Religion and Reality: True Religion Is Not Belief in Any “God”-Idea but the Direct Experiential Realization of Reality Itself, by The Avataric Great Sage, Adi Da Samraj. The Dawn Horse Press, 2006.
The Parental Deity and the One to be Realized
A common notion about “God” or the Divine is that of another – a “Somebody Else” in the room even when I am alone. Adi Da’s viewpoint is “no matter how many people are in the room, there is still only One Person there!” [p.26] This “Somebody Else” is usually seen as a Great Parent analogous to the infant/parent relationship. In this sense, “religion tends to be a solution for a rather infantile problem: the need to be protected, sustained, and made to feel that everything is all right and that everything is going to be all right …” [p.27] Conventional religion, then, is the domain of the immature, childish, adolescent and not of “real human maturity.” All the ideas of God seeing all you do, wanting you to do certain things and not do other things, rewarding, punishing, &c. come from this infantile conception of God as Parent. But a religion of dependence runs into problems as we become adults and the hard facts of life make us feel much less protected. This makes us question and doubt the existence of this “Parental Deity.”
Here we come to a phrase that is often repeated in the book and makes me a little uneasy: “The only-by-Me Revealed and Given Way of Adidam.” This strikes me as a bit cult-ish in that the words of Adi Da are implied to be the final authority and no one can say anything else of value on the subject. Jesus made no such claim. Even if you interpret some of his words as saying that there is no salvation without knowledge of the person of Jesus, he never said that he was the final word and, indeed, Paul, in particular, goes far beyond the statements made by Jesus in defining Christianity. It seems to me that Adi Da was leaving no room for a Pauline equivalent in Adidam. Also, the ideas expressed here are common to many traditions in other religions, so I don’t understand Adi Da’s claim to uniqueness.
But that said, Adi Da makes an excellent statement about the nature of God: “Rather, That One is the Acausal Divine Self-Condition (and Source-Condition) of all phenomenal conditions – including all opposites, even all contradictions. Thus, you cannot account for That One in childish terms.” In this statement, we see the foreshadowing of some very Jungian ideas about holding the tension of the opposites and the subsequent creation of consciousness (which, of course, gets him back on my good side). He then summarizes his ideas of God and they will sound very familiar to many: God is Reality itself; God transcends our personal existence; our personal existence arises in God; the world is a modification of God – a “play” upon him; to realize God, you must enter an ego-less state. But here he takes a slightly different, perhaps semantically only, path by saying the route to realizing God is not by going inward but by transcending your seemingly separate self. I’m unclear as to what Adi Da means by “inward,” perhaps he means looking into your ego or your separateness. But “transcending” is a going beyond and, at least in Jungian parlance, implies the union of the conscious and unconscious analogous to the transcendent mathematical functions which is a union of real and imaginary numbers. So, the transcending requires an “inward” or, perhaps, “downward” looking in order to go beyond and above.
In any case, we here hit another odd phrase: “and It is Realized … by transcending your own separative … activity, and (thereby, ultimately, by Means of My Avataric Divine Spiritual Grace) …” Perhaps this should be understood in light of the fact that if we are all one and one with God then God’s grace is Adi Da’s grace. But then, by the same argument, isn’t it also Jesus’ and Buddha’s grace?
All “public religious chitchat” about the existence of God is meaningless because the God which is being discussed is the God of dependence, the God-idea formed from the infant/protector mindset and that God does not exist. The struggle to prove that God’s existence is a false struggle. “It is an expression of the common disease, the problem-consciousness of threatened egoity.” [p.32] Although much of conventional religion should be thrown away because it is “just a form of man-made consolation for rather childish egos,” [p.33] you should not throw it away in its entirety because “there is much more to true religion than what is contained in these childish propositions.” [p33]
Entering into a realization of God as the Great Divine Reality, That Truth requires maturity and does not entail appealing to the power of the “Other.” It requires awakening “to the Realization of That Which is in the Inherently egoless Self-Position.” [p.34] It requires the realization “that no matter what is arising, no matter how many others are present, there Is Only One Being.” [p.34]
Part I of series
Our Father
I’ve been motivated to look at The Lord’s Prayer in some depth. We never (or rarely) recited this prayer in the church I grew up in and, for the most part, these were just verses that I memorized at one point. There was not a lot of significance attached to them. But, as I approach Christianity anew, after several decades of separation from it, and under the influence of Jungian Depth Psychology, something is drawing me to rethink this model prayer which Jesus has given us.
I want to start with the first two words: “Our Father.”
This signifies a change in the human psyche and how we approach and relate to God. The Old Testament was the story of our infant years where God was a (seemingly) capricious, loving/hating being out there somewhere, up there in the sky somewhere. Starting with Jesus, we now relate to God as child and, sometimes, like a teenager. We have a more conscious relationship with him and he treats us less arbitrarily (at least it seems like that to us).
Consider an infant who is crying because she is hungry and her father is offering a bottle but she really wants her mother’s breast. The infant is confused and hurt that she’s not getting what she wants and her father must seem so cruel. At other times, the father puts her in her mother’s arms and she gets exactly what she wants. There is no rhyme nor reason to this. Why does her father not always give her to her mother when she cries out of hunger? Why does he sometimes (seemingly) punish her by only offering that wretched bottle? The issue is that she has no other way of relating because she does not have enough consciousness.
Now, skip ahead to a 4 or 14 year old. Now, the child can address his father as “Father” and ask for exactly what he wants. The child is capable of understanding, in some cases, why the father gives what he does. With the child’s increased consciousness, the father’s actions seem less arbitrary. And this is where Jesus was taking us. He was showing that we have an increased consciousness and, therefore, can relate to God in a different way.
What this two-word phrase also identifies is our relation to God in an essential way. That is, by calling God “Father” we are acknowledging that we are of the same essence. My daughter has my genes and is made up of the same things that I am. We have matching DNA. Our basic reality or essence is the same. In the Old Testament, or as an infant, we do not recognize this. We cannot grasp the idea that this great, powerful being who gives us what he wants to give and not what we want to receive is of the same stuff as we are. But with increased consciousness comes increased awareness of what we are and what he is. We can recognize the imago Dei, the “in our likeness” that is within us from God. “Our Father” is not only said out of respect or out of love. It is also said out of identification — we are of the same essence as God. We share the same DNA.
A local church has a quote from Hafiz on their sign: “Little by little you will turn into God.” We do turn into our fathers. How many times have I done something or said something or caught a glimpse of myself and thought, “My God! My father does that! I’m turning into my father.” And this is the case with God, our Father. But it’s also the reality that we already are our father. Our DNA tells us that from the moment of conception. What appears to be a “turning into” is really nothing more than a “realizing that we already are.”