Adi Da Plays the Part of a Dualistic, Quasi-Christian Savior, Contrary to His Non-Dualistic Written Teachings
from the Shambhala Ken Wilber Forum
Posted by former devotee
Adi Da plays the part of a dualistic, quasi-Christian Savior in his relationship
with devotees that utterly betrays the non-dualism that is the key concept in
the best of his written teachings.
When I was a member of his community, I never saw even the slightest evidence of
any commitment to the possibility that there might be "only God, " which was the
philosophy Adi Da taught in the purest of his writings and which he claimed to
have fully realized spiritually, whatever that might actually mean. In contrast
to those teachings, every aspect
of the life and culture surrounding him reinforces the dualism between Adi Da as
the Enlightened Savior with the power to awaken others to Consciousness, and his
Narcissistic followers who are trapped in the “sin” of identification with the
contraction from Consciousness that is the ego.
In the way it is described by Adi Da, this activity of contraction from
Consciousness is the kind of sin that no one can ever be free of, despite his
clams to the contrary, any more than exoteric Christians can be free of
original sin that they were born into as a result of mankind's "fall."
There is a circular logic to Adi Da's particular description of the contraction that
vilifies the one who is doing the contracting and permits no mechanism for that one
to transcend this "error." So, a devotee who accepts the belief that they are Narcissus is
utterly and permanently convicted of failure, just like a fundamentalist
Christian. The solution offered by both of these religions is a unique
Savior, who does for the sinner what he cannot do for himself. I suppose
this is not altogether surprising, given that both Adi Da (as Franklin Jones)
and virtually all of his followers grew up in Christian cultures, and most were
at least nominal Christians growing up.
There is simply nothing about the Daist lifestyle and practice that has anything
to do with a non-dualist perspective on reality. At most, there are elements in
Adi Da's written teachings that reflect non-dualism, but those are
just words. Devotees absolutely relate to Adi Da as a cultic and exclusive
source of salvation, divine revelation and transformation, and everything Adi Da
does (as opposed to what he sometimes says) encourages this dualism. And
while there is nothing about non-dualism that would prohibit the acknowledgment
of differences in function between human beings, I would expect people who were
awakened to that view of Reality to establish a more egalitarian community, not
an extremely hierarchical one where all of the power, control and resources were
excessively concentrated at the very top like they are in Adidam. Nor
would I expect such people to adopt the attitude that "the world" outside the
community was populated by "five billion slugs," as Adi Da has referred to
non-believers. How is that consistent with Only God?
In Adi Da's later teachings, threads of non-dualist thought are bastardized and
undermined in a non-stop barrage of capitalized letters where dualistic
concepts of Adi Da as God are conflated with non-dualist ideas in nonsensical
ways that truly boggle the mind. Devotees seem not to notice, because
their actual practice is the cultic worship of a human being, and the conflation
of personal and transpersonal points of view by Adi Da serves to encourage their
continued devotion to a delusion they are already committed to. Those who remain
devotees are the ones who have successfully adopted the contradictory
rationalizations for Adi Da's authority over them, which for many from Christian
backgrounds was not difficult to do. Adi Da became their Jesus.
Alas, for many devotees, the written teachings are something they gawk at and
pay homage to, but don't claim to understand at all. They are the pure
cult members, the ones who are attached to the symbol and person of Adi Da as
Savior, finding a level of comfort that they are "with God" and believing he
will take care of everything.
Even those devotees who were originally interested in non-dual teachings that
have stayed with Adi Da have strayed from their original path, perhaps clinging
to aspects and elements of the written teaching that reflect non-dualism, even
as their lives are filled with an endless array of dualistic rituals, rules, and
practices in the obnoxious Daist machine of spiritual seeking and cultism. It
takes a twisting of the mind to do this, since you have to pay more attention to
what is said than what is done, select which writings you pay attention to, and
read an opposite meaning into Adi Da's words when he goes off the deep end and
makes inflated claims for himself. However, none of this seems to stop either the corrupt or the
true believers, or those who are a mix of both.
Devotees become distracted in a dualistic adventure where their lives are swallowed up by
a deceiver who takes advantage of them until they wake up. The inner circle who
are closest to him have to live with the greatest level of contradiction and
dissonance, and have become corrupt facilitators and enablers for him. As
an offset for that they are paid in the currency of status within the community
and access to Adi Da, and often do not have to function or gets jobs in the
outside world. Just like the rest of the devotees, but even moreso, they either believe
in (through delusion) or conveniently ignore absurd justifications for the most
obvious lies and contradictions, until maybe one day the light of truth begins
to seep in. Or maybe the benefits they think they are getting from living in the
cult stop outweighing the price they pay in form of intellectual and emotional
dishonesty that are required for them to keep playing the game. Even after the
light starts to seep in, it takes time to truly wake up, regardless of how close
one was to Adi Da. Many ex-devotees stay stuck in a
kind of stupor for months or years, confused and ambivalent about how to make
sense of their relationship to Adi Da and his cult of personality.
In the end, some former members actually come back to the idea or insight that they had in the
beginning, the idea that really interested them in Adi Da's teaching in the
first place.
This is the idea that there is only God or Reality, and that there is no
separation or distinction between God and not-God. There is no such thing as
not-God, and that includes every kind of illusion, problem, or "contraction." If this is true, there is no
human being or experience or facet of
manifest existence that is more reflective of God than any other. So there is no justification for worshipping any
one particular piece of
the world, or any one person, as if they were "more God" than the rest of it.
Finally, there is no life that is not Life. There isn't "spiritual life" within
the community and "worldly life" outside of it.
Nothing special needs to change to
make the Divine nature of everything true, and there is nothing you can do that will make it more true than it already
is. There is no Problem and there is no Solution, even while there are many problems,
of which only some have solutions.
Get used to it and enjoy your life. Laugh, love, suffer, and die.
All of it is God.