Avatar Adi Da Samraj dedicated his lifetime to establish the basis for a new and comprehensive human culture. His legacy includes what he called “Reality-Communications”—comprehensive writings on spiritual and philosophical topics, pioneering works of literary and visual art, and practical guidance on bringing about world peace and living a right human life. He intended his legacy of works to be means by which people can benefit from his influence for all time.

A new kind of human consciousness is required—based on the working-presumption of prior unity, and on an understanding of the indivisibly single world in which everyone is living. This involves not only the notion that there is such a single world, but it requires grasping the necessity for cooperation, and the necessity to function on the basis of an understanding that the Earth is a single system, and humankind (likewise) is a single whole.

—Avatar Adi Da Samraj
Not-Two Is Peace

Avatar Adi Da’s teachings about Reality and Truth stand beyond both science and religion—beyond all materialistic views and even all traditional theological views of reality.

All modes of human “religion” and “science” are “point-of-view”-based systems of presumed “knowledge” that prescribe and limit what is “known” and define what is “allowable” to be “known”.

Reality Itself cannot be “known”, controlled, or destroyed.

—Avatar Adi Da Samraj
The Aletheon

In his writings and his art, Avatar Adi Da communicated this Reality as the prior unity inherent in the human condition. He characterized this prior unity condition as indivisible, conscious, radiant, and intrinsically egoless. He devoted himself to awakening this awareness in his devotees and to the world-wide communication of this awareness for the benefit of all people.

There is a Universal Conscious Force That Is indivisible, egoless, Acausal, and Absolute. And everything is arising as an apparent modification of That. Reality Itself Is a prior unity. Therefore, everything that is arising is part of a prior unity.

—Avatar Adi Da Samraj
Not-Two Is Peace

He revealed a new and comprehensive assessment of human existence and of the greater context of Reality within which humanity appears. He called for this new culture to be founded in Reality Itself, or what he described as the always prior self-condition of all existence.

Human beings are inherently one with the “world”-process, or the Unity of all beings and things and events in the cosmic domain. Human beings are only secondarily “knowers about” the “world”-process. Therefore, if human beings adopt a form of relationship to the “world”-process that is founded on separation, observation, and analytical “knowing”, rather than on intuitive and compassionately ego-surrendering participation in Unity with the “world”-process, then people will tend (more and more) to interfere (and even lose sympathy) with their own Unity.

—Avatar Adi Da Samraj
The Aletheon

Avatar Adi Da was not a political figure in any sense of the word. Rather, his address to humanity comes from his lifelong intention of communicating the Truth of human existence—of uncovering the essential driving forces of human limitation and suffering and revealing the means to go beyond those forces. Many people around the world are moved by Avatar Adi Da’s spiritual and literary writings and his visual art but are not interested in a devotional relationship with him. The legacy Avatar Adi Da imparted to humankind is a living blessing for all humanity, relevant to people of all cultures, faiths, and traditions.

Toward the end of his life, Avatar Adi Da called for the establishment of the Adi Da Foundation as a means to bring his transformative wisdom and art to the world.

Spiritual Philosopher

Avatar Adi Da’s spiritual, philosophical, literary, and practical writings consist of over eighty published books, epitomized in three core texts of spiritual wisdom, The Knee of Listening, his spiritual autobiography; The Dawn Horse Testament, his description of the spiritual process that he taught; and The Aletheon, a compilation of his quintessential spiritual and philosophical communications.

Avatar Adi Da’s texts The Pneumaton and The Gnosticon communicate an entirely new metaphysical understanding of spiritual and non-dual traditions. He also created original translations of traditional spiritual texts. The book Reality Is All the God There Is (published by Inner Traditions) presents his translations of ancient texts from the traditions of Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta.

Avatar Adi Da also undertook a comprehensive review and commentary of humanity’s religious, spiritual, philosophical, and artistic endeavors, culminating in an annotated bibliography of approximately 17,000 items, entitled The Basket of Tolerance. He described this work as his unique revelation:

…of exactly why and how the totality of human cultural history can (and should) be understood to be a single (coherent, but multi-faceted) Great Tradition.

—Avatar Adi Da Samraj
The Aletheon

He wrote prolifically about the need to transcend the limitations of—and any polarization between—Eastern and Western approaches to religion and knowledge:

What can be seen in the outward conflicts on Earth today are essentially the artifacts of the two halves (or the two brain-sides) of humankind—as if the brain's two hemispheres were at war with one another. Nevertheless, humankind is no longer of either the West or the East. Rather, now, and forever hereafter, humankind is a global construct (or re-union) of all—and, therefore, every individual, every brain-mind, and every nation and culture must intensively and comprehensively re-adapt to a unified (rather than a bi-polar) global (and, necessarily, cooperative) order.

—Avatar Adi Da Samraj
The Aletheon

Read further statements by Avatar Adi Da addressing the need for a global unity-culture.

Avatar Adi Da’s writings on the practical aspects of right life, or right human living, cover areas such as diet, exercise, sexuality, livelihood, cooperative living, and death and dying. Publications of his teaching in these areas include Green Gorilla, Easy Death, The Complete Yoga of Emotional-Sexual Life, Conductivity Healing, and The First Three Stages of Life.

Visit www.dawnhorsepress.com to access a catalog of Avatar Adi Da’s writings and audio-visual recordings.

Visit www.consciousnessitself.org to read the free e-book, We Are Consciousness Itself: A Communica­tion Freely Offered to All.

Message for World Peace

In the last years of his life, Avatar Adi Da Gave a unique gift to the human family—his description of how the human sphere of strife and conflict can be transformed into a world of cooperation, tolerance, and peace. In his book Not-Two Is Peace, Avatar Adi Da calls for the creation of a “Global Cooperative Forum” in which all of the people on earth—or, in his words, “everybody-all-at-once”—are enabled to embrace an absolutely necessary paradigm shift—the shift from competition and conflict to life as an “egoless collective”. Such egoless participation by “everybody-all-at-once”, based on recognizing the prior (or inherent) unity of the human family, is how he says we will save the earth from destruction.

The presumption of prior unity—rather than the conflict between opposing identities—needs to be the basis for life in human society. In the larger-picture sense, life must be lived as that—instead of the clash of identities, or clash of cultures, or clash of religions.

—Avatar Adi Da Samraj
Prior Unity

Visit www.priorunity.org to explore Avatar Adi Da’s book Prior Unity: The Basis for a New Human Civilization.

Visit www.nottwoispeace.org to explore Avatar Adi Da’s book Not-Two Is Peace: The Ordinary People’s Way of Global Cooperative Order.

Visual Artist

Avatar Adi Da created a vast body of groundbreaking artwork—including paintings, drawings, photographic work, video work, and digitally-created work (in both two and three dimensions)—which artwork conveys his liberating message in a non-verbal form that he called “Transcendental Realism”. He was invited to show his art in an official collateral exhibition at the 2007 Venice Biennale. In 2008, Avatar Adi Da was the first contemporary artist to exhibit at the Cenacolo di Ognissanti in Florence where his artwork was juxtaposed with masterpieces from the Renaissance. Successful shows in New York City, Los Angeles, London, and Amsterdam were followed in 2015 by a major solo exhibition, The Ascent of Orpheus, in the renowned Bargello Museum in Florence, Italy.

My image-art can be characterized as paradoxical space that undermines “point of view”. That undermining allows for a tacit glimpse, or intuitive sense, of the Transcendental Condition of Reality—always, inherently, and totally beyond and prior to “point of view”.

—Avatar Adi Da Samraj
Transcendental Realism

Visit www.daplastique.com for more information about and samples of Avatar Adi Da’s visual artistic work.

Literary Artist

Avatar Adi Da Samraj also communicated the nature of Reality Itself in literary form, through his trilogy of novels entitled The Orpheum: The Tragic History of The Recent Return of Orpheus, or, The First Room In Three Books and other literary writings. These texts are designed to draw the reader into what Adi Da called the “maze of ecstasy”, wherein the separate self is understood to be a fiction, a false presumption, or a myth, arising in the indivisible radiance of Reality Itself. Adi Da also established a unique form of what he called "transcendental realist" theatre, based on his literary works. This is a form of enactment that is purposed to enable the audience to participate in what he referred to as a “performance-assisted subjective process”—a process that leads to a transformation of the being for anyone who engages the performance in a fully participatory manner.

Work with Non-Humans

As an expression of his deep love for all beings in the natural world, Avatar Adi Da founded and developed the Fear-No-More Zoo and the Sacred Camel Gardens. He communicated a body of wisdom about the spiritual nature of non-human beings and the non-human world, for the sake of humans’ ongoing understanding, respect, and stewardship of life on the planet earth. Avatar Adi Da’s vision of Fear-No-More is one wherein humans and non-humans exist equally, at heart, within one diverse sacred culture.

Visit www.fnmzoo.org to learn more about Avatar Adi Da’s vision of Fear-No-More.