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Religion and Reality by Adi Da Samraj: Part II

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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 by Adi Da Samraj: Part I

Published
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Ken
on February 2, 2009
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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.

Favorite sentences from children’s books: IV

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on May 8, 2008
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A deep calm settled inside him. His heart filled with trust and joy.
Wrapped in the boy’s arms, Dog felt himself grow lighter and lighter.
And he never came back again.

Samsara Dog by Helen Manos, illustrated by Julie Vivas

What’s your favorite sentence(s) from a children’s book?

Favorite sentences from children’s books: III

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Ken
on May 7, 2008
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Now, what SHOULD we do?
Well . . .
What would YOU do
If your mother asked YOU?

Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat

What’s your favorite sentence from a children’s book?

Favorite sentences from children’s books: II

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on May 5, 2008
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On the day you were born
the Earth turned, the Moon pulled,
the Sun flared, and, then, with a push,
you slipped out of the dark quiet
where suddenly you could hear . . .
. . . a circle of people singing
with voices familiar and clear.

and

And as they held you close
they whispered into your open, curving ear,
“We are so glad you’ve come!”

On the Day Your Were Born, Debra Frasier

What’s your favorite sentence from a children’s book?

Did God forget to consult his omniscience?

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Ken
on April 26, 2008
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In The Creation of Consciousness, Edinger talks about the “new myth” initiated by Jung with his book, Answer to Job.

On the basis of our emerging knowledge of the unconscious the traditional image of God has been enlarged. Traditionally God has been pictured as all-powerful and all-knowing. Divine Providence was seen as guiding all things according to the inscrutable but benevolent divine purpose. The extent of divine awareness did not receive much attention. The new myth enlarges the God-image by introducing explicitly the additional feature of the unconsciousness of God. His omnipotence, omniscience and divine purpose are not always known to Him. He needs man’s capacity to know Him in order to know Himself.

And I just realized that the rescuing of Lot from Sodom is an excellent example of this. Lot and his wife and two of his daughters were rescued because they were “righteous” in the eyes of God. But, look at what Lot’s family does immediately after being rescued. Lot’s wife immediately disobeys God’s command and turns to look at the burning cities and is turned into a pillar of salt. Both of Lot’s daughters get their father drunk, sleep with him, and bear sons. Furthermore, Lot’s two grandsons are the fathers of the Moabites and Ammonites. Now, God was not fond of either of these civilizations, to say the least. Neither of them were allowed to enter the assembly of the Lord (Deut 23:3). The Isrealites slaughtered the Moabites: they killed 10,000 “robust and valient men” (Judges 3:25) on one occasion and an untold number on another (2 Kings 3:24). Saul slaughtered the Ammonites and scattered them so that “no two of them were left together” (1 Sam 11:11). Jeremiah makes prophesies against both the Moabites and Ammonites.

So, God considered Lot and his family righteous but immediately after he saves them from destruction, they disobey a direct command and father two civilizations that are Israel’s mortal enemies and the cause of many Israelite deaths. This does not seem very consistent with an omniscient God.

What do you think? Why were Lot’s daughters saved only to sin and father civilizations that God hated?

The Creation of Consciousness: V

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We know turn to Jung’s amazing work Answer to Job. At the outset, the reader should be aware that Answer to Job is offensive. Edinger warns:

These are the two most common sources of offense to the readers of Answer to Job. Either one is offended that Jung describes Yahweh so outrageously, in contradiction to the dogmatic God-image in which he believes, or one is offended that Jung takes so seriously the primitive, anthropomorphic image of God that has long since been discredited by the rational intellect. I venture to assert that every person on first encounter with Answer to Job will be offended to some extent in either on or the other, or perhaps both, of these ways.

Whoever is gravely offended will have nothing more to do with Answer to Job, and that is proper since one man’s meat can be another man’s poison.

So, if you’re still with me, lets get to being offended!

Jung wrote Answer to Job during an illness. He said that the book “came to me” and that he felt “its content as the unfolding of the divine consciousness in which I participate.”

Edinger could not have put more emphasis on Answer to Job. He felt that “it has the same psychic depth and import as characterize the major scriptures of the world-religions.” Edinger also considered the book as a new dispensation. (I warned you that this would be offensive!)

Jung identifies the audience for the book:

I am not . . . addressing myself to the happy possessors of faith, but to those many people for whom the light has gone out, the mystery has faded, and God is dead. For most of them there is no going back, and one does not know either whether going back is the better way. To gain and understanding of religious matters, probably all that is left us today is the psychological approach. That is why I take these thought-forms that have become historically fixed, try to melt them down again and pour them into moulds of immediate experience.

The central theme of Answer to Job is “the relationship between man and Yahweh.” Jung’s psychological approach to the issue requires us to understand two things. First, we must understand that Jung recognized “the full reality of all psychic phenomena.” [1]

For Jung the psyche is not less real than the body. Though it cannot be touched, it can be directly and fully experienced and observed. It is a world of its own, governed by laws, structured, and endowed with its own means of expression.

Whatever we know of the world or our own being comes to us through the mediation of the psyche. [2]

Second, we need to understand what Yahweh means psychologically. Edinger summarizes this point thusly:

. . . Yahweh as a psychic reality is a personification of the collective unconscious especially in its aspect of center and totality, the Self. It expresses itself in dreams and fantasies of an archetypal nature; in affects, instincts and intense energy-manifestations of all kinds; in psychic and somatic symptoms; and in its specific quality of “otherness” which goes contrary to the desires and expectations of the ego. Since the phenomena of synchronicity imply a fluid boundary between inner and outer reality, the unconscious can come to us from without as well as from within. Hence Jung can say, “God is reality itself.”

We’ll start looking at the Edinger’s commentary on the book next time.

—————————————————
[1] Jolande Jocobi, The Psychology of C. G. Jung, 1973, p. 1.
[2] Ibid.

Favorite sentences from children’s books: I

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Ken
on April 4, 2008
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That very night in Max’s room a forest grew
and grew—
and grew until his ceiling hung with vines
and the walls became the world all around
and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max
and he sailed off through night and day
and in and out of weeks
and almost over a year
to where the wild things are.

Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak

What’s your favorite sentence from a children’s book?

The Creation of Consciousness: IV

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We know turn to the meaning of consciousness. Etymology indicates that consciousness is made up of two factors: knowing and withness. That is, it is the experience of knowing together with an other.

Edinger tackles the act of knowing from a psychological-empirical approach rather than a philosophical approach. Through the former approach, says Edinger, “the experience of knowing can be at least descriptively elaborated.”

The psychological function of knowing or seeing requires first of all that undifferentiated, diffuse experience be split into a subject and an object, the knower and the known. . . . As [Erich] Neumann says, “This act of cognition, of conscious discrimination, sunders the world into opposites, for experience of the world is only possible through opposites.”

This is exactly Jung’s individuation process which is realized through the experience of the tension of the opposites. Each new increment of consciousness that we collect requires a repetition of this same process of separating object from subject. Schopenhauer talks about the ability for a man to step away from his struggling, suffering life and observe it as if he is a spectator to a play. All the things that were intensely emotion are now cold, foreign, and strange. It is this process that turns an “unconscious complex which has one by the throat into an object of knowledge” and is “an extremely important aspect for increasing consciousness.” The myth of Perseus and Medusa also demonstrates the power of reflection. Once cannot look upon Medusa directly but one can view her via the mirror-shield — the process of human culture or art.

Being known as object is the other half of the process of knowledge. The ego as “knower” is only providing simple knowing. “To achieve authentic consciousness the ego must also go through the experience of being the object of knowledge, with the function of the knowing subject residing in the ‘other’.” This “other” must ultimately be the inner “knowing one,” i.e., the Self or inner God-image. The “Last Judgment” is the ultimate experience of being the object of knowledge. It “can be understood psychologically as a projection into the afterlife of the ego’s encounter with the Self and the archetypal experience of being the known object of a transpersonal subject; it is an awesome experience, as the myths make clear, an experience that man has understandably tried to postpone as long as possible by transferring it to the afterlife.”

We all begin as the known object and slowly, as the ego develops, become the knowing subject. This is a tranquil and powerful state since the subject dominates the object and the object is the victim of the knower. But we must give up our relative freedom as we realize that we are also the known object, once again, to the Self. So, we alternately must play the role of subject and object. The real key to the process is the realization of the “dynamism of connectedness, the relationship principle” that is knowing with. It is a coniunctio, a union, of Logos (knowing) and Eros (withness) and, as such, we are simultaneously playing both parts. Furthermore, this process also applies to the Self which must also be the known object to the ego’s subject. In Answer to Job, Jung says:

Existence is only real when it is conscious to somebody. That is why the Creator needs conscious man even though, from sheer unconsciousness, he would like to prevent him from becoming conscious.

What we see in Job is that “because Job has seen Yahweh’s amoral nature, Yahweh is obliged to change.” In other words, God — or the Self — needs man to promote the Self’s consciousness.

This reciprocal relation between the ego and the Self — in which both are object and subject — has some interesting implications. The unconscious provides the material of our dream life and thus the Self becomes visible to the ego. But what if the life dramas of the ego are the dreams of the Self, the process of God becoming aware of himself?

In this modern age, religion is the Eros, or withness, factor and seeks the maintain man’s connectedness with God and is Self-oriented. Science is the Logos, or ego-oriented, factor and seeks human knowledge at the expense of the connection with the other. Science alone inadequate to the needs of the whole man and the intellectually naive standpoint of religious faith is equally inappropriate for us today. It is the synthesis and linking of these two factors that will increase consciousness in the universe.

The Creation of Consiousness: III

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Ken
on April 3, 2008
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[ Finally getting back to this book. I actually lost it for a while in the black hole residing in the center of my office. But I've managed to rescue it from the event horizon and now we'll continue... ]

It is the union of opposites that is the essential feature:

Consciousness is the third thing that emerges out of the conflict of twoness. Out of the ego as subject versus the ego as object; out of the ego as active agent versus the ego as passive victim; out of the ego as praiseworthy and good versus the ego as damnable and bad; out of a conflict of mutually exclusive duties — out of all such paralyzing conflicts can emerge the third, transcendent condition which is a new quantum of consciousness.

It is in “paralyzing conflicts” that we grow, learn, and mature. It is the no-win situation that makes us confront our passive, un-examined beliefs and prejudices and figure out what we truly believe. Being in a rut — physically, emotionally, mentally — simply atrophies our being. Nothing new comes from one-track thinking and avoiding to actually make the tough decisions.

Edinger then goes on to talk about the Trinity and how the Holy Spirit could only come after Jesus’ death in which the opposites of the Father and the Son collided on the cross. In this respect, the Holy Spirit embodies the creation of consciousness and thus the indwelling of the Parachlete “thus anticipates the new myth which sees each individual ego as potentially a vessel to carry transpersonal consciousness.”

As two archetypal figures who both represent the idea of a carrier of consciousness, Christ and Buddha give us the opportunity for comparison and objectivity.

As long as there is but one figure embodying supreme value he can only be worshipped but not understood. With the presence of two we can discover the separate third thing which they both share; understanding and greater consciousness then become possible.

I think this is exactly the situation of the Old Testament God versus the new Testament God. In the Old Testament, there was only the one God and so he could only be worshiped; there was no point of comparison from which he could be understood. It took Jesus, as the wrathful, jealous God’s opposite in order for us to be able to put them both in perspective.

The new myth suggests that man is an experiment in the process of creating consciousness; “that the sum total of consciousness created by each individual in his lifetime is deposited as a permanent addition in the collective treasury of the archetypal psyche.” There are many mythical images that talk about the transfer from the personal life of the ego to the eternal realm: the early Egyptian idea of the dead being turned into stars and the translation of dead kings to the heavenly realm; Christian symbolism of the righteous ascending into Heaven; the promise in Revelation that the victorious will be a pillar in the temple of God.

This new myth gives meaning to our mundane life:

Every human experience, to the extent that it is lived in awareness, augments the sum total of consciousness in the universe. This face provides the meaning for every experience and gives each individual a role in the on-going world-drama of creation.