Adi Da’s private persona: a nasty, moody, self-obsessed prima donna

from Elias' 2000 article "Daism Report #4: The New Pattern."

 

Sources paint a quite different picture of what goes on behind the scenes [than what most devotees think about him]. When the veil is pulled away, and 'the man behind the curtain' is revealed, Frank (Adi Da) comes across as incessantly foul-mouthed, petty, nagging, totally self-obsessed and controlling. His life is a constant stream of decision-making about his hobbies and his possessions. He obsesses about money, and he micro-manages virtually every detail of ashram life. Among his intimates he often refers to the devotees as 'dummies,' 'damn phonies,' 'kiss-ass retards,' and 'high-faluting egos' who 'diddle me with their crap.' (And those are only a few of the nice things he says about his followers.) His private conversation is laced with obscenities.... Anybody who dares to stand up to his bullying is quickly sent packing.... Sources report that he has to be handled with kid gloves at all times. He will begin to ruminate obsessively about some detail and be unable to get off it, until one of his wives skillfully directs his attention to something else -- sort of like the way you treat a child or a mental patient.....

 

Zardoz,

There’s more than one Adidam myth. They get juggled around depending on what Adi Da has or hasn’t done recently. Sometimes he’s loving, sometimes angry. The basic “myth” is that he is so far beyond everything he might seem to do that it isn’t comprehensible, and therefore we shouldn't even ask ourselves these questions - it might lead us down the road to heresy.

As one very highly placed devotee told me not long ago, Adi Da doesn’t give a damn about the body-mind. I pointed out that this wasn’t true of his own body-mind - he seems to care a great deal about that - but it is true that he seems not to care much about the body-minds of his devotees. He pushes them and creates all kinds of distress in their body-minds, and this is considered “okay”, because he is trying to get devotees to move beyond the body-mind. And then, when he seems to actually show some concern about a devotee’s bodily problems, and acts with even the slightest degree of loving energy, this is seen as a sign of his profound love for all beings, when in fact it is more like a miser’s throwing a few coins at some beggar in the gutter.

Yes, occasionally Adi Da can be very loving towards people, and it seems very genuine and moving, but let’s not pretend that happens very often. When it does, everyone makes such a big deal out of it precisely because it is so uncommon. Adi Da phases between being self-satisfied, and being angry, sarcastic, bitter, disappointed, displeased and critical. Occasionally he may be loving in the outward sense of things, but even that is considered something one should not place any great faith in, because he will be a bastard the very next moment as he sees fit. So the myth that arises to explain this is that it is all for the benefit of the devotee, or his own body-mind is just completely “vulnerable” and easily hurt, or that he doesn’t need to show his love to others in any obviously visible way, or any number of other excuses/explanations.

I’ve also talked to devotees who report that Adi Da can be extraordinarily angry for hours on end, and then just suddenly drop it and joke as if nothing had ever disturbed him, as if his anger meant nothing to him. One could either consider this to be a sign of Divine Indifference of psychopathology. One wonders what to make of such a “God”.

Okay, you have at least mentioned some kind of criteria for a "free" person: the ability to let go of reactive emotion the instant it is done being animated.

How then can you explain the fact that Adi Da does not let go of his reactive emotions towards those who do not sufficiently love him, but instead keeps them going for days, weeks, months and years? He keeps these reactive emotions of his spinning like a one of those circus performers spinning plates in the air. Do we ever see then end of them? Give him a paperweight, and for a brief period he is happy, then a day or so later he's pissed again, over the same things, and never seems to let it go and move on. Where exactly is the freedom in that.

And you, O Free One, can't free yourself from your cycle of reactive emotions to those who criticize Adi Da. You keep coming back here for no purpose at all except to dramatize your reactive emotions. If you were free, could you not just let it all go, and stop reacting to everyone here? Seems impossible.

As for Adi Da's reactions to me, no, they don't seem to have come to an end either.

So both you and Adi Da don't seem to meet your own criteria for freedom. How is that possible? Will you have to come up with new criteria, or just pretend there's no contradiction when it stares you in the face?

I don’t get what I want either.  In fact, no one ever gets exactly what they want. That's life. It doesn't mean anyone has the right to make other people's lives a living hell of frustrated demands because one isn't getting what they want.

Sure, maybe Adi Da is upset because his devotees aren't enlightened. But that still doesn't explain why he, the enlightened one, can't transcend that frustration and live a life of love instead. Simply doesn't make sense at all. Instead of transcending that frustration, he seems to blame everyone else for it, in the pattern of the narcissist who can't endure even the slightest frustration of his desires.

Yes, the open hand could slap you silly, but why would it want to? Why would an enlightened being who has fully opened himself to God want to deface that enlightenment by slapping people around.

Adi Da himself once used something like this analogy to explain why it is that once enlightened, one never abandons it. He told the story of how in his freshman year at Columbia, they had a "health class" which was basically a kind of sex-education session where a lot of these very naive kids could ask all those weird questions teenagers in the '50's needed to ask. So one kid asks the professor if, while having sex with a woman, it would still be possible to urinate. The Professor thinks about this a while and says, "Well, yes, I believe it's possible. But why would one want to?" And Adi Da made the point that yes, it would of course be possible to lose enlightenment once one had awakened, but why would one want to? Why, being fully conscious of the whole matter, would one choose to deface it? Like pissing on a woman while having sex with her?

Adi Da's point was that the enlightened would simply not choose to do anything unenlightened. But this raises the question with Adi Da - if enlightened, why would he choose to slap people around rather than love them? Why would he choose to constantly piss on his devotees rather than embrace them? Why use an "open hand" to emulate the very same behavior as a closed fist? What then is the difference between the two? Would not choosing to emulate a closed fist actually close that open hand? You do become what you meditate on. So perhaps Adi Da has awakened but chosen to be unenlightened for reasons we can only speculate about. In either case, it doesn't work to enlighten anyone. The evidence suggests that very clearly.

I appreciate the fact that you’re willing to put forth controversial statements, and some of what you say even rings true, but there’s some glaring inconsistencies.

For example, it’s almost true that Adi Da’s philosophy is “I don’t give a rats ass about you me or anyone else as a born entity," except for the part about “me”. Adi Da certainly does give a very large rat’s stinky ass about his own “born person”, and he expects everyone else to do so also. Now he may claim that he doesn’t care about “Franklin Jones”, but he most certainly does care about “Adi Da”, and how the body-mind of Adi Da is cared for, treated, sucked and fucked, wined and dined, ensconced in luxury, served hand and foot, you name it. And everyone in Adidam knows this damned well. So while it’s true that Adi Da doesn’t care about the bodily lives of his devotees, he most certainly does care about his own bodily life, raising it to the level of the primary directive, that all his devotee’s bodily lives should be sacrificed for the slightest requirement of his own bodily life. If this is the definition of “selfless service to others”, it’s a new one to me.

Now of course there’s nothing like that in Buddhism, or any other path I know of. It’s certainly not “the Guru’s point of view” in any of the Guru traditions. It’s just Adi Da’s point of view, and “uniquely so”. There’s no tradition, even ones that view the Guru as transcending individuality and separate self, which relate to the bodies of the Guru and his devotees in this manner. It’s pure nihilism, pure hatred of life, not liberation or salvation or serving the enlightenment of all beings. The Guru tradition is not about treating devotees as cannon fodder for the Guru’s own comfort and pleasure, and “undoing” them by ignoring, exploiting, or destroying their bodily life. The Guru traditions may at times use harsh discipline, but the genuine ones are generally quite moderate. The Buddha explicitly warned against this very approach, and never practiced it himself. Same with Ramana, and most other genuine realizers. Even Adi Da at one time preached the same dharma, saying that his teaching recommended a benignly sattvic, pleasurable life, not an ascetical one. And yet that changed over the years to the stressful, cannon-fodder approach of tearing people apart for his amusement and personal advantage.

You have to ask yourself, what bodily sacrifices has Adi Da made for his devotees? One would be hard pressed to find a single one. If the Adi Da is a casual meal eaten by lovers, I’d like to know when he’s ever acted in such a manner. Quite to the contrary, devotees are the meal he casually eats while they scream and writhe.

Your suggestion that Buddhism is opposed to democracy and compassion is utterly absurd and demented, and you only put forth such ideas to somehow justify Adi Da’s compassionless approach. If you want to defend or advocate Adi Da’s way of going about things, fine, but don’t pretend that Buddhism supports your view. It doesn’t. Loving compassion towards others is at the center of Buddha’s practice, and this kind of attempt to destroy the devotee’s ego through crushing demands and inhuman authoritarianism is utterly foreign to the way he taught, both verbally and in actual practice. Early Buddhism may not have been democratic in the purely political sense of putting things to a vote, but it was in the general sense of lacking any significant hierarchical structure, and treating all devotees equally, and in the process utterly discarding the highly hierarchical, authoritarian, class-based system of Hinduism and its castes and priesthoods.

But I know that yours is a view commonly perpetuated in Adidam, and people there will believe it to be true, even historically, in spite of tremendous evidence to the contrary. Face it, the only real precedents for Adi Da’s way of working with devotees are Jonestown and all the other petty authoritarian cults that have appeared throughout history. That’s why he call his avatarship the “Mummery-Ashvamedha” incarnation. He’s “incarnated” as a cult-leader of the most mediocre kind, not within the tradition of Sat-Gurus and Living Buddhas. Defend it all you want, but do so honestly, not pretending the traditions support his approach.