Da Avabhasa & Adidam - An Introduction
Da Avabhasa (the "Bright") is a God Realized Master whose teachings
are called The Way of the Heart or Adidam.
Da Avabhasa was born already Awake on Long Island, New York, in 1939 as
Franklin Jones. He entered Columbia College at seventeen and studied Western
philosophy. He did graduate work in English at Stanford University and
later studied at three Christian seminaries.
Da Avabhasa, from the beginning of his college years, immersed himself
in a spiritual quest. His primary breakthroughs in understanding occurred
before he met his human spiritual teachers, Albert Rudolph (Swami Rudrananda,
known as Rudi), and Rudi's own teachers, Swami Muktananda and Swami Nityananda
of India. He received the spiritual transmissions of each of these great
yogis and was blessed by them to enter into an esoteric devotional relationship
with the Divine Goddess, or Shakti. After an extraordinarily rapid spiritual
evolution, which included three sacred pilgrimages to India, Da Avabhasa
passed into the most radical or absolute Realization of the Divine Self
in a temple of the Vedanta Society in Los Angeles, California, on September
10, 1970.
The "Teaching Message" revolves around two principal revelations.
The first is that "every ego -'I' is an addict," chronically
locked in the adventure of self-created separation, suffering, and fruitless
seeking for relief, union, or consolidation. The second principle is that
Da Avabhasa is himself the Source of Divine Grace that makes our freedom
from egotism possible.
Practice of Adidam thus proceeds along two lines. It involves increasingly
deep understanding of how we create the sense of egoic separation and
why all our searches are futile. But even this is a joyous and in many
ways miraculous ordeal, because the core of it is increasingly deep communion
with Da Avabhasa as the agent of very tangible grace in one's life.
|
