Punctum Saliens

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

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.

This was my initial introduction to Adi Da. A member of the Kansas City Friends of Jung recommended this book and a couple others to the President of the organization who then mentioned it to me. I was intrigued by the title.

First, I must mention a couple points about the style of writing which make it rather tough going. Adi Da uses capitalization profusely and seemly at random. This is more of a curiosity than an impediment to reading, unlike his use of parentheses to include additional, related words and ideas. It’s a bit like reading the Amplified Bible (from my memory of that translation many years ago.) At times, I found myself skipping the entire parenthesis even though some were many lines long.

The book has 7 short sections — the entire book is only 81 pages including an Introduction and a Glossary.

Moving Beyond Childish and Adolescent Approaches to Life and Truth

Childhood is marked by dependence and “the presumption of dependence is eminently realistic and useful.” [p.17] But when adults remain in a dependent state, they conceive of the idea of “God-Apart.” Basically, exoteric religion is adults wanting no responsibility and craving dependence. “The sense of dependence initiates the growing sense of separate and separated self … At the conventional level of the life-functions themselves, there is a need for such functional practical differentiation — but the implications in the place of consciousness are the cause of an unnatural adventure of suffering and seeking-in-dilemma.” [p.17] The Jungian in me has a difficult time with this, although I may be using incompatible definitions for similar terms. Differentiation of the self, or development of the ego, is an absolutely necessary act both in terms of external life and our psychic health. This departure from Oneness and then journey back to Oneness is our inevitable path in life and while it has the side effects of struggle and suffering, we would not be human if we did not undergo it.

The transition from childhood to maturity is adolescence and “perhaps the majority of ‘civilized’ human beings are occupied with the concerns of this transition most of their lives.” [p.18] This stage is marked by a sense of dilemma imposed by the presumption of separateness inevitably inherited from childhood. The dilemma is between the mutually exclusive impulses towards independence and dependence. Adolescence is the origin of the “conscious mind” but this is a “strategic version of mind” and has as its foundation life-as-dilemma. As such, “[a]dolesence is an eternally failed condition, an irrevocable double-bind.” [p.19] “Traditional Spirituality” is an attempted balance between these adolescent extremes. The separate self (and it’s desire for success, fulfillment, and immortality) then sees everything — including the idea of God — as a potential opposite and problem. Sin then enters the picture as the separate self looks to “conditionally manifested things” as the hope for peace.

“Real and true human maturity” results in an undermining of the separateness of self and a return “to the Condition of Truth” in which there is no separate “self” and nothing outside “God.” For a mature person, “all that is manifest, and all that is unmanifest — all universes, conditions, beings, states, and things, all that is ‘within’ and all that is ‘without,’ all that is visible and all that is invisible, all that is ‘here’ and all that is ‘there,’ all dimensions of space-time and All that is Prior to space-time” [p.22] are included in “God” or in “Absolute Reality.”

“This mature phase of life requires, as its ongoing foundation, the most fundamental understanding of the egoic self … [and is] characterized not by the usual religious and Spiritual ‘solutions,’ but by no-seeking, no-dilemma …” [p.23] This is very Jungian and very Zen-ian.