Do Devotees Fake Irrational Beliefs in Adi Da Samraj Cult Adidam? (Da Free John)

The post about Adi Da taking credit for the Berlin wall coming down but not for Iraq was making me remember that it was considered to be DEVOTEES who were causing the war (in Iraq) when I was in Fiji. I'm not sure who this talk originating with, but I remember everyone jammed into I think it was the dining area quite late at night, summoned in panicked tones for an urgent meeting. People were weeping with apparently broken hearts about this talk (that we were causing the war) -- or maybe the broken hearts were over their abuse of the guru.

I remember sitting there, watching a room full of largely very high IQ people actually believing they were causing a war in the middle east because they could not please their guru. It was one of those moments in my time in the community where I was stunned beyond speech or any response whatsoever. It was like being in an insane asylum -- a very distant one, with the inmates in charge of all exits! If I had not actually witnessed this scene, I don't think I would have believed that it was possible to create this level of thought distortion in the human mind. There was such a terrible loneliness about it too. I kept wondering: why is this not "taking" in my mind? Why is this working on everyone else? It almost felt like my brain had to be structurally different from all those other people who were sitting there listening to the very same words and drawing such profoundly different conclusions.

And now I'm wondering: were some of those people faking? This is especially a question for people on this forum who were there in these kinds of meetings where the most preposterous claims were being made (no guru at the front of the room distorting people's grip on reality by dissolving their minds in bliss, instead him off "in jail" or somewhere and everyone else wringing their hands with worry). Did you believe these assertions and threats? When I was a devotee, whenever I questioned any of these things, it was as if I was proposing ideas so off the wall, so BIZARRE, that the other devotees could not even begin to imagine how my mind could go along such strange paths. I remember the blank stares, and the stunned bewilderment, when I said I thought Adidam was a cult. It was literally as if this thought had never once crossed the minds of the other people. And we are talking about people who had been in the community for years and had graduate degrees. What does it all mean??!!

Posted by Broken Yogi on Mar-10-05

My experience was that there was a wide range of opinions, not just among devotees, but in devotees' own minds, but that range was always flattened out in any open discussion, and only the most banal, orthodox view was allowed to be voiced or affirmed in those kinds of gatherings. In private, afterwards, devotees might privately voice other views, or at least acknowledge that they didn't have any way of knowing whether these crazy ideas were actually true, but knew that they had to "play along" not just to avoid conflict, but because that was somehow "our sadhana".

There's this strong notion even among the most intelligent devotees that for some reason they can't begin to comprehend, it is somehow necessary to go along with all this crazy stuff because it is in some bizarre way working a purification of themselves, of the world, of the spiritual process, and they just decide not to question that, but accept it and go with the flow of it, even participate in it to some serious degree. They have such a strong conviction that Adi Da is the Big Kahuna that they give license to just about anything, at least in their own minds, and give a huge benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, what people are actually willing to do is quite different. Amazingly, a lot of people do take this shit very seriously and even act on it, making complete life plans on the basis of it. But many, many others only let it take only a relatively small bite out of their practical life, or even just give it lip service. Which is of course something Adi Da endlessly complains about as well - the lack of commitment his devotees show.

The real commitment required, of course, is being committed to a mental institution, which Adi Da has also accounted for in the Mummery. Some devotees do take it that far, and really do belong in a psyche ward. Others just mouth the talk and do another walk. But to be honest, a lot of what you hear in those open gatherings is meant for the "little fish". You might notice that very often the community leaders themselves don't even bother attending such meetings, and don't speak out if they do. Most of them don't take this apocalyptic talk seriously, or only half-seriously. They've become too jaded from seeing too much of the inner circle, and hearing this shit too many times. Half of them know it's crazy, the other half knows they ought to take it seriously, and the third half is looking to see what's in it for them. (devotees are almost all multiple split personalities, composed only of fractions of fictional people).

Are some people faking it? You might as well ask if the people in pentecostal churches are faking it when they speak in tongues or writhe on the floor in ecstasy. It's almost exactly the same phenomena. Yes and no is the only coherent answer. What's going on is that the person is so split into so many different characters, that some of those characters actually believe what's going on and some of them actually lie to their other internal personas about it. Trying to talk sense with such people is just impossible. You can't even get all their personalities to come out at the same time and hash it out. So the answer you get from them depends entirely on which persona is dominant at the time you are speaking to them. This is why devotees who might be your best friend one day are suddenly condemning you as a crazy heretic the next (are you listening, Randog?) It's not that they actually changed their minds about you suddenly, it's just that a different persona became dominant that previously was only partially seen, or even entirely hidden from view.

Cults thrive on the old motto: divide and conquer. Except that the primary divide they encourage is an internal one in the minds and hearts of the cultist. And therefore the best defense against cultism is to unify one's unconscious and subconscious parts and personas through the rather difficult process of self-examination and even self-debate. One of the best things about this forum is that it allows people who engage it to bring out their own hidden personas and face up to parts of themselves that were kept from view while in Adidam, or that never were allowed to consciously exist in the same place at the same time.

It's the old Jungian process of integration of the self. Cults seek to split the self into as many tiny parts as possible in order to dominate and subjugate them all. And so cultic personalities are noticeably "multiple", and thus inherently untrustworthy. One persona may make a perfectly sound agreement with you that they fully intend to honor, but another of their personas never made that agreement with you, and has no intention of ever honoring it. And so when the second persona takes over from the first, your agreements are completely wiped out without a shred of conscience.

A mature individual simply isn't divided so psychotically within himself, and so simply honors all agreements he's made, or re-negotiates them. But in Adidam you have the phenomena of agreements constantly being dropped, made obsolete, not even acknowledged, simply because the conditions required that everyone drop yesterday's persona and take on a new one. It all depends on which persona of the day serves the interests of the cult best. So individual integrity means very little in Adidam. What is considered the highest virtue in Adidam is devotion to the Guru, devotion to what serves his best interests, and to hell with everyone and everything else if that be necessary. And at one time or another, it always is.

But that's a great insight about the loneliness of the believer. The cultic character really is all alone, even with himself. He's split off from reality, from real relationships, from real friendships, because he's sold his soul to the devil, literally. This is why you see such sad, defeated faces in Adidam. That photo of Richard on Randog's site is priceless. What more needs be said about the effects on one's character of three decades of cultism? You can't help but feel compassion for the poor guy.