The Heart of Understanding
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Death is utterly acceptable to consciousness and life. There has been endless time of numberless deaths, but neither conscious-ness nor life has ceased to arise. The felt quality and cycle to death has not modified the fragility of flowers, even the flowers within the human body. Therefore, one's understanding of consciousness and life must be turned to That Utter, Inclusive Truth, That Clarity and Wisdom, That Power and Untouchable Gracefulness, That One and Only Reality, this evidence suggests. One must cease to live in a superficial and divided way, seeking and demanding consciousness and life in the present apparent form, avoiding and resisting what appears to be the end of consciousness and life in death.
The Heart Is Real understanding. The Heart Is Real Consciousness and Real Life. The Heart Is What Merely and Only Is, but Which Is also Appearing In and Behind the conditions of mortal life and its death. Therefore, it is said of old, the One That Is Is neither born nor come to death, not Alive merely as the limitation of form (itself), not Itself (or Entirely) Rendered in what appears, and, yet, It Is the Living One, than Which there Is no lesser other (and no Great or Greater Other), Appearing As all of this Play of changes, but Eternally One, Unchanging, and Free.
There Is Only the Constant Knowledge and Enjoy-ment of the Heart, moment to moment, through the instant of all conditions of appearance and disappearance. Of This I Am Perfectly Certain. I Am That.
[Adi Da Samraj, The Knee of Listening]
Avatar Adi Da, 2005
With deepest gratitude, I surrender my father, in my heart, to the human, all-pervading, and transcendental Real God, to my all-Blessing and all-Loving Divine Heart-Master, Adi Da Love-Ananda Samraj.
I didn’t make a request for Adi Da’s Blessing when my father was initially diagnosed with cancer because I wanted to wait until the exact extent and seriousness of the disease was understood—and because neither my family nor I assumed the disease would be anything but treatable. So my father and my family received Adi Da’s Blessing when my father was being moved into a hospice, three weeks before he died. And it was during this time that my Master’s Divine Influence—on my father and those around him—was most evident.
I vividly remember the evening in late April, right before my father was diagnosed with cancer. I had been with him at my sister’s house. As I was dropping him off at the station for his train, I felt a painful love for him—and an acute sadness. He looked so old and frail, so afflicted by the mortal condition. In my diary that night, I wrote a prayer to Adi Da for my family and for all of humankind—that they find recourse to Real God in the midst of this difficult life. I wrote: By Your Teaching and Your Grace, I see the mortal organism for what it is, when it is devoid of communion with the deathless Real God. What an empty, horrific fate! I feel this mortality tangibly and nakedly, almost like a sore on the flesh—a dark, sad, heavy, bewildering wound. I almost can’t bear to look at it.
The next day my father suffered symptoms that seemed like those of a mild stroke. He was writing a letter to his eldest daughter, Nancy, and found he couldn't control the pen properly. In a slightly confused state, he continued to struggle to address the letter and take it to the post office, all the while getting more frustrated and angry with himself. His main symptoms were a mild disassociation from the entire right side of the body, and a general sense of confusion and disorientation.
The next day, he informed me and my sister about the event and we took him to a radiographer for a CAT scan. The technician there said we should take him straight to the hospital for an immediate evaluation. The doctor at the emergency room examined my father and took an x-ray. He said my father hadn't suffered a stroke—but his symptoms were being caused by a tumor in the left hemisphere of his brain.
That night I engaged the Devotional Prayer of Changes for my father’s health, and to be able to serve my father as Adi Da’s devotee, to be a means for His Blessings to flow to Dad.
In the middle of the night, I felt Adi Da’s all-pervading Spiritual Presence and Energy working deeply in my brain, then moving down the left side of my body, and entering my heart. Then His Force moved over to the right side of my body. I felt that this movement of Adi Da’s Spiritual Energy was somehow related to my father’s condition, and that I had to surrender deeply to His Spiritual Presence to allow Him to do His Work. The next night, I stayed with my father, and again felt Adi Da’s Force, taking hold of my right hand and moving powerfully through the right side of my body.
In early May, my father was admitted to the local hospital, where he underwent numerous tests. Nothing conclusive was found. The following week, he was admitted to the neurosurgery ward of St. Vincent's Hospital, in Melbourne. That Wednesday, the tumor was biopsied. On Friday, we received the results, which showed that my father had a “Grade 4 Glioblastoma multiforme”—a serious, aggressive, fast-growing, and often fatal tumor. It was diagnosed as possibly treatable but most likely incurable. My father was given a few months to live—possibly longer, if radiotherapy was successful—and discharged a week later. Although the prognosis came as a shock, we expected that with the help of radiotherapy he would recover, or at least live a few more years.
My request for Adi Da's Blessings was sent to Him at this time. I asked that whatever my father had to go through, the process would be Spiritually auspicious: that whether he lived or died, he have a positive destiny in Real God. My father said that he did not want any unnecessary prolongation of his life, so I wasn't requesting that kind of miracle.
And it soon became obvious that my father's condition was not as hopeful as we had imagined. He continued to deteriorate, and after suffering a fever and several falls, he was readmitted to the hospital in a delirious state. By the end of May, we had come to terms with the fact that radiotherapy was not going to help, and that my father was going to die. In June, he was moved to Caritas Christi Hospice, in Kew, near Melbourne. I spent the next three weeks living and sleeping in the same room with my father, along with my younger sister Alice and my elder sister Nancy, who had arrived from Scotland.
I was at the Adidam Center in Melbourne when I got the email confirming that Avatar Adi Da had received and responded to my request for His Blessings. I was overcome with a deep sensation of love that filled my heart. He had sent His Love and Blessings, and He had doused with water a photograph of my father, a photograph of myself, and a group photograph of my sister Alice, her son Javari, and my father and me. I wept at this Gift, feeling my Divine Guru’s direct and personal Regard, His Love and embrace. I was filled with Him. After writing a letter of gratitude, and performing a puja on Adi Da’s Murti Form, I went back to the hospice.
At this stage, my father was bedridden and couldn’t even feed himself without help. As the tumor grew, his sense of orientation and coordination were becoming more and more impaired. His speech had become a mere whisper, and he was not able to say more than a few words at a time.
On this day, a friend had brought in a Buddhist nun to visit Dad, and she was waiting in the hall outside my father’s room when I arrived. I sat down with Dad and told him that Adi Da had sent His Love and Blessings. I was sitting with my hand on his chest, and, as I said this, a flow of energy moved down from my heart into his. There was a sudden feeling of light and love around us, an ecstatic energy. I knew this was a sign of Adi Da’s “Bright” Transmission of His Spiritual Presence. My dad and I sat there, bathed in this happiness, my dad smiling from ear to ear. After a while, he managed to whisper, “I can feel it.” I knew exactly what he meant. After this, I left and the nun came in. As she entered the room, she looked at my father and said, “You don’t need me. You’re already in ecstasy!”
My father’s Blessed death
by Daniel Green
My father was something of a seeker in the “New Age” sense. He spent his life studying the work of various teachers and Spiritual Masters, including Gurdjieff, Meher Baba, and Ramana Maharshi. But despite his eclectic interests, he remained committed to a do-it-yourself approach to Spiritual life, and I was brought up accordingly. By becoming a devotee of Adi Da, I felt I was breaking faith with my father and the do-it-yourself “way” he had shown me. I had broken an unspoken rule, violating my fidelity to my father's authority: I had accepted someone else as my “authority”, as being more Spiritually knowledgeable. And although my mind said it was nonsense, on some emotional level I felt a strange and guilty logic: I had become a surrendered devotee of a Guru who definitely was not a “do-it-yourself” teacher, and a month later my father had been diagnosed with terminal cancer!
But my own guilt, and my father’s personal decision not to fully submit to the Guru-tradition, which I had come to regard as the true source of Grace and Spiritual Help for humankind, and any possible conflict between us about this matter—all these were purified by an event I consider a direct result of Adi Da’s Blessings, His Graceful Influence on our karmic patterns.
On his deathbed, my father decided to become the disciple of a Guru.
He decided that Ramana Maharshi, a Spiritual Master from India who lived and taught in the twentieth century, was his Guru. Avatar Adi Da writes that Ramana Maharshi is “the historical (human) Representative of the Great Tradition Whose Confession (and Process) of Realization was (even in many of Its specific Yogic details) most like (or most sympathetic with) My Own Most Ultimate Process and Confession. . . . ”* To me, this was a wonderful and blessed development, and appropriate for my father, who throughout his life had studied Ramana Maharshi’s books.
At this time, I also received acknowledgement from my dad that he was pleased I had accepted Adi Da as my Spiritual Master—and my dad’s acceptance of my relationship with my Guru was a great blessing for me.
We placed a photograph of Ramana Maharshi in my father’s room and read to him from Ramana Maharshi’s teaching. I also used this opportunity to read to my father from Adi Da’s book, Easy Death: Spiritual Wisdom on the Ultimate Transcending of Death and Everything Else, which includes Adi Da’s detailed and Compassionate Instructions on the death transition. And I played for my father taped excerpts from a seminar on Adi Da’s Teaching on death and dying, which had recently been held in Melbourne.
This period of time was full of Spiritual Energy and Light. Everyone around Dad was affected and uplifted by it. Sitting next to Dad often felt something like being in the Communion Hall at the Adidam ashram in Melbourne, where we meditated on and communed with Avatar Adi Da—the same Energy and “Brightness”, the same deep silence and peacefulness. Some excerpts from my diary describe this period:
A day of great Grace today. Spent several hours alone with Dad and the Spirit was very tangible then and throughout the day. (continued)
There was no recoil from the human reality of the situation, but we all felt sublimed. And, through Dad’s surrender, we were able to sense the Reality to which we all must surrender if love and peace are to be the characteristics of our lives.
Dad died very peacefully. At the time of his death, Alice was alone with him, and she called me to say that he had stopped breathing.
Certain water phenomena are recognized as a sign of Adi Da’s Blessing-Influence, particularly brief showers in sunlight that devotees call “Grace Rain”. There was a brief sun-shower as I drove to the hospice. Alice also noticed it, as did her son Javari, who was at school.
When I reached the hospice, Dad had passed.
Adi Da has said that the death transition is a positive event, very much like the birth transition—only the person dying is “birthed” out through the top of the head. And there was a powerful, out-the-top, “ascending” energy in the room where Dad died, which lasted for about three hours.
In the days before Dad’s death, I had read to him Adi Da’s Instructions about what to do during the first few hours after death, and he had appreciated them. For example: “Release body, emotion, and attention via the upward Energy-flow in the spinal line of the body and toward the crown of the head—until, if Grace will have it, there is emergence from the body-mind via the crown of the head, into the next (or new) dimension of
experience.”** Now I again read these Instructions to Dad, as Adi Da Instructs his devotees to do with a deceased person in the first few hours after death.
As his body was removed from the hospice room, we put a photograph of Ramana Maharishi on Dad’s chest, and I felt an instant psychic response from him, indicating that he was pleased with this.
It is clear to me that Adi Da's Blessing-Work comes from His innate Compassion for all beings. And, in retrospect, I can see how His sublime Influence worked on all of us in different ways, and continues to do so.
For me, there was a tremendous healing of my relationship with my father. During the memorial service, I felt Adi Da's Grace washing me of years of unresolved feelings.
Adi Da's Teachings on the death process resonated with Dad. He wished to have a three-day vigil over his body, as we do for devotees in the Way of Adidam,*** and Alice and I helped organize this. His body was kept at a local funeral parlor, and we spent time with the body every day.
On the last day of the vigil, it felt as if Dad had fully and finally departed the body for his new destiny.
The night before the last day of the vigil, I again felt Adi Da's Spiritual Presence and Energy. It was strong, and as I responded, it occurred to me that surrender to Adi Da in the Form of His Spiritual Force—a process of Yoga He describes as “self-surrendering, self-forgetting and self-transcending”—must be somewhat similar to the profound “letting go” of the death process. This surrender went on for a while, until I had a curious vision, more “real” to me than an ordinary dream.
I found myself standing on a platform in a large, underground subway tunnel that was dark and colorless, and hewn out of solid rock. I started walking to the left, towards the dark interior. I sensed something behind me, turned around, and saw a light—a train was coming! I instantly thought of Adi Da. I started to walk towards the light . . . and then I was floating in light . . . and then I saw color, and blue sky ahead. Suddenly, I joyously emerged into the open, and I was so happy, floating like a cloud without weight or form, and clapping my hands.
I knew this vision was somehow related to my father's death transition. And I knew he, too, was happy and in the Light.
As a new devotee, the process of participating in Avatar Adi Da’s Blessing Puja was wonderful for me. I was able to enter into an ongoing communication with Him, which strengthened and deepened my devotional relationship with Him in a personal and intimate manner. I wrote to Him six times during my father’s transition, and each time there would be a communicated response from Him, giving His Love and Blessings to my father, myself, and my family, and occasionally asking questions about my father’s condition.
After my father’s death, I received the photographs of my father, myself, and my family that I had sent to Adi Da—they had been splashed with the water that Adi Da uses to direct His Blessing. They were accompanied by the flowers that Adi Da also uses in His Divine Puja of Blessing, and I knew that they had been for a brief time in His Sukra Kendra.
Later, I learned that these photographs were in the Sukra Kendra during the days when we conducted the vigil, when I had the vision, and when I had set up a new Communion Hall in my house.
With deepest gratitude, I surrender my father, in my heart, to the human, all-pervading, and transcendental Real God, to my all-Blessing and all-Loving Divine Heart-Master, Adi Da Love-Ananda Samraj.
_
*Adi Da Samraj, The Knee Of Listening (Middletown, Calif.: The Dawn Horse Press, 2004), 456.
**Adi Da Samraj, Easy Death (Middletown, Calif.: The Dawn Horse Press, 2005), 267.
***For more about the three-day vigil and other practices recommended by Avatar Adi Da related to the death process, please see the book Easy Death. Information on Avatar Adi Da’s Teachings on death can also be found at www.easydeathbook.com.
On March 14, 2004, at the age of thirty-five, in an initiation ceremony in Melbourne, Australia, I took a vow of eternal devotion to the Eternal Person—the human, all-pervading, and transcendental Divine Heart-Master, Adi Da Samraj. I became a formally practicing devotee in the Way of Adidam.
On April 24, my father was diagnosed with a brain tumor. On June 24, at the age of sixty-five, he died.
Dad sleeping mostly today. Spent some time with us while he was awake this evening. Very lovely time with him. He’s all smiles and love. Very precious being with him like this. So full of profound love and peace.
Sitting with Dad this evening was a deeply healing time for me. Just resting for some time in the “peace that passeth all understanding.” Simple, pure, tangible peace. So lovely to be with him like this.
My sisters and I—spending so much time at the hospice—were the people most affected by the energy around Dad. Nancy recalls awakening in the night, and seeing so much light around Dad that she thought it was dawn. Alice recalls waking to see a strange orange cloud swirling above Dad, which suddenly spun back into his body like a vortex. Some of the nurses also remarked on the “good energy” they felt when they came into the room.
Until the last few days of his life, Dad was in remarkably good spirits for someone who was being devoured by cancer—all laughs and smiles when he was awake. The doctor remarked that Dad was suffering from a “happy tumor”, and that people often reflect in death the disposition they had shown in life. And although his mental functions were slowly being eclipsed by the brain tumor, he would still make hilarious or penetrating comments, often showing seemingly psychic awareness of what was going on around him. What so easily could have been a disturbed and difficult death became a demonstration of profound acceptance and human love.
Avatar Adi Da writes in “The Heart of Understanding”, the prologue to His Spiritual Autobiography, The Knee Of Listening: “Death is utterly acceptable to consciousness and life.” This was certainly true of my father’s death process. Death was acceptable—and it was acceptable because there was also the tangible Influence of (as Adi Da writes)
“That Power and Untouchable Gracefulness”, which all could feel Present in the room.
Avatar Adi Da Samraj, 2008
“You’re Already in Ecstasy!”
Avatar Adi Da Samraj
India
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