Sacred History > 1957 > An Infinity of a Very Different Kind

An Infinity of a Very Different Kind

Chris Tong

	Chris Tong has been a devotee of Adi Da Samraj since 1989. He is one of the founders of this website. You can read his biographical information in the About Us section. With the exception of the Postscript, this story is part of a longer story, The Devotee Feeds the Guru, and the Guru Feeds the Devotee.

My mother was a true pioneer. After spending ten years in a Catholic convent as a nun, she decided that it wasn't truly the spiritual life she had longed for . . . she hadn't found God there, just a group of well-intentioned but rather ordinary women, and the egos that tend to butt up against each other whenever communal living is attempted. So she left the convent and entered the graduate program in mathematics at Columbia University in New York City, where she met — and then married — my father, who was a brilliant young professor of mathematics there.[1] With his help, she completed her Ph.D. and became the first woman professor of mathematics at Columbia University in the late 1950's.

Her specialty, which she taught undergraduate students in her classes, was "transfinite numbers" — the study of different kinds of infinities.[2] Little did she know that an Infinity of a very different kind would enter her classroom!

Many years later, after I became Adi Da's devotee, I told my mother about Him. I showed her some of His books and showed her pictures of Him. She recognized Him immediately! She told me that, in her Autumn 1957 class, she had had a student named Franklin Jones, who stood out in her memory because, after class, He would always be down at the front of the classroom with a crowd of students gathered around Him.[3]

Thirty-one years later (in 1988), Franklin — Adi Da — would give a talk ("One More Monkey") that drew upon this curious notion of "different kinds of infinities" that my mother had taught. And, as was His way, He turned it into a profound lesson about Spiritual Realization.[4]

I was born in June, 1957, while my mother was teaching at Columbia. She would sometimes take me with her into class during my first year of life, which was rather unusual for the time — but, as I said, my mother was a true pioneer. Adi Da began His studies at Columbia in September, 1957 and took her class that autumn. When I asked her about it years later, my mother said she certainly would have brought me into the class He took with her.

So, even though I cannot remember it directly (and even though I will never know the full nature of its impact on my life and its course), any story about my relationship with my Guru must begin with the earliest time He Graced me with His Darshan! He would have been 17 (and then 18 on November 3) during that Autumn 1957 class.[5]

* * *

POSTCRIPT: After having been in the convent for a decade, searching for God, my mother had the great Grace of teaching an entire course with Adi Da — the Very Divine, incarnate in human form — in her classroom. She would again receive Adi Da's Blessing through me and my wife, Mary, as His devotees — something Adi Da has described is the case for the families and friends of all His devotees. During my mother's life, even though she had a spiritual sensitivity to Adi Da, her strong belief in Catholicism kept her from acknowledging Him as the Divine.

But when my mother passed in 2009, Mary (who helped spiritually link my mother with Adi Da, after my mother's death) had a clear, unshakeable vision, and the most extraordinary meditation she had ever had, in Plain Talk Chapel at the Mountain Of Attention. Even though the actual meditation hall was dark, in her vision (which lasted an hour and a half, and prevented her from moving), the room was filled with brilliant White Light. The White Light was shining from Avatar Adi Da. She saw my mother kneeling at Adi Da's feet, smiling, extraordinarily happy, radiant in His Light. My mother was looking up at Him in rapture, her arms outstretched toward Him, the recognition of the Divine shining in her face, her lifelong search for God finally coming to rest in Him.

The Way of Adidam is a Way of relationship, a Way of mutual gift-giving. My mother had given Adi Da a gift, in the form of some of humankind's greatest concepts of infinity. . . And, in the end, she gave Him her heart as well. And Adi Da, in turn, gave her the Gift of Infinity Itself. In the Infinity of the Heart, what goes around comes around!

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FOOTNOTES

[1]		More about my father can be found in this Wikipedia article.
[2]		"The study of different kinds of infinities" may sound like a very strange notion (it is!), but here's a way to get a quick feeling for it. We know that if we start counting: 1, 2, 3, and so on, we will never come to an end. For example, whatever large number you give me (say, 3 gazillion), I can always give you one more: that number plus one (3 gazillion and one). The title of Adi Da's talk, One More Monkey [3], is a riff on this mathematical argument that there are an infinite number of counting numbers because there is always "one more". So we can say the number of counting numbers is "infinite". Mathematicians give the special name "aleph null" (the mathematical symbol is ) to the infinity that is the total number of counting numbers. So if you ask, "how many are there?" of anything, even if there are an infinite number of "them" (whatever they are), if you can count all of them (even though it would take forever), then the "number" of them (from a mathematical perspective) is aleph null. But here's where it gets interesting. . . Most people would presume that you can take any group of things, even an infinite group, start counting them, and eventually you'd hit every single thing in that group (even though it might take a gazillion years before you reached and counted some particular item in that group). But, amazingly, mathematicians have shown that there are groups of things that are infinite in a very strange way: they aren't countable. You can't come up with a scheme for counting all the items in the group, no matter how clever you are, even if you were given an unlimited amount of time to do the counting. No matter what approach you have for counting the items in the group, it will definitely miss counting some items in the group, no matter how long you're given to do the counting. Mathematicians say that such a group of things is not only infinite, but uncountably infinite, in size — in other words (strangely enough), a larger infinity than the counting numbers! What's an example of an uncountably infinite group of things? The points on the number line between 0 and 1. No matter what counting scheme you can come up with, I can construct an irrational number with an infinite number of digits in it — something like ∏ (pi) — that your counting scheme will miss, no matter how long it is given to count. As you might guess, once mathematicians "opened the door" and allowed in two different kinds of infinity (countable and uncountable), with one bigger than the other, then there wasn't anything stopping them from going the next step, and conceiving of a much larger variety of infinities. That's exactly what the study of transfinite numbers is all about, and aleph null is only the smallest transfinite number. There's "aleph one" (), "aleph two", etc. And how many transfinite numbers — how many different kinds of infinities — are there altogether? A transfinite number, of course!
[3]		Being surrounded by people spontaneously attracted to Him — like Krishna and the gopis — seems to have been an ongoing theme in Adi Da's life, even from early on. Here is another story, about Adi Da's time as a student at Stanford University, from John K.: I was told a story by a retired professor from Stanford about his experiences with Franklin Jones (when Franklin was a graduate student at Stanford). This particular professor was an Indian-born Hindu who taught philosophy at Stanford. He did not have Franklin as a student of his, but he remembered him. It was an interesting conversation. The professor was skeptical of gurus. As he put it, he had seen too many "abuses" in India. So, he was dubious about where Franklin Jones "wound up." He did recall Franklin was very charismatic and captivating and would often "hold Court" in the cafeteria where many students would gather around him listening entranced. This professor attributed all of this to "Franklin's charismatic personality and notable intelligence".
[4]		Adi Da's talk, One More Monkey, can be heard here. Here is an excerpt: Infinity is a convenience of mathematics. Some "wag" mathematician suggested some time ago that there are a number of different kinds of infinities. . . . You think you're working toward infinity as if it's an end number, having begun with zero. . . . . You are under the illusion that you can be "infinite", you can be "nothing", and you can be "much". . . . This is your apelike illusion! . . . Infinity is simply a sign of the indefinite — in other words, there is no number, "infinity". There's always "one more". . . . The Totality exceeds all limitation, and you are a participant in That, absolutely identified with It. Avatar Adi Da Samraj, One More Monkey
[5]		Knowing Beloved Adi Da's extraordinary love for children and babies, I have a fantasy that He might have held me in His arms on one of the occasions I was in my mother's classroom with Him. . . But I'll never know for sure. (My mother had already passed by the time this occurred to me, so I was not able to ask her.) In any case, I am profoundly grateful to have been in the room with Him as a baby — an incredibly auspicious beginning for a human life!