FAQs about Adi Da & Adidam > Introduction

Introduction:
"Are There Any Questions?"


Avatar Adi Da Samraj



[After sitting silently with everyone for an hour, Gracing them with His Darshan. . .]

Adi Da: "Are there any questions?

[Silence from the audience.]

Adi Da: "Everyone has understood?"

audience member: "I haven't understood. Explain it to me."

The beginning of Adi Da's first public talk,
"Understanding" (April 25, 1972)
in Avatar Adi Da Samraj, My "Bright" Word [1]


"Are there any questions?" was one of Adi Da's favorite lines when He gathered with His devotees, and from Adi Da's responses — to both the asked and unasked questions of the devotees sitting before Him (or participating in such a gathering via the Internet, from around the world) — came thousands of talks filled with extraordinary wisdom.


Often at the end of a gathering . . . He would press us to tell Him if there was anything else He could do for us. "Is there anything left over? Are there any questions at all? Do your friends not here with us tonight have any questions? Speak for them. Is there anything? We don't want to have to do this again. We will if we have to, but we don't want to have to. Is there anything, anything at all? Anything in you or in your friends I need to address?"

Leroy Stilwell
Love's Sacrifice and the Ordeal to Become Human


But from time to time, Adi Da would tell us that the deeper purpose of this exercise of gathering and answering our questions was simply to provide a means to keep us occupied — to keep us "in the Room" with Him:


All I am doing is just keeping you present while I am Present, and that is sufficient. That is the whole of sadhana. Everything else is an elaboration of that.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
Approaching the Guru: Prasad and Darshan, No Remedy


while He transformed our state with His Spiritual Transmission, dissolving the questioner in the Enlightened State of Divine Ignorance (which Adi Da also calls "Perfect Knowledge"). And that indeed was what would happen. Late in the night, He'd ask again, "Are there any questions?" And there would be none: not because we had asked every possible question, but because we ourselves had been dissolved.

Adi Da always made the point that our question-asking was founded on our chronic sense of dilemma, and was symptomatic of our egoity — the activity that is actually creating our sense of dilemma.


The Mystery of our existence is not a problem to be solved. The search for an Answer implies that the Mystery of existence is a Question. And when individuals become bound to the presumption that the Mystery of existence is a Problem or a Question, their lives become a search for Solutions or Answers in the form of experience or knowledge. . . . The only ultimate release from the presumed Problem or Question of existence is Realized in the transcendence of that presumption itself.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, The Transcendence of Attention

The real question is the state you are in. And the real answer is not in the form of a verbal response to verbally expressed dilemmas, or even apparently actual life-dilemmas. The real answer is the transcendence of your self-contracted state. . .

From the point of view of the real question — the actual dilemma — the most auspicious thing that can possibly happen is to enter into Satsang with Me. . . .

Satsang with Me is the answer. Satsang with Me is the process and Condition wherein the dilemma is undone. No spoken or written word, but (rather) the very relationship to Me, the Living True Divine Heart, is the Real answer. The answer is not in the form of an ego-serving method, a strategic technique, or a conceptual system that addresses your particular notions of human existence. The answer is the Self-Evident Manifestation of Truth, and that answer undermines that very structure in your conscious awareness that supports your entire search.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
"No 'One' Survives Beyond That Moment", My "Bright" Word


In a real sense, the purpose of this section, FAQs about Adi Da and Adidam, is similar. We are happy to answer your questions about Adi Da and Adidam as best we can! But answering questions cannot relieve the chronic sense of dilemma that motivates us to ask questions in the first place (since the actual source of that sense of dilemma is egoity itself — the unconscious activity of self-contraction); and answering questions cannot "cause" the Revelation of the Divine that is the starting point of true practice of the Way of Adidam.

At best, effective answers to questions can serve useful secondary purposes:

  • They can convince one that there really is something extraordinary about Adi Da and Adidam, something worth the investment of substantial time, energy, and life to explore further.

  • They can relieve one of (or at least reduce the force of) personal obstructions (doubt, anxiety, etc.) that may otherwise be preventing the Revelation from occurring in one's own case.

The very first thing Adi Da did during His first public gathering (on April 25, 1972) was to simply sit silently with everyone for an hour, gifting them with the Revelation of the Divine. It was only then that He asked, "Are there any questions? Has everyone understood?", demonstrating right from the start the secondary (but supportive) role of His Teaching Work in relation to His Revelation Work.

Thus, the true (and greater) purpose of this section, FAQs about Adi Da and Adidam, and this site altogether — and, indeed, the Way of Adidam altogether — is to help link you up with Adi Da's Spiritual Transmission, to the point where you yourself (and your questions) are dissolved and the Divine is Revealed.


Avatar Adi Da Samraj



RETURN TO "QUESTIONS ABOUT ADI DA AND ADIDAM"
[1]

Adi Da's first public talk, "Understanding", is also available as a CD.

 

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