Adi Da Samraj’s teaching and practice (Daism) are a form of spiritual seeking, just like the traditions he criticizes
Posted by Phoenix to the Shambhala Ken Wilber forum - 1998
In actual practice, Adi Da's criticism of Narcissus is just another form of spiritual seeking that attempts to offer a simple explanation for the root cause of human suffering, and then tells people what they need to do to cure the problem. Adi Da portrays the "Narcissistic" activity of identification with the separate self sense, the contraction from Consciousness, as the core illusion and error that people need to overcome. Adi Da's early version of spiritual practice, the enquiry "what are you always doing?" shows that he assumes there is a "you" who is doing the contracting from Consciousness, and that this entity and its activity are presumed to be separate from Consciousness. It is this form of the devotee's wrong behavior that he is focused on curing and seeks to be freed from, just like exoteric religious practitioners attempt to abstain from more ordinary forms of sin.
In either case there is the core presumption that the devotee or practitioner is fundamentally separated from God by his erroneous activity or sin, and needs to seek to fix that problem by performing some type of practice, or else have the problem cured by someone or some form of divine influence. For the Daist, the form of seeking engaged in is a particularly difficult and even un-solvable one. The devotee must attempt to transcend the very structure of human experiencing, in which there is the sensation that a separate "you" inside the body is differentiating itself from Consciousness and all other objects of attention.
Therefore, the devotee is caught in the problem-solution dynamic of "seeking" to be free of the activity of Narcissus, which is really just the ordinary mode of perceiving and relating to reality that is normal for human beings. The fact that this search is impossible to fulfill condemns the practitioner to a lifetime of striving for something he will never attain. In the meantime, Adi Da is able to criticize the devotee's failure while at the same time claiming that he himself is no longer a seeker, thus establishing a claim to superiority over the devotee that can used to further Adi Da's own agenda and purposes.
Adi Da's claim that his teaching and way of life are free of the spiritual search and all its suffering is a semantic game that makes no more sense than fundamentalist Christians who say they are not a religion because they are "saved by grace through faith in Jesus." It's all about setting up a straw man definition of religion, or in Adi Da's case, spiritual seeking, and then differentiating yourself from the straw man. Meanwhile, Adi Da loads the burden of all of the traditional disciplines and worst of all the need for the Adi Da guru/savior on the backs of those who are told they are not involved in a regime of spiritual seeking. What a contradiction!