Mental Floss

You don’t have to be conventionally religious to be curious about the afterlife. Anyone reading this blog must know they will wake up dead one day. Then what? All religions have their stories about what believers should expect. And many people are comforted by such beliefs.

But for others, open to conjecture, the possibilities of the afterlife are limited only by our imagination.

David Eagleman has written a wonderfully imaginative and quirky collection of vignettes describing possible afterlives. Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives is a whirlwind tour of possibilities for all kinds of life after death which I found to be a wonderfully stimulating read.

There’s an afterlife where you find yourself in a world exclusively populated by people you’d known while alive:

“The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose while you were alive.”

There’s a free-market afterlife of “fast cars and charisma and drinking and lovemaking” which stands in contrast to the Heaven where “the harp music is maddeningly slow”. There’s a wide range of Sci-Fi afterlives where human beings are data gathering machines created by a race of subterranean beings to roam freely and map the world; or one where a race of dumb creatures who engineered us as smart machines to discover the answer to ultimate questions de-brief us by repetitively asking “Do you have answer?”.

Each chapter teases, provokes and, implicitly, pokes gentle fun at the binary options often presented by the fundamentalist afterlives of mainstream religions.

I read it, entranced, in one sitting. The one caution is that you should be prepared for acute mental whiplash as each of the 40 chapters challenges us to imagine an alternative future.

If you’d like to think outside of the box and come up with alternatives to commonly held beliefs, read a chapter or two of Sum. Then apply the same creativity to the topic of a business presentation or Toastmasters speech.

Candid Camera

Springwise reports that a wearable camera has been developed in the UK which can document a person’s life. Promising “Memories for Life” the Vicon Revue has been created as an aid for people with memory loss.

The device can operate either on a timer—taking photos every 30 seconds—or it can be set to take photos automatically when triggered by internal sensors, which can detect body heat as well as changes in temperature, light and motion. Along with images, the camera also stores a time-stamped log file that can be enriched with GPS traces. Its 1GB of flash memory can typically hold around 30,000 images, or approximately 6 days’ worth of capture.

The appeal of the Vicon Revue is expected to broaden from Alzheimer’s patients who need a photographic record of events they might otherwise forget to anyone narcissistic enough to want to record as much about every moment of their life as possible.

So, if you were to stick one of these devices on a newborn and they lived to be, say, 70, then 4.3TB of disk storage would hold their entire lifetime in pictures. You can actually buy that much storage for around $700. What are you waiting for!

Life Caching

Springwise terms this emerging trend Life Caching and notes:

Thanks to the onslaught of new technologies and tools, from blogging software to memory sticks to high definition camera phones with lots of storage space and other ‘life capturing and storing devices’, an almost biblical flood of ‘personal content’ is being collected, and waiting to be stored to allow for ongoing trips down memory lane.

One possible future is that all of us will soon have enough of our lives recorded that no-one, least of all ourselves, will have the time or inclination to review the data we’ve collected. If you cache 100% of the life you lead for 24 hours, and proceed to review it, then the next 24 hours would be a cache of you reviewing your cache. Our lives would recede like reflections in a hall of mirrors, as we viewed ourselves viewing ourselves. Our self-obsession would become magnified.

Technology is already causing this to happen to some of us. I’ve collected 27 days worth of music on my iPod, most of which I’ll probably never listen to. I have countless folders filled with digital photographs I never look at and a blog with over 500 articles that I hardly ever read.

So what’s your point (of view)?

The end-game of this technology might well be a time when each of us holds a cache of our separate lives and yet is unable to make any more sense of it than we do of our unrecorded life. In fact, if everyone did this, life would become infinitely more confusing.

What would it be like to play back all the images from even a half-dozen lives, lived wearing a Vicon Revue? Imagine a group of people in the same family or people who worked together all recording their separate points of view. What would this tell us? How would we even begin to make sense of it? Imagine they spent time together in the same room—what would it look like?

Not knowing what anything IS

This question has been addressed by Avatar Adi Da Samraj, who writes:

If each person’s “point of view” were replaced by a camera, and you collected photographs of all those “points of view” in the room—up, down, sides, all different orientations—and if you put them all together, you would wonder what you were looking at. Ten such photographs would be enough to make the room unrecognizable. In any case, no single photograph represents the room in its totality. Any single photograph is a portrayal (or an abstract representation) only—and the same is true of your perception. Your perception is only a portrayal (or an abstract representation) of the room. Your perception is not the room As it Is.

— The Way of Zero Bargaining, The Aletheon, p. 1590, Avatar Adi Da Samraj.

Adi Da discusses the profound implications of this fundamental truth. He explains that neither a single room, nor the whole universe, can be accurately described, since “knowledge” about anything is limited by a “point of view”:

“Point of view” defines everything about conditional “knowledge”, whether it is “knowledge” of “self” or “knowledge” of the universe. That is the purpose served by “point of view”. That “knowledge” is the power of “point of view” - its presumed ability to escape bad luck, misfortune, confinement, death, bad results, negative destiny, and so on. That presumed power (or ability) is the purpose of the effort of introversion. It is also the purpose of the effort of extroversion. It is the purpose of all seeking.

— The Aletheon, p. 1591-2.

Understanding Life

So, perhaps a better option than obsessive life caching and a concern with squirreling away the minutia of every moment, is working to develop an understanding of life as it really is; not as an archive of separate images, but as a totality that transcends all possible “points of view”.

Here’s a nice way to celebrate the end of one year and the start of another. This awe-inspiring video of the known, material, universe deserves 5 minutes of your time to watch in HD and full-screen mode (click on the second box from the right in the menu bar below.)

The Known Universe video takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. This new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.

Happy New Year!

I’ve just finished reading The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work an enjoyable and uniquely insightful book by Alain de Botton.

In de Botton’s own words, he wrote the book to “shine a spotlight on the working world,” exploring both its beauty and its beastliness. By turning a philosopher’s eye on the intricacies of labor and trade, de Botton has produced a compelling series of essays that focus on life’s hidden minutiae, offering insights into working people as well as the taken-for-granted structure of the world around us.

The Poetry of Work

The essays are compelling reading – and not only because the approach is novel and the writing superb. De Botton takes us to places most of us have never been, showing us the vast global framework of cargo ships and warehouses, delving deep into their particular logic and strange beauty. He takes us to anonymous structures on the outskirts of the urban core, where:

“…vessels slip in continuously, during humid summers and fog-bound winters, night and day, to deliver the bulk of London’s gravel and its reinforced steel, its soya beans and coal, its milk and its paper pulp, the sugar cane for its biscuits and the hydrocarbons for its generators - an area as noteworthy as any of the museums of the city, but about which the guidebooks are silent.”

De Botton sees poetry in areas others overlook, such as the food distribution facility in the British midlands, where, in early December:

“…twelve thousand strawberries wait in the semi-darkness. They flew in from California yesterday, crossing over the Arctic Circle by moonlight, writing a trail of nitrogen across a black and gold sky.”

It’s a Small World, After All

In his chapters on the global supply chain, de Botton bridges the divide between the First and Third Worlds, detailing how cold-eyed, lifeless fish are transported around the globe by an assortment of humanity. His single-minded pursuit of the journey of a slab of frozen tuna – from the ocean off the Maldives to an eight-year-old’s supper plate in a Bristol kitchen – takes the form of a stark photo-essay.

Eccentricity Generation

The book skirts the edge of pathos when it teases the poetic from a Monty-Pythonesque cast of eccentric characters:

• The man who painted multiple pictures of a lone oak tree for two years, come rain or shine;
• A three-day journey by the founding member of the Pylon Appreciation Society from the Kent Coast to East London, cataloging the 542 pylons that provide illumination for Oxford Street shops;
• An independent career counselor whose conducts business with clients in a house that smells of cabbage; and
• The inventor of a pair of shoes that walk on water.

And if you want to know what Japanese day-time television, French Guiana, the freezing point of hydrogen and the fragile ego of a Hong Kong journalist have in common, read the chapter on Rocket Science to find out.

Lese Majeste

All of de Botton’s characters are treated with gentleness and respect. The one time de Botton seems to be peeved by a subject of his inquiries is, unfortunately, the one place in the book where the cloak of anonymity fails him. His long chapter on ‘Accountancy’ profiles the European headquarters of “one of the world’s largest accountancy firms,” and his interview with the chairman of the operation is singularly bad-tempered. De Botton notes that the senior executive has forsworn the trappings of authority - sitting in an open cubicle, asking people to call him by his first name – yet, as the author scathingly notes:

“…power has not disappeared entirely; it has merely been reconfigured. It is by posing as a regular employee that the chairman stands his best chance of preserving his seniority. His subordinates admire the sincerity with which he pretends to share their fate, while he privately recognises that only a convincing show of normalcy will prevent him from ever having to be normal again.”

Say what?

More convincing are the comments on the frequent internal presentations the top guy delivers “against a backdrop of PowerPoint slogans”:

“It is evident that success in his job will ultimately depend less on anything he might do than on his relative luck in aligning his reign with auspicious currents in economic history. He is like a general on a battlefield vainly striving to maintain an appearance of control amidst the chaos of sporadically exploding munitions.”

‘Nuff said.

The one problem with the supposed ‘anonymous’ critique is that the company chairman is photographed in front of a PowerPoint slide where the logo of the major accounting firm is clearly visible. Curious which firm it is? Turn to page 253 to find out.

John Berger

de Botton’s book reminded me of another of my favorite authors. John Berger is a Marxist art historian best known for Ways of Seeingand the wonderful coming-of-age novel G.

His examination of the life of a country doctor A Fortunate Man is a great companion to The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

Berger examines the daily life of the country doctor with an art historian’s and sociologist’s perspective. The working life of one man is situated in the broader framework of the social relationships.

The book is full of insights like this on the structures of social intercourse:

The easiest - and sometimes the only possible - form of conversation is that which concerns or describes action: that is to say action considered as technique or procedure. It is then not the experience of the speakers which is discussed but the nature of an entirely exterior mechanism ot event - a motor-car engine, a football match, a draining system or the workings of some committee. Such subjects, which preclude anything indirectly personal, supply the content of most of the conversations being carried on by men over twenty-five at any given moment in England today. (in the case of the young, the force of their own appetites saves them from such depersonalization.)

Both authors show depth of meaning and discover truth when they focus on the everyday. As writers, we should always look deeply into the world around us.

Is anyone really addressing the global crisis?

By Dennis Bumstead, PhD

I’ve just returned to the USA, after some weeks in the Third World, in part on a spiritual retreat. I’m struck more than ever by the lack of productive address to our multi-toothed-and-clawed Global Crisis - and by the lack of any comprehensive critique in the mainstream media.

The dire situation in the Third World

For those in the Third World, the escalating global crisis comes on top of long-established deprivations caused by poverty, malnutrition and environmental degradation. They also suffer the effects of the many wars which are often conducted, sponsored or ignored (and always armed) by the so-called “developed” nations .

Yet the mainstream media seems unable to connect the dots in global crisis. For example Dean Baker writes in The Guardian on Economics in a bubble: The cheerleaders for America’s toxic boom want us to bail out US banks. They were wrong then - and are wrong now.

Baker offers an intelligent critique of a significant aspect of the mainstream view of current economic problems. But his critique is very much limited to a litany of economic woes in advanced economies (the housing bubble; financial institutions; government response and so on) and never mentions the broader global implications, or anything beyond the confines of the dismal science itself.

The Financial Times reported on 22 April that the IMF sharply cut back their outrageously optimistic and inaccurate world economic forecast of only three months prior. Doubtless the revisions are still optimistic. The IMF continues its role of trying to prop up the status quo, and accruing benefits to its masters in the “developed” nations. The report does not point out that, even if the IMF’s revised optimism were to prove justified, their forecast signals a death sentence for thousands, perhaps millions more Third World people. These are people who would not need to die if the global system were managed for the benefit of all, instead of for the few.

Millions in the Third World are already sentenced to death by the effects of disease and malnutrition.

Cynics in the mainstream western media seem to assume that a few hundred thousand more during a recession is collateral damage as the system is fixed. Calling the Third World the “developing world” is supposed to make us all feel better about these depredations visited on poor countries by our systemic global “fixes”.

A very sanitized explanation of the effects, all price statistics and no dead bodies, is found in a UN News Center report on food prices in developing countries:

High food prices persist in developing countries despite an improved global cereal supply situation and a sharp decline in international food prices, FAO warned today in its latest Crop Prospects and Food Situation report. This is creating further hardship for millions of poor people already suffering from hunger and undernourishment.

In all the acres of newsprint dedicated to the current crisis, nothing I am seeing in the mainstream media addresses the global totality of the escalating crisis we are in. Nothing.

An alternative: The Ordinary People’s Way of Global Cooperative Order

However, in the newly published edition of the book Not-Two Is Peace, The Ordinary People’s Way of Global Cooperative Order (2009), the author Adi Da has spelled out in detail:

• what the problems are,
• why the system cannot and will not continue - and that
• it will be determined, by our understandings and actions, “in the next handful of years” that

“The future is either going to be catastrophic disaster, or it is going to be the turnabout moment in human history, in which humankind will step out of its dark ages of “tribalism” into a new mode of human cooperative order.”

Adi Da points out that the world’s political economy simply can not continue, built as it is on a model of growth for the rich and depletion for the poor. The system as is simply unsustainable, as more and more nation-”tribes” try to get in on the so-called “good life”.

Can we expect the “G-establishment”, (the G8, G20, GSacks, GM etc etc) and creatures thereof, (the World Bank and IMF) and personages thereof (the Geitners, Summerses, Gordon Browns, Sarkozys et al) to lead us anywhere except toward the vain attempt to re-establish the status quo / business-as-usual?

The mainstream economist critics I read, such as Krugman, Stiglitz, Roubini and Sacks, indicate that proposed solutions may not be enough, but also confine their proposals to sub-sectors of the total system.

Many propose change. But who is proposing real change? Change which is political, and social, and cultural, and psychological and spiritual, not just economic?

Al Gore has been a sustained and effective communicative voice for environmental change. But that is only part of the problem and environmental challenges are not soluble without radical change in other arenas. Many alternative writers / activists like Hazel Henderson and David Korten likewise address critical sub-sets of the issues. Hawken’s book Blessed Unrest suggests there is a mostly invisible movement already tackling many of these issues.

Adi Da is the only writer I have come across who fully addresses the issues that others treat in isolation. He proposes the formation of a Global Cooperative Forum, functioning on the basis of “prior unity” and managing the globe for the benefit of all instead of the few.

These ideas are likely to appeal to ‘early adopters’, those who are already beginning to notice that attempting to reinstall the status quo is very unlikely to work and interested in exploring real alternatives.

The book is fundamentally very clear. But it’s a challenging read none the less. In part because - well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it? It addresses the conventions of global life that we have all been taught to assume but really no longer make sense.

Not-Two Is Peace :The Ordinary People’s Way of Global Cooperative Order, by Adi Da can be read on line.

Take a look, and let me know what you think in the comments area below.

Dennis Bumstead

Dennis grew up on three continents and studied economics, sociology and psychology, at Cambridge and Manchester and M.I.T. He taught at Manchester University, M.I.T., London and Antioch Universities, and was a consultant for Shell companies, for I.C.I., British Airways, J. Walter Thompson, Motorola and on the staff at the World Bank. For the past 10 years he has been working in the non-profit world. Since 2006 he has been the General Manager of the Global Cooperation Project.

JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen’s book Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History is required reading for anyone calling themselves a speechwriter. Sorensen witnessed many historical moments in his 11 years as JFK’s chief speechwriter and Special Counsel to the President. This book reveals the challenges and rewards of such unparalleled access to one of the greatest American presidents.

As I reported in February, Sorensen gave the closing keynote at the Ragan Speechwriters Conference. I purchased my signed copy at that event and have finally finished it.

There’s over 500 pages of compelling narrative in his striking honest autobiography. It covers his Unitarian origins in the soil of Nebraska, to Washington DC and the Kennedy years, to the recent past. While it does not include his endorsement of Barack Obama there is no doubt that his political sympathies are on the left of the Democratic Party.

Speechwriting Tips

The book contains a fascinating number of insights into speechwriting and the role of the speechwriter:

• Speechwriters should have a “passion of anonymity” so as not to diminish the principals’ stature by accepting any credit for the speech. (p. 131)
• Sorensen writes speeches in longhand, with painstaking precision, requiring uninterrupted time, with piles of notes gathered on the floor around him, each pile reflecting a different topic in the outline. (p. 136)
• The six basic rules of speechwriting (p. 138-141) are:

1. Less is almost always better than more.
2. Choose each word as a precision tool.
3. Organize the text to simplify, clarify, emphasize.
4. Use variety and literary devices to reinforce memorability, not confuse or distract.
5. Employ elevated but not grandiose language.
6. Substantive ideas are the most important part of any speech.

Nevertheless, Sorensen warns, “Saying it so doesn’t make it so” :

Rare is the speaker who has the power to make others listen, and, if they listen, to act, and if they act, to do so in the manner he advocates. Nevertheless, I do not dismiss the potential of the right speech on the right topic delivered by the right speaker in the right way at the right moment. It can ignite a fire, change men’s minds, open their eyes, alter their votes, bring hope to their lives, and, in all these ways, change the world. I know, I saw it happen.

Kennedy’s impact on the world

As fascinating as the ‘inside baseball’ view of speechwriting is, the real value of the book is Sorensen’s role as witness to the defining crises of JFK’s Presidency. Supreme among these was the Cuban Missile crisis, the thirteen days in October 1962 when the world teetered on the brink of destruction. Sorensen had a ring-side seat as a member of the ExComm group who met daily in the White House as the situation unfolded. Many senior advisers encouraged Kennedy to invade or bomb Cuba. Former secretary of state Dean Acheson advised bombing both Cuba and Soviet missile sites in Russia.

Kennedy, as we know, chose the option of blockading Cuba against that of gung-ho military aggression. Sorensen notes that “It is not difficult to amass public support for a belligerent policy against a national adversary… (but)… I believe that a president who refrains from going to war may actually be showing more courage than one who follows the more politically popular course and launches military combat.” (p. 296)

Sorensen’s role as trusted policy adviser during the crisis elevates him far above that of any other speechwriter in history. His drafting of key communiques to Khrushchev helped save the world.

The chapter on Kennedy’s assassination is heart-wrenching for any of us alive on November 21, 1963. More than anyone except Kennedy’s immediate family he felt the loss which robbed him of his future.

Sorensen’s view of 21st century politics

His epilogue reveals his utter contempt for the Bush/Cheney policies. In early 2004 he stated:

The damage done to this country by its own misconduct in the last few months and years, to its very heart and soul, is far greater and longer lasting than any damage that any terrorist could possibly inflict upon us.

Nevertheless, he remained optimistic that “a one-man aberration, however disastrous, is not permanent…Inept political leaders can be replaced.”

He’s lucky to have lived to see the replacement take office. It remains to be seen if Obama fulfills the promise that Kennedy heralded.

Virtual JFK

Coincidentally, the weekend I finished the book, I saw a remarkable movie in San Francisco which was a nice visual coda to many of the highlights in the book.

Koji Masutani’s compelling movie Virtual JFK: Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived emphasizes the contrast between Kennedy’s approach to international relations and that of LBJ and every President since, save perhaps the current one. It examines the challenges Kennedy faced, from The Bay of Pigs to Berlin and the crescendo of the Cuban Missile Crisis. We are shown documentary footage of press conferences and speeches which all confirm Sorensen’s eye-witness accounts in Counselor. The movie implies that, had Kennedy lived, we might well have avoided the loss of 2 million Vietnamese and 58,000 American lives in that conflict.

The movie is on very limited distribtution, if it’s not showing in your area, at least take a couple of minutes to view this trailer on YouTube:

Back in August 2006 I speculated if we’d ever see bards in business class to entertain airline passengers with poetry and epic stories on long-haul flights.

I was pleased to read in Tuesday’s FT that Yorkshire-born poet David Whyte is helping stir imagination in the workplace. He has made it his mission, through corporate speaking tours and seminars, to help businesses harness the insights and metaphors that poetry can offer to broaden their language, improve interaction within the workplace and stir imaginations.

He’s worked with blue chip companies like AT&T, Microsoft, NASA, Boeing and Kaiser. Thus his muse has helped people reach out and touch someone; know where they want to go today; reach for the stars, line their dreams and thrive.

Of interest to corporate communications staff and speechwriters, Whyte stands for precision in language “listening and talking to a group until he is able to articulate an uncomfortable and unspoken truth.”

As I noted in my article on The Medieval Speechwriter, aspects of modern corporate life recall life at Court. Whyte agrees:

“All these organizations are like Shakespearean plays writ large, with the nobles telling their truths from the podium while the gravediggers are telling it like it really is in the bathroom. And every epoch ends with a lot of blood on the floor”.

He sees real value in poetry as a tool to help managers make sense of their work. It enables novice managers, overwhelmed, desperate, hungry for some ground in a world gone mad, to analyze things:

“The idea is to get deeply into experiences where they have different images and metaphors to use out of the poetry. A lot of the images will have to do with being lost, with not having the usual bearings, and therefore looking at the world in a different way.”

Whyte has a new book, The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship. In it, he explores three commitments we have in life: to our partner; our work; our self. He calls for perspective to keep grounded in oneself.

Thanks to a posting by Chris, I’ve just enjoyed watching an excellent speech delivered by Sir Ken Robinson at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) called Changing Paradigms.

Sir Ken Robinson is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources.

His speech (almost an hour long) has a quirky, academic quality to it, but without the dry-as-dust content many insecure PhD’s include when trying to impress with their command of the facts.

He uses self-depreciating humor to win over the British audience. Some of the humor sounds weird to those of us who live in the US. He gets appreciative chuckles when he tells them “I live in California, and you don’t…”. He speaks with sincerity and passion about challenges in education and the mis-diagnosis of kids today as ADHD.

I especially like the graphics he uses around 43:00 minutes into the talk showing the relative size of the Earth to the vastness of interstellar space. A great way to represent statistical data in a presentation.

A speech worth watching as an example of an informative and persuasive argument supported by data.

There’s just one thing I can’t get over - it looks like he & Michael Cain were separated at birth. I’m sure no-one has ever told him that…

Adi Da Samraj Passes from the Body

Naitauba, Fiji – November 29, 2008

Adi Da Samraj, a spiritual master, writer, and artist of international renown, passed away in his hermitage in Fiji, on November 27, of natural causes. He was 69 years old. He founded an entirely new way of spiritual practice, to which he gave the name “Adidam”.

Adi Da was a prolific writer and artist with over sixty published books and hundreds of thousands of works of art. The book that Adi Da designated as his most important work is The Aletheon, which he worked on intensively for the last two years, bringing all of his most essential spiritual and philosophical communications into a final form. He completed his work on The Aletheon on the morning of his passing. The Aletheon is scheduled for publication in 2009.

Spiritual Teacher

In the early 1970s, Alan Watts, writer of numerous books on religion and philosophy, acknowledged Adi Da as “a rare being,” adding, “It is obvious, from all sorts of subtle details, that he knows what IT’s all about.”

In the 1980s, Wittgenstein scholar Henry Leroy Finch wrote: “If there is a man today who is God-illumined, that man is Avatar Adi Da Samraj. There exists nowhere in the world, among Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, or any other groups, anyone who has so much to teach. Avatar Adi Da is a force to be reckoned with, a Pole around which the world can get its bearings.”

From his birth (on Long Island, New York, in 1939), Adi Da manifested unique signs of spiritual illumination. He described his early years as being focused in two fundamental activities. His first focus was to discover the process by which any human being can realize the Truth of “Reality Itself”. His second focus was to develop his own ability to communicate the Truth of “Reality Itself”–through verbal means and also through artistic means.

Adi Da graduated from Columbia University in 1961, with a BA in philosophy, and from Stanford University in 1966, with an MA in English literature.

In 1964, Adi Da began a period of intensive practice under a succession of spiritual masters in the United States and India. Eventually, in 1970, after a final period of intense spiritual endeavor, Adi Da spontaneously became re-established in the continuous state of illumination that was his unique condition at birth.

Author

Adi Da’s literary, philosophical, and practical writings consist of over sixty published books. These include many masterpieces of spiritual illumination, including The Knee of Listening, his spiritual autobiography, and The Dawn Horse Testament, his magisterial revelation of the entire Spiritual process from beginning to end.

Over a period of many decades, Adi Da undertook a massive examination of the world’s religious traditions, culminating in an annotated bibliography of approximately 10,000 items, entitled The Basket of Tolerance. A briefer “epitome” version of The Basket of Tolerance is scheduled for publication in 2009.

Adi Da also created original translations of traditional spiritual texts, translations which bring out the deepest meaning of the original texts. The recent publication Reality Is All the God There Is presents his translations of texts from the traditions of Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta.

Adi Da’s writings on fundamental practical areas of human life, examined from the spiritual perspective, include Green Gorilla (relative to raw diet) and The Complete Yoga of Emotional-Sexual Life.

Adi Da’s principal literary work is his trilogy entitled The Orpheum. In the late 1990s, poet Robert Lax said of The Mummery Book (the opening volume of the Orpheum trilogy), “Living and working as a writer for many decades, I have not encountered a book like this, that mysteriously and unselfconsciously conveys so much of the Unspeakable Reality.” The Orpheum is also presented in theatrical form—as shown online at www.mummerybook.org.

Artist

Adi Da was an extraordinarily prolific artist, producing over 100,000 works, primarily in the years since 2000. He was invited to show his work in a solo exhibition at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and also as part of the 2008 Winter in Florence Festival. Noted art critic Donald Kuspit has written, “It is Adi Da Samraj’s imaginative triumph to have conveyed the illusions created by discrepant points of view and the emotionally liberating effect when they aesthetically unite . . .” Among the publications of Adi Da’s art are The World As Light, Transcendental Realism, and The Spectra Suites. His artistic work can be viewed online at www.adidabiennale.org and www.daplastique.com.

Call for World Peace

Another dimension to his far-reaching legacy is his contemporary social wisdom embodied in the book Not-Two Is Peace. In it he calls for the establishment of a Global Cooperative Forum that mobilizes “everybody-all-at-once” on the basis of recognizing the inherent unity of the entire human family. He proposes that such a forum is the necessary and effective means for addressing the world’s most pressing issues. Information about this initiative is available online at www.globalcooperationproject.org.

Spiritual Way

Adidam, the spiritual way founded by Adi Da, is practiced by thousands of individuals worldwide, with centers in many parts of the world. Information about Adi Da and Adidam is available online at www.adidam.org.
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At the end of January I spent a day with a remarkable Aussie, Malcolm Cohen. As I wrote at the time, his Rocket Ship workshop helps people get clear about whatever is their life’s true purpose, their quest. Using simple Internet ‘Web 2.0′ technology you can craft a Vision Statement that is, for many of us, a 21st century mirror to the soul. Easy to say, not so easy to do.

Two weeks and countless hours of searching for the right mix of text, music and images later, I have just published my ‘brave statement’ on YouTube. Thanks are due to everyone who helped make this possible: Malcolm and my fellow voyagers on the Rocket Ship at Ft. Mason and the Sandbox Suites; Patricia, Brady and the invisible lovers; James, Richard, Dan and the men in the corner; my Mum & Dad (who paid the photographer in Derby back in 1952 to take the first picture); my Spiritual Master, Adi Da Samraj for the last picture; Emily & Neil who smiled at the camera in Laos and Limerick; Bob Geldof for Thinking Voyager 2 Type Things; and most of all for Sandra, for walking beside me. And you, of course, if you choose to click on the video and spend 2 minutes carrying a vision for me.

Signed, Maverick