Adi Da Samraj and Adidam: The Spiritual Necessity for self-Understanding and self-Transcendence

From the beginning of His Teaching Work, Avatar Adi Da Samraj has emphasized that the two primary and complementary aspects of the practice of Adidam are the devotional relationship to Him; and self-understanding. Even the relationship with the Divine Presence through the Agency of the Spiritual Master isn’t sufficient, by Itself, to Fully Awaken a human being. This is so because both our awareness of the Divine Presence, and our reception of It (our ability to be Melted in and Awakened by It), are cut off, hindered by the ego:


	At the same time you are in My Company you are separated from My Company, you are dramatizing the act of self-contraction right now! Therefore, merely to be in My Company is not enough. How often has it been regretfully said in the traditions that even though people were given access to [Spiritual] Realizers of one degree or another, allowed to be in the Company of the Realizers, [Who were] serving them all the time, most of these people got nothing — or very little. Why is it so, then? Since My Radiant Presence Is sufficient, and since all you have to do is come into It, why do you not feel altogether good? Why are you not sublimed to the Perfect Degree right now? Of course, such sudden Realization is eminently possible, but the reason it is not happening is that you are engaged in a particular act right now, here in My Company, as you are at all other times. You are enforcing that action constantly and making a life out of it. Therefore, you are doing it right now, and you are also feeling it and all its results and all its impositions on you.

Therefore it is essential to Spiritual growth that we understand and transcend the "ego", the "self", as it is the primary obstacle to Spiritual Realization.

The self-contraction — We conventionally view “me” as a given; it simply goes without saying. "Obviously", there’s “me” here, there’s “you” over there, etc. But what is this “me”? We are literally re-creating our sense of being a "separate self” in every moment through a separative activity of self-contraction, that is something like making a fist.
The hearing capability: the discovery that the self-contraction is one's own activity — Most fundamental "self-understanding" is a matter of observing the “self” in feeling (not merely intellectually) to the degree that the primal act, the self-contraction, is discovered to be one’s own activity. That discovery, which Avatar Adi Da Samraj calls hearing, then becomes one’s capability from that point on. In any moment, one can directly locate this activity and feel beyond it, transcending the sense of being a separate self.
Seeking and desensitization — Even though we always are acting (mostly unconsciously) on all levels of egoic activity, most of our time we find ourselves only consciously inhabiting the outermost circle of ego activity. This is the most peripheral or superficial level, corresponding to the least depth of feeling. In fact, our motive for only being conscious there is to desensitize ourselves from what is being generated at the deeper levels of ego activity, especially the pain at the core. Avatar Adi Da Samraj describes our occupation at the peripheral level as seeking — and it generally takes place in the areas of money, food, sex, and relationships.

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Practice and growth in the Way of Adidam

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All excerpts from the works of Avatar Adi Da Samraj and and pictures of Avatar Adi Da Samraj © 2003 The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as trustee for The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam. All rights reserved. Perpetual copyright claimed.