Spirituality and Death with Julie Anderson
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove
6,815 views Feb 5, 2024
Julie Anderson, a former Playboy centerfold model, was an intimate companion of Adi Da Samraj from 1976 until 1992. During that time she was known as Kanya Samarpana Remembrance (also Swami Dama Kalottara Devi, and a number of other names).
Her article, "The Real Practice of Guru-Devotion," was published in the Free Daist Magazine in 1992.
You can learn more about Julie at the following sites: https://www.evelynexposedandfreed.com/, https://beezone.com/julieanderson/int.... and
• Video
Following up on her previous two interviews in which she shared details of life in the household of Adi Da Samraj, she describes her experiences surrounding the death of her mother, the near-death and then death of her guru, Adi Da, and other major life changes that could be thought of as ego deaths.
00:00:00 Introduction
00:08:25 Adi Da's 1986 near-death experience
00:27:38 The one reality, consciousness itself
00:35:47 Easy Death
01:00:33 Spiritual practice as an ordeal
01:09:36 Ego death
01:37:18 Religion vs. the spiritual path
01:44:41 The death of Adi Da
02:07:08 Postmortem influence of Adi Da
02:11:22 Conclusion
New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in "parapsychology" ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death.
(Recorded on January 23, 2024)
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Transcript
Introduction
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Thinking Allowed Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge
and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove
New Thinking Allowed Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today
we'll be exploring spirituality and death. With me is Julie Anderson, who has come all the way from Australia.
She has been a guest twice before on New Thinking Allowed, talking about her life as an intimate companion of Adi Da Samraj,
a spiritual guru of whom she is a devotee and
has been, even though he died 2008, as I recall.
Julie is visiting here in Albuquerque, and I'm delighted
that you're with us today in the studio. Welcome, Julie. Thank you, Jeffrey. I'm really grateful to be here.
And I feel I have communicated to you, but I also want to acknowledge to
listeners how wonderful it is and how grateful I am to be able to be here with you
and to feel your life and the environment within which you work and how rich it is,
how full it is of all the forces and possibilities that
exist within this sphere within which you've worked. They're very much present here, and I can feel the vastness
of all of the possibilities that you've worked with. And I feel grateful to be able to integrate that in the context
of my conversation with you about Adi Da and about consciousness and, of course, this matter of spirituality and death is key in relationship to it all.
And I understand that this has been something that you have focused on in terms of your own process and consideration, too.
Death is something everybody has to deal with sooner or later. It's the
one inevitable fact of being a human being. We are all going to die.
Yes. So spiritually speaking, this is something that you're
very consciously aware of. It's not a taboo to speak about.
It's actually a practice, that feeling awareness of the inevitability of that.
So in a very real manner, you die and allow that death while you live.
And that's not a negation of life in any way whatsoever. It's actually a combining with that which is eternal,
acknowledging that there is really no death except for the falling away of
this psychophysical mechanism that we identify with while we're embodied. So that's the fundamental process of being consciously aware and awake
prior to and coincident with everyone and everything that arises.
And this is an extraordinary gift to have that process in yoga alive and awakened in the being.
So that's the process that I live in relationship to the transmission of Adi Da.
Let's begin, before we launch into the subject of death,
with the very fact that you initially reached out to me. It's been quite a few months now. And you felt motivated
to communicate to the world something of your own personal, direct experiences with this controversial figure,
Adi Da, who's back in the days when he was alive. And I lived in California. There was a spiritual
center in San Rafael, the city where I live. So I was familiar with Adi Da's community.
And I think you've felt that he's been misunderstood both
by the outside world and by, I think what you're suggesting,
is even by some of the most leaders in the current movement,
Adi Da, in a religious movement that he left behind.
That this guru in your mind has been misunderstood all across the board,
and you are hoping to correct the record by sharing from your own heart what you personally experienced and know.
Yes, thank you very much want to do that. As we've
considered a bit, I would say that my life has included
a full spectrum of experiences in relationship
to human, religious, spiritual possibilities.
And when I came into Adi Da's ashram and
lived in intimacy with him and with devotees,
that was an opportunity to really dive into it, as I've indicated, not only through study, but also through direct experience.
And then as those years passed, which we've touched upon, I also
then had the opportunity to test what it was that I was given
in terms of direct experience, transmission, and instruction, also in the general life that everyone lives,
just as a human being in the world assuming the fundamental responsibilities that anybody has to assume.
And of course, they're very different depending upon where you are and who you are and what your interests are.
And then when Adi Da passed away, there was another process that I began to become involved in,
which is a reevaluation of both the direct experience with him and then living in the world
and reintegrating again with my blood family also. And then with him passing,
there was also the observation and evaluation of
the relationship that I had to all the devotees and the gathering that was created around him and
the work that has continued since he passed on. So with all of those different factors involved, one
of the things that I discovered was really important was that I had to be able to make use of the
gifts that I was given in the spiritual process that also affected me humanly in order to be able to
really feel the truth of what it is that I had been given
directly, my own experience of it, and how that actually then was beneficial in life
and not even in this life, but then beyond life. So where would I begin?
First of all, for any of our viewers who haven't watched your previous interviews, I'm going to link to them in the upper right-hand corner of your screen.
For viewers who have the right equipment, you can just click and you go to the earlier interviews.
I don't know that it works with smartphones, but it works with computers and laptops.
Second of all, I think I'm going to plunge right in.
The one experience that struck me as really worth probing is an occasion in which,
Adi Da's 1986 near-death experience
while you were living in his intimate company, as one of four, I think, intimate partners at the time,
he went through what today we might call a near-death experience. He died and he came back.
You were present during that event. Yes, yes. Okay, so in the context of a spiritual
practice and specifically relative to a practice that involves transmission and yoga, my
relationship with Adi Da as an intimate of his and also as a practitioner, everything that I lived
with him and what I received through his instruction and transmission had a significant impact bodily. So it wasn't abstract.
And it wasn't just a philosophical study. It was the yoga that combined the whole conscious being
and the energy of the being simultaneously. And anyone who's actually practiced a spiritual or
religious life that was that involved and that in-depth knows that it has significant impact in relationship
to how the body feels, how the energies move, potential transformations, purifications, awakenings, all sorts of different kinds.
And then what was required in my relationship with Adi Da in the process of the practice,
it had to do with taking responsibility for the various awakenings or understandings
that came about through that process. So with Adi Da, part of what he did with us that
was controversial was that he actually himself, having already most perfectly or fully
realized what he describes as reality truth, which is the very self-condition, the condition
that's not other than you or other than me, but it's the context within which all of this is arising, that very self-condition,
which is consciousness and radiance itself. So this he lived with us and I live that and
feel that that's the transmission of his being. So in the midst of our relationship to him through all the years,
he entered into living with us intimately and with a large number of people as you indicated,
we talked about that in some of our other dialogues. And this was in 1986, the particular period of time that you're speaking about.
I want to preface it by saying this was a unique event because of its particular significance,
but this process of death occurs quite regularly in the process of real yoga and real spirituality.
And that has to do with the fact that as consciousness and energy goes through a process of awakening,
there are certain aspects of the being that begin to fall away. And then you go through another level of awakening
in which there is an actual death of the being. There's an awakening in which there is an actual death of something that falls away
and then there's awakening into a new reality or a new understanding of reality or certain aspects of reality.
So at this period of time, he was working very intensively with a number of devotees
who he knew intimately and were available to him to delve deep into the process of insight
relative to the manner in which the being functions. So for example, with me, I had to know myself
physically, emotionally, mentally, psychically,
even beyond what I might experience in this life but the possibilities of previous lifetimes.
And there are means by which we can enter into this investigation. And you would be familiar with these different possibilities
because of the many traditions in which you can enter into these subtleties.
Yes. And so this period of time was like that. And we called these periods of time reality consideration.
And each time we would have such a reality consideration, we would focus or concentrate on a certain aspect of psychophysical possibility.
And this was the way that he submitted. He actually entered into these possibilities with us so
that we could express to him what we were experiencing and he could reflect back to us. We could ask him questions.
We would see things. And they weren't just universals that we would see. They would be particularities relative to our own psychophysical manifestations.
So it was not, again, abstract. It was very intimate. And the implications of these experiences in being
exposed or seen or revealed as such was very revealing
and very vulnerable and very emotional because possibly the ramifications of what you saw may be significant in some sense.
Say something that would be exposed that would be embarrassing or that you didn't understand.
Well, for example, as I recall, when I met you at the airport, I'm waiting outside of security.
And for a moment I believed I was watching him come down the escalator.
Right. And I had to look twice and I realized, oh, it's not him. But for a moment it was a perfect image of him as if he wanted to briefly manifest.
Ah, beautiful. Okay. So the coincidence, the coinciding, that's a perfect way to feel what I'm describing.
Because even though Adi Da appeared objectively in that manifestation that you viewed,
as he did objectively in a body for his devotees while he was alive,
as you indicated is that this matter of the manifesting and unmanifesting, being embodied, not being embodied,
the process of our relationship to it always occurs consciously. So you were conscious of that event in that moment and saw that.
And it had a significant communication to you. You could say I felt it, not just saw it.
And you felt it, yes, yes. So that's beautiful. Yeah, thank you for bringing that up and acknowledging
that that exists, those real possibilities. And obviously it exists.
This is our life. We exist in this body and it's lasting for a period of time. But it will come to an end.
So the fact of the death of it is significant. Let me just mention one thought that's come into my head.
I forget the scientist who wrote this, but I'm pretty sure it's true that because we live in a quantum reality,
things occur in – I'm going to try and explain
this – that reality comes in and out of existence
trillions of times every second. It's at the Planck scale, reality.
So one might say that we all die trillions of times each second. Sure, sure, yes.
Infinitely. Yes. It happens so fast that our consciousness can't really perceive it, I don't think.
But a trillionth of a second, it's very real. Sure, sure. And consciousness is the principle, the constant.
And consciousness can manifest as feeling awareness or
being conscious of as a mental perception or conception.
There's different forms of consciousness, but the consciousness that is
constant is not modified in that regard through any kind of a mechanism.
So in this event that you were asking about, Adi Da, through his
coinciding as conscious feeling awareness from the self-position
in relationship to the manifestation in which we are still alive as, he said
his specific unique purpose was to help illuminate these different possibilities
and these possibilities that you are speaking of that are
phew, phew, and infinite, those perturbations that occur.
And to be able to have an insider understanding in relationship to what is our real position in relationship to all that arises.
Are we identified with the arising or is our position of identification that is true prior to that?
And that's what he describes as the fundamental self-position. So when he, in 1986, in this particular reality consideration, what he
said to us is that there came a point of a death that occurred for him
that revealed to him that it was no longer necessary for him to have to submit in a particular way that he had been previously,
which he would describe as being reflecting and teaching about the various manners in which we needed to have understanding
about the different possibilities of our manifest life. And so in that moment of, these moments, these yogic deaths
always had various forms of psychophysical qualities to them
in which one could feel incredible sorrow or incredible
passion or incredible anger even or frustration. There's a peak where you get to where there's a limit that is reached
and the limit seems like an end or a kind of even a tragic event. But when you pass through that threshold of
fire, then there's a liberation that comes about. And this is what occurred in the moment with him where he said that
the divine self-conditioner position actually had fully manifested through this submission of his whole being in coincident
with manifestation, his own body, his own physical body, the body of those that he was intimate with, and then not
only because we are intimate with others like in this room, but because we are intimate with one another
because we're in this space together, but we also know based on our own direct
experience that the world is psychophysical. So we're not just combined in this room, we're also
infinitely connected with all sorts of possibilities and different vibratory levels of awareness beyond.
So I presume that the event you're referring to in 1986 from an external point of view
would have looked like a medical emergency of some kind. Well, it did at a certain moment in time, but what's
important is to also describe what occurred right prior to it so that I can give you more of a graphic feeling of what the environment was like.
So Adi Da was in his own bedroom at this point in time,
and we have the capability on the island to be able to communicate to him just through intercoms,
through different rooms and environments and places, and we had been involved in one of these intensive
investigations and considerations with him. And he began to describe to us that he was acknowledging that there was a yogic event
that was beginning to occur in him. Now this was not something that was unfamiliar
to us, so we knew that it was significant, and on the phone he communicated to us that he
was beginning to feel that he was leaving the body and describing that he could feel numbness
coming up and that his heart and his breath, it was beginning to become difficult to breathe.
So then when he described that, a number of the devotees, including myself, came over to where he was.
He was alone in the room at the time, and one of the doctors also then came to attend to him.
And we had to do this because the impact of the spiritual process in him was so significantly intense
that it had a kind of, not a kind of, but an actual
effect on the heart, the breathing, the brain, all of it was going through a transformative process.
And then so he ceased to breathe for a while and felt that he had died, and yet he came to again.
Now he doesn't really like to call it so much a death event because it gives a kind of a connotation
that it was some kind of medically validated, as if he was in an operating room or something.
But it was a death because what fell away in him and was relinquished was a particular form of working
that he did not need to do anymore. And he said that in that particular moment for
him, he was free then to be able to manifest the fullness of the realization of the self-condition and the transmission of that
without having to reflect the limits to us that are possibilities within the human structure and within human life.
And in this it was really ecstatic because it meant that he could then more liberally live freely
as he manifests his own realization and enlightenment.
And in that then there was a magnification for us to feel that in relationship to him.
In other words, by going through what to the external observer such as yourself,
going through a death experience, he became more himself.
Exactly. Precisely. Yes. His function as a guru or a teacher knows
there's a burden of responsibility that you bear and you do actually make a sacrifice, a surrender to
the student or to the practitioner or to the devotee to be able to give what you can give and you
have such passion you want to give it all because it's ecstatic, it's happy, you want them to understand.
He did that so thoroughly that then the magnification of his own position
of freedom and liberation was magnified. So it's exactly what you're describing and in doing that,
that magnification then was also given to the devotees who were surrounding him.
And I can speak to that because what occurred in that moment is all the struggle
of the being and the passion of the heart to want
to realize freedom, liberation, truth, ecstasy
and have that be permanent wasn't something that I could do in relationship to life or truth
or even the guru as an effort. The yoga, as I've described it and what Adi Da demonstrated,
was always a matter of a relinquishment of a particular binding force
or a relinquishment of a point of view, a relinquishment of a limit and then opening up and awakening more profoundly and more deeply.
So when that would occur with him, there'd be a simultaneity of something that would occur with us.
And in that moment what happened for me was that I was spontaneously awakened to what's traditionally described as the witness position of consciousness,
the non-dual reality itself. So there was a struggle that was let go as he relinquished the process
of having to reflect to us the limits within the psychophysical structure and the esoteric anatomy of the body-mind.
And in that freedom there was a liberality of a lack of concern
relative to a way of having to engage the body-mind in a strategic fashion to try to achieve something as a yogic practitioner.
It rested me in the certainty that I could trust the position of the self in consciousness itself
as being the revealer and the realizer of truth itself. Now that may sound, I don't know, does that sound complicated?
It sounds pretty vague actually. On this channel, for example, we have done quite a few interviews
on a relatively recently described phenomenon called the shared death experience.
It's like a near-death experience, but people who are in the presence of somebody who is going through a death experience
often sort of go along for the ride part way. And I'm under the impression that something
like that was occurring with you at the time. Okay, that's a good example. So it's interesting that you use the word vague.
The one reality, consciousness itself
And this points to the limit of language in terms of being able to actually describe
something that's non-verbal or that can't be fully conceptualized.
It can be conceptualized, but the conception of it is not the direct experience of it.
And even the direct experience of it always is modified by a point of view
or the feeling of the experience itself. When you're talking about a process in the consciousness domain itself.
Now that may sound abstract or vague, but for me, in relationship to Adi Da's transmission,
that is more real as reality itself than even what we're experiencing in this room.
And why is that? It's because it's permanent and it's a constant feeling,
awareness of being itself, being itself as love bliss, radiance,
consciousness, awakeness, awareness that never is absent.
Whereas experiences are always coming and going as we were speaking of earlier. There is the process of the death of it and the
birth of it, the death of it, the birth of it, the awareness of it, the dying of it, the going away and you can't hold on to it.
It's never permanent, all of that. So that to me, having been through what I've
been through with Adi Da, this is more vaporous. I get that. That's really fascinating.
It's like the one reality, I think you referred to it as love, bliss, radiance, brightness.
That's the real reality and this is what is often referred to as Maya, something of an illusion.
Yes, so that is what became tangible repeatedly in Adi Da's company.
And I could describe numerous experiences that coincided with that,
but the context or the actual transmission was the magnification of that bright condition
so that the separate sense of self would fall away
and there would be the constant awareness of being the self, the only self that is true.
And your expression of those who are with people who are in the death transition is really perfect
because I just experienced that recently with my mother who passed away a couple of weeks ago
and also with my father and with other people, with animals also, many people will speak about what a blessed event it is
to be with individuals who are not fighting the process of the death transition
and they are aware that they're involved in that death transition or they may be individuals who have lived a
life that they feel at rest with the process because they don't have regrets. Somehow they have dealt with or come to a resolve or a resolution
and they're just accepting of that passing. They may have been taught something as a human being about death
or as a religious or spiritual practitioner to not resist it. So with my mother, for example, she was very
afraid initially of death and did not want to die. And then when she became aware that it was inevitably going to happen,
I began to have very intimate conversations with her even as she had Alzheimer's. Because one of the things that I noticed with my mother having Alzheimer's
is that even though her memory was not good, I kept reminding her, you are not your memory, Mom.
Can you feel that? You are always present. Your memory may be falling away, but you are not your memory.
And she got that, really clearly got that. So in the process of her transitioning and realizing that she was going to die,
I kept saying, Mom, this is going to happen. There's no point resisting it now.
Your body is going to fall asleep. It's just not going to function the same way that it did. So there's no point in resisting it.
It's inevitable, so better to participate with the process. So I helped describe to her what would occur as her feeling awareness
would no longer cease to be identified with the manner in which she was familiar with the body,
her thoughts, her breath, the heartbeat, and there would be the tendency to grasp onto it,
to try to continue to live and to continue to identify with it. So I said to her, you have to let that go.
And I could visibly see in her face and in her body when she began to actually understand that,
her whole being began to like literally relax and come to a point of ease.
And it was notable even by the cares that were with her that there wasn't resistance in her body
through the fear of being moved and what's going to happen. And so I could feel a luminosity, literally see the light of the energetic being
which is combined with the etheric body. And then beyond that, there's greater and greater brilliance of light
that surrounds and pervades us if we're actually open to allowing it to enter in and we're not so tight as a psychophysical mechanism.
So when I saw this in my mother, she then began to cognize and reevaluate her
life, reevaluate her relationship to God, and then she actually then was able to let go.
And the ease with which she passed was brilliant to observe
and an affirmation for anybody who is in the room when someone passes.
Her presence was still there. And she would often say that it was the heart.
She called it the heart. It was love, the feeling of love, the feeling of her love for her husband that had already passed away, my father.
That God was love. All of these things become obvious and they aren't just metaphors.
They're the actual direct experience of it. But experience then that's going beyond the psychophysical mechanism.
And she told me when she finally made the reconnection with God, she said God had told her to take his hand and don't look back.
And I was suggesting to her to always look into the light,
be aware of the light that seems to be above in relationship to the psychophysical mechanism
and just let go. Don't look for something as if you have to grasp onto anything
and then the perfect possibility of if and when there's a next for you, it will be revealed.
And to see her go through that process and actually participate in it was a profound blessing because then it only magnified that understanding
that it's true in relationship to someone that I loved. And there was a lot of sorrow in her passing
because of the familiarity and the intimacy and the gratitude and the experience and the history.
And then for my brothers and sisters to see that too. And we're all very different in terms of our process and life and beliefs
and styles and all of that. But then for them to feel and see the certainty that mom's okay.
One of the books, of the many books published by the Dawn Horse Press
Easy Death
about the life and teachings of Adi Da, one of those books, maybe one of the most unusual of the many books
is called Easy Death. I don't know how many books there are, I think about 30 or so.
But Easy Death wasn't just from Adi Da, it's not just his writings and included the testimonial of many other people.
But I gather that that book is suggesting something that you just described,
that death can be a very easy thing. It doesn't have to be a struggle.
Yes. So anything that he communicated about life
was in the context of the embrace of the inevitability of death.
And this means that when we are born,
there is a process of adaptation. And part of that process is the identification that takes place with this,
being a body and a sense of self. And Adi Da describes that through the mechanism of attention
and the feeling of relatedness, consciousness feels related to a body.
Consciousness feels related to and becomes familiar with a body
and a sense of identity. And then in relationship to others and things and life itself.
That's the arena within which we feel that we exist and that we are alive.
Most people would say, I am my body. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I am myself, I am my body, I am my thoughts, I am my memories.
Different ways of describing it. There are sensations.
Adi Da is saying, yes, those things are real and true. They are direct and real experiences.
But the actual self-position, again, and this can never be repeated too many times,
because I've had a lifetime of it. And the process of awakening into this is that the true position of self-identity is not dependent upon this mechanism
of being a body-mind. Consciousness itself is constant
in all different possibilities of manifestation, even if it's not this gross psychophysical one.
So in the easy death, the reason it's called easy death is that the process of identification
is what needs to be investigated and understood. That the act of identification
is the act of what defines the ego. The ego as an identity is what will inevitably die
when the body falls away. Aspects of it may linger and continue,
but even those levels are undone, as there is the actual ascension into the light
in which all of that is dissolved. And then the potential for something new may occur,
but as anyone who studied reincarnation, past life experiences, or even memory loss,
or whatever, will know that there can be a continuation without a memory,
but sometimes those memories will bleed through again, and they'll seem to be a continuum.
So the possibility of the continuum of experiences
that any person can remember somehow through transitions in which you might fully forget it,
like with a death event, an actual physical death, and then you might remember something about a seeming past life,
those experiences are actually occurring in what could be described as a field,
a patterning of possible experiences that consciousness identifies with,
actively does, actively chooses, and identifies with it, and begins to form its sense of self-persona,
and that's what's described as the ego. So easy death is describing that
the way to be able to accept death when it actually happens, for one, physically,
is to embrace the process of relinquishing identification while you're alive,
and to then be able to be established in the light of the true identity while you are living.
So it's a constant process of life and death as a simultaneity in that which never dies
and actually is never born. These are traditional terms and traditional references
that many practitioners will understand. For most of humanity, this kind of language
and kind of speech might not be familiar and would seem a bit strange even to speak about
because the fierceness of identification just with the body is so strong, what the body can taste, what the body can smell,
what it can hear, what it can see, what it can feel, how it combines with
all of the elements in life, and presuming that's just it. It's not.
It's really genuinely not. But it's so seductive. Yes, it is very seductive.
And that is the process of what Adi Da describes as identification, differentiation.
Through the act of identification as a separate self, there's inevitable differentiation
as everything else is different. And then if everything seems separate and different where in reality it's not, then there's a desire,
like when you say it's seductive, there's a desire to then combine with or have union with
what seems separate from you. And where does that desire come from? It's a longing, an intuitive heart longing
and yearning of knowledge that actually in truth there is no separation. So the heart itself or the being itself
is actually yearning for something that is already natively and inherently true.
So that's the lesson of life and understanding that if you yield into the truth of your condition,
there is a constant death of identification, differentiation, and desire.
So the process that he describes is that of no seeking. But that no seeking isn't about recoiling from life
as if life is a negative or any possibility is it or on the opposite end of the spectrum, taboo.
Either light or dark or something that you want or something that you don't need. In fact, all of those combinations of possibility
can exist without being in any kind of a recoil from it. And it's only in that asana that the truth of your position
as conscious light becomes revealed and magnified because you're not superimposing anything on it
or squishing it into a box of identity. Does that sound abstract? No, that's beautifully put.
And I like the expression asana in that case. It's like our whole physical existence might be thought of
from a larger perspective as a posture. Precisely, precisely.
And I have a wonderful story I can tell you that is an example of this.
In 1992 when Adi Da indicated to me that it was time for me
to leave his intimate sphere and the ashram and be tested in the world,
I think I might have said this to you. He said to me, now, little Buddha, it's your time to go out into the world.
And I didn't want to leave. I really did not want to leave, and I think I've spoken about this in detail,
but I knew that the process of my intimacy with him was much more profound,
not dismissive of the emotional, sexual, human intimacy as being part of his family and the ashram
and all the intimacies that I had to go through another transition, which would be a death.
This was a significant change. And I don't know if I described this to you.
In the moment when I realized I was leaving, I kept going into an asana of curling up
because there was so much sorrow about having to leave, and he kept reaching over to me and taking my whole body
and putting it into, I was sitting in a half-lotus pose, and he told me that from going forward,
give me your hands for a moment, he told me that he wanted from now on that my asana, my posture, had to be this,
and he put my hands on my thighs, and he said, from now on, this is your asana.
In other words, the open asana, and allowing that to be completely, fully descended
into the being as going into the world in which I'm leaving everything that I love, everything that I'm familiar with,
with incredibly immense gratitude for what had occurred for me, and now I'm going into an unknown
in which everything will be tested, re-adapting to life differently than I had
from birth till the age of 18, and then reintegrate with all of the wisdom
and lessons that I had learned and tested without doing this, you know, or this, or this, or this, or this,
you know, just like not, the asana that he had taught had to be one that was entirely open,
open vessel, flowered out, completely receptive,
able to feel everything without recoil, and in that, there would be the heart ability
to discriminate and continue to allow and make choices that would magnify
bright understanding, the intelligence of the heart, and the certainty that the self-position
is not dependent upon the vast possibilities that I would be finding myself in.
Is it the choice to identify and then feel the angst of the loss,
or somehow needing that thing to be satisfied, to satisfy me as a separate self,
or was I going to be able to be in the world without the proximity or the dependency
upon what was presumed traditionally necessary as an ashram, sacred space, the guru, the teacher,
the sangha, the gurubais, you know, that makes it really rosy for spiritual practitioners?
Try doing it in the world. So that was a profound instruction.
And again, there are these moments where I won't ever forget that, because the transmission of him taking his hands
and showing me what that posture was, that's the easy death. That's where be at ease as life rises and falls.
But I gather that transition was hard for you, if I recall. You went through a period of psychotherapy
to accommodate the changes. Exactly, exactly. So this is where it's reality consideration,
the process with Adi Da as the yoga of the bright. It's because there's no recoil.
And because the psychophysical mechanism is made up of patterning, the possibility of patterning
that consciousness is identified with, karmas, traditionally vasanas, samkhya,
it's all the different ways through the traditions that name these different... Samskaras?
Samskaras, yeah, samskaras. In other words, habits. Habits, yeah, tendencies, liabilities,
virtues even, all the different ways that a person can be defined.
And these you adapt not only from this physical embodiment through the bloodline,
you adapt that also through deeper levels of manifestation, whether the reincarnate soul,
and then the causal dimension. We've touched on that last time that we spoke. There's the causal dimension, which is just the feeling of relatedness
and attention itself. So at all those different levels, I had to then re-address my life
based upon this asana and the trust in the spiritual process itself that had been given.
And I even had to question and went through all of what happened in my relationship to Him.
That was the most important part. Because even though I have had intimacies
with my mother, my father, my brothers, my sisters, my dear friends,
and then Adi Da and the Guru Kula, those intimates around Him, Guru Bhai's ashram, even other spiritual realizers
through the study and the visionary visitations of many realizers through the experiences with Him,
traditions, realizing that whoa, all of the vastness of all of that is in psychophysical feeling awareness of this persona,
literally so, as direct as an experience is I can touch this. There's that kind of touch that has happened
in relationship to so much history and memory and even present time and future.
All of that, becoming aware of that. So as time went by, I had to re-address all of that.
And the time that I spent where Adi Da was teaching and reflecting, there was an awakening that was occurring,
but it was a fundamental intuitive seed awakening. But that seed had to blossom and flower and be tested
to see whether or not it would remain like this or if it would go like this. One never knows.
There's always the possibility of backsliding. Exactly, exactly. And the backsliding occurs if the self-position is lost
by virtue of failing to maintain the integrity or the fidelity to that in relationship
to any life experience. So as you indicated, yes, re-entry you could call it
into the world was a new birth.
Let me jump around a little bit. I want to go back to the moment in 1986
when Adi Da went through a death experience. As I recall from earlier material you had sent to me,
he wasn't sure he was going to return. No, no, he wasn't. And this defines the manner in which he functioned.
There was never a certainty that he assumed in advance of direct experience.
So in that moment and in relationship to life, he never superimposed thought, pre-thought
or historical thought upon the moment of that event. Just allow it to occur.
And what the significance of it is will be revealed.
The revelation can't come through the superimposition of history because the body-mind is a repetition of history.
The mind is a repetition of memory. It's all just pattern patterning.
And yet for something new to be revealed, you have to allow it without a precognition.
So in that moment he couldn't even really speak about what had happened. It became clear over time the actual significance
of what had happened for him. And that actually took quite a long time. I'm talking about months.
I mean, a few days or weeks he began to speak about it, but there were only like, this is my birthday.
This is my real birth. And as a human being, fully human,
not some sort of fantasy you might have about a guru or a god or avatar or whatever you might want to call it,
or whatever you might want to superimpose on him, he was a man, fully vulnerable of all his own
psychophysical makeup and patterning that he was living with and we were aware of.
And he trusted us enough. We respected him enough. He respected us.
So there wasn't a fear with just allowing the saying of whatever it was. And even if it wasn't clear in that moment,
that's actually really what happened. This is what really occurred. Now I'm understanding it more.
Oh, now I can speak about it more clearly. This is the truth of what occurred. You know, as soon as the ah,
it's like the ah moment, the satori, this is actually what occurred. Why? Because it is an affirmation of the certainty
of the position of truth itself. It corresponds or it coincides with that rather than being something that is simply of mind
that can come and go. But it's self-authenticating. You may have heard or seen that language in his teaching
where he describes it's inherently so. It's self-authenticating, self-validating.
And that is even a common understanding with someone who in human terms feels empowered.
You know, you become certain of something because it becomes obvious. Well, it's the same thing in relationship to reality truth.
Spiritually or transcendentally realized, it's authentic and becomes obvious as being true.
Well, what, as I recall, he revealed when it became clear enough to him
is that one of the things that brought him back from death
was a thought of you. Yes, that's a very significant moment.
I could not comprehend the significance of that in that moment.
I was surprised when he said that. I still am.
I don't think I have a way to cognize that fully, except for that I could describe that he indicated to me
in the midst of saying that was that I was one of the people that he worked with really intensively.
I was available to him to completely combine with him in every way
and go very, very deep with him, very viscerally, all together, physically and emotionally and mentally
and beyond in all sorts of different realms of possibilities. I was available to explore all of this with him
so that my feeling awareness with him and his process is so thoroughly combined
and my passion for realization and freedom was so intensified that I made a vow with him very, very early on
that he said he would take me seriously as a practitioner
and as a devotee in relationship to him if I would trust him beyond the fear of betrayal,
separation and death. And having been around long enough to know the significance
of what that would mean, I said to him that I did, that I would do that because my longing and my yearning
for that freedom was really, really my only purpose for existence anymore.
So in that moment when that happened, I feel that the integrity of my trust of him
was not just mine alone, but it was the heart of humanity.
Like I'm not separate from the rest of humanity. I'm not an individuated being.
I don't identify myself as that anymore. So when I speak of anything that occurred in my relationship to Adi Da,
I actually feel that I was only what he described as one of his coins,
one of the beings that was available for him to work with humanity and make the communication
that he needed to to everyone through his writing and through the means that he's given.
So he said that I epitomized the struggle
that he had to endure in terms of teaching the lessons that were necessary for human beings to have to learn.
So I was brave enough to stay with him. And I saw his gratitude for that,
like I saw his tears, I saw his love, I saw his passion, I saw his need,
the reciprocal need for someone to be sensitive enough to how important it was to stay with him
in the process of what he was doing. And so that expression from him personally,
that's what it meant to me, is that revealing or saying that he comes down,
the full self-condition manifest through the sacrifice and the reciprocal participation of a lover
as one who is willing to stay with the process of truth, to stay with the I am that is the self
in the yoga of realization. In that moment he said he was drawn into that relationship with me,
but I don't see it as a separate self as a me, me, me, me, me, me. Not like that at all.
It was just another expression of a moment of him revealing the nature of the yearning and the fidelity
that's required to bring or draw the divine process into manifestation.
That has actually epitomized my relationship to him, the revelation that occurs, the manifestation that occurs
through that fidelity, the heart fidelity to the yoga of truth itself. And there's a lot of stories that I could tell about
actual physical manifestations happening. So when he talks about that coming through,
the intimacy with him in relationship to me, that's when he gave me the name Swami Kalatara Devi Ma.
And if you study about that particular name, which I won't go into the details of that now,
but it is the surrender of the mind. It's the surrender of identification with the self,
the separate self position. To be given over so fully and intimately that it's not just a union,
but what remains is only the self condition, simply the self condition. That is the process within which life continues to be lived.
We've talked about the book Easy Death. We've talked about your mother's death
and how at the end it was an easy death. I've also heard the word ordeal
Spiritual practice as an ordeal
used in connection with Adi Da. If I recall correctly,
he might have said the ordeal of discipleship or his ordeal as the ordeal of being a guru or an avatar.
So it's not just all easy. No, that's right. Not remotely easy.
No. If you're seeking to be satisfied,
if you're seeking to be given something for free,
if you're seeking to have what is given
to be able to be something that you can own and control independently,
if you're seeking to give something that's going to give you a sense of life being easy,
that's not the true spiritual process. And anyone who's entered into even life
that requires a growth psychologically or emotionally or even physically going beyond the habits of the being,
it's an ordeal. It's always an ordeal. Adi Da would in the very early days speak about
just imagine being somebody who's grotesquely overweight, just speaking at a very physical level,
what the ordeal is to actually have to go beyond the habits, the addictive habits, the feeling that you have this need connection with food.
It's an ordeal. So any kind of a growth beyond a limit, it's an ordeal.
Well, the spiritual ordeal is most intense because you are relinquishing certain forms of dependency
on a familiar way of functioning, and you're learning new forms of means and arms
that you never even knew that you had. And you're entering into passageways
and ways of living that are unfamiliar. Like, for example, the energy body is even, again,
another level of reality that is so significant in relationship to the physical condition.
Like, in fact, this is all energy. This is all just energy, modified energy.
And it's constantly changing, even though we perceive it as something that's very finite.
So becoming sensitively aware to the energy body and then having the energy body combine with the psyche
or the mind and the possibilities, that's an ordeal of adaptation because it's not familiar.
And then you enter into all of those awareness of that, and then you get to the point
where you even have to go beyond familiarity to actually enter into the domain of consciousness itself,
because consciousness is prior to mind. Consciousness itself is prior to mind.
I like that you make that distinction between mind and consciousness. Many people seem to obscure the two.
And as a result, they think that we are like computers. Precisely. And that when you're dead, you're dead.
When the brain stops, you're dead. And that you're only conscious through the mechanism
of whatever is computing or happening and triggering in the brain. That's absolutely not true.
And when you have that assumption, of course, there's all sorts of...
People can become horrified of that, but there's also the flip side of it.
It's still fascinating. And there's even nothing negative about the fascination with it.
It is. It's extraordinary. The whole way that this mechanism functions
and the way that it connects with all the different levels of possibilities and the extraordinariness of it.
It's all fascinating. And as you said, it's seductive. And it's luring.
So there's a point in which, if you make a choice to investigate it and to experiment with it and experience,
the yoga of the Bride is to have greater fidelity to consciousness itself.
And Adi Da, in terms of his communication, where he says, I am the one and only,
which a lot of people have a really hard time with, in that communication, he's not speaking as an ego.
He's not speaking as a separate self-identity that is saying, I, as Franklin Jones, am the one and only.
Look at me. It's a problem that mystics have had throughout history. Many have been executed for exactly that,
particularly the Sufi mystics. They get their head chopped off for simply saying something, I am the truth.
Yes, yes. Ecstatics. Or even an enstatic, an ecstatic or an enstatic,
which has to do with the enstatic. Ecstatic is ecstasis. It's something that's communicated
that is outside or beyond. And then enstatic has to do with more of an internal, the identification with, say, the Atman,
that is prior to experiential phenomena, where there's just absolute void,
complete and utter stillness, no arising. And in that, there's the I am,
and Ramana Maharshi, Buddha, many great realizers in the midst of their ecstatic communications,
the samadhis that we spoke about, you speak ecstatically from that, and you do. You make proclamations.
So Adi Dham's proclamation of I am the bright, divine self-condition,
well, people will stop there and react before you continue to listen,
listen to the communication of the I am condition, I am the one and only that is true
of every one and every thing. I am not other than you, as you are.
There is no distinction.
It's beautifully put. It's so fundamental and yet so difficult to grasp
at the same time. I think in the half century I've been doing interviews.
The best ones always come around to that very point. And we seem to need to do it over and over and over again,
because as soon as you grasp it, you can lose it. Precisely. And that's just a habit.
That's the automaticity of egoity, identification, a sense of dependency.
And it literally is a machine, an automaticity. That is the act of the ego that Adi Dham indicates
that we can awaken beyond and prior to so that that automaticity doesn't define you.
And that's the process of bright yoga. But not exclusive of or separate from
all of the great traditions that also are existing in and pointing to and have experienced that divine light,
that divine truth, that divine self-position. But describe it through the permutations
of various forms of experience. What he's saying is unique and why he says that his revelation
in seeming time and space is a culminating revelation, because he's indicating, OK, it seems like there's all this
history and time and space, and it's happening linearly, in a linear fashion.
There seems to be a future, there seems to be a past, there seems to be a present moment. But in truth, there is only the one divine self-condition
that is eternally and always already present, now. And now.
And now. No matter what arises. Let me go back and jump around a little more, Julie.
Ego death
You talked about a kind of a death that you experienced when you left his intimate company in 1992.
And that was a major transition in your life,
after living intimately with him for 16 years in the ashram.
But then in 2008, 16 years after that, he died.
And you were still, after all you had been through, you were still intimately connected with him at the spiritual level.
Yes, yes. When I left in 1992, one of the things he whispered in my ear as I hugged him for the last time when I was about to leave the island,
he said to me, never forget that your relationship to me is a spiritual one.
And I said to him, I promise I will not dishonor you.
That was not two separate beings speaking, even though it appeared that way.
And there was all the emotion of lovers, where a shift had happened,
and suddenly I was no longer going to be there intimate with him. We both felt the angst and the sorrow of that.
And yet the commitment to truth was greater than and beyond our own coming together and coinciding that way.
So fast forward through that period of time of having to deal with the seeming loss of that intimacy with him
in human terms and even in spiritual terms, even in what had happened with him as guru
and the manner in which he worked in his crazy wise way, which sparked a lot, triggered a lot for me to have to examine,
did I understand that correctly? Have I responded to that rightly?
Do I feel betrayed because of it? Do I feel victimized as a result of it?
Has it failed because I'm not there anymore? Did I do something wrong?
I mean, all of those ordinary emotions, or am I so full of myself that I can go on and I can teach myself?
You know, assume a role because I would get people reflecting things to me and wanting me to do that kind of thing.
You know, even people that I worked with, even I did spa therapy and taught yoga and meditation
in just very ordinary circumstances, and I would unexpectedly to me be reflected that,
wow, there's something happening with you that seems significant, and I want more of that.
I didn't know that that would be reflected to me because I had been on an ashram for a long time
and didn't have any knowledge of how I would appear or seem to be in the world. When you were in the ashram,
I understand you had been designated by him as a swami.
Yes, yes. So in that sphere, I played a lot of senior advanced roles,
even coveted roles, and I'd always say, got him in it.
No, you may have a fantasy notion of what this lie is like, but I even invited many friends around Adi Dhar,
devotees that I knew that wanted to be close, for whatever reason, unbeknownst to those who were able to be around him,
it really didn't have a lot to do with a knowledge or an ownership of it,
as if you could in advance know that that's something you could or could not do. It just became something that you found that you were capable of.
And similarly in the situation when I left, being around him, is that there was a lot of doubt about my ability to function in the world
because I knew that what I had experienced was so unusual, and also because of how controversial it was.
Like even for me to say that I was a devotee of Adi Dhar, I didn't know what kind of reaction I was going to get.
And oftentimes I got negative reactions from people. There were scandals.
There were scandals. And even to this day I still get it. And I don't react to it anymore
because part of what occurred through that period was an ability to be able to fully comprehend without reactivity
what is not other than an obvious process
that one has to go through and grow beyond in a reaction to identification with the separate self
in the context of awakening to the divine process and reality, truth itself, without shaming or negating or making anybody feel like that's really crap
or you're less than because you might not understand that or you have to go through this thing. It actually has granted incredible compassion,
which I didn't have before. The qualities of being able to be patient and to step back and observe it
and feel the angst of it, too. All of these things can be simultaneous
without having to recoil from it. So when I got to the point where Adi Dhar passed away,
I had already been two years in therapy because there was a point, this is an important moment, another death,
another moment in which there was a significant transition in my relationship to him, and it was in 2006.
I was living as a devotee still, sort of peripherally involved with the gathering, not so much directly living in an ashram or a center,
which I had continued to do since 1992, but I was still associated with the gathering in Melbourne and Australia.
I was working at a spa retreat in Victoria in Melbourne, Aurora Spa Retreat, a wonderful place.
It was a beautiful temple. I worked there for four years. During this period of time, my husband and I began to invest in properties.
We were making money. One of the instructions Adi Dhar gave me is that I want you to become completely financially independent.
He said, you don't have to do it alone, but I don't want you to be dependent upon the organization.
And also you needed to be able to feel that you, as a woman, you were not dependent in relationship to men.
So I had to integrate the capabilities of the male-female aspects of the being during this period of time to become strong and stronger
while cultivating the feminine simultaneously. So he gave me specific instruction this way
all through these years before he passed away. And in 2006, it was an interestingly unique time
because while I was in Melbourne, I happened to come across a lot of swamis that were associated with Adi Dhar's traditional lineage
that was with Baba Muktananda and Bhagavan Nityananda. And these simultaneities or synchronicities would happen
unexpectedly while I was living in the world during this period of time. This is part of the trusting of the revelatory process
of spirituality and yoga, is that these coincidings will come.
It's all part of the perfection of the patterning that's necessary for you to learn from
or to be informed by or to go beyond. So I started to associate with devotees
that were close to Bhagavan Nityananda as the lineage, the head of the lineage,
and the Shakti or the Durga actually as the iconography associated with this lineage.
And I was communicating to Adi Dhar about all of this.
And of course, these communications became very significant around how he would again use myself,
many, many other devotees. I'm not the only one, of course, this has happened through, just to make that really clear.
I'm one of many, many devotees who could speak this way similarly. I'm just one that happens to be blessed with being able
to have an opportunity to speak to more people about it in detail. So when I was speaking with Adi Dhar about this,
for some reason I began to look and compare traditional ashrams and organizations that I saw thriving
in relationship to what was happening with Adi Dhar as an organization. And one of the things that Adi Dhar always addressed
about the devotees around him is that we seem to be failing as a mission.
That something about what he was offering, and I think it had to do with the controversies
that were out there about the way that he worked, it had to do with the fact of the pronouncements and proclamations that he was making,
that people were finding offensive. It had to do with the fact that he was speaking in a manner
that was not exactly the same as all the traditions, and it was hard to grasp. It just, altogether, as a new tradition,
as something new being revealed, it was not easily graspable by many people. And he would often describe that those who would come to know of him
would be people who would have been born into this lifetime while he was embodied,
who would be available for some reason or other to have gravitated towards knowing him in some form.
And he said it wouldn't be necessary for these beings to have to actually be in his physical company
because there was so much, he was so productive, you know, in terms of what he put out and what he created
and so many different levels that it actually has infiltrated the world quite a bit.
And yet the numbers of beings who were actually willing to speak about him and become part of the process of helping his work to prosper
is still very limited. And this was always a frustration of not only his but for all of us.
It seemed to be like self-sabotage almost. We're wondering, what the heck is wrong?
You know, why is this not working in examining ourselves and the limits of the organization and how come we're not functional,
how come it seems to keep collapsing, we're not getting the resources and there's so many changes in positions
and devotees coming and going, like myself. You know, so in 2008 when this period of time was occurring,
I ended up having a very difficult conversation with him where I fundamentally told him,
and I will say it as I said it, I said, I feel you created a monster.
Meaning that I felt like the organization and the gathering of devotees, I began to see it as extremely cultic
in relationship to him, okay? And I meant that in the cultic sense of which he had revealed
because combined with observing now that devotees were being kind of fanatical
and fundamentalists and you're the only one and this is the way and you have to be involved in this fashion and do this
and I'm looking at it and feeling the way that we're functioning has nothing to do with the manner in which I know
living the direct relationship to him demands and what it requires, which completely undoes any kind of a way of living
that way of cultic relationship to him. And but on the other hand,
because he was so combined with us, there was very much a liability to feel that he was the one orchestrating
everything that was happening. And so I went through during this period of time another process of having to examine
to what actually happened in terms of how things occurred around him.
And doing that in the context of myself becoming more
free to accept the gifts of freedom that had been given with me without being dependent upon him
as a separate other, giving it to me as though I needed certain something from him
as an other manifest persona. In other words, remember our relationship is a spiritual one and never forget that.
So the spiritual nature of the relationship was no longer dependent upon his physical form.
And this was magnified then when I began to understand more about his process in relationship to the great tradition
of Babamuktananda and Bhagavanichananda and his relationship with these other
gurubais in that tradition and beginning to share experiences. And then they're talking to me in a similar way.
These other swamis are talking to me in a similar way relative to their own process in relationship to Babamuktananda.
And then there's other devotees from other traditions that I began to communicate with and realizing,
oh, this devotee-gur relationship, this relationship between practitioner and teacher,
I've read about it in the books, but then actually in life to be able to feel the nature of the way
all of us have had to process what it actually is to become, to own responsibility for participating
in an incredibly intense ordeal. Well, in 2006, I said some things to him
that would seem to be taboo that you would never say to the guru, you'd never say to the teacher. If you were really, really respectful,
you would not say these kinds of things. But I had an intimacy with him in a human way
that I knew that if I wasn't real with him and honest, without taboo, without fear,
to be able to say to him some really, I think that some of this shit that happened I really don't like.
And I don't like what devotees are doing. I don't like the way that they're spending money or what they're doing,
this, that, or the other thing. It just doesn't, seems counterproductive. What's the point of it? I just said it all.
And his response to me was so beautiful, he had absolutely zero reaction to it.
Zero. And this was, as soon as this occurred, it reminded me of other moments throughout my relationship
to him when a similar thing would happen. Like one moment when I was frustrated
and in a peak of frustration, you call yourself God? You know, like a passionate, like, what?
You know, a sense of betrayal relative to you promised. You promised.
And again, a moment of reflecting on who is it that I am speaking to
that is promising what? A deeper examination of the nature in relationship to God, guru,
spiritual process, reality. And in 2006, when I made this complaint,
so to speak, he said, okay, I am going to relieve you
of any sense of responsibility that you have to righten anything about what you observe and feel is wrong.
But I want to ask you, please don't dissociate from anyone or anything in the midst of it.
So on that point, and that's a big deal, okay, when you're feeling the volatility of the being,
dealing with the depth of emotion in relationship to not only human matters,
but religious and spiritual and the whole thing and the traditions and God and really involved in the intensity of that examination,
even at a more profound level, he's saying, okay, okay, that crisis,
that's okay, that you're feeling all these things, don't dissociate. So again, it goes back to this asana,
because dissociation is a recoil. At the same time, you are feeling that
you have been involved in something that's hypocritical. Yeah, I felt that. I really did feel that.
And he's saying, stay with it. Don't run away just now. Don't run away, yeah. So don't dissociate.
So as a response to that, what I did was, Nick and I, we actually moved closer in.
Nick being your husband. My husband. We decided to pick up where we had established ourselves,
subdivided the property, built another property, bought and sold and related to the devotees there,
and it's like the life is really full of all sorts of things that were involved in. We picked up, left it behind,
and moved in closer to the ashram again as a form of response to the instruction,
a trust in the instruction. And that was when...
When you follow the guru's instruction or any teacher's instruction, when you're going to go through a threshold
or a passageway of difficulty, you can be certain that that's when the fire will actually be magnified,
because there'll be a process of purification and there'll be a process of disentanglement from limits that you're identified with.
And when I moved back in closer, I only saw the very thing that I was complaining about even more so.
Of course. Yeah. So, yes, without dissociation. He didn't tell you to let go of your realization
that something hypocritical is taking place. No, no, no, no. And as a matter of fact,
the interesting thing that occurred is that while I was there and I'm beginning to feel like I can't even swim anymore,
I felt like I was sinking into a depths of despair about confronting everything I have done
in this process has been worthless.
And not that I had lost the ability or the feeling awareness of consciousness itself,
that's the paradox of it, that was never lost, but the actual manifestation of the fruition of his work
and the ability for the gathering to manifest a sign of integrity or manifestation
of the integrity of that radical realization of consciousness itself and the freedom in it.
And also because I had seen the impact that that had had on him bodily,
psychophysically in his own yogic process, that that was a piercing in my own human heart
of seeing what he had to endure. And so in that point in time, when I'm seeing it even more clearly,
I'm feeling like I can't swim, I just can't, I don't know if I can do this. And I began to experience significant
and severe depression. And I went to a doctor and I needed help.
And I had already employed all of the things that I knew how, you know, from meditation, yoga, and the herbs and the therapies
and everything I could possibly do. And finally I went to a medical doctor and the medical doctor said to me,
in no uncertain terms, you need to get psychiatric help.
You need to get someone to help you through this. Because I told her, you know, what I was involved in.
And fortunately she was recommended to me by a friend. And she knew that this doctor would be able to comprehend what it was that I was going through.
Yeah, most doctors probably could not. No, no. So there would be these blessings, you know, these coincidings,
and whatever you want to call it, but you would find the right person that would be able to help you in a moment of need.
So this was a woman who could help me and she gave me on to another doctor who said she knew that this man
would be able to understand the process that I had been through. Okay, so I ended up going into
a six-year process of therapy relative to integrating everything in terms of hypnosis,
you know, deep memory therapy, all sorts of psychoanalysis. I went on different forms of medication,
you know, to experiment with that, to see how I could even out all the symptoms that I was having psychophysically.
Adi Da was aware that this was happening. Everything that I ever did was always in direct relationship with him.
No reaction. Constant guidance in terms of making sure that she has what she needs,
that she's getting help with what she needs and serving her in this, and then he would make sure
that she knows what's happening with me. She being your therapist? No, me. Me, yeah.
But that being said, the therapist was a man. So the female doctor,
I had to have a referral to a therapist to be able to go to one, a specialist. So the man that I went to,
he extremely indebted to him.
You know, in a very real way, he knows me better than a lot of people do,
even people that I live with, because as Adi Da had taught me, there was no purpose in going through
any kind of investigation or exploration or insight if everything had to be explored
and said without any kind of apprehension.
Because in that relationship and in that process, you have to trust that the truth will be revealed about it
in terms of what's significant. So that's the process that I went through. But going back to 2006,
there was an important moment in 2007 while I was in the midst of this process of examination.
He asked, and I was aware, even though I wasn't so much involved because he knew I was going to have to take some time out,
and I no longer had the responsibility to have to play a senior role of leadership within the institution,
he relieved me of that, relieved me of having to try and fix it, because I needed to go through this other process,
and I wasn't able to give myself over to the culture in the same way that I had. But he asked me during this period of time
to serve as what he called as God's eyes.
And this is a role that actually isn't a function of telling people or instructing
or being directly related to interactively with devotees as teaching courses
or having intimate considerations with them about their own process. But it was a function in which I was called
to communicate the truth of what was actually really occurring
that was not exclusive of being able to make some kind of sense out of the dynamic of opposites,
of everything that was arising, and it was what would be described as being able to communicate the essence
in the midst of the mayhem, being able to bring a greater understanding
so you don't lose the thread in the midst of the play of life or the lila of the spiritual process,
the ordeal of it. And he gave me that function to be able to do that and to help to communicate to him
and communicate with devotees about what I was observing in the midst of all of this. In other words, he didn't ask you to keep a secret
of the fact that you thought there was a lot of hypocrisy. No, no, no. And as a matter of fact, I was known
in relationship to him to not lie to him. And that was one of the virtues. And he revealed to me very early on
that that virtue was necessary in relationship to the divine process because who are you lying to?
Who are you lying to? What's the purpose of lying? The divine is indifferent in that regard,
and who are you speaking to? An other that is the divine process that's listening to you?
Or who is going to be injured by lying? Who is going to be served by lying?
What's the purpose of deception? What's the purpose of being so opaque and deceptive
that you are not available for the spiritual process for real? You have to be transparent.
You have to be open, transparency, in order for the revelation to occur. So he gave me this function,
and I was asked to choose a few other devotees to do this with, and he specified women.
And we began to do that together. But as soon as it began to happen, I noticed that the ones that I had chosen to do this with,
and he blessed for us to do this together, that we hit the wall, hit a wall of the force of the organization
and the bureaucracy of functional continuation, like that wall.
This was not meeting. The esotericism of the process
and the speak of truth itself and the bureaucracy of manifesting the organization
in functional terms were coming at loggerheads, and there was a stalemate. And we had seen this throughout the years in different ways.
And the long and the short of it is that that function fell apart.
And I myself couldn't perform it anymore because the top of the level of frustration
just was a fury to be able to try to penetrate that wall of solidity,
because it was like turning the tide of a force, of an intent to institutionalize the religious and spiritual process.
Religion vs. the spiritual path
Which probably is a fundamental conflict in any religious or spiritual organization
between the needs of institutionalization, organization, and the true spiritual path.
Precisely. Precisely. And that describes what has been occurring
ever since Adi Da left the body. The gathering is in a conundrum.
And when I say the gathering now, I don't regard the gathering being the institutional organization
that has taken hold. There is an organization called Adi Dam. There is an organization called Adi Dam
that is serving a very necessary role in terms of the survival of the literature,
the sanctuaries, the art, the different gifts that he's given, all the various forms of instruction.
There's been a lot of different instruction that's been given over all the years.
An archive. An archive, yeah. So that's a necessary function.
It needs to be preserved. Exactly. No question about it. And the individuals who are doing it, I bow down.
I mean, in terms of the role of responsibility and the capability to stay with it in their own fashion,
in the midst of all odds. And also when you get forces of nature that are actually literally trying to shut these things down.
I mean, we've had to deal with fires. We've had to deal with accidents. We've had to deal with hurricanes.
We've had to deal not only in the place of sacred domains, but even with individual devotees.
These accidents, sometimes you could say, whatever, you can't name what the force is,
but you know for very certain that there are dark forces that are trying to shut down and counter illumination,
the divine intervention, particularly when it comes from the necessity for human beings
to have to surrender to something beyond their own separate self-identity. But wouldn't it be the case that you would think of these things,
I think maybe the word you might use is lila, as part of a divine play? Yes, yes.
And traditionally that's the case. There is a unique manner in which Adi Da will speak of that, however.
In the fourth and fifth stage traditions, which are sort of associated with the seven stages of life
that is Adi Da's tool of making sense, or a skeletal measure or tool to be able to understand
the great tradition of mankind, there's a fourth to fifth stage process that occurs,
and these are the ones that are truly religious or spiritual, that can also bleed over into the sixth stage,
and then there's the seventh stage process. Well, in the fourth to fifth stage traditions is where you will find this description of lila, or the play.
Krishna is an epitome of that. Krishna and the gopis, and saying that everything that arises is perfect.
It's all God. Cosmic consciousness. It's all light. It's the revelation of no separation.
And the self is undifferentiated in relationship to the whole play, so you can be ecstatic in seeing this as perfection
in terms of how it arises. That's true enough to be said.
However, if you're involved in the process of awakening in the consciousness domain itself,
that is prior to the mind and prior to the structures of the psychophysical mechanism
that correspond with all possibilities of the cosmic universal domain, consciousness being aware of it, not separate from it,
then there's a discrimination that occurs wherein you understand that you can make certain errors
of making overly much of experience itself, and you can see that experience itself
is not perpetuated by consciousness itself. Consciousness stands free itself.
Consciousness itself stands free, undisturbed. It's not the creator or the cause.
Once consciousness itself manifests through the mechanism of attention
and identification, differentiation, and desire, through the feeling of relatedness and familiarity
in the cosmic domain, that is the wheel of Maya.
It perpetuates itself. So to call it a perfect play would ascribe perfection to
identification of the separate self-manifestation.
So Adhida is not saying that's not true enough to be said, but he's saying consciousness itself
is not the one that is perpetuating Maya. So the perfection of it is only in the recognition of it
as a necessity to learn lessons about it, which will provide you with perfect opportunities.
The coinciding is perfect because you will come across every necessary purposeful
and meaningful significant association that will reveal something to you, like our coming together, is not arbitrary.
It's significant. In the divine process, so long as we stay in the radical understanding
in relationship to consciousness itself. The consciousness domain itself.
It's a very subtle thought. Extremely subtle. I can kind of barely grasp it, but I think I did.
I think I barely grasped it. Yes, yes, yes. That's the seed, the locus,
that's the locus of the causal. It's even more subtle than the causal. The causal is extremely, it's the subtle domain.
I mean, the subtle is the middle station of the heart. It's the subtle domain.
The intuition, that seed, is in the causal domain, which is the domain, the passageway
into the consciousness domain itself. This is, yes, this is extremely tangible,
tacitly tangible, and yet cannot be accessed by the mechanism of the brain in and of itself,
or the body in and of itself, which does not mean there's anything wrong with the brain or the body or the mind in and of itself,
unless it becomes independent of consciousness itself.
The death of Adi Da
In the midst of all of this energy, in the midst of you working with this group
and running into the obstacle and going through the psychotherapy as when he died.
Yes, yes, right in the midst of that. And I remember at a certain point,
I had become so certain that the process
and engagement in life was essential. I had ceased to react to it.
And he had brought me back and forth by my own choice and by his asking
and in and out of his physical company that there had been a relinquishment
of that level of attachment. So when he passed away physically,
of course I was devastated mainly because I knew that he had not been able
to enjoy the fruition of seeing his work manifest as he had indicated,
and many times would ecstatically speak about the way that it would be and could feel and the positive impact or intervention
or penetration it could have in the world, particularly in terms of bringing it to an equanimity
where there would be no conflict potential. It doesn't mean that there wouldn't be fire and water and all the play in that regard,
but there would be an ability to maintain a way of associating or relating to one another
in a non-dual fashion, truly non-dual, and that we could live that way with one another.
And that was what his passion was, to bring about a different manner of living, a new way, a new world order,
in order to live with one another completely differently than we had based on history. Well, it sounds like what you're saying is
he envisioned himself as a world teacher. Exactly. Like Jesus Christ or Buddha,
and although he was greatly revered and still is, one might say that his teachings
never had that level of impact. Oh, absolutely not. And he was aware of that,
and he actually knew that that wouldn't happen. He never intended and knew that the manner
in which he had to work would never be in the public domain.
He would not be surrounded by thousands and millions in gatherings,
mainly because the kind of work that he needed to do could not be conducted with that many face-to-face.
So he had to work with fewer that would have the reverberations in the MVL. Well, Jesus had 12 apostles.
Right, yeah. And look at the reaction he got, even in the small domain that he did. And as time went on and Adi Da became more known,
because the interconnectedness through the means of technology became more obvious
in the world, and which is really widely obvious now to everybody,
no matter where you are. Like you go to very remote places in India, and you walk into temples that are so remote,
and the priests have iPhones. That's one of the things that I was gobsmacked about
when I went to India, and I'm seeing them performing these incredibly sacred rituals in front of these icons
that are some are thousands of years old. And I'm like really delicately quiet, you know, and coming into these domains
with the kind of preciousness and tenderness and respect that you would go into these spaces. And then you see they've got the sports glaring,
and they've got, you know, the rock and roll happening in the temples. And the combining of the East and the West
and the Left and the Right and the Alpha and the Omega, you know, it's just the clash of all the seeming opposites
are just wildly manifesting presently. And another interesting thing about Adi Da
is that he prophesied all of this even before he began to teach, even before he passed away.
The last 10 years of his life, he described exactly what was going to occur after he passed on.
He addressed devotees about how the gathering would continue to function
in a cultic fashion. There's, I told you about the trilogy, one of the books that he wrote and penned
that have the Mummery book in it and the Scapegoat book and the Happenine book, which hasn't been published yet
because he was hoping to find that there would be a publishing organization
that would publish it respectfully, but not just hide it away somewhere,
because what he reveals in there as a literary work of art is as consequential as what he manifested
in his visual art forms. It again is a breakthrough kind of communication
because he uses language and shapes language in a way that it initiates a process
that draws you really deeply into it. Cognizing what he communicates there requires an availability,
like a seed recognition of his function as a spiritual teacher
and a divine incarnation. He knew that he would not be glorified.
He wasn't looking for that. He wasn't looking for world recognition as something great like that.
His passion was much more profound and not about a separate self or egoic identity
that was looking to be granted favors for whatever he did. He only had the passion to have
what he communicated and had awakened that wasn't dependent upon the survival of his physical body to stay alive.
And what he calls his treasures or his means, which is what myself and you could say
a handful compared to many who know about him, a handful who gave our lives over
and continue to do to try to help the means or the gifts that he gave survive
so that they can carry through the transmission of what he established that is permeating and vibrating
everyone and everything in the psychophysics of things. And you see signs of that,
that it's not just coming from Adi Da as a separate person, but it is the divine manifestation
continuing to reveal itself in all the great traditions, because it's all going through
a significant shift. Let's talk about his actual death. How was it treated by the community?
Yes, yes. He was involved on the island, at Naitamba, in late 2006.
He returned to the island of Naitamba and to reside there at that point in time
saying it was likely he wouldn't leave anymore. Now, something about Adi Da
that I think a lot of people know and talk about, he says things and then maybe a few months later
he does the opposite. I'm never going to leave the island again or I'm not going to do this anymore or we're going to only do this
and then before you know it, shape-shifting and something happens differently. So we sort of took it with a grain of salt,
okay, you're not going to leave again and we're thinking he's going to live on and on and on and that's our hope
that he won't die fairly soon. We don't want him to. But he's starting to indicate
that the resistance in the world through the communication that he is bringing
is being resisted really strongly and he's saying it's being resisted
because the Guru function itself is being resisted and there's a misunderstanding
about the actual true nature of the Guru function or the Siddha function
or an avataric incarnation or an actual divine intervention and that there's more and more
a stronger inclination for independence. I can realize this on my own
independent of everyone and everything. It's an American characteristic
among other things. We regard ourselves as fiercely independent people,
pioneers. Sure, sure. That in and of itself again, in right measure,
but not done overly much, is useful to become strong
and capable of functioning as I had to myself. If you stop there though,
you are not open to further growth. There's always further growth, growing an awakening above and beyond and prior to.
So yes, this mode of what they call the dark time or the Kali Yuga,
which not only Adi Da has spoken of, but many traditions have spoken of that there will be a dark time.
There has been dark times. It's a cyclical pattern of there being resistance
and causing calamities and wars. That's not the divine doing that.
That's humanity doing that. It's allowing the dark forces to take greater hold of the force within the sphere
within which we all live, not just in this red-yellow realm, but in the vibratory spectrum of possibilities,
even extremely subtle entities that aren't embodied in physical forms. So there's all sorts of beings
that are working at different levels of manifestation with the forces that are present right now.
And Adi Da was working with those forces himself. And the yoga, the meditation,
the puja, the rituals, the invocations that we were taught to do
was working at that level also with him. And so at this point when he passed away in 2008,
none of us were wanting or expecting him to, but he kept communicating, there's such resistance in the world
and these dark forces are impinging upon me because there has been an inability
for my function to be able to respect it and be given a circumstance
with the right sacred context, with enough numbers recognizing me to be able to move with a force of protection in the world.
And he said, so it's coming onto his body. And he said that he was feeling symptoms, again, yogic symptoms of another death
that was about to occur. And he said that if there wasn't going to be an advancement of enough numbers of devotees
to be able to incarnate the advanced practice, to carry on, it would become our burden of responsibility
without there being a guru necessary anymore, which is an interesting twist in him playing the siddha role, the guru function,
where he was actually indicating there would no longer be the necessity for a single guru function.
That the actual truth of the esoteric process of the incarnation of non-dual truth
required the force of every man and woman, non-differently realizing the self-position itself.
That would liberate mankind. That's an optimistic vision.
Incredibly. Reality idealism, a bit of a paradox, right?
So, this is what's communicated in Not Too Is Peace, which I've brought up before.
And the call, the global, you know, call to global humanity. And so when he passed away,
he said that he started working at a more profound level, where he was working with his writing
and working with his artwork. And he was attempting to work with a number of practitioners
that he was hoping would move into, again, more advanced practice. And he said, it's not happening.
It's not happening. And Adi Da is the epitome of integrity in terms of saying it like it is.
He's not going to say, this is okay, and this is it, if it isn't. He's going to call it what it is.
And he's going to say, you are still relating to me cultically. And what that means is, you are not relating to me, with me,
in right relationship, relating to me, realizing me non-differently. In other words, taking responsibility
for the full force of the brunt of realization itself. And doing that in relationship with one another
so that you take on this responsibility. It's not mine. I've done everything I can possibly do.
Don't scapegoat me for the failure of it. And this was something,
if you look at the thread of his communication, he was always saying exactly the same thing
about the pitfalls of relating to the world as an I other dynamic and relating to God
or the divine force or spirit in that fashion. And then also relating to Guru in that fashion,
relating to any other being in that fashion. And indicating that if you continue to do that,
you're going to scapegoat me. You're going to scapegoat God. You're going to be the victim of the failure
in relationship to life. You're going to blame the universe for your own inability to awaken.
And so when he passed away,
he was simply working one day in his art studio. It was a set-apart space, not dissimilar to this.
It actually had the walls and the space where he could actually do photo shoots
and there could be specific music playing. He had high technology with a lot of artists
and devotees and technicians coming on retreat and working with him to be able to manifest his visual art and the auditory art
combined with the visual art. He was also working with a lot of writers and a lot of editors. Basically, the island was this incredible
university of artists. And not only technically speaking, but also sacred artists in the sense of the temples
and the sacred grounds, as he always did. He always did this. And huge numbers of people came around him,
influx and outflow and influx and outflow. Thousands and thousands of beings
have had this opportunity with him. And at this time it wasn't any different, yet the frustration of him confronting the resistance
was excruciatingly painful. And so much so that it was difficult for me personally
to even hear about it. To even hear about it. And because I also knew synchronously
exactly what needed to occur for it to completely be different. It was just paper thin.
But you were relieved of all responsibility for changing. I had no role, absolutely no role.
And I was continuing to fulfill the function that I was given. And as a matter of fact, Nick and I had bought
a retreat property that could actually have the capability of housing Adida on this property.
And I came so close to inviting him to come there at that time.
To give him an opportunity for another refuge. But immediately when I would feel that I wanted to do that
to relieve him of that sense of frustration, incredible sense of the forces with which
would come into my sphere. Of what would be required and the responsibility of it.
And humbly, I wasn't prepared. And I didn't even know, like I thought,
who would I call on to help do this? You know, how would I know?
These are all the individuals that I know or ones that have worked with him so closely. And so then I'd finally fall back.
And so he stayed there on the island doing this work intensively, communicating through a few devotees
that I had been very intimate with through all the years around him. And then one day as he was working in his studio,
and lo and behold, he had just completed a work of art that he had worked on.
And he had finally done the title page, the cover page for the Alethion,
one of his writings, final works. And then later that day, he dropped the body.
No drama, nothing happened. He was just in his studio and fell.
And he kept warning people prior to this, if something doesn't change, you can't make use of me anymore.
I have nothing more to give. I have nothing more to give. I've left it all to you. It's all yours.
You do what you will. And he dropped the body. And of course, people tried to resuscitate him,
because we'd seen him have these kinds of yogis. You talked about the earlier. Yeah, yeah.
We have seen this kind. And we actually presumed, and I was called up by a male devotee calling Nick
and I saying, Adidas dropped the body again. He probably will come back,
and we sort of assumed that might happen. He didn't. Getting calls again, he's not coming back. He's not coming back.
And finally it sunk in. He left. He left.
It was traumatic. It was shocking.
Because we never thought it would happen. I mean, we knew it would happen. But not then.
You were not prepared. No. But it's not complete.
Or it doesn't appear to be complete. Yeah.
Every devotee could describe something unique for them in terms of the profundity of that moment for them.
My response personally was that I immediately went back to a moment in 1976
when I was on the airplane with him and we were going to Hawaii. And I was sitting next to him on the plane.
And we had this very simple conversation when I think back on it. It's so mundane.
It's ridiculous. And we're talking about what's your favorite color? What's your favorite animal?
What would you do if the plane was about to crash and you knew we were going to die?
And he was posing these questions to me, which seemed like very simple questions. And I said, well, probably maybe the color yellow
and lions. I would probably, of course,
give all my energy and attention to you and the process. In the moment of death, I would be given over in the spiritual process.
And what would you do? I asked him, what would you do? So I would just continue reading my newspaper.
That was what came to me. And at that moment when he said that to me
and when I remember that in the moment he was passing, it was an extraordinary communication of no drama.
You're simply present and then you're not. No reaction, no drama, no recoil, no fear.
It's going to occur and you just let go. It just is an inevitability.
So I remembered that moment in his passing and I could feel the angst of what was occurring.
And then, of course, I immediately was like, what's going to happen? What will devotees do in response?
And then when I went home and I sat, entered into a meditation for days
and entering into the process of feeling the significance of what occurred, and the only thing I felt was a magnification
of the divine self-position, the bright love bliss, magnified immensely so that there was the communication
that there was no loss. Absolutely zero loss.
Never left, never gone, always present, always was present, the divine was always present
as revealed, that divine light, not dependent upon his physical form.
And that certainty has always only been magnifying even in the midst of every possible test and challenge
and seeming adversity. It's constantly the magnification of that so long as there's no dissociation from life.
It's a complete paradox. Well, as it occurs to me, you went through several 16-year phases,
Postmortem influence of Adi Da
16 years living with him, 16 years after you left his intimate company
until his death. And now it's been 16 years since his death.
And I gather what you're telling me is that his presence has only grown stronger.
Yes, yes. Constant. Yes, yes, constant, constant. And the precipice that I feel not only myself
but as a seeming separate self, I feel so combined with the certainty of the psychophysics
of our condition that humanity itself is an incredible threshold
of a transition of awakening. It's a potential, the potential of it. But it entirely has to do with what our relationship
to consciousness itself is. And it is interesting to observe and feel that that is the field of focus in so many arenas of study
and learning and experimentation and growth, this matter of consciousness,
and who, what, and where is consciousness? What is its nature? How does it influence the material world?
And this is the reality awakening that's necessary in order to not destroy the world fundamentally,
to not destroy one another, to cease the conflict in relationship to what is arising. And this precipice is not just a spiritual awakening,
like knowing that the world is psychophysical in nature. Like we've been speaking recently about the phenomena
of realization that there are other dimensions of entities, and they cross over, that there's an awareness
between all different forms of incarnation and conscious awareness of different forms
of vibratory incarnations. And people are in upheaval about even the acknowledgement
of that level of awakening. And so that's an important, really important transition.
And once a greater humanity is aware of that fact, then there is the possibility of moving even into
a more subtle or causal awareness of what consciousness is in relationship to manifestation as a whole.
But the key necessity, though, even in the midst of all of that awakening, has to do with a fundamental responsibility
relative to not living cultic relationships that cause conflict in relationship to one another,
as though we are threatened because we are separate beings. Therefore, in physical, emotional, mental,
and sexual and psychophysical terms, we are troubled, at war, complicated,
unable to even have an equanimous way of living with one another,
being at peace with one another. So if humanity can't come to that point of feeling discrimination,
responsibility, independence in terms of being able to be responsible as a humanly mature being,
available to keep growing in relationship to one another as a whole, then all of these subtleties of the religious and spiritual
and transcendental process will not be accessible. So that's what I'm aware of in the midst of the education
and opportunity that I've been given, but I don't feel separate from it. And there's nothing that I can do independently.
You can't force it, you can't superimpose anything on it to make it happen, so all it is is just a vulnerability
of living in a completely open disposition and trust the coinciding and allow the revelation
of the divine self-condition and the bright and the light to be revealed and awakened.
Conclusion
Julie Anderson, what a lovely discourse. Thank you.
We set out to talk about spirituality and death, and I think we have accomplished that.
Yes, yes, thank you, thank you. It has been heartfelt and inspirational.
I'm so glad that you went to all of the trouble and expense to come here to Albuquerque
to share this story with me, Julie. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you.
And for those of you listening or watching, thank you for being with us.
You are the reason that we are here.
I imagine that by now many of you already realize that in conjunction with White Crow Books,
we've just launched the New Thinking Allowed Dialogues book imprint, and our first title is
Is There Life After Death? New Thinking Allowed is a non-profit endeavor.
Your contributions to the New Thinking Allowed Foundation make a meaningful difference in
our ability to produce new videos.
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<줄리 앤더슨: 영성과 죽음, 그리고 아디 다와의 여정> 요약 및 평론
개요
본 글은 줄리 앤더슨(Julie Anderson)이 제프리 미슬러브(Jeffrey Mishlove)와 나눈 대담을 바탕으로, 그녀의 스승 아디 다 삼라지(Adi Da Samraj)와의 관계, 1986년 아디 다의 근사 체험, 어머니의 임종, 그리고 영적 수행 과정에서의 <에고의 죽음>을 다룬다
[요약: 삶 속의 죽음과 의식의 해방]
1. 아디 다의 1986년 사건과 요가적 죽음
1986년, 아디 다는 신체적 기능이 정지되는 임상적 사망에 가까운 <요가적 죽음>을 경험했다
2. <이지 데스(Easy Death)>와 임종의 지혜
아디 다의 가르침 중 하나인 <이지 데스>는 죽음이 투쟁이 아닌, 삶 속에서 이미 연습되어야 할 과정임을 강조한다
3. 세상 속으로의 방출과 시련(Ordeal)
1992년, 아디 다는 앤더슨에게 아쉬람을 떠나 세상에서 시험받을 것을 명령했다
4. 종교적 제도와 영적 본질의 충돌
앤더슨은 아디 다 사후의 추종자 집단이 폐쇄적이고 광신적인 <컬트(cult)>적 성향을 띠는 것에 대해 비판적인 시각을 드러냈다
[평론: 신비와 광기, 그리고 현대적 통합의 기로]
1. 구루-제자 관계의 위험한 헌신
줄리 앤더슨의 고백은 전통적인 구루-제자 관계가 지닌 초월적 힘과 동시에 그 위험성을 극명하게 보여준다. 아디 다 삼라지는 <미친 지혜(Crazy Wisdom)>의 전통을 표방하며 제자들의 한계를 깨부수기 위해 논란의 소지가 있는 극단적 수단을 사용했다
2. <죽음>의 재정의: 공포에서 해방으로
본 텍스트의 가장 강력한 통찰은 죽음을 생물학적 종말이 아닌 <식별과 포기의 연속>으로 본다는 점이다
3. 조직화된 영성의 모순과 개인의 자율성
앤더슨이 지적한 <조직의 관료주의와 영적 에스테리시즘(비전주의)의 충돌>은 모든 영적 운동이 직면하는 숙명적 과제다
결론
줄리 앤더슨의 서사는 극단적인 신비체험에서 시작하여 처절한 심리적 치유를 거쳐, 마침내 보편적 인간애와 의식의 자유로 귀환하는 여정을 보여준다. 그녀의 이야기는 영적 수행이 현실 도피가 아니라, 가장 고통스러운 삶의 순간(질병, 조직의 갈등, 사별)을 <열린 자세>로 통과해야 하는 치열한 과정임을 일깨워준다
추가로 아디 다 삼라지의 다른 주요 저작이나 <7단계 삶>의 구체적인 내용에 대해 더 알고 싶으신가요? Would you like me to explain more about the "seven stages of life" mentioned in the text?
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