The Perfect Tradition

The Perfect Tradition is Book One of the "Perfect Knowledge" Series by the Avataric Great Sage, Adi Da Samraj.

In The Perfect Tradition Avatar Adi Da Reveals His unique Gifts of the "Bright" and the "Thumbs" and elucidates all the traditions of religion and Spirituality through His schema of the seven stages of life.

Carolyn Lee writes in her introduction, "The Wisdom-Teaching of Adi Da Samraj is a great gift to all who need to understand the human event from the viewpoint of Ultimate Truth, beyond the winds of doctrine and the competing philosophies that have made and unmade the cultures of humankind."

The books of the "Perfect Knowledge" Series comprise the complete text of Avatar Adi Da's "Source-Text" IS: The Perfect Knowledge of Reality and The "Radical" Way to Realize It.

Introduction

by Carolyn Lee, PhD

There is a dimension of existence that is off the edge of the mind. Words can only gesture paradoxically toward it.

And yet the most urgent human need is to plumb this dimension, to get to the source of things, to know Reality with a capital "R", in order to make sense of the chaos of experience.

This fundamental enquiry was conceived by the author, during His youth, in visual terms:

From My early years, including My college period, I would have an image, a visual impression, of a group of people sitting around a massive boulder-like stone in a room. There were no windows, no features to the room at all, no reason to be looking at the room itself.

I would be sitting with others, in chairs, around this stone — turned directly at the stone, simply persisting in that situation. There was the sense that eventually everything would be known — meaning Realization would be the case — based on the starkness of that scene.

It was about the transcending of the objective by simply looking at what Is — simply the room itself, or the great stone, the mere event of conditional awareness.

— March 1 and 4, 2006

The primal circumstance of contemplating what is is native to the human being. But who can "explain" what is? Who can answer the conundrum of the stone?

What is the stone?
Why is there a stone at all?
Why does anything arise?
What is the Source of all of this happening?

During His childhood, and on into His years at Columbia College, New York, Adi Da Samraj was possessed with the question: "What is consciousness?"

By "consciousness" He meant that very sense of existence, or awareness of simply being — that which is constant in us, whatever the events and changes of life.

In the modern scientific view, consciousness is the by-product of an electro-chemical process originating in the brain, and, therefore, dependent on the survival of the body.

Thus, according to this opinion, consciousness, which seems to be our most fundamental condition, disappears at death. This is the message imparted — even officially — by the institutions of modern "civilization". Avatar Adi Da could never accept it, because He had a greater tacit knowledge, which had been self-evident at His Birth.

Adi Da Samraj was born in New York in 1939 into an ordinary lower-middle-class family — but He was not in an ordinary state.

As He describes in His Spiritual Autobiography, The Knee Of Listening, He enjoyed in infancy an unbroken Condition of Radiant, Blissful Being, which, from childhood, He has called the "Bright".

But He discovered in His earliest years that this sublime Reality was not obvious to others.

And so, in a great Impulse to embrace the human condition completely — and, thus, to Illumine it for all — Avatar Adi Da spontaneously relinquished that Native Awareness of Reality.

From the age of two, He submitted to participate in the human dilemma, the presumption that one is a separate mortal entity in the midst of a bewildering and threatening world.

Nevertheless, the "Bright" persisted as an undercurrent of Truth that kept driving Him to the root of things — until all obstructions fell away, and the "Bright" was Re-Awakened in Him completely. From that point, He turned about to Teach others.

From time to time in human history, Great Sages have appeared who have, to one degree or another, agreed to instruct devotees. Such a one does not teach from the position of an "I" speaking to "you" or "me".

A truly Great Sage speaks as the Very Condition, the Radiant Ocean of Being, That is Reality.

Adi Da Samraj, from the beginning of His lifetime, has shown the signs of such a one. He is here in a brief span of a human lifetime, to show that the Ultimate Reality and Truth is not (as He has remarked) a "blank absolute", nor the "Creator-God" (making the world, and implicated in the human drama).

Rather, the Very One Who Is, is by Nature moved to Liberate — to set beings free of identification with the sticky web of illusions that makes up the usual life.

The Wisdom-Teaching of Adi Da Samraj is a great gift to all who need to understand the human event from the viewpoint of Ultimate Truth, beyond the winds of doctrine and the competing philosophies that have made and unmade the cultures of humankind.

Next: The Great-Reality Teaching
Transmitted in Living Relationship