The ego-"I" Versus the Perfect "Is"

During His junior year at Columbia College, Adi Da Samraj had a sudden, profound experience that revealed to Him the "self-contraction" that prevents "Perfect Knowledge" in the general human experience, as well as the Perfect Condition that is Prior to it.

The context for this experience was a bold experiment that Adi Da Samraj had been engaging for the previous two years. Out of utter despair at finding Truth in any traditional source, and certainly not in the university ethos in which He was living, He had chosen an extreme course.

On the streets of New York and in every kind of circumstance, He had abandoned Himself to the gamut of experience, unrestrained by social taboos, in the hope that Truth, or God, or Reality would be revealed through the intensity of His search.

He writes in The Knee of Listening:

On this extraordinary night, I sat at my desk late into the night. I had exhausted my seeking, such that I felt there were no more books to read, no possible kinds of ordinary experience that could exceed what I had already embraced.

There seemed no outstanding sources for any new excursion, no remaining and conclusive possibilities.

I was drawn into the interior tension of my mind that held all of that seeking — every impulse and alternative, every motive in the form of my desiring.

I contemplated it as a whole, a dramatic singleness, and it moved me into a profound shape of life-feeling, such that all the vital centers in my body and mind appeared like a long funnel of contracted planes that led on to an infinitely regressed and invisible image.

I observed this deep sensation of conflict and endlessly multiplied contradictions, such that I was surrendered to its very shape, as if to experience it perfectly and to be it.

Then, quite suddenly, in a moment, I experienced a total revolution in my body-mind, and (altogether) in my humanly-born conscious awareness. An absolute sense of understanding opened and arose at the extreme end of all this sudden contemplation.

And all of the motions of me that moved down into that depth appeared to reverse their direction at some unfathomable point.

The rising impulse caused me to stand, and I felt a surge of Force draw up out of my depths and expand, Filling my entire body and every level of my humanly-born conscious awareness with wave on wave of the most Beautiful and Joyous Energy.

I felt absolutely mad, but the madness was not of a desperate kind. There was no seeking and no dilemma within it, no question — no unfulfilled motive, not a single object or presence outside myself.

I could not contain the Energy in my small room. I ran out of the building and through the streets. I thought, if I could only find someone to talk to, to communicate to about this "Thing".

The Energy in my body was overwhelming, and there was an ecstasy in every cell that was almost intolerable in its Pressure, Light, and Force.

— Adi Da Samraj
The Knee of Listening

Next: The State Beyond All Contradiction
from the Introduction by Carolyn Lee, PhD