Adi Da Samraj Passes from the Body                            GCP home

Naitauba, Fiji – November 29, 2008

 

Adi Da Samraj, a spiritual master, writer, and artist  of international renown, passed away in his hermitage in Fiji, on November 27, of natural causes. He was 69 years old. He founded an entirely new way of spiritual practice, to which he gave the name "Adidam".
Adi Da was a prolific writer and artist with over sixty published books and hundreds of thousands of works of art. The book that Adi Da designated as his most important work is The Aletheon, which he worked on intensively for the last two years, bringing all of his most essential spiritual and philosophical communications into a final form. He completed his work on The Aletheon on the morning of his passing. The Aletheon is scheduled for publication in 2009.

 

Spiritual Teacher

In the early 1970s, Alan Watts, writer of numerous books on religion and philosophy, acknowledged Adi Da as “a rare being,” adding, “It is obvious, from all sorts of subtle details, that he knows what IT’s all about.”
In the 1980s, Wittgenstein scholar Henry Leroy Finch wrote: “If there is a man today who is God-illumined, that man is Avatar Adi Da Samraj. There exists nowhere in the world, among Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, or any other groups, anyone who has so much to teach. Avatar Adi Da is a force to be reckoned with, a Pole around which the world can get its bearings.” 
From his birth (on Long Island, New York, in 1939), Adi Da manifested unique signs of spiritual illumination. He described his early years as being focused in two fundamental activities. His first focus was to discover the process by which any human being can realize the Truth of “Reality Itself”. His second focus was to develop his own ability to communicate the Truth of “Reality Itself”--through verbal means and also through artistic means.
Adi Da graduated from Columbia University in 1961, with a BA in philosophy, and from Stanford University in 1966, with an MA in English literature.
In 1964, Adi Da began a period of intensive practice under a succession of spiritual masters in the United States and India. Eventually, in 1970, after a final period of intense spiritual endeavor, Adi Da spontaneously became re-established in the continuous state of illumination that was his unique condition at birth.

 

Author

Adi Da's literary, philosophical, and practical writings consist of over sixty published books. These include many masterpieces of spiritual illumination, including The Knee of Listening, his spiritual autobiography, and The Dawn Horse Testament, his magisterial revelation of the entire Spiritual process from beginning to end.
Over a period of many decades, Adi Da undertook a massive examination of the world's religious traditions, culminating in an annotated bibliography of approximately 10,000 items, entitled The Basket of Tolerance. A briefer "epitome" version of The Basket of Tolerance is scheduled for publication in 2009.
Adi Da also created original translations of traditional spiritual texts, translations which bring out the deepest meaning of the original texts. The recent publication Reality Is All the God There Is presents his translations of texts from the traditions of Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta.
Adi Da's writings on fundamental practical areas of human life, examined from the spiritual perspective, include Green Gorilla (relative to raw diet) and The Complete Yoga of Emotional-Sexual Life.
Adi Da's principal literary work is his trilogy entitled The Orpheum. In the late 1990s, poet Robert Lax said of The Mummery Book (the opening volume of the Orpheum trilogy), “Living and working as a writer for many decades, I have not encountered a book like this, that mysteriously and unselfconsciously conveys so much of the Unspeakable Reality.” The Orpheum is also presented in theatrical form—as shown online at
www.mummerybook.org.

Artist

Adi Da was an extraordinarily prolific artist, producing over 100,000 works, primarily in the years since 2000. He was invited to show his work in a solo exhibition at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and also as part of the 2008 Winter in Florence Festival.
Noted art critic Donald Kuspit has written, “It is Adi Da Samraj's imaginative triumph to have conveyed the illusions created by discrepant points of view and the emotionally liberating effect when they aesthetically unite . . .”
Among the publications of Adi Da's art are The World As Light, Transcendental Realism, and The Spectra Suites. His artistic work can be viewed online at
www.adidabiennale.org and
www.daplastique.com.

Call for World Peace

Another dimension to his far-reaching legacy is his contemporary social wisdom embodied in the book Not-Two Is Peace. In it he calls for the establishment of a Global Cooperative Forum that mobilizes "everybody-all-at-once" on the basis of recognizing the inherent unity of the entire human family. He proposes that such a forum is the necessary and effective means for addressing the world’s most pressing issues.  I
Information about this initiative is available online at www.globalcooperationproject.org

 

Spiritual Way

Adidam, the spiritual way founded by Adi Da, is practiced by thousands of individuals worldwide, with centers in many parts of the world.
Information about Adi Da and Adidam is available online at
www.adidam.org.

Contact:

Bill Dunkelberger

12030 Shenandoah Road

Middletown, CA  95461

(707) 928-5560

bill_dunkelberger@adidam.org

 

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