Bonus Sample: The God-Man & His Enabler: How Ken Wilber Got Adi Da All Wrong
By the 1990s, the sadistic cult leader who claimed to be God on Earth had already fled the United States to avoid a stack of lawsuits and potential criminal charges. Even still, highly influential spiritual intellectual Ken Wilber was calling him the “greatest living realizer,” privately saying he was “happy about how many people had found their way to Adi Da through reading my books.”Wilber later modified his model of stages of spiritual development to try to account for supposedly enlightened beings who were awful people. In this week’s Bonus episode, Julian recounts this story of a sociopathic holy man and his brilliantly naive enabler—which culminates in a wickedly illustrative thought experiment!
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
You can support our work and have full access to bonus episodes and other premium content by subscribing for as little as $5 a month at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
Thanks for listening and your support, which keeps us ad-free and editorially independent.
The event of Baba Free John is an occasion for rejoicing because, without any doubt whatsoever, he is destined to be recognized as the first Western-born avatar or world teacher to appear in the history of the world.
For the other great avatars, Christ, Gautama, Krishna, all have been Asian, but here, for the first time, is a Western-born spiritual master of the ultimate degree.
Whereas the ordinary person continually abandons this divine mystery in order to contract into knowledge and sensation, the awakened one, "...has perfectly and radically fallen into the condition of divine ignorance itself, and thus is perfectly aligned to the utterly spontaneous and unknowable play of the divine, founded as the ultimate condition of which all arising is but modification.
Baba Frijon stands as simple presence for all who would have recourse to him.
The times at which such enlightened ones have appeared are very rare.
Please make use of the works and presence of Baba Frijon to whatever degree you are capable.
And in addition to that very over-the-top endorsement, throughout this passage, Wilbur does something that we find in all of then-Baba Frijon, later Adi Da's work, which is a lot of idiosyncratic capitalizations.
So things like Divine Mystery, Awakened One, Ultimate Condition, Simple Presence, Enlightened Ones.
Any of these kinds of terms are given the treatment of having capital letters to designate some really important significance, right?
So here then is Adi Da in one of thousands of recorded public works.
I'm going to play you one three minute clip of him that will illustrate the complete lack of exaggeration in my description of him so far.
Give me your attention.
Thank you.
At any moment, and you will receive this grace, it is always pouring through this body-mind, which is no longer a person, you see.
There's nobody here.
No Franklin Jones.
Nobody like you, you see.
It's not here anymore.
Totally absent.
What a miracle.
What a wonder.
I am He.
I am God.
I am the adept in our generation.
What an amusement!
This should happen in precisely this form.
I can't account for it myself.
But I'm not a me, you see.
I literally am you.
I'm your psyche and mind.
I'm your being, your destiny, your ego.
I am all selves.
Literally.
Not metaphorically.
I know this for absolute certain because I am you.
I think your mind.
I breathe your breath.
I suck down your food.
I shit out your life.
I am your person.
All together and absolutely.
What a wonderful, what a wonder this great one is.
I marvel in this great one.
More than you, you see, do not witness this miracle.
More than you.
Because you don't see it.
I can understand your reluctance.
Because you do not see what I see.
But I have been sifted into this wonder since eternal time.
I'm just that one.
The Great One.
Here.
Sitting as this body.
Talking to you.
I am God.
And there is not the slightest doubt in me.
But the doubt in you It's your own perversion, and this is the cause of my teaching.
So I'm here to teach you out of this unhappiness.
Poor me.
I'll be laughing about this for countless ages, as I have been since eternal time.
I'm full of all space-time, all bliss, all wonder.
All the marvels of being are in my being.
I know it, and you do not.
Absolutely.
And all miracles are potent in my heart.
So I come here to give you everything.
One of the slightest reluctances, eh?
But I'm not here to tell you about some asshole ego, you see.
I'm here to wonder with you about the Great One.
There is this Great One.
This Great One is totally known to me.
This Great One is myself.
I'm my consort, his being.
I am the self of God.
I have no doubt in me about it.
All miracles are evident in me.
All time is obvious to me.
It seems great to me.
But you poor people.
If you do not love me, you cannot submit yourselves to God, is it?
You're the ones I must teach.
How do I teach you?
By countering your self-contraction, your reluctance to submit to intoxication.
So my entire life has been involved with this countering the unhappiness of evil.
I began reading Ken Wilber's work in the early 90s and voraciously devoured his books for about 12 years.
This was mostly pre-internet, and so I didn't register his enthusiasm for this supposedly divine avatar at first.
When I eventually did, I was very curious if a little taken aback by the sheer religious fervor of his endorsement, which was not a characteristic of the rest of his writing.
By the time I became aware of Adi Da and had bought his autobiography at Wilbur's suggestion titled The Knee of Listening, which featured a foreword by another hero of mine named Alan Watts, and one other intensely devotional book about him by devotees titled See My Brightness Face to Face, I was, however, very engaged on an early internet forum where discussions of Wilbur's work took place.
It was on that forum that I became very friendly with a man named Jim Chamberlain, who had been in one of Da's early and small San Francisco communes and lived to tell the tale.
Jim talked about being initiated into membership in Da's community with his wife, donating their entire $10,000 savings account in exchange for lodging, food, and $7 a month walking around money.
He also was granted an unpaid job working in the bookstore that was part of the community enterprise and home to the guru's rapidly expanding self-published bibliography.
Jim was already an avid seeker who had experimented with LSD and primal therapy and had a disciplined yoga and meditation practice and he was drawn in by Da's powerful writing about spiritual enlightenment.
He also had As many people would, profound experiences of altered states when meditating in Da's presence.
Experiences that would be characterized in the community as the divine transmission of spiritual energy.
Devotees followed strict rules regarding diet, money, sex, and spiritual practice.
Within a short time, though, Jim also discovered that the Guru was a party animal who indulged in junk food binges, drugs and alcohol, and reveled in having total sexual power and at times abusive control over his followers.
Da lived, as it turned out, with nine wives, and stories of wild parties and dark psychosexual dramas circulated quietly, sometimes framed as part of how the master was waking up his students.
The partying, and by all accounts sexual sadism and power games, alternated with long satsang sessions of meditation and teaching from Da, Mostly filled with the insistence that there was a way to true enlightenment and surrender to the divine that could be achieved only through recognizing Him as God incarnate.
Any resistance to His perfection could only be a reflection of the disciple's ego, self-contraction, their lack of commitment to doing the work necessary for total transformation.
Within these sessions, the traumatized and captive community would often break through into ecstatic states, Kundalini phenomena, and visionary experiences verging on the psychedelic.
They would experience profound catharsis or complete meditative absorption and a sense of being blown open into overwhelming bliss.
