about the Truth of His Person, and I felt completely relieved of the burden of problems and concerns I was overwhelmed with before setting foot on the Island. There are no words to describe what it feels to see Adi Da in His hermitage in Fiji, and what happens in His Company is beyond what the mind can comprehend or words can try to explain. It is a special and life-transforming event. Sitting in front of Him in silent Darshan, I felt a great peace and happiness, and a sense of a very familiar feeling of finally arriving "home". He was bathing everyone with love and dissolving all sense of separate self-identity. At the end of the two weeks, I was overwhelmed with love and gratitude for the Blessings and the opportunity to be alive during His lifetime and see Him. I wanted to come home and bring this love and freedom I felt to my family and let His Blessings wash away their pain. I came back also with a tangible gift Beloved Adi Da had given to give to my parents. I had gifted Him a beautiful white statue of Lord Buddha on behalf of my parents during this visit, and Sat-Guru Adi Da received this statue and asked it be kept in His Sukra Kendra. The day before I left the island, Adi Da had given instructions for me to take this statue back to my parents as prasad from Him. It was a very happy moment to receive this gift back from Him. Even after going through many successful and highly advanced surgeries and receiving great care from world-renowned doctors, my father's life was disappearing quickly due to the cancer. Adi Da has given a great body of instructions on how to serve a dying person in complete detail in the book, Easy Death, and studying and practicing these instructions helped me to release my concerns and be there for my father as much as possible during this time. It was very painful to see him suffer, but during the last few weeks of my father's life and for a few weeks after his death, I tangibly felt Bhagavan Adi Da's Blessings penetrating into our circumstance and transforming it. My father had gone through many surgeries and therapy, and fought with all of his energy to live and be there for his family. But at the end, after a reoccurrence of the illness struck his body, remarkably he started to make peace with the death process that was happening. My family was continuing to search for alternative treatments that could cure him, but he was indifferent to it. A few days later he started to peacefully go in and out of a deep sleep-like coma. When he was awake, he did not seem to be in pain any longer as before, and needed very little pain medication. All the while, he showed great strength and peace with the process happening. His cardiologist said that he had not seen anyone go through so much, but still be in so much spirit. Another doctor said that it was not usual to be in a quiet and peaceful state as he was, as usually patients with his type of condition would be in excruciating pain. Before going home for the last time, he even made a joke to my mother and smiled as if he was trying to ease her of concerns one last time. Two days after coming home, my father passed as he was surrounded by all of his family. In the midst of my grieving, I was also overcome with a relief of feeling a very peaceful and loving Presence in the whole room during this time. Then, early the next morning only a couple of hours after his passing, I got a call from a friend saying Bhagavan Adi Da had sent His love and Blessings to my father and my family just a few hours before my father passed. It helped immensely to hear these words at that most difficult time in my life. Although my father did not continue to live and make a full recovery as my family and I hoped, it is a great relief to have witnessed his very benign and peaceful last days. Bhagavan Adi Da continued to help me go through the grieving process after my father passed away. A few weeks after his passing, Sat-Guru Adi Da came to the United States from Fiji. He first came to Los Angeles, and spent a few weeks there on His way to the Mountain of Attention Sanctuary in northern California. I was living in Los Angeles at that time, and was fortunate to serve Him and receive His Darshan every day. That was an ecstatic time. A few weeks after He arrived in California, He gave His loving help and guidance to me by giving me instructions to spend a significant time in His Company. It was a very healing time for me to be where He was. I felt all of my prayers being answered every time I went to see Him. It was a joy to see Bhagavan move freely and radiate love and happiness all around Him. He touched, healed and instructed thousands of people that came to see him. Four months after my father's passing, Adi Da gave more instructions as He saw that I was still not being able to completely let go of the sorrow. His instructions were to surrender the sorrow and relate to Him as Who He truly Is. It was difficult to receive those instructions at the time because it was a great self-reflection of the wrong way I was tending to relate to Him. But as time went on, I realized the immense value of His instructions. He did not mean that I should suppress my emotions and not feel the sorrow. The fruitlessness in seeking to realize happiness by relating to Adi Da as a separate Realizer or a being that has something that "I" do not have, was beginning to be very clear. Since that time when He gave those instructions in September of 2005, He has been revealing more and more what He meant by relating to Him as Who He Is. The more time I spent around Him, the more it started to become clear what this wrong way of relating to the Realizer is. His calling is always to stop the search for a relief from sorrow, fear, or anger and instead to realize happiness in this moment, in the joy of self-forgetting relationship to the Happiness itself, that He Is. Now He is not in a body any longer to relate to in person, and His instructions are clearer than ever. He is undoubtedly still living, as who He truly Is, and this searchless relationship to Him alone, as Truth itself, is all that is left. I am forever grateful to Bhagavan for His Revelation that He has made available to all beings. Below is an essay by Avatar Adi Da Samraj called “What Is More Than Wonderful Is Not Threatened”:
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